Who is the true Halalkhor?

Genealogy
and ethics in dalit Muslim oral traditions

Joel Lee

The social worlds that dalit Muslims in North India daily negotiate are pervaded by
contradictions between caste practices and Islamic ethics. Dalit Muslims engaged in manual
scavenging and related forms of sanitation labour experience these contradictions acutely
in the distinctive spatial and affective conditions of this labour, which I characterise as
‘intimate untouchability’. Grounded in historical and ethnographic research in eastern
Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, this article demonstrates how dalit Muslims use narratives
mobilising the genealogical and ethical concept of the Halalkhor—a caste label that also
denotes ‘one who earns an honest living’—to critique their higher status co-religionists
and to engender a more egalitarian Islamic community. The category of the Halalkhor is
tracked in the historical record and in its deployment in dalit Muslim oral traditions about
the origin of the community and its association with sanitation work.

Keywords: Halalkhor, caste, anthropology of Islam, sanitation labour, North India, origin
myths

I
Introduction
Muhammad Faiz likes to tell a story about the caste title Halalkhor. To
understand it, one must know what every participant in the story already
knows: that Faiz, a civil law advocate, is the only member of his caste
to have attained such a respected profession in the eastern Uttar Pradesh
(UP) town in which he lives, whereas many of his family members and
caste fellows work in the deeply stigmatised professions of sanitation, the

Joel Lee is at Williams College, Williamstown, MA, USA.

E-mail: jl20@williams.edu

Contributions to Indian Sociology 52, 1 (2018): 1–27

SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC/
Melbourne
DOI: 10.1177/0069966717742223
2 / Joel Lee

weaving of sūp, and wedding musicianship.1 Some also work as manual

scavengers, removing human excrement from dry latrines. Faiz’s excep-
tional occupational status and economic security enable him to make the
jocular criticism of high prestige Sayyids2—in their presence—that he
does in the story; few of Faiz’s caste fellows would risk such a move.
One must also know that the name by which Faiz’s caste is prevailingly
denoted, Halalkhor, means literally eater (khor) of that which is lawful or
lawfully gained (halāl): in other words, one who earns an honest living.
Here is how Faiz told the story the first time I visited him at his home:

There are two Sayyids who live here [Faiz names them]. These two
were arguing. Both are Sayyids: one is a Shia Sayyid, the other a Sunni
Sayyid. Both of them were saying to the other, ‘I am a Sayyid, you
are not. I am a genuine [sahīh] Sayyid, you are not a genuine Sayyid.’
[Faiz chuckles]
So I said to them, ‘You all should become [long pause] Halalkhor, then
there will be no need to write Sayyid! Kindly tell me: which of you
is not Halalkhor? Do tell.’ They fell silent. [Then, in agreement,] they
started to laugh, and said, ‘Who will say that we are not Halalkhor?’3

The story turns on the ambivalence of the title: on the one hand, in
everyday contexts in eastern UP and Bihar, Halalkhor signifies sweeper
or scavenger—somewhat more polite than the contemptuous ‘Bhangi’, it
nonetheless clearly designates a member of one of the paradigmatically

1
Sūps are winnowing baskets. In traditional manufacture, cow sinews are used to
hold the basket together, thus the ‘pollution’ associated with its producers. Traditional
wedding musicianship in this region centres on drums, often made from cow or buffalo
hide and reed instruments, seen in a Brahminical frame as ‘polluting’ on account of the
musician’s saliva. Though brass bands now predominate, the caste stigma attached to
wedding musicianship remains.
2
Putative descendants of the Prophet Muhammad.
3
Yahānׂ pe do Sayyid hainׂ… ye log āpas mainׂ bāt kar rahe the. Dononׂ Sayyid hainׂ:
ek Shia maslak ke Sayyid hai aur ek Sunni maslak ke Sayyid hai. Dononׂ āpas mai kah rahe
the ki tu Sayyid nahīnׂ, mainׂ Sayyid hunׂ. Mainׂ sahī Sayyid huṅ, tū sahī Sayyid nahīnׂ. To
maine kahā āp log Halālkhor ho jāīe, Sayyid likhne kī zarūrat nahīnׂ hogī, aur āp batāīe ki
dononׂ mai Halālkhor kaun nahīnׂ hai. Yeh āp batāve. Dononׂ ćup ho gaye, dononׂ hanׂsne
lage, kahne lage ki kaun kahegā ki Halālkhor nahīnׂ hainׂ (recorded interview, 7 May 2011).

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 Who is the true Halalkhor? / 3

‘untouchable’ castes, bearers of ritual pollution4 and social stigma. On

the other hand, the Persian–Arabic compound designates an honourable
worker whose honour is anchored in one of the most potent and venerable
of Islamic moral distinctions, that of the halāl and the harām. Things
which are halāl are lawful, prescribed, ethical; lexemes and phrases
formed with halāl—namak halāl, a loyal person or one who is ‘faithful
to his salt’, being a fine example—must be good things. Halāl’s notorious
opposite is harām—unlawful, proscribed, immoral—and its compounds
and variants supply the North Indian vernacular with some of its most
savoury terms of abuse: harāmzada or harāmī (bastard), for instance,
as well as Halalkhor’s opposite harāmkhor, eater of unlawful earnings,
used to describe pimps and others whose livelihoods are considered
morally abhorrent. Halalkhor, then, exemplifies what V. N. Vološinov
(1973: 23) calls the multiaccentual sign, a sign charged with the evalua-
tive connotations of two or more conflicting ideologies, a sign that is ‘an
arena of class struggle’. It bears the semantic weight of the normative
tradition of Islamic piety and, simultaneously, of Muslim practices of
caste and untouchability.
Thus, when Faiz, in his story, intervenes in the two Sayyids’ argument,
he inserts a concept that appears to conform to the terms of the debate—
Halalkhor, like Sayyid, is a caste or descent-based status group—while
actually shifting the discursive frame. By inviting the Sayyids to ‘become’
Halalkhor—an absurdity in the sociological/caste sense of the term—
Faiz pivots the dialogue from the genealogical to the ethical, implicitly
reproaching his caste ‘superiors’ for their petty bickering over status and
suggesting, instead, that they concern themselves with earning an honest
Islamic living.5

4
The conception of certain castes as ritually polluting, while primarily associated with
Hindu contexts, is by no means unheard of in the sociological literature on Islam in South
Asia, as we will discuss later.
5
Whether or not this conversation took place in the way Faiz describes it is not the
central question here. As mentioned, Faiz is rare among his caste fellows in the relative
social parity he enjoys with the Ashraf in his locality; from no other member of the Halalkhor
community have I heard such a story of openly remonstrating with Sayyids (or other high
status Muslims) for their genealogical pretensions, even in a gentle or jocular vein as in Faiz’s
account. Usually the critique of non-dalit Muslims for hierarchical or casteist behaviour is
uttered in Halalkhor spaces, far from Ashraf ears: a textbook example of a ‘hidden transcript’.

