It is an effort to strike at the root of superstitions and prejudice. This proposes to look into gender as socially constructed than what was earlier thought to be biological. This volume, Body Politics: Rethinking Gender and Masculinity will engage with the current developments in the field of Masculinity Studies and will try to diversify the issues of gender and masculinity.
This points to the difference between women and dalit women and the latter with dalit men, which leave them unrepresented. There is an incisive discussion of knowledge produced about dalit women and the intervention and contribution of Dalit Feminism therein. The book concludes with the question of who can be or become a dalit feminist, intriguingly, not a limited category. Beginning with an extensive introduction that charts important theoretical contributions to the field, this History includes extensive essays that shed light on the legacy of English in Indian writing.
Organized thematically, these essays examine how English was "made Indian" by writers who used the language to address specifically Indian concerns. Such concerns revolved around the question of what it means to be modern as well as how the novel could be used for anti-colonial activism.
By the s, the Indian novel in English was a global phenomenon, and India is now the third largest publisher of English-language books. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History invites readers to question conventional accounts of India's literary history. Drawing together a selection of topics and texts from Africa, the Caribbean, Africa, North America, and India, it encourages readers to take a more expansive and innovative approach to this emerging field. Author : Robert D. Interpreting texts that have addressed cooking, dining, taste, hungers, excesses and aversions in South Asia and its diaspora since the mid-nineteenth century, Parama Roy relates historical events and figures to tropes of disgust, abstention, dearth and appetite.
He repeatedly pointed out how, besides being denied access to avenues for economic betterment, untouchables were forced to provide their labor against their will and without any control of their wages. As Dalits waged battles for equality and dignity, the names that their oppressors had given them became an issue. Arya Samajists were alarmed by the conversion of large numbers of Chuhras to Christianity and Sikhism in the s and the s.
The Arya Samajists started emulating the Christian missionaries by opening schools and hospitals for the untouchables and performing shuddhi, a purification ceremony to reconvert the Christian converts. Arya Samajists told Chuhras that they were the descendants of Valmiki, the creator of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana. Valmiki devotes several pages to the ironies that his new identity entails.
In western Uttar Pradesh, however, this surname does not lift the author up from his Chuhrahood and the attendant untouchability. The Buddhists see him as a casteist, a supporter of the caste system, because he refuses to shed this identity marker as a badge of selfassertion, a declaration that he does not want to hide his Dalit identity. Valmiki points out the daily dilemmas that Dalits face in a caste-based society that make it almost impossible to shed the caste marker and leave behind the stigmas attached to it.
In addition to the terminology that the Dalits chose, the government gave them bureaucratic nomenclatures. The term Depressed Classes, first used by missionaries in southern India, was later adopted by the British government in its official records.
Gandhi replaced the term untouchable with Harijan. Dalits, on the other hand, found it patronizing and infantilizing. Because of their vociferous protests, it has now generally gone out of favor. A bureaucratic term that has stuck is Scheduled Castes. It refers to a list of untouchable castes that was prepared by the British government in and attached to the Order-in-Council issued under the Government of India Act of The Constitution of India uses Scheduled Castes in a more flexible way, leaving the making of the list, and deletions and additions to it, up to the government.
The Scheduled Caste identity is a bureaucratic necessity for Dalits when they apply for reserved positions, which are often derided by anti-Dalits as quotas, and for other government benefits.
The term usually is shortened to SC, and many high-caste Hindus associate it with favoritism, unequal treatment, pork-barrel politics, and giving educational and employment opportunities to people lacking in merit and qualifications, as when high-caste Hindus complain about the SCs taking away all the jobs. In Joothan Valmiki draws attention to the bitterness and ambivalence that Dalits feel when they must use the SC identity in order to be considered for jobs reserved for them by law and when others thrust it upon them in contempt.
Introduction xxxi Dalitbahujan is a new term, proposed by Kancha Ilaiah, who, like many other Dalit writers and activists, thinks that the term Dalit should not describe the status and situation of untouchables alone but should cover all victims of poverty and exploitation.
