A Dalit history 9789386815484, 9386815486

Citation preview

K. Satchidanandan

A Dalit History

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents For Dalit History Is Not Past But Present Meena Kandasamy He Has Left Us with Only His Words Gopal Guru Follow Penguin Copyright Page

You who have wronged the simple man Bursting into laughter at his suffering . . . Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You may kill him—a new one is born Deeds and talks will be recorded —Czeslaw Milosz

For Dalit History Is Not Past but Present Gopal Guru The recent polemics on the question of societal prejudice seems to be revolving basically around three ideas—obligation to history, social tragedy and intolerance. Thus, one can find these ideas in the recent protest of the writers emerging from the intensification of intolerance and the delayed response of the state to a politically motivated tragedy of a minority person from Dadri village in Uttar Pradesh. On the other side of the spectrum, those who objected to the writers’ protest seem to have chosen to use the history of social tragedy as the basis for launching their counter protest. Such opponents accused the writers of being selective in choosing Dadri as an incidence of intolerance. As a part of their particular understanding of the history of social tragedy, these opponents further accused the writers for not protesting against the intolerance that had led to the displacement of a large number of Pandits from the Kashmir Valley some decades ago. Thus, the assumption behind such an accusation was that the writers showed no obligation to history. One may not deny social significance to any tragedy, including the dislocation of Pandits that happened in the past or has been happening in the present. The supporters of the ‘displaced’ Pandits, however, do not realize that they commit the same ‘mistake’ of which they accuse the protesting writers. The mistake is that they fail to historicize other forms of tragedies that coexist with the tragedy of the Pandits’ displacement. They

too are guilty of being unconscious about the history of social tragedy that involves, for example, the Dalits in this country. As a corollary to this, one also needs to realize that, among other things, history is a thick field in which different kinds of tragedies not only coexist side by side but some of them also compete for public attention—by pushing the suffering of one social section ahead of the sufferings of other social sections. In such a marathon, it is interesting to note that those who are in sympathy with the Pandits seem to be treating the tragedy of the latter as the only concern around which everyone, including the writers, has to rally. In such an act of privileging, the ethics of historicizing receives a severe jolt. The major focus of this essay, therefore, is to historicize social tragedies so as to grasp different dimensions of such tragedies. It is also necessary to point out some serious implications that are internal to a skewed reading of the history of tragedies. Let us address the second point first. It is possible to argue that the act of privileging a particular social tragedy, such as the displacement of Pandits, as the only context for defining intolerance has the following limitations. First, the counter protest against the writers seeks to privilege the displacement of Pandits as a kind of spectacular tragedy and hence such position by implication tends to ignore other tragedies. It may be because such tragedies are regular rather than spectacular. And, when this does not even occur to the opponents, Dalit tragedies have to wait for the social attention of these historically sensitive supporters of the Pandits. In such a reading, social history tends to move ahead primarily through the suffering of the privileged sections of society. Second, a particular reading of tragedy does not tell us whether the tragic experience of displacement has led the Pandits to identify them with those who have been facing different kinds of displacement. For example, the supporters of Pandits do not tell us whether the experience of ghettoization has morally inspired the Pandits to make common cause with Dalits as another displaced and despised social group. Instead, they seem to be using the dislocation of Kashmiri Pandits as a moral stick with which to beat the protesting writers.

