Caste Scripts: Notes on Historical Methods between the Archive and the Repertoire

Vivek Narayan’s paper will take Ayyankali’s villuvandi samaram (or, Bullock Cart Protest) of 1893 as a starting point to think about caste assertion and anti-caste resistance. Narayan reads archival and ethnographic material from nineteenth-century Kerala to analyze jati maryada, or caste-based codes of conduct that governed social interaction. The remit of caste codes went beyond governing discrete aspects such as space, body, and language, to cohering acceptable forms of personhood that ranged from abjection to reverence. These forms of personhood emerged from the interaction between caste codes, social behaviour, and materiality called caste scripts. Viewing the situated relationship between caste codes and caste scripts through the lens of performance can offer insight into the significance of everyday behaviour for the social construction of caste. The new caste scripts enacted by Ayyankali offer, in short, a frame within which to theorize a performance approach that can accommodate both the modes of self-presentation that assert caste as well as the political actions that enact anti-caste resistance.

The lens of performance allows Narayan to re-read missionary records and state gazettes to analyze how quotidian enactments both reaffirm and resist the caste order. This paper brings together methods developed in historical anthropology with theoretical insights from performance studies to seek traces of the everyday in the archives.