A review of a memoir by an ‘untouchable’ starting in the 1950s in rural Uttar Pradesh.
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily. This review won the top award in the 3 Quarks Daily 2011 Arts & Literature Contest. Read more about it here.)
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I grew up in the central Indian city of Gwalior until I left home for college. This was the 70s and 80s. My father worked as a textile engineer in a company town owned by the Birla Group, where we lived in a middle class residential quarter for the professional staff and their families. Our 3-BR house had a small front lawn and a vegetable patch behind. Domestic helpers, such as a washerwoman and a dishwashing woman, entered our house via the front door—all except one, who came in via the rear door. This was the latrine cleaning woman, or her husband at times. As in most traditional homes, our squat toilet was near the rear door, across an open courtyard. She also brought along a couple of scrawny kids, who waited by the vegetable patch while their mother worked.
My mother often gave them dinner leftovers, and sometimes tea. But unlike other domestic helpers, they were not served in our utensils, nor did the latrine cleaners expect to be. They brought their own utensils and placed them on the floor; my mother served them while they stood apart. When my mother turned away, they quietly picked up the food and left. To my young eyes this seemed like the natural order of things. These were the mehtars, among the lowest of the so-called ‘untouchables’. They worked all around us, yet were ‘invisible’ to me, as if part of the stage props. I neither gave them much thought during my school years, nor recognized my prejudices as such. I, and the kids in my circle, even used ‘untouchable’ caste names as playful epithets, calling each other chamaar and bhangi.
It’s possible that I first reflected on the idea of untouchability only in college, through art house cinema. Even so, upper-caste Indian liberals made these films and it was their viewpoint I saw. It is hardly a stretch to say that the way even the most sensitive white liberals in the United States knew and described the experience of black Americans is partly why one had to read Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and other black authors. A similar parallel holds for Native Americans, immigrants, and women, as well as the ‘untouchables,’ now called Dalits (‘the oppressed’), numbering one out of six Indians. For some years now, they have been telling their own stories, bearing witness to their slice of life in India. Theirs is not only a powerful new current of Indian literature, it is also a major site of resistance and revolt.
Joothan by Omprakash Valmiki is one such work of Dalit literature, first published in Hindi in 1997 and translated into English by Arun Prabha Mukherjee in 2003 (she added an excellent introduction in the 2007 edition). It is a memoir of growing up ‘untouchable’ starting in the 1950s outside a typical village in Uttar Pradesh. Told as a series of piercing vignettes, Joothan is also a remarkable record of a rare Indian journey, one that took a boy from extremely wretched socioeconomic conditions to prominence as an author and social critic.
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Valmiki was born into the Chuhra caste (aka Bhangi), whose ordained job it was to sweep the roads, clean the cattle barns, get shit off the floor, dispose off dead animals, work the fields during harvests, and perform other physical labor for upper-caste people, including the Tyagi Brahmins. The Tyagis didn’t address them by name, only called out, ‘Oe Chuhre’ or ‘Abey Chuhre.’ It was alright to touch cows and stray dogs but touching a Chuhra inflicted instant ‘pollution’ on the Tyagis. During his boyhood, his entire family worked hard, yet they ‘didn’t manage to get two decent meals a day,’ not the least because they often didn’t get paid for their labor and instead ‘got sworn at and abused.’
The Chuhras were forced to live outside the village reserved for upper-caste people. A high wall and a pond segregated their brick houses in the village from the Chuhra basti, or cluster of shanties. Upper-caste men and women of all ages came out and used the edge of the pond as an open-air lavatory, squatting across from the Chuhra homes in broad daylight with their private parts exposed. ‘There was muck strewn everywhere,’ writes Valmiki. ‘The stench was so overpowering that one would choke within a minute. The pigs wandering in narrow lanes, naked children, dogs, daily fights, this was the environment of my childhood.’
In the rainy season, these narrow lanes of the basti filled up with muddy water mixed-in with pigs’ excrement; flies and mosquitoes thrived. Everybody’s arms and legs became mangy and developed itchy sores. There was one drinking well in their basti for about thirty families, and despite a guard wall around it, it became full of long worms during the rainy season. They had no choice but to drink that water, as they were not permitted to use the well of the upper-caste folks. Their homes were made of clay that sprang leaks all over. During heavy rains, the ceilings or walls often collapsed, as it did for Valmiki’s house more than once. One season most of their homes collapsed; as always, there was no outside help or insurance, and they had to rebuild on their own.
What Valmiki had going for him was a headstrong set of parents, determined to give him a better future. In 1955, despite Gandhi’s work on ‘upliftment’ and the new anti-discrimination laws on the books, his father had a hard time getting him admission into a primary school. When the boy finally got in, he was not allowed to sit on the benches but on the floor, away from the upper-caste boys, at the back by the door, from where he couldn’t see the blackboard well. Other boys hurled epithets and beat him casually, turning him into a cowering introverted kid. Even the teachers looked for excuses to punish him, he writes, ‘so that I would run away from the school and take up the kind of work for which I was born.’ In fourth grade, a new headmaster arrived, who thrashed him almost daily and one day asked him to take a broom and sweep all the rooms and the playground in school. The hapless boy spent two full days sweeping, hoping it would soon be over.