Kanshi Ram, an Ambedkarite, proposed in the early s that the untouchables, the Sudras now given the bureaucratic name of Other Backward Classes—the word classes was thought to be more neutral than castes—usually abbreviated as OBCs , and other non-Hindu minorities, including the Scheduled Tribes STs , together were more numerous than any single caste or ethnic group. If they united, they could become a political power. The party has been able to reduce the supremacy of Brahmins and Kshatriyas in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous province in India, where it is back in power for the third time.
Dalits are thus a major force in India today, playing a decisive role in shaping the future. Spread over the entire country, speaking many languages, and belonging to many religions, they are certainly not a homogeneous community.
However, they continue to face certain problems, which emanate from their status as untouchables. The Dalit scholar Bhagwan Das provides a comprehensive snapshot of how untouchability affects the day-to-day lives of Dalits today: Land-holding upper caste people in villages do not allow the Dalits to wear decent clothes, cast votes freely, ride on a horse in marriage procession, draw water from a public xxxii Introduction well, sit on a cot while the upper caste man is standing.
In cities a student belonging to Scheduled Castes is purposely given low marks, an officer is prejudged as incompetent and inefficient just because of his birth in an untouchable caste. A professor, a lawyer, a doctor, an architect, born in an untouchable family, is considered inefficient and inferior without even seeing his performance. A patient refuses to be treated by a Scheduled Caste doctor and a house owner refuses to let a vacant house to him for the fear of pollution.
A superior gives bad reports to a Dalit subordinate in order to obstruct his promotion. In everyday talk in the canteens, buses, trains and airplanes, offices and establishments, aspersions are cast on the men and women of untouchable origin and derogatory remarks are passed.
In rural areas Dalits continue to face physical violence, including mass killings and rapes by vigilante groups established and operated by high-caste landowners, when Dalits ask for fair wages and freedom from molestation. The authorities seldom apprehend and punish the perpetrators of such violence. Dalits struggle against these injustices through political as well as cultural means. Dalit literature is one of the major sites of their resistance and creativity. Dalit Literature and Dalit Literary Theory Many Dalit writers have claimed a unique status for Dalit literature, in response to established literary critics who want to sub- Introduction xxxiii sume it under wider categories of literature in different Indian languages and judge it according to criteria that they claim to be timeless and universal.
As a rule, these judgments have been negative and even hostile. Dalit literary theory has emerged as a reaction to these critics. It is also a cultural and social movement. Dalit society has been imprisoned for a thousand years in the dark mist of ignorance, deprived of knowledge. Stating that high-caste Marathi literature is artificial and false, like a paper flower, M. He has never seen that outside there is a vast world—a suffering, distressed, strug6. I am thankful to the translator for giving me access to the manuscript.
This and all subsequent translations of the Hindi edition of Omprakash Valmiki, Dalit Sahitya ka Saundaryashastra Delhi: Radhakrishna, , are mine. Valmiki finds similar problems of caste and class bias in contemporary Hindi literature and says that since upper-caste writers do not know the miseries of Dalits, what they write remains superficial, born out of sympathy but not out of a desire for change or repentance.
Dalit writers and critics have contested attempts by mainstream critics to include these high-caste portrayals of Dalits under the rubric of Dalit literature.
How will they feel the angry ideas rising in the hearts of untouchables on the basis of their helpless imagination? In making such claims, Dalit writers are not alone; aboriginal writers in the United States and Canada have made similar declarations. This battle about representation is reminiscent of the struggle between Gandhi and Ambedkar in Clearly, readers are strongly divided about the value of Dalit literature, and Dalit writers have decided to depend on their own value judgments.
Equality, freedom, justice and love are basic sentiments of people and society. Thus what detractors have enumerated as faults, Dalit writers have embraced as the distinct aspects of Dalit aesthetics. There are many points of conjuncture between Marxist and Dalit perspectives on the world, society, and literature. Dalit Literature and Autobiography Autobiography has been a favorite genre of Dalit writers.
