Janlokpal bill: a brahmanic and patriarchal script

The Jan Lokpal bill is under 35 pages. The creators of this document successfully manufactured a ‘revolution’ out of this. The corporate media sold it as such, and some academics called it a ‘movement’.

Media and academia largely did not comment on the contents of the document. Their preoccupation was with the leaders on the dais and the people on the Ramlila grounds.

In a caste ordered, rigidly patriarchal society like ours, exclusion of dalitbahujan men and women is the default status when socio-political changes are framed by upper-caste, male-dominated power groups, such as Kejriwal’s team. Unless contested, this group of unelected civil society actors will not concede their male and caste privileges. Hence all their formulations have to be meticulously examined for their apparent and hidden biases against women and non-dominant castes.  Read the rest here

reserved murders

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

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more on the death of merit blog.

it was never an anti-caste movement

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

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. 

modern?

 

temporality is a petty tool. don’t carbon date me with my own words

my ancestors chiseled words into couplets that cusp universal ethics.

another, oiled tanned and unstitched brittle form into free flowing humanity

light a torch and shine it on your kind, look under the morass of hypocrisy

our words, thoughts, gods, you burgle. what webs woven to keep the loot

go untangle that if you dare. it would leave your descendants bare

so instead you continue weaving that ancient web of thievery

your greed is a calendar

our humaneness has no chronology

 

dharmic expressions

vaibahv wasnik’s comment on this pic: and these are going to be life givers. they hate 85 percent of the country, the sc/st/obcs so much that they cannot even tolerate people from these communities as co-doctors. how can these be expected to treat the illnesses of these same people.

kuffir, calls this picture “the ordinary faces of hate.”

i recently read an academic paper which was laboring to make a point about UN recognizing caste as a race issue and trying to decipher the relation and difference between race and caste. this is what this picture made me write “caste is not a sibling of race, it is not even the parent, it is the God of all forms of discriminations.”  just look at those women’s faces, there is no hate, there is only a supreme conviction of righteousness, such pure dharmic expressions. who needs conical masks and nooses, who needs to disguise hate that is so pure that it does not even require the face to contort into a negative expression.

maintained by the state (VII: 133)

It is clear therefore that the motive of the priests in forming an exclusive caste was not any consideration of a religious or spiritual or racial nature but one of sheer greed for wealth, women and wine. The ridiculous extent to which they went on advocating their own unimpeachable divine greatness even so late as 100 A.D. may be seen in the Manu Smriti:-

“A brahman is born to fulfill dharma. Whatever exists in this world is the property of the brahman. On account of the excellence of his origin, he is entitled to all. The brahman eats but his own food, wears his own clothes. All mortals subsists through the benevolence of the brahman.”

” Let a brahman be ignorant or learned, still he is a great deity. To brahman, the three worlds and the gods owe their existence. Thus though brahmans employ themselves in all mean occupations they must be honored in everyway, for each of them is a great deity.”

” Let the king after rising early in the morning worship brahmans who are well versed in the threefold sacred sciences and learned in policy and accept their advice.” (Laws of Manu, VII 37).

“brahman is the root of scared law. By his origin alone he is deity even for the gods and his word is authoritative for men.” (XI, 85) in (S.V. Ketkar, 1975:165).

“When a learned brahman has found treasure deposited in former times he may take even the whole of it, for he is the master of everything. When a king finds treasure of old concealed in the ground, let him give one-half to brahmans and place the other half in his treasury” (VIII:35,39).

” brahmans should not be taxed and should be maintained by the state” (VII: 133)

this extract is from the book Dharmatheertha, No Freedom with Caste, The Menace of Hindu Imperialism. edited by  G. Aloysius.

reading these laws is making me want to commission a playwright to write a play. wonder which actor will be able to deliver these lines with the same intent that manu meant and ensured its enactment,  that too,  forever?

