Caste Is Inscribed in Space case Study - Sociology Assignment Help

Assignment Task

Smell the Neighborhood

I advance in this essay the following proposition: that to understand the tenacious persistence of caste and untouchability in the present we would do well to take a phenomenological turn and inhale deeply.

Heeding our senses and our embodied relationship to place, we may exhume meaningfully patterned re- lations between caste ideology, the organization of space, and the marking of bodies and sensoria by the sensuous content of the environment. Caste functions, among other things, as a spatial-sensory order. It is experienced as an inscription into the environment—indeed, into the chemical and olfactory content of the air we breathe—of the Brahmanical ideological premise that every caste has its own distinctive, hierarchically ranked “place” in the world, and that the places inhabited by subordinate castes should not
only be set apart but should look, smell, and feel differently from those of the rest of society.

Let me begin with two moments in which Dalit men guided me to this line of thought. I was con- ducting ethnographic and archival research in the cities of Lucknow and Benares in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.1

The subject of my research was not the spatial or sensory life of caste but rather Dalit religious history. In the two moments I am about to relate, though, my interlocutors redirected my queries about religious and caste belonging toward a set of questions posed in general form by Henri

Lefebvre: “What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, whose vocabu- lary and links it makes use of, and whose code it embodies?”2

In the first instance, I was talking with Govind Prasad,3 born in 1926, about his childhood in a vil- lage a few kilometers north of Lucknow. His parents had worked for dominant-caste landlords as manual

scavengers: workers who clean latrines and dispose of human excrement. Prasad himself, one of very few members of his caste and generation to obtain a formal education (he completed eighth standard), had served a British military officer as personal assistant and then worked as a postman after Indian.

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