This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

  In fact, as more and more Dalits and others who had been victimized by the hatred of the relatively privileged were asserting their rights, the social backlash against them was mounting. In Uttar Pradesh, two Dalit brothers, who were sons of a daily-wage labourer, made headlines after securing admission to the coveted IIT in Kanpur. But right after that announcement and the public commitment by politicians that their tuition fees would be taken care of, the rest of the village gathered to throw stones at their home.

  We like to believe that in the melting pots of the country’s sprawling new cities these historic discriminations have been eliminated by the imperatives of economics and the realities of modern urban living. So how do we explain the impotency of industrialization when two infants, a two-year-old and his nine-month-old sister, are burnt alive by feuding ‘upper-caste’ neighbours—right on the edge of Delhi—in Faridabad, a township that was among the first to become a commercial hub for factories and manufacturing? We imagine that capitalism has conquered caste, but its insidious imprint is everywhere, often unacknowledged, even unnoticed. Most kitchens still keep a separate tumbler for the woman who comes every morning to mop and clean, reinforcing the age-old Brahminical association of Dalits with so-called ‘impure’ occupations. There was, until recently, the infamous 350-metre-long ‘Uthapuram’ (untouchable) fence in a village in Tamil Nadu built across the length of the panchayat area to segregate Dalits from the rest of the residents for three decades till it was forcibly brought down. But that isn’t the only atrocity some of our countrymen have to deal with.

  In satellite towns connected to the national capital by multi-lane expressways, where swanky showrooms for Volvo and Mercedes have replaced wayside dhabas, you can still be killed for marrying ‘below’ your caste. And despite the committees and commissions, bills and bans, the railway lines that run through the major cities of India are still cleaned by manual ‘scavengers’, all Dalits and mostly all women, who carry human shit off the tracks, and are ostracized for doing this ‘dirty’ job. The ‘Bhangis’, as people belonging to the sweeper caste are known, are treated as outcasts; they are the lowest of the low—‘a people apart, even among people apart’ as political scientist and journalist Harold Isaacs once described them. In India’s elite drawing rooms however, the word is sometimes used as a pejorative for an absence of social sophistication. Among the comfort of friends who naturally believe they are too evolved to ever display caste-bias, there are still sniggers about Dalit politicians who ‘look like Chamars’, a reference to the tanning community that derives its name from the Sanskrit word for leather workers—Charmakar. Once again, however innocuous these jokes—that these words are used as synonyms for unattractive or ugly makes a mockery of the claim that urbanization and the growth of cities would flatten out the caste divide.

  At one level, it would seem as if the semiology of the broom (and thus the status of the sweeper) had dramatically changed. The ‘jhadu’ is the party symbol of the activist turned chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal. It is also the centrepiece of the prime minister’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Campaign). Now fashionistas, industrialists and movie stars wanted to be photographed, broom in hand, sweeping the streets in a moment of glamorous and trendy egalitarianism. The Modi government deserves credit for mainstreaming the subject of sanitation and toilets. But as recently as 2014, India’s Supreme Court had accepted that the ‘practice of manual scavenging continues unabated’.

  India passed a law in 1993 mandating the demolition of all dry toilets. Two decades later, the official census still placed the number of manual scavengers at 750,000. Activists argue that the statistic is at least 1.3 million because those who pick human waste from the thousands of kilometres of rail tracks crisscrossing India have not been factored in.

  Caste having consigned them to this life, most women who are manual scavengers believe they will never be entitled to alternative sources of employment. No state is willing to admit to the continuing practice of scavenging but you don’t have to go very far down the multi-lane expressways to meet Indians whose survival remains tethered to a variation of modern-day slavery.

  Maya Gautam was one such person. She came to meet me from Meerut, a bustling industrial hub no further than seventy-odd kilometres from Delhi. Resplendent in a purple sari, her eyes lined with thick black kajal, her nose ring as shiny as her wide-set smile, Maya’s personal resilience had helped her stay alive though she had contemplated suicide more than once. ‘I stayed alive for my children,’ she said, detailing the fifteen years she had spent cleaning shit from homes in her immediate neighbourhood. ‘Even beggars shun us, people who have no money to eat don’t consider our caste clean enough to ask for alms,’ she said. It wasn’t just the stomach-churning stench of her daily livelihood or the exposure to infection and disease that made her life hell, it was the denial of personal dignity. She was considered ‘dirtier’ than the bathrooms she cleaned. When she entered the loo, she was forced to leave her slippers at the door. When her employers paid her, they flung the money on the floor to avoid contact with her hand and watched her get down on her knees to pick it up. Until, one day, she fired back: ‘How do you know I won’t buy vegetables with this cash? How do you know the money won’t recirculate in the market and come back to you through some shopkeeper?’

  V

  Maya Gautam’s retort to those who humiliated her would not have been possible without the bold step taken by one man whom many feel has not got his due. When Manmohan Singh got up in Parliament to implement the vision of his then boss P. V. Narasimha Rao, prefacing the budget that transformed the lives of millions with a Victor Hugo quote, ‘no power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come’, it was one of the greatest turning points the country has ever experienced. As we have seen throughout the book, that moment wrought change everywhere in Indian society. Without it, there would have been no India Shining, the rise and rise of Narendra Modi would probably not have occurred, nor would we have witnessed developments like India’s ambition to become the world’s newest nuclear superpower and its current status as the world’s fastest growing major economy.