” brahmans should not be taxed and should be maintained by the state” (VII: 133)”

————

the most important lesson i have learned from anti-caste writings is that caste can only be dismantled by reason, which is a tough job, when you have manu’s smriti deeply engraved into the indian psyche.

caste oppression has been resisted by millions of people, both in words and deeds, people whose names will remain unknown to history.  anti-caste radicals and thinkers like phule and ambedkar have used their fierce intellect to cause ruptures in this ancient, unreasonable social order. in this long struggle we have had little or no international help in our battle for equality, so far.  and now,  a male-brit-author comes along in 2011 with a book on India, and in an interview he has claimed:

“Caste can be substantiated through genetics,” French said, citing a slice of genetic history that he gathered in course of researching his new book, “India: A Portrait“, released at a packed British Council here Wednesday evening.“

where does one begin with this kind of nonsense? his subsequent statements indicate the opposite, as it should. did he mean to say “caste can be unsubstantiated by genetics”? anyway, if there is any research based evidence to this absurd announcement, i would only see it as an insidious reermergence of social darwinsim.

a friend assures me that the  brahman who mans all the decision making bodies of academe will never use reason to substantiate caste, they will always appeal to and control the dharma-karma ‘reasoning’ to substantiate caste. i agree, but i am also worried. worried that people are going to aggravate me enough to make me stop working on my research grant and take time out to write a paper on caste and genes and stuff like that. what an absurd waste of time that would be, use the precious few hours i get for activism towards shooting down retrograde ideas such as brahmin genes! wonder if the celebrated author would interview  EMBL scientists  and write an article titled  ‘A royal in your genes’? or ‘A mine worker in your genes’?  if i wasn’t plagued by the sensation that some dalits are going to be playing ball with such retrogressive agents, i would laugh this off.

about the IGIB institute itself i have no worry, the enterprise of science is such that it cannot sell dharma-karma reasoning to the world, and modern science, whether one likes it or not, is global.  these days even a high school graduate will not look for a biological basis in a social category like caste, so there is no question of such nonsense gracing science journals .  it is the popular media that can be played around with, as there is zero capacity to handle science communication in india, and since the system of peer review is not applied there, it is back to dharma-karma along with a random mix of scientific verbiage being dished out.  before i forget to write  the reason for combining a post on Dharmatheertha’s  incisive observations on caste and a white man’s ridiculous observations on the same, please read his interaction with a scientist at IGIB:

“It seems like a lot of Bengalis work here,” I said. Dr Mukhopadhyay smiled. “I am a native of Calcutta. If a job is advertised, seven out of ten applicants are Bengali. Some say, “Ah, Bengalis are more clever because they eat a lot of fish and get omega-acids.” I tell them: it’s not like that, clever Bengalis go to academia and clever north Indians go to commerce.”

and where do the rest of the indians go? they, will have to read manu’s smritis for an explanation of their exclusion from such cerebral pursuits as figuring out imprints of cultural practices in the genome. we nod sagely that at IGIB like elsewhere ” brahmans should not be taxed and should be maintained by the state” (VII: 133)”

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note: dharmatheertha, was an anti-caste intellectual from Kerala. in the 1940s’ he issued a call for the reconstruction of a casteless society. he wrote the The Menace of the Hindu Imperialism while residing at Edla Ramdas Ashram in Rajamundry in a span of seven months.  about him, aloysius writes: “……..finally the composition of the erudite but none-the-less highly impassioned text, all these seems to have compounded within him a deep sense of frustration and the near-impossibility of any significant Hindu reform, not to speak of abolition of caste.” i find aloysius’s own writings very erudite and if he is using that term, it must have been a tough text to edit.

Malikas

I have been reading the History of Oriya Literature by Mayadhar Mansingh (Chief Compiler, Oriya encyclopedia). Published by Sahitya Akademi, year 1962.

Fascinating book: a good resource to gather anti-caste thoughts in Oriya literature. Here I am posting an excerpt of a passage that describes the author’s puzzlement as he analyzes and summarizes for us, his understanding of  Malikas written by Achyutananda Dasa:

Critically considered most of these are just muddle-headed imagination or apocryphal stuff fathered by unscrupulous followers. One wonders what good all this has done to the people. But a general note which runs through all these  Malikas appears to be rather striking, it is this, that in the times to come: (i) the brahmins will deteriorate to the level of shudras; (ii) there shall be no sub castes, all being equal in status; and (iii) after many catastrophies there shall be a revival of spirituality under the guidance of a new prophet.

I understand the author’s puzzlement that such verses must cause, I see the same bewilderment in well-meaning upper caste (diku) friends who try to engage with dalits about the  ’dalit angst’ – they sound exactly like this. “One wonders what good will all this do to the people” when dalits grit it out through clenched teeth that this society is unequal -we think, dream of and demand an egalitarian society. They don’t get it. Like the above the author, who was an extremely sensitive poet, researcher and human being.

