In the event, something went wrong. When the kerosene failed to light, Rajeev doused his whole body, and set it alight. His friends weren’t there: they had somehow become lost at the back of the crowd, and there was no one to put out the flames. But there were photographers, and while Rajeev burned, the shutters clicked. The next morning, while Rajeev fought for his life in hospital, his picture was on every front page.
The protest against the job reservations had needed some catalyst. Rajeev provided it. In quick succession, riots broke out in every Indian city as high-caste students – the main losers if the reservations were implemented – fought police, disrupted traffic and derailed trains. In some cities the police opened fire. There was a wave of self-immolations – deliberate this time.
The immolators were all high-caste teenagers – like Monica Chadha, a nineteen-year-old belonging to the kshatriya (warrior) caste from south Delhi. One Sunday morning she got bored with the video she was watching with her mother and five sisters, went out on to the terrace and set herself ablaze.
Susaria Mohan, aged twenty, was a Brahmin computer programmer from Hyderabad, the son of a temple priest. He walked to the city’s main shopping centre with a bottle of petrol, and there he burned himself to death. His suicide note said he had done it to disprove V.P. Singh’s claim that the riots had not spread to the south.
Rajasthan was one of the main centres of the agitation. Here, centuries of rule by Rajput Maharajahs had left a legacy of caste distinctions as monolithic as any in India. In every village, the Rajputs – the ancient warrior caste – were still the landowners and the lower castes still their serfs. Social mobility was virtually unknown. Thus, when the new government measures were announced, the shock was greater there than elsewhere. Peaceful tourist towns like Jaipur exploded with rage. In Jodhpur, Rajput students battled with police almost as violently as their warrior ancestors had fought the Great Moghuls. The attack on Dr Tyagi’s field centre was just one among many similar incidents.
When I went to Rajasthan a month after the riots started, the violence had begun to subside, but emotions were still running high. In the centre of Jodhpur, in a tented pavilion erected on the town’s principal roundabout, I found an angry group of high-caste students. They waved black flags and clustered round a makeshift shrine – a picture of the burning Rajeev Goswami and a statue of the monkey god Hanuman (‘to give us strength to fight the government’).
‘In old times, these Untouchables were oppressed, but today nothing,’ said Shyam Vyas, the students’ leader. He shook his head with horror: ‘If they get government jobs, everything will break down.’
‘They will be wanting to marry Rajput girls,’ said his assistant, Arvind Chaudary.
‘And anyway,’ pointed out a third student, ‘if there is no person to sweep the roads, where will the dust be going?’
Many of the students nursed genuine personal grievances. Arvind Chaudary said that he got 80 per cent in his examinations, but because of the reservations he had been refused a place at Jodhpur College. In his class there was a tanner’s boy – an Untouchable – who had scored only 30 per cent, but because there were few Untouchables applying for the college, and because its caste quota had to be filled by law, the boy had been given a place.
As I was leaving, the students broke in to a great chorus of denunciation against the man who, as they put it, was trying ‘to make these bungi [oiks] sit on our head’.
‘V.P. Singh,’ they shouted. ‘He is dog!’
‘Not dog, pig!’
‘Bad than Hitler!’
‘Enemy of India!’
The students’ argument was that today the lower castes had the same opportunities as anyone else, and if many of them were poor, then so were many Brahmins.
Like all the most powerful lies, what they said was rooted in a shadow of half-truth. For even in conservative Rajasthan there were some Untouchables who were doing well. Forty miles outside Jodhpur lies the village of Gadvada. Here there lives a large community of leatherworkers, one of the lowest sub-castes of Untouchables, doubly outcaste for working with dead animals and for skinning India’s nominally sacred cows. For years they had pursued the thankless and badly paid trade of stitching together leather shoes, but recently they had had a stroke of luck. They were good at their work, and their skills came to the notice of an idealistic Delhi exporter who had employed twenty stitchers to make high-quality leather goods for export to the West. He paid them fifty rupees (£1) a day, well over double the official Indian minimum wage, and riches compared to the five rupees a day that the Rajputs paid day labourers in their fields. As the stitchers worked in pairs, usually of brothers, it was now possible for one family to receive three thousand rupees (£60) a month.
