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. Continue reading →
I was killed on this very land thousands of years ago
punarapi jananam punarapi maranam
I don’t know the karma theory but
I am taking birth, again and again, in the same place where I had died
My body dissolved in this land
And became the Ganga Sindh plain
When my eyeballs melted as tears
Perennial rivers flowed across this country
When my veins spurted minerals
This land became green and showered wealth
I was Shambhuka in the Treta Yuga
Twenty two years ago, my name was Kanchikacherla Kotesu
My place of birth is Kilvenmani, Karamchedu, Neerukonda
Now Chunduru is the name that cold-blooded feudal brutality
Has tattooed on my heart with ploughshares
From now on, Chunduru is not a noun but a pronoun
Now every heart is a Chunduru, a burning tumour
I am the wound of multitudes, the multitude of wounds
For generations, an unfree individual in a free country
Having been the target
Of humiliations, atrocities, rapes and torture
I am someone raising his head for a fistful of self-respect
In this nation of casteist bigots blinded by wealth
I am someone who lives to register life itself as a protest
I am someone who dies repeatedly to live
Don’t call me a victim
I am an immortal, I am an immortal, I am an immortal
I am the poison throated one
Who swallowed the famine so that the world may have wealth
I am the sunrise standing on its head
It was I who kicked the Sun on the head
To make him stand erect
I am the one stoking slogans in my flaming heart’s furnace
I don’t need words of sympathy or tears of pity
I’m not a victim, I’m an immortal
I am the fluttering flag of defiance
Don’t shed tears for me
If you can
Bury me in the middle of the city
I’ll bloom as the bamboo grove that sings the melody of life
Print my corpse as this nation’s cover
I’ll spread as a beautiful future into the pages of history
Invite me into your hearts
I’ll become a tussle of conflagrations
And rise again and again in this land.
Kalekuri Prasad‘s Telugu poem ‘piDikeDu aatmagauravam kOsam‘ (from the collection of poetry ‘daLita kavitvam- 2‘ ; originally published in another collection ‘manDutunna chunDuuru‘). Translated by Naren Bedide.
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
I want to say, FINALLY! but i think i’ll wait. But i’ll definitely say, Yeah, to Nepal. One small Hindu nation country has the moral courage to acknowledge this ancient but persisting atrocity.
NEW DELHI: If the recent genome study denying the Aryan-Dravidian divide has established the antiquity of caste segregations in marriage, the ongoing session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva looks set to recognize caste-based discrimination as a human rights violation. This, despite India’s opposition and following Nepal’s breaking ranks on the culturally sensitive issue.
Nepal has emerged as the first country from South Asia — the region where untouchability has been traditionally practiced — to declare support for the draft principles and guidelines published by UNHRC four months ago for “effective elimination of discrimination based on work and descent” — the UN terminology for caste inequities.
In a side-event to the session on September 16, Nepalese minister Jeet Bahadur Darjee Gautam said his county welcomed the idea mooted by the UNHRC document to involve “regional and international mechanism, the UN and its organs” to complement national efforts to combat caste discrimination. This is radically different from India’s stated aversion to the internationalization of the caste problem.
Much to India’s embarrassment, Nepal’s statement evoked an immediate endorsement from the office of the UN high commissioner for human rights, Navanethem Pillay, a South African Tamil. Besides calling Nepal’s support “a significant step by a country grappling with this entrenched problem itself”, Pillay’s office said it would “like to encourage other states to follow this commendable example”.
The reference to India was unmistakable especially since Pillay had pressed the issue during her visit to New Delhi in March. Pillay not only asked India to address “its own challenges nationally, but show leadership in combating caste-based discrimination globally”. The granddaughter of an indentured labourer taken to South Africa from a village near Madurai, Pillay recalled that in 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had compared untouchability to apartheid. Adding to India’s discomfiture, Sweden, in its capacity as the president of the Europeon Union, said, “caste-based discrimination and other forms of discrimination based on work and descent is an important priority for EU”. If this issue continues to gather momentum, UNHRC may in a future session adopt the draft principles and guidelines and, to impart greater legal force, send them for adoption to the UN General Assembly.
