Colonial Jealousy and Brahmin Anger: An Emotional Archive of Anticaste Performance

From the 1860s through 1890s, kirtan (a form of devotional song and storytelling) was the primary means through which Marathi pastors and catechists spread the gospel and worked to abolish caste in Maharashtrian villages. The two most popular Christian kirtankars of that era were Krishnaraw Sangale and Rev. Waniram Ohol. Through their strategic use of Christian performance, Sangale and Ohol generated heightened experiences for listeners that provoked the jealousy of missionaries and the ire of Brahmins. Both kirtankars were born into oppressed castes, and their caste-flouting performances angered some Brahmins, who couldn’t help also feeling moved by their musical and dramatic skill. A different sort of ambivalence was experienced by American missionaries, who simultaneously admired and envied kirtankars’ ability to attract and hold a crowd.

Neither Sangale nor Ohol published their kirtan texts, but a lone photograph, as well as reports on their kirtans by American missionaries and Marathi Christians, offer ample evidence of the anti-caste resistance imbedded within their performances. More specifically, they stimulated resistance through quotidian gestures of transgressive proximity, as well as through their subversion of sartorial, vocal, and oratorical practices formerly marked as Brahmin. In this talk, I read the archive for traces of colonial jealousy and Brahmin anger, arguing that these emotions serve as indices of the anti-caste—and ultimately anti-colonial—politics hidden within performance.