Some years ago now, I took a seat in a conference room on the upper story of a hotel in downtown Baltimore. I was attending a regional conference of the Society of Biblical Literature, but I had jumped disciplinary ship to listen to a presentation by my friend, Sunder John Boopalan, which he would give under the auspices of the American Academy of Religion. Fellow-feeling and the desire to support John brought me over. But I came away vividly impressed: John’s paper cut through the abstraction and technicality clouding the conference. John was talking about bodies—real, suffering, human bodies—caught up in patterns of violence inherited from the past; and yet also, through their very corporeality, liable to grief, and so open to liberative action. I recognized with excitement the urgency and the promise of what John was doing.

I was already determined to read the monograph that would result from John’s research. I could not have imagined that I would receive his invitation to participate in a symposium on it! It was with enthusiasm and apprehension that I consented to do so. Enthusiasm because my confidence in his project has only increased as I have read it in published form; apprehension because I am so ill-equipped professionally and positionally to evaluate its merits or to suggest critiques. Professionally, I teach Old Testament—a literary collection with plenty of bodies and violence and grieving and redress, but whose secondary literature hardly overlaps with the scholarship that John engages. Positionally, I am the definition of a dominant subject: a white male body socialized for “the conquering, cutting, and dismissal of racially marked bodies” (78). John does direct some—perhaps even much—of his book towards a readership of privileged subjects. And yet insofar as John’s book recommends and also enacts a “critical interrogation” of “violent identities,” the task of assessing it, and even more of criticizing it, from a subjectivity habituated to violence is a fraught undertaking. As a prophylactic against my own built-in tendencies towards abstraction and avoidance—towards “framing out” wrongs perpetrated against abject bodies—let me first rehearse what I thought John’s book was most basically about. John can then indicate what I have I have misunderstood or left out. I have reserved a few critical questions for the end of this review essay.

Memory, Grief, and Agency is, as noted, about bodies. No claim is more fundamental to John’s argument: all humans are bodies, and, as such, all humans are prone to suffering and harm. By turning so programmatically to corporeality, John signals a contrast: humans-as-bodies stands over against other visions of humankind for which abstract properties or mental practices are more central and bodies are of lesser or incidental importance. The bodied-ness of human life also furnishes John’s liberative proposals, on which, more momentarily: for now suffice it to say that the shared human predicament of bodily vulnerability presents a commonality across societal stratifications.

If, however, humans-qua-bodies move through the world with a baseline experience of shared vulnerability, societies distribute additional vulnerabilities in vastly differing measure. Some bodies are endowed with power such that they face only the ordinary vicissitudes of sickness, aging, and finitude. Other bodies are disempowered: slated for servitude, they are exposed to increased and intensified forms of proneness. John’s account takes departure from the distinct and yet parallel experiences of two non-dominant communities: the Dalits in India—to which John himself belongs—and people raced as Black in US contexts. Both communities are “historically marginalized,” meaning that in the not-so-distant-past, the societies in which they live provided legal, cultural, and religious sanction for their subjugation, exploitation, and exclusion by the dominant populations.

But John’s interest is not primarily in this history of not-so-distant, past, official marginalization. He aims rather to elucidate the present experiences of Dalits and African Americans. Both communities share the situation of having achieved relief “on the books” from caste- or race-based discrimination. Official discourse—which is to say, dominant discourse—has renounced the depredations of the past; public sanction for subjugation and exclusion is revoked. Indeed, the socially dominant in both contexts pride themselves on being “post-caste” and “post-racial,” respectively. Whatever caste-based or racist events of violence crop up are, in their eyes, vestigial only—a “remnant” (60).

But all this official progress belies the reality that casteist and racist “logics” still saturate these societies. The corporeality of John’s argument comes into focus just here. The positive changes that have affected Indian and US societies have left intact a basic feature of collective human life: the “socially conditioned corporeal habits” that govern people’s behavior. Humans are bodies, and bodies are habituated to move in certain regularized ways vis-à-vis other bodies. In other words, just because US courts desegregated public places did not impact the mass of bodily habits that had grown up in and around the former, overtly racist legal regime. Dominant bodies were accustomed to reacting in fearful and hostile ways to racialized bodies—and all those reflexes, embedded into the “muscle memory” of dominant subjects—persist. John writes of “the clutching of the purse by someone standing near you in an elevator; being followed by a clerk in a store; rude customer service; the quickening pace by the person in front of you who fears your racially marked body; being pulled over by a police officer” (82). All of these actions showcase the continued operation of corporeal habits inherited from the era of legalized high-caste and white supremacy.

