[did this post for Insight, liked the book in parts and enjoyed framing the questions, the chapters on caste-gender were interesting, I usually am unable to read the shallow way this topic is dealt with in few other books, but still it remains an under-explored area]
This email Interview with Anupama Rao is largely about her new book, The Caste Question: Dalits and The Politics of Modern India. Anupama Rao is an Associate Professor of South Asian History at Barnard College, New York.
Anu: Anupama, looking at the body of your work it would be easy to refer to you as a caste historian. Can you please give a background to why you chose to pursue this area of research?
AR: Certainly. Let me answer this question by connecting my personal background to a brief intellectual autobiography.
I was introduced to African-American life and literature, and to pan-Africanism, and remember going to visit what is now the Harold Washington Library in downtown Chicago to read the literary and political works of the Harlem Renaissance.
I saw that powerful words were born from painful experiences, and that though the experience of social exclusion was painful, it also gave rise to powerful and potent forms of resistant thought and action. This influenced my decision some years later to study Maharashtra, a place of distant (if ancestral) belonging, but also a region of the sub-continent associated with upper-caste progressivism, and radical anti-caste protest.
By then, I had been exposed to postcolonial theory and colonial critique at the University of Chicago and later, at the University of Michigan, where a profound rethinking of the historical anthropology of South Asia was underway. My participation in a feminist reading group together with exposure to the aggressively masculine cultures of debate and discussion at Chicago, had alerted me to the necessity of gender analysis. Continue reading →
Sukumari Bhattacharji tracks prostitution in ancient India in an essay in the book -Women in early Indian Societies.
This scholar is working with ancient reference materials; she cites some 100 odd references and notes. She culls words which might mean prostitute, gathers texts which might indicate the economics, the family structure, the position of women then, and is also inferring from all this, the possible reasons leading to the origin of prostitution in India, since the time when written texts were available. Continue reading →
A lot on my mind is about the written world and untold stories of dalits. A lot more on what has and is written about the dalit woman. I recall Toni Morrison’s interview somewhere and this statement that stays with me always “i wrote for myself stories that i wanted to read”. The last week’s angst ridden talk and counter talk about what has and should be written about the dalit woman, meandering into some kind of mindlessness of ignoring the fact that all kinds of stories needs to be written in this gigantic vacuum. Doesn’t matter whether i sympathize with the broken unwanted or sexually exploited image of the dalit woman or end up romanticizing the image of a woman on whose knowledge, strength and stamina this country like Africa and any other agriculture based economy survives. Or write about Dalit women in cities who take charge of ‘brahmanization’ of their families. This is the truth. And it needs to be told, if anyone has the capacity of understanding the reasons why she opts for and uses this strategy please lets us hear it without the need to condemn or hide from it. Our stories may have similarities with women from oppressed communities all over the world, if some one can draw on these parallels, wonderful! Our stories will be unique in the kind of negotiations that we make as aspects of caste society are unique to this world, we know this and one or some of us may focus to dwell on these. Bottom line we need many stories. Lets write and hear them.
Leave you with two people who inspire me, listen to them to know why there is no need to worry about what image gets written, that it is written and that many more are written BY US is important:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the danger of a single story.
And Wole Soyinka on stories written by drawing from people and experience and not from previously read literature and styles, among other things:
While reading this if there are some kannada speaking ones, please let me know what you think of this vacana. I love listening to it, but cannot fathom it at all.
This one below is a lot easier.
—–
Lord, if you will listen, listen;
If you won’t, don’t—
I can’t bear to live without singing of you.
If you will look, look;
If you won’t, don’t—
I can’t bear life unless I look at you and be happy.