In rural Rajasthan this is big money, and in Gadvada the prosperity was beginning to show. The village had recently been connected to the electrical grid. Many houses boasted ceiling fans, and there were six television sets in the village. The leatherworkers’ shop was surrounded by a rank of brand new bicycles. Inside was a new stereo system with a pair of huge loudspeakers surmounted by a bizarre battery of flashing strip-lights.
Socially, the tanners were still untouchable. But untouchability is a relative thing, and for the leatherworkers of Gadvada it meant apartness rather than oppression. They had a separate well from other castes, relaxed in separate chai shops, worshipped a different set of Hindu deities, and lived physically at a distance from the main village. But they were now rich, and they no longer had to defer to the high castes in the way that they had once done – for example by removing their shoes and getting down from their bullock carts when a Rajput or a Brahmin passed by. Indeed, several of the leatherworkers had now leased farmland to the middle castes. They were upwardly mobile Untouchables – yuppy Harijans.
But Gadvada is an exceptional case. In most Rajasthan villages the traditional order of the caste system is completely intact, and caste prejudice has a free rein. The village of Gagadi, where Dr Tyagi had his field centre, is typical. Gagadi is home to about a hundred families from ten different castes: Rajputs and Brahmins are at the top of the social pyramid, Jats and Bishnoi in the middle. Below them are three low castes – the musicians, potmakers and shepherds – and finally three Untouchable castes – the tanners, blacksmiths and sweepers.
The strength of caste feeling can be horrifying. Bhera Ram is a charming old man of the Bishnoi caste. He has ebullient moustaches, has never touched alcohol and is strictly vegetarian. He has eighteen grandchildren, readily offers tea to visitors, and smiles amiably as he chats about the harvest. Yet when I mentioned the plan to reserve government jobs for the lower castes, Bhera Ram narrowed his eyes.
‘In the old days, under the Maharajah, everyone knew their place,’ he spluttered, turban quivering with rage. ‘Now these bungi [oiks] want to break down social barriers. How can a sweeper be my equal?’
‘You think they should be your servants?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Just as I respect a Maharajah, so the bungi must respect me.’
‘And do they no longer respect you?’
‘The ones who are educated create problems. When I want them to work on my fields they do not come. They say they have other work.’
‘Would you let a Harijan come in to your house?’
‘If a bungi ever tried to come near my house I would beat him with my shoe, then I would kill him,’ said Bhera Ram without hesitation.
In the end, only time and education can hope to remove the stigma of the caste system. Just before I left Gagadi, I had a chance to talk to one of Bhera Ram’s grandchildren, Oma Ram. Bhera Ram was especially proud of him, as he was the first of the family to go to school. He was a good-looking boy, nearing his thirteenth birthday. Were there any Untouchables in his class at school, I asked.
‘There is one sweeper boy.’
‘Is he your friend?’
‘Yes, but I cannot mix with him out of school because of my family.’
‘Do you think that is a good thing?’
‘No,’ replied Oma Ram. ‘I treat everyone equal.’ He thought for a second, then nodded: ‘Yes, when I have a hut I will keep equality there.’
Postscript
Dr Tyagi rebuilt his field centre and continues to do brave work in and around Jodhpur and Gagadi.
V.P. Singh’s decision to implement the Mandai Commission Report on reservations for the lower castes eventually helped bring down his government. In November 1990 he was replaced as Prime Minister by the Rajput Chandra Shekhar, who had led the opposition to the policy.
Since 1990, however, reservations have begun to be fitfully introduced by many state governments, and in some areas of the south, such as Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, as many as 65 per cent of government jobs are now reserved for the lowest castes. Moreover, in 1997 K.R. Narayanan, a Keralan Untouchable, became India’s first Dalit President, and an important symbol of lower-caste emancipation. At the same time the rise of lower-caste politicians, particularly in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, has important long-term implications for the status of the Dalits.