Ironically, displacement of Dalits is not merely a physical or territorial dislocation, neither is it a loss of social and economic domination; it is, in fact, a colossal moral loss of their human existence. The ideology of purity– pollution which is the core of Brahmanism, forces Dalits to carry with them all the time a morally degrading meaning, even if some of them have moved out of defiling jobs such as scavenging and other sanitary works. Those Dalits who still find themselves chained to the obnoxious job of manual scavenging and ragpicking continue to remain repulsive objects of intolerance. The touchable caste pushes Dalits first into degraded/inhuman forms of jobs then uses the same dislocation and stigmatizes them. Thus the upper castes invent justification for their intolerance of Dalits. This burden of stigma remains attached to Dalits across time and space. The ideology of Brahmanism thus turns Dalits into a walking carcass or mobile dirt, and their colonies into stigmatized ghettos that look almost similar to the apartheid that existed in South Africa. Yet, in the privileged imagination of the film stars who are opposing the writers, social existence that has been reduced to repulsive wretchedness does not have the moral calibre that could help foreground intolerance. The intolerant attitude adopted by the upper castes towards Dalits is morally vacuous in two major senses. First, those whose attitude of intolerance renders the Dalit untouchable or even unseeable, just because the latter deal with human dirt, conveniently forget that they themselves are the source of such dirt. Upper-caste intolerance, thus, inflicts civilizational violence against Dalits. Secondly, those who push Dalits out of the civilizational sphere do not take the responsibility of seeking the exclusion of Dalits from human interaction. On ethical grounds, the attitude of intolerance associated with the touchable castes is deeply problematic as it seeks to either minimize or cancel out the very existence of Dalits from social interaction. Narrowing of the ethical sphere to which human interaction is central, however, takes place through the speech act. The speech act that infests human communication with the language of humiliation suggests that Dalits are lower than human beings and hence not worthy of love and affection. Devastating expressions of intolerance, which

for Dalits produce an everyday experience of humiliation and hence social death, however, do not merit the critical attention of those who see conspiracy behind the protest by writers. On the other side of the spectrum, self-enlightened politicians from mainstream political parties would not demonstrate an intense kind of intolerance against Dalits. Let us understand this ‘social generosity’ of politicians with the help of an incident that happened during the elections campaign in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, in the early 1980s. This particular political leader, who was campaigning in this slum, was confronted with a foul smell as soon as he entered the slum. When he found it difficult to tolerate it, he sprayed a very strong perfume on his socks in order to save himself from the stinking smell. In the domain of electoral politics, even the political parties and some cultural organizations with Hindutva agenda have to be socially generous and show tolerance to the Dalits and their cultural symbols such as Ambedkar. The Hindutva parties, for example, have been making efforts since 1991 (Ambedkar’s birth centenary year) to carry the image (pratima) of Ambedkar literarily on their heads, but do not seem to be interested in stopping those who trample under their feet his genius (pratibha). The question one needs to raise here is what are the preconditions within which upper-caste intolerance against Dalits occur? Social transgression by Dalits provides the major context that intensely irritates the upper castes. Social transgression can be defined in terms of a rebellious act of defiance, which may trigger either an ordinary or an extraordinary expression of intolerance. Social transgression can be defined in terms of the rejection of negative right that the Dalits had—to cast off the cloth of their feudal master, leftover food, and the flesh and hide of dead cattle. Social transgression has to be understood against the social conditions where Dalits were barred from learning Sanskrit, marrying someone from the touchable caste or owning a double-storeyed house; or appearing in public with their head held high or being argumentative—all these are some of the factors that act as irritants for the upper castes. Thus, the untouchables’ moral struggle to transgress, to move from the paralysing

state of servility into the flowing dynamics of self-respect is what continues to irritate the upper castes. The moment the untouchables begin to don new clothes and eat fresh food, use their own minds and speak in an abstract language or construct new spacious houses, it becomes cause for strife. In effect, it is the Dalits’ positive right to freedom and autonomy that serves as a backdrop for conflict. The assertion for equality comes with a heavy moral and social cost. It can produce extraordinary forms of intolerance.

Extraordinary Forms of Intolerance The difference between two sets of intolerance is the following. First, the extraordinary intolerance that occurs within the varna–caste framework, both in mythical and lived times, against Shudra–Atishudra castes. For example, in the mythical time the Shambhuka story from the Ramayana represents a classic case of upper-caste intolerance against the Shudras. As the narrative goes, the members of the Suvarna castes did not tolerate Shambhuka chanting the Vedas. In the early twentieth century the same intolerance was repeated by the middle castes against the Mahars (Dalits) from the village Dindori in the Nashik region in Maharashtra. The Mahars were beaten up by the middle castes as the latter could not tolerate the former reciting the chapter on Pandav Pratap from the Mahabharata. The intolerance of the upper castes against intellectually aspiring Dalits continues even today. This was evident in the tragic case of Rohith Vemula in January 2016, a young Dalit scholar from Hyderabad Central University, whose intellectual assertion was not tolerated by the ‘university structures’ that seemed to be dominated by members of the upper castes. The upper castes can be actively intolerant, particularly about the intellectual existence of Dalits. What irritates upper-caste academics is the discursive transgression made by a Dalit who has now moved from the empirical to the theoretical and from identity to ideas. Of course, these are ordinary forms of intolerance that are expressed in order to inject a sense of inferiority among Dalits; but there are crueller or extraordinary forms of intolerance that the middle castes seem to be using. Social intolerance