This is not surprising, in light of the emphasis that they place on authenticity of experience. Here again Dalit writers have faced criticism xxxvi Introduction from mainstream critics who say that autobiography is not a literary genre.
Valmiki says that even some Dalit writers have internalized this negative view of autobiography. Ambedkar and Periyar spoke and wrote on the day-to-day experiences of the Dalitbahujan castes.
One main point of Dalit literary analysis is that Dalit literature is based on real life and the lived experience of Dalit writers. While mainstream critics have seen this as evidence of a lack of imagination in Dalit writing, suggesting that Dalit literature is nothing but reportage, Dalit writers point to the authenticity of experience as the most important characteristic of Dalit writing.
Periyar means great soul, or mahatma, the honorific given to E. Ramasamy Naicker — , the great leader of the non-Brahmins of Tamil Nadu. Naicker founded the Dravida Kazhagam, or Dravidian Federation, a party of political, social, and cultural reform that rallied south Indians against the Brahmin hegemony and called on them to take pride in their own distinct culture. He founded the SelfRespect movement for non-Brahmins.
When I questioned him about it during an interview, Valmiki insisted that all his stories are based on real incidents. Dalit analyses of ancient Indian sacerdotal texts have been irreverent, turning the heroes into villains and vice versa. Ilaiah retells the mythological stories about gods and goddesses like Ram and Sita, Shiva and Parvati, Vishnu and Lakshmi, and others from a Dalit point of view, rehabilitating the traditionally demonized characters in them.
Valmiki says that Dalit literature has recuperated such stigmatized characters as Eklavya, Karna, and Shambuk from ancient epics and established them as heroes This is the only place in the text where he draws on traditional Hindu mythology. Like the goddess, who is the embodiment of shakti or power, his mother will not be submissive against such an insult but will avenge herself.
The goddess Durga is the protective mother who will also use her power to rid the world of evil. Dalit writers like Valmiki are thus producing literary analysis and literary theory simultaneously with their literary creations. The high-caste literary establishment can no longer continue to present its choices as universal and timeless. Moreover, by producing their own discourse and publishing it in small Dalit-run journals, Dalit writers have created a space for themselves.
He therefore has broken new ground, mapped a new territory. Besides a few stray poems and short stories by canonical Hindi writers, which portray Dalit characters as tragic figures and objects of pathos, Dalit representations are conspicuously absent from contemporary Hindi literature.
A literary critic, reared in an educational system that taught a canon of literature focused solely on the experience of the privileged sections of society, whether of India or of the West, must Introduction xxxix tread cautiously in this new territory, using the benchmarks provided by Dalit literary theory and continuously on guard against those kinds of formalist analyses that privilege form over content. The Hindi word joothan literally means food left on a plate, usually destined for the garbage pail in a middle-class urban home.
However, such food would be characterized joothan only if someone else were to eat it. The word carries the connotations of ritual purity and pollution, because jootha means polluted.
I feel that words such as leftovers or leavings are not adequate substitutes for joothan. Leftovers has no negative connotations and can simply mean food remaining in the pot that can be eaten at the next meal; leavings, although widely used by Ambedkar and Gandhi, is no longer in the active vocabulary of Indian English.
Scraps and slops are somewhat closer to joothan, but they are associated more with pigs than with humans. Valmiki gives a detailed description of collecting, preserving, and eating joothan.
His memories of being assigned to guard the drying joothan from crows and chickens, and of his relishing the dried and reprocessed joothan, burn him with renewed pain and humiliation many years later. The term actually carries a lot of historical baggage. Both Ambedkar and Gandhi advised untouchables to stop accepting joothan. Ambedkar, an indefatigable documenter of atrocities against Dalits, shows how the highcaste villagers could not tolerate the decision of Dalits to no longer accept joothan and threatened Dalits with violence if they refused it.
