Abstract
Abstract
This paper examines why the substantial political and material gains secured by Dalits in postcolonial India have not produced a corresponding transformation in social status. It argues that the Subaltern Studies school, notwithstanding its stated aim of restoring subaltern agency, cannot adequately account for this persistence, because it treats subalternity primarily as a condition defined through resistance to colonial rule, leaving the specifically Dalit experience of everyday, non-colonial domination under-theorised. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between the economic base and the socio-cultural superstructure, the paper traces how upper-caste hegemony in India has rested less on coercion than on the ideological absorption of caste norms into common sense, reproduced through the institutions of civil society. The Bahujan Samaj Party’s shifting electoral strategy in Uttar Pradesh between 1993 and 2024 is developed as an extended case study of this dynamic: a party that mobilised anti-upper-caste sentiment to capture power, only to be substantially reabsorbed into the hierarchy it was formed to oppose, and ultimately displaced in its own strongholds by a rival Ambedkarite formation attempting to relitigate the same struggle on different terms.