works on the premise that the Dalit should never grow in the eyes of a Brahmanical elite. The Dalit situation in India is analogous to the situation of Blacks who, as the leading light of Black literature Toni Morrison has observed, also do not grow in the eyes of white American males. This intolerance against Dalits not only continues across historical time and space but it also gets intensified along the passage of time. Hence the upper castes find even the shadow of Dalits a provocation.

Shadow and Intolerance The ideology of Brahmanism not only reduces the corporeal body of a Dalit to mobile dirt, but also treats the shadow of a Dalit as the source of intolerance. Shadow as the ritual source of generating intolerance among the touchable castes has known history that goes back to Peshwa rule in early nineteenth-century Maharashtra. During the Peshwa rule in nineteenth-century Pune, the upper castes could not stand the shadow of Dalits. The Brahma Wrunda (Brahmins) from Pune were protected by the Peshwa state from the menace of the ‘defiling’ shadow of the untouchables. The Peshwa state had debarred Dalits from entering the main street except around noon. The Brahma Wrunda of Pune considered this time the most opportune as it helped them protect their body from the disintegrating impact of the Dalit shadow. This attempt by the state also helped the upper castes convert this intolerance of Dalits into a moral force. Intolerance as rage becomes much more powerful expressed against the minorities than that which results from the object of repulsion, that is, the untouchable. The passive intolerance of the Brahmins of nineteenth-century Pune is different from the twenty-first-century expression of social intolerance that is associated with the members belonging to the Other Backward Classes (OBC). According to newspaper reports, in a small town in Madhya Pradesh, a Dalit girl was reported to have been beaten up by an OBC person for her crime of polluting him by cast(e)ing her shadow on him. The violent articulation of this attitude against Dalits is finding new social bases. Today, it is the OBCs who have become more intolerant of

Dalits. It is the OBC patriarchy that has become the immediate cause for the intensification of intolerance against Dalits. Intolerance demonstrated by the caste Hindus, particularly by the other backward castes, does not take a subtle route; in fact, it seeks to find its resolution in a much more direct manner. There are two things that lead the OBCs to intensify their antagonism against Dalits. First, it is an element of patriarchy and masculinity that decides the degree of intolerance. This was evident in the brutal killing of Dalits all over the country. The context for such extreme manifestations of intolerance was inter-caste marriage with an OBC girl. Second, the economically poor OBCs’ intolerance resulted from their inability to compete with Dalits, particularly in the domain of the realization of cultural modernity. The OBC predicament suggests that what was lost in cultural modernity was gained in tradition. The loss in cultural modernity bothered the OBCs so much that they expressed their anger by attacking the house, electronic goods and motorbikes that belonged to Dalit households in Maharashtra, Haryana and Tamil Nadu. To put this differently, the lack of cultural modernity is compensated by resurrecting the traditional power of caste. The OBCs’ social and cultural need to compensate for this lack led them to intensify their intolerance, seeking to devastate even the aesthetic universe of Dalits. As we have seen above, for the highest of the twice-born (upper castes), it was the shadow that provided the context of intolerance against Dalits. In the case of the OBCs, it was not only the shadow but even the sound that came from the mouth of a Dalit that was considered the source of not only active but extreme intolerance.

Sound as the Source of Intolerance Sound as the source of intolerance has a known history of some eighty years. The corporeal sound embodied in the Dalit body made the upper caste of the temple town of Pandharpuram in Maharashtra intolerant to the extent that the latter thrashed the Dalits mercilessly. This was reported in the fortnightly Bahishkrut Bharat published by Babasaheb Ambedkar.