In fact, the repeal of official discrimination has created more opportunities for non-dominant bodies to “move out of place”: to enter spaces formerly reserved for dominant bodies. Because corporeal habits from the past endure, these dominant bodies react fearfully and hostilely. As John observes, their reactions are patterned. To get at the fixity of such patterns, John fortifies his treatment of “habits” with two further concepts. On the one hand, he calls these reactions “rituals” in view of their bodied and routinized character. On the other hand, he speaks of a “grammar of the body,” a concept that accents the communicative dimension of these acts, as well as their “ruled” quality (82). Considered as rituals, the aggressive conduct of dominant bodies towards non-dominant ones effects a powerful humiliation. Such acts punish marginalized subjects for transgressing into dominant space. As events of “speaking,” these acts issue a strong warning: get out of here! This is ours!

John’s description of socially conditioned corporeal habits has another virtue: in keeping with his overall emphasis on concreteness and his corresponding criticism of abstraction, John’s account of violence relativizes the question of intention. For both “common sense” reckoning and for high-level legal deliberation, “malicious intent” is the sine qua non of wrongdoing. Not so in John’s argument: bodies perform rituals—including “rituals of humiliation”—in the absence of ill will or intent to harm. Dominant bodies lash out against the perceived intrusion of non-dominant bodies because that is what they have been trained to do, quite apart from the goodwill or cruelty inside the minds of the perpetrators. John here gives conceptual heft to a well-known and ubiquitous phenomenon: the well-intentioned white racist (or, mutatis mutandis, the high-caste bigot).

The thoroughgoing corporeality of John’s account also means that he sets himself a formidable challenge: of articulating a project of liberation in a “bodily register.” In other words, if John’s diagnosis subsists at the level of bodies, so, too, must his constructive recommendations. This task is even more clearly the case given the critique that John levels against some other theologians: namely, that they engage in strategic abstraction. They look away from bodies, especially abject bodies engrained with memory of wrongs, and instead they look to God, the eschaton, the post-political, etc. John’s criticism of two well-known theologians from the dominator class (Miroslav Volf and Oliver O’Donovan) on just such grounds is pointed and, to me, convincing. But it also raises the stakes for John’s own liberative proposals. Does Memory, Grief, and Agency live up to its own insistence on embodiment?

I think so—although I suspect that if there is any place in John’s argument that needs clarification or expansion in future work, it is the book’s “normative element,” or better, its “evocative proposition” (149). To a certain extent, this is only to be expected! After all, what is seen in Indian and US societies is, in the nature of the case, observable and therefore patient of description, whereas the changes that John hopes for are as-yet unseen (“hope that is seen is not hope”). They are consequently murkier.

The driving concept of John’s “evocative proposition” is discernible enough: grief. By this term John means something far larger than “mourning” and “self-enclosed melancholia” (153). Rather, he intends “a multi-dimensional process”: an active regimen of remembering wrongs enacted against oppressed bodies. Such a practice is multidimensional because it implicates the entirety of the remembering person or persons. It begins with their fundamental “recognition” of the “sameness” of other humans’ suffering bodiliness (105), and it encompasses all the human faculties that “light up” when this recognition takes place: “emotional, psychological, cognitive, and other affective elements” (153). John does not use the following analogy, but his explanations made me think of “mirroring”: one body can experience a “reflection” or an “echo” of the sufferings and harm done to another body, and this mirroring can then propel reparative efforts.

John’s “positive theological anthropology” (150) seems to suggest that this “recognition of sameness” is primordial. Other factors can (and usually do) obstruct it from happening. As John says, some bodies are “framed out” from “count[ing] as persons whose loss is to be grieved” (150); members of an in-group do not even notice the “injurability” of people from an out-group (100). But recognition nonetheless bubbles up, threatening to disrupt well-trod routines of violence. Two examples of this possibility stood out to me: first, John’s anecdote about a white woman and her teenage son in an ice cream shop. The white mom cuts in front of John and someone else with him, another raced body. The son “looked at [John’s] visibly upset face and whispered to his mother, ‘Mom, I think we cut in line’” (77). Much more poignantly, John tells about how Emmett Till was staying at his uncle’s house when drunk white men showed up at 2 a.m. to abduct him. Till’s aunt went to the next-door neighbors’ house to plead for help. These neighbors were white. John writes: “The wife wanted to give [help], but the husband would not consent” (169, quoting Timothy B. Tyson).

In both these instances, dominant bodies “chimed” with the sufferings of oppressed bodies. The white teen’s body echoed some of the injury shown on John’s face —the injury that he and his mother had wrought. The white neighbor-woman’s body absorbed some of the urgency and vulnerability of Emmett Till’s aunt begging for assistance. A “window of opportunity” thereby arose—what John calls a “call-and-response situation”—when the violence scripted for dominating bodies nearly broke off (168). The white teenager almost acted against his mother’s exclusionary protocol. The white woman neighbor “wanted to give [help].” John’s treatment of grief—as I understand it—adds only discipline to this natural and yet usually-interrupted bodily reaction. John “build[s] on what and who human persons do and are already” (149).

