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. 

dharmic expressions

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

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

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

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.

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.

——————————————————————————————————————-

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.

+++

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

=============

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.

UN set to treat caste as human rights violation

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. 

——-

Manoj Mitta, TNN 28 September 2009

 

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.

Lost daughters and citizen rights

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.

Kuffir asked here, will the UID number make the state know that I exist?

I added to this question:  If I exist, am I safe?

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.

Page. 18.  5.5 Person identification data elements. 

Personal identification number……..?????……….

Personal name in English ………….. ?

Father’s identification number ……………..?

Mother’s identification number ………………?

Mother’s name ……………..?

Spouse’s identification number …………….?

Spouse’s name ……………..?

Gender identification code : ….. …… +

DOB ……………..?

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.

Citizen-criminals rats and $40 billion

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?

private is public

Mass of Separation

My parent’s home in Bangalore is on a lane that ends in a Mosque.  Its location gets us many interesting comments from friends, guests and from total strangers too. One such comment “I thought of stopping by yesterday, but forgot it was Friday, the lepers were sitting in front of your home.”  A supposedly self-explanatory statement, a reference to the weekly gathering of the needy and afflicted to collect the alms, dispensed at the mosque after the prayers. They usually sat under the shade of trees eating their lunch, talking among themselves and dispersed after sometime. Their very presence stops some from even considering venturing into this street. Why? A primal fear, perhaps. A fear that a rational mind should be able to overcome, given the amount of information in the public sphere on leprosy, that 95 % of humans posses natural immunity to it and when treated with antibiotics the disease loses its contagious state within 90 days. We have known for some time now that leprosy is curable and it is far less contagious than many other diseases. Yet!

Senses and objects

As a child growing up in Bangalore city, leprosy afflicted persons registered in my mind as people who went about their daily lives by mostly using some kinds of objects to move around. A wooden board with wheels, a metal rod with a flat base, a wooden grip to move the wooden board or a wheel barrow pulled by a rope. These mobility-aiding tools appeared to be made of material forced into a design stemming from determination and grit. Wood against tar, metal against concrete, human will against odds, providing the necessary mobility the rest of us take for granted. These aids lacked any kind of uniformity, a sure sign that they were not manufactured but innovated and handmade by the ones who used them. Manufacturing would’ve meant that the need and demand for these objects was translated into a process of providing. It would mean the involvement of several sections of the society other than the users. That could have included me. Why was I not involved? How do my senses and fears exclude me from their lives? Fear of losing those very senses, perhaps! The image of an impaired human body is distressing and remains in the subconscious even when it is no longer in the vision. The possibility of losing the functionality of body parts, and worse, being disfigured are not easy mental obstacles to overcome. 

A few facts about leprosy are highlighted below from fascinating papers that recount the history of the disease and the ongoing struggle humans have with managing their fears that have no rational basis. This should help us along a bit to see the disease for what it is and the silent havoc our senses play on the patients –forcing social exclusion as the only way of life for them.

Indian Origin

 

It has been known since a long time that leprosy and the pathogen, Mycobacterium leprae have evolved in the old world. Historians of the disease have explored two prominent lines of evidence, that of an African or an Asian origin. Recent studies have added significant archeological evidence that show India is probably the place of origin. In this fascinating paper (linked below), the authors reporting on the skeletal remains of a male, excavated from a burial site in Balathal, in Rajasthan, along with interpretation of Vedic references to leprosy gives us several insights into many aspects of leprosy and practices associated with it in Ancient India.

As the Sanskrit word kushtha referred to a plant used to treat leprosy and tuberculosis (rajayaksma), the Atharva Veda is also the earliest text to infer a connection between the two conditions, at least in terms of treatment. It is not common to find adult burials after 2000 B.C. In contrast, infants and children under 5 years of age are common in peninsular sites. These features of second millennium burial practice are suggestive of Vedic tradition. Given this, it is interesting to note that it is customary in Vedic tradition in parts of India to bury lepers alive rather than cremate their bodies, which as diseased are not considered an appropriate sacrifice to Hindu Gods. The biological evidence presented here indicates that similar mortuary behavior for people with leprosy was present at a rural Chalcolithic village in northwest India by the beginning of the second millennium B.C.

This ancient disease has elicited the most severe forms of ostracizing in all parts of the world, however, in this paper the authors note that it was not universal and many kings, knights and crusaders who suffered leprosy carried on with their public lives.

Afflicted Royals

Robert I, King of the Scots (1306-1329)

Baldwin IV, King of Jerusalem (1174-1182)

Henry VII of Sicily and Germany (1212-1242)

Afonso II, King of Portugal (1212-1223)

Henry IV of Bolingbroke, King of England (1399-1413)

Constance of Brittany, Duchess (1186-1196)

Afflicted Subjects

Leprosy had long been rampant in the Eastern Mediterranean lands and apparently reached Europe during the Roman campaigns of the first century A.D. During the Medieval period, leprosy sufferers were often ostracized from society and condemned to living in seclusion without recourse to social contact with the community. They were declared legally dead and their goods were confiscated. Their spouse was however expected to honor the sacramental bond and serve the leper until his/her death. Once identified as a leper, a “Mass of Separation” (13th century) was performed by the priest at the site of the leper’s hut. 