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4 / Joel Lee

The social worlds that dalit Muslims in North India daily negotiate are
pervaded by the kind of contradictions between caste practices and Islamic
ethics that Faiz’s anecdote throws into relief. This essay is concerned with
ways in which dalit Muslims mobilise the ambivalent social-ethical label
Halalkhor to critique their higher status co-religionists and to engender a
more egalitarian Islamic community. I consider four kinds of stories that
Halalkhor women and men tell about the origins of their community and
its name. The first two correspond to strategies of assertion or upward
mobility that are familiar in the sociological literature: advancement by
means of state policies of compensatory discrimination (i.e., reserva-
tions), and ‘ashrafisation’, the mimetic adoption of practices of high status
Muslims. The third affiliates the community with a 14th-century heretic,
registering a sidelong critique of Islamic normativity from its historical
margins. The fourth and most widespread kind of origin story, to which
most of our analysis will be devoted, deploys the Halalkhor concept in all
its ambiguity in the narrative world of the Prophet and his companions.
This mise-en-scéne thrusts such distinctively North Indian phenomena
as manual scavenging and the local caste order onto a universal Islamic
stage, presenting them for examination in the light of the tradition’s high-
est ethical authority.
These oral traditions are genealogical insofar as they seek origins in
a remarkable ancestor. They are not, however, shijrāt, the genealogical
trees or pedigrees that families in high-status Muslim castes in North
India often maintain. The origin stories share neither the structure nor
the temporality of shijrāt; there are no lists of names, and the present
relates to historical and mythical time not through the mediation of an
elaborated sequence of generations but through a more diffuse sense of
continuity in community—birādarī or ‘brotherhood’ is the usual term
for the caste community in the stories, though jāt or zāt is also used—
and ethical disposition. Thus, when I refer to Halalkhor oral traditions
as genealogical, it is in this sense, as concerned with the community’s
descent from storied ancestors.
The oral traditions may also productively be read alongside geneal-
ogy in the Foucauldian sense, history emphasising the disjunctive and
non-unitary development of practices and categories (Foucault 1984). I
attempt such a genealogy in a subsequent section of this essay: an analysis
of the shifting denotations of the term Halalkhor in the historical record

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 Who is the true Halalkhor? / 5

from the 16th century to the present. While the archival findings and the
oral traditions invite us down divergent paths of interpretation, they also,
I hope, shed on one another a new and suggestive light.
Analysing oral traditions of Halalkhor origins may give us purchase
on a set of politically urgent questions that have been scarcely addressed
by empirically grounded scholarship. How are dalit Muslims, who suffer
structural deprivation comparable to their counterparts categorised as
Hindu, differently positioned from the latter to combat their oppression?
In eastern UP and Bihar, Muslim Halalkhors work alongside Helas, Doms
and Valmikis in sanitation crews and brass bands, and are subjected to the
same forms of everyday caste contempt, yet the latter three are identified
by the state as Scheduled Castes while Halalkhors, because they profess
Islam, are excluded from this category and its concomitant safeguards and
benefits. In what ways does exclusion from Scheduled Caste status de-
termine Halalkhor strategies for contending with casteism and structural
deprivation? What are the Islamic ethical and narrative resources that
Halalkhors bring to bear on these struggles? How do Halalkhor oral
traditions diverge from the origin myths of closely related but non-Muslim
dalit castes, and with what implications?
In addition to illuminating the distinctiveness of the dalit Muslim
situation, Halalkhor genealogical narratives also exemplify the kind
of non-elite contributions to Muslim social and ethical thought that, in
practice, constitute Islam for much of the community of believers. Veena
Das (1984: 297–98) has called these ‘folk theologies of Islam’. As Joyce
Flueckiger (2006: 2) reminds us, ‘vernacular Islam’—locally situated ideas
and practices of which dalit Muslim critiques of caste are an example—is
nothing less than how ‘“universal” Islam is lived locally’. Like Das and
Flueckiger, I think we do well to attend to such subaltern formulations of
religion; this essay is one attempt to do so.
Because there are virtually no studies of Halalkhor history or com-
munity life, some basic groundwork must be laid before we can turn
to the genealogical narratives. In the following section, I briefly situate
Halalkhors in the anthropological/sociological literature, note some key
findings from my fieldwork regarding untouchability practices affecting
dalit Muslims and propose a new way of thinking about the sociality of
domestic sanitation work. Next I track the career of the term Halalkhor
in the archive from the Mughals to today, observing along the way shifts

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6 / Joel Lee

in denotation. Following this historical sketch, I present the four kinds of

Halalkhor origin stories my interlocutors shared with me and elaborate
some of their implications.

II
Intimate untouchability
If there is a paradigmatic dalit Muslim caste in sociological studies of
Indian Islam, it is the ‘Muslim sweeper’. While there is a great deal of debate
over the degree to which different Muslim communities are stigmatised and
discriminated against, and the applicability of labels such as ‘backward’,
‘pasmānda’ and dalit are hotly contested for many groups, the literature is
unanimous that those Muslim castes engaged in sanitation labour have
long constituted a class apart, a class subjected by fellow Muslims to a
distinctive set of exclusionary practices comparable or identical to those
usually called ‘practices of untouchability’ in the Hindu context (Ahmad
1978, 2010; Alam Falahi 2007; Ali 1978; Ansari 1960; Anwar 2001;
Siddiqui 1978; Trivedi et al. 2016). In Muslim Caste in Uttar Pradesh:
A Study of Culture Contact, for example, Ansari (1960: 50) observed that

A Bhangi, either Muslim or non-Muslim, is not permitted to enter a

mosque no matter how clean he may be at the time [and that] in almost
all the households of Ashrāf, Muslim Rajputs, and the clean occupa-
tional castes… Bhangis, either Muslim or non-Muslim, are generally
served food in their own containers… [and] are given water to drink
in such a way that the jar does not touch even their lips.

In their landmark volume Caste and Social Stratification among Muslims

in India, Imtiaz Ahmad and his colleagues documented that Muslims in
southern Bihar maintain distance from and refuse to eat with ‘Muslim
Bhangis’ and that in Calcutta, in addition to non-commensality with co-
religionists, Muslim sweepers ‘often experience difficulty in getting their
dead buried in the common Muslim burial ground’ (Ahmad 1978: 27–29,
254–64). More recently, studies by Anwar (2001), Alam Falahi (2007) and
a team from the Giri Institute of Development Studies (Trivedi et al. 2016)
attest to the continuing prevalence, although with considerable variation
in degree, of a number of forms of segregation and exclusion faced by

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 Who is the true Halalkhor? / 7

Muslim castes involved in sanitation.6 While the prohibition on mosque

entry appears to have been brought to an end in the last 50 years, the pro-
hibition on intermarriage—the sine qua non of any caste order—remains
firmly in place. Observations from Nepal (Gaborieau 1981) and Pakistan
(Gazdar and Mallah 2012; Martin 2009) suggest the perdurance of a
comparable situation there for those Muslim groups descended from the
sanitation labour castes (known as Halalkhors in Nepal, and in Pakistan,
Musallis, or Chuhras before conversion to Islam).
Some of the thickest descriptions of the treatment accorded to the ‘Muslim
sweeper’ come not in the data foregrounded at the centre of the social
science scholarship, but in the anecdotal and autobiographical observa-
tions on its margins. For example, in a footnote to his article ‘Can There
Be a Category Called Dalit Muslims’, Imtiaz Ahmad writes the following:

From my observations of growing up in a Muslim family I am able

to recall a number of instances of both open and silent discrimination
practiced against these castes. We had a Lalbegi woman come to clean
the toilets in our house. She was on the best of terms with my mother and
would sit for hours together gossiping with my mother. Whenever my
mother would offer her pan, she would wrap her hand with her dupatta
to receive it. My mother used to drop the pan in her hand, making sure
that her hand did not touch the Lalbegi woman’s hand. On occasions of
marriage the family would come and sit in a corner and wait until all
guests had eaten and left. It would then be given food in vessels they
brought with them. They did not eat the food there, but instead took it
with them to be eaten at home (Ahmad 2010: 252).

What Ahmad so richly portrays here is a concurrence of rituals of

close familiarity, even warmth (‘she was on the best of terms…’), with
rituals of radical hierarchical differentiation—an adunation of intimacy
and domination—that, I would argue, distinctively marks the relation
between householder and domestic sanitation worker in North India.
6
I should clarify that these studies, while they document practices of untouchability
experienced by Muslim castes in sanitation, are not ‘exclusively’ interested in this group;
these works are ‘multi-caste studies’, concerned with a range of stigmatised Muslim
communities. Moreover, none of these studies is based on fieldwork conducted primarily
with Muslim sanitation labour castes.

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8 / Joel Lee

Readers of Hindi and Urdu literature will recognise these scenes of

fraught, power-laden intimacy from their representation in novels such
as Amritlal Nagar’s Nachyau Bahut Gopal and short stories by Ismat
Chughtai, Surajpal Chauhan, Omprakash Valmiki and others. To be sure,
the emphasis tends to shift depending on whether the writer identifies more
with those who clean toilets or with those whose toilets are cleaned—there
is more familial warmth in Nagar’s novel, and more overt casteism in
Valmiki’s story ‘Amma’, for example. But in all cases both elements—
the familiarity borne of a particular kind of daily interaction and the
hierarchical dominance grounded in caste—are acknowledged as crucial
to the social economy of domestic sanitation work.
To characterise these relations, I propose the term ‘intimate untouch-
ability’. Its affective charge derives in part from the place of its enactment.
Unlike the locus of most dominant caste exploitation of dalit labour—
agricultural fields—the familial home is, for the employer of domestic
sanitation work, a vulnerable interior temporarily exposed to the gaze and
touch of an outsider. At the same time, for the domestic sanitation worker,
it is a hierarchical workplace laden with the hopes and fears associated
with economic dependence, as well as the danger of unwanted advances
from dominant caste men.
In part, too, intimate untouchability holds power over its participants
due to its ineluctable link with the body and that which the body expels.
Shame—sharam—is important to note here as an embodied affect. Sharam
cuts both ways: shame over the byproducts of one’s own body and their
exposure to others, and shame at having to deal with other people’s
human waste. But shame is not the only possible affective entailment of
the corporeal aspect of relations formed over domestic sanitation. As we
will see, Halalkhor origin stories not only address the labour of cleaning
bodily expulsions but provide a meditation on the affective bonds and
ethical meanings that such labour can potentially entail.
To understand these stories, it is essential to ethnographically substanti-
ate and historically deepen the sociological sketch of Muslim sweepers
provided in surveys and multi-caste studies. My research in eastern UP
and Bihar seeks to do precisely this.7 While this is not the place to report

7
During 2011–12, I conducted research with Muslim Halalkhors in the following
locations: Benares, Mau, Mirzapur, Gorakhpur, Tanda, Lucknow, Bhadohi and Pratapgarh
in UP, and Sasaram in Bihar. Preliminary interviews in Patna and Mau in 2008 also inform
this research.

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 Who is the true Halalkhor? / 9

extensively, a few findings need to be summarised. Most importantly,

Halalkhors and their allies are, and have been since at least the 1940s, en-
gaged in ongoing local struggles for emancipation from stigma, exclusion
and discriminatory treatment. For example, in Benares and its hinterland,
my Halalkhor interlocutors alongside sympathetic local pirs have, despite
at times hostile resistance, brought an end to the exclusion from mosques
that their grandparents experienced, as well as the segregated confinement
in the back rows of the congregation during collective prayer that they
themselves experienced in their early adulthood. Likewise in places like
Tanda and Mirzapur, collective efforts by dalit Muslims, supported at times
by individual members of the ‘ulema, recently overturned long-standing
untouchability practices such as the use of separate vessels in teashops and
in the homes and wedding venues of the ashraf. The eradication of such
exclusionary social forms as these warrants recognition as revolutionary;
the changes wrought are profoundly altering the texture of public life and
the experience of being dalit and Muslim in these places.
That said, other untouchability practices remain firmly in place, and
structural deprivation on caste lines remains starkly the rule. Most of my
Halalkhor interlocutors live in bastīs (settlements) spatially segregated from
neighbourhoods of non-dalit Muslims, and Halalkhor bastīs, like those of
other dalits, are disproportionately located adjacent to public latrines and
rubbish depots—the consequence of what I have elsewhere called environ-
mental casteism (Lee 2017). Many higher status Muslims refer to Halalkhors
by their caste title whether they do sanitation work or not. My interlocutors
have to think long and hard to recall examples of Halalkhor individuals who
have married outside the caste. Most qabristāns (graveyards) in my field-
work area remain fully segregated—Halalkhors in Benares and Bhadohi,
for instance, are either buried in a separate section, behind a boundary
marker, in the back of otherwise mixed Muslim cemeteries or they have
separate graveyards altogether. Incidents, in which members of privileged
castes verbally express contempt for Halalkhors, whether overtly or subtly,
remain relatively frequent. As a man in Mirzapur put it to me, condensing
the developments of recent decades into a single image of modified but
persistent untouchability, ‘They used to drop paisa [into our hands] from
five feet above. Today they do it from one foot above.’8