The third day I went to the class and sat down quietly. After a few minutes the headmaster’s loud thundering was heard: ‘Abey Chuhre ke, motherfucker, where are you hiding … your mother …’ I had begun to shake uncontrollably. A Tyagi boy shouted, ‘Master Saheb, there he is, sitting in the corner.’
The headmaster had pounced on my neck. The pressure of his fingers was increasing. As a wolf grabs a lamb by the neck, he dragged me out of the class and threw me on the ground. He screamed: ‘Go sweep the whole playground … Otherwise I will shove chillies up your arse and throw you out of school.’
Frightened, I picked up the three-day-old broom [now only a cluster of] thin sticks. Tears were falling from my eyes. I started to sweep the compound while my tears fell. From the doors and windows of the schoolrooms, the eyes of the teachers and the boys saw this spectacle. Each pore of my body was submerged in an abyss of anguish.
As it turned out, his father was passing by that day and saw him sweeping the grounds. Sobbing and overcome by hiccups, the boy told him the story. Father snatched the broom and with eyes blazing, began to scream, ‘Who is that teacher, that progeny of Dronacharya, who forces my son to sweep?’ [1] All the teachers stepped out, including the headmaster, who called his father names and roared back, ‘Take him away from here … The Chuhra wants him educated … Go, go … Otherwise I will have your bones broken.’
On his way out, his father declared in a loud voice, ‘I am leaving now … but this Chuhre ka will study right here … In this school. And not just him, but there will be more coming after him.’ His father’s courage and fortitude left a deep and decisive mark on the boy’s personality. His father knocked on the doors of other upper-caste men he had worked for, hoping they would support him against the headmaster, but the response was the opposite. He was plainly told: ‘What is the point of sending him to school?’ ‘When has a crow become a swan?’ ‘Hey, if he asked a Chuhra’s progeny to sweep, what is the big deal in that?’ When his father had all but given up, one village elder yielded to his tearful beseeching and intervened to get the boy reinstated. A close call, else he would have ended up illiterate like the rest of his family.
Most of his family worked at harvest time. For a hard day’s labor, which included harvesting lentils, cutting sheaves of wheat in the midday sun, and transporting them via bullock carts, each person got one out of 21 parts produced—about two pounds of wheat—as wages. For the rest of their labor in the cowshed, they got paid in grain and a leftover roti each day (‘made by mixing the flour with the husk since it was for the chuhras’), and at times scraps of leftovers from their employer’s plates, or joothan.
The Hindi word joothan, explains Mukherjee, ‘literally means food left on an eater’s plate, usually destined for the garbage pail in a middle class, urban home. However, such food would only be characterized ‘joothan’ if someone else besides the original eater were to eat it. The word carries the connotations of ritual purity and pollution as ‘jootha’ means polluted.’ Words like ‘leftovers’ and ‘leavings’ don’t substitute well, ‘scraps’ and ‘slops’ work better, though ‘they are associated more with pigs than with humans.’ Joothan is also unfit for consumption by anyone in the eater’s family or in his own community. Mukherjee writes:
The title encapsulates the pain, humiliation and poverty of Valmiki’s community, which not only had to rely on joothan but also relished it. Valmiki gives a detailed description of collecting, preserving and eating joothan. His memories of being assigned to guard the drying joothan from crows and chickens, and of his relishing the dried and reprocessed joothan burn him with renewed pain and humiliation in the present.
The word actually carries a lot of historical baggage. Both Ambedkar and Gandhi advised untouchables to stop accepting joothan. Ambedkar, an indefatigable documenter of atrocities against Dalits [and an ‘untouchable’ himself], shows how the high caste villagers could not tolerate the fact that Dalits did not want to accept their joothan anymore and threatened them with violence if they refused it.
Valmiki describes one such incident, among the most powerful in the text. His community looked forward to marriage feasts in the village when they would gather outside with big baskets. After the guests had eaten, ‘the dirty pattals, or leaf plates, were put in the Chuhras’ baskets, which they took home, to save the joothan sticking to them.’ At the end of one such marriage feast, Valmiki’s mother requested the Brahmin host for additional food for her children, only to be humiliated and told to mind her place, be satisfied with what she already had collected, and to get going. Valmiki writes:
That night the Mother Goddess Durga entered my mother’s eyes. It was the first time I saw my mother so angry. She emptied the basket right there. She said to Sukhdev Singh, ‘Pick it up and put it inside your house. Feed it to the baratis [marriage guests] tomorrow morning.’ She gathered me and my sister and left like an arrow. Sukhdev Singh had pounced on her to hit her, but my mother had confronted him like a lioness. Without being afraid.