The draft principles specifically cited caste as one of the grounds on which more than 200 million people in the world suffer discrimination. “This type of discrimination is typically associated with the notion of purity and pollution and practices of untouchability, and is deeply rooted in societies and cultures where this discrimination is practiced,” it said.
Though India succeeded in its efforts to keep caste out of the resolution adopted by the 2001 Durban conference on racism, the issue has since re-emerged in a different guise, without getting drawn into the debate over where caste and race are analogous.
Indian society with all its complex variation of lived realities will be excel sheeted into a sanitized, digitized, very middleclass, database version through the UID number. How many Indians deviate from this ‘normal’ table should be the concern of this agency (UIDA). For it has the task of assigning citizenship status to ALL Indians. And let me not forget to add, at the cost of $40 billion.
These are the core deliverables of a citizenship identification program from the point of view of the individual citizen.
Now, please watch this documentary for one group of Indians who deviate from the prescribed forms of identification parameters with respect to the data elements. The required data elements to be filled out to obtain UID numbers, are given in the table below.
These were female children abducted from far off places and sold into the sex trade. At this point it is not clear to me how this group will be included into the UID program without ambiguity. That is, how will it serve the primary question -do I exist- for this group of Indian women?
Will the state apparatus go to them and fill out the data elements, if so, how is it going to do it? Use the police, NGO, activists network? How long will this take?
Or will these young women self identify to gain the benefits of UID number, that is a beginning of sorts for better services and rights? If either of these does happen, will their digitized information be safe? What are the safeguards for this information from becoming vulnerable to more agencies in addition to the exploitative ones that these women are already exposed to? That is, if I exist now as a number with all my personal details filled out, where I live, what I work as, etc. visible in the card/database, am I safe or is it safe?
See how such a simple data filling exercise falls apart in this specific instance. The ? mark against the data element refers to data that is not likely to be verifiable and + sign indicates those that can be.
Status in family –Head of family/not head of family…………?
POB (place of birth)…………..?
Premise Address …………….?
Photo. …….. +
Finger print…….. +
Visual identification mark……… +
Signature………. +
Current marital status……….?
Education qualification…………?
Occupation category…………..?
Title ……….?
Of the 24 plus data elements, 7 data elements can be filled unambiguously either by the state or by the individual.
All other elements, by their very nature for this specific group of women are not available as reliable data.
The name, date of birth, place of birth, fathers name and mothers name if known would and should have been used to relocate the girls back to their families.
Will the agencies record their information in the absence of documentary evidence?
Study these specific dataelements in the context of these women:
Occupation: This data element has already been finalized and codes have been assigned for the UID for most jobs. However, sex worker unions have been waging a losing battle to have this profession legalized. So what is going to be filled here?
Address: The documentary gives visual proof of the kind of temporary hovels they are likely to reside in. Will it be recognized?
Relationship to head of the family: Who will that be? The pimp, the brothel owner?
Marital status: What?
Of the data elements that can be filled; gender, photo, fingerprint, physical identification marks and signature are actually the biometric data, literally proof that a person is alive, nothing more. And this is the only data that is going to be available for a large number of Indians who find themselves as stateless trafficked humans involved in slave labour. For those who would like to say that these women and men are miniscule percentage of the population, I would like to remind them that they are also paying for this mammoth project. The tax that they pay on salt, dhal, clothes contribute to the funding of this project. So kindly hold that line.
On a personal note, I would also like to reawaken the deadened empathy of such argument profferers –these girls/women were beloved children of parents, they are Indian daughters, their rights are not be relegated to some arbitrary or representative numbers of exploitation/trade as against any other larger or smaller numbers of categorized Indians.
Since the data elements are designed for the imagined ideal Indian, the data can be filled quite easily by the middleclass, with ‘normal’ families with access to institutions such as education, ‘respectable’ employment and marriage. So, for the already citizenship-rights accessing Indians, this is indeed a better system and seems like the best solution for the tiresome multiple identification systems. The -am I safe question- for this class has more to do with credit or identity thefts, which is a significant valid concern. However it becomes even more worrisome, for the marginalized whose meager savings/earnings are also susceptible to the same fears. They have nothing else to fall back on.
