 |
 |
|
| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reporting & Essays |
|
|
Essay |
Lighting Out for the Territory
|
| The arduous journey of modern Dalit literature |
|
Published : 1 February 2011 |
| |
|
|
ANIL SAINI FOR THE CARAVAN |
|
| A bookstall
in Pune on 14 April, the
birth anniversary of BR
Ambedkar.
|
|
|
|
| I |
N MANU JOSEPH'S DEBUT NOVEL Serious Men—praised by
one critic as “one of the very best novels ever to come out
of South Asia” and the winner of The Hindu’s inaugural
Best Fiction award in 2010—the protagonist, Ayyan Mani,
is a manipulative, sly, scheming Dalit-Buddhist who almost
gets away with passing off his partially deaf son, Adi, as a
prodigy, a |
genius who can recite the first 1,000 prime numbers. The garb of satire—where almost every character cuts a sorry figure—gives the author the licence to offer one of the most bleak and pessimistic portrayals of urban Dalits.
Ayyan Mani works as secretary to the Brahmin astrophysicist
Arvind Acharya at the ‘Institute of Theory and Research,’
where he bestows on himself the subversive power
of inserting anti-Brahmin statements into the “Thought of
the Day.” While the novel’s bumbling scientists are at least
earnest in their pursuit of ostensibly higher truths, Mani
is an open fraud—a conman. The novel’s female characters
hardly fare better: the astrobiologist Oparna Goshmaulik
is purely a ‘sex item,’ described each time she makes an
appearance, in Mani’s gaze, as “always a sight,” “a commotion”
and “an event”; the wife of Ayyan Mani, with the unlikely
Tamil name Oja, is draped in naiveté bordering on
dumbness.
An undisguised contempt for women and Dalits goes
hand in hand with the ancient Brahminical book of social
codes, the Manusmriti, and Joseph decidedly lives up to his
first name. Despite his savage portrayal of female and Dalit
characters—or perhaps because of it?—Serious Men has
won critical appreciation from a cross-section of readers
and critics, including some upper-class feminists (“dodgy
sexual politics but, basically, I had such fun reading it!”).
As a friend remarked, even though India has never had a
regime of political correctness, a section of the elite has decided it’s okay to enjoy jokes at such correctness.
At a time when a formidable body of Dalit literature—
writing by Dalits about Dalit lives—has created a distinct
space for itself, how and why is it that a novel such as Serious
Men, with its gleefully skewed portrayal of an angry
Dalit man, manages to win such accolades? In American
literature—and particularly in the case of African-American
authors and characters—these issues of representation
have been debated (and, to some degree, resolved) for decades.
But in India, the sustained refusal to address issues
related to caste in everyday life—and the continued and
unquestioned predominance of a Brahminical stranglehold
over cultural production—have led us to a place where
non-Dalit portrayal of Dalits in literature, cinema and art
remains the norm.
The journey of modern Dalit literature has been a difficult
one. But even though it has not necessarily enjoyed the support
of numbers (in what has come to be the trade publishing
market) we must engage with what Dalits are writing—not simply for reasons of authenticity, or as a concession to
identity politics, but simply because of the aesthetic value
of this body of writing, and for the insights it offers into the
human condition. In a society that is still largely unwilling
to recognise Dalits as equal, rights-bearing human beings,
in a society that is inherently indifferent to the everyday
violence against Dalits and their near-total ghettoisation in
various spheres of social and cultural activity, in a society
unwilling to share social and cultural resources equitably
with Dalits unless mandated by law (as seen in the anti-reservation
discourse), Dalit literature has the potential
to humanise non-Dalits and sensitise them to a world into
which they have no insight. But before we can understand
what Dalit literature is seeking to accomplish, we need first
to come to terms with the stranglehold of non-Dalit representations
of Dalits.
| R |
OHINTON MISTRY'S A Fine Balance, published
15 years ago, chronicles the travails of a Chamar
family in a north Indian village and follows two
characters—uncle Ishvar and nephew Omprakash—who migrate to Bombay and yet cannot escape brutality.
While the present of the novel is set at the time of
the Emergency, Ishvar’s father Dukhi (an homage |
to the equally pitiable Dukhi in Premchand’s famous short story ‘Sadgati’) belongs to the era of the anti-colonial nationalist movement. During one of Dukhi’s visits to the town, he chances upon a meeting of the Indian National Congress, where speakers spread the “Mahatma’s message regarding the freedom struggle, the struggle for justice,” but add that this is not a realisable goal unless “the disease of untouchability, ravaging us for centuries, denying dignity to our fellow human beings” is wiped out.