I suppose one will never get it when one is sitting on the favorable end of an unjust society.

Image: Saura painting

courtesy: Internet.

The Refugee (an excerpt)

‘Go away from here, my son.’

That a mother should say this to her son! It was impossible to beleive. No one would have beleived if he had told them. He was haunted by a rising swarm of thoughts. Again and again, he searched within himself for an answer. That the mother who brought him into this world should say to him, ‘Go away!’ He just couldn’t bear it. He staggered like a blind man whose support had suddenly been taken away. Today, on account of his quick temper, he had to sever himself from his relations. Every part of the road looked as lifeless as stone to him. He was trembling, trying to walk steadily. How often he felt like turning and looking back! But his stubborn mind would not let him. His father was not his father any more, nor was his village his village; and the mother who gave him birth couldn’t call him her son any more. His mind burned with the thought. All of them were alien to him. He was an outsider among them  -an orphan! Why should he turn back?

[............]

And here I am, a citizen of this country! A woman in a village drew water from the well of the high-caste, so they beat her up. They ordered all the Mahars to empty the well. A young man like me trying to break out of this casteism couldn’t stand all that. I resisted. The whole village was furious. They beat up the Mahars as they do their beasts. They stopped giving them work, they wouldn’t allow them water, food -just because they were untouchables. They told me to beg forgiveness, to grovel and prostrate myself before them, confessing my wrong doing. Or else, they threatened to burn the entire Mahar settlement. Just because we are untouchables! I argued, I protested – for my rights. But my own mother -she took my younger brother in her lap, and touched my feet, her own son’s feet, and said, ‘Don’t do this,’ and finally told me , ‘My son, go away from here!’ A mother tells her own son to leave the village -she is reduced to such wretchedness, only on acount of caste and custom. And the boy has to leave the village. The whole scene came alive again before his eyes. On one side there was Bangladesh in turmoil and on the other, the community of Mahars, in agony. One homeless Bangladeshi was going back to his relations after twenty years. And one Mahar, even after twenty years, was homeless in his own country.

Short story by Avinash Dolas, translated by Y.S. Kalamkar, in Poisoned Bread, Marathi Dalit Literature.

hammers, wires, chips

In the words and images of the dalit woman lies the untold histories of anti-caste struggles, resistance, strength and intelligence in surviving odds which few other humans experience. That she survives is not the marker, that she dreams and works for a better life, for herself and her offsprings despite and against the storm of negative forces -is the celebration of her fighting spirit. She is pitted against all institutions like an alien individual, who has to first make herself visible to the unseeing eye, state her rights to the deaf ears and keep up a sustained battle with the institution, for it to deliver -be it education, law, health, housing or any other. The dalit woman rag picker, the flower seller, the stone quarry worker, the construction laborer, the sex worker, the panchayat leader or the urban homemaker are all bound by one single dream -a dignified living. They all dream of a world that treats their children better than it does them. They have a vision of an egalitarian tomorrow.

This vast democracy, its policies on education, its long line of thinkers and educators have only this to offer the dalit women -lowest literacy rates. Thus, a large chunk of dalit women’s articulation is accessible only in the oral form. A form that is so easy to ignore, so very easy to step in and be her interpreter, become her ‘saviour’. And proceed to develop one sided theories on her victimhood, secure in the knowing that she is not going to challenge its content from the same platforms. These theories inform policy formulation without the dalit woman’s actual participation in it. Policies are put in place for her, like she is a commodity to be managed, controlled and pacified for a short time, when the world proceeds conducting its other important businesses of keeping things normal for the ruling classes. To wait for institutional education to empower her, means a wait of several generations, which in turn will increase the lag between upper caste Indian women and dalit women, which also means accumulation of several more entangled policies, that would require the dalit woman to unentangle. This takes away enormous amount of her energy which could be better used towards her community’s needs.

Both, the ignoring and misinterpretation of her words and actions has to be tackled simultaneously. This trampeling of her articulation has to change and it has to change fast.

When I discard institutions for their snail like pace in responding to her articulation, what alternatives are there?

Technology? Technology that readily and faithfully records and transcribes the dalit woman’s articulation against exploitation and engraves her direct demands for a better society -without mediation by others. Wondering how…..

Photo courtesy Jitendra Kumar Jatav’s album, Faces.