His family fell on even harder times when his oldest brother and wage earner got a high fever, and without access to a clinic, died. Valmiki had finished fifth grade but their deepening poverty—they didn’t even have enough food—meant that he could not continue with school. He dropped out and began tending buffaloes in the field, watching with a heavy heart his schoolmates going to school. Over the protests of others, his brother’s widow pawned the only piece of jewelry she had, a silver anklet, to pay for Valmiki’s school—yet another close call.
Back in school, Valmiki continued to face severe discrimination. Though he consistently did well in his studies, his memories of school are suffused with pain and humiliation: from taunts and beatings by schoolmates and teachers in a ‘terror-filled environment’, to his exclusion from extracurricular activities like school plays; during exams, he was not allowed to drink water from a glass when thirsty. He had to cup his hands, and ‘the peon would pour water from way high up, lest our hands touch the glass.’ At times, he writes, ‘I feel I have grown up in a cruel and barbaric civilization.’ He does remember fondly a couple of boys who befriended him and didn’t let caste come between them.
Remarkably enough, Valmiki was determined to make full use of the school library; by the time he reached eighth grade, he had read Saratchandra, Premchand, and Rabindranath Tagore, and relates this poignant vignette.
I had begun to read novels and short stories to my mother in the faint light of the wick lamp. Who knows how often Saratchandra’s characters have made a mother and son cry together? This was the beginning of my literary sensibility. Starting from Alha, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata to Sur Sagar, Prem Sagar, Premchand’s stories, Kissa Tota Maina … whatever I found, I, the son of an untouchable illiterate family, read to my mother.
He studied in the light of a lantern in his intensely noisy neighborhood. ‘I was the first student of my caste,’ writes Valmiki, ‘not just from my basti but from all the surrounding villages of the area, appearing for the high school exams,’ and he felt the pressure that came from their pride in him. His graduation became an occasion for a feast in his community. He remembers that even one of the Tyagi Brahmins came to his basti to offer congratulations, and later took him home and fed him lunch in their own dishes while sitting next to him. Valmiki’s example inspired other children to show more interest in education, and for a while he even ran evening classes in his basti.
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Unlike in the dominant Hindu tradition—which Valmiki pointedly denigrates and wants no part of—widow remarriage was even in the 60s an accepted norm in his community. He describes in some detail how their gods were utterly different from Hindu Brahminical gods and how different their religious rituals were. [2] Around Janmashtami, for instance, they worshipped not Krishna but Jaharpir, a folk deity, and ‘during Deepawali it is not the goddess Lakshmi but Mai Madaran who is worshipped and offered a piglet’ and a bottle of liquor. He also describes lots of family drama and interpersonal politics in his community, not shying from reproach where it is due, especially on their rank superstitions. He writes about their jobs, suffering, and everyday struggle for dignity, acknowledging that the women had an even rawer deal than men.
Many Hindi writers and poets had written about the charms of village life, observes Valmiki, but its ‘real truth,’ depicting the ‘terrible suffering of village life has not even been touched upon by the epic poets of Hindi.’ In this he echoes Ambedkar’s own views: ‘What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance and narrow mindedness.’ Valmiki also recounts other changes that were beginning to take place in his village. The young men of his community had begun to refuse to work without wages. This soon escalated into an open confrontation with the upper-caste men who couldn’t tolerate their nerve, and even got the local police to beat them up. Valmiki calls this a turning point of sorts; young men began departing from their basti to nearby towns and cities.
Valmiki too left to pursue college education in the city of Dehradun, where his brother and uncle worked. They all shared a single room in a Bhangi basti. It was here that he encountered the works of Ambedkar, which shook him up; he ‘spent many days and nights in great turmoil.’ He grew more restless; his ‘stone-like silence’ began to melt, and ‘an anti-establishment consciousness became strong’ in him. Ambedkar’s books, he writes, ‘had given voice to my muteness,’ and raised his self-confidence. His rage grew sharper and he became more active in college events, until his penury made him quit college and seek technical training in an ordnance factory, with its promise of a shop floor job that would judge him only for his work. But quitting college made no dent whatsoever in his love of reading.
After a year of training, he got posted to the city of Jabalpur in 1968, moving in the ensuing years to Bombay and Chandrapur, Maharashtra. The last third of his memoir is on this phase of his life. Now he really came into his own: he met a bunch of Marxists, read Chekov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Hemmingway, Zola, and other Western writers. He joined a local theater group, saw Vijay Tendulkar’s plays, ‘read the entire works of Tagore and Kalidasa,’ was drawn to the Buddha’s teachings, and discovered Marathi Dalit literature, the most sophisticated in all of India, which energized him and forged his literary consciousness. He began to publish poems and write a column in a local weekly, later also plays and short stories. Almost two decades later, he published Joothan. In its last two paragraphs, he anticipates his critics:
Times have changed. But there is something somewhere that continues to irk. I have asked many scholars to tell me why Savarnas [caste Hindus] hate Dalits and Shudras so much? The Hindus who worship trees and plants, beasts and birds, why are they so intolerant of Dalits? Today caste remains a pre-eminent factor in social life. As long as people don’t know that you are a Dalit, things are fine. The moment they find out your caste, everything changes. The whispers slash your veins like knives. Poverty, illiteracy, broken lives, the pain of standing outside the door, how would the civilized Savarna Hindus know it?