8
Pahle to log pānׂć fut se paisa dete the. Āj ek fut ūpar se (recorded interview, Mirzapur,
22 February 2011).

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10 / Joel Lee

III
Halalkhor: The career of a category
It will be apparent that titles among the Muslim sanitation labour castes
follow the rule of proliferation and instability that obtains in other domains
of caste nomenclature. Already we have seen ‘Muslim Bhangi’, ‘Musalli’
and ‘Lalbegi’ used by various writers as equivalents of ‘Muslim sweeper’.
When I began my fieldwork in eastern UP, I understood ‘Halalkhor’ to be
one among a small throng of such regionally inflected labels for the same
endogamous community. Indeed my reading of the colonial archive and
secondary literature (especially Das 2007; Prashad 2000) had led me to
anticipate uncovering a tragic but increasingly familiar story of cultural
partition that would explain the particular distribution of caste titles across
space and time: the syncretic and widespread Lalbegis of the 19th century,
in response to mounting pressures of communalist competition in the
early decades of the 20th century, parted ways to become either Hindu
Valmikis (in Punjab, Delhi and western UP) or Muslim Halalkhors (in
eastern UP and Bihar).
Not long into my research, though, it became clear that this narrative
was mistaken—or rather, that it was correct only on the recently Hinduised
side. The Lalbegis of the 19th century did indeed become known as Hindu
Valmikis—precisely in the early 20th-century conditions anticipated. But
the family histories my Halalkhor interlocutors in eastern UP and Bihar
shared with me did not square at all with the theory of a split from the
Lalbegi community, even taking into account the motivated silences
bequeathed by the history of communalism in North India. Instead,
Halalkhor family histories pushed me back to the archive with a new
set of questions. There, however, the question of the community’s social
history was complicated by the fact that with each century that I retreated
into the past, the caste title seemed to swell in importance and in the scope
of its reference. Clearly the regional dalit Muslim caste presently desig-
nated by Halalkhor was only one stream of a much larger group labelled
Halalkhor between the 17th and 19th centuries.
Usages of Halalkhor in the archive present a skein of history that is
tangled, but not impossibly so. I present here, then, a preliminary attempt
to track the term through the historical record from its emergence in the
late 16th century to the present.

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 Who is the true Halalkhor? / 11

In the section of Abu’l Fazl’s Ain-i Akbari that deals with the
administration of the royal stables, the entry entitled Khākrob—a Persian
word meaning ‘sweeper of dust’9—reads as follows: ‘In Hindustan the
sweeper is called Halalkhor. The world sovereign [Akbar] brought this
name into circulation’10 (‘Allami 1872 [c1590]: 144, my translation). To
my knowledge this is the first textual appearance of the term Halalkhor
in South Asia. The meaning that Akbar apparently intended, and which
remains the primary denotation today, is ‘one who earns an honest living’,
or, as one 20th-century Urdu dictionary has it, ‘one who earns by the sweat
of one’s brow’ (Qureshi 1971: 277). Yet in the centuries that followed, a
secondary meaning, altogether contrary in spirit to the first, accrued to
the term, and was apparently used by many to disparage sweepers. That
meaning is those for whom all food—including pork, the leavings of
others, and so on—is lawful; thus, a number of observers in the colonial
period opined that Halalkhor really implies ‘eaters of unlawful food’
(Raghunathji 1884), ‘all-eaters’ (Campbell 1885: 435) or other variations
on this theme (‘Allami 1872 [c1590]: 147; Crooke 1890: 36; Gait 1902a:
436; Platts 2004 [1884]: 480; Shakespear 1834: 782).
Whether or not we trust Abu’l Fazl that it was Akbar who popularised
the title, Halalkhor certainly came to have currency across the breadth
of the Mughal Empire as a generic label for all caste-stigmatised communi-
ties whose members do sanitation work (Azad 1907 [1880]: 394; Scrafton
1763:7–8; Tavernier 1925 [1676]: 145–46; Yule and Burnell 2013 [1903]:
254–55). Other polities adopted the term, as well; in the Rajput kingdom
of Marwar, for instance, we find Halalkhors enumerated in a 17th-century
household census and, a century later, named in a royal decree as one of the
‘achhep’, or untouchable, castes residing in the kingdom (Cherian 2015:
Ch. 1; Peabody 2001: 828). European sources of the 17th, 18th and early
19th centuries—from Jean-Baptiste Tavernier to Jeremy Bentham—are
replete with references to Halalkhors, consistently depicted as figures of
abjection engaged in defiling labour (Chatterjee 2012: 170; Graham 1812:
31). Lexicographers, from John Gilchrist onwards, featured Halalkhor as
a North Indian vernacular equivalent of ‘sweeper’, or as John Shakespear’s

9
Khāk (dust) + rob (sweeper), from ruftan (to sweep). Thus, ‘sweeper of dust’. The
other term for sweeper in the passage is the Arabic kannās.
10
Dar Hind kannās ra Halalkhor namande. Gītī khidev badīn nāmrūshinās gardānīd.

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entry has it, ‘A person of the lowest caste, generally a sweeper, or employed
in the meanest and dirtiest occupations (so called, because everything
is lawful food to him)’ (1834: 782, emphasis in original). Dictionaries
throughout the 19th century present Bhangi, Khakrob, Mehtar, Chuhra
and Halalkhor as ‘synonyms’ (Dehlawi 1898–1918; Fallon 1879; Forbes
1858; Gilchrist 1787–98; Platts 2004 [1884]; Shakespear 1834).
While some preliminary census exercises and early gazetteers retained
this usage (Campbell 1885; Williams 1869), the picture began to shift
with the decline of Mughal-era nomenclature in the language of gov-
ernment and the increasing influence of Brahmin and other ‘high caste’
Hindu personnel and perspectives in the sociological project of the late
19th-century ‘ethnographic state’ (Dirks 2001). In the decennial censuses
between 1872 and 1911, Halalkhor was superseded initially by Mehtar but
ultimately by Bhangi as the premier blanket term for the sanitation labour
castes. The ascendance of the Sanskrit-derived Bhangi—which, unlike
Halalkhor or Mehtar, carries no positive connotation—was then further
cemented by Gandhi’s determined patronage of the latter, even when his
interlocutors among these castes repeatedly entreated him to use another
term (Lee 2015: Ch. 4). In two regional pockets of governmental discourse,
however, Halalkhor held on. One was Bombay, where the life of the title
was extended by the institution of a municipal sewerage fee known as the
‘Halalkhor tax’.11 The other was Bihar, where colonial officials observed
that Halalkhor locally denoted an endogamous community ‘who, though
similar in their employments, are quite separate, and differ considerably in
their habits’ from other ‘sweeper castes’ (Beverley 1872: 164; Gait 1902a;
cf. Gait 1902b; Gait 1913: 196). Outside of these two contexts, following
its decline in official usage, Halalkhor as a general term for sweeper fell
out of circulation except among a stratum of ‘educated Muhammadans’
by the end of the 19th century (Yule and Burnell 2013 [1903]: 255).
From Abu’l Fazl to the decennial censuses, there is no indication that
the category of the Halalkhor was regarded as religiously determined; until
the 20th century, the term clearly denoted primarily the occupational-
cum-status group of sanitation labour castes, irrespective of religious
orientation. Where the group’s relation to religious communities was

