http://www.caravanmagazine.in/Story/719/Lighting-Out-for-the-Territory.htmlEssay
Lighting Out for the Territory
The arduous journey of modern Dalit literature
By S ANAND
Published :1 February 2011
ANIL SAINI FOR THE CARAVAN
A bookstall in Pune on 14 April, the birth anniversary of BR Ambedkar.
I N MANU JOSEPH'S DEBUT NOVEL Serious Men—praised by one critic as
"one of the very best novels ever to come out of South Asia" and the
winner of The Hindu's inaugural Best Fiction award in 2010—the
protagonist, Ayyan Mani, is a manipulative, sly, scheming
Dalit-Buddhist who almost gets away with passing off his partially
deaf son, Adi, as a prodigy, a
genius who can recite the first 1,000 prime numbers. The garb of
satire—where almost every character cuts a sorry figure—gives the
author the licence to offer one of the most bleak and pessimistic
portrayals of urban Dalits.
Ayyan Mani works as secretary to the Brahmin astrophysicist Arvind
Acharya at the 'Institute of Theory and Research,' where he bestows on
himself the subversive power of inserting anti-Brahmin statements into
the "Thought of the Day." While the novel's bumbling scientists are at
least earnest in their pursuit of ostensibly higher truths, Mani is an
open fraud—a conman. The novel's female characters hardly fare better:
the astrobiologist Oparna Goshmaulik is purely a 'sex item,' described
each time she makes an appearance, in Mani's gaze, as "always a
sight," "a commotion" and "an event"; the wife of Ayyan Mani, with the
unlikely Tamil name Oja, is draped in naiveté bordering on dumbness.
An undisguised contempt for women and Dalits goes hand in hand with
the ancient Brahminical book of social codes, the Manusmriti, and
Joseph decidedly lives up to his first name. Despite his savage
portrayal of female and Dalit characters—or perhaps because of
it?—Serious Men has won critical appreciation from a cross-section of
readers and critics, including some upper-class feminists ("dodgy
sexual politics but, basically, I had such fun reading it!"). As a
friend remarked, even though India has never had a regime of political
correctness, a section of the elite has decided it's okay to enjoy
jokes at such correctness.
At a time when a formidable body of Dalit literature— writing by
Dalits about Dalit lives—has created a distinct space for itself, how
and why is it that a novel such as Serious Men, with its gleefully
skewed portrayal of an angry Dalit man, manages to win such accolades?
In American literature—and particularly in the case of
African-American authors and characters—these issues of representation
have been debated (and, to some degree, resolved) for decades. But in
India, the sustained refusal to address issues related to caste in
everyday life—and the continued and unquestioned predominance of a
Brahminical stranglehold over cultural production—have led us to a
place where non-Dalit portrayal of Dalits in literature, cinema and
art remains the norm.
The journey of modern Dalit literature has been a difficult one. But
even though it has not necessarily enjoyed the support of numbers (in
what has come to be the trade publishing market) we must engage with
what Dalits are writing—not simply for reasons of authenticity, or as
a concession to identity politics, but simply because of the aesthetic
value of this body of writing, and for the insights it offers into the
human condition. In a society that is still largely unwilling to
recognise Dalits as equal, rights-bearing human beings, in a society
that is inherently indifferent to the everyday violence against Dalits
and their near-total ghettoisation in various spheres of social and
cultural activity, in a society unwilling to share social and cultural
resources equitably with Dalits unless mandated by law (as seen in the
anti-reservation discourse), Dalit literature has the potential to
humanise non-Dalits and sensitise them to a world into which they have
no insight. But before we can understand what Dalit literature is
seeking to accomplish, we need first to come to terms with the
stranglehold of non-Dalit representations of Dalits.
R OHINTON MISTRY'S A Fine Balance, published 15 years ago, chronicles
the travails of a Chamar family in a north Indian village and follows
two characters—uncle Ishvar and nephew Omprakash—who migrate to Bombay
and yet cannot escape brutality. While the present of the novel is set
at the time of the Emergency, Ishvar's father Dukhi (an homage
to the equally pitiable Dukhi in Premchand's famous short story
'Sadgati') belongs to the era of the anti-colonial nationalist
movement. During one of Dukhi's visits to the town, he chances upon a
meeting of the Indian National Congress, where speakers spread the
"Mahatma's message regarding the freedom struggle, the struggle for
justice," but add that this is not a realisable goal unless "the
disease of untouchability, ravaging us for centuries, denying dignity
to our fellow human beings" is wiped out.
