It caused an almighty ruckus.
‘What does she think she’s doing,’ the mother screamed, ‘giving pills like this to my daughter?’
My mother was embarrassed and contrite. But, not unreasonably, she also asked: What did you think you were doing, sending your daughter to an elderly and senile ex-gynaecologist for medical advice in the first place?
Now, when she is forced to look back, Prakash maintains the death of her husband was the beginning of her life. Without his loss, she admits, she would never have become her own person. The tragedy is how the road to this place left her blind and blinkered. Suffering so much pain, she could not see a way to live, or let others live. She could never see how happiness was a choice as much as a circumstance, nor could she see the way in which the power she developed as a woman could have been the gift she had for her daughters. She saved girls from abortions, but still believed they were a curse. For all her achievements, her fundamental belief in the conservative and patriarchal social structures of India remained.
BAMBOO BASKETS AND BROCADE SARIS: LIFE AND STORIES OF DALIT WOMEN
C.S. LAKSHMI
When I was young, I once spread the world map on the floor and decided that I would go and live in that country where no discrimination existed in terms of colour, birth, race, gender, language or knowledge. I kept crossing out one country after another, and finally the entire map was filled with cross marks except for the oceans. That discrimination, prejudice and segregation exist in all countries is the truth of the world we live in.
In 1988 I set up the Sound & Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW) along with two academic friends, Dr Neera Desai and Dr Maithreyi Krishna Raj. We wanted to document women’s lives and women’s history, for the three of us strongly believed that positive change is possible only when we understand women’s lives, history and struggles for self-respect and human dignity.
In the last twenty-five years of documenting and archiving, our anchor project has been oral history documentation. Recording the oral narratives of women from various walks of life – artists, writers, feminists, environmentalists, freedom fighters, educationists, political activists and scientists – has been an important part of our work.
We have recorded and documented the narratives of more than one hundred women writers. One such writer is Urmila Pawar, a Marathi writer whose writings reflect Dalit experiences of living and working. In India, there are four primary castes: the Brahmins (priests), Kshatriya (warriors and princes), Vaisya (farmers, traders and artisans) and Shudra (tenant farmers and servants). Those who were known as untouchables, and treated as untouchables, were considered below the caste system and had the lowest social status, because they were expected to do the menial work of the society. ‘Dalit’ has now become the term that defines them completely, for it carries with it not only the weight of years of oppression but also years of resistance of oppression. The language to write about their lives and politics has also changed. In all the Indian languages they are no more referred to as lower castes but lowered castes.
In Urmila’s narration of her life one can see many stories, and in her stories one can see her life.
I come from the Dalit community [in Konkan]. My mother did not study; she was illiterate. My father had studied up to the sixth standard. Everybody in the village would think he had studied a lot. In those days it was possible to get a job after the sixth standard. So he was a teacher.
I was in the third standard when my father passed away. But since he was a teacher, he knew that a person needs education to progress. He had built a small house, like a hut, in Ratnagiri town and he brought us there [from the village Phansawale]. That is how we started to go to school. He had told my mother, ‘Do whatever you can, but don’t stop the children from going to school. Let them study.’ So the one thing my mother understood was that we had to study. If we did not study she would beat us. She knew how to beat very well. When my father died, she had us six brothers and sisters to take care of. One of our brothers had already passed away, so there were [actually] five of us …
We did not have enough to eat. My mother would therefore weave baskets; that was her work – to sit and weave.
My brother passed his S.S.C. [Secondary School Certificate] exams and then he caught typhoid and died. The pain of his death and the death of my father made her cry often. She only remembered how to cry and weave. She was concerned only about our studies. We would eat really low-quality food and wear poor clothes. I would not even bathe for four or five days. I would play in the dust and I would have plenty of lice in my hair. Water would be boiled hot and then a little washing soda would be mixed with it and rubbed into our hair, and then [she] washed [our hair] with this boiling water. Mother would then comb hard to pick out lice. When she poured hot water and combed through my hair, I could see stars before my eyes like flashing lightning.
There were those belonging to Maratha1, Brahmin and other castes living around us. These people would ask mother to weave baskets [for them] and since I was the youngest, she would always ask me to go to such and such person’s house to deliver the baskets. I would go, but they would make me stand outside their house. They would sprinkle water over the basket. They would drop the money from above into my hands. I would feel really hurt. So I would tell my mother that I would not go.
… I would bunk school. Because I did not go to school, the teacher would beat me. The teacher would also practise caste discrimination. He would make me sit in the last row.
One good thing was that our father had brought us to a town. We benefited from that. We could see and learn the rituals, traditions and customs, ways of behaviour, ways of eating, and how we should keep our clothes clean, from the Brahmin and Maratha children in our class. And we began to behave like them. We did not have that kind of food at home. We did not have the recipes. We ate roti and machli [fish] because we were from Konkan and the machli that we ate was also of low quality. We did not know of big fish like halwa and pomfret. We went to their houses and learned how to make ladoos and other things for Diwali. If I tried to make these at home, my mother would scold me because it would need a lot of oil, a lot of flour. So she would not let me do it. And because she was unhappy, she would cry.
