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

jasmine gajras for lokpal men

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

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. 

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.

Angadi Theru

Rupesh Kumar, a documentary filmmaker wrote this post for The Roundtable Portal. The ease with which popular culture screws the marginalized psychologically even as it massively thrives on their hard earned money, has made us consider having a separate tab for film and TV reviews on Roundtable, once we reorganize the database. Hope this review on Angadi Theru starts the trend of bringing in more writers sharing their analysis of film culture and its impact on Dalitbahujan.

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Angadi Theru: Soft killing weapon of celluloid

By Rupesh Kumar

‘Angadi theru’ is the latest offering of Brahmanical experiments in the cultural landscape of Tamil or Indian cinema. Under the pretext of presenting ‘real’ life experiences of Dalits, a casteist capsule bomb is deployed, it is intended to satisfy the Brahmanical mind set of the film maker and aesthetes of upper caste audience on the one hand, and on the other it cultivates images of dalit identities that are deeply disturbing.

Their voice on violence

Violence on the female body and mind, in private and public spaces continues as an endless and thriving phenomenon for women from disenfranchised communities, well into modernity. This is possible only because the state and its institutions as well as civil society sanction it, through action and inaction. Violence on these women is about the bloodcurdling kind; it is also about forms rarely associated with this word: the malnourished female body is the result of selectively failing systems, that they work efficiently for other women indicates the insidious ways in which violence manifests. All societies that render marginalized women undernourished and unhealthy are indeed violent societies.

In these ongoing crimes we are all implicated as perpetrators and abettors.  We devise many ways to hide from this ugly truth about ourselves, and one common ploy is to intellectually distance ourselves from these women –pretend they are on a planet separate from ours and all things happening there can be viewed superficially or ignored all together. At all times keep ourselves pure from that violence, if we do not see, hear, talk or think about it, we can lull our brains into imagining that we play no active role in that violence. Almost attain a spiritual distance! However, some voices do not care for this personal and public deception, increasingly I see these voices belong to Muslim women. I am deeply suspicious of elite women from any community taking up digital and text space espousing the cause of women as they have a tendency to reduce the vast canvas of experience and insights to a pixel of themselves –which leads to caricaturing the women’s experiences they intended to represent. But in contemporary times both elite and other Muslim women have managed to usher in an insurgent intellectual era that is rooted in the lived experiences of the most marginalized in their societies. I also find in their articulation an understanding of politics and its grip on female sexuality, freedom and all things female, more powerful, more realistic than other kinds of female voices attempting the same.

An exceptional observation in the diverse Muslim women’s voices articulating on women’s issues is that they seem to have the rare appreciation of the very obvious but completely ignored fact of human life: high intelligence is required for the survival of the most stressed humans – the marginalized women. Intelligence is deployed in extremely complex ways to retain their humanity while almost perpetually living in soul-destroying conditions. This is brought to light in the sensitive portrayal of the marginalized women’s struggle for a dignified life in stories by authors like the Kannada writer Bhanu Mustaq, in poems by the young Telugu poet Shahjahana, in the intellectual analysis of violence by drawing on personal stories by Muslim women activists working in NGO’s spread across the Muslim world. To the ones who follow the message in their articulation -marginalized women do not require our intelligence to save them; they need us to use it on ourselves to stop being the triggers and abettors of violence. It is we who need corrective measures to lead less violent lives. Can we?

The killing of the prominent Afghan intellectual-activist Meena in the late 80′s left a deep  impact on me, her organization RAWA (Revolutionary Association of Women of  Afghanistan) is the most inspiring model of activism for me, if some readers are  not  familiar with their work, please read here. Closer home, Bhanu Mushtaq’s short stories  brought home the power of the individual to demand change -no matter how alone she was  and how bereft of material possessions. I have had access to very few poems by  Shahjahana that were translated, and I am always looking for more of her amazing  poetry. Other voices further  away from home like Shirin Ebadi, Ayaan Ali, Shirin  Neshat  and many others help  me focus on the psychology of gender violence (both, the  aggression  and resistance). While there are such few insights into the lives of dalit women and their  struggles, I eagerly  and naturally draw from Muslim women’s articulation on aspects of  gender violence.

