bas relief of akka

A bas relief of Akkamahadevi, the renowned 12th century saint-poet has been found at Gunjiganur in Holalkere taluk of Chitradurga district. Dr S Y Somashekhar, the Head of Department of Ancient History and Archaeology, Hampi  Kannada University, told Deccan Herald that the bas relief was found on a pillar in Lokeshwara temple at Gunjiganuru, during a field work.

The art depicts Akkamahadevi, with her tresses a ‘Ishtalinga’ in her left hand and a ‘Rudrakshimala’ in her right hand heading for ‘dhyana.’ It also shows Kadalivana (banana plantation) and a deer following her, while a sleeping lion is before Akkamahadevi.

Speaking to Deccan Herald, retired VC of Kannada University, Dr M M Kalburgi said the Lokeshwara temple was constructed by Kumbara Bammanna during the rule of Vikramaditya VI, the Chalukya king. The temple dates back to 1076-1127 AD.

Women scholars grappling with the enigma called Akkamahadevi:

—

I have been working on the translation of some of her vacanas, hope to have them up soon.

—

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.

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.

The Caste Question –Interview with Anupama Rao

[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.

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.

so much racket

 

 i like reading and listening to readings of  sojourner truth for the sheer power in it. i am no feminist, i am from a community fighting for such basic rights as food, shelter, jobs and dignity, i don’t know which edges of the battle to choose; children, men or women’s rights, for they are all trampled upon. and they are all connected to me. so i choose to be a curious human instead. have a strong day!

To all Chitralekhas

the post below was written for Insight Blog, wrote it in between grant proposals and a dozen deadlines at work, the editor of Insight was busy organizing a meeting, so it went out without any decent editing. let me be  very clear, i am aware no amount of cyber scribbling is going to change the trauma the Chitralekhas of the dalitbahujan world are subjected to, day in and out. they battle it out alone. they are the warriors.

me and a hundred educated dalit women writing, subverting/ inversing logic is not going to make much difference to their battles. but if i could shut up, some online ‘concerned citizens’ for a few darned minutes, it would be good for my soul. i pray and work for the day when all the dalitbahujan Chitralekhas can write their own story.

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Chitralekha a perceptual divide

Some years back, Chitralekha, a young dalit woman, took a loan to buy an autorickshaw, and began her livelihood as an auto driver in her hometown Payyanur, Kerala.

The trade union organization (CITU) in Payyanur reacted to this with hostility. The history of her struggle with the organization isrecorded here in the archives of the insight magazine.

Chitralekha has ventured into this profession as a woman and a dalit: two non-collapsible identities of otherness. But together it catapults her into an unlit hazard prone road, with directed violence coming at her in unexpected turns and curves. Her auto was burnt down in 2005. A nascent support system rallied around her then, and she was back at work. Last fortnight she was subjected to police violence at the behest of the CITU.

The only remark I would like to make on this fresh incident and the reactions from civil society is: the organization’s current strategy is ensuring no support system springs around her, this time. It is definitely a far more complex campaign than lighting a match to her vehicle.

In this post, I have no wish to debate the details of the case or repeat the rapidly spinning tales around Chitralekha. As I find it deeply offensive and denigrating to all my intersecting identities with Chitralekha -dalit, working woman, wife and mother. Instead, I would like to use parallel anecdotes from the lives of Ruby Bridges, Savitribai Phule, Barbara McClintock and Chitralehka to frame these questions: How are pioneers perceived? And whom does a pioneer facilitate?

The word pioneer has these synonyms: colonist, colonizer, developer, explorer, founder, frontier, settler, guide, homesteader, immigrant, innovator, leader, pathfinder, pilgrim, scout, settler, squatter, and trailblazer. The term’s origin is French and was used to describe foot soldiers that went ahead of the army to dig trenches. Pioneers then were of low status. They took the burnt of brutalities in unknown territories.

Protected walk

Last month, New York State Museum in Albany, had featured a fascinating theme in the painting and photo exhibits section. It was titled: Through the eyes of others! On display were a selection of paintings and photographs of early American life, by European and White American artists.

The physical marginalization of Blacks in each composition, seen visually spoke more eloquently on racism and its manifestations than any thesis. The curator had also interjected a wall into this exhibit, and it contained paintings and photos of Blacks, by Black artists. The perceptual contrast presented here, held me mesmerized, and I had to force myself to respond to my son’s hushed but excited voice saying ‘amma look, that is Ruby Bridges’.

He was racing to view an image he recognized from his school lesson. The Norman Rockwell painting below is of the little girl chosen to be a test for the Brown VS Board of education ruling. It is a stunning rendering of the ‘other’ venturing into a rightful but hostile territory.