Neither in the 1940s, where the novel’s past is set, nor in
the Emergency period of the 1970s—when the minds and
bodies of the two Dalits, Ishvar and Omprakash, are savaged
by the state—do we find any mention of a figure like
BR Ambedkar or of Dalit movements. In his ‘nationalist’
understanding of modern Indian history, Mistry seems
to have not veered too far from the road charted by predecessors
like Raja Rao (Kanthapura) and Mulk Raj Anand
(Untouchable) or, in Hindi, by the likes of Premchand. Sixty
years after Premchand, Mistry’s literary imagination
seems stuck in the empathy-realism mode, trapping Dalits
in abjection. Mistry happily continues the broad stereotype
of the Dalit as a passive sufferer, without consciousness of
caste politics.
| HENNING STEGMÜLLER. COURTESY OF NAVAYANA PUBLISHING |
 |
The poet Namdeo Dhasal, a founder of the Dalit Panther movement, at his village Pur-Kanersar in 2004. |
It is not as if Dalit movements were not active during the
periods that form A Fine Balance’s backdrop. Ambedkar’s
birth anniversary was being celebrated in faraway Hyderabad
in the 1930s, as the Dalit historian PR Venkataswamy
notes in Our Struggle for Emancipation, published in 1955.
In the northern belt, Swami Achutanand of Kanpur, who
ran the newspaper Achut in the early 20th century, was
considered an architect of Dalit consciousness. Around the
same time, Chandrika Prasad Jigyasu, a Lucknow Chamar,
was reconstructing Ravidas, a revered ascetic born in the
Chamar caste. By the turn of the 20th century, in other
words, Dalits and lower-order shudras in much of northern,
southern, eastern and western India were in protest mode,
resisting the overtures of the Congress-led nationalist/anti-colonial
movement and waging struggles more pertinent to
their own liberation. In fact, such challenges began emerging
in the mid-19th century across the subcontinent. Jotirao
Phule (1827-90) was a pioneer in western India who viciously
attacked the Congress’ Brahminical nationalism and established
the Satyashodhak Samaj (Truth-Seekers’ Society).
For Mistry, even in 1995, it is the same, worn script which
combines the fatalism of Thomas Hardy and the compassion
and good intentions of Premchand. Despite the fact
that the novel is set in Bombay during the time of the Dalit
Panther movement, and despite the constant authorial references
to the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution,
the Chamars, Ishvar and Omprakash, who struggle
as tailors, remain oblivious to an unmissable figure like
Ambedkar and the larger context of Dalit politics. While in
2010 Joseph seems to use the sleight of evenhandedness to
nail all his characters with comedy and satire and thus gets
away with giving the worst end of his stick to Dalits, Mistry
uses the heavy hand of tragedy and melodrama to deal devastating
blows to all his characters: his Dalit protagonists,
whose entire families are wiped out in the unnamed village,
are vasectomised, rendered legless (Ishvar) and castrated
(Om) during the Emergency. As the novel ends, they are
reduced to pathetic beggars; their dignity, dreams and desires
are seriously compromised to service gritty realism.
The concern with what non-Dalit writers do with their
Dalit characters also brings us to Arundhati Roy’s Velutha
in The God of Small Things, Amitav Ghosh’s Fokir in The
Hungry Tide and, more recently, his Kalua in Sea of Poppies.
Here, the writers seek to bestow agency on their Dalit
characters, but again their portrayals do not keep pace with
an awareness of the history of the evolving realities of Dalit
politics—specifically, the assertion of Dalit identity and the
consciousness of caste oppression. If from Premchand to
Mistry we have empathy sans agency, in Roy and Ghosh we
see that the Dalit characters lack distinct subjecthood prior
to their involvement with high-caste characters.
In The Hungry Tide, Fokir, a survivor of the 1979
Morichjhanpi massacre, is an unspeaking, noble but informed
savage who guides the American ethnographer
Piyali Roy. Under Piyali’s loving gaze, Fokir’s beauty and
deep knowledge of the backwaters unfold; there’s unconsummated
passion between the two. Roy makes bold to
have the mostly silent Velutha, with his attractive, muscular
Dalit body—honed by the labour of carpentry, not
in a gymnasium, as Roy says in an interview—love and be
loved by the Syrian Christian Ammu; but there’s still the
worry over his speechless suffering and inevitable death
for transgressing the Love Laws. Velutha’s beautiful body
is offset by those of his father, with one glass eye, and his
brother, with a broken spine.
