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Rettaimalai Srinivasan (1860–1945), a Dalit leader in colonial India, argued that there were two kinds of freedom struggles being waged in the region–one against the British and the other against caste. His autobiography, published in Tamil in 1938, is likely the first Dalit autobiography, and along with his other papers, pamphlets, and speeches comprises a potent anti-caste archive that is yet to be studied. In these texts, Srinivasan defined untouchability as a complex of social and economic practices and emphasized the role of Dalit leadership in undoing these practices. As his work indicates, the freedom struggle against caste required a re-signification of caste names and untouchability itself and an increased representation of Dalit groups within governance. By seeking to turn the name of the Pariah caste into one that could be used with pride, he continuously grappled with the question of self-representation and an appropriate vocabulary to do so. His definition of untouchability as intimately linked with agrarian labour lies at the heart of his emphasis on the importance of Dalit representatives governing and leading people from these communities towards freedom.

Throughout history, speech and storytelling have united communities and mobilized movements. Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern examines this phenomenon in Tamil-speaking South India over the last three centuries, charting the development of political oratory and its influence on society. Supplementing his narrative with thorough archival work, Bernard Bate begins with Protestant missionaries' introduction of the sermonic genre and takes the reader through its local vernacularization. What originally began as a format of religious speech became an essential political infrastructure used to galvanize support for new social imaginaries, from Indian independence to Tamil nationalism. Completed by a team of Bate's colleagues, this ethnography marries linguistic anthropology to performance studies and political history, illuminating new geographies of belonging in the modern era.