Undignified names: caste, politics, and everyday life in North India

Abstract

Focusing on the experiences of the marginalised castes in North India, this article examines the use of given names in intercommunity micro interactions and how it shapes the practices of everyday humiliation. With ethnographic data from Dalit activist discourses as well as everyday life in an urbanising village in Rajasthan, this article analyses how the upper castes tend to deform the given names of the members of the Dalit community to produce undignified names, and how the community claims their right to be addressed with appropriate names. I engage with the complexity of the formation and use of undignified names by analysing their function in shaping the local political field to regulate participation in the public sphere and how they are linked to valuable names in the production of social distinctions and their economic benefits. Taking names as an important symbolic object, this article foregrounds the politics of humiliations in everyday intercaste vyavahar to understand the micro dynamics of caste reproduction and how it is negotiated and contested.