Eighty years later a Dalit youth was killed by upper-caste youth in another temple town, Shirdi, in Maharashtra, the reason being the same—‘shrill sound’. In the case of Shirdi, what absolutely annoyed the youth was not the corporeal vocal sound but the ringtone playing Ambedkar’s song. This ringtone of the Dalit boy’s cellphone seemed to have irritated the OBC youth so much that they killed him instantly. What irritates the upper-caste Sikhs in Punjab is the song ‘Chamar Da Munda’ (the son of a Chamar), a legitimate cultural assertion of the Dalit youth of Punjab. One does not know how long the killers of Dalits would take to understand that music and art reintegrates human beings into everyday life. For a Dalit the ringtone of Ambedkar’s song works as the aesthetics of ordinary existence. It suggests how to govern one’s life in order to give it possibly the most beautiful form in the eyes of oneself, others and the future generation. However, the net consequences of the upper castes’ active intolerance force Dalits to adopt coping mechanisms. Hence, they are forced to edit out the acclamatory language that has Ambedkar in it.

Destructive Intolerance Leading to Self-Censorship or the Tonsuring of Language Ambedkar has been an immutable expression of the cultural and social identity of Dalits. But in an event of increasing upper-caste intolerance, they are forced to culturally access Ambedkar only in an abbreviated form. They are, thus, forced to hide behind abbreviation because the so-called public sphere has been socially quite hostile to them. Hence Dalits have changed their usual ways of greeting each other with ‘Jai Bhim’ (Hail Bhimrao Ambedkar). They now say JB as a short form for Jai Bhim. This has an atrocious impact on the very words, in the sense that they are made to undergo a kind of photosynthesis. In such a natural process of photosynthesis, the words begin to shrink; they are condensed to their essence. As a consequence, Dalit life itself becomes synonymous with

playing a reductive language game, and caste or social reality becomes synonymous with linguistic reality.

Conclusion Upper-caste intolerance towards Dalits casts the latter repeatedly into social stigma. To put it differently, the intolerance of the tormentor and the unfreedom of Dalits coexist in perpetual tension. Through this contradiction between intolerance and un-freedom we can interrogate the purported objective of tolerance, which is considered a means to effect a compromise between a variety of opinions. It is in this sense that tolerance provides the middle space, a kind of stopgap that can offer an opportunity to radically rework our positions. This would help us adopt a critique (of intolerance) based on rational belief and cosmopolitan humanity. It may have been possible for a Dalit to deal with the unreasonable forms of intolerance they are confronted with by using cultivated arrogance. But since it would lead to a barbaric reproduction of intolerance, this route is not available to a Dalit who has deep interest in the creation of a decent society.

He Has Left Us with Only His Words* Meena Kandasamy The suicide of a Dalit student is not just an individual exit strategy, it is a shaming of society that has failed him or her. Rohith Vemula’s death comes as the sad, unforeseeable climax of a struggle that he was spearheading against casteist, communal forces. One of the five Dalit scholars who were expelled from the University of Hyderabad on charges moved by the rightwing student organization, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), he kept the spirit of resilience alive until his last moments. Even as Rohith being driven to death shows us the vulnerability of our most militant students, it also lays bare the true state of our educational system: a vice chancellor with a decades-old history of rusticating Dalit students, the involvement of Central ministers to settle scores on behalf of right-wing Hindu forces, the entire administrative machinery becoming a puppet of the ruling political forces, and the tragic consequences of social apathy. There could not be a more potent image of the caste system at play than the expulsion of these five Dalit students. Even though the ensuing strikes highlighted the sense of solidarity among the Dalit Bahujan student community, the act of expelling these students itself carried grim reminders. Just as the Manusmriti ordains the outcaste to leave the caste quarters, the very ritual of punishment appeared to have all the symbolism that accompanies a caste cleansing. Education has now become a disciplining enterprise working against Dalit students: they are constantly under threat

of rustication, expulsion, defamation, discontinuation. In a society where students have waged massive struggles to ensure their right to access higher educational institutions through the protective, enabling concept of the reservation policy, no one has dared to shed light on how many of these students are allowed to leave these institutions with degrees, how many become dropouts, become permanent victims of depression, how many end up dead.