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  Before 1991, most of us who identified ourselves as ‘middle class’ were the children of salaried professionals—bureaucrats, journalists, military officers and company executives—with a somewhat childish and irrational air of cultural superiority, especially to those who were from ‘business’ families. I went to school in the eighties when our exposure to foreign brands was mostly through advertisements that we saw on videotaped reruns of the great Pakistani romantic drama Dhoop Kinare. College began in the nineties, right on the cusp of India’s first wave of economic reforms. Until then, to be a middle-class Indian meant you displayed a slight scorn for and embarrassment at any obvious display of money. Middle-class values were all about a premium on education and reading books and bringing your children up to be progressive, pluralistic and even somewhat rebellious.

  At Delhi’s Modern School, as prefect, I made myself vastly unpopular by confiscating the Nike and Reebok socks that the wealthier children insisted on wearing instead of the dull, blue uniform gear mandated by the school. Looking back, my self-righteousness must have been unbearable. But at the time it was a natural extension of the middle-class values I had been shaped by. We rode the school bus, scorned the carpool and when we stayed back after school to play basketball or write for the magazine we travelled back home in overflowing public transport, pushed and shoved against sweaty palms and groping hands.

  Later, in college, at Delhi’s St Stephen’s, we even had a whole different way of classifying those who were richer, more glamorous, drove or were driven to university and spent their afternoons smoking cigarettes bought from over-generous weekly allowances. They were called the ‘Dhaba type’ because their college haunt was the legendary samosas and nimbu-pani shack run by old man Rohtas, who came to be more famous than the institute’s big-name alumni. But the categorization was cultural not loca
tional. It captured a sub-culture of fashionable, unapologetic opulence that was distinct from the ‘leftie types’ who dressed down in shabby chic, walked the corridors in floppy rubber slippers, had animated debates on the conservatism of stifling social mores and economic inequities and considered themselves to be the more grounded sliver of India’s middle-class with authentic claims to ordinariness.

  I belonged to the latter tribe. Wealth creation among our lot was never an aspiration but educational pedigree was. Yet, we thought of ourselves as deeply egalitarian and overlooked our innate snobbery about intellectual labels. My college sweetheart was the son of a naval officer whose mother spoke of a time when money was so short that she used giant steel trunks dressed up with colourful throws as substitutes for sofas. When we spent an evening out it was often on the back of his decrepit ‘Vijay Super’ Lambretta—a twenty-year-old scooter which was a hand-me-down from the clerk in his grandfather’s office. Both he and my best friend worked hard to get themselves a world-class education. I managed to land myself a scholarship to Columbia University’s journalism school without which I would have had to turn down the admission offer because even if my father sold all his investments and assets we would never have managed the Rs 14 lakh annual tuition. I mention all this simply to show how important education was to our lives and how we scorned conspicuous consumption.

  None of us had much money and we (immaturely) scrambled to hide anything that could be even remotely considered flashy. When my father brought home a second-hand Mercedes after a seven-year residency posting in New York my sister and I wondered how we would explain it to our friends at school. Our family car till then had been a grey Padmini Fiat whose roof-carrier doubled up as a bed under the skies for us girls on balmy summer nights of load-shedding in Delhi.

  Now, how were we going to explain the Merc? Remember, this was the eighties and ‘foreign’ cars were still a rarity. My sister christened the car ‘Benzy’ and we secretly loved the magic of its sunroof that opened up to the elements. But we remained sheepish about the existence of this fancy creature in our driveway, in an odd and telling juxtaposition with our shabby makeshift swing—an old car tire strung from a tall tree. For years we continued to fib and tell our friends, when the subject came up, that our car was a Fiat.

  Even the movies were different in the years before globalization both glamorized and standardized storytelling on screen. Today’s Hindi cinema characters, with their perfectly toned bodies and coiffed hairdos, rarely tell the story of the Everyman or woman. As shooting locations moved out from Kashmir and Ooty and Shimla to the Swiss Alps, Spain and New York, the target viewer became the ‘global desi’.

  This was the upwardly mobile Indian—a product of the new middle class—who loved both her samosa and sushi, her KFC and Karva Chauth. She was at home in the world, but preferred her own society to be ordered in a reasonably conformist way—that was a reflection of herself. She did not go to the movies to see the angst and struggle of the underclass or the rage of the honest cop against a corrupt system. For her, the film itself was another element of an evening out in a swanky multiplex where ‘American corn’ and ‘nachos with salsa’ supplemented the humble popcorn. And if you were willing to pay a little more, waiters would bring your food to your plush seats. You couldn’t get this sort of luxury in London or New York unless you had access to a private theatre.

