Calling names: Humoring caste and caste-ing humor

Abstract

What is the role of humor in obfuscating social hierarchy? This article describes how caste prejudices among male taxi drivers in Uttarakhand in the Indian Himalayas are enacted through the humor of calling each other “funny” names. Such humor is directed toward Dalit drivers whose proper first names are replaced by “funny” names that caricature their personal attributes as an index of their “lower-caste” identity without addressing it directly. Given the conditions of social change in the practice of caste across India, calling such names provides the “upper-caste” drivers grounds for the disavowability of addressing caste. Calling Dalit drivers funny first names at the taxi stand eschews addressing directly the collective lower-caste identity indexed in their last names even as the humor so enacted becomes the premise for identifying their caste identity. It exceeds and bypasses legalized notions of caste atrocity by distorting personal attributes into humorous name-calling that is indexically removed from the denigration of collective caste identity that can be disavowed. This article offers an ethnography of humor to understand how humorous sociability becomes the means for addressing lower-caste identity while simultaneously providing the grounds for its obfuscation and disavowal.