EXCERPTS
No Alphabet in Sight
Exclusive excerpts from the recently released No Alphabet in Sight,
edited by Susie Tharu and K. Satyanarayana, that brings together
contemporary dalit voices …
No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India, Dossier I:
Tamil and Malayalam, edited and introduced by Susie Tharu and K.
Satyanarayana, Principal Advisors: Ravikumar (Tamil), T.M. Yesudasan
(Malayalam), Penguin, 2011, p. 643.
In my student days
a girl came laughing.
Our hands met mixing
her rice and fish curry.
On a bench we became
a Hindu-Christian family.
I whiled away my time
reading Neruda's poetry;
and meanwhile I misplaced
my Identity Card.
She said,
returning my card:
'the account of your stipend
is entered there in red.'
These days I never look at
a boy and a girl lost in themselves.
They will depart after a while.
I won't be surprised even if they unite.
Their Identity Cards
will have no markings in red.
"Identity Card" by S. Joseph
Backdrop: daily life in a college in Kerala — a state renowned for its
achievements in education, its development model and a score on the
quality of life index which matches that of many countries in the
West. Bubbling through the restrained reportage is the headiness of
youth, of college life and its promises of freedom and equality: a
girl's inviting laughter, a bench on the grounds, the intimacy of
shared food, the thrill of touch. Poetry. Revolution. A world opening
up. In the happy, secular lighting of this theatre, the dark age of
religious difference has long been left behind. Enter accidentally: an
identity card bearing the official record of his Scheduled Caste
stipend. She must leave, and does so feeling deceived. He remains —
numbed, holding what he now knows as the dark secret of this
modernity; and the beginnings of a sensibility and an assertion that
enables this dalit poem.
The title poem of S. Joseph's 2006 collection Identity Card opens onto
a number of the themes and concerns in this volume. For the one who
assumes that a secular modernity may be taken at its face value, that
he can be a world citizen, aspire to poetry and to love, the real
betrayal is not singular or by an individual; it is a many-layered
betrayal by a politics, a government, an era. What he encounters is
not a traditional taboo, but a modern stigma. It is assigned by modern
means in a modern institution. Ironically, it is precisely that which
offers possibility of escape — state stipend, higher education,
reservations — that also stigmatises him, mocks at his aspirations,
returns him to his place, exposed, humiliated, externed from the world
of those 'normal' others who can love and unite. For the other, whose
liberation appears total — she came laughing, shares a bench and lunch
box, brushes aside belief — caste turns out to be the line that cannot
be spoken or crossed. The account of their parting cited in the poem
is hers. It is the upper-caste story. She speaks; her point of view
has public legitimacy. She leaves, returning to her kind. A readymade
sensibility allows the common reader to consider her action 'only
natural, understandable'. He remains silent, immobilised, alone.
So much for the story. We turn now to the poem. The point of view and
the experience that it reframes direct us to the two stories that
comprise the poem. One is relatively familiar and focused on love in
the localities of caste and the pain of parting. The other records the
modern protagonist's journey from innocence into [a dalit] maturity,
from a desire limited to individual fulfilment, into a desire that
involves a painful turn away from that scheme, towards his communal
identity — and, equally significantly here, towards poetry. The first
story constitutes the plot — it tells us what happened. The second
directs us to the poem itself as a happening, a critical event. It is
the poem that directs our attention to the setting, to the silencing
and to the turning away from the bright air of the campus to a darker
region in which the poet must encounter his difference and explore its
meaning for himself.
Subtle shifts enable a reader to first notice the poetic persona; then
slowly to see his silence, to acknowledge a disagreement that deserves
full hearing; and finally, to endorse the human right, not simply to
recompense or welfare, but to love. In the process it is not only her
story that is reframed, but also older ethnological-humanist
formulations of the untouchability question as well as the statist
mode in which 'historical wrong' and its official remedy have been
configured in modern Indian history.
The poem puts the identity card into unprecedented play.
The moves made here are indicative of the complex,
late-twentieth-century shift in conceptualizing the dalit question
that this collection attempts to document. We have chosen the dossier
mode for the documentation because it creates room for the variety of
themes and concerns, the cross-cutting connections as well as the
divergences, arguments and tensions that comprise this productive
conjuncture. The poised control of writing, the self-possession, is
evidence of a break with earlier modes of thinking about the dalit
question and of the creative opening up of the field in recent times.
When dalits themselves formulate the dalit question they bring
innerness to the enquiry, but that is not all. This dossier is
evidence of the new issues, settings, figures, experiences, analyses
and propositions that have emerged...
Caste Reconfigured
The theorisation of caste undergoes transformation in the 1990s. It
takes several turns in rapid succession. The commonly held idea that
caste is a remnant of a pre-modern, hierarchical, purity-pollution
formation specific to Hindu religion is criticised and rejected.
Caste, the new theorists point out, is a live force in modern Indian
culture and politics. The remnant-of-the-past thesis transforms what
is actually a contemporary form of power into an outmoded religious
practice that disadvantages those subjected to social stigma and
geographical or social segregation. In other words, the caste issue is
morphed into a problem of the social and economic marginalisation of
one section of society, and the caste problem is seen as a problem
only for the lower castes who 'suffer from it'. The social and
political dominance of brahmins and other upper castes, their role in
perpetuating and extending caste discrimination, the benefits they
derive from the formation and the role of caste in modern culture and
modern institutions — all remains uninvestigated. This dominant view
of caste underlies the well-known and largely ineffective moral
campaigns to change traditional mindsets, legislations to 'abolish'
caste, initiatives to uplift and modernise the lower castes and see to
their welfare.
It is important to note that when dalit and other subordinated castes
describe existing theory as upper-caste or brahminical, the criticism
is not only directed at the academy that produced this theory, but
also at the efforts of the Indian state to address caste inequities
based on such theory. In fact, the anthropological notion of caste as
a religious hierarchy has informed state action. Thus, the Nehruvian
consensus was to eliminate, through planning, education and
administrative action, anomalies like caste in order to make India
modern and secular. The state designed developmental programmes to
address ' disabilities' such as bonded labour, untouchability, manual
scavenging and atrocities through rural development, poverty
alleviation, land reforms, the Anti-Untouchability Act and so on. In
this scheme, reservations were considered compensation for past wrongs
and not as remedy for current suppression and marginalisation. The
Scheduled Castes and other oppressed caste groups are regarded as
suffering from known injuries, caused by residual pre-modern
formations. Further, they are merely 'target groups' for welfare
programmes extended by the state.
The contemporaneity of caste
Relocated thus in the domain of modernity, caste is reconfigured as a
contemporary form of power. It structures social relations and
therefore also state action. It works in renewed and updated forms in
modern contexts and institutions. This history of caste is part of the
history of modern India. The experience of the dominant castes — their
authority, visibility, power, economic presence — as well that of the
lower castes — their subordination, oppression, invisibility, and
economic and political marginalisation — is a modern phenomenon.
A second important line of critique is that of the norm of the secular
citizen. This normative figure, and the assumed neutrality with which
it occupies the public domain, is shown up as marked by caste and as
reaping the benefits of caste power and privilege. Since this figure
is foundational for modern institutions — law, education, knowledge
forms, the arts, public culture — it is also the principal modality
through which these institutions practise caste. Third, caste is
re-conceptualised as institutionalised in the modern state as a form
of power and as a source of privilege.
(From the Introduction to the volume.)
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