While my eyes focused on the terrible isolation around an innocent child with schoolbooks, being escorted by tall faceless marshals, my son was pointing to the artist’s capture of the violence directed against this tiny pioneer -a single splattered tomato against the wall. He said ‘grownups threw tomatoes and yelled mean stuff to her, every single day.’ He was recalling and connecting the dots of what he had learnt about this pioneering moment in history.

Back then; the prying open of mighty iron doors had rested on the shoulders of a six-year old girl! Could a child, the most defenseless and vulnerable of ‘others’ in a world run by adults, be a pioneer all by herself? Who became her support system?

Her white teacher had continued teaching her like the classroom was full, ignoring the absence of other students pulled out by parents resisting this move. The state provided her protection, Ruby’s parents and the school did not cave in, and some other parents continued sending their children to the school, unfazed by dominant public opinion. These adults became the few, yet strong crowbars that helped keep the door ajar, while the child Ruby could occupy that space, thus claiming it for all Black children.

Walking away

A few years back, I did my postdoc in a well-known genetics department, and soon received some oral history of one legendary predecessor and ex-alum, Barbara McClintock, Nobel laureate in physiology 1983. Though her work as a student and researcher was highly regarded, no tenure track position was forthcoming, not even from this department where she had spent a significant amount of time conducting complex experiments.

One reason being -the department was all male and there was no precedence of having a female faculty. She headed to another lab and later received her Nobel from there. So there! We could leave this story as one institute losing out to another, its moment in history, for management reasons of yesteryears. However, the department learnt from its colossal mistake and started to evolve as an equitable work place, attracting and retaining female researchers in impressive numbers, since then.

Although she claimed and could not occupy a space, she was the trigger for the transformative change. Despite leaving a vacuum, can we call her a pioneer? I do. In this case, I find the origin of the word, foot soldier, more suitable. She was richly rewarded from elsewhere, but here, she dug the trenches for the rest of us. When I say, rest of us, I mean a small group of women who want to specialize in the fields that this particular department offered. She was not a foot soldier or pioneer, for the math or history or economics department, or brick-making factory, somebody else did that, and may not have had such a quick and powerful impact, on changing the organizations attitudes.

Pioneer Plurality

The above anecdote makes me slice up organizations into before and after phases; for such a pioneer as the ‘first other’ exists in many professions, as there are very few that are truly democratic from the start. Sometimes these phases don’t help much to understand the peculiar and often violent resistance that some women face at their work place. Usually happens when the woman is also gay, or an unwed mother, black or physically challenged, sometimes a combination of all these ‘others’.

The organization appears to develop strange new weapons forcing an unequipped person to spend extraordinary amount of energy just focused on remaining uninjured. Whereas she was there to do a job, earn a livelihood, she never went there to do battle, either attitudinal or physical. Here, the path cleared by the earlier pathfinders becomes obstructed anew. This makes us look more carefully at representative numbers of organizations before calling them equitable, as single or few pioneers rarely facilitate the spectrum of all the ‘others’.

Striding alone

In the year 1848, the first woman teacher of India, Savitribai Phule began demolishing the millennia old ban on education for Indian women and dalitbahujan, by opening a school for girls and lower castes. This revolutionary move was greeted with verbal abuses and hurling of filthy objects on her person by upper caste people, everyday, as she walked to school. Today’s taken for granted freedom to own space in education, and its consequences by modern Indian women, goes back to this single woman’s unrelenting walk, to teach, in an abusive atmosphere, two centuries ago.

Having paved the way and changing forever how Indian women and the masses access education, one expects such a pioneer to be imprinted on the cultural consciousness of this nation. Strangely, she is not. Any Indian, woman, man or child can easily image Sita or Kasturba, but not Savitribai, as her legacy is not mediated either by popular media or by academic culture.

The mainstream women’s movements in India –one of the direct beneficiaries of this pioneer, don’t fight to keep her memory vibrant. They appear to lend a tacit and silent support to the process of making her invisible, effectively marginalizing her from the rightful place as a preeminent leader of women’s and human rights movement. Does this have to do with Savitribai Phule’s ‘otherness’, of being from a lower caste?

In contrast, the dalitbahujan and their movements have kept her persona alive in their collective memory and writings. Here, I would like to go back to the theme of the photo exhibit ‘through the eyes of others’, which had visually highlighted the perceptual difference of the same elements by different peoples. When spectacular pioneering events come from the marginalized communities, even as the majority benefit from the breaking of barriers to newer horizons, they, with great dexterity work towards erasing the memory of that pioneer event.