How does John do this? And what is the discipline that he adds to the corporeal “mirroring” that occurs innately and spontaneously between humans? These matters remain somewhat murky to me, in part because John’s vocabulary evoking this discipline appears to move into more cognitive and intentional domains. John speaks throughout the book, for example, of “critical interrogation”: interrogation of conditioned reflexes (67), of the conditions that make and unmake subjects (10), of human agency (208). In the absence of such interrogation, rituals of humiliation endure. John similarly fronts the action of “examination,” and the weighty effects of omitting it: “When left unexamined, identities . . . become violent identities” (75, my italics). John also identifies the “internal work” of grieving, a practice that consists in active remembrance of “the dead, exploited, despised victims of history” (179, quoting M. Shawn Copeland). The trouble—if it is that—with these recommendations is that they are not yet things that bodies do. As such, it seems that they might fall prey to the same impotence as the legal changes made in Indian and US societies: well and good in themselves, but hardly disruptive to the deeply-rooted, ritualized body-ways of these oppressive societies.

John does make other recommendations that are bodily: he urges an “external work of grief” whose ritualistic character matches rituals of humiliation “on their own turf” (209). This external work issues in public remembrance of wrongs and inculcation of grief over them; what gives it a ritual quality is its integration into regular Christian observances like baptism, Eucharist, and marriage. John also commends “the physical coming together of people across in-group/out-group differences in collective communal gatherings” (219). This kind of “moving out of place” creates new possibilities for differently-stratified bodies to syncopate with one another and so to interrupt inherited, violent corporeal habits. But John appears to see these outward and corporeal rites growing out of the internal discipline. In one intriguing footnote, he reverses the sequence: “Sometimes it is the external work (various rites) that makes possible internal work” (171n77). But this sounds like the exception. I came away from the book still wondering exactly what a “rite of moral responsibility” would look like—and how its outward and bodily aspects relate to its rather more deliberative and interior features. Also, and once again: if the latter, “internal” acts of “interrogating,” “examining,” and “remembering” really are as primary as they seem within John’s project, I question whether they have strength enough to make a dent in the accumulated momentum of violent bodily routines.

I also had concerns about the concreteness of John’s proposal in quite another direction. If at times Memory, Grief, and Agency visits the incorporeal terrain of discipline and deliberation, at other times it veers theological. It was with surprise and interest that I read, for instance, John’s brief exegesis of Exod 3, according to which the grief expressed by the oppressed Israelites moves Moses to disinvest in his privilege and to seek redress. Their grief also moves God (173). Earlier in the book, John observes that “the last and the least . . . subscrib[e] to a notion of God who sees and hears wrongs and is moved by cries for redress” (17). But these were rare theological moments: it mostly seems as though for John, giving attention to God (and/or Scripture) competes with giving attention to the dead and despised. God is abstract while humans are bodied and concrete. An occasional christological aside would join the two, but these remarks, too, were exceptional and ad hoc (95n54; 177). I wondered why there wasn’t more scriptural interpretation, or reflection on God proper, in this book, especially because I suspect that John is interested in both. I can recall seminary conversations with him about Ps 56:8, in which the psalmist confesses to God:

You keep track of all my sorrows.

You have collected all my tears in your bottle.

You have recorded each one in your book (NLT)

Or: I remember John’s interest in the story of Rizpah in 2 Sam 21, whose public grief galvanizes King David to properly bury the remains of Saul and Jonathon. Was it, then, a tactical consideration that led John to cut back on these sorts of reflection—an attempt to keep things corporeal? If so, then why did he allow these exceptions? And is this avoidance of exegesis or theology really necessary in the first place, especially given that some sources that John privileges emphasize God and/or Scripture? I am thinking here of John’s footnoting of the Dalit theologian K. Jesurathnam’s article on lament psalms, which specifies how “the oppressed honor divine agency” (152n5); or even of John’s grandmother and her love for Ps 121 (10). I also thought of Kazoh Kitamori and his theology of divine pain, based largely on readings in the book of Jeremiah. Might not sustained contemplation of God or Scripture augment remembrance of wrongs rather than distracting from them?

John Boopalan’s project has the potential to have a far-reaching impact regarding race and caste theories. Perhaps one of Boopalan’s main contributions to the efforts of dismantling and countering racism and casteism consists in emphasizing the positive and constructive force of grieving over wrongs committed against individuals and groups that have been put in social and political disadvantage through structural violence. One of Boopalan’s main claims is that grief over wrongs has a positive agential power. This agential power is to be used to create rites of moral responsibility that are capable of contributing to the creation of more hospitable societies for everyone, particularly for those who have been wronged historically, culturally, socially, politically, and religiously.

Following Judith Butler’s approach and others, Boopalan affirms that human patterns of thinking inform social practices. This is why the processes and conditions that form those patterns of thinking need to be interrogated critically, Boopalan says. The purpose of such interrogation is to prevent and counter the formation of violent identities that not only exclude and discriminate but also have killed people. Two prime examples of how violent identities operate at a societal level are racism in the United States and casteism in India. There is a wide range of forms in which violent identities are capable of exerting not only direct acts of violence but also perpetuate “rituals of humiliation,” Boopalan says. These rituals of humiliation are “historically conditioned practices of inferiorization that are affected by and originate in discriminatory legal and/or religio-cultural logics of the past still sustained today” (4). These common, day-to-day, and oftentimes unconscious interactions, have the effect of keeping disadvantaged and marginalized individuals and groups “in place,” Boopalan argues. Therefore, Boopalan’s proposal seeks to counter, dismantle, and eradicate these rituals of humiliation with an equally effective remedy: rites of moral responsibility, which are characterized as “antidotes to violent identities” in Boopalan’s project.