Do I exist? Will remain the basic question, while the am I safe questions will immediately materialize as soon the system recognizes the existence of the marginalized, and be ever ready to derail them further away from seeking their aspirations, without built-in protections especially designed for them.
I hope to elaborate on the individual marginalized safety questions arising out of digitization, and reflect on their group/caste/geography, then, dwell on the bigger concerns of safety of such citizen’s information. While all the time never being sure of what specific benefits are really gained for the marginalized by the UID. Whereas for the IT component of middleclass Indians there is an immediate and definite benefit in terms of jobs and unending contracts.
Until the activists and civil liberties groups have clear cut answers from the UIDA as to how the marginalized are going to be included in this system and provided safety, the UID program has to be seen as the BPO/IT industry’s very smart switching of ‘outsourcing’ from other countries to making the government of India and its citizens its largest ‘insourced’ assignment.
In India you can by accident of birth be a criminal at birth. In India you can be severely malnourished, be forced to catch rats and eat them and be labelled -rat eaters. In India we will spend $ 40 billion to uniquely identify its citizens and everybody wants a piece of the pie.
Will the marginalized be identified by the UID? Will this magic number hinge them to the nation as Indian citizens and allow them to start the long trek to gain full citizenship rights; to food, wages, education, health, services and protection?
This was to continue the discussion here, but became too long for a comment.
The dalit women heroes of the 1857 Rebellion have become symbols of dalit assertion and pride. They have become the icons of the castes to which they belong, and it is become a political compulsion of various political parties especially the BSP, to use their myths to politically mobilize the members of these castes. In Dalit political discourse, myths of different castes are also being used to consolidate all the dalit castes and create a homogenous metanarrative. One such legendary character who is claimed to have played a significant role in 1857 Rebellion alongside Begum Hazrat Mahal of Lucknow and who has become the icon of the Pasi community, but whose aura encompasses all the Dalit castes, is Udadevi. She is one of the hero of the 1857 Dalit heroes who has been taken over by the BSP to develop the image of Mayavati, who is claimed to be her incarnation.
Richard Connerney recounts her story:
….. There British forces met desperate resistance of rebels who fortified the position. In the sanguineous battle that followed, over 2,000 rebels and many soldiers lost their lives in hand-to-hand combat.
After the British overran Sikandarbag, an officer noted that many of the British casualties had bullet wounds indicating steep, downward trajectory. Suspecting that a sniper remained hidden in the pipal tree, British officers fired at the tree and dislodged a rebel who fell to the ground with a thud, dead. Further investigation revealed that the rebel was, in fact, a low-caste woman named Udadevi Pasi, who had donned men’s clothing to participate in the uprising.
Back to issue at hand, that is, iconization of Mayavati, Badri Narayan tells it like this:
There were cut outs, posters and hoardings showing Udadevi standing beside Mayavati, at roadsides and important sites before the 2004 parliamentary elections. The story of her brave deeds and heroic achievements during the 1857 Rebellion were narrated by different BSP leaders at election rallies in various places around Lucknow where her myth was popular, to highlight the glorious history of dalits. While these stories were narrated mainly at rallies that were held in Pasi hamlets to arouse the caste identity of the Pasis, they were also narrated during rallies held collectively for all dalit castes in particular regions adjoining Lucknow. The telling and retelling of the Myth of Udadevi transforming into an icon for dalit assertion that is being used by the BSP for the political mobilization of the dalits.
The part that is fascinating and heart wrenching is the way the image of Udadevi was created.
It was created in 1953 as part of the NBRI’s initiative to build a museum based on the history of Lucknow, A painter was commissioned to paint her image based on the description of Udadevi in the narratives collected by the botanist N. N Kaul. Following this a cement statute was made based on the image in NBRI, this was not made well and soon started cracking. Unskilled laborers were called in to fill in the cracks but in the process the image got distorted. Later when BSP wanted to build her statues and print her portrait in posters they picked up this distorted image. That is why the statue at NBRI grossly differs from the roadside statues.