So simple to translate, or is it? I have two colleagues taking a go at it, one in Spanish and the other in Hebrew for Pavada, both believe that they will be able to do a fairly good job of it. I am very curious though to know how they read and interpret it. Of course like me their grounding is biology, so God, worship etc is hmmmm. But Akkamahadevi’s vacanas is not godliness as much as spiritual in content. Which I am using as a start of sorts to understand how Indian women perceive their bodies and all that it entails, my first attempt is here on Pavada blog. If you are wondering what it has to do with this blog? The dalit world, is all about control of the mind via control over our bodies by the oppressor, be it in labor exploitation -mostly manual comprising both genders or in sexual exploitation -largely women. For long I believed that scientific/biological awareness of the body would help in loosening the tightly wound coils of physical and hence psychological oppression. But then if the educated women (all castes/classes) knew the biological significance of menstruation, would they still be having notions of impurity associated with it? The body can be explained through biology, but it will still clash with the inherited understanding of the body, that we receive from our cultural-historical milieu. It leads to what we do so well, partition our brains into modern and pre-modern/ logical and illogical selfs. So an attempt to understand the other non biological bodies in our heads is necessary, at least to me.
Source: Songs for Shiva. Vacanas of Akka Mahadevi. Translated by Vinaya Chaitanya.
A rape incident in Beed district of Maharashtra brought some of us together to look into caste-based atrocities, particularly against dalit women, in this State. Many public meetings later, it was decided that a letter expressing our concerns and articulating our demands be sent to relevant government authorities in the State and the Centre as well as various commissions and the media.
Following is the letter, which has been passed in the GBM held on Saturday. Please do sign up for it on the posters that have been put up near both the dining halls and the new campus canteen.
Respected Madam/Sir,
We, the students of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, write this letter to you to condemn caste-based atrocities against Dalits, particularly Dalit women, across the State of Maharashtra.
The immediate context to this letter is the gang rape of a 15-year old dalit girl at the village of Ranjani at Georai taluka in Beed district, Maharashtra on August 23, 2009 by some upper caste men. The trauma of the rape apart, the girl was beaten up by the police and threatened against making a complaint. The FIR was registered only at the instance of the District Magistrate of Beed but even then the crime, clearly a caste-based atrocity, has not been registered under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. About a month into the rape, the accused have also not been arrested.
Incidents of caste-based violence in Beed District are not new and newspapers over the last few months provide evidence of this rising brutality. On August 24, 2009, a dalit man from Malaspimpalgaon was poisoned to death because he refused to beat the drum during the ‘Pola’ festival. Earlier, on June 25, 2009, another dalit man from Phulepimpalgaon at Mazalgaon was murdered by upper caste people. On January 17, 2009, in Shindi village, two Dalit college girls were severely beaten and paraded in the village because they did not respond to lewd remarks by upper caste people.
Organisations working with Dalits in Beed district – Rural Development Centre and Savitribai Phule Mahila Mandal – have found that out of the 247 cases, registered for offences against SC/ST between 2001 and 2008, over 70 such atrocities have been against women.
This data points to a larger incidence of increasing caste based violence against Dalits across the State. Government data shows that the number of atrocities against SCs in the state has gone up from 689 in 2004 to 844 in 2005, 1,001 in 2006 and 1,173 in 2008. (Indian Express; August 5, 2009)
The increasing violence also shows the complicity of the police with people from upper castes in perpetuating atrocities against Dalits, particularly Dalit women. This is clearly seen in the gang-rape of the 15 year old Dalit girl from Beed.
That women bear the brunt of caste-based violence is well documented. Even in this case, the girl was raped and then beaten up by the police when she went to file her complaint, not just because she is a woman but importantly because she is a Dalit. Violence against dalit women, we assert, is to perpetuate and sustain caste superiority. Rape of women from the dalit community is a tool of violence used by upper-castes to maintain their control over marginalized communities.
Therefore, to prevent atrocities and to strengthen security of Dalits, we demand that following action be taken:
1. The case must be registered under the SC/ST (PoA) act.
2. The P.S.I. of Georai police station should be suspended immediately and action taken against him under section 4 of SC/ST (PoA) Act, 1989. The Sarpanch, Police Patil, S.P., D.M. should be held responsible in case of atrocity in their areas, under the same provision.
3. Police have been seen as complicit in caste-based atrocities. Efforts, in the form of training programmes, by the State Government are necessary to ensure that the police act as agents outside of the caste system and ensure safety of the marginalized. It must be ensured that the police do not make victims of caste-based violence more vulnerable.