Nevertheless, for all these changes, in much of rural India the caste system remains firmly entrenched. Indeed, if anything, it seems likely that the policy of reservations and the Dalits’ recent assertion of political power have both brought about a new awareness of caste.
Sati Mata
DEORALA, JAIPUR, 1997
On 22 October 1996, thirty-two men trooped out of a courtroom in to the bright desert sunlight of the small Rajasthani town of Neem Ka Thana. After a trial lasting ten years and a controversy which profoundly divided the people of India, the thirty-two men were finally cleared of ritually burning to death an eighteen-year-old widow, and attempting to revive the ancient Hindu practice of sati.
In Rajasthan, like many of the more traditional parts of India, different centuries, even different millennia manage to exist side by side. In the larger towns, advertisements for cellular phones and satellite television now score a skyline once dominated by the spires of temples. But head out in to the countryside and you soon have the unnerving sensation of the twentieth century simply slipping away.
Turning off the Jaipur–Delhi highway and driving north in to the arid thorn-scrub, you leave the modern world far behind you. Cars and trucks disappear, to be replaced by camel and bullock carts. Women carry water from wells in bulbous brass pots balanced carefully on their heads. Occasionally at road junctions you pass small domed cenotaphs commemorating the site of some long-forgotten sati: a memorial put up to mark the place where a living, breathing widow chose to climb atop her husband’s burning funeral pyre, sacrificing herself to ensure her husband’s successful rebirth. In this way she is believed to join her soul with the goddess Sati Mata and to bring good luck to her family and her village for seven generations. Under the domes of the cenotaphs stand a series of stone stelae, some dating back to the sixth century AD. On these are carved small, primitive sculptures of a husband and wife standing side by side, sometimes with the husband’s arm over his wife’s shoulders. The cenotaphs – known as chattris – are cool, peaceful spots, and standing beside them listening to the cooing of Rajasthani rock doves, it is easy to forget the violence and brutality of the events they commemorate.
Sati is still deeply engrained in the culture of many parts of rural India, and nowhere more so than in Rajasthan, which is now the centre of the cult of the goddess Sati Mata. Historically, of course, widow-burning is not unique to India: Greek myths record its presence in Europe, and there is archaeological evidence for its existence among the Scythian tribes of the Central Asian steppe. Moreover, the practice has links to the widespread ancient belief that a man needed his companions in the afterlife as much as in this world. But its presence in India is recorded from at least the first century BC – sati appears in the Mahabharata and in the Indian writings of the Greek historian and traveller Diodorus Siculus – and from the third century AD onwards it became increasingly common, with the very greatest reverence being paid to those women who (in the eyes of the Hindu faithful) sacrificed themselves for their family’s well-being. In Rajasthan the cult came to be particularly associated with the warrior Rajput caste, who saw sati as an expression of their martial valour: while the men showed their bravery by fighting the Muslim sultans of Delhi, the women showed theirs by opting to die on their husbands’ funeral pyres.
Sati began to die out elsewhere in India after the British banned it in 1829, but astonishingly, in Rajasthan it has lingered on to the present day in some of the more distant villages, with around forty cases thought to have taken place since Independence. The most recent – and much the most controversial – of these satis took place in the village of Deorala. There, on 4 September 1987, Roop Kanwar, an exceptionally beautiful eighteen-year-old Rajasthani girl, was burned to death on her husband’s pyre.
Roop was the youngest of six children in a middle-class Rajput family, and had grown up in the Rajasthani state capital of Jaipur, where her father ran a trucking company. She was well educated, and had finished ten years of schooling by the time her parents arranged for her to marry Maal Singh, the son of a Rajput landowning family from Deorala, where many of Roop’s cousins lived.