Thoughts on this topic are on various drafts, I hope to find the time to compile them into a post or posts. Some friends find me naive that I am not taking the whole context in which some of these Muslim women are being heard. That’s OK, if, I am shown other voice/s that situates correctly the marginalized woman as a highly intelligent human and examines analytically the forces and sources of violent actions of society which leave her at its receiving end , then I will reexamine my fixation, until then I am deeply grateful to these powerful and meaningful Muslim women’ s voices.

Awwal Kalima

You won’t believe us

but no one’s talking about our problems

now, again, it’s the tenth or eleventh generation scions

of those who lost glories

who are speaking for all of us.

Is this what they call the  loot of experience?!

In reality, Nawab, Muslim, Saaheb, Turk-

whoever’s called by those names belongs to those classes-

those who lost power, jagirs, nawabi and patel splendours

they have retained, at least, traces of those honours

while our lives have always been caged between our limbs and our bellies.

We never had anything to save.

What would we have to recount….?

We who called our mothers ‘amma’

never knew she was to be called ‘Ammijaan’.

Some Vedic ‘reasons’

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.

crows miniskirts and a war chief

Crow Shitting

L Thomas Kutty

It takes just a shit on your head
For the crow to retrieve its identity.
The notorious sidelong glance helps
(Sectarian views will do –
At least for crows).
The lonely hermit on the power line,
The faithful soldier in the dark legion
On its homeward flight at dusk,
The starkest of poetic images,
A stop in transit
For an ancestor’s transmigrating soul.

But we know how to put it in its place:
No upstart crow ever became a swan.
The British East India Company’s
Records will tell you that.

Undaunted by the taunt
It goes back to business.
Shitting on the petrified expressions of guilt
And glorified legends of sacrifice
Of the men of destiny –
Ineffectual scarecrows in stone –
Who darken the city squares
With their looming shadows,
Making no distinction
Between subaltern and hegemon.

The grey shit
Retrieves its black identity.

—–

Somebody posted this poem in response to the fresh discussion around V V Rao’s poem, yep, that one. I prefer crow shit to that shit of a post. When I first read it and the following discussion, it was too silly to bother with a reread, but was very amused at the alacrity with which they were defining the elite/middleclass female sexuality -read as upper caste female body. In all the acute angles in which they explored the poet’s intended insult to their sexuality, it did not occur to them even once that low caste, poor girls can be cute,  may wear miniskirts and high heels. Had they considered this possibility then the poet’s words would have been insulting the sexuality of low caste  girls too, right? But then. Can the sky be green? Its that absurd a notion.

Without taking away all the hard work, and intellectual rigor that goes into churning out these theorists (at the tax payers expense which include all the dalit, adivasi and minority women, may I add) and give them the benefit of doubt, that theirs is a well considered position on Indian women’s sexuality especially their own class -which they refer to as elite. It would help me if they defined elite in urban or rural terms, since the whole discussion revolves around caste and reservations, there is a simple equation going on, only upper caste women can be elite, and be the ones who wear miniskirts, high heels and are uniformly cute (very assembly line!). All of  which seem to be highly threatening to men such as VV Rao, interpreted via his badly translated poem.

Some trivia.

I wore my first highheels in class four -a white strapless thingy, swung a hockey stick with a sports skirt that was definitely mini, studied in a school catering to girls from very poor to marginally well of families, many of them had pictures of moms and aunts in miniskirts and highheels -poor girls in Bangalore cantonment area did not have elite upper caste girls as their role models in dress sense or anything else -EVER. Their sense of style has always been cool and unique and it draws from a wide range of cultural influences owing to the cosmopolitan nature of the city.

When other metro cities were strangulated their young women in yards and yards of material, Bangalore streets, even before the pub culture took root, saw women attired quite comfortably in jeans, trousers and skirts, a definite nod to the influence of the city’s once prominent anglo indian community. The girls in elite hindu uppercaste residential areas in Bangalore were wrapped in silk pavadai and davanis, lovely garments, though I would never call them as power dresses. The boys used to call those longskirts -parachutes- as they tended to billow around in the wind, with the girls hastening to hold them down.