In Sea of Poppies, Ghosh bestows agency on Kalua, a
Chamar, who saves Deeti, an upper-caste woman about to
be consigned to sati, and goes on to make a life with her.
Ghosh, however, slips when he shows Kalua reductively as
all brawn, “a man of unusual height and powerful build”
who can trump anybody in a wrestling bout—which comes
in handy as a plot device to enable Kalua to steer Deeti to
safety. Towards the end of the novel, we see that Kalua has
superhuman strength whereas Kalua’s lover, Deeti, the
protagonist, is the one with the mind. Ghosh, even as he
gives story-altering agency to Kalua, seems happy to depict
a mind-body binary between Deeti and Kalua—a division of
labour that plays into both caste and gender stereotypes.
“Attempts to incorporate Dalits into the discourse of a
novel are presumably preceded by some crisis in the dominant
social groups,” says TM Yesudasan, a retired English
professor from a small town in Kerala, referring to the limited
representation of Dalits in fiction set in the state. Dalits,
Yesudasan says, are invariably “the Mute”: “Their representative
must at the same time appear as their master, as
an authority over them, making them Mutes.”
In Roy’s novel, it is the divorced Ammu’s crisis that sucks
in Velutha (quite like Deeti’s crisis sucks in an almost orphaned,
community-less Kalua in Sea of Poppies). Velutha is
perhaps the first Dalit character in contemporary non-Dalit
fiction who is overtly political, a former Naxalite who takes
part in a communist protest march, and has sex with an upper-class woman. However, Yesudasan, situating The God
of Small Things among other classic ‘Malayali Enlightenment’
novels such as Potheri Kunjambu’s Saraswativijayam
(1892), Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s Randidangazhi (1948),
and Sara Thomas’ Deivamakkal (1982) argues:
The fictioning of pratiloma [a lower caste man in a relationship
with an upper caste woman] is motivated by…
the savarna desire to become more hegemonic, represented
by a savarna woman in distress who seeks/finds
a Dalit paramour, reversing the traditional boy-meets-girl
formula and committing an act of sacrilege. She
crosses the boundary on a cultural mission of hegemony
and consecrates the sacrilege in order to close in
on Dalits. This is like “primitivism” in Western modern
art, turning for creative rejuvenation to the so-called
“primitive” cultures of others.
It is not that non-Dalit writers do not have the enlightened
right to portray Dalits; there cannot be any literary
policing on such a subject. But, as K Satyanarayana, who pioneered
the teaching of a Dalit Studies course in the English
and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, observed,
“Despite their serious commitment, non-Dalit writers miss
the dreams, desires and visions of Dalits and objectify them
as either victims or romanticise them as great people. This
continues to be a serious problem.”
To come back to the author we began with: Manu Joseph
manages to inaugurate a new template—he identifies
his characters specifically as Dalits (not as untouchable
Chamars or Pulayas) and depicts them as fully conscious
of (but enraged by) caste oppression. Joseph’s rationale for
making Ayyan Mani a Dalit makes for interesting reading.
In an interview with rediff.com, he says:
When Ayyan first formed in my head he was just the
same but he was not a Dalit. He had this anger and a
comical interpretation of the modern world and modern
women and science and everything around him.
But he was not a Dalit. Then I asked myself, why is he
so angry, can I give him a justification? And the idea of
a Dalit male who is trying to create from thin air the
first Dalit boy genius just fascinated me.
Consider what kind of social reality leads a writer like
Joseph to decide that Ayyan Mani ought to be a Dalit because
he is “so angry.” Mani’s specific kind of imagined
‘Dalitness’ is clearly a by-product of the post-Mandal anti-reservation
rage of the upper classes of India, represented
with deep sympathy by the Brahmin-controlled media.
Such a portrayal of a scheming Dalit—who is merely a prop
in the novel—would perhaps not have been possible in the
period before the 1980s or the 1990s.
It is not that a Dalit character ought not to be dark and
devious, especially in a dark comedy. It is not as if one is
looking for a portrayal of triumph shorn of the complexities
of human nature. What’s worrisome is how Mani’s son
Adi has to be a congenitally poor, underperforming student
with a hearing disability (to compound matters), who has to
cheat his way through tests and quiz shows—lacking inherently
in “merit.”
Towards the end of Serious Men, a mindless Dalit mob
with stones, metals rods and sticks is on a rampage—breaking
limbs and furniture and everything in sight at the Institute
of Theory and Research—because the vile, anti-Dalit
comments of the Brahmin scientists there have been exposed.