… During those days people were very backward. They would not get good food to eat, so the life expectancy of women was also very low. A woman would get very old by the time she was fifty. Thirty-five- or forty-year-old women would be called old. ‘That old hag’, they would call her. Now, even if we turn seventy, eighty, we do not feel like calling someone ‘old woman’. We don’t even think about being old women. But it was like this earlier … Even when they got pregnant, they would be in a bad state. Nobody would attend to them …
When women deliver today, we talk about stitches, how many stitches are needed and so on. What they would do those days was, if someone’s body would tear during delivery, they would take a cloth, put a lot of salt water and a little bit of oil over it, fold the cloth over and give it to her and she had to bear it. They would give the salt-fold because salt has some protective qualities. They would give a hot fomentation. They would put burning coals in a sigri [charcoal stove] and let her breathe the smoke. She should sleep above it. Otherwise they would say, ‘The body will ring out,’ meaning she would pass wind and it would make a noise [and she is not supposed to make any kind of noise]. They would pour the hottest water possible on [the women’s] hips. This meant that the task of giving birth to a child was [very difficult] for a woman. Some women would have the child’s leg coming out, some would have the hand, there would be no doctor and the woman would die. The condition of women was very backward.
When I grew older, from among my relatives, all the women had shorter life expectancy. My maternal aunt was dead. Mostly they would catch TB, or [have] asthma. Other diseases like cholera or chicken pox would spread and a lot of women would fall victim to these. The women would die and then there was the [inevitable] second marriag
e. There are a lot of my relatives who have married twice or thrice. These women were not even aware of hygiene. They would wipe their nose and give roti with the same hand. My sister’s mother-in-law would scratch her foot and then serve the roti with the same hand. When I would say, ‘No, there could be germs,’ she would say, ‘What germs? Where can you see germs?’
Women worked very hard and often died early because poverty made it impossible to ward off diseases and deaths; however, it was not as if there were no tender moments in this life of poverty and oppression. Urmila spoke about an aunt who used to visit them, and how her mother expressed love for her:
I remember, there was this chachi [aunt] of my mother’s, she loved my mother a lot. When she would come over, even my mother would [show her affection]. She lived alone. When she would come, bathing was a ritual. She would be bathed and given good clothes; good as in my mother’s sense of the term. They were just clothes [washed] with a little soap. We would give her good clothes. And how was she bathed? There would be love in it, a lot of love. She would be made to sit, water would be heated, and khopra [coconut] – no soap, only coconut [was used] – Mummy would cut a piece of it, chew it and spit it on her hands and she would rub it on Chachi’s arms and her body. We were young, we would not understand it – about the coconut. The chachi, she would go to her village and say, ‘I had gone to my niece. She bathed me with chewed coconut.’
We did not use sugar in tea. We used jaggery. We did not know the use of milk at all. Our tea was without milk. We stayed in the city, so we would get a little sugar. She was given tea with sugar. She would be overwhelmed.
Often Urmila is criticised for writing about Dalit men who do injustice to their women. Dalit male writers sometimes ask her why she does not write the way they do and speak in general about the life of Dalits and the oppression they face without being gender-specific. Why does she write about her community the way she does? Urmila was also told that writing about the Dalit community may be used as a weapon by the upper castes against them, especially against Dalit men. The critics saw it as a kind of betrayal.
Urmila has dismissed the criticism, saying that it need not be seen as a weapon, and that such criticism cannot be used as a weapon against women either. In her own life, Urmila would like to straddle Dalit and feminist identities. She does not think that they are mutually exclusive.
The women from our village would come to the town to sell grass that they had cut, or wood. Our house was next to the road. My father had dug a well in our house. No one would give these women water to drink in the bazaar. They would suffer a lot. They would start from their homes at four in the morning. They would walk eight or ten miles barefoot. Their feet would be chapped, they would gather dust, their hair would be knotted and they would not have good clothes. They had no water.
My father had given my mother good advice that this well should be kept open for women. The rope and the bucket that was needed to pull out the water would also be there for those women. But my mother was very poor and miserly. She would not feel like leaving the rope there because [constant use] would easily break it. She would have to buy it again. So she would remove it and keep it aside. My father would get angry with her.
The women who would come to drink water would sit and eat their roti and chatni. I would steal onions from home and give [the onions] to them. Mummy would get very angry with me for that. When they would come, they would tell my mother all the village gossip. As she would weave, she would listen.
