http://www.theage.com.au/world/untouchable-prejudice-20100226-p94d.html
Untouchable prejudice
AMRIT DHILLON, NEW DELHI
February 27, 2010
A Dalit ("untouchable") man sits on the outskirts of the city of
Lucknow. Photo: Reuters
A VIBRATION of sympathy ran through the audience at the recent Jaipur
Literary Festival in Rajasthan as author Omprakash Valmiki, his voice
trembling with indignation, spoke of the daily humiliations suffered
by his community.
As one of India's 160 million ''untouchables'', Valmiki is part of an
emerging genre of writers now telling their stories of centuries of
abuse under the rigid and hierarchical Hindu caste system. Brimming
with anger and bitterness at the injustices meted out by upper caste
Hindus for more than 2000 years, the writing has a singular quality to
it: raw and jagged, full of anger and pain.
His people, Valmiki told the audience, were not allowed to wear decent
clothes, ride on a horse during marriage processions, draw water from
the village well or remain seated while an upper caste person was
standing.
Indeed, the very word ''untouchable'' hurts - denoting a status so
lowly it falls outside the caste system, a system that deems
untouchables too filthy for higher castes to touch, and which has in
the past decreed that molten lead be poured into the ears of
untouchables who tried to memorise Hindu sacred texts, and that the
tongues be cut from upstarts who dared to read them.
Hardly surprising then that many of India's 160 million untouchables
would rather be known by a term of their own choosing, ''Dalit'' - the
word is derived from the Sanskrit for destroyed or crushed - much as
African Americans rejected ''Negro'' during the civil rights movement
in the US.
As Valmiki spoke, the largely upper caste audience almost visibly
winced with embarrassment. Dalit children, he continued, were seated
apart in school, forced to sweep the classroom and given water in
different glasses. Upper caste Hindus refused to be treated by a Dalit
doctor or rent their homes to Dalits for fear of ''pollution''.
The session's title, Why Hindus Feel No Shame, had been chosen by
Valmiki's colleague, Dalit writer and academic Kancha Ilaiah. "Whites
in America fought alongside the blacks in the civil rights movement in
the '70s. White South Africans fought to end apartheid,'' said Ilaiah.
''But which upper caste Hindus have fought to end untouchability?"
In the Hindu system, the four castes are, in descending order, the
Brahmins (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (rulers and warriors),
Vaishyas (merchants and traders), and Shudras (servants). The
''untouchables'' are outside the caste system and as outcasts, their
very touch pollutes a high caste Hindu who regards them as
''unclean''.
The reason Hindus had never struggled to end untouchability, said
Ilaiah, author of the acclaimed Why I Am Not a Hindu, was because they
felt no guilt, this absence arising from their conviction that the
caste system was morally just. Thus, said Ilaiah, although
untouchability was a much deeper form of human degradation than racial
discrimination, upper caste Hindus could countenance it without
discomfort, the segregation being, in their world view, divinely
ordained.
Racism, he continued, had for many years dictated that black Americans
could not sit next to whites on buses or in restaurants. In South
Africa, it had meant that blacks could not vote. ''But if a white
person touched a black person, he did not have to go and bathe because
the black was 'unclean','' he said. ''The black person was still
regarded as a human being created by God.
''But Hindus have to bathe if they touch a Dalit because God himself,
according to them, created him as an untouchable.''
That Dalit literature was a special theme at a mainstream book
festival such as the now globally known Jaipur Literature Festival,
attended by Indian and international authors, was thanks to festival
co-founder and publisher Namita Gokhale.
''I wanted to bring this genre to the attention of a wider audience.
Their voices, their stories need to be heard. They have a message for
India about the deep injustices in our society that have been glossed
over for millennia," she said.
Although the Indian constitution bans any caste-based discrimination,
the reality is quite different. True, owing to affirmative action in
politics and government jobs, Dalits are more visible than before in
these two spheres of Indian life. But few Dalits can be found in the
world of books, music, film, theatre, art and the media. India has no
famous Dalit actor, model, singer, journalist or television
personality. No Dalit version of the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire
- portraying the lives of Dalits sympathetically - has ever been made.
And even today, Dalits, who form 17 per cent of India's 1.2 billion
people, continue to be subjected to routine brutality.
Against such a backdrop, even the act of writing a book becomes a
powerful gesture, asserting the right to intellectual creativity for a
community that has never before moved beyond simple survival. ''By
writing, Dalits are claiming their right to beauty instead of being
confined to struggling for bare necessities,'' said Dalit novelist
Ajay Navaria, who teaches at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New
Delhi.
Political scientist Christopher Jaffrelot sees Dalit writing as a
specific literary genre. ''It gives us a new history of India, a
history from below, a history that is not found in the textbooks," he
said. It was inevitable, he said, that Dalit works should be full of
rage and rebellion, for it was the first time in their history that
Dalits were narrating their experiences. ''Just as with feminism and
the American civil rights movement, the first wave of writing tends to
be autobiographical.''