I find this project very promising in terms of its potential to achieve the goal of seeking redress for certain kinds of wrongs, countering rituals of humiliation associated with those wrongs, and more importantly, helping to create more hospitable societies. I have, however, some questions regarding the process and mechanism through which persons of privileged backgrounds are expected to embrace and experience the substitution of rituals of humiliation for rites of moral responsibility, leading to what Boopalan calls “a kind of moral conversion” (92). According to Boopalan, it would be through “new habitual formations and perhaps new rites of responsibility, which can lead to positive agential ends” (92), that such moral conversion could ultimately be achieved. This means, apparently, that moral conversion occurs as a process derived from the adoption of habits and practice of rites. This also seems to imply that for this conversion to happen, a multilayered intellectual operation (awareness, identification, and discernment of wrongs) needs to take place. According to Boopalan’s own words: “Attention to socially conditioned corporeal habits enables persons to better discern wrongs” (92). This seems to suggest that wrongs are committed as a result of “not paying attention” or “not enough attention” to the “body’s grammar.” In a sense, this not paying attention seems to be what Critical Race Theory (CRT) identifies as prejudice. Awareness by itself, however, would not solve the problem of racism or casteism for the same reasons that elimination of prejudice is not sufficient to solve racism. It is true that Boopalan does not say that awareness is the solution to racism and casteism, but rather moral conversion that translates into rituals of moral responsibility. The issue here is that racism and casteism are entrenched in sociopolitical, economic and cultural structures or systems where power plays a central role. It is clear that Boopalan is fully aware of the impact that individual identities have over structures and systems. He says: “Corporeal habits reinforce asymmetry in power and caste status” (93), but the question is, to what extent this “paying attention,” this awareness of the wrongs, and these rituals of moral responsibility have the power to transform the dynamics in structurally or systemically conditioned scenarios? In other words, is the proposed moral conversion powerful enough to start the process of eradicating racism and casteism? In the end, my question could be read as a return to the old question about what needs to change first in order to achieve a more just society, the individual or the structure? My initial response to this question is that both, individuals and structures/systems, need to change simultaneously and dialectically. I acknowledge that perhaps the question of what should change first is not the most productive approach to the issue, precisely because there is not a simple nor a single way in which these changes can happen. However, it is precisely because of the complex, multiple, and fluid ways of this change, that it is important to balance the analysis by incorporating other mechanisms of eradication of racism and casteism. An example of the complex nature of the mechanisms of change that are needed to affect the status quo can be found in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. regarding his view on the idea—the myth, in his own words—that legislation cannot change hearts: “Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless. The law cannot make an employer to love an employee, but it can prevent him from refusing to hire me because of the color of my skin. The habits, if not the hearts of people, have been and are being altered everyday by legislative acts, judicial decisions, and executive orders.”1 This passage points to the fact that even though some traces of racism and casteism can persist at the individual level, legislation, policies, and government practices can effectively neutralize or diminish the kind of power imbalances that characterize racism and casteism. The use of legislation is not 100 percent effective either, and that is the reason for arguing that both, individual and systemic changes, need to happen simultaneously and dialectically. This observation points only to a matter of emphasis in Boopalan’s project, not necessarily to a matter of substance.