Valmiki has thus recovered a word from the painful past of Dalit history, and it resonates with multiple ironies. Her act of defiance is an example of rebellion to the child Valmiki. He has dedicated the book to her and his father and portrays both as heroic figures who desired something better for their child and fought for his safety and growth with tremendous courage. An honorific title, it meant an officer who kept and prepared records. The child Valmiki rises on their shoulders to become the first high school graduate from his neighborhood.
He pays his debt by giving voice to the indignities suffered by his parents and other Dalits. He constructs Joothan in the form of wave upon wave of memories that erupt in his mind when triggered by a stimulus in the present.
These are memories of trauma that Valmiki had suppressed. He uses the metaphors of erupting lava, explosions, conflagrations, and flooding to denote their uncontrollable character.
The text follows the logic of the recall of these memories. Instead of following a linear pattern, Valmiki moves from memory to memory, showing how his present is deeply scarred by his past despite the great distance that he has traveled to get away from it. The text abounds in metaphors of assault, wound, dismemberment, scarring, and so on, conveying the brutality and violence of the social order that the narrator inhabits.
Valmiki presents the traumatic moments of encounter with his persecutors as dramatized scenes, as cinematic moments. His narration of the event captures the intensity of the memory and Introduction xli suggests that he has not yet healed from these traumas of the past. We see a full-dress reenactment of the event from the perspective of the child or the adolescent Valmiki. Many Dalit texts share this strategy of staging encounters between the Dalit narrator and people of upper castes.
Often these encounters are between a Dalit child at his or her most vulnerable and an upper-caste adult in a position of authority. The Dalit narrator lives these traumatic experiences again but this time in order to go past them by understanding them in an ethical framework and passing judgment on them, something that the child could not do. The theoretical glossing of the experience, then, is a sort of healing, a symbol of having overcome it by naming it and sharing it with a caring community.
By documenting these experiences of the Dalit child, first by theatricalizing them so that we see them for ourselves and then by commenting on them in the ethical language of guilt and responsibility from the perspective of the victim, Valmiki and other Dalit writers break through the wall of silence and denial that had hidden the suffering of the Dalits.
He relives the agony of having to sit away from his classmates, on the floor, of being denied the right to drink from the common pitcher, lest he make it jootha, and, worst of all, being denied access to the lab, which ensured his failure in an examination.
The text, as testimony to a crime suffered, acquires the character of a victim impact statement. Indeed, after losing his thumb, Eklavya could no longer perform archery. When people of high caste tell this popular story, they present a casteless Eklavya as the exemplar of an obedient disciple rather than the Brahmin Dronacharya as a perfidious and biased teacher. When in a literature class a teacher waxes eloquent about this same Dronacharya, Valmiki challenges the teacher, only to be ruthlessly caned.
The modern Dalit Eklavya, however, can no longer be tricked into self-mutilation. While Valmiki indicts the education system as dealing in death for Dalits, Valmiki pays tribute to the Dalit organic intellectuals who help nurture the growth of a Dalit consciousness in him. Hemlal has shed his stigmatized identity as a Chamar by changing his name from Jatia, which identifies him as an untouchable, to Jatav, which is not readity identifiable.
See page This moment, narrativized at length in Joothan, gives us a key to how marginalized groups walk onto the stage of history. Valmiki underscores the way that Ambedkar has been excised from the hagiography of nationalist discourse.
Valmiki first encounters Ambedkar through the writing of a fellow Dalit, passed on to him by another Dalit, in a library run by Dalits. Valmiki mocks and rewrites the village pastoral that was long a staple of Indian literature in many languages, as well as a staple of the nationalist discourse of grassroots democracy. Valmiki portrays a village life where the members of his caste, Chuhras, lived outside the village, were forced to perform unpaid labor, and were denied basic requirements like access to public land and water, let alone education or camaraderie.
Valmiki describes in painstaking detail the process of removing and skinning dead animals, curing the hide, and taking it to the hide market, which is permeated with the stench of raw hides and fresh bones. We read about the cleaning of stinking straw beds in the cattle sheds of higher-caste villagers. He describes the tasks involved in reaping and harvesting in terms of intense physical labor under a scorching sun and the needle pricks of the sheaves of grain.
