Dangerous Marginality focuses on villages festivals invoking the Matangi, an outcaste clan goddess in Andhra Pradesh. It explores the ambiguous category of outcaste priest and priestess whose intriguing presence appears in fleeting images in colonial archives and missological accounts. These striking personae challenge the assumptions predominant in the discourses of caste.
As we delve deeper into this domain it becomes apparent that the constraints in engaging with such seemingly inscrutable sites lies not only in the paucity of sources but also about the dread that comes with the loss of secure ideologies, as also from having to deal with an idiom that is beyond modern reasoning and worldview. The compelling evidence of this ritual space suggests the need to move beyond the frame of pathos that has come to define not only the past of outcastes but their very being. Based on field data and historical sources, this volume offers a framework to critically examine the ways in which outcastes in definitive ways shape caste culture while also signifying a deeper tension in historical processes.