The other aspect that I found intriguing in one of Boopalan’s main theses has to do with the level of efficacy of grieving in the process of making those in privileged positions to respond with responsibility. Boopalan says “persons from privileged backgrounds are called to take a cue from the grief of victims and survivors of wrongs, and grieve, in turn, over their own complicity in violence, and consequently prepare themselves for responsible agency” (154). The claim here is that privileged people “are called” to pay attention to those who are grieving and then to grieve themselves over their own complicity. This is not an appeal to the magnanimity nor the good will of persons from privileged backgrounds, but rather an “invitation . . . to recognize how social violence has conditioned human imagination and action in such a way that complicity in wrongs is often deeper than one is willing to acknowledge” (181). Boopalan is absolutely right when he indicates that acknowledgment of complicity or wrongdoing is extremely difficult. Here I am reminded again of what Martin Luther King Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr have said: “History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.”2 There is consensus, then, regarding the fact that it is very difficult for persons from privileged backgrounds to recognize or acknowledge any complicity in structural wrongs. For those who are willing to take the step of paying attention and caring about the suffering inflicted by wrongs, Boopalan—rightly—believes that grief has the power to “reorder discriminatory epistemological frames” and transform “violent identities in order to yield morally responsible agency” (156). I agree with Boopalan regarding the effect of such act, through which “persons from dominant locations, in turn, could change themselves to move closer and into the worlds of victims and survivors” (156). However, as pointed out above, this does not happen easily at the individual level and it is even more difficult at the societal level. What are the alternative or complementary mechanisms that could help in the process of eradicating racism and casteism? This question is relevant in the context of persons from privileged positions, considering the voluntary character of their process of grieving. Boopalan offers some examples that hint at the alternative mechanisms that I have in mind. Two of the examples referenced in the book are the ones of Mamie Bradley (Emmet Till’s mother) and Rosa Parks. When elaborating on the wrongs experienced by these two women, Boopalan emphasizes the agential power of their grief, but I think more emphasis could have been given to the actions taken by these two women and the impact of their actions on those of privileged backgrounds. These women protested the wrongs they suffered, and by doing so they brought visibility to their suffering and made persons in privileged positions to take notice. The agential grief of these women provided not only more opportunities for persons in dominant locations to grieve over their complicity in those wrongs but also they set in motion important structural changes. Therefore, considering that acts of resistance and protest are mechanisms that can lead to systemic changes, such as legislation and policy, I think they need more attention as complements or alternatives to the voluntary act of paying attention to the suffering of the victims and survivors of wrongs. Of course, protest and resistance are not necessarily going to transform hearts, but they can effectively produce necessary structural changes. These changes, along with a moral conversion in the terms that Boopalan has brilliantly proposed in his book, are necessary to achieve the goal of a more hospitable society.

To begin with, I want to acknowledge my appreciation and gratitude to Sunder John Boopalan for offering new possibilities and avenues of thinking and acting in his book, particularly to those who are committed to disrupting and dismantling oppressive social structures. Memory, Grief, and Agency is certainly a groundbreaking and trendsetting work in global liberation theology. Celebrating such a phenomenal work, first, I want to highlight a few themes in the book which I found to be insightful and exciting. Following this, I would like to engage in, to use a phrase of my teacher, Prof. Paul Knitter, “fierce loving”—lovingly and respectfully questioning and challenging some of the assumptions and arguments made by Boopalan in his book.

To begin with, one of the things that stood out for me in the book is Boopalan’s courage to look beyond popular notions and (mis)conceptions, and point out the facts. I am able to see this in his unmasking of the casteist and racist mindset among Indian communities in the United States (23–24). His boldness also becomes visible when he critically interrogates the “sainthood” ascribed to the well-known Indian freedom fighter and champion of nonviolence, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (30–31). I believe that both these issues are often overlooked, not just by the common people, but also by scholars, impeding a critical inquiry of the nuances behind and the nexus between race and caste.

Secondly, I am also deeply challenged by Boopalan’s theorization of the grammar of the body which helps us to identify corporeal habits that construct violent identities. Such identification, as the author suggests, propels us towards corporeally mediated obligatory acts towards others, particularly, those who are “othered” in our society. Given that the actualization of caste and race on the ground—especially in relation to Dalits and Blacks—is often based on ignorance and innocence, his insistence on acknowledging, identifying, and dismantling the “corporeal entanglements” we are caught up in enables us to take responsibility and become active respondents to wrongs that arise out of these entanglements (90).

Finally, I find Boopalan’s use of grief as a means of reordering structures that order violent identities very powerful and compelling. His argument that grief from remembering wrongs, as a continuous act of critical internal interrogation, “reorders discriminatory epistemological frames” (156) which then flows out as the external work of “forging corporeal solidarities” (180), has opened a deeper and positive dimension of grieving. Since grieving is generally viewed as “weak” and vulnerable, Boopalan has convincingly re-visioned it as a powerful means of dismantling hierarchical social orders.

Now, as I appreciate these important and strong proposals that Boopalan has made, I also have a few questions and concerns. These are issues that I struggled with as I read and dialogued with the book and could very well be attributed to my ignorance or misunderstanding. I look forward to Boopalan’s clarifications.