Valmiki shows that he performed most of these tasks under duress and was often paid nothing. Such a portrayal of village life is very unlike the lyric mode of Hindi nature poetry where the sickle-wielding, singing farmworker is just an accessory of the picturesque landscape. By so doing, he provides readers with not only his experience as a victim but an inkling of how some people flatly deny such experiences ever occurred.
His voice acquires a bitterly ironic tone when he addresses those who deny these experiences. In fact, one distinctive aspect of Joothan, which marks it as a Dalit text, is its interrogative discourse. Valmiki, like many other Dalit writers, demands the status of truth for his writing, taking issue with those who find Dalit literature lacking in imagination.
Dalit autobiography claims the status of truth, of testimony. Naming people and places by their real names is one strategy through which Valmiki establishes the status of Joothan as testimony. The concrete materiality of his village and the cities that he later inhabits, and the rendering of historical Dalit protests that he participated in or wrote about in the newspapers at a personal cost, give Joothan the status of documented Dalit history. The timbre of his voice is exhortatory.
It demands answers and points out contradictions. While the text has many moments of deep sadness and pathos, its predominant mood is irony. The narrative comments are inevitably in an ironic voice, pouring sarcasm on the cherished cultural ideals and myths of high-caste friends. He relentlessly exposes the double standards of friends who are greatly interested in literature and theater yet practice untouchability in subtle ways, such as having a different set of teacups for their untouchable visitors.
Indeed, Joothan demands a radical shift from the upper-caste and upper-class reader by insisting that such readers not forget their caste or class privilege. While Valmiki directs his irony, satire, harangue, and anger at non-Dalit readers, he sees Dalit readers as fellow sufferers. While the indictment of an unjust social system and its benefactors is one thrust of the text, its other important preoccupation is a substantive examination of Dalit lives. This self-critique has earned him brickbats from many Dalits who find the frank portrayal of Dalit society to be humiliating.
For them, it is tantamount to washing dirty linen in public. Valmiki accuses these Dalits of succumbing to brahminism. His frank critique of his own family members who hide their caste and therefore deny their relationship to Valmiki in public must have been painful to the people involved, particularly because he named them.
Joothan, then, is a multivalent, polyvocal text, healing the fractured self through narrating, contributing to the archive of Dalit history, opening a dialogue with the silencing oppressors, and providing solace as well as frank criticism to his own people.
On the other hand, the harsh realities that he portrays so powerfully underscore the failure to fully meet the promises made in the Constitution of independent India. Joothan stridently asks for the promissory note, joining a chorus of Dalit voices that are demanding their rightful place under the sun.
A manifesto for revolutionary transformation of society and human consciousness, Joothan confronts its readers with difficult questions about their own humanity and invites them to join the universal project of human liberation.
No translation is a replica of the original text, and every translation necessarily entails a loss. My translation of Joothan is no Introduction xlvii exception. At times the English version may sound awkward, but I have chosen awkwardness over falsification or softening. For example, the Hindi term jatak, as used by the village upper castes, does not translate as child or children because these English words have positive connotations.
I have therefore used progeny to convey the coldness and contempt in caste-inflected interactions. The speech and conversations of his family and villagers are in local dialect but with distinct variations, the linguistic equivalent of the social distance between them.
All cross-cultural communication involves a loss in meaning. Valmiki constantly worries whether savarna Hindus who have not experienced the hardships of untouchability will understand him. Limbale proposes that what the readers and critics need more than anything else when reading Dalit writing is empathy. If this translated version of Joothan manages to engage readers by appealing to their consciousness and arousing their empathy, it will have done its job. Thus Spoke Ambedkar: Selected Speeches.
Edited by Bhagwan Das. Jullundur, India: Bheem Patrika Publications. In Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches. Compiled by Vasant Moon. Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra. Edited by Vasant Moon. Dangle, Arjun. Translated by Avinash S. Pandit and Daya Agarwal. Bombay: Orient Longman. Das, Bhagwan. Bangalore, India: Ambedkar Sahitya Prakashan. Edited by Bhagwan Das and James Massey. Ilaiah, Kancha. Calcutta: Samya. Kosambi, Damodar Dharmanand. An Introduction to the Study of Indian History.