The marauding mob can hardly engage in an intelligent
battle—it has to use brawn. Earlier on, Joseph does indicate
how violent the angry Dalits of Bombay can be when
their sensibilities are offended. Either a Dalit-Buddhist
can be a conman whose aspirations are disproportionate
to his talents, or Dalits are congenitally disabled, or plain
lumpen. In the West, such a depiction of, say, blacks, would
invite the charge of racism—a close cousin of homegrown casteism. Here, such ‘wit’ may be legitimised with endorsements
in the form of awards and good sales figures.
What is worrying is that the majority of readers—most
of them presumably non-Dalits—seem undisturbed by the
way Dalits have been presented in fiction, whether by Premchand
and Mulk Raj Anand or contemporary writers like
Ghosh, Roy, Mistry and Joseph. This situation might have
been more understandable—if no less unacceptable—in a
much earlier era. But there are no excuses today, after a half-century
that has witnessed the emergence of modern Dalit
writing, starting in Marathi in the post-Ambedkar period.
Ambedkar himself is said to have used the term Dalit
only a few times in his Marathi speeches, but the term really caught on only after the emergence of the literature of
the 1960s and the 1970s in Marathi. The word ‘Dalit’ originates
in Pali, where it means ‘ground down’ or ‘broken’, as
in broken dal (lentils). In Pali Buddhist literature, the term
dalidda (daridra in Sanskrit) is used for the property-less
poor in contrast to the gahapati class of the rich.
The 1972 Dalit Panther manifesto defined Dalit in an all-encompassing
way: “A member of Scheduled Castes and
Tribes, neo-Buddhist, the working class, the landless and
poor peasants, women, and all those who are being exploited
politically, economically, and in the name of religion.”
As Gangadhar Pantawane, a Marathi Dalit ideologue, says:
“Dalit is not a caste; Dalit is a symbol of change and revolution.
The Dalit believes in humanism. He rejects existence
of god, rebirth, soul, sacred books that teach discrimination,
fate, and heaven because these make him a slave.”
In popular and academic usage, ‘Dalit’ has come to function
as a politically correct substitute for terms like Scheduled
Caste, harijan, untouchable, or the Depressed Classes.
But Dalit has an emancipatory potential which caste and
jati categories like Chamar and Brahmin do not; Dalit is not
a caste, but an anti-caste subjectivity that someone born
into untouchability occupies by rejecting caste.
The political and literary ferment of the 1970s remained
confined to the Marathi context—throwing up names like
Namdeo Dhasal, Narayan Surve, Baburao Bagul, Hira Bansode
and Daya Pawar. It was only after the 1990 Ambedkar
centenary and the implementation of the Mandal Commission
recommendations that a Dalit literary upsurge began
in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, Punjabi and Malayalam.
This coincided with the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party,
founded by Kanshi Ram and now led by Mayawati, which
gave nationwide currency to the term ‘Dalit.’
It is not as if Dalits were not writing previously, but literature
by Dalits with an anti-caste consciousness seemed
to need the charged atmosphere of the 1990s. In its early
phase, poetry, the short story and autobiography remained
the chosen modes of expression. But in the past five to ten
years, Dalit literature appears to have taken a new turn,
veering away from the first-generation writing that overemphasised
politics and protest. The work of this new generation,
however, is not easily or frequently translated into
English—and sometimes even resists the process. It is the
journey of these writers that needs our attention today.
| | | |
| |
|
|
|
|
Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
|
|
Raman
5 October 2011
01:43 AM
|
|
Meena Kandasamy is not from a Dalit (-the so called "untouchable" - Panchama) family. She is from a backward caste (-the so called "Shudra") family. By saying this I am not belittling her writings against caste and her advocacy for Dalit human rights. I admire her talent for poetry and her writings against caste bigotry. But it is wrong to identify herself as a "Dalit writer" or as a "Dalit poet". Instead she should call herself as an advocate for Dalit rights and as an "anti-caste" writer.
|
|
|
|
janaki
26 February 2011
06:48 PM
|
|
interesting read. but i wonder at why srividya natarajan's 'No Onions nor Garlic' has been given a miss here.
|
|
|
|
C S Lakshmi
9 February 2011
12:45 PM
|
|
A well-researched piece. There are several other writers in Tamil much before P Sivakami like Poomani who have written excellent novels still to be translated. It is just that Poomani does not want to be seen only as a Dalit writer and identified only as a Dalit writer.This article must be translated into Tamil, Anand. Why don't you do it?