Why is my caste my only identity? Many friends hint at the loudness and arrogance of my writings. They insinuate that I have imprisoned myself in a narrow circle. They say that literary expression should be focused on the universal; a writer ought not to limit himself to a narrow, confined terrain of life. That is, my being Dalit and arriving at a point of view according to my environment and my socioeconomic situation is being arrogant. Because in their eyes, I am only an SC, the one who stands outside the door.[3]
Valmiki’s narrative voice brims with a quiet sense of outrage at what he had to endure as a human. Indeed, I’m inclined to see his memoir as a form of Satyagraha: in reflecting back to others their own violence and injustice, it attempts to shame them into introspection. This is the kind of book that becomes ‘the axe for the frozen sea inside us.’ More Indians ought to read it and let its hard edges get to work inside them.
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(Also consider reading my companion piece, The Blight of Hindustan, which provides a brisk overview of the Indian caste system—its origins, spread, and some historical attitudes and debates.)
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Notes:
Arun Prabha Mukherjee notes that ‘Valmiki places his and his Dalit friends’ encounters with upper caste teachers in the context of the Brahmin teacher Dronacharya tricking his low caste disciple Eklavya into cutting his thumb and presenting it to him as part of his gurudakshina, or teacher’s tribute. This is a famous incident in the Mahabharata. By doing this, Dronacharya ensured that Eklavya, the better student of archery, could never compete against Arjun, the Kshtriya disciple. Indeed, having lost his thumb, Eklavya could no longer perform archery. In high caste telling, the popular story presents a casteless Eklavya as the exemplar of an obedient disciple rather than the Brahmin Dronacharya as a perfidious and biased teacher. When Valmiki’s father goes to the school and calls the headmaster a Dronacharya, he links the twentieth-century caste relations to those that prevailed two thousand years ago.’
- Kancha Ilaiah outlines a range of sociocultural differences between the twice-born Hindus (of the top three varnas, namely, Brahmin, Kshatriya, and Vaishya) and the Shudras and Dalits in his trenchant book, Why I Am Not a Hindu.
- SC stands for Scheduled Caste, the administrative term for the former ‘untouchables’.
Hi Namit, (I am going to try this again, my comment vanished yesterday)
I enjoyed your 3QD posts on Islam and the recent one on the caste system, this review was forwarded by a friend.
The Blight of Hindustan was written well, thank you for penning it. The whole of the dalit critique centers on deconstructing the concept of the Hindu nation. And this project precedes western colonialism that is before Hindustan became India, and it is in continuum. So, I was curious about why you titled it as ‘Hindustan’?
>>Theirs is not only a powerful new current of Indian literature, it is also a major site of resistance and revolt. <<
Sure, if one keeps in mind that this is also being processed, mediated and consumed by the very structure the dalits are trying to resist. Writing too is Joothan. It will not carry the power of writing in revolt as in the Black movement.
>>This is the kind of book that becomes ‘the axe for the frozen sea inside us.’ More Indians ought to read it and let its hard edges get to work inside them.<<
As to this noble thought, it is a forgone conclusion that the Indian consciousness cannot be awakened to the basic human rights violations committed on its fellow citizens. Dalit resistance is an ongoing 3000year old story, and we’ve had this century’s prominent thinkers and social reformers of the subcontinent also give up on this (tweaking the morality of upper caste Indians), as a failed approach to reform. Sad but true!
Regards
anu
Posted by: anu | March 30, 2010 at 04:15 PM
Anu, thanks. I'm glad you stopped by and recomposed your message.
> Why 'Hindustan'?
I used this word in the title because it calls to mind more explicitly a territory and a people—which foreigners once named after a river—and whose blight I speak of.
> Sure, if one keeps in mind that this is also being processed, mediated and consumed by the very structure the dalits are trying to resist. Writing too is Joothan. It will not carry the power of writing in revolt as in the Black movement.
Can you elaborate a bit more please? Are you suggesting that the agency of Dalits, because it relies on institutional power, is incapable of shaping the emerging discourse based on their own interests? I think it worked for the blacks, no?
> As to this noble thought, it is a forgone conclusion that the Indian consciousness cannot be awakened to the basic human rights violations committed on its fellow citizens.
Hmm. Do you really believe this outside moments of deep pessimism? When you say "cannot be awakened", this turns Indians into a non-human species, of which there is no evidence. I think multiple approaches are necessary, but awakening consciousness has to be one of them. On caste, do you see no change between an average upper caste young Indian today and his grandfather at the same age?
