Music as an Anti-Caste Counterpublic: Notes From North India

This article aims to understand the acts of resistance in the everyday music of oppressed caste communities and the repertoire of anti-caste musical performances in specific moments in history. The everyday soundscape has the potential to bring together shared experiences of displacement, casteism, and social exclusion. For dalit–bahujan singers, an engagement with music is a resource with which to ‘talk back’ to the structures of caste and to recast their identity. The practices of such musical form have also been part of the cultural transmission of an anti-caste narrative. Using printed material and oral narratives collected during fieldwork in selected regions of North India, this article explores anti-caste musical practices. It engages with the concept of ‘counterpublics’ and the implications of the term ‘anti-caste counterpublics’ for an understanding of anti-caste movements.