Let me begin with the grammar of the body. Boopalan notes that “paying attention to the grammar of the body helps to better articulate the language of wrongs” (95). Yes, it surely exposes “how discriminatory logics of the past continue to affect agents’ unreflective corporeal interactions in the present” (86). But I wonder whether Boopalan’s focus is, as the anecdotes and examples throughout the book seem to suggest, (almost solely) on discriminatory dynamics between the bodies of the oppressors and the oppressed. I will be interested to know how Boopalan would use the grammar of the body to explain “non-discriminatory” corporeal habits between and within the oppressed themselves. After all, the problem in caste and race is that “socially conditioned corporeal habits” do not always operate between the oppressor and the oppressed but also between, and importantly, within the bodies of the oppressed. It is precisely because the oppressed perpetuate them that these systems manage to survive and thrive. Though we can call them habitual, in this case, however, speech-acts and body language are not (always) entirely unwilled but also intended to imitate the dominant. That is, the grammar of the bodies within the caste or race matrix is not only punctuated by habits but also governed by fear and shame. The bodies are, to recall a term used by Foucault, “disciplined” to look and act a certain normative way.1 In that sense, I believe that caste and race involve, as Foucault might say, an internalized “panoptic mechanism”2 that maintains “order” in order to force, particularly but not exclusively, Dalit and black bodies (respectively) to monitor and control themselves individually and communally. We see this manifested in various ways: not eating beef (or “baptizing” it as “mutton,” something which Boopalan (48) and I are familiar with), whitening/lightening one’s skin, using the language of the dominant, distancing oneself from marginalized community/ies and so on. I am afraid that locating the grammar of the bodies between the oppressors and the oppressed slips into an easy (and, I am worried, a simplistic) binary/bipolar (oppressor vs. oppressed) understanding of caste and race, not to mention that it seems to fail to acknowledge the role of the oppressed. On the other hand, I believe that paying (more) attention to the grammar of the bodies of the oppressed reveals the complexities present within caste and race, both in relation to the dominant and among/between the oppressed.

Secondly, I am concerned about Boopalan’s emphasis and confidence in “critical examination” of corporeal habits. I agree that “when the continuing impact of histories of discriminatory logics is not critically interrogated, persons from privileged and dominant social locations inherit violent identities and perpetuate social violence” (6). Hence, a deep and systematic (self-)analysis is certainly needed to identify, interrupt, and eradicate the unconscious practice and perpetuation of structures of oppression. However, I wonder whether this “trust” on critical interrogation reflects and mimics a typical liberal intellectual approach to caste and race. Are we so influenced by Western epistemological frameworks that we put all our eggs in the basket of reason? Is there more to the picture that Boopalan, and, I have to confess, I myself, are missing? If it is the lack of critical awareness that is the fundamental problem, then why do we see caste reified, reimagined, and regenerated in newer ways among “enlightened” and “liberal” caste people? The reason for this, I believe, is that caste—I am not sure if I can say the same about race—is not an individual problem. Rather, it is a communal issue, a disease if you will, that survives in and as communities.3 Caste is, at least in general, stronger than acquiring critical awareness and willing to engage in “rites of moral responsibility” (213). No matter how deeply informed and genuinely critical a caste person is, as long as she is part of her community, her becoming aware of corporeal entanglements or her willingness to treat everyone equally may not be enough to make her act ethically. I think that the only possible way out, although it may not work all the time, is for the subject (i.e., a dominant subject) to courageously and categorically cut off her ties with her caste community, and (decide to) become, to use an ignorantly oft-used term, a Pariah!4 I have to add that I wonder whether the over-emphasis on trusting the ability of the oppressors to “reason” their way out of their inherited violent identities is caused by—in spite of the careful delineation of their specificities—the conflation of race and caste, although I believe that race too is not entirely free of communal obligations.

Finally, related to the above point is my question regarding Boopalan’s primary audience. Though occasionally he does consider those who are oppressed, and those between the oppressor and the oppressed categories, it looks like, predominantly, his words are addressed to the privileged and the dominant. (This probably explains, what appears to me to be, the “one-sided” parsing of the grammar of the body I referred to earlier.) That being said, “hats off” to Boopalan for his courage to pull the dominant by their ears and challenge them to enter and engage in a conscious remembering of wrongs and to grieve within and without to make a positive change. I agree with him that, from a Christian theological point of view, this is what makes the church what it is supposed to be—a remembering, re-membering, and grieving community of faith (176). But, the sequence of the internal and external work of grief that Boopalan suggests makes me uneasy and a bit skeptical. I am concerned about the possibility and practical efficacy of expecting the privileged to first “sincerely” reflect, confess, and relate through grieving with the grief of those “othered” (which he calls point A), and then move on to enact external rites of moral responsibility (which he calls point B). I am worried if Boopalan is slipping here into an “over self-centered” Gandhian-style reformation which prefers the internal transformation of the oppressors. In contrast, we have the Ambedkar-style revolution which acknowledges the (urgent) need for compensatory justice and ushers in practical and realistic socio-political changes, envisioned and led by the oppressed themselves.5 As we know any change in the society comes through a certain amount of force from the oppressed people. You kick the privileged in their backs and force them to act; they can do their self-interrogation in their own sweet time! This being the case, I wonder if Boopalan has spent too much of his energy preaching to the dominant trying to “convert” them, while he could have elevated more the potential of grief among the Dalits and the Black people. Not that what Boopalan suggests is unnecessary or unimportant, but I believe that the real change-creating factor that can disrupt and dismantle inherited discriminatory logics of the past is, at least primarily, in the agency of the oppressed. While Boopalan has spoken a lot about agency throughout his book, it looks like it often refers (only) to the agency of the oppressors rather than the agency of the oppressed. I am worried that, at best, the oppressed are portrayed as silent spectators who facilitate grieving for those who marginalize them, something that they have been forced to do for long. I am interested to know why Boopalan decided to silence those who are already silenced, and not listen and bring out their voices!

