Race against discrimination
Pratik Kanjilal
March 05, 2010
First Published: 21:58 IST(5/3/2010)
Last Updated: 22:01 IST(5/3/2010)
The English are girding their loins to make war on caste
discrimination. They have noticed that the dastardly Asians have
imported it to their shores along with chicken tikka masala, cheap
phone cards, internet aarti darshan and Patak's pickles. They had
learned to respect caste when they began to rule India and then they
had learned to use it, dividing their sepoys on religious and caste
lines to prevent a reprise of 1857. Now they have learned to despise
it, like everyone else. And so Westminster has commissioned a
needle-sharp probe into the morass of caste. On the basis of its
findings, it plans to wipe out caste discrimination in Albion.
What a hope! We Asians, who invented caste, have been fighting it for
over half a century, armed with a Constitution drafted by a Dalit, and
we are still baffled by its cockroach-like endurance. Caste
discrimination is alive and well and meanwhile its doppelganger, lower
caste assertion, is raising steam. Uttar Pradesh is ruled by a
caste-based party which is righting historical wrongs through
monumental statuary. The upper castes are richly represented in
national imagery while Dalits have had to make do with the rustic
statues of Ambedkar you see from the train window, pink-faced and clad
in a piercingly blue jacket. Now, one caste imagery is competing with
the other, though Ambedkar would have wanted neither to exist.
Pursuing our commitment to erasing caste, we have banned the very
utterance of caste names, which are sometimes used as obscenities. But
it's no use. People of the abused castes freely use those very names
as a badge of identity. Caste is the obscenity that dares to speak its
name. And it speaks it so casually and familiarly that you forget it's
illegal.
I can't get over the embarrassment I once suffered while covering an
election in Haryana. For days I had wandered far from the highways,
and then I had filed a story from a one-fax, two-dog, three-lathel
village. The only reason I didn't get busted to rookie reporter when I
returned to Delhi was that my editor of that time was a hard-bitten
veteran, not easily rattled. All he asked me was: "Did you want to get
me arrested, then?"
I had written that Clan Devi Lal would face surprise reversals in its
strongholds because it was being opposed by the community of cha…
There I go again. Now, I'm trying to get the editor of this paper
arrested. My only excuse for having spelled out a derogatory caste
name in a newspaper was that for days on end in the villages, I had
heard the word being used by everyone. Not as a term of abuse, as city
people use it, but as a commonplace descriptive, like 'Darjeeling', or
'banana'.
Action against caste in Britain will put the heat on India by
intensifying the 2001 UN initiative to equate caste discrimination
with racism. But the English, I fear, will discover that caste is like
the human appendix. No one knows what it's for any more but it remains
deeply embedded in our psyche. Its nuisance value is easily remedied
by surgery. But patients usually resist treatment, for it would mean
cutting away a part of their selves.
Pratik Kanjilal is publisher of The Little Magazine
The views expressed by the author are personal
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