India
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More than a century after Ambedkar’s unhappy childhood journey, individuals who would never, at any moment in India’s history, have been able to make their way in the world, are assuming positions of political power. The outcastes are answering back, and in some cases biting back. The extent of this shift is still not clear, but it has much further to go. Despite the genuine advances of recent years, Dalits remain undereducated and under-represented, and their collective importance as an Indian community is not recognized. To equal the number of Dalits in India, you would need to add together the populations of Albania, Australia, Belgium, Israel, Kuwait, Libya, the Netherlands, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Or to express it in a different way: if every sixth person on the planet is an Indian, every sixth Indian is a Dalit.2 In 1996 a memorable article was published by B. N. Uniyal, “In Search of a Dalit Journalist”: he could not find one among the 686 accredited correspondents of the Delhi press corps.3 In many professions, the situation still remains the same.
Throughout his life, Ambedkar tried to figure out why “caste” Hindus had an obsession with defilement. He studied texts like the laws of Manu, which specified that anyone touching a Buddhist or a member of various outcaste groups should purify himself at once with a bath. Ambedkar’s theory was that old wars between settled and nomadic tribes, and between Brahmins and Buddhists, had led to the expulsion to the edge of villages of “Broken Men,” who followed the teachings of the Buddha and ate beef.4 They became the untouchables. His supposition about Broken Men and their social, cultural or religious origins does not depend on any clear evidence, but it shows how he was attempting to understand and imagine the historic position of a group that had been recorded mainly by others. Because he is remembered as the father of the Indian Constitution, it would be easy to believe Ambedkar was part of a wave of people of similar background, examining their origins and trying to create a new social contract. Rather, he was in an unusual position at every stage of his career. His Mahar community was at the upper end of the scale of untouchability, respected in the region around Bombay for military service; he had won a scholarship sponsored by the Maharaja Gaekwad of Baroda, studied at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, published books, including The Problem of the Rupee, and by the late 1920s was both a legislator and a professor at the Government Law College in Bombay. Although a related movement for social reform and self-respect had started in the south, guided by Periyar E. V. Ramaswamy, most untouchables in India remained oppressed—a situation which Ambedkar found ever more frustrating as he grew older.
As the country moved towards political reform and independence, his ambitions to represent depressed communities (soon to be known as the Scheduled Castes, because their names were listed on a long taxonomic schedule attached to the Government of India Act of 1935) were restricted by the growing power of the Indian National Congress. Like an anaconda, Mohandas Gandhi intended to squeeze his opponent by appropriating the untouchables as his own. He had renamed them “harijans”—or “children of god”—which looked to Ambedkar like a patronizing means of maintaining the birthmarked position of his community. “What is Gandhism?” he asked, angry at the Mahatma’s ability to appeal to the Indian heart rather than the head. “Barring this illusory campaign against untouchability, Gandhism is simply … militant orthodox Hinduism. What is there in Gandhism which is not to be found in orthodox Hinduism?” In his passion and clarity, Ambedkar reads here like Orwell. He translated Gandhi’s characteristic but baffling words from his Gujarati journal Navajivan:
I believe that interdining or intermarriage are not necessary for promoting national unity … Taking food is as dirty an act as answering the call of nature … Just as we perform the act of answering the call of nature in seclusion so also the act of taking food must also be done in seclusion. In India children of brothers do not intermarry. Do they cease to love because they do not intermarry? … The caste system cannot be said to be bad because it does not allow interdining or intermarriage between different castes.
As on many things, Gandhi’s views on caste and interdining altered as he went along. He had declared in 1921 that he wished personally to be reborn as an untouchable “so that I may share their sorrows, sufferings and the affronts levelled at them … I love scavenging.” Imitating the hereditary work of a sweeper would be a way of “cleaning Hindu society.” For Ambedkar, this elevation of the spiritual role of the sweeper—Gandhi’s suggestion certainly had a strong Christian ring to it—was a distraction from the factual, political reasons for his community’s oppression: “Can there be a worse example of false propaganda than this attempt of Gandhism to perpetuate evils which have been deliberately imposed by one class over another?” he wondered.5 Gandhi kept a harijan in his ashram as a symbolic gesture, but Ambedkar wanted practical, legal change and the creation of separate electorates for untouchables.
