Well beyond Khairlanji
April 2010
By: Ashley Tellis
Questioning our personal contradictions is essential to any discussion on caste.
Karen Haydock
I find a question about the 'future of caste' offensive, primarily
because caste is an issue of the present and we do not have the luxury
to pontificate about the 'future' of it. I teach at a new Indian
Institute of Technology (IIT) which is being mentored by an old IIT,
where casteism is sickeningly alive. Colleagues speak derisively of
Dalit students who naively change the question in the entrance exam to
the 'prestigious' IIT so they can answer it, because they are too
stupid to solve a difficult question but they get in regardless,
because of quota, thus 'lowering' the standards of the IIT; a
professor tells me there is no Brahmin ideology to the IIT, and that
Brahmin students commit suicide too, when I ask him to set mechanisms
in place so that Dalit students can complain, especially if we are to
have Brahmins teaching Sanskrit. When I was in college, my Sanskrit
teacher told the Brahmins in class that they would understand better.
As a half-Dalit half-Christian, I felt great, of course.
We do not have to look to Khairlanji for Dalit atrocities. They happen
in our bourgeois urban lives every day. I was marginalised and looked
upon as pariah because of my black Dalit father. That he was
alcoholic, wife-beating and had no responsibility toward the home made
it easier for people ('good' Catholic people in the Bombay
neighbourhood in which I grew up) to hate him and me. My schizophrenic
mother, whom he pretty much beat to a pulp, sang songs about his
Harijan, chokra-boy identity, and spoke of his skin colour (she was
white as driven snow). He broke all her teeth in return.
What my Dalit history has taught me – and this is all I can offer for
the 'future' – is that Dalit identity, like all identity, needs to be
reflexive, needs to step outside itself, needs to look at itself
askance, needs to ask questions of the self and see internal
contradictions. In a writer like Urmila Pawar, we see the pain of this
process, the difficulty of it. In her autobiography Aydaan, her
deepest love, for her husband, is constantly lashed by his sexism, by
his inability to see her as powerful, by his implicit resentment of
her growing into the most important Dalit feminist writer of her, and
many other, generations. She fights him; she fights him to the bitter
end. And yet, after his death, she can still offer a stunning portrait
of him, swimming in his own particularity, singular and beautiful.
But what is far more beautiful in the end is the picture of her –
writing, struggling, wondering about her own contradictions, her own
investments in casteism, in bourgeois morality, nevertheless confident
of her feminism, ambivalent about her children, working through these
difficult processes in her life with a candour that is as remarkable
as it is searing. Pawar never lets herself suffer any illusion, and
works relentlessly towards the politics of which she dreams. That is
all I can hope for the Dalit future. That we have such a
self-reflexive politics. That we fight caste on all fronts, starting
from within ourselves, till the bitter end of it.
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