11
J.A. Turner and B.K. Goldsmith, ‘Sanitation in India’, The Times of India, Bombay,
1917.

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 Who is the true Halalkhor? / 13

noted at all, it was as neither Muslim nor Hindu (Azad 1907 [1880]:
394; Cherian 2015: Ch. 1). When the decennial censuses imposed the
categories of caste and religion as single-value variables, those people
enumerated as Halalkhor appeared, in the resulting identitarian matrix, to
include Hindus, Muslims and animists. In their qualitative descriptions,
colonial officials often portrayed Halalkhors as ‘half Mussalmans and
half Hindus’ (Campbell 1885: 437) or ‘on the border-land between the
two religions’ (Gait 1902a: 436). At the same time, census workers also
noted subgroups, known by names such as Sekra or Sheikh Halalkhor,
who were ‘more completely converted to Muhammadanism than [other
sweeper castes…] [t]heir boys are circumcised; they refrain from pork;
they worship no Hindu gods; they are married by Muhammadan Kazis,
and they observe the Ramazan and offer up prayers like other Muham-
madans’ (Gait 1902a: 436).
The Halalkhor category, then, provides a fine gauge of the chafing
between colonial categorical schema and multiple indigenous frames of
reference, and the erasure of some of the latter by the former, for which
the imperial census is justly notorious. Yet even in such epistemologi-
cally turbid waters, one can discern in the census accounts both a broad
coalition of sanitation labour castes whose religious life tended towards
the autonomous (Halalkhor in the general, Mughal-era sense), as well
as a regional sanitation labour caste committed to Islam (Halalkhor/
Sekra in Bihar).
In the post-Mandal period, the title Halalkhor has come almost exclu-
sively to designate the regional dalit Muslim jāti or birādari centred in
Bihar, Jharkhand and eastern UP (though present in pockets elsewhere,
e.g., Delhi, Bhopal). A subset of Halalkhors in the earlier, general sense,
and a continuation of the geographically delimited Halalkhor/Sekra noted
in the Bihar reports of the colonial census, this community retained the
title even as it fell into disuse outside the region and among non-Muslim
sweepers, such that the once pan-Indian, religiously neutral term now
applies to a regional and unambiguously Muslim community.
The occupational connotation of the old title, meanwhile, remains. In
the districts of eastern UP and Bihar in which I have conducted fieldwork,
Halalkhors make up a sizeable portion (often between 20 and 50 per
cent, but in some places up to 90 per cent) of the sanitation workforce in
municipalities, hospitals, universities and other institutions.

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IV
Origin stories: Conversion, downward mobility, heresy
and the Prophet’s illness
With this background in mind, let us turn to the narratives that Halalkhor
women and men relate about the origins of their community, and the
politics and modes of social critique that these oral traditions bring into
play. In the course of many long conversations in canteens, Sufi shrines,
brass band offices and above all Halalkhor homes, I have been presented
with what strike me as four distinct kinds of genealogical narratives.
The first, and perhaps least surprising, is that the community descends
from indigenous converts to Islam who, before conversion, performed
the same stigmatised forms of labour. In other words, Halalkhors are
converted Helas—Helas being a Scheduled Caste who inhabit the same
region and have the same ‘traditional occupations’ as the present-day
Halalkhors, but are designated by the state as ‘Hindu’. The few men,
all educated, who proposed the conversion story to me have presented
it not as oral tradition but as a ‘hypothesis’. In the absence of any
written shijrāt, or family trees, and having inherited no oral tradition
about conversion, they reason, we must assume that we descend from
converted ‘Hindu’ sweepers. Importantly, this narrative involves no Sufi
pir, shrine or miracles nor does it reference a particular ruler, ruling
dynasty or other source of patronage—as the literature on subaltern
Muslim conversion might lead one to anticipate (e.g., Eaton 1982,
2004; Lawrence 1984).
The second kind of narrative, which I have encountered only slightly
more often than the first, asserts that economic hard times in the past two
generations have compelled an unprecedented turn to sanitation labour.
Connecting this—which is indeed a feature of a number of family histories,
though by no means the majority—to the widely attested fact that in this
region landowning dominant castes used to address the community as
‘Sheikh Halalkhor’, some people imply that the community is, properly
speaking, Sheikh by caste. Yet no sooner is this suggestion made than
a retreat to ambiguity often follows. In Tanda, for example, a woman
born around 1940 told me that her family had cultivated the land until
her father’s generation, which, pressed by poverty, took up service in the
municipality. Then she said: ‘We people, son, we people are Sheikh. And

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 Who is the true Halalkhor? / 15

people started writing Halalkhor, Sheikh Halalkhor. We eat the earnings

of hard labour, we don’t eat unlawful earnings.’
If she were to press the point, insisting on a proud Sheikh status tem-
porarily tarnished by economic constraints, the narrative would nicely
exemplify what is often called ashrafisation (Ahmad 1978; Vreede-de
Stuers 1968), the effort to raise one’s social status by claiming ashraf
status and adopting the social practices of the Muslim elite. And as Imtiaz
Ahmad (1978: 184) noted decades ago, of the four categories of the North
Indian ashraf—Sayyid, Sheikh, Mughal and Pathan—it is above all the
porous Sheikh that has enabled this operation, absorbing en bloc upwardly
mobile castes of indigenous converts seeking to conceal their origins. In
the event, however, this woman remains ambivalent, first asserting Sheikh
status, but then also owning, rather than repudiating, the Halalkhor title
and its claim to a dignified livelihood.
While I have seen, on occasion, more vigorous and public attempts by
Halalkhors to assert Sheikh status, these efforts are constrained first of
all by the vastness of the social distance to be traversed, and second by
a growing awareness within the community that the state, in its regime
of compensatory discrimination for Scheduled Castes, offers an alterna-
tive modality of upward mobility premised not on the concealment but
on the laying bare of caste stigma. This path, at present, is blocked for
Halalkhors: in what one constitutional historian calls ‘legal Hindutva’
(Conrad 2007: 216), the state, since 1950, has refused to recognise dalit
Muslims as belonging to the Scheduled Castes, thereby excluding them
from government programmes designed to redress the structural violence
of untouchability.
Organised efforts to reverse this exclusionary regime of recognition
have been underway since the 1990s, and a small number of Halalkhor
leaders are involved in the national level dalit Muslim and dalit Christian
organisations heading these efforts. It is awareness of all this among a
growing circle of Halalkhors that transforms the first kind of origin story—
the conversion from Hindu sweeper castes—from a badge of shame to
coin in the economy of compensatory discrimination. To admit shared
origins with ‘Hindu’ sweepers is not only to be on firm historical footing
but is also to buttress legal arguments for the inclusion of dalit Muslims
in the category of the Scheduled Castes. From this point of view, the
second kind of story—of a temporary fall from ashraf respectability—is

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politically disastrous, as it rejects the very criteria that the state uses to
identify its most needful subjects.
Narratives of recent downward mobility, significantly, were told to
me primarily by women. This seems in part to reflect women’s experience
of male hypergamy between Halalkhor tāts (units of community self-
governance that also function, to a degree, as exogamous patrilineages, or
gotras). That is, women of certain Halalkhor tāts in eastern UP engaged
primarily in tailoring and petty shopkeeping tend to be wed to Halalkhor
men of a ‘lower’ tāt, which sometimes means women previously unex-
posed to sanitation labour marry sweepers and take up sanitation work
themselves. Such experiences are given powerful utterance in narratives
that emphasise intergenerational erosion of status—narratives like those
claiming a fallen Sheikh identity.
The third account of Halalkhor origins I heard for the first time on a
winter night in Mirzapur, 60 kilometres upriver from Benares. In a group
discussion, a middle-aged man named Bachhanu, who had until then been
silent, spoke up to say, ‘The foundation of the Halalkhors is a matter of
several thousand years ago. There was one Fazalullah Halalkhor. He was
born in Anatolia.’ Bachhanu went on to explain that Fazalullah Halalkhor
was a sant (sage), mahātmā and ‘ālim (scholar) who, upon receiving
visions of omnipotence in his dreams, invited the local bādshāh (king)
to recite a new kalima—a new Islamic confession of faith—that he,
Fazalullah, had composed.

