Dadu Mandrekar’s Untouchable Goa (published in Marathi in 1997), rendered into English through Nikhil Baisane’s (published by Panther’s Paw Publication in 2025) layered and attentive translation, is a powerful sociological archive that exposes caste in a region often reduced to the postcard image of beaches and heritage-rich towns.
Across eighteen essays that traverse the maharwadas of Goa’s villages, Mandrekar—writer, journalist, and Ambedkarite activist—constructs a counter-map of the state, highlighting some of its most invisibilised spaces. I approach Untouchable Goa through three interlinked pillars: the maharwadas as infrastructures of caste, death as a mechanism of Brahminical control, and superstition as a material and moral economy.
Mandrekar maps the state’s maharwadas—Dalit settlements pushed to the village outskirts, often bordering forests or water bodies that swell dangerously during the monsoon, and typically beyond the reach of the state’s infrastructural gaze. He renders each dwelling an index of economic neglect and a site of endurance. Government housing schemes surface as 1,200–2,000-rupee grants intended to fund entire homes in contexts where installing a functional toilet alone might cost 10,000. In a rare instance, they appear as a failed experiment in socialist “uniformity”. Units are childishly conceived to erase caste boundaries. They are crumbling and ill-maintained, yet statistically “complete.”
A passage from this chapter describes a tap installed in a tattered village; a lone functioning emblem of “development”- capturing this paradox with devastating precision. These homes, like their inhabitants, are barely built to survive, let alone live. Subsidies exist largely as bureaucratic data points, disbursed without provisions for repair or maintenance. The Dalits who inhabit maharwadas do not own the land it stands on, nor the land where they will one day be buried—an unbroken circle of dispossession that renders their bodies “owned” by Brahminism in living labour and in death.
In the chapter “365 Devchaar”, Mandrekar visits a maharwada in Dhargal, where an old man narrates what begins as ancestral history but gradually reveals itself as myth. He speaks of devchaars, betaals, and a god who, aided by a man, banishes Vetal from his throne. When the protagonist, Pavne, receives water from a Mahar, he loses his caste. Pavne is rewarded with land for banishing Vetal, which, according to local lore, explains why some Mahars in Dhargal still nominally possess land.
Mandrekar reads these mythic residues not as distortions of history but as evidence of how ownership itself is shaped by caste memory. He situates the story within a reality where, even when bahujans legally own land, they must still seek permission from the original Brahmin proprietors to build on it—a spiritual and social contract that lays bare the feudal motivations of Brahminism.
If home marks the beginning of Mandrekar’s sociological map, death forms its moral and material core. In the second chapter, “Desecrating the Dead,” he examines a grotesque ritual of exhumation in which lower-caste men are bound to dig up graves and participate as drum-beaters in the procession. These bodies are then dismembered and paraded through the night before being discarded. Mandrekar analyses this hideous practice not as a cultural aberration, but as violence enforced through faith.
The Brahminical logic of untouchability, Mandrekar observes, seeps even into mahar households. Among Dalits themselves, contact with a menstruating woman demands purification through gomutra, tulsi water, bathing, and changing clothes—rituals that are unmistakably Brahminical in form. The burden of humiliation trails bahujan women intimately.
When menstruating or pregnant women die, their corpses are buried without ceremony, often in unmarked places, their faces turned groundwards to prevent them from returning as “vengeful spirits.” Mandrekar intuits an economic ‘fear’ behind this superstition: these rituals are meant to guard family wealth from women who, in death, might return to claim property once denied to them in life.
Mandrekar expands the idea of ritual as a sociological archive, tracing the “traditions of death” where the humiliation and economic dispossession of Dalits are most visceral. He refuses to dismiss superstition as quaint or irrational, instead locating its persistence in material and political realities.
Mandrekar observes that mahar traditions (whether deities or celebrations) are modest, symbolic, and exposed to the elements, much like Dalits themselves. But over time, these have been displaced by Brahminical practices such as angat yene and devdevski. Dalits must now spend heavily during Hindu festivals, sinking into cycles of never-ending debt. “They barely pay off one before another comes,” Mandrekar notes, showing that belief itself becomes a form of bondage.
Superstition, Mandrekar shows, is also a survival strategy shaped by precarity. Dalits participate out of belief but also fear of persecution by upper-caste men and the consequences of stepping outside caste-bound occupations such as bamboo work, cleaning, or leatherwork. Mandrekar notes that their modest homes are sometimes targeted for demolition under the rhetoric of modernisation, mirroring the contemporary demolition of Muslim neighbourhoods across India.
Untouchable Goa is a vital ethnographic companion to recent scholarship on caste in Goa by Parag Parabo (2023), Kaustubh Naik (2017), and Jason K. Fernandes (2020). Parabo’s 2023 work, which distinguishes between the Old and New Conquests, analyses the latter as being aligned with Brahminical consolidation following a period of colonial Christian influence—a process that Mandrekar charts through his fieldwork. While Portuguese colonisation itself remains largely absent in Mandrekar’s account, his ethnography provides a rich archive that complements studies of Goan temple politics, landholdings under colonial regimes, and the intersection of Christianity and Brahminism in defining the asprushya or untouchable, as explored by Parabo and Fernandes. Mandrekar specifically documents the everyday realities of home, ritual, and death in post-independence Goa, when Brahminical consolidation became increasingly visible. Untouchable Goa transforms accounts of caste abuse into evidence, offering a necessary corrective to Goa’s sanitised public image and an essential resource for students of the political economy of caste in the region.
The Deras: Culture, Diversity and Politics by Santosh K. Singh (2025): A Review by Neha Sharma
Courtesy : Doing Sociology
Note: This news is originally published on https:/doingsociology.com/bha and is used purely for non-profit/non-commercial purposes, especially human rights