The dalitbahujan recall Savitribhai Phule, as a woman of phenomenal courage, who opened up possibilities for the masses of a huge country like India, and in the context of this post, the only word that comes close, is trailblazer. The perceptual divide between the mainstream and the dalitbahujan, of this pioneer woman leader is simply astounding, why is it so?

Amnesiac memory

Perhaps, giving prominence to inspirational events and figures from the downtrodden would mean acknowledging them as a people, in possession of capacities and potential to displace the prevailing hegemony, and move towards an utopian world. The perpetuation of such historic memories perturb their notions of the marginalized people as infinitely exploitable, detestable or as sympathy deserving masses.

Amnesia comes in handy, and mass memory propagating tools being in their control, the majority finds it easy to deal with such uncomfortable memories. It even spares the ‘liberal’ among the majority from self-examination, and keeps the ‘other’ in a state of not becoming too familiar with their own power.

Some memories however, refuse to die down; the oppressed appear to posses an obstinate means of memory retention, which is kept percolating among themselves, long after the majority believes it is has done a neat job of suppressing history.

Lonely drive

If one looked for commonality in the many kinds of pioneers that we see in our daily lives, it would be the opening up of new possibilities. The other common experience is loneliness. Since they are the first among their own kind to take on the establishment, support systems are not easy to come by.

In a personal communication, a dalit activist wrote ‘we have to ask Chitralekha if she would like to be relocated to a city, she has been fighting beasts for so long, she needs some peace’. This was from someone who I know understands the emotional and other costs of relocation.

This suggestion was to me poignant and reminiscent of how Ruby Bridges’ parents must’ve felt, when their child was being shown, a doll in a coffin, as her fate, if she continued going to the white school. The urge to bundle their child within their protective arms and shield her from the vileness of society must have been overwhelming for them.

Right now at Payyanur, a glimpse of the various processes set in motion to stop Chitralehka’s continued challenge to the establishment can be observed. The most fascinating one is the attempt to localize the story, and arrest its possible spread to a wider audience.

The dual purpose of this is evident -isolate her and break her spirit, and simultaneously prevent it from reaching the popular imagination of the dalitbahujan world. A world that is replete with pioneers, all of them breaking barriers in the multitudes of upper caste, male dominated professions, all poised to open possibilities for others, like themselves.

Hence, Chitralekha appears as a visible attack on the well-fed and muscled system. An act that can inspire all other Chitralekha’s across the length and breadth of this country. Therefore her true story has to be contained. The memory of her challenge to hegemony has to be erased, rapidly, at ground zero!

Well, it would seem like this has succeeded at present: as she stands alone, isolated even from her colleagues and local dalits. But this lady here, has overcome a crucial unseen barrier, her story is on its way to become embedded, she is already in the imagination of distantly located dalit men and women, and as I’d earlier said, the dalitbahujan are obstinate rememberers!

At this point, nobody knows whether  Chitralekha will fall into the trench, get a sustained support system, walk away, or emerge as a trailblazer. Chitralekha’s courage to keep fighting the prolonged abusive working atmosphere, without giving in, is typical of most pioneers.

This characteristic, subjects her to ever diminishing value of her personhood, from the organization’s and its ecosystem’s point of view. They are blinded by perceptions of her as an easy victim, whom they have impounded within several layers of impenetrable isolation.

So intoxicated is modern India’s civil society in its comfort zone of seeing her as a devalued human, it remains immune to the existence of opposing perceptions of her. With each torment and her resistance to it, she emerges as a bigger hero for the dalits, and she evolves into an inspirational story for the dalitbahujan.

Lastly, no less than 45% of women in contemporary India are yet to reach literacy levels; to aspire and gain access to education based careers and jobs. Chitralekha as a pioneer in the informal sector of public commute; facilitates by example and grit, the livelihood possibility, for this large number of Indian women.

And a significant number of them are dalitbahujan, in the history of dalitbahujan women’s movement, Chitralekha occupies the space and power that encapsulates the spirit of all the different kinds of pioneers illustrated here.

Image courtesy from here.

Rise to learn and act

Rise to learn and Act

Weak and oppressed! Rise my brother  

Come out of living in slavery.  

Manu-follower Peshwas are dead and gone

Manu’s the one who barred us from education.

Givers of knowledge –the English have come

Learn, you’ve had no chance in a millennium.

We’ll teach our children and ourselves to learn

Receive knowledge, become wise to discern.

An upsurge of jealousy in my soul

Crying out for knowledge to be whole.

This festering wound, mark of caste

I’ll blot out from my life at last.