Posted by: Namit | March 31, 2010 at 08:25 AM
namit, it worked for blacks largely because the civil rights movement happened/s in one language. in any struggle, the written word of the oppressed carries two messages; one to the oppressor and one to the community. the most powerful writings of the dalits is in the vernacular and comes out of non-institutionalized structures. for the revolt content to deliver at a country wide level -it cannot escape passing through the hegemonic structures, and when it does, it loses its double-edgedness
>>Do you really believe this outside moments of deep pessimism? <<
moments? : )
always, in the lived realities of millions who are never going to write a memoir, yet live this life AND know it will be the same for many more progenies. statistics is boring, but if you are interested to look at what the numbers are saying, have been saying throughout history, you might pause and wonder about the non-human species that populate, dominate and live this normalized 'upper' and 'lower' caste lives. even from the 'enlightened' phase of the last 60 years since we have obtained terms like ‘democracy’ and imagine we have stepped out of the medieval, feudal mindsets of treating fellow humans as subhumans -it takes the eyes and experience of the subhuman to evaluate the non-human in the human species.
do you believe a little boy today is not being asked to sweep the school playground because of his low caste? do you believe such atrocities are sporadic or systemic in much of India? do you believe such an incident will get the nation to sit up and be offended enough to act on it, in 100 years from now? and somebody at 3QD is asking you to write on the bhotmanges, -that- dear namit, did not make it to the newspapers!
>>awakening consciousness has to be one of them<<
hmmm, very bright indian students in my univ. with breathtaking innocence said to me, they experienced no caste system, as they came from w.bengal which was communist ruled and caste played no role in theirs or their parents lives. :) i was very tempted to ask them if they ever cared to wonder why the servants, the vendors, the sweepers in w bengal don't carry the same surnames as themselves?
an average upper caste indian would still marry within his class which is his caste or caste equivalent. an average indian is still likely to ask or assess another's caste. how is he different from his grandfather? one can of course continue living in denial that we are lovely human beings.
dalits believed in the awakening of consciousness of the upper caste for too long and still do, some of us don’t care for it any longer.
regards
anu
Posted by: anu | March 31, 2010 at 02:35 PM
Thanks, Anu. I understand much better where you are coming from. I agree things are still depressingly bad, caste atrocities are still rife, law enforcement is a problem, the mainstream media does not take it seriously enough, and I don't think this will be fixed in a hurry.
Yet, from my own experience, I can say without hesitation that the attitudes of cousins in my generation or younger—across sundry Indian cities—while not caste-blind by any means, are on average less benighted than that of their parents, let alone of their grandparents. Dalit resistance, affirmative action, and the winds of globalization have not been inconsequential in changing minds. I also think stories like Valmiki's, to the extent they reach audiences—and translations contribute to that end—help raise consciousness. They raised mine.
Come back here often. Just noticed that the April 2010 issue of Himal is all about caste, with articles from several notable writers.
Posted by: Namit | April 01, 2010 at 06:57 AM
Oh, I'd replace 'caste-blind' with 'non-casteist' above, which is what I meant. I also readily concede that the change I cite from my experience is not comforting to the oppressed if it is seen as too slow, which is indeed the reality of too many. In the long run we are all dead.
Posted by: Namit | April 01, 2010 at 01:50 PM
Hi Anu,
I learnt a lot from Shunya's post and your comments. Then I visited your blog and learnt some more.
You mentioned that your students from WB were fairly ignorant about the casteist issues that dominated rest of the country. I will elaborate a little on this issue. WestBengal is essentially no different from the rest of India in terms of caste conflicts but it has always been that the caste conflicts have yielded to the Marxist based class conflicts when it has come to a crunch.
The Dalit assertion movement in WB started somewhere in the 1870s led by the RajBansi comunity (in northern Bengal)and the Namasudras of east bengal. These were the two parties that provided the leaders of the movement during the pre-partition era. The Namasudras of East Bengal were mostly the peasant classes with two adverseries, namely the upper caste Hindus ( their landlords) and the poor Muslim peasants as their competitors. For many the Muslims rather than upper caste Hindus were their chief opponents, marked by riots in Dacca and Noakhali. When the bloody East and West Bengal partition happened in 1947, the Namasudras tried their best to retain their lands in East Bengal but this did not happen. They were forced off their lands and homes to enter West Bengal as swarms of 'East Bengal refugees' or 'Hindu minorities' along with other upper caste hindus who shared the same fate due to partition.
The political scenario in WB dominated by Communist parties and militant Naxalites (in the fringes)actively took up the cause of the peasants and working classes in terms of land-reforms and tebhaga movement. As a result the Namasudras from east bengal as well as Rajbanshis lost their 'Dalit' identities and became integrated into the 'labourer class' category. They got some landholding benefits as tenants, bargadars and sharecroppers but not as 'Dalits', never as 'Dalits'.