Bombay: Popular Prakashan. Lal, A. Limbale, Sharankumar. In press. Translated by Alok Mukherjee. Hyderabad, India: Orient Longman. Mukherjee, Prabhati. Omvedt, Gail. Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India. Delhi: Sage. Delhi: Orient Longman. Valmiki, Omprakash. Dalit Sahitya ka Saundaryashastra. Delhi: Radhakrishna. Wankhade, M. Translated by Maxine Berntsen. Families of Muslim weavers lived on the other side of it.
The pond was called Dabbowali, and it is hard to say how it got that name. Perhaps because its shape was that of a big pit. On one side of the pit were the high walls of the brick homes of the Tagas. At a right angle to these were the clay walls of the two or three homes of the Jhinwars, another untouchable caste. After these were more homes of the Tagas. The homes of the Chuhras were on the edges of the pond.
All the women of the village, young girls, older women, even the newly married brides, would sit in the open space behind these homes at the edges of the pond to take a shit. Not just under the cover of darkness but even in daylight. The purdah-observing Tyagi women, their faces covered with their saris, shawls around their shoulders, found relief in this open-air latrine. At this same spot they would have a conference at a round table to discuss all the quarrels of the village.
The muck was strewn everywhere. The stench was so overpowering that one would choke within a minute. The pigs wandering in narrow lanes, naked children, dogs, daily fights—this was the environment of my childhood. If the people who call the caste system an ideal 1. Taga is the abbreviation of the surname Tyagi. Our family lived in this Chuhra basti. Everyone in the family did some work or other. We did all sorts of work for the Tagas, including cleaning their homes, agricultural work, and general labor.
We would often have to work without pay. Nobody dared to refuse this unpaid work for which we got neither money nor grain. Instead, we got sworn at and abused. They did not call us by our names. The Chuhras were not seen as human. They were simply things for use. Their utility lasted until the work was done. Use them and then throw them away. A Christian used to visit our neighborhood. His name was Sewak Ram Masihi. He would sit with the children of the Chuhras around him. He used to teach us reading and writing.
The government schools did not allow us to enroll. My family sent only me to Sewak Ram Masihi. My brothers were all working. There was no question of sending our sister to school. One day Sewak Ram Masihi and my father had an argument. My father took me to the Basic Primary School. There my father begged Master Har Phool 2. Basti refers to settlement. In the villages the huts would be built of mud, and usually people of the same caste would live side by side.
See these and other kinship terms listed in the glossary. My father went. He kept going for several days. Finally, one day I was admitted to the school. The country had become independent eight years earlier. Although the doors of the government schools had begun to open for untouchables, the mentality of the ordinary people had not changed much. I was not allowed to sit on a chair or a bench. I had to sit on the bare floor; I was not allowed even to sit on the mat.
Sometimes I would have to sit way behind everybody, right near the door. From there, the letters on the board seemed faded. This was an absurd, tormented life that made me introverted and irritable. If I got thirsty in school, then I had to stand near the hand pump. They tried all sorts of strategies so that I would run away from the school and take up the kind of work for which I was born.
According to these perpetrators, my attempts to get schooling were not justifiable. Ram Singh and Sukkhan Singh were also in my class. In general, few adults are called simply by their first names. In northern India, where this autobiography is set, speakers always add the honorific ji as a courtesy suffix, because simply calling someone by a name is seen as presumptuous and rude; some people also believe that a name is something powerful, not to be taken lightly.
He had to stand near the pump and wait for someone from another caste who could touch the pump to notice and give him some water. The three of us studied together, grew up together, experienced the sweet and sour moments of childhood together.
