![]() ![]() This book tracks the career of this tradition alongside the effort to encompass it within a newly imagined Hindu body politic-a majoritarian project advanced in complex, distinct, yet convergent ways by colonial administrators, Hindu nationalists, the Congress Party, and Mohandas Gandhi. Deceptive Majority How did it come to be common sense that the vast swath of the population of South Asia once known as ‘untouchable’ are and always have been Hindu? Grounded in detailed archival and ethnographic research, Deceptive Majority unearths evidence that well before the emergence of twentieth century movements for Dalit liberation, the subset of ‘untouchable’ castes engaged in sanitation labor in colonial India conceived of themselves as constituting a religious community (qaum) separate from both Hindus and Muslims-a community with its own prophet, shrines, rites, legends, and liturgical songs.
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