Neither in the 1940s, where the novel's past is set, nor in the
Emergency period of the 1970s—when the minds and bodies of the two
Dalits, Ishvar and Omprakash, are savaged by the state—do we find any
mention of a figure like BR Ambedkar or of Dalit movements. In his
'nationalist' understanding of modern Indian history, Mistry seems to
have not veered too far from the road charted by predecessors like
Raja Rao (Kanthapura) and Mulk Raj Anand (Untouchable) or, in Hindi,
by the likes of Premchand. Sixty years after Premchand, Mistry's
literary imagination seems stuck in the empathy-realism mode, trapping
Dalits in abjection. Mistry happily continues the broad stereotype of
the Dalit as a passive sufferer, without consciousness of caste
politics.
HENNING STEGMÜLLER. COURTESY OF NAVAYANA PUBLISHING
The poet Namdeo Dhasal, a founder of the Dalit Panther movement, at
his village Pur-Kanersar in 2004.
It is not as if Dalit movements were not active during the periods
that form A Fine Balance's backdrop. Ambedkar's birth anniversary was
being celebrated in faraway Hyderabad in the 1930s, as the Dalit
historian PR Venkataswamy notes in Our Struggle for Emancipation,
published in 1955. In the northern belt, Swami Achutanand of Kanpur,
who ran the newspaper Achut in the early 20th century, was considered
an architect of Dalit consciousness. Around the same time, Chandrika
Prasad Jigyasu, a Lucknow Chamar, was reconstructing Ravidas, a
revered ascetic born in the Chamar caste. By the turn of the 20th
century, in other words, Dalits and lower-order shudras in much of
northern, southern, eastern and western India were in protest mode,
resisting the overtures of the Congress-led nationalist/anti-colonial
movement and waging struggles more pertinent to their own liberation.
In fact, such challenges began emerging in the mid-19th century across
the subcontinent. Jotirao Phule (1827-90) was a pioneer in western
India who viciously attacked the Congress' Brahminical nationalism and
established the Satyashodhak Samaj (Truth-Seekers' Society).
For Mistry, even in 1995, it is the same, worn script which combines
the fatalism of Thomas Hardy and the compassion and good intentions of
Premchand. Despite the fact that the novel is set in Bombay during the
time of the Dalit Panther movement, and despite the constant authorial
references to the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution,
the Chamars, Ishvar and Omprakash, who struggle as tailors, remain
oblivious to an unmissable figure like Ambedkar and the larger context
of Dalit politics. While in 2010 Joseph seems to use the sleight of
evenhandedness to nail all his characters with comedy and satire and
thus gets away with giving the worst end of his stick to Dalits,
Mistry uses the heavy hand of tragedy and melodrama to deal
devastating blows to all his characters: his Dalit protagonists, whose
entire families are wiped out in the unnamed village, are
vasectomised, rendered legless (Ishvar) and castrated (Om) during the
Emergency. As the novel ends, they are reduced to pathetic beggars;
their dignity, dreams and desires are seriously compromised to service
gritty realism.
The concern with what non-Dalit writers do with their Dalit characters
also brings us to Arundhati Roy's Velutha in The God of Small Things,
Amitav Ghosh's Fokir in The Hungry Tide and, more recently, his Kalua
in Sea of Poppies. Here, the writers seek to bestow agency on their
Dalit characters, but again their portrayals do not keep pace with an
awareness of the history of the evolving realities of Dalit
politics—specifically, the assertion of Dalit identity and the
consciousness of caste oppression. If from Premchand to Mistry we have
empathy sans agency, in Roy and Ghosh we see that the Dalit characters
lack distinct subjecthood prior to their involvement with high-caste
characters.