So the son of the bādshāh had [Fazalullah] arrested and murdered…

And in his rage, he also had the Halalkhor community imprisoned…
When the Muslim kings came from Anatolia to Hindustan… they
brought [the Halalkhors] along to serve them. To clean the stables.
Whatever dirty work there was, they were made to do it, they were
made slaves.

Though the temporal and geographic bricolage of the story suggested

oral tradition, Bacchanu mentioned that he had read it in a book. I began,
after this, to ask about the Fazalullah story wherever I went, and soon
found that people knew of the heretic saint elsewhere too—in Benares
and Gorakhpur, but not in Bhadohi or Sasaram—and they, too, refer-
enced a book. At a wedding in Tanda, I met someone who had the book
in hand—a slim Hindi volume entitled Herufī Nāma—and eventually I

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 Who is the true Halalkhor? / 17

met the author, a retired engineer and Haji from the community, at his
home in Pratapgarh. Bashir Ahmad’s text, in which he proposes that
Halalkhors descend from the persecuted followers of the 14th-century
Persian founder of the Herufi sect, Fazalullah al-Haruf, warrants a
more substantial analysis than what can be offered here.12 For now I
would like only to observe that the story of Fazalullah and his enslaved
followers has taken on the life of an oral tradition, both linked to and
independent of the text.
In adopting as a founding figure someone executed for heresy, the story
participates in a long dalit tradition of identification with antinomian figures
with a reputation both for supernatural power and deviance from ortho-
doxy: figures such as Sheikh Saddo of Amroha, or Lal Beg the ‘prophet
of the sweepers’. In making Muslim bādshāhs the villains of the piece, the
story clearly does not project the ashraf as a class on which to lay hopes.
Nor does it follow the template of those advocating for inclusion among
the Scheduled Castes, insofar as the genealogy leads back not to local
converts but to Persia (or Anatolia, in Bacchanu’s telling). For neither
old nor new strategies for social mobility—ashrafisation or the embrace
of state protection—does the Fazalullah story provide any purchase. Yet
it circulates and is narrated with verve.
The fourth type of narrative traces the community’s history to the
time and milieu of the Prophet. This oral tradition is by no means
ubiquitous—many of my interlocutors are not familiar with it—but I
have heard it more often, and in more places, than the first three kinds
of narratives. According to an elder in Sasaram, who told me the story
while sitting in the roadside office of the brass band that he owns and
conducts, the Prophet Muhammad, in order to maintain the cleanliness
(safāī) of his wives’ quarters, retained a man, whom he named Din
Muhammad. From this man descended the Halalkhors. Elsewhere I was
told that Bilal, the Prophet’s companion, did the household sweeping for
Muhammad, and that this was why some Halalkhors take the surname
Bilali. Most versions of the story, though, centre on a particular moment
in the Prophet’s life. Here is how the story was told to me by Hasan Ali,
an admired lathībāz (cudgel fighter) and sanitation worker in Banaras
Hindu University.

12
I undertake a more detailed study of Herufī Nāma and the story of Fazalullah in the
larger work of which this essay represents a beginning.

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Why do we call ourselves Halalkhor—for this we have a history. Elders

used to tell us, and it is in the Qur’an, and it is in the Shariyat. And the
‘ulema used to relate this story as well, how our biradari got its title, how
the name Halalkhor came about… One time our Prophet Muhammad,
Muhammad Sahib, was traveling somewhere. Our Prophet Muhammad
Sahib was travelling somewhere, and during the journey his health took
a bad turn. Our Sirkar. Our Prophet. Well, there were several Muslims
with him, Muslims. Now when he fell ill then he had vomiting, ultī
—it’s called ultī (in Hindi), yes? Or, in Arabic, qai. So when Sirkar
vomited (ultī kar diya), his five or seven Muslim companions—five,
seven, eight people—none of them cleaned it up. And one man from
our biradari stood up and, out of love of our Sirkar, or for whatever
reason, he stood up, saw that no one was cleaning it, and then picked
it up and cleaned the place. He gathered the mess (gandagī) altogether,
removed it from there and threw it out. And Sirkar said with his own
words, that from today, you are truly a Halalkhor.

Note the frankness and specificity with which the bodily expulsion and its
cleaning are described. Hasan Ali in his account used three words for the
malady: the Hindustani ultī, the Arabic qai and the English ‘vomiting’.
This kind of clarity is consistent across tellings. Consider another version,
told to me by a railway worker in Lucknow.

My uncle who is no more, he used to tell me when I was a child, when

I would ask him how and why our Halalkhor biradari came to be, he
would say that his father, grandfather and elders would tell him—my
uncle’s father and grandfather and elders used to tell him, and then he
told me—uncle said that our Lord, peace be upon him, had an attack of
vomiting [ultī] and diarrhoea [dast]. Both. And latrine. Now to clean all
of this up, this latrine, no one came forward. There were many biradaris
present, people of every caste [har jāt ke log]. Then one man spoke
up, saying ‘Our Lord, peace be upon him, is in such a state!’ Then he
cleaned it up with some ashes and sand and all [rākhī lākhī mit$t$hī],
and disposed of it. He cleaned it and threw it out. So then what hap-
pened, it was said, ‘To this believer [momin] shall be given this post
of honour [martabā], he shall have the title Sheikh Halalkhor.’ From
then on Sheikh Halalkhor is the biradari’s name. The Lord himself,
peace be upon him, bestowed it.

