My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  25.S. Gurumurthy, co-convenor of the Hindu right-wing Swadeshi Jagaran Manch, talks of how caste and capitalism can coexist: “Caste is a very strong bond. While individuals are related by families, castes link the families. Castes transcended the local limits and networked the people across [sic]. This has prevented the disturbance that industrialism caused to neighbourhood societies in the West, resulting in unbridled individualism and acute atomization.” He goes on to argue that the caste system “has in modern times engaged the market in economics and democracy in politics to reinvent itself. It has become a great source of entrepreneurship.” See “Is Caste an Economic Development Vehicle?” The Hindu, January 19, 2009.

  26.See “Forbes: India’s Billionaire Wealth Much above Country’s Fiscal Deficit,” The Indian Express, March 5, 2013.

  27.J. H. Hutton, Census of India 1931 (Delhi: Government of India, 1935).

  28.David Hardiman, Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 15.

  29.See “Brahmins in India,” Outlook, June 4, 2007. Despite the decline, the Lok Sabha in 2007 had fifty Brahmin Members of Parliament—9.17 percent of the total strength of the House. The data given by Outlook is based on four surveys conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, between 2004 and 2007.

  30.BAWS 9, 207.

  31.See Khushwant Singh, “Brahmin Power,” Sunday, December 29, 1990. Singh’s figures are based on information provided by one of his readers.

  32.BAWS 9, 200.

  33.Reservation was first introduced in India during the colonial period. For a history of the policy of reservation, see Bhagwan Das, “Moments in a History of Reservations,” Economic & Political Weekly, October 28, 2000, 3381–84.

  34.Selected Educational Statistics 2004–05 (New Delhi: Ministry of Human Resource Development, 2007), xxii, http://www.educationforallinindia.com/SES2004-05.pdf.

  35.Under the new economic regime, education, health care, essential services and other public institutions are rapidly being privatized, which has led to a hemorrhage of government jobs. For a population of 1.2 billion people, the total number of organized sector jobs is 29 million (as of 2011). Of these, the private sector accounts for only 11.4 million. See the Economic Survey 2010–11: Statistical Appendix, A52, http://indiabudget.nic.in/budget2011-2012/es2010-11/estat1.pdf.

  36.See “Yes Sir,” in Ajay Navaria’s collection of short stories, Unclaimed Terrain, trans. Laura Brueck (New Delhi: Navayana, 2013).

  37.National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, Fourth Report (New Delhi: Author, 1998), 180–81.

  38.Prabhu Chawla, “Courting Controversy,” India Today, January 29, 1999. The lawyers quoted are Anil Divan and Fali S. Nariman. Later, India did get a Dalit Supreme Court Chief Justice in K. G. Balakrishnan (2007–10).

  39.S. Santhosh and Joshil K. Abraham, “Caste Injustice in Jawaharlal Nehru University,” Economic & Political Weekly, June 26, 2010, 27–29.

  40.Ibid., 27.

  41.The note submitted to the Jawaharlal Nehru University vice-chancellor was signed by Yoginder K. Alagh, T. K. Oommen, and Bipan Chandra (among others). Alagh is an economist and a former Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha), a former union minister and regular newspaper columnist. Oomen was president of the International Sociological Association (1990–94) and published an edited volume titled Classes, Citizenship, and Inequality: Emerging Perspectives (New Delhi: Dorling Kindersley, 2010). Chandra is a Marxist historian, former president of the Indian History Congress, and former chairperson of the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

  42.Anuradha Raman, “Standard Deviation,” Outlook, April 26, 2010.

  43.The Justice Rajinder Sachar Committee was appointed by prime minister Manmohan Singh on March 9, 2005, to assess the social, economic, and educational status of the Muslim community of India; its 403-page report was tabled in Parliament on November 30, 2006. The report establishes that caste oppression affects India’s Muslims too. According to Teltumbde (The Persistence of Caste, 16), “working from t,he Sachar Committee data, the [Scheduled Castes] and [Scheduled Tribes] components of India’s population can be estimated at 19.7 and 8.5 per cent respectively.”

