Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Signs, the census, and the sanitation labor castes -- The ummat of Lal Beg : Dalit religion before enumerative politics -- Missionary majoritarianism : the Arya Samaj and the struggle with disgust -- Trustee majoritarianism : Gandhi and the Harijan Sevak Sangh -- Hinduization and its discontents : Valmiki comes to Lucknow -- Victory to Valmiki : declamatory religion and the wages of inclusion -- Lal Beg underground : Taqiyya, ethical secrecy, and the pleasure of dissimulation.

"In this compelling account of Hindu majoritarianism and its sly subversion by one of India's most oppressed minorities, the author calls into question foundational assumptions about caste, religion, and the politics of inclusion. Asking how it came to be common sense that one-fifth of India's population known as Dalit or 'untouchable' are and have always been Hindu, this book unearths evidence that tells a different story. The sanitation labor castes-those Dalit communities that provide nearly all of South Asia's sanitation workers-understood themselves in the colonial period to constitute an autonomous religious community separate from both Hindus and Muslims and centered on an antinomian prophet named Lal Beg. Weaving together history, ethnography, and linguistics, it charts the trajectory of this tradition: its apparent decline under pressure from mid-twentieth century nationalists and Hindu reformers, including Gandhi, as well as its clandestine continuation in the present. A chronicle of Dalit lives in the north Indian city of Lucknow and a meditation on the ethics and semiotics of secrecy, this book studies the history of the architects of the majoritarian project and of those who quietly undermine it"--