  In many ways, the single-hall cinemas of pre-liberalization India and modern multi-screen cinemas showed the ways in which the country was changing. While it could be argued that the old-style cinema emphasized differences in class because the ‘balcony’ seats of yore used to separate the rich from the poor who sat below in the ‘chavanni class’, back then people from a lower economic strata were part of the same movie-watching experience as relatively richer Indians. In today’s India, the halls do not have segregated seats but the entire experience of watching a movie is much more exclusionary. You rarely meet a poor person inside a theatre, in fact, you rarely see a poor person on screen. If you do see a poorer, small town character on screen the film is usually classified as arthouse cinema.

  Chronicling the changes in Hindi films post-liberalization, writer Rachel Dwyer comments on how cinema has changed to reflect these economic ambitions. ‘Big-budget Bollywood films have become part of the metropolitan imagination, open to those who are or who aspire to be metropolitan but far removed from the mofussil towns.’ And Dalits? Dwyer says that Dalits are only characters in ‘political films like those of Prakash Jha’, underlining how heroes still have north-Indian, upper-caste surnames like ‘Malhotra’ and ‘Khanna’.

  The movies we watched as children growing up in the seventies and eighties were very different. My mother allowed my sister and I one movie a week and most of them were about the extraordinary virtues of the ordinary. The protagonists were angry, honest men and women, who wore rumpled kurtas or ungainly, non-branded bell-bottomed trousers or simple cotton saris that billowed clumsily in the wind, but always fought the good fight. Before ‘item numbers’ were specially written into movie scripts to serve as flamboyant, rhythmic, over-sexed showstoppers, moments of romance would feature the likes of Deepti Naval and Farooq Sheikh who embodied a million middle-class fantasies when they rode pillion on a rusty two-wheeler to buy a ‘softy’ cone served to them by liveried waiters in elaborate headgear at restaurant tables with pink paper napkins neatly arranged in a slightly stained tall glasses. And when they drove home from their ‘date’ their ‘barsati’ flat was done up—not in Italian marble or laminated wood—but in sparse, unfussy bamboo ‘chitais’ matched with soft white muslin curtains draping windows that allowed far too much sunshine in. By the time I was an adult and a working journalist, the India I grew up in had been transformed radically. So had its cultural moorings. In an environment exploding with mobiles and McDonald’s, economic and social ascent became the key drivers of dreams, creating a country within a country; one in which citizenship was no profound, or even, argumentative pact with nation-building but almost a corporate membership in a rewards programme designed to give maximum returns. Liberalization and rapid growth had also played midwife to the birth of a neo middle-class consumed by its own daily battles for survival and self-fulfilment.

  In fact, now it was this class that had become the biggest proponent of economic liberalization. The ascent of India’s new middle-class (very different from the old) could be graphed against the fluctuating lines of what political scientist Leela Fernandes has called its experience of ‘alienation and resurgence’. Economic liberalization was embraced by the middle class because it coincided with a phase in Indian politics when they were threatened by the sudden assertion of subaltern and lower caste groups. These were turbulent years. In many ways, Rajiv Gandhi—the youthful Indian Airlines pilot turned politician who spoke of modern things like computers and telephones—had the potential to become the perfect urban hope as prime minister, but his career nosedived a few years after takeoff. His successor V. P Singh’s contentious decision to have quotas for ‘Other Backward Classes’ (as recommended by the panel called the Mandal Commission, which I’ve referred to in an earlier chapter) in government colleges and jobs further spooked the middle class and distanced it from mainstream politics. Politics had begun to let down its barriers to include regional backward leaders like Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav. They were extraordinarily powerful in their own right but their rustic style was antithetical to the self-image of the English-educated middle class. Then there was the BJP, dipping its toe in these shifting currents to see if the ripples could become a Hindutva wave.

  When liberalization announced its arrival with the grand promise of unlocking a closed economy, nobody welcomed it more than the middle class because, as we have seen, it believed that the imminent arrival of more caste quotas would undermine merit and take away their economic opportunities. It’s what academics Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss have called the ‘protest of the privileged’. They went on
e step further to argue that middle-class anger had intersected with the emergence of reforms, writing that it was possible to ‘describe both economic liberalization and Hindu nationalism with their sometimes contradictory but often surprisingly complementary agendas for the reinvention of India as “elite revolts”. Both reflect and are vehicles for the interests and aspirations especially of the middle class and highest caste Indians’.

  The anti-Mandal agitation of 1992 was India’s first middle-class protest. I was part of it. I often look back at those years to try and understand what made me march down the streets in opposition to something I barely understood. Every morning, at college, we would listen to the fiery speeches on the murder of merit made by young men who were aspirants for the Indian Administrative Service (and thus, especially worried about the quotas reducing the number of seats open to competition). Many of us were either ignorant of caste or indifferent to it. So what made us do it? Maybe we were just a generation in search of a cause—we wanted something to get angry about. The day we got sprayed with water cannons and dragged into the Parliament Street police station we felt a heady adrenalin rush and thought we had become revolutionaries. But mostly the cause had our support because the narrative that hard work and talent was going to be swept away in a tornado of political opportunism was too compelling to disagree with. I may have a much more informed opinion on caste reservations today than I did as an eighteen year old, but back then I represented the average middle-class Indian who found politics too cynical to engage with and was ready to take to the streets to agitate.