At the Round Table conferences in London in the early 1930s, Ambedkar put this case forcefully and the British government agreed to his demand. He was at an advantage in a foreign setting, since European prejudice was predicated on race rather than caste, and an untouchable was treated like any other Indian delegate. Gandhi thought separate electorates were a ploy to damage national unity during the struggle for self-rule, and responded with a “fast unto death.” Ambedkar, under great pressure now and fearing reprisals against untouchables if Gandhi were to die, met him and retreated. Their agreement became known as the “Poona Pact.” When the agreement failed to deliver any obvious benefit for his community, Ambedkar said Congress “sucked the juice out of the Poona Pact and threw the rind in the face of the untouchables,” treating them like “dumb-driven cattle.”6
Gandhi’s victory over the matter of separate electorates would later be portrayed by Dalits as a moment which retarded the community’s ability to advance. In The Chamcha Age, a book published on the fiftieth anniversary of Ambedkar’s climbdown, the Dalit leader Kanshi Ram used strong words:
The sufferings and humiliations of the slaves, the Negroes and the Jews are nothing as compared to the untouchables of India … Everywhere in the world democracy means rule of the majority. But in India 85% of people are ruled by 10 to 15% Higher Castes … Brahminism had such poisonous germs in it, that it effectively killed the desire to revolt against the worst form of injustice.7
In Kanshi Ram’s opinion, untouchables had allowed themselves to be made the chamchas, or stooges, of the upper castes.
Unlike the other founding fathers of independent India, Ambedkar is hard to read as a person (this may be because he has been neglected by Indian biographers, just as the culture of his community remains neglected by academics, except as a source of votes; many of the websites concerning Dalits are either kooky or run by evangelical Christians). In the 1930s he announced that Hinduism was beyond reform, and shortly before his death in 1956 converted to Buddhism along with his second wife, Savita, and many thousands of his followers. Despite his essential role in making the Constitution, Ambedkar was defeated by a Congress candidate in India’s first general election. In most photographs he appears opaque, giving nothing to the camera, and often he looks as if his mind is elsewhere, or as if he has seen enough. So rather than being a person, Dr. Ambedkar has instead become his myth, his portrait, his statue, holding a book in his left hand and gesturing at the world in bronze or blue plaster—blue being the chosen colour of the modern Dalit movement.
Until recently the outcaste who became the lawgiver was sidelined in pan-Indian history, as a fly in the ointment of the independence movement. The Hindi poet Omprakash Valmiki, a Dalit, stated that during the 1960s he never once heard Ambedkar’s name “from a teacher’s or a scholar’s mouth.” He went unmentioned on Republic Day. “I knew about Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Radhakrishnan, Vivekananda, Tagore, Saratchandra, Bhagat Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Savarkar, and so on, but was completely ignorant about Dr. Ambedkar.”8
Valmiki was born in 1950,
the year in which Article 17 of the Indian Constitution formally abolished untouchability. How different was life after this impressive, momentous change? In his book Joothan—the title means “slops,” referring to the waste food that people like himself were expected to collect and eat—Valmiki evokes a childhood of something like internal exile in an Uttar Pradesh village near Muzaffarnagar. His people, Chuhras, lived in narrow lanes filled with garbage and worse, and were expected to do whatever tasks they were commanded by the higher castes, sometimes for no pay. If they refused, they risked being thrashed by Hindus and Muslims alike.