  44.According to economist Sukhadeo Thorat, “Nearly 70 per cent of SC households either do not own land or have very small landholdings of less than 0.4 ha [hectare]. A very small proportion (less than 6 per cent) consists of medium and large farmers. The scenario of landownership among SCs is even grimmer in Bihar, Haryana, Kerala and Punjab, where more than 90 per cent of SC households possess negligible or no land.” Sukhadeo Thorat, Dalits in India: Search for a Common Destiny (New Delhi: Sage, 2009), 56. Citing Planning Commission data, another research paper states that the majority of the Scheduled Castes (77 percent) are landless, without any productive assets and sustainable employment opportunities. According to the Agricultural Census of 1990–91, the essay says, “Around 87 per cent of the landholders of scheduled castes and 65 per cent of scheduled tribes in the country belong to the category of small and marginal farmers.” B. B. Mohanty, “Land Distribution among Scheduled Castes and Tribes,” Economic & Political Weekly, October 6, 2001: 1357–68.

  45.National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, Fourth Report, 176.

  46.Express News Service, “13 Lakh Dalits Still Engaged in Manual Scavenging: Thorat,” The New Indian Express, October 8, 2013. See also the status papers on the website of the International Dalit Solidarity Network, http://idsn.org/caste-discrimination/key-issues/manual-scavenging/.

  47.Data are from the Indian Railways website and Agrima Bhasin, “The Railways in Denial,” Infochange News and Features, February 2013.

  48.See the interviews of Milind Kamble and Chandra Bhan Prasad, respectively the chairman and mentor of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, in Shekhar Gupta, “Capitalism Is Changing Caste Much Faster than any Human Being. Dalits Should Look at Capitalism as a Crusader against Caste,” The Indian Express, June 11, 2013. For an analysis of how India’s policies of liberalization and globalization since 1990 have actually benefited rural Dalits of Uttar Pradesh’s Azamgarh and Bulandshahar districts, see Devesh Kapur, Chandra Bhan Prasad, Lant Pritchett, and D. Shyam Babu, “Rethinking Inequality: Dalits in Uttar Pradesh in the Market Reform Era,” Economic & Political Weekly, August 28, 2010, 39–49. See also Milind Khandekar’s Dalit Millionaires: 15 Inspiring Stories (Penguin, 2013). For a critique of the “low-intensity spectacle of Dalit millionaires,” see Gopal Guru, “Rise of the ‘Dalit Millionaire’: A Low Intensity Spectacle,” Economic & Political Weekly, December 15, 2012, 41–49.

  49.Sam Jones, “Anti-caste Discrimination Reforms Blocked, Say Critics,” The Guardian, July 29, 2013.

  50.Ruth Vanita, “Whatever Happened to the Hindu Left?” Seminar, April 2002.

  51.Sukta 90 in Book X of the Rig Veda tells the story of the myth of creation. It describes the sacrifice of the Purusha (primeval man), from whose body the four varnas and the entire universe emerged. When (the gods) divided the Purusha, his mouth became Brahmin, his arms Kshatriya, his thighs Vaishya, and Shudra sprang from his feet. See Wendy Doniger, trans., The Rig Veda (New Delhi: Penguin, 2005). Some scholars believe that Sukta is a latter-day interpolation into the Rig Veda.

  52.Susan Bayly shows how Gandhi’s caste politics are completely in keeping with the views of modern, privileged-caste Hindu “reformers.” Susan Bayly, “Hindu Modernisers and the ‘Public’ Arena. Indigenous Critiques of Caste in Colonial India,” in Vivekananda and the Modernisation of Hinduism, William Radice, ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 93–137.

  53.In 2012, the newsmagazine Outlook published the result of just such a poll conducted on the eve of Independence Day. The question was: “Who, after the Mahatma, is the greatest Indian to have walked our soil?” Ambedkar topped the poll and Outlook devoted an entire issue (August 20, 2012) to him.

  54.See Ambedkar�
�s Pakistan or the Partition of India (1945), first published as Thoughts on Pakistan (1940), and featured in BAWS 8.

  55.Anthony Parel, “Hind Swaraj” and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 188–89.

  56.In a 1955 interview with BBC radio, Ambedkar said, “A comparative study of Gandhi’s Gujarati and English writings will reveal how Mr. Gandhi was deceiving people.”

  57.Cited in BAWS 9, 276.

  58.AoC 16.2.

  59.See Kathryn Tidrick, Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 281, 283–84. On May 2, 1938, after Gandhi had a seminal discharge at the age of sixty-four, in a letter to Amritlal Nanavati he said: “Where is my place, and how can a person subject to passion represent non-violence and truth?” (CWMG 73, 139).