4. Beed district should be declared as Atrocity Prone Area, a provision under section 17 (1) of the SC/ST (PoA) Act, 1989.
5. A comprehensive review of caste-based atrocities in all districts must be undertaken and those areas which see a high incidence of such atrocities must be declared atrocity prone areas as well.
6. The State should undertake its duty of providing economic and social rehabilitation for victims of all caste based atrocities, as given under section 21 (iii) of the SC/ST (PoA) Act, 1989.
7. A collective fine must be imposed on villages where caste atrocities have been reported, as provided for under section 16 of the Act.
8. In most caste-based atrocities, it has been seen that the police do not register cases against the SC/ST (PoA) Act. It must be made mandatory for the police to register them under this act. Action must be taken against those police officials who do not register it under the Act.
9. Investigation by a special committee on why the gang-rape case at Beed had not been registered under the Act should be undertaken since it could provide indicators to the visible trend of not registering caste-based atrocities under the Act.
10. Caste-based violence against women must be registered under provisions in the SC/ST (PoA) Act and the Indian Penal Code together. This reflects the understanding that violence against women is because they are vulnerable as women and also as members of the dalit communities.
Lastly, the State must explore initiatives to encourage collective action among Dalit women for their empowerment and to provide them a safe environment. We would like to add, that we intend to follow the proceedings of this case closely and will be awaiting an urgent response from you, to decide on further action. We hope that the above demands are considered at the earliest so that the confidence of Dalits and the general public in the State is restored.
Indian society with all its complex variation of lived realities will be excel sheeted into a sanitized, digitized, very middleclass, database version through the UID number. How many Indians deviate from this ‘normal’ table should be the concern of this agency (UIDA). For it has the task of assigning citizenship status to ALL Indians. And let me not forget to add, at the cost of $40 billion.
These are the core deliverables of a citizenship identification program from the point of view of the individual citizen.
Now, please watch this documentary for one group of Indians who deviate from the prescribed forms of identification parameters with respect to the data elements. The required data elements to be filled out to obtain UID numbers, are given in the table below.
These were female children abducted from far off places and sold into the sex trade. At this point it is not clear to me how this group will be included into the UID program without ambiguity. That is, how will it serve the primary question -do I exist- for this group of Indian women?
Will the state apparatus go to them and fill out the data elements, if so, how is it going to do it? Use the police, NGO, activists network? How long will this take?
Or will these young women self identify to gain the benefits of UID number, that is a beginning of sorts for better services and rights? If either of these does happen, will their digitized information be safe? What are the safeguards for this information from becoming vulnerable to more agencies in addition to the exploitative ones that these women are already exposed to? That is, if I exist now as a number with all my personal details filled out, where I live, what I work as, etc. visible in the card/database, am I safe or is it safe?
See how such a simple data filling exercise falls apart in this specific instance. The ? mark against the data element refers to data that is not likely to be verifiable and + sign indicates those that can be.
Status in family –Head of family/not head of family…………?
POB (place of birth)…………..?
Premise Address …………….?
Photo. …….. +
Finger print…….. +
Visual identification mark……… +
Signature………. +
Current marital status……….?
Education qualification…………?
Occupation category…………..?
Title ……….?
Of the 24 plus data elements, 7 data elements can be filled unambiguously either by the state or by the individual.
All other elements, by their very nature for this specific group of women are not available as reliable data.
The name, date of birth, place of birth, fathers name and mothers name if known would and should have been used to relocate the girls back to their families.
Will the agencies record their information in the absence of documentary evidence?
Study these specific dataelements in the context of these women:
Occupation: This data element has already been finalized and codes have been assigned for the UID for most jobs. However, sex worker unions have been waging a losing battle to have this profession legalized. So what is going to be filled here?
Address: The documentary gives visual proof of the kind of temporary hovels they are likely to reside in. Will it be recognized?
Relationship to head of the family: Who will that be? The pimp, the brothel owner?
Marital status: What?