In the photographs Roop has large, sensuous eyes and finely chiselled cheekbones. Some newspaper reports talked of her painting her nails – the mark of an outrageously modern girl in conservative Rajasthan – but her family say that she was always unusually religious. She had been married only eight months when her husband, Maal Singh, began to complain of stomach pains. On 2 September 1987 he was taken by Roop to the local hospital at Sikar, north of Jaipur. The doctors said his condition was not serious, so Roop returned home that evening. That night, however, Maal’s appendix burst, and he died in the early hours of the morning. The body was brought back to Deorala by Maal’s father. Roop had no children. Now she was faced with the prospect of spending the rest of her life as a childless widow. In a traditional Indian village this is regarded as the lowest form of life. High-caste widows like her would be expected to shave their heads, sleep on the floor, wear only simple white clothes and to perform menial tasks; for a woman of Roop Kanwar’s caste there would be no possibility of remarriage.
The following morning, the young widow appeared at the door of the family’s eighteenth-century haveli. She was dressed in her finest wedding sari, decked in jewellery, with her hands brightly painted with bridal henna. Word had already spread about what was going to happen, and the young widow soon found herself leading a procession of over six hundred villagers through the narrow lanes of Deorala, past a line of crumbling havelis and some abandoned camel carts, past the village shops and the village well.
On reaching the cremation ground the procession wound its way through a cluster of centuries-old cenotaphs erected to commemorate three satis which had taken place in the village in the Middle Ages. There Roop Kanwar split off from the crowd, and three times circled the funeral pyre that had been erected in the shade of a wide, spreading peepul tree. As she did this her in-laws raised Maal Singh’s body – wrapped in a white shroud, but with his face showing – on to the logs. Then Roop climbed up on to the pyre, put her husband’s head on her lap and commanded her sixteen-year-old brother-in-law to light the kindling. Brahmin priests intoned Sanskrit prayers, drums began to beat and the crowd took up the chant ‘Sati Mata ki jai!’ Long live Sati Mata! ‘Jab tak suraj chand rahega, Roop Kanwar tera nam rahega!’ As long as there is a sun and a moon, Roop Kanwar’s name will live!
The pyre was apparently slow to catch alight, and when a police constable arrived some fifteen minutes later Roop Kanwar may still just have been alive. But the constable did not intervene, and eventually the flames did their work. Within half an hour Roop Kanwar and her husband had both been reduced to ashes.
On these events there is general agreement. But beyond the bare facts there is profound dissent about what happened in Deorala on the day of Roop Kanwar’s sa
ti; indeed, the controversy soon grew in to a major national debate, splitting the country in two.
Roop’s own family, her in-laws and the whole of the village maintain that the young widow voluntarily gave herself up to the pyre. They say she firmly resisted all attempts, by both her in-laws and the village Brahmins, to dissuade her from becoming a sati. They say an almost supernatural calm came over her as she processed through the village, blessing passers-by who fell at her feet to touch her robes, and performing a miracle on the way by healing the bleeding of an elderly relative. They say she smiled beatifically from the pyre as the flames danced around her. This is the version that is uncritically accepted by the Hindu faithful of rural Rajasthan, who quickly turned Roop in to both a saint and a goddess: within a fortnight of her burning, three quarters of a million people had turned up to worship at the site of her pyre.
But the police, the state government, Indian feminist organisations and most of the English-language Indian media will have none of this. There was deep embarrassment in both Jaipur and New Delhi when the news broke about the survival of such a primeval tradition, and within a few days the Jaipur police had started to leak stories to the papers which implied that what had happened in Deorala was not sati, but a barbaric public execution in which the entire village was implicated. Roop’s marriage was said to have been a failure, and it was hinted that she might even have been conducting an affair; it was also pointed out that she was well educated and not particularly religious. The chances of such a woman voluntarily jumping on her husband’s funeral pyre were – so the reports implied – next to zero. It was suggested that Roop had been pressurised in to the sati by her in-laws, then drugged with opium; and that her ‘beatific calm’ was not due to spiritual ecstasy, but to the mesmeric effects of the opium poppy.
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