DALIT LITERATURE GOES GLOBAL

Autobiographical texts by Dalit writers are now part of courses offered by several American universities. But the impact may go beyond academics, changing the West's idea of India

For ages, Dalits have had their tales told by upper-caste writers. Premchand wrote of Dukhi, Mulk Raj Anand of Bakha, Arundhati Roy of Velutha and Mahasweta Devi of Doulati. But what if Dukhi, Bakha, Velutha and Doulati take up the pen and decide to tell their own tales? Over the past few decades, a Dalit literary movement has been giving readers a first-hand experience of how the community lives. In doing so, these writers are also re-scripting the conceptions of Indian society and history while challenging prevailing literary conventions.

The movement has become so influential that almost every university in India has Dalit texts on its curriculum. And now, the academic interest has gone global with the texts making their way into universities in the US, the UK, Canada and France. Britain's Nottingham Trent University and Universite Paul-Valery Montpellier, France in June 2014 together started a study that aims to “bring Dalit literature to new audiences“. The ongoing project has been organizing conferences for scholars, writers and trans lators from India, the US, Europe and Canada.

Acclaimed historian Gyanendra Pandey recently started a course at Emory University, US, juxtaposing Dalit history with that of African Americans.Several other American universities including University of Washington, Seattle; University of Texas, Austin; and University of Oregon, offer courses which include Dalit autobiographies.A course in the offing at New York University (NYU) called ` Aesthetics and Politics' will also include a unit on Dalit writing. English translations like Omprakash Valmiki's Joothan (2003), Narendra Jadhav's Untouchables (2005) and Baby Kamble's The Prisons We Broke (2009) have emerged as the most popular texts.

“The circulation of Dalit literature in America is important to deconstruct an idea of India that is pervasive, and one that many diasporic Indians seek to cultivate: India as non-violent, Hinduism as mythological, anti-orthodoxy and benevolent, and both as peace-loving,“ says Toral Gajarawala, an associate professor at NYU. “The knowledge of India that circulates in the West is caste-free. Dalit studies offer a corrective to this `idea of India' in an important way .“ Different aesthetic Dalit literature first found its voice in Marathi in the 1960s and '70s, and then soon appeared in other languages like Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada. Mostly through autobiographies described as `narratives of pain,' writers could share personal experiences of caste discrimination, making its existence undeniable for the middle classes. Even genres like fiction, poetry and drama became largely autobiographical in the hands of Dalit writers. Caste was seen as the definitive aspect of Indian society and raising political consciousness (Dalit chetna) turned into a literary goal.

In the '80s and '90s, a group of Hindi writers like Om Prakash Valmiki, Mohandas Naimishray and Kanwal Bharti had to fight a hostile literary establishment to carve out a unique space for Dalit literature. Attacked for their lack of “aesthetic sophistication“, these writers argued that the Hindi literary intelligentsia's aesthetic standards were far from universal and concealed an upper caste bias.

Dalit writers, instead, shocked the readers with crude language and graphic descriptions. In Apne Apne Pinjare, Mohandas Naimishray talked about his experiences living in Delhi's red-light area GB Road. Surajpal Chauhan in GB Road. Surajpal Chauhan in Tiraskrit described the killing of a pig at a Dalit wedding.

But the stress on autobiography is now being questioned by young Dalit writers. And this, in turn, has drawn criticism. “It is one of the things that the Dalit literary movement will have to wrestle with, if it wants to maintain its relevance. The Hindi writer Ajay Navariya, for example, has been accused of being too modernist, or not Dalit enough, for engaging in new and different aesthetic techniques.But I think we have to be sympathetic to the insistence on origin in so far as it is trying to challenge the monopoly of upper-caste people over cultural spaces,“ says Gajarawala.Both archive and social history Historians have come to accept Dalit autobiographies as relevant documents of social history .“The point made by all sorts of oppositional histories -feminist, subaltern, Dalit, etc -is that history and the archive it relies on are both tendentious, writtenpreserved in the interests of dominant classes and groups. Dalit autobiography , like much subaltern and feminist writing (including autobiography), serves as both archive and history -in the absence of state sponsored versions of these,“ says Pandey .

The very utterance of the term `Dalit' is a political statement. The word means `ground', `crushed' or `broken to pieces'. Thus, the `Dalit autobiography' is not just a literary movement, it's part of a political movement too. “The first generation of Dalit writers questioned the idea of India,“ says Raj Kumar, a professor at Delhi University, “They felt they weren't a part of it and rejected it. Later writers like Valmiki have a more mature approach. They engage with and explore the possibility of Dalits being a part of India. They see hope in Ambedkar's goal of annihilation of caste. The contemporary Dalit autobiography is an inclusive exercise.The Dalits are trying to write themselves into the Indian narrative.“

Pandey , too, stresses the need for an inclusive approach. He says, “The chief problem here is one that faces any `minority' movement, of not becoming too narrowly tied down by a politics of identity . So Dalits need to establish the worth of their identity and history , and yet work to ensure that the movement doesn't become unduly sectarian and isolated.“