A test of any theoretical framework is its translatability into different contexts, times, situations, and individual lives. Boopalan effectively deploys the homo ritualis in his analysis of structural injustices evident in both America and India, the two countries where he has developed and fostered pastoral-theological acumen. What is the homo ritualis? Boopalan argues that “the lens of ritual enables an understanding of human persons as homo ritualis, thus emphasizing the significance of everyday habits and dispositions.” By understanding ourselves as creatures of ritual, we can simultaneously grasp the urgent necessity of “rites of moral responsibility [which] ultimately aim to create conditions for enacting agency for engendering a more hospitable world” (18). Through his discussion, Boopalan weaves together recognition of and grief over past injustices with a clarion commitment to imagining new ways of enacting rites of moral responsibility that diminish neither the harms done nor hopes for a future free of such harms. Connectedness across different experiences of oppression and humiliation are central to the postcolonial moral imagination that Boopalan unfolds for his readers.

Sound bite visions of justice prevent activists from recognizing the subtle but persistent ways that oppressive social relations reduplicate themselves even in movement for social justice. For instance, I myself have used the following anecdote as a shorthand criticism of white supremacist logics that result in brutal violence: Gandhi was asked, “What do you think of Western civilization?”—and answered, “Oh, I think that’s a great idea!” Yet, precisely through such a cutting and witty criticism of British imperial rule in India, a whole range of other wrongs are occluded from the eyes of those who might see themselves in the phrase “Western Civilization.” As Boopalan writes, “Unless wrongs are actively remembered, resisted, and transformed, discriminatory logics from the past will continue to haunt communities—even those that sincerely (albeit mistakenly) believe that they are ‘good’ people” (11). Inattentiveness to cultural context can mean that, even when one means to set things to rights, one can effect harm through ignorance. This is not a new observation, as many theorists have recognized the ways that whiteness and its supremacist logics morph and adapt to new settings. Boopalan, though, invites his readers to “the active remembrance of wrongs [which] is important not only to counter such dominant, false, and cruel claims, but also for engendering responsible habits and rites” (36). That is, ignorance of the racist ideologies of movement leaders such as Gandhi means his prejudices go unaddressed and ungrieved in pursuit of what is purported to be a just response to injustice.

Boopalan explains the ways that Gandhi, in his own organizing efforts, sought to lift Indians to the level of whites but did not seek to change anti-black racism—or indeed the oppression of Dalits within the caste system (65). Boopalan provides a compelling discussion of the ways that Dalit organizing was inspired by the Black Panthers, forming a parallel organization known as the Dalit Panthers, which rendered the term “Dalit” a point of pride. In this way, “Dalit”—unlike the term “Harijan,” deployed by Gandhi—is “a political and positive identity ascription” (26). Forms of hospitality that involve dominant caste members welcoming Dalits or the so-called “untouchables” are, in fact, cruelty masquerading as kindness precisely because the hospitality is not between mutuals; rather, one party is assumed to have hospitality to extend, while the other is presumed to want but often be denied such hospitality. In other words, by giving accolades to those who treat others with basic dignity and respect one disincetivizes recognizing and redressing severe wrongs done. What matters is the friendly embrace, not the process of reckoning and taking responsibility for long-standing historical patterns of humiliation and degradation that have rendered some of society’s members “untouchable.” For Boopalan, “wrongs understood as ‘rituals of humiliation’ . . . are violent modes and patterns by which human bodies are conditioned to move against each other. This movement of persons against each other in discriminatory and violent ways is affected by a certain grammar learned by the human body through dominant social conventions” (107). The identity being forged, though, can be reclaimed through an alternate social movement, such as the Dalit Panthers. Through the phrase “rituals of humiliation,” Boopalan’s discussion encompasses both brutal and ordinary wrongs.

Boopalan draws our attention to the cause-effect relation of a long-standing dominant social convention through which members of society are formed through rituals of humiliation. Boopalan analyzes the process of formation through what he calls a “grammar of the body”: “how bodies are habituated to act and react in socially conditioned ways that are repeated so frequently that they become unreflectively oppressive” (80). Yet they are able to lay claim to their enduring goodness and strength through rites of moral responsibility. For Boopalan, grieving what is lost through rites of humiliation is necessary: “Knowledge of wrongs and the recognition of human vulnerability do not necessarily engender positive human agency. It is grieving over remembered wrongs that engenders positive agency and the transformation of violent identities” (115). Grief, for Boopalan, is not only an index of the value of that which is grieved but a reflection of the humanity of the one who grieves. Boopalan avoids romanticizing grief through focus on the agency that attends grief in the formation of community across in-group/out-group differences and the transformation of violent identities.

I would like to invite him to reflect on the ways that rituals of humiliation might also be fashioned when the identity forged through such rituals can become its own destabilizing source of pride. I am thinking here, for instance, of the processes of criminalization and hypercriminalization in contemporary American society. How are new rituals of humiliation enacted in order to transform former dominant social conventions in ways that permit them to endure in the midst of a shifting value system that might not be as receptive to the old techniques of ritualized humiliation?

