Jogendranath Mandal and the Politics of Dalit Recognition in Pakistan

This essay examines some turns in the Pakistani political career of the Dalit leader Jogendranath Mandal between 1947 and 1950 when he resigned as a government minister and left the country. The imperatives of Dalit emancipation interacted with concerns about the position of minorities, thereby revealing the conditions by which difference became legible in the new state. In the creation of Pakistan, Mandal had seen a promise of furthering Dalit emancipation, but this vision could not withstand the state’s view of an undifferentiated Hindu minority population. By tracing Mandal’s trajectory, this essay follows both the promises offered by Pakistan and the slow closure of such alternative possibilities.