Other cities waited for the influence of a few generations of foreign returned relatives and mass media to begin wearing western wear. The girls from lower middleclass and poor areas of Bangalore, on the other hand drew from local affordable styles and carried it off with causal ease. The theorists will of course say this is a bad sample and not representative, precisely why I would ask who do they call elite, when it comes to manner of dressing, the upper caste girls in cities or does it include uppercaste girls in rich families in small towns too?

While I want to point out that their observation of girls, clothing and female sexuality in India is rather strange, I am aware, it is a pointless exercise, theirs is a myopic world, blind to the very existence of girls from poor or lower castes backgrounds except in pre fabricated opinions of them as incapable of affording and dressing themselves in western wear.

Now, do I think western wear somehow accentuates woman power? Needs a separate post. But yes, it lets the female body to be more free than some Indian garments. That leads to the question are we aware of the different kinds of clothes that Indian girls wear in all the regions of India,  that allows some to make such sweeping statements? I have traveled a bit and lived in a few  Indian cities and still know next to nothing about the different kinds of dresses young women wear in different regions.

Does it matter at all what a select few think, and articulate on their narrow opinions? Sadly yes, read this disgusting report on how the tribal girls looks and manners are denigrated here by public officials. This, is the manifestation of all that elite talk. Verbal proof of entrenched values of exclusion. Racism and sexism pushed eloquently by college and university educated bunch of men and women. The women revel in spreading this pathology against ‘other’ women. Indian women are more racist than Indian men towards women they consider the ‘other’. The ‘other’ is not everybody outside their gothra, no, they are others with definite skin color, physical attributes -lower caste and tribal. The genetically and geographically distant white woman is never the ‘other’. For it is her attire that is being appropriated and is being bandied about as some arrived at state of awareness.

Miniskirt is a power statement because it shows more skin? I am not sure about that. It does trigger another old memory, from my days as a pre teen kid spent in Karwar along the Konkan coast. I saw more skin and well toned female legs of the local fisherwomen than what I see in peak summer here in the all-white town, I now live in.

When at work, those ladies wore their sarees in a way, one could see their beautiful legs right up to the upper thighs. They dressed that way to do business. Power dressing? Oh yes! These fisherwomen spelt woman power to me. Style, strength, attitude, they had it all.

So all you Indian girls claiming a black identity, you have no business with words such as ‘cute’ ‘miniskirts’ ‘highheels’. Class theorists who lesson up in workshops on gender  and blah, define these words as ‘elite girls only’. And air hostess is a definite no as a career option.

—-

River is calling all crow lovers. I love crows, the above poem changed me from being an admirer to being one. I like that even more, not that I believe in souls flying anywhere after death and stopping to say hello to me, or from within me . But simply because crows personify my dream of travelling to strange places and enjoying exotic views of distant cultures, without having to get off the fence. Strangely, there is no human culture that would see the crow as the ‘other’. I guess most cultures would like to claim it as their very own. There are half dozen Tamil sayings on crows that I would love to share here, some other day perhaps. Though I will romance a bit on Pine Leaf, the woman war chief of the Crow Indian tribe, to further  turn symbols upside down.

Pine Leaf wanted nothing to do with learning any traditional duties expected from the tribe’s women. She did dress the part of a beautiful woman but chose the actions of a fearsome warrior. The Crow Indians allowed her to join in the male activities with the braves. The men of the tribe and Pine Leaf’s adoptive father seemed to enjoy her spunk and encouraged her fighting spirit.

White men who crossed Pine Leaf’s path along the fur trade route were totally confounded by her.  They had never seen, or even heard of, such a woman who could strike such terror in the hearts of men.  They were confused, fascinated, and intimidated by her very presence.  Since there was nothing in their own cultures they could compare to Pine Leaf, she became known as the Absaroka Amazon among the white traders.  She became almost a mythical figure to them.

I like crows in miniskirts or in fisherwoman’s sarees, neither apparel takes away from their sleek body lines. Here’s to a  black world of crows that tells the pallid world to go shit on itself with dumb theories.