Fire on the Ganges: Caste, Gender, and Sacred Labour among the Dom Community of Banaras

Abstract

The present paper articulates the voice against the injustices and discrimination that the Dom community faces, focusing on Radhika Iyengar’s Fire on the Ganges: Life Among the Dead in Banaras as a recent ethnographic text that documents their lives and labour. The Doms, a sub-caste within the Dalit community, perform the indispensable task of cremating the dead at Manikarnika Ghat, a labour that is central to the Hindu pursuit of moksha yet marked as polluting and degraded within the caste order. We discuss how the domination of caste, class, and patriarchy converges to perpetuate structural violence that impacts on Dom men and women through rigorous reading of Iyengar’s narrative and protagonists like Dolly Chaudhary or Aakash Chaudhury. The interpretation places Iyengar’s work within the framework of contemporary Dalit literary and cultural criticism, as well as new studies which frame that Dalit writing is an act of voice, dissent, and embodied testimony against Brahmin hegemony. Via an analysis of mythic narratives of the origin of Manikarnika, the sacrificial economy of moksha, the gendered precarity and vulnerability in which Dom women are steeped and sustained, and the occupational risks entailed in this work by Dom cremators, this article posits that Fire on the Ganges lays bare a paradox between social arrangements founded on recycling Dalit labour into spiritual uplift and denying to them questions power, human dignity. The article argues that Iyengar’s ethnographic account expands the project of Dalit literature by focusing on the lived experiences of the Dom community and by demanding a reconfiguration of caste, labour, and recognition in today’s India.