In Baliraja’s kingdom, let’s beware

Our glorious mast, unfurl and flare.

Let all say, “Misery go and kingdom come!”

Awake, arise and educate

Smash traditions-liberate!

We’ll come together and learn

Policy-righteousness-religion.

Slumber not but blow the trumpet

O Brahman, dare not you upset.

Give a war cry, rise fast

Rise, to learn and act.

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Sunil Sardar and Victor Paul have translated this poem along with four other poems for a chapter in a lovely new book titled: A forgotten liberator: The life and struggles of Savitribai Phule. These poems were translated from M.G. Mali’s original marathi collection Savitribai Phule Samagra Wangmaya.

This book is a first of its kind in English on the social reformer and first woman teacher of India Savitribai Phule, by independent  authors.

Indian history is not just porous and one sided but is often a naked lie for and about the large majority of people who were once forbidden any formal education under the caste system. It would have us believe that this vast humanity produced no thoughts and actions worthy of mention in its pages. Occasionally stray strands do get woven into this brutally selective reading of the past like the 9th century Saint Nandanaar and 13th century Janabai. These are names that have escaped and appear in literature inadvertently; perhaps a rare occurrence of negligence in the maintenance of tightly clamped literary facilities. The hegemonic majority treats any acknowledgement of original, radical thoughts and actions emanating from the lower castes akin to radiation leaks. It has to be avoided at all costs and they use every single resource they command to do so. However, when such histories are far too powerful to fall into the usual traps of appropriation and co-option, they have the strategy of just saying and writing nothing about it. Stonily waiting for the collective memory to erase itself over generations.

In the last century a small group of people from within the lower castes have emerged to retell Indian history. This they do by finally claiming and owning the alphabet, taking us to the ones who made it possible; Savitribai Phule and her husband Jyotirao Phule, the visionary educators and social reformers. How cruel and effective a system we face, when this lady who in the mid-late 1800’s sought English as a liberating tool for the masses, only now in the year 2009  an independent well researched book on her life and achievements gets published in English!! This effort has been done by a group of dedicated scholars and researchers on their own steam. To the marginalized these efforts come as iridescent showers of enlightenment connecting us to the vibrant ancestors and their vision of an egalitarian society, their compassion and empathy rooting us firmly back to this soil. We stop feeling like ahistorical entities as we begin reading about the life and struggles of Savitribai Phule. A feeling of sudden awakening grips and removes the hovering disconnectedness for members of the oppressed communities, to whom she dedicated her life!

The startling strength and razor sharp intellect of this pioneer leader taking on society’s myriad evil and unquestioned practices of inequality among humans and between men and women is stunning in its forcefulness and sincerity. We receive this rare and fantastic effort of bringing out a book on Savitribai Phule like a sparkling oasis to quench the thirst of a million throats, charging us with fresh energy to continue on with her legacy.

I chose this poem of the five in this book as it brings us closer to the multifaceted personality of a reformer whose engaged poetry weaves her politics into her verses. In them one gets a glimpse of the mind of a woman completely dedicated to education of the downtrodden. Her impatience to see them empowered, her conviction that knowledge alone is the ingredient for salvation of people caught in unending cycles of servitude and destitution speaks volumes. Her revolutionary call to shake of the mantle of ignorance and fear of scriptures can be grasped only in the background of a time when her husband and she were ostracized from their family and home as they feared a backlash against the couple’s move to educate women and untouchables.

The undisputed place Savthribai Phule holds as the pioneer in women and human rights movements in India at a glance below:

Events	Year
Birth of SavitriBai.(Naigaon,Tha. Khandala Dist. Satara) Father’s name- Khandoji Nevse, Mother’s name- Laxmi.	3rd Jan.1831
Marriage with Jotirao Phule.	1840
Education started.	1841
Passed third and fourth year examination from Normal school.	1846-47
Started school with Sagunabai in Maharwada.	1847
Country’s first school for girls was started at Bhide’s wada in Pune and Savitribai was nominated as the first head mistress of the school.	1 Jan.1848
School for adults was started at UsmanSheikh’s wada in Pune. Left home with Jotirao for educating Shudra and ati Shudra’s .	1849
First public Til-Gul programme was arranged by Mahila Seva Mandal.	14 Jan.1852
Phule family was honoured by British government for their works in the field of education and Savtribai was declared as the best teacher.	16 Nov.1852
Infanticide prohibition home was started.	28 Jan.1853
Prize giving ceremony was arranged under the chairmanship of Major Candy.	12 Feb.1853
“Kavya Phule”-the first collection of poems was published.	1854
A night school for agriculturist and labourers was started.	1855
‘Lecture’s of Jyotiba’ was published.	25 Dec.1856
Orphanage was started.	1863
Opened the well to untouchables.	1868
Adopted son of Kashibai, a Brahmin Widow’s Child.	1874
Done important work in famine and started 52 free food hostels in Maharashatra.	1876 to 1877
Adopted son, Dr.Yashwant was married to the daughter of Sasane.	4 Feb.1889
Death of her husband Jotirao Phule .	28 Nov. 1890
Chairperson of Satya Shodhak Samaj Conference at Saswad.	1893
Again famine in Maharashtra. Forced government to start relief work.	1896
Plague epidemic in Pune.Had done social work during this hour.	1897
Died while serving the Plague paitents during plague epidemic.	10 March 1897
Centenary year in Maharashtra and National honour.	10 March 1997 to 98
Government of India honored her by publishing a postage stamp.	10 March 1998