This is so poignant to me, along with a burden of forced amnesia, which completely eliminates the memory of the role the dalits played in the Independence struggles and continue playing in nation building activities, is the tucked in history we have contributed. When a chance presented itself for the resurrection of one such memory; poor choice, material and attitude bequeaths us a distorted image! These stories also reminds each one of us, of other heroes, known only to a small handful, often only in oral form. They forcibly make us conscious of all our current heroes who have kept the struggle going on with such meagre resources, but with unending determination. As, are we the internet accessing ‘other voices’ in every way are also ‘heroes’ with our own set of anxieties, confronting our own set of unique hostilities, we continue to extend upon the history of resistance. The additional responsibility we carry, comes with the knowledge that we are doing so on a full stomach, unlike many of our counterparts in Dalitwadas in villages and city slums. Stories in rural India of young people handwriting pamphlets, xeroxing copies and delivering them on foot and cycles, can be heard everywhere. Most often done after a long day at work, in dimly lit huts, shops and under streetlights, often in the face of hostility, quite often on hungry stomachs. We can never lose our hard won ability to question incessantly every notion that hinders the possibility of well being of all our people and we do that by questioning ourselves in the same light.
If I gain access to resources how am I going to use it? I have so many issues to address. Historical amnesia is one of them. How do I prioritize?
Statues are important. They are symbolic in a million ways, most especially in the stories that remain untold. To have all our stories come alive we need resources, however, access to resource remains elusive. The rare times when access is possible, balance and forethought is needed while attempting to utilize it. Fear that this access will disappear should never lead us into paths which lets us forget the spirit of our dead heroes, for they did what they did, for their progeny –us. Or overdosing on ideas that might let us negate the tireless efforts of our living heroes in dalitwadas, slums and offices. It would be the most painful hurt we would deliver to the memories of the past and efforts of the present, if we started to transform into them , in thought or action.
Sexual violence is incomprehensible to me and as such I must avoid thinking aloud on this subject as it has been outside of my personal experience or study. But I do want to understand what is that I perceive and process while reading, hearing and seeing images of sexual violence, particularly related to dalit women.
My involvement with dalit issues keeps sending me down paths that invariably vortex into sexual violence. There are surprisingly few texts that have researched the sexual politics of dalits. Though the words ‘dalit women and sexual abuse’ are almost synonymous in the popular media as well as in serious writings.
I am particularly intrigued by a couple of paragraphs from two books that dwell at some length on this topic in different ways, one by Vidyut Bhagwat and the other by Kalpana and Vasantha Kannabhiran on dalit women.
One paragraph relates to the supposed ‘silence’ of dalit women and the other to the supposed ‘manhood’ of lower caste men.
Vidyut’s observation of dalit women in rural and urban centers.
First she states:
Women who are part of toiling masses are leading their life as beasts of burden and often as victims of dominant caste onslaught. It is but natural they are mute.
And then wonders:
But dalit women in urban centres taking care of homes and children at times teaching in schools and colleges or most of the time playing the role of housewives have not yet come out. We do not know how they perceive themselves and the world around them. Particularly, wives of political leaders, professors, doctors, executives are strangely silent.
In the categorical statement “it is but natural they are mute” is she talking of verbal silence, silence in the popular language or is she saying that there is no reaction to circumstances and resistance to injustice and violence?
For me, verbal silence can sometimes be very loud and menacing. I have used it to get my way through many passive-aggressive battles quite effectively. However, in those instances, the ones at whom it was aimed at astutely perceived my silence. No outsider could have probed the silent struggle and be able to give weightage to the outcome. In that respect what does Vidyut’s observation of ‘mute’ actually mean?
Mute because they don’t revolt physically, individually or in groups? For that I ask you to look at the image of Lalgarh protest here, and does one see resistance? Is it silent or loud, armed resistance or a democratic protest?
In this image I do see and hear a loud silence. Media being a beast of burden, toiling to keep the governments happy, it is but natural they are mute. Academicians, liberals, feminists, activists in designer khadi are also strangely silent. Should one wonder about this?