Moreover, till date the sociopolitical scenario in WB is dominated by 'Bengali Bhadralok'- the leading class of Bengali Intelligentsia. Their understanding of caste as an issue is that caste is regressive, traditional, backward-looking and therefore not modern. Consequently it does not figure into the political discourse which is all about modernity, industrialization etc etc. As a result, though caste system is quite prevalent in rural, semi-urban and urban areas, there is very little public articulation about caste. Caste articulations are more in domestic spheres and in the sphere of marriage alliances.
This is the reason Anu your students are not aware of casteism in WB because the Dalit uprising has taken different names at different times.
Posted by: Shreyasi | April 04, 2010 at 11:51 AM
Hi Namit,
Perhaps because of the length of my comment Shunya's Blog refused to post it the first few times :)
This is just a note to thank Shunya for his thought-provoking post and Anu for her comments that led me to her Blog to learn some more on this issue about which I feel deeply.
Posted by: Shreyasi | April 04, 2010 at 11:59 AM
Hi Shreyasi,
Not my students, but students from various departments gathered at a discussion on caste as we understand it now. This was after the screening of the documentary ‘resilient rhythms’.
The collapsing of caste into class by the left and its failure to change the brahminical way of life has been critiqued extensively by dalits. The bhadralok remained the ruling class, leaving the lower castes out of civil society.
Marichjhapi massacre in W. Bengal or the suppression of the Chengara struggle in Kerala are not narratives in the popular discourse for obvious and not so obvious reasons. Lack of awareness of such movements is not the reason I recalled the anecdote with students but to answer Namit’s question about the generational difference in perceiving caste, in the immediate.
Marriage or the most basic interaction between Indians revolves around caste; it is also in your face as soon as one steps into public and secular spaces. Lets take an Indian who has only inhabited urban spaces; either he/she is blind to the ragged children at traffic signals, or he/she has never wondered if those children could possibly have surnames such as Bhattacharya, Sengupta etc. It is instinctively acknowledged that destitution and exploitation does not visit those who carry upper caste surnames as themselves.
Did the left ideology do such a wonderful job of erasing this basic connect between observation and inference, that generations of Indians continue to think class and caste are separate categories? I don’t know.
An educated Indian is a participant and perpetuator of the caste system. He is unaware or is stubbornly willing to ignore the racist doctrines central to caste.
Even if we want to buy into this ‘forced amnesia’ post independence which pushed caste as a topic, under the carpet; how can youngsters pursuing knowledge and truth, using tools of reason and logic not wonder about how their society is organized and how it functions? What are all those qualifications for, if it has not prepared the mind to question the immediate? The historical will follow naturally.
The resistance by the oppressed is only one side of the social reform story. The oppressed cannot change the oppressor’s mindset; he can only wrest back his rights and dignity. The oppressor if he wants to change, has to do that all by himself.
Resistance presents the oppressor with a few options: denial, use of force or self-examination.
Violent suppression and massacres like the one at Marichjhapi shows which option the oppressor (in its state form) is choosing most often.
At the individual level it is often denial.
Thanks for the thoughtful comments. Shreyasi, such a lovely name!
Regards
anu
Posted by: anu | April 06, 2010 at 01:36 AM
Hi Anu,
Thanks for coming back and reading my comments.
Some more thoughts on Dalit Identity Crisis in WB.
In our state the Dalit identity was thrown in a dilemma because of the huge physical and emotional displacement post partition resulting in serious raptures in the Dalit movement. The 1947 partition was an event in which even the so called East Bengal Bhattacharyyas and Senguptas were reduced to abject levels of poverty with their honoured 'surnames' severely tarnished. Ironically the Dalits were absorbed in the streaming masses of hapless refugees thereby losing their identities.
Secondly the ruling 'Bhadroloks' of West Bengal, almost invariably belonged to the upper castes : Brahman, Kayashta and Baidya but they have never claimed superiority on the basis of caste, but rather through their education and culture. Casteism was therefore never articulated in public. As if in WB the Casteism didn’t even exist !
However as a result of this 'pseudo-modernity' though the Dalits almost completely lost their identity there has been no aggressive caste-based landlordism and no known cases of caste violence in WB as we find in other provinces in India and politics has never been centered around caste identity.
Having said that, one cannot forget the Marichjhnapi incident in 1978 and its atrocities. However in WB political scenario this massacre is perceived as the slaughter of ‘poor’ East Bengali refugees rather than Dalit killings.
So my point is though the caste related brutalities were less in WB compared to other states in India, the Dalits did not get any cultural recognition either. Even Jogendranath Mandal the famous Dalit leader who was a 1952 electoral candidate did not represent himself as a ‘Dalit’ but as a ‘Refugee’ leader and got a lot of votes from the huge cross section of non-congress voters.
In the face of leftist politics in WB the Dalits found their niche in two areas-an exclusive religious sect ‘Matua’ in Nadia district and in the field of Bengali literature contributed by authors of all caste and creed.
This is however the story of the Dalits in WB.
