The (im)possibility of a term: ‘Pasmanda’, the (non-)addressability of the state, and the ghettoization of communication

Abstract

Abstract‘Pasmanda’ is arguably the most explosive term that the more recent anti-caste discourse in India has produced. It is assembled from the Persian words pas (‘back’) and manda (‘left behind’), thus describing somebody ‘at the back’ (of society), who ‘has been left behind’. Like ‘Dalit’, ‘Pasmanda’ is essentially a political term, which means that it only comes into being and develops significance if people decide to acquire it and to identify themselves as different and as discriminated—in this case as lower-caste and ‘Dalit Muslims’. ‘Pasmanda’ is hence intrinsically reliant on being communicated and mediated so as to enable its acceptance among the signified and to normalise the creation of a respective reality through a newly collectivising identity. This essay approaches ‘Pasmanda’ as ‘a term to think with’, in tracing the very possibility, among deprived and discriminated groups, to openly communicate, negotiate, and mediate this identity that challenges claims of religious (comm)unity and demands for national loyalty. This possibility varies greatly even across north India. As I examine ‘Pasmanda’ through three different local prisms, the term thus also becomes a dialectical index for the political conditions of its realisation: the conditions of its emergence and, however increasingly precarious, its thriving (in the state of Bihar) as much as the conditions for its suppression (in the capital Delhi) and even of its complete absence (in the state of Gujarat)—i.e. of the conditions that render Pasmandas non-existent. A different form of regional comparison thus emerges.