Students like Him That Dalit students like Rohith Vemula enter universities to pursue a doctoral degree is a testament to their intelligence, perseverance, and a relentless struggle against caste discrimination that attempts to destroy them from the first day. Textbooks ridden with caste hegemony, the atmosphere that reinforces alienation within college campuses, classmates who take pride in their dominant caste status, teachers who condemn them to miserable fates and thus enact a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure—these are the impossible challenges for Dalit students to surmount. Caste which ingrains the notion of intellectual superiority, when replicated within the boundaries of academia, becomes a poison potent enough to kill and consume lives. Classrooms, instead of becoming sites of resistance and subversion, become assertions of unbridled caste power by those who believe in the twice-born, sacred threads of knowledge transmission, and who are inherently obliged to maintain the status quo. The tiny minority of students from oppressed backgrounds who try to camouflage and masquerade out of the fear of being ostracized are punished at the time of exposure—like the mythical Karna—with the curse of fatal failure. Those Dalit students who emerge in their own right, with their identity out in the open and for all to see, become the proverbial Ekalavyas, left alive but unable to practise their art. This is not the fate of students alone because within these corridors of caste power, Dalit Bahujan faculty are also at the receiving end of ostracization. As much as I have watched in

awe my mother’s struggle in the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, I have also watched with absolute helplessness the woman I love crumble and disintegrate. The dismal representation of Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes/Other Backward Classes faculty members in our IITs/Indian Institutes of Management and universities renders the caste discrimination absolute, because students from similar backgrounds do not even find a support group to hear their difficulties or give them advice. In front of the interview panels of Brahminical professors, whose hostility reminds one of firing squads, how does a student hold his or her own? These professors, who on the one hand might have mastered nuclear physics, but on the other hand cradle their dearest caste prejudices, represent only one dimension of the problem of caste terrorism in academia. When combined with right-wing political student groupings like the ABVP, it reaches a deadly high. Our universities have become the modern killing fields. Like all other battlegrounds, institutions of higher education also specialize in things beyond caste discrimination. They are also notorious for the sexual harassment visited upon women students and faculty members alike, stories that are hushed up, stories that are twisted to character-assassinate the victims who resist, raise an alarm, do not allow sex to be extracted under threat, compulsion or coercion. Just as Rohith’s suicide has broken the silence over caste as a killer, one day we will also hear the stories of women who were driven to death by these ivory towers. What we see in the case of the University of Hyderabad is the deadly combination of caste supremacy and political pandering. The role of the state machinery, especially the police force, to threaten and subdue students has been established as a classical method of repression on campuses. In the days that followed the derecognition of the Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle, IIT Madras became a veritable site of siege, with uniformed men and women everywhere on the campus, guarding its gates night and day. (The decision was revoked later after much protest.) Now, we have a similar massive deployment of armed police on the Hyderabad campus, and the imposition of curfew under Section 144.

A Pledge to Keep Rohith, you have left behind your dream of becoming a science writer like Carl Sagan, and left us with only your words. Each of our words now carries the weight of your death, every tear carries your unrealized dream. We will become the explosive stardust that you speak of, the stardust that will singe this oppressive system of caste. Within every university, every college, every school in this country, each of our slogans will carry the spirit of your struggle. Dr Ambedkar spoke of caste as the monster that crosses one’s path every way one turns, and within the agraharams that are the Indian educational institutions, our very physical presence must embody the message of caste annihilation. Let every despicable casteist force wince when they encounter a Dalit, a Shudra, an Adivasi, a Bahujan, a woman staking claim within academia, let them realize that we have come here to end a system that has kept trying hard to put an end to us, that we have come here to cause nightmares to those who dared to snatch our dreams. Let them realize that Vedic times, the era of pouring molten lead into the ears of Shudras who hear the sacred texts, the era of cutting the tongues of those who dared to utter the knowledge that was denied to them, are long gone. Let them understand that we have stormed these bastions to educate, to agitate, to organize; we did not come here to die. We have come to learn, but let the monsters of caste and their henchmen bear in mind that we have come here also to teach them an unforgettable lesson.

* First published in The Hindu, 19 January 2016.

THE BEGINNING Let the conversation begin... Follow the Penguin Twitter.com@PenguinIndia Keep up-to-date with all our stories YouTube.com/PenguinIndia Like ‘Penguin Books’ on Facebook.com/PenguinIndia Find out more about the author and discover more stories like this at penguinbooksindia.com

PENGUIN UK | Canada | Ireland | Australia New Zealand | India | South Africa Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Copyright © Penguin Books India 2016 The moral right of the author has been asserted This digital edition published in 2017. e-ISBN: 978-9-386-81548-4 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.