The protest intermixed with many other issues was also about physical abuse of both men and women.
To read, toiling masses as silent masses is extremely simplistic. How does one reduce a human being as complex as the next one, to something like an unreacting mass of living cells? That is an incorrect analogy, even cultures of cells in a petridish will react to adversity; resist, learn, adapt and by these actions over a period of time they will change the effect of the adversity or die out.
Now lets take her wonderment at urban dalit women’s silence:
Does the movement from rural to urban and becoming professionals and wives of professionals guarantee articulation? If this is a general rule or observation with all women, then we truly have to wonder why this is so with dalit women? How is the perceived silence among rural women connected to the urban women’s silence (again perceived)?
Could it be the memories of rural oppression persists even as they move out into a different cultural, political and economic space? Is there a collective memory operating among dalit women about oppression and methods of resistance, and how deep and complex is it?
The sensitivity and should I say the caliber to read into the psyche of the dalit woman and her response to sexual violence is missing, evident in such blanket statements.
Lets go over to the Kannabhirans reading of the Chilakurti atrocity:
Gender within caste society is thus defined and structured in such a manner that the ‘manhood’ of the caste is defined both by the degree of control men exercise over women and the degree of passivity of the women of the caste. By the same argument, demonstrating control by humiliating women of another caste is a certain way of reducing the ‘manhood’ of those castes. This is why. While Muthamma was paraded naked in the streets of Chilakurti, the men of her caste who unable to bear the sight covered their eyes, were derided by the aggressors who said, ‘open your eyes. Are there no men amongst you? This insult is double edged. On the one hand gender is defined by the capacity for aggression and appropriation of the other. On the other hand the lower-caste man could only cover his eyes because the structure of relations in caste society castrates him through the expropriation of his women.
This on the face of it seems like pretty sound explanation, so with a magic wand if we push the upper caste down the ladder, upper caste men lose their ‘manhood’ when their women are appropriated and humiliated, right? Any caste that finds itself at the bottom of things, will experience it, any human aggregation that finds itself stripped of its protection from civil society; such as during war and unrest, experiences this.
Substitute caste in that paragraph with war, and nothing changes.
The uniqueness of caste being that the forces keeps it in a war like exploitative situation. It must be the longest war in the history of mankind, and with that -the longest history of resistance. Dalits did not die out, that is the proof of their resistance and also proof of the pace at which the aggression keeps evolving.
The Chilakurti analysis is not specific to the dalit man being unable to protect and the dalit women being appropriated and humiliated, I see it as a general explanation for any man and woman, high or low caste, Asian, African or Caucasian finding themselves pitted against a horrific oppressor. The burly Scotsman would have shut his eyes when his clanswomen were humiliated by the English. Any man, anywhere loses his ‘manhood’. Any woman. anywhere becomes ‘silent’ just arrive at the right concoction of factors that lead up to to it. A variation of what happens between Tutsis and Hutus, Serbs and Bosnians, Gujarat Hindus and Muslims. The amazing aspect of dalit atrocities is that it does not peak, it remains as a constant background noise.
I learn nothing from these observations and analysis in these books except a lot of recycled academic verbiage. Articulation delivered through unseeing eyes and deafened ears only indicates the comfort of safe jobs and privilege of the authors.
So does it matter what gets written about dalit women in dusty academic books? Yes, it does, as one can see bits and pieces are taken out from these books and find their way into the public sphere, extended by journalists who attach these sentences to their daily bread articles on atrocities. And I run into variations of these statements by loud ‘feminists’ on the web routinely. Tiresome and mediocre! Repeated with such conviction and surety, that I loathe the thought of a dialog with them. Another instance of silence, perhaps?
May I gently suggest, please turn your weak analytical skills and the light on the perpetrators of the evil. They require reformation.
We will describe ourselves. Leave it to us.
Image: Sanhati website
Sources: a) Dalit Women in India: Issues and perspective. b) De-Eroticizing Assault: Essays on Modesty, Honour and Power.
