South Central Review

At a moment when conversations surrounding caste are gaining leverage, Shailaja Paik’s powerful new book, The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India approaches the subject by looking into the lives of Tamasha artists in Maharashtra as a way to understand the performative politics as regards this art form in the 20th century. The book considers the “sex-gender-caste complex” (1) as it emerges in Tamasha, a Dalit-based carnivalesque art form. Tamasha brings together “song, dance, mime, poetry, farce” (48) to suture all these entertainment forms into affective states of masculine amusement and pleasure. Paik makes the predicaments of Tamasha artists, and particularly Dalit women, integral to emancipating the art form from its existing sexual economies, using dual emphasis on the gender and caste dynamics to make space for authentic expression.

The Vulgarity of Caste opens with an anecdote about the lives of the Tamasha artists still fighting for their respectability, a position denied to them due to their caste status in addition to an overtly sexual nature of their profession. Although Dalits have been traditionally performing Tamasha for a long time, Paik focuses her discussion on the sexual economy of this craft that, in turn, affects the social relations of Dalit women. Paik reasons that this particulate ethos has a history that stems from the dehumanization of Dalits and the politics of keeping them separate from everyday life. In Paik’s book, the interrelationality of caste and sexual politics in Tamasha, as she reveals, is an important concern that has not been given critical attention before. Her study traces Tamasha’s evolution from the twelfth century into the early twentieth century to uncover the overlapping histories of social and sexual exploitation of the Tamasha performers. Paik’s contribution is salient to the sociohistorical aspects of performance theory and the discipline of caste studies.

Paik’s first book, Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (2014), addressed a related subject, situating the educational rights of Dalit women in Maharashtra as a distinct category, something that was imperceptible heretofore. While her first book explores the reluctance of colonial enterprise to shape educational opportunities for Dalit women, The Vulgarity of Caste is a compelling critique of the Brahminical standards of purity and virtue as it limits the Tamasha performance art to its sexual economy, something equivalent to obscene and ribald. Concomitantly, the gender and caste economies that underlie Tamasha also come under scrutiny. Paik emphasizes on the question of the Tamasha performer’s subjectivity, or lack thereof, in the larger scheme of their sociality as Dalit women. By calling into question their performative acts as direct reflections of their character, their exhaustive labor is challenged, politicized, and subjugated. What makes the situation worse, as Paik suggests, is that the Dalit women’s complicity in their own exploitation as sexual [End Page 127] performers is very much innate to the Tamasha art form. Paik problematizes the contingent modifiers such as gender, caste, and sexuality on Tamasha—and how Dalit women specifically suffer due to it. As such, her broad question remains compelling: while dominant-caste men revel in Tamasha performances—in contemporary times or otherwise—why are Tamasha women condemned for the overt sexuality of their acts and for being Dalits? Her concern borders on the Tamasha women’s literal and metaphorical exploitation by dominant caste male gaze that distance Dalit women’s art and work from established orders and communities.

For example, in the introduction titled “Performing Precarity,” Paik introduces us to Meena Javale, a Dalit woman who supports herself through Tamasha performance in present day Maharashtra. Meena expresses disgust with her lack of respectability as she compares herself to her maid. According to Meena, her maid has access to the respectability she herself is denied owing to her profession. As Paik puts it, “Meena’s participation in an economy of sexual excess confirmed her presumed ashlil [vulgar] quality and her status...