A note to the Dalit child

by anu

When you read Ambedkar’s comments below, please substitute the Left for the Congress or any individual or organization that takes it upon itself to say who should speak for the Dalits. Always know this, every time a Dalit speaks (literate or unlettered) he/she fully represents themselves and their communities. Plural.

Here is what Ambedkar said:

“What disturbs me, after hearing Mr. Gandhi, is that instead of confining himself to his proposition, namely, that the Minorities Committee should be adjourned sine die, he started casting reflections upon the representatives of the different communities sitting around this Table. He said the delegates were the nominees of Government, and that they did not represent the views of their communities for whom they stood. We cannot deny the allegation that we are nominees of the Government, but speaking for myself, I have not the slightest doubt that even if the Depressed Classes of India were given the chance of electing their representatives to this conference, I would all the same, find a place here. I say, therefore, that whether I am a nominee or not, I fully represent the claims of my community. Let no man be under any mistaken impression as regards that.”

why bant singh can’t go to rahul pandita

by anu

This is a cross-post from Kufr.

something led me here, to this very entertaining piece of information:

The meaning of the word ‘Saraswat’ has more than one origin. One refers to ‘offspring ofSaraswati‘^{[citation needed]} , the Goddess of learning applied usually to learned and scholarly people. It may also denote the residents of Saraswati river basin. The brahmins of this region who are referred to as ‘Saraswats’ in Mahabharata and Puranas were learned in Vedic lore^{[citation needed]} . They concentrated on studying subjects like astronomy, metaphysics,medicine and allied subjects and disseminating knowledge^{[citation needed]} .

the heading, you’d notice says ‘history’. history? do people really believe that’s history? gods and goddesses are history? do you notice anything like dates in that whole section?

that piece of history whetted my appetite for more such knowledge. this page tells you about the origins of the nambudiris:

The ancient Sangam literature mentions Brahmins ofChera Kingdom (which became Kerala) who may be Namboothiris as there is mention of Perinchellur(Taliparamba) village, which is one of the most important villages for Namboothiris, as a great Vedic village. There is no concrete evidence to suggest migration of Namboothiri Brahmins to Kerala but would most probably be the heavily civilised Aryans who took the Red sea route to Kerala even before the 100O BC. The recent evidence of Brahmin migration to Kerala is the Embranthiris who were originally Tulu Brahmins.

no concrete evidence, but they’re most probably heavily civilised Aryans who took the Red sea route to Kerala even before the 100O BC (100O BC?).

what’s funnier (than the content of those histories) is the fact that some people, at least two persons, actually wrote those pages. why? to tell people like me: this is not your history, you can’t bask in the glory of the saraswats or the nambudiris, you can only admire them. but would anyone have written those pages if non-nambudiris/non-saraswats like me didn’t exist? what’s the point of being a brahmin when there aren’t any non-brahmins around? so i am there in those narratives: as, say, most probably the heavily uncivilised native who didn’t take the red sea route to kerala even before the 100O BC, but was born here. no non-indian can read between the lines and spot me, the non-saraswat or non-nambudiri, who doesn’t deserve any history. the nambudiri is the light, i am the shadow that gives the light meaning.

for all the pacing

by anu

——

ages since i heard you sing a full song, don’t remember the last time you hummed one of these songs. for all the times i came home late, dreading to see you pacing near the gate, preparing and rejecting answers for the inevitable grilling…. miss your anxious voice, miss your singing voice, miss you. will be home soon.

a painting for banabhatta

by anu

Sometime back, I was looking for the translation of the Oriya Mahabharata written by the Shudra saint-poet Saraladasa. Eager to post an excerpt centered on Sarala’s Ganga on The Shared Mirror, I was busy combining library and internet searches, when I got side tracked by a poem penned by none other than the brahmin poet, Banabhatta.

I am now in love with this brahmin poet.

No, not really, but I was far from bored with what I found, as I usually am with brahmanized/mainstream literature. Though the poem contains no mention of caste, it still is fascinating stuff. Such rare articulation, beautifully illuminating the fear and anxiety of the colonizer, with just a few lyrical lines, Bana develops a blueprint for the demonization of the natives; a textual instrument for his descendants to perpetually fine tune. For, colonization rarely means the extinction of the colonized, it usually means the complex business of having the native remain in a constant state as the ‘other’. And caste is all about the other, isn’t it?

When race and geography of the oppressor and oppressed are not clearly distinct, where and how do we begin locating the processes of internal colonization? Perhaps in the narratives of both sides (?)

