Questioning Caste Hegemony through Dalit Kulapuranas: A Study of Jambapurana Abstract

Beginning with the colonial census, social scientists have tried to give an ‘authentic’ hierarchical order to the various castes and sub-castes in India. These attempts, which later led the dominant understanding of caste system(s), appear to have been influenced by the Kulapuranas of the dominant castes.

Kulapuranas are narratives in the form of songs, depicting the cultural heritage of a particular caste, the claims of its glorious past and the specific understandings of the caste’s status and past in relation to other castes and sub-castes. Most of the Kulapuranas are carried forward through generations in the oral form. The rest, of the dominant castes, have taken textual form as well in sacred texts like Mahabharata and Ramayana. These texts that influenced the colonial understanding of the caste system(s) in India, have in turn given legitimacy to the Kulapuranas of the dominant castes.

The Kulapuranas of the lower castes and sub-castes have, at the same time, existed in oral tradition as marginalized, unrecognized, illegitimate voices that continue challenging the cultural hegemony of the dominant castes. These marginalized Kulapuranas narrate a different history of caste and sub-caste relations, providing a counter narrative to the established notions of hierarchical caste relations.

This paper would analyze how the marginalized Kulapuranas exist as potential sources for the alternative understandings of history, culture and caste relations. I intend to critically examine the Kulapuranas of the Madigas, a Dalit caste, and its sub-castes, to understand the caste relations and its challenges in Andhra Pradesh, where more than 198 castes exist with its sub-castes. I propose this by a detailed study of Jambapurana, a Madiga Kulapurana that discusses the genealogy of the Dalit castes and their social relations, as a text to understand how challenges against the upper caste dominance have arisen from the Dalit castes.

This Abstract which I presented at 5th Inter National Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at Cambridge University Cambridge at Edward Murry College on 2nd to 5th August 2010.