The Forsaken King

About The Forsaken King

This ethnographic and archival study offers insight into Dalit identity politics, Tamil ethno-nationalism, and affective understandings and experiences of sovereignty in contemporary Tamil Nadu, South India. It is an-depth exploration of the recent history and present moment of inter-caste conflict that plagues Tamil Nadu, despite the fact that it is India’s most urbanized state, and among its wealthiest and most industrially developed. Over the course of the past thirty years, spectacular and brutal murders, riots, and police repression have regularly characterized the relationships between groups of politically affiliated individuals we call castes. I historicize and contextualize such incidents, tracking the changing phenomenology of caste as it intersects with the gendered politics of Tamil ethnic identity. In order to do so, I examine the formation of caste conglomerations, which I define as intentionally incorporated political bodies attempting to situate themselves relationally in the context of rapid demographic and technological changes, and the breakdown of formal, intergenerational models of caste differentiation and hierarchy.

The practices of intercaste relations in Tamil Nadu, are not disappearing, but are asserting themselves in new and sometimes violent ways as the economic realities and inhabitable spaces of many formerly distinguishable castes become increasingly alike. Responding to the anxiety of disintegrating hierarchy, what were once localized, relatively independent castes are uniting as political bodies that attempt to identify themselves in relation to each other, competing mimetically in a cycle of recursive opposition. I focus on two increasingly visible caste conglomerations – the Devendras and the Thevars – who have been embroiled in a violent conflict in Tamil Nadu since the late 1950s. The recent experiences of the Devendras who are officially classified as Dalit (“untouchable”), and the Thevars who were once socioeconomica

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