If we take the rest of India as it stands today, we are still fighting with the evils of the caste ridden society at many levels, Dalits and Non Dalits. For instance the massacre of the kashmiri pandits and the khap panchayat killings ? These massacres don’t involve the Dalits yet they are caste associated violences all the same. What is the true name of Nandigram violence ? Is it a caste or class based killing ?
Our progress on these fronts have been depressingly slow. Yet undeniably there has been changes. As the economy of India is improving there is an increasing fusion of the caste/class system and upward mobilisation. The caste associated 'cleansing' and 'purification' concepts are gradually disappearing. The burning ambition of the younger generation today, in rural and urban areas alike is to exploit the growth opportunities to compete with rest of the world. I will not say that the students today are more aware of the caste issues and its evils rather the focus is on economic progress.
Thanks Anu for liking my name. Hope you like me in person when we meet :)
Posted by: Shreyasi | April 08, 2010 at 08:59 AM
Anu,
You've given me good food for thought. Yet, I hope I'm mistaken in my growing sense that you see caste as almost the sole filter of analysis. I think there is a lot going on in Indian society today, and, as you know, there is a great deal of diversity even in the Dalit movement on what the current state of caste is, how it is changing, and what strategies can hasten its demise. Consider the April 2010 issue of Himal. I was struck -- but not surprised -- by the range of opinions on caste from Dalit-bahujan writers. Of those I've read, there is a definite spectrum from CB Prasad and Kali to Omvedt and Kandasamy. One finds articulation for a range of views:
-- that there is tremendous change and there is little change.
-- that jati is getting undermined due to its detachment from old/hereditary occupations and that it is still quite alive.
-- that the modern/urban economy's caste-neutral jobs are weakening casteist exploitation but new exploitations are emerging.
Many of these authors note that the basis of caste in ritual 'purity-pollution' is reducing. Prasad notes that among the sweepers in the malls around Delhi there are as many caste Hindus as Dalits (38% each), which argues in favor of not reducing the problems of class (defined by wealth, education, language, etc.) to problems of caste, overlapping though they are. The lens of class is also able to include Muslims, who are disproportionately poor. In Britain, both race and class have been used to examine the propagation of privilege. Likewise, in modern urban India, caste and class are separate yet linked categories. And if a shift is occurring, as I believe it is -- at least in urban India -- in which a few Dalits have advanced into the middle class and many Dalit castes are coalescing into a socioeconomic underclass, including poor caste Hindus and Muslims, the question it raises is: does this represent a step in the right direction for casteist exploitation?
I agree that most of these shifts in the caste system have not come about due to a conscious awakening among the caste Hindus. I think the bulk of the change is due to the waning of the same factors that have kept traditional casteism alive for ages -- i.e., the subconscious internalization of caste hierarchy and 'pollution' that a child in a Hindu household was/is exposed to. Jobs and lives in the modern economy, urbanization, and an increasing material culture has reduced that subconscious conditioning in the new urban generation, which is growing up with somewhat different attitudes -- not more enlightened, I'll say it again, but less steeped in reflexive casteism, because it has simply had fewer opportunities to internalize its traditional form and practice. Other forms of domination and injustices may be rising but I think they increasingly turn on issues of class. Of course, rural India lags way behind, where oppression still mostly derives from traditional casteism.
Also, are all considerations of caste in marriage bad in themselves (I ask this even as I'm no proponent of any)? Is it not better to criticize just their excesses? For instance, the fact that most whites marry whites does not mean they are racists for doing so (but some are, and deserve our criticism). Such preferences can also arise out of a sense of preserving a shared culture and community. Don't the various ethnicities in LA still find reason to mostly prefer their own subgroups when it comes to marriage, and is all of this worthy of moral condemnation?
What do you think?
Posted by: Namit | April 08, 2010 at 11:41 AM
Namit, Shreyasi,
I will get back on the very interesting points (Namit's largely predictable ones) you both raise, in a short while. In case you have not already read this article, by Shiv Vishwanathan, do check it out. It has some data based insights. Dalits have always known this study's reality, though they never had the resources and possibility of producing empirical data to prove it. My views are based on this larger reality, apart from having a below-up interest in these issues.
Soon...
anu
Posted by: anu | April 08, 2010 at 05:03 PM
Anu,
Thanks for the article. Just days ago I read another report on the same survey (which indeed would be worth digging into). Can't say I found anything I didn't already know, or found surprising. This is indeed the social reality in much of India, and I see it as the writer does too. His conclusion is that "Rural India must be the focus," though I think urban India must be too, as there are great inequities there as well. You have read both of my recent articles on caste + comment threads; I hope you didn't think the article's insights would be novel to me. :)
Posted by: Namit | April 09, 2010 at 11:03 AM
Shreyasi,
Thanks again for sharing your perspective on the dalits in W. Bengal. I am learning.
