Deceptive Majority

Joel Lee teaches and conducts research on religion, language, caste and the state in South Asia. In particular his work concerns the ways in which Dalits – those communities historically stigmatized as 'untouchable' – combat structural deprivation, navigate the politics of religious majoritarianism, and contend with the sensory and environmental entailments of sanitation labor in colonial and postcolonial India. His research and teaching interests also include linguistic anthropology, semiotics, popular Hinduism and Islam, and Urdu and Hindi literature.

• Part I. Untouchability and Alterity, Now and Then: 1. Introduction: Signs, the Census, and the Sanitation Labor Castes; 2. Lal Beg Nāma: Dalit Religion before the Hindu Majority; Part II. Making 'Untouchables' Hindu, or, the Great Interpellation: 3. Missionary Majoritarianism: The Arya Samaj and the Struggle with Disgust; 4. Trustee Majoritarianism: Gandhi and the Harijan Sevak Sangh; 5. Hinduization and its Discontents: Valmiki comes to Lucknow; Part III. Semiotics of the Oppressed: 6. Victory to Valmiki: Declamatory Religion and the Wages of Inclusion; 7. Lal Beg Underground: Taqiyya, Ethical Secrecy, and the Pleasure of Dissimulation; Epilogue.

'… deeply informative and thought-provoking … has offered great insight into the wide variety of options and positionalities among Dalits in modern times.' Jon Keune, Reading Religion