All three of us were very good in our studies, but our extremely lower-caste background dogged us at every step. Barla Village also had some Muslim Tyagis who were called Tagas as well. The behavior of these Muslim Tagas was just like that of the Hindu Tagas. If we ever went out wearing neat and clean clothes, we had to hear their taunts that pierced deep inside, like poisoned arrows. We were humiliated whichever way we dressed.
I reached fourth class. Along with him had come another new teacher. After the arrival of these two, the three of us fell on terrible times. They would thrash us at the slightest excuse. Ram Singh would escape once in a while, but Sukkhan Singh and I got beaten almost daily.
I was very weak and skinny in those days. Sukkhan Singh developed a boil on his belly, just below his ribs. While in class, he used to keep his shirt folded up to keep the boil uncovered. This way the shirt could be kept clear of the puss, and he thought that if the teacher could see the boil, he would be decent and not hit him. Sukkhan screamed with pain. The boil had burst. Seeing him flailing with pain, I too began to cry. While we cried, the teacher was showering abuse on us nonstop.
If I repeated his abusive words here, they would smear the nobility of Hindi. I say that, because many big-name Hindi writers wrinkled their noses and eyebrows when I had a character 8.
Students in the fourth class are around ten years old. Coincidentally, the character who swore was a Brahmin, that is, the knower of Brahma, of God. Was it possible? Would a Brahmin swear? The ideal image of the teachers that I saw in my childhood has remained indelibly imprinted on my memory.
Whenever someone starts talking about a great guru, I remember all those teachers who used to swear about mothers and sisters. They used to fondle good-looking boys and invite them to their homes and sexually abuse them. Children used to feel scared just encountering the headmaster. The entire school was terrified of him. See that teak tree there? Climb that tree.
Break some twigs and make a broom. And sweep the whole school clean as a mirror. It is, after all, your family occupation. My face was covered with dust.
I had dust inside my mouth. The other children in my class were studying and I was sweeping. The headmaster was sitting in his room and watching me. I was not even allowed to get a drink of water. I swept the whole day. I had never done so much work, being the pampered one among my brothers. The second day, as soon as I reached school, the headmaster again put me to sweeping the school.
I was consoling myself that I would go back to class the next day. The third day I went to the class and sat down quietly. The pressure of his fingers was increasing. As a wolf grabs a lamb by the neck, he dragged me out of the class and threw me on the ground. Just like me, it was shedding its dried up leaves.
All that remained were the thin sticks. Tears were falling from my eyes. I started to sweep the compound while my tears fell. From the doors and windows of the schoolrooms, the teachers and the boys saw this spectacle.
Each pore of my body was submerged in an abyss of anguish. Just then my father passed by the school. He stopped abruptly when he saw me sweeping the school compound. When I saw him, I burst out sobbing. He entered the school compound and came toward me. Tell me, what has happened? In between my hiccups I told the whole story to my father: that the teachers had been making me sweep for the last three days, that they did not let me enter the classroom at all. Pitaji snatched the broom from my hand and threw it away.
His eyes were blazing. Pitaji, who was always taut as a bowstring in front of others, was so angry that his dense moustache was fluttering. All the teachers, along with the headmaster, came out. Kaliram, the headmaster, threatened my father and called him names. But his threats had no effect on Pitaji. I have never forgotten the courage and the Joothan 7 fortitude with which my father confronted the headmaster that day.
Pitaji had all sorts of weaknesses, but the decisive turn that he gave my future that day has had a great influence on my personality. The Chuhra wants him educated. Go, go—otherwise I will have your bones broken. So I am leaving now. But remember this much, Master: This Chuhre ka will study right here, in this school.
And not just him, there will be more coming after him. But what happened was the exact opposite. Knowledge is not gained like this. Pitaji came back, tired and dejected. He sat up all night without food or drink. God knows how deep an anguish Pitaji went through.
Omprakash Valmiki mentions that pigs formed a part of their lives and he believes that they are not the signs of unhygienic conditions; instead they brought prosperity in the families. He comments thus: Yes, the educated among us, who are still very minute in percentage, have separated themselves from these conventions.