It would be a lovely day when dalits lose their identity as dalits. : ) no, I know what you mean here. But that is a misconception about ‘a dalit identity’. Dalits are a diverse people with distinct histories, cultures and experiences. The commonality is that they are all set outside the hindu fold, to be used and exploited as a subhuman underclass. The names by which they are/were known has changed over the ages. The term dalit is a new one; it is consciously used as a mapping term to connect across differences. It is used in the retelling of histories of the oppressed people.
For example, the story of the 9th century untouchable Nandanar’s murder when he sought entry to the Shiva temple in Tamilnadu and the story of the 21st century murder of a dalit Kotwal on entering a hanuman temple in Maharashtra are stories in a historical continuum. The term dalit would not have been used in Nandnaar’s time. Now he is referred to as a dalit martyr saint.
So, you see the term has crossed time, geographies and language to connect the story line –temple entry as a form of resistance and the highlighting of the racial underpinnings of this ancient but persisting atrocious hindu practice against one section of Indians.
~ upper caste abject poverty~
Poverty of a very small percentage of the upper caste is real. They may live in the same basti as the dalit, do the same sweeper’s job, earning the same money. However, this poverty is not the same, it is not an equalizer. The upper caste will never equate himself to a dalit. The social and cultural capital of the poorest upper caste and the dalits are oceans apart.
As to other forms of caste oppression you refer to, it is has been the dalit movements burden to consistently seek structural changes in the Indian society. If you are familiar with the phrase ‘annihilation of caste’ then you know it is not just liberation of dalits, but the complete and total liberation from this wretched social order, for all. The diverse dalit movements, in the past as well as in contemporary times, have as the core agenda –removal of inequality at all levels. Dalit resistance is one of the foremost and longest human rights struggle the world has ever known.
~So my point is though the caste related brutalities were less in WB compared to other states in India~ ? Kerala also claims the same! :)
------
Namit,
Your reading of the himal series sums up my first comment: writing too is joothan. The series are abstract analysis by a tiny group of English speaking dalits trying to make sense of their world through Marxist or capitalist worldviews. Gail’s scholarship lets her lay it out in a simple analogy.
In case you are looking for revolutionary potential in this set of writings, which it should have, given the observation you made in your post –I, found it in Ashley Tellis’s brief essay in this series. His brutally honest acknowledgment of the contradictions and pain of being a dalit is the only articulation that spoke to me. He is an urban dalit from a metro city, not rural India ‘which lags behind in change’. Nothing more to say.
Confusing free choice of the western society with ‘free choice’ of Indians marrying within their own caste, is, what can I say? Confusion, I guess. Namit, you need to work out, whether Indians see fellow Indians as belonging to distinct ethnic groups, or linguistic groups, or distinct castes. And figure out why only one of these categories has the social and ritual sanction for marriage. Along with some pondering on why modern Indians are unable to break free from this.
Thank you both, I apologize for the length of the comment. :)
(just read your last comment Namit, did not share link for its novelty but for it being backed by data, it means a lot to me to have caste discrimination anchored in data)
Posted by: anu | April 09, 2010 at 12:27 PM
Anu,
My point with marriage was not that Indians approach it as westerners do. That would be, duh! What's objectionable about caste is the hierarchy, without which there would be no caste system. However, caste is also other kinds of identity, encompassing a shared culture, community, custom, language, region, and often material proximity, all important considerations for marriage the world over. I was asking whether *all* considerations of caste identity in arranged marriage ought to be condemned (in other words, why shouldn't we stay focused on condemning and combating hierarchy, and letting marriage take the course it will? **). A nuance, which I should have stated more clearly.
I liked Ashley Tellis's piece too.
** This parenthetical note added a day after posting this comment.
Posted by: Namit | April 09, 2010 at 02:06 PM
Excerpts from Dalit Poetry by Gandhvi Pravin
I can be a Hindu
A Buddhist,
A Muslim
But the shadow
Shall never be severed from me,
The Kuladi is done,
The broom is gone,
But the shadow
Still stalks me,
I change my name,
My job,
My village,
My caste,
But the shadow will never leave me alone,
The language has changed,
The dress,
The gesture,
But the shadow
Plods resolutely on.
Posted by: Shreyasi | April 10, 2010 at 09:13 PM
Another excerpt from Dalit poet Vaghela Yeshwant
Here
They know
Who I am
Yet feigning ignorance
They ask me:
Who are you ?
I tell them
This head is Sambooka's
These hands are Ekalavya's
This heart is Kabir's
I am Jabali Satyakama
But these feet are still untouchables
Today I am a man
Isn't that good enough for you ?
Posted by: Shreyasi | April 10, 2010 at 09:22 PM
Via Himanshu Rai, I found this 2007 documentary, India Untouched: Stories of a People Apart. It more than answers Anu's rhetorical question above, "do you believe a little boy today is not being asked to sweep the school playground because of his low caste?"
The 2-hour documentary is on youtube in 11 parts (you may well consider this a blessing; it is painful to watch in one go). Here they are:
One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven
Posted by: Namit | April 17, 2010 at 09:30 AM