Criminalization is also effected through rituals of humiliation that, over time, calcify into a social role that provides stabilization to other identities. Social theorist Victor M. Rios describes criminalization as “the process by which styles and behaviors are rendered deviant and are treated with shame, exclusion, punishment, and incarceration.”1 When the focus falls on everyday behaviors, the result is hypercriminalization: “the process by which an individual’s everyday behaviors and styles become ubiquitously treated as deviant, risky, threatening, or criminal, across social contexts” (Rios, xiv). Through humiliating encounters with shop owners, school personnel, and police officers, the individuals adapt to social conventions associated with suspects and criminals.

The result is, as Rios argues, social incapacitation: “the process by which punitive social control becomes an instrument which prevents marginalized populations from functioning, thriving, and feeling a sense of dignity and humanity in their daily interactions with institutional forces” (Rios, 160). Through his empirical examination of the lives of Latino youths in Oakland, Rios observes how they understand their own process of criminalization and the decisions it drives them to make. One young man, Tyrell, got the most attention from police in his neighborhood. Over the course of three years, he had twenty-one separate encounters with the police. While his father made his wage fixing cars, their community couldn’t pay enough for those repairs to keep his family afloat. Tyrell determined that his father’s lack of economic resources meant that “he would have to ‘hustle’ for his own money” (Rio, 51). Rios concludes that “his father’s inability to provide for him, and the stigma that school officials and police officers imposed on him, left Tyrell feeling trapped. . . . In Tyrell’s perspective, poverty and criminalization ‘pushed’ him into selling drugs, but he also consciously took this ‘jump,’ knowing that this was one of the only ways he could make some money” (Rios, 51–52). Shaped by rituals of humiliation that took the form of punishment, Tyrell made decisions that helped him navigate the limited suite of options available to him: “Tyrell . . . experienced a life-course process in which he was systematically punished into believing that he had nothing to lose” (Rios, 52).

In the background of Boopalan’s discussion echoes Judith Butler’s question, “Which lives are grievable?” Boopalan builds on Butler’s project to recognize the equal grievability of all lives while also asking simultaneously: Which losses are grievable? And which griefs are positively agential? Boopalan considers not only grievability but the agential process of grieving. I want to invite Boopalan to explore how the process of grieving as an act of moral agency might fit into Tyrell’s picture when he is said to have “nothing to lose.” How might Boopalan’s theory of the rites of moral responsibility position us to respond to the distinctive American rituals of humiliation associated with criminalization and hypercriminalization, especially when those rituals are enacted not only by the police but sometimes by one’s own circle of intimates, such as one’s parents? Let me try to clarify my question by reference to another part of Boopalan’s excellent analysis.

In his discussion of the autobiography of the Dalit author Omprakash Valmiki, entitled Joothan, Boopalan recounts the exchange between Valmiki and his lover Savita, a dominant caste Brahmin woman who—along with her father—mistakes him for a fellow dominant caste member. The revelation of this mistake culminates in this scene: “She started to cry, as though my being SC [subordinate/scheduled caste] was a crime. She sobbed for a long time. Suddenly the distance between us had increased. The hatred of thousands of years had entered our hearts. What a lie culture and civilisation are” (quoted on p. 42). Boopalan draws attention to Valmiki’s poignant description of the dissolution of love—“the hatred of thousands of years had entered our hearts”—and so identifies a “caste-specific hospitality that is really hostility” in this scene (42). It is precisely these ways that cruelty masquerades as kindness that makes recognition of harms and moral responsibility for harms done so elusive. Valimiki’s breach of the caste-specificity of Savita’s hospitality results in her grief; she feels wronged by Valimiki’s “being SC”—and her scandalized tears criminalize him. Her sobbing grief is yet another rite of humiliation. How might grief’s implication in rites of humiliation complicate its centrality in rites of moral responsibility?

For Boopalan, “In calling agents to take cues from the grief of those who suffer wrongs, the internal work of grief invites persons from privileged backgrounds to undertake the task of identity-transforming grief. In this way, grief’s internal work challenges privileged persons to recreate their inner epistemological worlds” (181). Grief extends recognition that a wrong has been done. While Savita feels she has suffered a wrong, her grief is identity-affirming rather than identity-transforming. Yet, is it possible that her identity-affirming grief can become identity-transforming grief? In this moment, she grieves the loss of her misunderstanding of Valimiki as dominant caste; her epistemological world has shifted. In this way, her grief exposes her violent identity. She does not yet grieve the criminalization of Valmiki through the categorization of scheduled caste, yet might this possibility be embedded within her grief? Where could this grief lead her?

Boopalan’s focus on the agential possibilities of grief is pastorally acute. There is no going around the wrongs. Rather, one’s communal, emotional, psychological processing of the wrongs is not only permitted, but necessary for imagining—and forging—a hospitable world.