|
|
|
|
C S Lakshmi
9 February 2011
12:45 PM
|
|
A well-researched piece. There are several other writers in Tamil much before P Sivakami like Poomani who have written excellent novels still to be translated. It is just that Poomani does not want to be seen only as a Dalit writer and identified only as a Dalit writer.This article must be translated into Tamil, Anand. Why don't you do it ?
|
|
|
|
Thalak
2 February 2011
04:40 PM
|
|
Kudos for your remarks about the literary works mentioned; Absolutely correct and to the point! I have
had occasions to hear many educated and well travelled Indians ( none of them Dalits!) opining with
no prick of conscience that, "the new lower cast/scheduled cast (Dalits in short) functionaries in the
govt. offices and other institutions, who got there not by merit but thru quota, have no manners, are not
polite, not well behaved, not cultured, etc" Unfortunately, what most people forget is that the acquisition
of culture, civilities, social behaviour, etc are also a bye product of a given socio-economic structure, and it is a process. Curiosly, 'Dalit' is now referred to as a caste. Can you imagine that a Chamar would
not marry a Kumbhar, a Paraya would not wed a Pulaya, etc. Even among the Dalits, is the caste
consciousness so rigid, so invasive? If so, it is time to break and burn it.Continue the good work;!!!!
|
|
|
|
Satchidanandan
1 February 2011
07:33 PM
|
|
An extremely insightful survey of the representation of dalits in literature, by dalits as well as non-dalits. A lot of information, acute political awareness and genuine identification with the cause.
|
|
|
|
Arun Mukherjee
1 February 2011
07:25 PM
|
|
Dear Anand:
Thank you for this informative article. Two things. I am perturbed by Mini Krishnan's "the dalit in us." So we high castes are supposed to have a dalit identity inside us along with our high caste identity? Secondly, you also seem to subscribe to the notion that autobiography does not experiment with form and language, thereby creating a hierarchy of genres. I would beg to say that autobiographies like "Joothan" and Bama's "Karukku" are, in fact, complex texts vis-a-vis genre and language, requiring a lot of interpretation and analysis, as I can vouch from my teaching of these texts. I am afraid that the newer Dalit writers you quote might fall into trap of proving they are not political, thus maintaining the binary of aesthetic versus political, angry versus funny etc..
|
|
|
|
Gajanan Madhav
1 February 2011
03:42 PM
|
|
I disagree with this review of Manu Joseph’s novel, Serious Men. A politically correct or incorrect reading of a literary text as nuanced as Manu’s is to totally miss the whole effort. A novel is *not* about eulogising a character, however historically victimised he may be. It is about showing how human the character is and how his situation is more exemplary than others. But exemplary situations doesn’t mean characters are extraordinary. Sometimes a tricky victim might be more interesting to know about than a heroic, moral character.
The reviewer seems to have a problem understanding the nuances of negativity. He is reading literary texts with moral eyes. Not only is that not the best way of reading a text politically, it can be quite regressive. To demand black-and-white portrayals of Dalits in literature is not the way to espouse the Dalit cause.
The examples from poetry that the reviewer has drawn are about *lived experiences* and they will have a sharp edge and directness about them. But a novel is *not only* about lived experiences—even from a Dalit writer. There is a hyper-paranoia about non-Dalits writing on Dalit characters and issues, which denies a nuanced portrayal of a victimised subject. When direct experience is missing—and it misses in every fiction—irony is what adds to it, not subtracts.
Moreover, he misses out a crucial point that is made about Ayyan in the novel—that he made it into MENSA, and has, in fact, a higher IQ than the mediocre (and scheming) Brahmin scientists in the institute. It is too much of an allegation that Joseph’s book is the product of the anti-Dalit mania among the upper castes. The reviewer seems to be too keen to prove his credentials to Dalits, being a Brahmin himself. At least Joseph doesn’t come from that standpoint. And making a snide remark on his first name was totally uncalled-for. If the reviewer, being a Brahmin can be above board in his commitment to the Dalit cause, so can others.
|
|
|
|
Mini Krishnan
1 February 2011
08:22 AM
|
|
Beautiful crackling piece but date and publisher of KARUKKU unfortunately wrong...it was 1999 and through Macmillans that I published Bama s first work. Also....why hasnt Priya Adarkar been honoured in this article ? Or Poisoned Bread out of Orient Longman (now OBS).
Best wishes
Mini Krishnan
|
|
|
|
| 1 |
|