In The Hungry Tide, Fokir, a survivor of the 1979 Morichjhanpi
massacre, is an unspeaking, noble but informed savage who guides the
American ethnographer Piyali Roy. Under Piyali's loving gaze, Fokir's
beauty and deep knowledge of the backwaters unfold; there's
unconsummated passion between the two. Roy makes bold to have the
mostly silent Velutha, with his attractive, muscular Dalit body—honed
by the labour of carpentry, not in a gymnasium, as Roy says in an
interview—love and be loved by the Syrian Christian Ammu; but there's
still the worry over his speechless suffering and inevitable death for
transgressing the Love Laws. Velutha's beautiful body is offset by
those of his father, with one glass eye, and his brother, with a
broken spine.
In Sea of Poppies, Ghosh bestows agency on Kalua, a Chamar, who saves
Deeti, an upper-caste woman about to be consigned to sati, and goes on
to make a life with her. Ghosh, however, slips when he shows Kalua
reductively as all brawn, "a man of unusual height and powerful build"
who can trump anybody in a wrestling bout—which comes in handy as a
plot device to enable Kalua to steer Deeti to safety. Towards the end
of the novel, we see that Kalua has superhuman strength whereas
Kalua's lover, Deeti, the protagonist, is the one with the mind.
Ghosh, even as he gives story-altering agency to Kalua, seems happy to
depict a mind-body binary between Deeti and Kalua—a division of labour
that plays into both caste and gender stereotypes.
"Attempts to incorporate Dalits into the discourse of a novel are
presumably preceded by some crisis in the dominant social groups,"
says TM Yesudasan, a retired English professor from a small town in
Kerala, referring to the limited representation of Dalits in fiction
set in the state. Dalits, Yesudasan says, are invariably "the Mute":
"Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as
an authority over them, making them Mutes."
In Roy's novel, it is the divorced Ammu's crisis that sucks in Velutha
(quite like Deeti's crisis sucks in an almost orphaned, community-less
Kalua in Sea of Poppies). Velutha is perhaps the first Dalit character
in contemporary non-Dalit fiction who is overtly political, a former
Naxalite who takes part in a communist protest march, and has sex with
an upper-class woman. However, Yesudasan, situating The God of Small
Things among other classic 'Malayali Enlightenment' novels such as
Potheri Kunjambu's Saraswativijayam (1892), Thakazhi Sivasankara
Pillai's Randidangazhi (1948), and Sara Thomas' Deivamakkal (1982)
argues:
The fictioning of pratiloma [a lower caste man in a relationship with
an upper caste woman] is motivated by… the savarna desire to become
more hegemonic, represented by a savarna woman in distress who
seeks/finds a Dalit paramour, reversing the traditional boy-meets-girl
formula and committing an act of sacrilege. She crosses the boundary
on a cultural mission of hegemony and consecrates the sacrilege in
order to close in on Dalits. This is like "primitivism" in Western
modern art, turning for creative rejuvenation to the so-called
"primitive" cultures of others.
It is not that non-Dalit writers do not have the enlightened right to
portray Dalits; there cannot be any literary policing on such a
subject. But, as K Satyanarayana, who pioneered the teaching of a
Dalit Studies course in the English and Foreign Languages University
in Hyderabad, observed, "Despite their serious commitment, non-Dalit
writers miss the dreams, desires and visions of Dalits and objectify
them as either victims or romanticise them as great people. This
continues to be a serious problem."
To come back to the author we began with: Manu Joseph manages to
inaugurate a new template—he identifies his characters specifically as
Dalits (not as untouchable Chamars or Pulayas) and depicts them as
fully conscious of (but enraged by) caste oppression. Joseph's
rationale for making Ayyan Mani a Dalit makes for interesting reading.
In an interview with rediff.com, he says:
When Ayyan first formed in my head he was just the same but he was not
a Dalit. He had this anger and a comical interpretation of the modern
world and modern women and science and everything around him. But he
was not a Dalit. Then I asked myself, why is he so angry, can I give
him a justification? And the idea of a Dalit male who is trying to
create from thin air the first Dalit boy genius just fascinated me.
Consider what kind of social reality leads a writer like Joseph to
decide that Ayyan Mani ought to be a Dalit because he is "so angry."
Mani's specific kind of imagined 'Dalitness' is clearly a by-product
of the post-Mandal anti-reservation rage of the upper classes of
India, represented with deep sympathy by the Brahmin-controlled media.