Valmiki’s memoir contains much information that can be revealed only by someone deep inside a social system: how Chuhras were at the limits of Hinduism, with their own deities, religious practices and sorcery involving offerings of pigs and alcohol. With great effort, his father had him admitted to a government school. Like Ambedkar, Valmiki sat apart from the other children and was forbidden from using the water pump. As well as studying, he did hereditary work: sweeping, cleaning, dealing with dead animals, skinning buffaloes. At weddings, the Chuhras would sit outside and wait to collect the leftover leaf-plates, and then scrape up the waste food, the joothan, for boiling, drying and storing. He admits, and it is a painful admission for both reader and writer, that he relished the chance to eat joothan, such was his desperation. “If the people who call the caste system an ideal social arrangement had to live in this environment for a day or two, they would change their mind,” he observed.9
In Joothan, Omprakash Valmiki showed the effects of such long-term humiliation on an individual. Later, he became a poet and literary critic, and got a job at an ordnance factory in Dehradun. It was made clear to him in early adulthood even by some of his friends that they felt contaminated by his presence. They were worried, not without reason, by the possible consequences within their own family and community of, for example, being seen to share a meal with him. He tried in his writing to determine why this aversion was so potent but, like Ambedkar, failed to find an answer.
Casteism remains one of the aspects of Indian life that is hardest to understand. It is unlike other forms of prejudice, where antipathy is linked to envy or desire; an anti-Semite will ask why “they” do so well in business, and a white racist will fear and envy apparent black physical prowess. Prejudice against outcastes is built on the idea that you will be polluted if you go near them. They exist only to serve, and then at some distance. It is a uniquely powerful form of social control, since it is total and self-replicating. The higher castes can only remain high if they have others to look down upon. So in the not too distant past, a boy would brush against an elderly sweeper in a corridor and his mother might whisper to him: “Don’t touch, you will get a scale or turn into an insect!” A prayer of purification might follow. This would lodge in the child’s memory, and even as he grew older and less traditional—or even international, living in Europe or America—the instinctive response, the flinch, remained.
• • •
I met Anu Hasan in Chennai. She was in her late thirties and had led a varied life. She ran a marketing agency in far-off Calcutta, did modelling, starred in the 1995 movie Indira (which had a soundtrack by the double Oscar winner A. R. Rahman) and now presented a popular Tamil TV show, Koffee With Anu. In addition, she starred in the action soap Rekha IPS—IPS stood for Indian Police Service—about a woman cop. “I fight the baddies,” she said. “I do my own stunts with motorbikes and guns.” Anu Hasan had made a distinct career for herself, which in its singularity was expected. She was of normal weight, rather than looking starved like many of the Bollywood actresses, and more than anything she gave off an impression of healthy vigour.
“My mother’s a Tamil Brahmin from Andhra Pradesh and had an arranged marriage to my father. My grandfather was a lawyer. After marriage, my father shifted out of the joint family to live in a separate house. They moved to Trichy [Tiruchirapalli, in southern Tamil Nadu], though my mother went back to her home place to have her first child, my brother, as was traditional. My father trained us to be non-vegetarian, saying if we went abroad we should be able to eat everything and not have problems. He was involved in film production at Rajkamal Films, in partnership with his brother.” The brother was Kamal Haasan, one of India’s biggest film stars; Anu’s cousin was the actress Suhasini, who was married to the successful director Mani Ratnam. This family background was important to her, though she was down to earth, even offhand, when talking about it. “To other people they are stars, but to me they’re just family. When I’m in other parts of India, I think of myself as Tamilian, but when I’m in Madras I’m just ‘Anu.’ I’m not identified as a Tamil Brahmin.”
She was perhaps being optimistic here: the sentiment against the upper castes remained strong in the south. When a Madras-based newspaper, The Hindu, had called in 1908 for “natives” to be appointed as judges (they were only permitted to take junior judicial posts), the magazine Tamilan argued this would result in their further dominance: “The self-styled Brahmins migrated to this country from alien lands … If we give the power of District Magistrate to these people, they will employ the people of their caste and cheat common Hindus.”10 What Anu meant, I felt, was that she did not promote herself on-screen as a Brahmin and tried to be fluid, modern and universal. The resentment against her community was not hard to locate or to understand. When Tamilan expressed a fear of further dominance, 83 percent of sub-judges in the Madras presidency, which covered much of the territory of southern India, were Brahmin, although they only made up 3 percent of the population. After the First World War, 72 percent of Brahmin men in the region were literate, against less than 4 percent of Paraiyars (or pariahs—this was the origin of the word).11 Unlike in the north, where Brahmins were often poor despite being of high caste, here they had also been landowners, which created further resentment. In the south, caste barriers started to break down in the 1920s, in part because of the radical reforms promoted by the ideologue and activist Periyar E. V. Ramaswamy. He was the Dravidian answer to Dr. Ambedkar and considered the ruling castes to be a greater threat than the British.