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Source: A forgotten liberator: The life and struggles of Savthribai Phule. Page 66.

Edited by

Braj Ranjan Mani

Pamela Sardar. 

Update: A earlier NCERT book on the life of Savithribai Phule is also available.

Melanin rich Dalits

This conversation here reminded me of this first post i had written, it is one of the posts that is most regularly read for some odd reason, readers use the tag ‘dark indian girl’ to reach here, i wonder about it sometimes .

Valli’s Beauty

Not the Tamil God’s tribal consort, but just someone known to me. Valli, husband and young son arrived in Bangalore as migrants. What they sought? What they got? Interesting line of inquiry, but, here, I want only to share few stories that I heard from Valli.

Valli did not land in the usual receptacles meant for poor villagers fleeing drought and other nasties, i.e, the sprawling slums of Bangalore city. Instead, she got housing within the grounds of a regal bungalow owned by an elite Anglo-Indian family, thanks to husband’s green fingers. He was hired as the resident gardener. Valli, got into the bungalow routine. Thus, knew the tea-making, serving and other genteel stuff.

Valli as I remember her then, was in her late thirties, around 5′2, very dark skinned, not the blotchy kind, but the uniform shade, with even facial features. She wore thick rimmed glasses, giving her the appearance of a stern professor with an exotic hairstyle. Wish I could draw, for describing that style is difficult. Hair was tucked in a way that had the ends of her tresses framed around her head in a fan shaped arrangement. Her gait was proud and erect. Her form was slender.

Death of the aging patrons, brought Valli and family to the slums. A reluctant Valli started as housemaid and baby sitter to families in the neighborhood. She gained the reputation of being a loyal but fastidious worker. In the meantime, the extended family from the village kept coming into the city, in a steady stream. As the drought did not go away, the elections always got over, with it, promises of better rural life, while other nasties just got nastier. Valli kept track of the in coming clan members, doing her best to keep the men from succumbing to alcohol, and women from prostitution.

Valli and husband, could never do enough for their only son. The story of her becoming a mother after many years of marriage, was recounted in great detail, every moment of motherhood was magnified for Valli. Poor eyesight had always plagued her. She would tear up while recalling near total blindness, for the first three years of her son’s life. The way she traced her baby’s features and kept him safe from danger, always transfixed her listeners. Herbal medicines and glasses helped her regain her sight to some extent.

When it was time to find a bride for the beloved son, Valli was teased by other women, where will you find the perfect girl? Are you going to find him a fair one? No, was the prompt reply. “Amman pola”, meaning dark like the village goddess, she said. She was dead serious and would explain in her clear voice, that in her community pale skinned girls were not sought after. Beauty is dark. Period.

Take home messages for me from Valli’s anecdotes came in handy at different points.

It took me a long time to realize that girls like me in School were not part of any cultural activities (read on-stage), not because we lacked grace in our movements, or articulation in our voices, but simply because we had little too much melanin. Did not do too much harm to my psyche, though (I am dark and thick skinned, I guess).

A sometime Sunday activity by girls in my hostel, was reading aloud the Hindu matrimonial ads, each girl would pick her community section and read it out, to the sneering rest. We concluded, here within the pages of Hindu matrimonial ads was the sign that Indians were indeed unified. No matter what caste, profession, age, or whatever, they all sought a FAIR girl.

As I follow arguments all over the world about objectifying women’s bodies and its effects, the manner in which Valli objectified, her would be daughter-in-law, always amuses me. For the sheer counterpoint it brings to the prevailing notion of a Nation obsessed with light skin. Then again, Valli spoke about her community, probably there are more Indians out there who are not terrified of the ‘pigment’. Just that their voices are not in all the noise that gets heard.