  60.BAWS 9, 202

  61.Dhananjay Keer, Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1990), 167. First published 1954.

  62.For an analysis of the radicalism inherent in the Ambedkar statue, in the context of Uttar Pradesh, see Nicolas Jaoul, “Learning the Use of Symbolic Means: Dalits, Ambedkar Statues, and the State in Uttar Pradesh,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 40, no. 2 (2006): 175–207: “To Dalit villagers, whose rights and dignity have been regularly violated, setting up the statue of a Dalit statesman wearing a red tie and carrying the Constitution involves dignity, pride in emancipated citizenship and a practical acknowledgement of the extent to which the enforcement of laws could positively change their lives” (204).

  63.“The State represents violence in a concentrated and organised form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence. Hence I prefer the doctrine of trusteeship.” Hindustan Times, October 17, 1935; CWMG 65, 318.

  64.Young India, April 16, 1931, in CWMG 51, 354.

  65.Das, Thus Spoke Ambedkar, vol. 1, 175.

  66.Jefferson says this in his letter of September 6, 1789, to James Madison. In Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, The Founders’ Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch2s23.html.

  67.Ambedkar argues in “Castes in India,” his 1916 essay, that women are the gateways of the caste system and that control over them through child marriages, enforced widowhood and sati (being burnt on a dead husband’s pyre) are methods to keep a check on women’s sexuality. For an analysis of Ambedkar’s writings on this issue, see Sharmila Rege, Against the Madness of Manu: B. R. Ambedkar’s Writings on Brahmanical Patriarchy (New Delhi: Navayana, 2013).

  68.For a discussion of the Hindu Code Bill, its ramifications, and how it was sabotaged, see ibid., 191–244. Rege shows how from April 11, 1947, when it was introduced in the Constituent Assembly, until September 1951, the bill was never taken seriously. Ambedkar finally resigned on October 10, 1951. The Hindu Marriage Act was finally enacted in 1955, granting divorce rights to Hindu women. The Special Marriage Act, passed in 1954, allows intercaste and interreligious marriage.

  69.Ibid., 200.

  70.Ibid., 241. Ambedkar’s disillusionment with the new legal regime in India went further. On September 2, 1953, he declared in the Rajya Sabha, “Sir, my friends tell me that I made the Constitution. But I am quite prepared to say that I shall be the first person to burn it out. I do not want it. It does not suit anybody. But whatever that may be, if our people want to carry on, they must remember that there are majorities and there are minorities; and they simply cannot ignore the minorities by saying: ‘Oh, no, to recognise you is to harm democracy’” (Keer, Dr. Ambedkar, 499).

  71.AoC 20.12.

  72.Gail Omvedt, Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals (New Delhi: Navayana, 2008), 19.

  73.Unpublished translation by Joel Lee, made available through personal communication.

  74.Gandhi, Young India, March 17, 1927, in CWMG 38, 210.

  75.Ambedkar said this during his speech delivered as Chairman of the Constitution Drafting Committee in the Constituent Assembly on November 4, 1948. See Das, Thus Spoke Ambedkar, vol. 1, 2010, 176.

  76.For an analysis of Gandhi’s relationship with Indian capitalists, see Leah Renold, “Gandhi: Patron Saint of the Industrialist,” Sagar: South Asia Graduate Research Journal 1, no. 1 (1994): 16–38. Gandhi’s approach to Big Dams is revealed in a letter dated April 5, 1924, in which he advised villagers who faced displacement by the Mulshi Dam, being built by the Tatas to generate electricity for their Bombay mills, to give up their protest (CWMG 27, 168):

  1.I understand that the vast majority of the men affected have accepted compensation and that the few who have not cannot perhaps even be traced.

  2.The dam is nearly half-finished and its progress cannot be permanently stopped. There seems to me to be no ideal behind the movement.

  3.The leader of the movement is not a believer out and out in non-violence. This defect is fatal to success. Seventy-five years later, in 2000, the Supreme Court of India used very similar logic in its infamous judgement on the World Bank-funded Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada river, when it ruled against tens of thousands of local people protesting their displacement and ordered the construction of the dam to continue.

  77.Young India, December 20, 1928, in CWMG 43, 412. Also see Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909) in Parel, “Hind Swaraj” and Other Writings.

  78.Rege, Against the Madness of Manu, 100.

  79.BAWS 5, 102.

  80.In Das, Thus Spoke Ambedkar, Vol. 1, 51.