“I was twenty-four when I came out of college,” said Anu, “but I looked seventeen and my cousin asked me to act in a movie she was directing. So I did Indira. I got too old to play leads, so I had roles like sister or mother of the hero. There are nearly a hundred Tamil films a year—it’s the biggest regional industry after Bombay. I said I didn’t want to be the kind of actress who wears skimpy clothes and runs around a tree in a romantic scene with the hero. In 2006, Koffee With Anu happened.”
Everyone I met in south India seemed to watch this soft, light-hearted chat show, done in Tamil with occasional asides in English. It was based on a more irreverent Bollywood show, Koffee With Karan, presented by the director Karan Johar, who had made hits like My Name Is Khan and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. When I watched a few episodes, Anu, wearing a frilly dress or a formal sari, greeted the guests with joined palms and sat them down on a swish but homely set. “We’re not looking for their bad side. People here expect a certain sort of behaviour. One of the actresses—Namitha—was wearing a top that showed a bit of cleavage, and we had complaints. Things like ‘Have you forgotten what Tamil culture is?’ A while back there was a problem when a woman in a skirt was photographed crossing her legs while the chief minister was speaking. There’s no porn industry in Tamil Nadu—most of it is imported from Kerala.” This was not quite accurate: there was Tamil porn, but the performers were restrained and usually took off only their tops. In one film, a man writhed around with a woman who wore cycling trunks, and she pacified him in a maternal fashion.
What did it mean to be a Tamil Brahmin in modern India? “We’re known for being highly educated, intelligent, a shade arrogant. Everything is distinct—there’s a special language, and a particular way of tying a sari if you are a Brahmin.” She did a sketch of an extra long sari pulled up at the waist. “Within our community, there’s a distinction whether you a
re Iyengar or Iyer. There was a court case about a new temple elephant at Kanchipuram. The priests at the temple were arguing whether the elephant was Thengalai or Vadagalai—which are Iyengar subsects—and went to law over it. I believe it took seventy years before the judgement was made, which was that for six months of each year the elephant was Thengalai, and for six months it was Vadagalai.” How would they signify that the beast followed one sect rather than the other? “By the ‘naamam’—the mark on its forehead—which is like the one the followers of the religious tradition wear. One is a ‘U’ shape and the other is a ‘Y’ shape. I believe the elephant died soon after the judgement, though depending on who you are speaking to it was either while the ‘U’ or the ‘Y’ was being applied.
“When I am with a non-Brahmin Tamil, I will use a different vocabulary, I will say ‘thanni’ for water, ‘rasam’ for rasam [a peppery, sour tomato soup]. With a Brahmin, I would say ‘jalam’ for water, ‘saathamudhu’ for rasam. Our food is different. Traditionally, a woman would bustle around in the house and she wouldn’t go outside. If my grandmother was ill and a non-Brahmin doctor came to the house, a silk cloth was put over her wrist so he could take her pulse. The old rules started to break down a while back. We have ‘madi’—the idea that you must do things in a particular way, like being bathed and clean before you cook, or that you should wash your hands before serving rice, again before you serve sambar, again before you serve vegetables. Now you might just do it symbolically, with a splash of water, if elders are there. We don’t hug or show emotions; it’s considered infra dig to do so. A boy who is really timid, you will say he’s ‘thayirsaadham’ or ‘thacchimammu.’ It means ‘curd and rice’—that he’s so well-behaved he’s like curd and rice. Drinking is seen as all right, though many people are still shocked if a woman drinks, or smokes cigarettes.