This is not to say that upper caste Indian authors have never
portrayed Dalits in their novels. On occasion, they have, but these
characters are invariably drawn as passive victims. ''When Dalits
write about themselves, it is a totally different kind of writing. It
is a cry of anguish. It is very moving and powerful,'' said Jaffrelot.
S. Anand, head of Navayana, which exclusively publishes Dalit works,
believes it is impossible for Dalits to sever their relationship with
pain, which is why their works make uncomfortable reading. ''When your
entire early experience has been shaped by caste cruelties, it can
never be a light-hearted, easy read,'' he said.
The days when untouchables had to wear a bell around their necks to
alert any approaching high caste person so that the latter could
quickly cross to the other side of the path to avoid being
''polluted'' may be over, but other forms of dehumanisation flourish,
particularly in the countryside, where 75 per cent of Indians live.
Valmiki, writing in his book Joothan, describes being forced by the
headmaster to sweep the classroom in the village school he attended
while the upper caste pupils studied, and writes of how his parents,
whose caste required them to remove human excrement from upper caste
toilets, squatted outside the homes of upper caste villagers, waiting
patiently for leftover food to be thrown out.
Years later, Valmiki feels sick whenever the memory of those days
returns. ''It was not so much that we had to eat the leftovers but the
fact that we were so hopelessly poor we relished them. That is what
rankles still.''
Elsewhere in Joothan, he describes how, not being recognised as a
Dalit, he is mistakenly treated with kindness by a family. They invite
him home for tea. Valmiki's heart melts with gratitude on being
treated like a human being. Not all people are wicked, he thinks to
himself. Minutes later, his host asks him his name and, realising his
mistake, throws Valmiki out, hurling obscenities at him.
Valmiki defends the genre against critics who have derided Dalit
writing as lacking in literary merit, dismissed it as propagandist or
claimed that the stark portrayals of injustice have been exaggerated.
''What they don't understand is that the Dalit literary movement is
not just a literary movement. It is also a cultural and social
movement because Dalit books portray the aspirations and wishes of
tormented Dalits,'' he said.
Even at the Jaipur Literary Festival, some people furtively exchanged
quizzical looks as P. Sivakami, until recently a senior civil servant
in Tamil Nadu, spoke about her experiences. Sivakami said caste kept
intruding into her life, no matter how hard she fought to escape it.
As the guest of honour at a school, she had recently stood alongside
an upper caste colleague as they watched a procession of Dalit
students.
''The first thing my colleague said was that they were 'too pretty',
they couldn't possibly be Dalit girls,'' said Sivakami. Her latest
Tamil novel, translated into English as The Grip of Change, marks a
departure from Dalit literary tradition, tackling the male domination
of the Dalit social movement rather than recounting her childhood
experiences.
S. Anand is never surprised at the charge that Dalit authors
exaggerate their suffering or the degree of caste consciousness in
India. As a Brahmin who had a Dalit girlfriend at university, he had
been sceptical too the first time his girlfriend remarked that he was
getting higher marks than her for literature because he was a Brahmin
and the department was full of Brahmin lecturers.
''I was shocked at her assertion. I didn't believe caste played any
part in it. But … once, because she was feeling lazy, I wrote a paper
for her and submitted it in her name. It was good because I worked
hard at it. It got only reasonable marks.
''Later, I wrote a very shoddy and mediocre paper and submitted it in
my name. It got top marks. I realised they were not marking me but
marking me as a Brahmin,'' he said.
Even among his liberal friends, Anand is constantly struck by how
little they realise the unconscious exclusion they practise when it
comes to Dalits. ''They don't realise it is manifested in every choice
we make - who we eat with, what we eat, who we marry. If I point out,
say, that they have never had a Dalit over for dinner, they say it's
not deliberate but that is exactly my point. That we practise
exclusion without being aware of it.''
AUTHORS such as Sivamani represent a new breed of Dalit writers who
are moving away from autobiographies and exploring issues of identity,
patriarchy or sexuality. For example, Anand is publishing an anthology
soon of Dalits writing on love.
And Navaria, a rising star in Dalit literature, has written about a
gigolo's travels in India and recounted his relationships with
non-Dalit women in which a niggling worry is that he might be
attracted to them only because they are not Dalits.
Dalit literature is also slowly emerging as a discipline of academic
study. The department of English at Pune University features Dalit and
African-American literature in a course entitled ''Literature of
Protest''. Jamia Millia Islamia University has received support for an
endowed chair in Dalit studies from the Ford Foundation.
While he welcomes such developments, Ilaiah is convinced that it will
take someone from outside India, perhaps a Hollywood director or a
European author, to make a film or write a book that will make Hindus
ashamed of what they have done to Dalits.
''We need someone who can portray the evil of caste in a way that
captures people's imagination globally, because we have tried and
failed to rouse the conscience of the upper castes,'' he said. ''If
creative Western minds can portray the evils of the Holocaust or
apartheid, why not untouchability?''
Amrit Dhillon is a Delhi-based journalist.
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