In Harshcharitra and Kadambari, Bana makes it abundantly clear that he writes from a brahmin centric worldview. In the introductions to both the non-fiction and fictional work, he traces his impeccable brahmin lineage back to some typically non-human, heavenly origin. Now, lets check out how Bana creates the ‘other’ in one particular tract of Kadambari. The verses below form a part of the scene depicting a face off between the Savara and Bana’s ‘civilized’ heroes as they trespassed deep into the jungles. There is sufficient verifiable proof that the Savara people are one of the earliest inhabitants of this land. Thus in this poem we are looking at a brahmin’s view of the Savaras. For a writer illustrating the ‘other’ is easiest done in a battle scene, in one neat move you ensure your readers know whom to fear, despise and hate. It is a literary device as old as story telling itself. Bana gives us a background of the ‘enemy’, the careful details he offers, as descriptors of the Savara’s way of life would make trained anthropologists sit up and take notice. 

reserved murders

by anu

List of Dalit students committing ‘suicide’ in last four years in India’s premier institutions

Here is the list of the Dalit students who have committed suicide in last four years. This is by no means an exhaustive list but covers only those cases which we were able to document and where parents and relatives have raised their voices and had accused the institutions of caste discrimination against their children that led to their suicides.

We are sure that the actual numbers of Dalit students committing suicide in country’s premier institutions in last four years will be much higher.

• M. Shrikant, final year, B.Tech, IIT Bombay, 1st Jan 07

• Ajay S. Chandra, integrated PhD, Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc), Bangalore – 26 Aug, 07

• Jaspreet Singh, final year MBBS, Government Medical College, Chandigarh, 27 Jan 08.

• Senthil Kumar, PHD, School of Physics, University of Hyderabad – 23 Feb 08

• Prashant Kureel, first year, B.Tech, IIT Kanpur, 19 April, 08

• G. Suman, final year, M.Tech, IIT Kanpur, 2nd Jan, 09

• Ankita Veghda, first year, BSc Nursing, Singhi Institute of Nursing, Ahmedabad, 20 April, 09

• D Syam Kumar, first year B.Tech, Sarojini Institute of Engineering and Technology, Vijayawada, 13 Aug, 09

• S. Amravathi, national level young woman boxer, Centre of Excellence, Sports Authority of Andhra Pradesh, Hyderabad, 4th Nov, 09

• Bandi Anusha, B.Com final year, Villa Mary College, Hyderabad, 5th Nov, 09

• Pushpanjali Poorty, first year, MBA, Visvesvaraiah Technological University, Bangalore, 30th Jan, 10

• Sushil Kumar Chaudhary, final year MBBS, Chattrapati Shahuji Maharaj Medical University (formerly KGMC), Lucknow, 31 Jan, 10.

• Balmukund Bharti, final year MBBS, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, 3rd March, 10

• JK Ramesh, second year, BSc, University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, 1st July, 10

• Madhuri Sale, final year B.Tech, IIT Kanpur, 17th November, 10

• G. Varalakshmi, B.Tech first year, Vignan Engineering College, Hyderabad, 30 Jan, 2011

• Manish Kumar, IIIrd Year B.Tech, IIT Roorkee, 13 Feb, 11

• Linesh Mohan Gawle, PhD, National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi, 16 April, 11

——-

more on the death of merit blog.

jasmine gajras for lokpal men

by anu

the ten member jan lokpal bill committee constituted post ‘revolution’ seen conferring at their first meeting. does anything seem strange here?

you know, my country does have women. they are just out of this picture. perhaps they are behind the camera, or behind the men, or simply left out. how can that be? i saw angry women ‘revolutionaries’ at the forefront of the anti-corruption ‘revolution’. think, i recognized a socialite turned gandhian, a famous retired police officer, prominent film personalities and anti-big dam activists. all these women are ones who reached the top echelons of their respective professions. surely, they did not fail to ask for inclusion in the committee -an all-powerful supra-parliamentary one! surely, these women know the long-lasting repercussions of excluding women in top committees (?)

feminist credentials, they all have. their decades long high volume presence in the media assures us that a feminist movement is thriving in india. so, what happened? someone, please explain the invisible patriarchal processes that facilitated this exclusion of the super bright, super ambitious indian women (naturally all upper caste).

it was never an anti-caste movement

by anu

continuing from here

kuffir: it is difficult to think of telangana as a social movement now, if it ever was one, in my view. as a movement for positive social change, a movement that’d take the anti-caste struggle forward. the number of adherents, cutting across society, might give us a different impression, but if numbers alone constitute proof, coca cola is also a social movement. so is baba ramdev.

people proceed from problems to solutions. the dalitbahujan activists of telangana produced a solution first and then tried to frame problems to fit it. i’m not being cynical when i say that: one can find tangible evidence for that fact in the notes of b.s.ramulu’s, written in 2007.