Of the data elements that can be filled; gender, photo, fingerprint, physical identification marks and signature are actually the biometric data, literally proof that a person is alive, nothing more. And this is the only data that is going to be available for a large number of Indians who find themselves as stateless trafficked humans involved in slave labour. For those who would like to say that these women and men are miniscule percentage of the population, I would like to remind them that they are also paying for this mammoth project. The tax that they pay on salt, dhal, clothes contribute to the funding of this project. So kindly hold that line.
On a personal note, I would also like to reawaken the deadened empathy of such argument profferers –these girls/women were beloved children of parents, they are Indian daughters, their rights are not be relegated to some arbitrary or representative numbers of exploitation/trade as against any other larger or smaller numbers of categorized Indians.
Since the data elements are designed for the imagined ideal Indian, the data can be filled quite easily by the middleclass, with ‘normal’ families with access to institutions such as education, ‘respectable’ employment and marriage. So, for the already citizenship-rights accessing Indians, this is indeed a better system and seems like the best solution for the tiresome multiple identification systems. The -am I safe question- for this class has more to do with credit or identity thefts, which is a significant valid concern. However it becomes even more worrisome, for the marginalized whose meager savings/earnings are also susceptible to the same fears. They have nothing else to fall back on.
Do I exist? Will remain the basic question, while the am I safe questions will immediately materialize as soon the system recognizes the existence of the marginalized, and be ever ready to derail them further away from seeking their aspirations, without built-in protections especially designed for them.
I hope to elaborate on the individual marginalized safety questions arising out of digitization, and reflect on their group/caste/geography, then, dwell on the bigger concerns of safety of such citizen’s information. While all the time never being sure of what specific benefits are really gained for the marginalized by the UID. Whereas for the IT component of middleclass Indians there is an immediate and definite benefit in terms of jobs and unending contracts.
Until the activists and civil liberties groups have clear cut answers from the UIDA as to how the marginalized are going to be included in this system and provided safety, the UID program has to be seen as the BPO/IT industry’s very smart switching of ‘outsourcing’ from other countries to making the government of India and its citizens its largest ‘insourced’ assignment.
Sexual violence is incomprehensible to me and as such I must avoid thinking aloud on this subject as it has been outside of my personal experience or study. But I do want to understand what is that I perceive and process while reading, hearing and seeing images of sexual violence, particularly related to dalit women.
My involvement with dalit issues keeps sending me down paths that invariably vortex into sexual violence. There are surprisingly few texts that have researched the sexual politics of dalits. Though the words ‘dalit women and sexual abuse’ are almost synonymous in the popular media as well as in serious writings.
I am particularly intrigued by a couple of paragraphs from two books that dwell at some length on this topic in different ways, one by Vidyut Bhagwat and the other by Kalpana and Vasantha Kannabhiran on dalit women.
One paragraph relates to the supposed ‘silence’ of dalit women and the other to the supposed ‘manhood’ of lower caste men.
Vidyut’s observation of dalit women in rural and urban centers.
First she states:
Women who are part of toiling masses are leading their life as beasts of burden and often as victims of dominant caste onslaught. It is but natural they are mute.
And then wonders:
But dalit women in urban centres taking care of homes and children at times teaching in schools and colleges or most of the time playing the role of housewives have not yet come out. We do not know how they perceive themselves and the world around them. Particularly, wives of political leaders, professors, doctors, executives are strangely silent.
In the categorical statement “it is but natural they are mute” is she talking of verbal silence, silence in the popular language or is she saying that there is no reaction to circumstances and resistance to injustice and violence?
For me, verbal silence can sometimes be very loud and menacing. I have used it to get my way through many passive-aggressive battles quite effectively. However, in those instances, the ones at whom it was aimed at astutely perceived my silence. No outsider could have probed the silent struggle and be able to give weightage to the outcome. In that respect what does Vidyut’s observation of ‘mute’ actually mean?
Mute because they don’t revolt physically, individually or in groups? For that I ask you to look at the image of Lalgarh protest here, and does one see resistance? Is it silent or loud, armed resistance or a democratic protest?
In this image I do see and hear a loud silence. Media being a beast of burden, toiling to keep the governments happy, it is but natural they are mute. Academicians, liberals, feminists, activists in designer khadi are also strangely silent. Should one wonder about this?
The protest intermixed with many other issues was also about physical abuse of both men and women.