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 Who is the true Halalkhor? / 19

Here, again, precise words for the Prophet’s ill health are used, and the
particulars of the removal of human waste—with the manual scavenger’s
standard technique of covering with ash and dirt before scooping up and
transporting away—are rehearsed. My interlocutors used neither euphe-
mism nor circumlocution to identify what the Prophet’s body expelled and
how the caste’s progenitor disposed of it. That is to say, an ideology that
would regard talk of vomit and diarrhoea as shameful or to be avoided is
not in evidence in these narrations.
If admitting descent from previously ‘Hindu’ dalit converts clears the
path for an emancipatory project through mechanisms of the progressive
state, and if claiming fallen Sheikh status implies the prospect of rising
‘again’ into the ranks of the ashraf, narratives of the man who disposes
of the Prophet’s discharge do a different kind of work. It is true that these
stories imply that the caste has Arabian ancestry, and in this respect, they
resemble the genealogical claims of, for instance, Qureshis previously
known as Qasais, or Ansaris previously known as Julahas, and thus invite
interpretation as further evidence that ashrafisation remains the prevailing
modality for upwards mobility among subaltern Muslim groups in North
India. Yet I would resist this reading. In fact, no one who related to me
this story framed it as a demonstration of the community’s nasab, or pedi-
gree. The proud status claim ‘we come from Arabia’, that is, a hallmark
of ashraf and ashrafising discourse accompanied none of these tellings.
I would argue, rather, that the meaning these stories hold for their tellers
is to be found in what the internal structure of the narratives underscores.
Essential to virtually every account of the originary Halalkhor I have
heard is the moment in which the companions of the Prophet—in some
versions five or seven people, in others 72, often specified as ‘people of
every caste’—‘fail to come forward’ to assist Muhammad in his distress.
Suspense builds until the protagonist—‘one man from our biradari’—steps
forward, speaks and performs the task nobody else is willing to do. A claim
to exemplary piety and devotion to the Prophet is thus conjoined with a
critique of the other companions, those who stand by rather than sully
themselves with the Prophet’s gandagī. Since the other companions present
are in most versions of the story explicitly identified as representatives of
the Muslim castes among whom Halalkhors presently live, it is difficult
to avoid the implication that it is the Halalkhors—and not ‘the Siddiquis
and Faruqis and Mansuris’, as another narrator described the bystander
companions—who serve the Prophet best.

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These stories highlight not only piety but the dignity of labour. The ma-
teriality of domestic sanitation work—the malodorous abjected matter of
the body that so decisively marks the scene of intimate untouchability—is
refigured here, its conventional connotations of stigma and disgust held in
abeyance by a narrative world in which the Prophet’s body is exceptional,
if not perfect. In implicit contrast with the inherited status ideologies of
the other companions present (‘Siddiquis and Faruqis’, ‘people of every
caste’), the protagonist’s ethic of work voluntarism is valourised: in the
moment of need, it is how one acts, rather than who one is, that matters.
This discourse on the merit, rather than stigma, of labour is then literally
put in the mouth of the Prophet. As he entitles his helpful companion,
the Prophet inaugurates the Halalkhor, a category in the lexical structure
of which is embedded the value of earning an honest living from labour.
The dignity of domestic sanitation labour is even more pointedly
asserted in a variant of the story in which it is not a caste progenitor
who performs the symbolically freighted task but the Prophet himself.
This version I heard in Benares at the home of Rahmat Ali, a Halalkhor
construction worker in his forties, as he and I sat discussing the com-
munity’s history with his older caste fellow B.L. Suleman, who practices
homeopathic medicine. Ali and Suleman and I had been joined by the
maulana who offers Qur’an and Arabic lessons to children in this primar-
ily Halalkhor bastī, including Rahmat Ali’s children. A tall, gaunt Bihari
dressed in the characteristically simple lungi and kurta of a graduate of
Barelvi madrasas, the maulana, like the neighbourhood imam who hails
from Bengal, is generally appreciated by Halalkhor men as less filled with
caste prejudice than local religious authorities. Yet the maulana and imam
remain outsiders in terms of birādarī kī bāt, matters of caste.
When I asked Ali and Suleman what their grandparents had told
them about the origins of the term Halalkhor, Suleman explained that
the Prophet Muhammad had once invited a number of people to a meal
(dāwat) together. These people were Hindu.
The maulana interrupted to say that the guests were in fact Jewish,
not Hindu. Accepting this, Suleman resumed, saying that Muhammad’s
guests ate rather too heartily, became ill and suffered a case of diarrhoea.
The bed was consequently soiled. Muhammad then cleaned up the mess.

‘With his own hands,’ added the maulana.

‘With his own pure [pavitra] hands,’ agreed Suleman.

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 Who is the true Halalkhor? / 21

After a pause, Rahmat Ali asked, ‘So, we are in the lineage [nasl] of
the Prophet himself?’
‘That’s a different matter,’ said the maulana, a bit abruptly.
‘We are following in his footsteps,’ offered Suleman.13

The maulana then put forward several revisions to Suleman’s account—

there was only one guest not several, and in fact the guest was not the
Prophet’s friend but an enemy. He concluded that there was no connec-
tion between this story and the origins of the term Halalkhor. Suleman
and Ali fell silent, apparently in deference to the maulana, and both the
conversation and the mood quickly grew cool.
In this narrative struggle, Suleman and the maulana converge on the
essential point that the Prophet Muhammad personally attended to the
cleansing of the excretions of his guest(s); in both tellings, the act of
safāī—‘cleaning’, but also, importantly, ‘sanitation’ (as in safāī karamcārī,
‘sanitation worker’)—is unambiguously figured as virtuous on account
of the Prophet’s doing it. But Suleman and the maulana differ sharply on
the implications of the story. Suleman offers the narrative as an answer
to my question about Halalkhor origins, establishing a parallel between
the caste’s (most stigmatised) traditional occupation and the Prophet’s
exemplary life. Like Muhammad Faiz in the story with which I began this
essay, Suleman makes use of the Halalkhor concept to shift discursive
frames from the genealogical to the ethical. Then, in calling Muhammad’s
hands pavitra, pure, Suleman not only underscores the claim of honourable
labour but marshals Islamic ideology in the service of anti-caste discourse:
the assertion that one can perform what is considered dalit labour with
pure hands directly contradicts caste ideology, which defines dalits and
their labour as precisely apavitra, impure.
When Rahmat Ali attempts to draw a genealogical implication from
the story—in keeping with the logic of the originary Halalkhor version
of the story—the maulana cuts him off. To follow Ali’s line of reasoning
would be to arrive, by a novel route, at a claim to Sayyid status. This is


13
Maulana: Apne hī hāthon se.
Suleman: Apne pavitra hāthon se. 
Ali: To, ham Paighambar Sāhab ke hī nasl ke hain?
Maulana: Yeh to alag bāt hai.  
Suleman: Ham un ke caran main cal rahe hain.
(Notes from unrecorded conversation, 5 May 2011.)

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22 / Joel Lee

not what Suleman intended, however, as he then clarifies by pointing

to ethical action—‘We are following in his footsteps’—rather than to
pedigree, or nasl. But the maulana is discomfited by this, as well, and
ultimately dismembers that which Suleman would articulate: Halalkhor
labour and the Prophet’s example. We are left with an uneasy stand-off
between religious authority and the authority of Halalkhor oral tradition.
Moments like these are undoubtedly one reason that Halalkhor women
and men are reluctant to relate their origin stories in mixed company.