India has a long history of individuals and organizations dedicated to healing of leprosy patients, but to a large extent, the patients have been subjected to exclusion. In the few cases that I’ve known personally there was no ‘Mass of Separation’ just a massive dose of shame and self-preservation of family members and efforts to find a quick means of dispatch to an institution. That brings us to the role of infirmaries and institutions; legacies of care and treatment in different cultures are varied and well documented in some parts of the world. One of the best  known traditions of caring for leprosy patients is the Order of St Lazarus. 

The care of the sick was during the Medieval Period viewed a Christian duty. This attitude encouraged the philanthropic establishment of infirmaries or centers to serve the sick and infirm of the society, including lepers. The Latin Kingdom and some European leprosaria were managed by a hospitaller chivalric Order dedicated to St. Lazarus set up in the Holy Land with the specific aim of caring for lepers. Various members of the European and Latin Kingdom Royalty acted as benefactors to the Order furnishing it with land and monetary donations to help it achieve its functions.

Legend of the Leper King

Closer home, in Cambodia there are various versions of the legend of the leper king, including one that draws from Indian literary narratives of Rama’s banishment associated with leprosy. I found this interpretation of the Khmer legend riveting

Cambodia’s leper king is also the king who rebuilt the kingdom better than ever before, Jayavarman VII’s epigraphic exegesis of the conjunction of physical health and social justice embodied by the king is given full form in the legend and its artistic representation at the Bayon. Suffering with the people’s suffering, the king in these scenes finds curative source for his own body, thereby implicitly curing the body politic.

Institutional confinement

The fact that royalty who suffered from leprosy have ruled their kingdoms dispels two powerful and persisting myths, a) that leprosy always meant exclusion irrespective of class or position, b) despite the debilitating nature of diseases several of these monarchs led very productive lives, some of their actions have positively changed the course of World history. And modern medicine has proved that this disease is far less contagious than many other diseases that we routinely live with, without resorting to exclusion of the afflicted of those diseases. 

Exclusion of leprosy patients is therefore only to shield us from our fears. There is no justification for it at all.

Take a peek at this bit of Institutional history of leprosy in India,

British government sent its Leprosy Commission (comprising both physicians and administrators) to India to investigate. The commission’s report in 1891 concluded, “the amount of contagion which exists is so small that it may be disregarded” . Initially, the colonial government accepted these findings but, under increasing popular pressure from England and within India, enacted the Leprosy Act of 1898. This law institutionalized people with leprosy, using segregation by gender to prevent reproduction. For the self-sufficient individual with leprosy, segregation and medical treatment were voluntary, but vagrants and fugitives from government-designated leprosaria were subject to punitive action. It was repealed in 1983 after the advent of effective multi-drug therapy for leprosy.

Current figures and claims

India recently made the dramatic announcement that leprosy was eliminated. Indeed, this is welcome news; does it mean that no more new leprosy cases will be reported? A more realistic picture appears to be along the facts and figures reported in this study.

 The most striking trend in global leprosy in recent years is the decline in India, which reported 137,685 new cases in 2007, representing a decline of 74% from the 537,956 reported in 2000. This implies that India’s contribution to the global leprosy burden has declined from 73% to 54% of the world’s newly detected leprosy cases over these years. It is unclear the extent to which this decline reflects changes in ascertainment and criteria for new cases to be counted in India–e.g. Whether single lesion cases are being systematically counted, and whether cases are being counted only if the diagnosis has been confirmed by medical supervisors (both of which procedures have been used in India). Without such information, these important trends in India’s (and the world’s) statistics remain difficult to interpret.

According to the latest available information, intensive efforts are still needed to reach the leprosy elimination target in five countries: Brazil, India, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Nepal. In the United States there are approximately 6,500 cases of leprosy, 90 percent of which are in immigrants from countries where the disease is endemic. The number of cases with active disease and requiring drug treatment is approximately 600. There are 200 to 250 new leprosy cases reported each year, with about 175 of these being new cases diagnosed for the first time. 

The above numbers are a sober reminder that the disease cannot be won be use of words, bold statements and incomplete information.

While we salute all those who have dedicated their time and effort in making the lives of leprosy afflicted better – social and medical, the task of eliminating irrational fears from the public seems quite insurmountable. Research and treatment of the lepromatous nature of our fears, our faith in believing, living and perpetuating myths by actions and words, needs equal attention.

In an imagined state of being safe from the microbe -we are the reasons for the existence of the thousands of leper colonies. As long as these colonies exist, they are reminders of our weakness of character and poor reasoning abilities. We cannot make claims of being moral, ethical or being in the possession of a scientific temper as a people.

Elimination of the disease will have to go hand in hand with the integration of the once affected and one’s in treatment back into civil society. That is entirely up to us. We can continue to be prisoners of our fears or conquer them.

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Mobility-aids as school projects and shortening the path of integration of leprosy-afflicted, to be continued.

Leper King Source: History, Buddhism, and new religious movements in Cambodia / edited by John Marston and Elizabeth Guthrie.

Images: Internet

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For my Son, on his eighth B’day. To all the fears that paralyzed me before he was born and fears that constantly hover now, about his health and well being. Wishing him many many happy days playing and fixing with precision, bits and pieces of material trying to make them move. Wishing that he always remains curious and interested in the world around him.