It is not because of a reformist perspective but because of their inferiority complex that they have done so. The educated ones suffer more from this inferiority complex that is caused by social pressures.
As a chuhra, he had to kill a piglet too as it was a part of worshipping Mata and the strain of that made him a staunch opposer of animal sacrifice through out his life. It was customary for the young bride and bridegroom among the chuhras to go to the houses of the Tagas and get some amount as the wedding gift. It was called salaam, and the author felt that it was a matter of ascertaining self-importance for the higher caste individuals, and a matter of losing dignity for Valmikis.
Chuhras also performed the duty of disposing the dead cattle, and collecting the skin of the animal to be sold at the market, the job which required great efficacy and patience.
All the incidents which happened in his early days made him think about the atrocities and injustices being meted out to the chuhras, and he could not accept the lines of the poem by the great Hindi poet, Sumitranandan Pant that he had to study in his text-book: Ah, how wonderful is this village life…. As an untouchable, he had to bear the insults at school along with his friends. He had two friends, studying at the same school Ram Singh and Sukkhan Singh who also belonged to the lower castes.
The author values the childhood friendship greatly as all the three studied together experiencing the joys and sorrows of life. His acquaintance with Chandrapal Varma, a Gujjar made him free from the harassments of the other Tyagi boys. His association with Vijay Bahadur Soul also was very important for him during his training period. But here it was an experience contrary to this aspect.
He could not image that a man who belongs to a noble caste could use foul language to humiliate the poor students. As such, he had to bear all the abuses and thrashings of the teachers. When he was in the fourth standard, he was instructed by the Head master Kaliram to sweep the whole school-ground, with a broom and the same was to be done for three days, which remained an inerasable memory in his life.
I started to sweep the compound while my tears fell. From the doors and windows of the schoolrooms, the eyes of the teachers and the boys saw this spectacle.
Each pore of my body was submerged in an abyss of anguish. Though his performance at school made him confident and happy, he could not become totally free from the bias of some of the teachers who did not allow him from participating in the extra-curricular activities, as almost all the teachers and the students were from the Tyagi community.
Poverty, hunger and unhygienic conditions in and around the homes especially during the rainy season in the basti raised many a thought in the growing mind of the author regarding prejudice and maltreatment that the Valmikis received. He began to ponder over the pre-ordained and pre- destined life of his community people. As he grew, he felt that the teachers were not teachers, but tormentors who were very spiteful and barbaric, and enjoyed the vicious pleasure of beating the young chuhra boy.
Teachers like Narendra Kumar Tyagi, though highly qualified could not come out of the caste-barriers and accept him as a chuhra which ripped apart the soul of the author.
According to the author, education should be an agent of social change and it should allow its citizens to participate equally in the building up of the democracy. His teachers did not possess the qualities of pleasant disposition or patience unfortunately.
It was in class five that he understood the importance of reading books and for him education meant not only excelling in academics, but also grooming of the personality which could be achieved only by reading books.
The library of the school gave him an opportunity to read the books by Saratchandra, Premchand and Rabindranath Tagore. Gandhi, Nehru, Vivekananda, Bose and other such personalities motivated him through their ideas and made him reflect on the contemporary Indian society with various distinctions and differences.
The passion, he says made him an introvert and he sought refuge in the characters of the short stories and novels. He tried to identify himself with the characters, as he read out the stories to his mother and his interest in literature. He read epics and realized that epics never recorded the sufferings of the Chuhras.
Reminding me of those hated days of hunger and hopelessness, this epic composed out of a feudalistic mentality is inscribed not just on my back but on each nerve of my brain. However, all the difficulties and pressures led him to the final destination; he got through successfully in the tenth class examinations and became the first boy in the chuhra basti to win the credit.
Education of a person brings in a change of ideas, and this was clearly noticed in the behavior of the author against the tagas, which provoked their rage and contempt against the author. Reading of Ramcharithamanas and the Mahabharata gave a way for him to know about the roots of Indian culture and philosophy. Omprakash Valmiki always received great support from his parents.
0コメント