There was one thing about my mother – if she heard anything from someone she would not tell another person. It’s like a newspaper press. Everything comes to the press but it does not get published! This is how she carried on. They all would come there – ‘My husband did this,’ ‘My mother-in-law does this,’ they would gesticulate, eat paan, spit it around and tell stories. My mother would sit in our courtyard under a small tree and weave. Sometimes I feel, if I had those baskets woven by my mother, we could place the needle on it [like in a gramophone] and spin it and they would tell us stories of all those people. We could have heard them.
She would record all the news, collect them. The mother-in-law would come and talk about the daughter-in-law: ‘She is a burden, she is useless, she has done this, she has done that.’ And she would go. Then the daughter-in-law would come and she would ask, ‘Did my mother-in-law come here?’ My mother would say, ‘No. Why, what happened?’ ‘Last night she did this,’ [she would say and add,] ‘My husband beat me. Because of her such and such a thing happened.’ My mummy wouldn’t say anything to her. They would tell my mother whatever was going on in their minds. They would all come and tell my mother, [they would] cry, all this would go on.
I would be very interested to listen. But my mother would take a stick and tell me, ‘Go to school.’ She would be after me. But I would also bunk school and come and sit down to listen to them.
There was this funny family. The husband would beat his wife, but he would never tell her why he was beating her. He would come into the house, look around, pick up a stick and beat her. If the woman would ask him, ‘Why are you beating me?’ he would not tell her why. He would not speak. So what she would do is, when he would get angry, when she would feel that he was going to beat her, she would run to our house. She would come and tell my mother, ‘This has happened. He has lost his temper,’ and so on. So what my mother would do was this. We had a loft. She would get a ladder and make the woman sit in the loft. She would then remove the ladder and tell us, ‘Go on children, go to the backyard, go behind the tree.’ We would hide there. Then he would come [and ask], ‘Has my wife come here?’ [My mother would ask,]’ No, why, what happened?’ Then he would say why he was angry. She would say, ‘Why did you get angry? You fight almost every day.’ He would say, ‘She did this. I had gone to take a bath; the water was very cold. I wanted warm water.’ [My mother would say,] ‘So, you should have told her. What is this you do?’ The woman would be listening from above.
He would come, look around in the house in the corners. But he would not think that she would be sitting above. So he would leave. He would leave after my mother had calmed him a little, saying, ‘You should tell your wife what you want and what do you do instead? You should not be doing this.’ He would leave when he had cooled down. Then the woman would leave after him. This drama would go on at our place. This kind of a mess would go on in women’s lives, but they would not feel that they were being oppressed by their caste.
Urmila and her friend Meenakshi Moon wrote a book on the contributions of Dalit women to the Dalit movement titled Amhihi Ithihaas Gadawala ( We Also Made History). It has remained a groundbreaking work: the Dalit women’s contribution to the Dalit movement had remained unspoken and unwritten. Urmila looks upon her own autobiography as a social document, for every person’s life, she feels, is a social document. She adds that she is now ready to face life stoically, as that is what her life has taught her.
It would be difficult to end this piece without a poem by Jyoti Lanjewar, who passed away recently and with whom I had the fortune to associate and interact. Jyoti was one of the foremost Marathi writers, widely acclaimed and much anthologised, and also a pioneering Dalit woman poet. Her poem on her mother is an oft-quoted one and it is also a favourite of mine. It would complete this piece like nothing else can, as it combines the images of many uneducated but wise and stoic Dalit mothers and the educated daughters they stood by.
I Have Never Seen You
I have never seen you
In a brocaded new
Nine-yard Ilkali sari2
With a gold necklace around your neck
Or gold bangles worn on your hands
Not even rubber sandals on your feet
Burning your soles in the scorching heat
Bundling the tender one of your womb and
Hanging the bundle on the acacia tree
Working with the road construction workers
Carrying barrels of tar
> I have seen you.
Your feet bound in rags
Planting a sweaty kiss on the naked child
Coming tottering towards you
Bearing the hunger knotting your entrails
And lips parched for water
Working to build a dam on the lake
On daily wages
Slaving hard
I have seen you
Deluge of tears in your eyes
Eternal summer heat in your life
When the burning sun got off your head
Picking cotton
Keeping it in your sari fold
Pushing behind the plough
Building the future of your children
I have seen you
In crowded streets balancing
The basket load on your head
Wrapping your tattered sari around your body
To guard your honour
Raising your sandal at anyone leering at you
I have seen you.
For a dream of four mud plastered walls
Your feet heavy with pregnancy
Carefully stepping on the scaffolding
Of skyscrapers
Carrying on your head
Scuttles of wet cement
I have seen you
In the late evenings
Untying the end of your sari for coins
To buy oil and salt for cooking
Placing a five paise coin
On your little one’s hand
And saying …
‘Eat whatever goodies you want
But go to school’
Lifting the little bundle from the cradle
Tenderly holding it to your breast
And saying …
‘At least, you study, become like Ambedkar3,
And relieve me of this basket load.’
I have seen you
Dragging your feet to your house
Walking Towards Ourselves Page 22