  81.AoC, preface to 1937 edition.

  82.Cited in Eleanor Zelliot, Ambedkar’s World: The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit Movement (New Delhi: Navayana, 2013), 147.

  83.Here, for example, is Ismat Chugtai, a Muslim writer celebrated for her progressive, feminist views, describing an Untouchable sweeper in her short story, “A Pair of Hands”: “Gori was her name, the feckless one, and she was dark, dark like a glistening pan on which a roti had been fried but which a careless cook had forgotten to clean. She had a bulbous nose, a wide jaw, and it seemed she came from a family where brushing one’s teeth was a habit long forgotten. The squint in her left eye was noticeable despite the fact that her eyes were heavily kohled; it was difficult to imagine how, with a squinted eye, she was able to throw darts that never failed to hit their mark. Her waist was not slim; it had thickened, rapidly increasing in diameter from all those handouts she consumed. There was also nothing delicate about her feet which reminded one of a cow’s hoofs, and she left a coarse smell of mustard oil in her wake. Her voice however, was sweet.” From A Chugtai Collection, trans. Tahira Naqvi and Syeda S. Hameed (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2003), 164.

  84.In 1981, all the Dalits of the village of Meenakshipuram—renamed Rahmat Nagar—in Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli district converted to Islam. Worried by this, Hindu supremacist groups such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh together with the Sankaracharya of Kanchipuram began to work proactively to “integrate” Dalits into Hinduism. A new “Tamil Hindu” chauvinist group called the Hindu Munnani was formed. Eighteen years later, P. Sainath revisited Meenakshipuram and filed two reports: “One People, Many Identities,” the Hindu, January 31, 1999; and “After Meenakshipuram: Caste, Not Cash, Led to Conversions,” the Hindu, February 7, 1999. For a similar case from Koothirambakkam, another village in Tamil Nadu, see S. Anand, “Meenakshipuram Redux,” Outlook, October 21, 2002.

  85.Cited in Omvedt, Seeking Begumpura, 177.

  86.The figure Ambedkar cites is drawn from the Simon Commission report of 1930. When the Lothian Committee came to India in 1932, Ambedkar said, “The Hindus adopted a challenging mood and refused to accept the figures given by the Simon Commission as a true figure for the Untouchables of India.” He then argues that “this is due to the fact that the Hindus had by now realised the danger of admitting the existence of the Untouchables. For it meant that a part of the representation enjoyed by the Hindus will have to be given up by them to the Untouc
hables” (BAWS 5, 7–8).

  87.See note 69 at 9.4 of this AoC edition.

  88.He says this in the April 1899 issue of the journal Prabuddha Bharata, in an interview to its editor. In the same interview, when asked specifically what would be the caste of those who “re-converted” to Hinduism, Vivekananda says: “Returning converts … will gain their own castes, of course. And new people will make theirs. You will remember … that this has already been done in the case of Vaishnavism. Converts from different castes and aliens were all able to combine under that flag and form a caste by themselves—and a very respectable one too. From Ramanuja down to Chaitanya of Bengal, all great Vaishnava Teachers have done the same.”

  89.The names of these organizations translate as Forum for Dalit Uplift; the All-India Committee for the Uplift of Untouchables; and the Punjab Society for Untouchable Uplift.

  90.AoC 6.2.

  91.Bayly, “Hindu Modernisers and the ‘Public’ Arena.”

  92.The term was coined by V. D. Savarkar (1883–1966), one of the principal proponents of modern, right-wing Hindu nationalism, in his 1923 pamphlet Essentials of Hindutva (later retitled Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? [Nagpur: V. V. Kelkar]). The first edition (1923) of this work carried the pseudonymous “A. Maratha” as author. For a critical introduction to Hindutva, see Jyotirmaya Sharma, Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism (Delhi: Harper Collins, 2005).

  93.Cited in Vijay Prashad, “The Untouchable Question,” Economic & Political Weekly, March 2, 1996, 554–55.

  94.BAWS 9, 195.

  95.A few privileged-caste Hindu members of the Ghadar Party later turned toward Hindu nationalism and became Vedic missionaries. On Bhai Parmanand, a founder-member of the Ghadar Party who later became a Hindutva ideologue, see note 11 in the prologue to AoC.

  96.For a monograph on the Ad Dharm movement, see Juergensmeyer, Religious Rebels in the Punjab.