V
Conclusion: Intimate touchability
Whether the Prophet blesses the man who cleans that which his body has
abjected, or whether it is the Prophet himself who does the cleaning, this
story in all the permutations in which I have heard it portrays a scene of
virtuous care for vulnerable bodies, of dignity amid human frailty. While
the originary Halalkhor story may not derive directly from Islamic texts,
and indeed while the relation of these narratives to textual traditions is
not the point, it is important that their signature trope—of intimate, in-
dividual care for the body of the Prophet—resonates widely in sources
authoritative for the broader Islamic community, notably in Hadith. There
are Hadith in which named, individual companions of the Prophet pour
the water with which the latter performs ablutions after excreting, or carry
his water pot for this purpose; another cluster of Hadith valourises those
companions who, during the Prophet’s illness, support him with their
shoulders and, along with his wife ‘Aisha, bathe his body’ (Khan 1976:
100–55). This narrative milieu enables a reworking of constituent elements
of the mise-en-scéne of intimate untouchability in North India—vulner-
able corporeality, domestic space, bodily secretions and cleansing—into
a staging ground for an Islamic ethics of care. In Halalkhor folk theology,
the scene is transformed into one of intimate touchability.
Does this move—narratively weaving together traditional Halalkhor
labour and the life of the Prophet—then sacralise or fetishise manual
scavenging? Might not these stories serve the ideological objectives of
dominant caste landowners, cloaking in religious garb what is, at root,
the exploitation of dalit labour? Does this oral tradition function as an
Islamic analog to Gandhi’s (1936) Brahminical exhortation that ‘the ideal
Bhangi’ should ‘approach [manual scavenging] only as a sacred duty’?

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 Who is the true Halalkhor? / 23

Evidence that could speak to this question for earlier periods is not
yet forthcoming. Speaking only for the present, I see no indication that
these oral traditions are interpreted in this way. Neither those who tell
this story nor anyone else among my Halalkhor interlocutors promotes
or speaks positively of manual scavenging; such work has been widely
abandoned and the move away from it is discussed as a sign of the
community’s progress. Some who tell the story of the first Halalkhor
stress that this ancestor did not, after his singular act of piety, make an
occupation of it, nor did the Prophet suggest doing so. An elder in Sasaram,
for example, emphasised that it was this ancestor’s descendants, well
after the death of the Prophet, who, due to poverty, took up safāī on a
regular basis.
More strikingly, my interlocutors were not only cognisant of the pos-
sibility of dominant castes cynically deploying Islamic tropes to justify
manual scavenging to their Halalkhor dependents, but a number of them
actively excoriated their parents’ and grandparents’ landlord employers
for doing precisely this. The story that these landlords apparently spun,
however, was that the hands and wrists of Halalkhor women, while soiled
in this life by their labour of removing ordure, would shimmer as though
gold, when they arrived in heaven—a play on the popular Hadith in which
the Prophet declares that ‘the parts of the body that the Muslims washed
in ablution [i.e., hands, wrists, feet, face] will glitter on the Day of Resur-
rection’ (Khan 1976: 101–02). This dominant caste ruse was spoken of
by Halalkhors with contempt and moral condemnation; the narratives of
the originary Halalkhor or of the Prophet cleaning up after his guest were
presented as stories of a different category altogether, associated with
ancestors and individual ‘alims rather than landed dominant castes. Thus,
while interpretations of the originary Halalkhor story as a kind of Islamic
endorsement of manual scavenging as a caste profession are conceivable,
such interpretations are not in evidence.
But if the narrative does not appear to sacralise domestic sanitation, it
also does not repudiate as contemptible or subhuman this form of labour
that, in many cases, the teller’s parents and grandparents have performed.
It does not figure emancipation as a ruptive departure from old ways, or
make liberation contingent on a change in occupation. While its politics
are not Gandhian, neither are they Ambedkarite. Instead, the oral tradi-
tion of the originary Halalkhor suggests a politics not readily assimilable
to current typologies of dalit political practice: An Islamic politics that

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is simultaneously utopian, critical of dominant castes, and couched in an

appeal to tradition.
In its (at least) four-and-a-half centuries of usage in South Asia, the term
Halalkhor has operated as a powerful social sign both ethically charged
and treacherously polysemic. As sociological category, Halalkhor has
narrowed from its Mughal-era denotation of all communities engaged in
sanitation labour to a regional dalit Muslim caste in the present. As ethi-
cal assessment, the term’s capacity to denote either ‘one who earns an
honest living’ or ‘eaters of unlawful food’ reflects the ambivalence of the
relationship between householder and manual scavenger. This relation-
ship—hierarchical, interdependent, forged in domestic space, anchored in
the materiality of human waste and suffused as often with warmth as with
the threat of violence—I have characterised as intimate untouchability.
I have sought to illuminate ways in which dalit Muslims find the
Halalkhor concept ‘good to think with’. For some, what is paramount
is that the government recognise the term as designating a category of
persons who have long suffered—and in many respects continue to
suffer—the structural violence of untouchability. For this first group, which
acknowledges the likelihood that their ancestors were Helas or a similarly
positioned regional ‘Hindu’ caste that converted to Islam, the exclusion
of dalit Muslims from the Scheduled Castes by the Congress in 1950 is
a historical wrong that can and should be righted by democratic political
means. For others—more women than men—Halalkhor is described as
a relatively recent accretion to the noble ancestral title of Sheikh, a de-
velopment resulting from a fall in economic status. This seems to reflect
women’s experience of the normative practice of male hypergamy within
the community as much as it does the continuing appeal of ashrafisation
as a paradigm for disprivileged castes attempting to elevate themselves
in the eyes of the broader Muslim community. For yet others, the title con-
nects the community with the medieval Persian Alim Fazalullah al-Haruf,
executed for composing his own kalima. Fazalullah’s appeal seems to
stem in part from the brazenness of his deviance from orthodoxy; his pull,
like that of other antinomian saints popular among dalit communities of
several faiths, suggests among Halalkhors a broadly critical sensibility
towards religious authority.
Finally, I have considered a set of narratives in which Halalkhors locate
the origins of their caste title in an ancestor’s caring act of cleaning the
bodily expulsions of the Prophet, or the Prophet’s righteous act of cleaning

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 Who is the true Halalkhor? / 25

the ordure of one of his guests. These stories deploy the Halalkhor concept
in a claim to Islamic ethical standing that is simultaneously a critique of the
community’s privileged caste coreligionists. In their complex engagement
with lived experience, aspiration, and Islamic ideas of dignified labour
and the exemplary life of the Prophet, these narratives reconfigure the
elements of intimate untouchability to suggest the possibility of intimate
touchability, a mode of sociality resting on Islamic piety, intimacy and care.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Imtiaz Ahmad, Carla Bellamy, Masood Alam Falahi, Manpreet Kaur,
Nadeem Hasnain, Ania Loomba, Saurabh Dube, Milind Wakankar, Olga Shevchenko, Peter
Just, David Edwards, Antonia Foias, Jim Nolan, Kim Gutschow, Meredith Coleman-Tobias,
James Manigault-Bryant, Zaid Adhami and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their
helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. I thank Thasin Alam for his assistance in
locating references to Halalkhors in several of the 19th-century colonial censuses. Research
for this article was supported by fellowships from the American Academy of Religion, the
Social Science Research Council and Fulbright-Hays.

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