To read, toiling masses as silent masses is extremely simplistic. How does one reduce a human being as complex as the next one, to something like an unreacting mass of living cells? That is an incorrect analogy, even cultures of cells in a petridish will react to adversity; resist, learn, adapt and by these actions over a period of time they will change the effect of the adversity or die out.
Now lets take her wonderment at urban dalit women’s silence:
Does the movement from rural to urban and becoming professionals and wives of professionals guarantee articulation? If this is a general rule or observation with all women, then we truly have to wonder why this is so with dalit women? How is the perceived silence among rural women connected to the urban women’s silence (again perceived)?
Could it be the memories of rural oppression persists even as they move out into a different cultural, political and economic space? Is there a collective memory operating among dalit women about oppression and methods of resistance, and how deep and complex is it?
The sensitivity and should I say the caliber to read into the psyche of the dalit woman and her response to sexual violence is missing, evident in such blanket statements.
Lets go over to the Kannabhirans reading of the Chilakurti atrocity:
Gender within caste society is thus defined and structured in such a manner that the ‘manhood’ of the caste is defined both by the degree of control men exercise over women and the degree of passivity of the women of the caste. By the same argument, demonstrating control by humiliating women of another caste is a certain way of reducing the ‘manhood’ of those castes. This is why. While Muthamma was paraded naked in the streets of Chilakurti, the men of her caste who unable to bear the sight covered their eyes, were derided by the aggressors who said, ‘open your eyes. Are there no men amongst you? This insult is double edged. On the one hand gender is defined by the capacity for aggression and appropriation of the other. On the other hand the lower-caste man could only cover his eyes because the structure of relations in caste society castrates him through the expropriation of his women.
This on the face of it seems like pretty sound explanation, so with a magic wand if we push the upper caste down the ladder, upper caste men lose their ‘manhood’ when their women are appropriated and humiliated, right? Any caste that finds itself at the bottom of things, will experience it, any human aggregation that finds itself stripped of its protection from civil society; such as during war and unrest, experiences this.
Substitute caste in that paragraph with war, and nothing changes.
The uniqueness of caste being that the forces keeps it in a war like exploitative situation. It must be the longest war in the history of mankind, and with that -the longest history of resistance. Dalits did not die out, that is the proof of their resistance and also proof of the pace at which the aggression keeps evolving.
The Chilakurti analysis is not specific to the dalit man being unable to protect and the dalit women being appropriated and humiliated, I see it as a general explanation for any man and woman, high or low caste, Asian, African or Caucasian finding themselves pitted against a horrific oppressor. The burly Scotsman would have shut his eyes when his clanswomen were humiliated by the English. Any man, anywhere loses his ‘manhood’. Any woman. anywhere becomes ‘silent’ just arrive at the right concoction of factors that lead up to to it. A variation of what happens between Tutsis and Hutus, Serbs and Bosnians, Gujarat Hindus and Muslims. The amazing aspect of dalit atrocities is that it does not peak, it remains as a constant background noise.
I learn nothing from these observations and analysis in these books except a lot of recycled academic verbiage. Articulation delivered through unseeing eyes and deafened ears only indicates the comfort of safe jobs and privilege of the authors.
So does it matter what gets written about dalit women in dusty academic books? Yes, it does, as one can see bits and pieces are taken out from these books and find their way into the public sphere, extended by journalists who attach these sentences to their daily bread articles on atrocities. And I run into variations of these statements by loud ‘feminists’ on the web routinely. Tiresome and mediocre! Repeated with such conviction and surety, that I loathe the thought of a dialog with them. Another instance of silence, perhaps?
May I gently suggest, please turn your weak analytical skills and the light on the perpetrators of the evil. They require reformation.
We will describe ourselves. Leave it to us.
Image: Sanhati website
Sources: a) Dalit Women in India: Issues and perspective. b) De-Eroticizing Assault: Essays on Modesty, Honour and Power.
I was introduced to African-American life and literature, and to pan-Africanism, and remember going to visit what is now the Harold Washington Library in downtown Chicago to read the literary and political works of the Harlem Renaissance.