Such a portrayal of a scheming Dalit—who is merely a prop in the
novel—would perhaps not have been possible in the period before the
1980s or the 1990s.
It is not that a Dalit character ought not to be dark and devious,
especially in a dark comedy. It is not as if one is looking for a
portrayal of triumph shorn of the complexities of human nature. What's
worrisome is how Mani's son Adi has to be a congenitally poor,
underperforming student with a hearing disability (to compound
matters), who has to cheat his way through tests and quiz
shows—lacking inherently in "merit."
Towards the end of Serious Men, a mindless Dalit mob with stones,
metals rods and sticks is on a rampage—breaking limbs and furniture
and everything in sight at the Institute of Theory and
Research—because the vile, anti-Dalit comments of the Brahmin
scientists there have been exposed. The marauding mob can hardly
engage in an intelligent battle—it has to use brawn. Earlier on,
Joseph does indicate how violent the angry Dalits of Bombay can be
when their sensibilities are offended. Either a Dalit-Buddhist can be
a conman whose aspirations are disproportionate to his talents, or
Dalits are congenitally disabled, or plain lumpen. In the West, such a
depiction of, say, blacks, would invite the charge of racism—a close
cousin of homegrown casteism. Here, such 'wit' may be legitimised with
endorsements in the form of awards and good sales figures.
What is worrying is that the majority of readers—most of them
presumably non-Dalits—seem undisturbed by the way Dalits have been
presented in fiction, whether by Premchand and Mulk Raj Anand or
contemporary writers like Ghosh, Roy, Mistry and Joseph. This
situation might have been more understandable—if no less
unacceptable—in a much earlier era. But there are no excuses today,
after a half-century that has witnessed the emergence of modern Dalit
writing, starting in Marathi in the post-Ambedkar period.
Ambedkar himself is said to have used the term Dalit only a few times
in his Marathi speeches, but the term really caught on only after the
emergence of the literature of the 1960s and the 1970s in Marathi. The
word 'Dalit' originates in Pali, where it means 'ground down' or
'broken', as in broken dal (lentils). In Pali Buddhist literature, the
term dalidda (daridra in Sanskrit) is used for the property-less poor
in contrast to the gahapati class of the rich.
The 1972 Dalit Panther manifesto defined Dalit in an all-encompassing
way: "A member of Scheduled Castes and Tribes, neo-Buddhist, the
working class, the landless and poor peasants, women, and all those
who are being exploited politically, economically, and in the name of
religion." As Gangadhar Pantawane, a Marathi Dalit ideologue, says:
"Dalit is not a caste; Dalit is a symbol of change and revolution. The
Dalit believes in humanism. He rejects existence of god, rebirth,
soul, sacred books that teach discrimination, fate, and heaven because
these make him a slave."
In popular and academic usage, 'Dalit' has come to function as a
politically correct substitute for terms like Scheduled Caste,
harijan, untouchable, or the Depressed Classes. But Dalit has an
emancipatory potential which caste and jati categories like Chamar and
Brahmin do not; Dalit is not a caste, but an anti-caste subjectivity
that someone born into untouchability occupies by rejecting caste.
The political and literary ferment of the 1970s remained confined to
the Marathi context—throwing up names like Namdeo Dhasal, Narayan
Surve, Baburao Bagul, Hira Bansode and Daya Pawar. It was only after
the 1990 Ambedkar centenary and the implementation of the Mandal
Commission recommendations that a Dalit literary upsurge began in
Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, Punjabi and Malayalam. This coincided
with the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party, founded by Kanshi Ram and
now led by Mayawati, which gave nationwide currency to the term
'Dalit.'
It is not as if Dalits were not writing previously, but literature by
Dalits with an anti-caste consciousness seemed to need the charged
atmosphere of the 1990s. In its early phase, poetry, the short story
and autobiography remained the chosen modes of expression. But in the
past five to ten years, Dalit literature appears to have taken a new
turn, veering away from the first-generation writing that
overemphasised politics and protest. The work of this new generation,
however, is not easily or frequently translated into English—and
sometimes even resists the process. It is the journey of these writers
that needs our attention today.
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