Migration, modernity, and caste in colonial India: a study of Narendra Jadhav’s Untouchables

This paper examines Narendra Jadhav’s memoir Untouchables as a narrative of dalit social mobility pivoted on a dalit family’s migration from rural Maharashtra to the colonial city of Bombay. It locates the memoir within the discourse of casteless emergence and studies the narrativization of the family’s pursuit of modernity. This paper studies the correlation between colonial middle-class emergence, the role of colonial cities in shaping Indian modernity, and the desires of a dalit family. The theoretical framework for this drawing on B. R. Ambedkar's writings and scholarship on caste, social mobility, and urban space (Srinivas 2016; Cháirez-Garza 2024; Gooptu 2001), the analysis situates the memoir within a broader commentary on the transforming spatiality of caste in postcolonial India. Untouchables archetypically represents a dalit family searching for a casteless society as they aspire to emerge from their dalithood. The memoir claims that one's journey to self-actualization and freedom is tantamount to a spatial journey to the metropolis. The complex pattern that emerges from the dichotomies of opportunity and discrimination, anonymity and humiliation, and restrictions and aspirations leads one to argue that the desire for casteless emergence, which motivates one to migrate from their ancestral village, remains unfulfilled.