the solution that the dalitbahujan activists offered to address the discontent of the age was telangana. and the method to achieve that was a ‘social movement’, as different from a ‘political’ or mainstream-polticians led movement. i can’t see how the ‘social’ can be separated from the ‘political’, but that was their chosen method.
how do we understand the contradictions in both their goal and method? their goal was political, a redrawing of state power sharing arrangements, but their chosen methods needed the pretense of the ‘social’… another way of expressing the disdain they’d acquired from the braminized middle classes for ‘dirty politics’. if we consider their goal ‘social’, bahujan empowerment, then why circumscribe, restrict their resources (or pool of like-minded actors, people) by imposing geographic limits on it? doesn’t globalization make it imperative for the oppressed also to build alliances? and so on.

perspectives of the bards

by anu

i am recording here, a part of a conversation about telangana movement between kuffir and chittibabu padavala happening in another forum where it may become difficult to retrieve after some time.

kuffir: there is a huge pool of dalit bahujans activism, as you say, in the telangana movement, but i don’t know if there are any strong currents of dalitbahujan thought in the movement as it has shaped up until now.

gaddar said in a recent interview: ‘manadikaani kotlaata manam kotlaadatunnaam’ (‘we’re fighting a battle which is not ours’). but he says we’ve to fight. but why? to own it, like you said? how can we fight someone else’s battle and win/own it?

gorati venkanna’s song, ‘palle kanneeru pedutundi..’ and prof.jayashankar’s theory of internal colonization– both were used as strong arguments for telangana. while venkanna’s song about the dying village and dalitbahujan distress could be about any village, in any region in the country wilting under the effects of globalization, jayashankar talks specifically about telangana.

gorati vekanna rises as the kabir of our times, or phule and asks (in this song and others)– this gaundlodu, this upparodu, this chakalodu, this kummarodu, this kammarodu, this kurmodu, this madigodu, this malodu, this erukalodu, this merodu, this turkodu– how about their right to life? he speaks with, not for, the village, the dying stream, the dying tank, the dying wells, the dying palms, the dying birds and even the dying babul trees.. it’s a stirringly human plea. a very dalitbahujan perspective. or, what i think is a dalitbahujan perspective i should learn to absorb. 

For a fistful of self-respect

by anu

I don’t know when I was born but

I was killed on this very land thousands of years ago

punarapi jananam punarapi maranam

I don’t know the karma theory but

I am taking birth, again and again, in the same place where I had died

My body dissolved in this land

And became the Ganga Sindh plain

When my eyeballs melted as tears

Perennial rivers flowed across this country

When my veins spurted minerals

This land became green and showered wealth

I was Shambhuka in the Treta Yuga

Twenty two years ago, my name was Kanchikacherla Kotesu

My place of birth is Kilvenmani, Karamchedu, Neerukonda

Now Chunduru is the name that cold-blooded feudal brutality

Has tattooed on my heart with ploughshares

From now on, Chunduru is not a noun but a pronoun

Now every heart is a Chunduru, a burning tumour

I am the wound of multitudes, the multitude of wounds

For generations, an unfree individual in a free country

Having been the target

Of humiliations, atrocities, rapes and torture

I am someone raising his head for a fistful of self-respect

In this nation of casteist bigots blinded by wealth

I am someone who lives to register life itself as a protest

I am someone who dies repeatedly to live

Don’t call me a victim

I am an immortal, I am an immortal, I am an immortal

I am the poison throated one

Who swallowed the famine so that the world may have wealth

I am the sunrise standing on its head

It was I who kicked the Sun on the head

To make him stand erect

I am the one stoking slogans in my flaming heart’s furnace

I don’t need words of sympathy or tears of pity

I’m not a victim, I’m an immortal

I am the fluttering flag of defiance

Don’t shed tears for me

If you can

Bury me in the middle of the city

I’ll bloom as the bamboo grove that sings the melody of life

Print my corpse as this nation’s cover

I’ll spread as a beautiful future into the pages of history

Invite me into your hearts

I’ll become a tussle of conflagrations

And rise again and again in this land.

Kalekuri Prasad‘s Telugu poem ‘piDikeDu aatmagauravam kOsam‘ (from the collection of poetry ‘daLita kavitvam- 2‘ ; originally published in another collection ‘manDutunna chunDuuru‘). Translated by Naren Bedide.

From The Shared Mirror

18 days

by anu

as the elite inside and outside of india are busy dreaming of squares, revolutions and miles of international media coverage, maybe, just maybe they’ll figure out who the oppressors are   -if only the untouchables, the unwashed masses, the perpetually hungry, the roofless disappeared for 18 days, they would show the world they can do an egypt. yes, they would!

sickos.