For contemporary Dalit writers, the real challenge lies in creating a fine balance between the idea of inclusion and the necessity of resistance.
Source: The Times of India dt 5-4-15

Caste and its triple role in the political economy

Book review by-MUJIBUR REHMAN

For long, I have realised India’s political economy cannot be explained in conventional sense rooted in Western tradition of analysis of capitalism and socialism. Almost every significant mind of India’s Marxist tradition came from upper caste background, and they failed to realise how pernicious the caste could be; and fell into the trap of class analysis — almost to the extent of not recognising caste at all. Consequently, Marx or Gramsci decisively displaced Ambedkar in the narrative of India’s suffering. In the radical intellectual world, it was more glamorous to be a Marxist than an Ambedkarite; and that romance with Marxism continues. Perhaps, sub-consciously, they became accomplices to what Gopal Guru calls the “silencing of Ambedkar” as much as India’s ruling regimes.

The never-ending debate whether class or caste has more explanatory power that dominated the 20th century remains alive even today. In the post-Mandal era, with the rise of caste-based parties, there is growing evidence that the intellectual wind has been in favour of caste rather than class. Barbara Hariss-White’s path-breaking book, India Working (Cambridge, 2003) shook up the class-inspired tradition of analysis. And it raised a few more questions that inspired further research that led to this book. In a way, it is a rehabilitation of the long-neglected caste factor in India’s political economy. In that sense, it is a pioneering work.

Given that the usual stuff has not addressed the issue of poverty either in India or elsewhere with adequate satisfaction, we have good reason why we should be generous in welcoming this unusual book. Three of its main chapters run to only 77 pages. The remaining 106 pages are full of maps depicting vital comparative data about the participation of Dalits and Adivasis in India’s business economy. These maps offer more useful insights than scholarly essays about discrimination, caste influence and general questions about capital or capitalism.

The first essay, about Dalit capital in market India, recalls how Jyotibha Phule and Ambedkar drew attention to two particular kinds of discrimination: British and Brahmanical. British colonial institutions gave some normative tools that some Dalits could use to fight the Brahmanical order and the fight continues. According to this research, caste is no longer a matter of pollution and purity after liberalisation but of difference and solidarity. But then in post-liberalised India, caste networks play a vital role. These networks are weak in the case of Indian Dalits. On the other hand, the state has become a primary means of reproducing caste ideology. Having failed to remove non-secular institutions, the state has also perpetuated deprivation caused by private property. Thus, the book argues that caste becomes an instrument of hegemony, and is a civil social institution of capitalist accumulation. It contributes to the blurring of the fine distinction between economy and society by being operative as ideology, as institutional structure, and as a set of political-economic relationships.

The next chapter is based on a case study of a small town in South India. It explores how scheduled and backward castes are placed and operate in the social structure of accumulation. It concludes that caste plays a key role in organising and sustaining accumulation. As labour and as employers and accumulators, Dalits are central to this process. Caste is the key pillar of ideology on which the town presents itself as a unified body. What is interesting to note is that the interplay of caste and the economy may be differentiated but is consistent with corporatism. This chapter recognises that education and reservations have helped Dalits change their professions from sanitary workers and agricultural workers to more diversified professions and even politics, but wealth creation for Dalits has to take place in India’s informal capitalist economy. This research suggests that caste plays a triple role. First, it provides what the author calls “ideological backcloth” for the corporatist organisations; Secondly, its working is consistent with the institutionalisation structure of the evolving corporatist organisations; and finally, caste also creates conditions for the overlap between economy and society necessary for the working of the corporatist project. The research findings suggest that the small town societal corporatist regime of accumulation resembles Gramsci’s concept of civil society. What is remarkable is that, according to the authors, the political, cultural and ideological hegemony of a single social group — the capitalist class — over the rest remains intact and operational.

The final chapter is about regions of discrimination against Dalits and Adivasis in India’s business economy. It examines the patterns of incorporation of both Dalits and Adivasis into the business economy not as labour but as owners of firms. More than 70 maps of state-level patterns are published in this Atlas, covering the period from 1990 to 2005, and they focus on 14 sectors of the economy. The data are drawn from Census, Economic Census and the National Sample Survey (NSS). They show uneven effects of discrimination across four dimensions: across scales — variations across macro-regions; secondly, variations across sectors of agriculture and the non-firm economy; thirdly, differences in the trajectory of incorporation of regions and sectors over time; and fourth, the differences between Dalit and Adivasis, the latter intensifying over time, Adivasis positively, but Dalits sometimes negatively.

This indispensable volume for students of India’s political economy and development studies offers fresh insights to a debate that seems to be frozen in various rival schools that either calls for state-led development or market-oriented reform, without realising that both institutions could be paralysed by caste factors. The exciting thing is that this book offers concrete evidence to that end.

Source: The Hindu dt 16-12-14