Publication: Race and Class
Publication Date: 01-APR-04
Format: Online - approximately 8126 words
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Ramachandran, Shalini
Article Excerpt
In the late 1960s and 1970s, the state of Maharashtra in western India saw a resurgence of anti-caste political struggle and, simultaneously, an explosion of literature by writers from formerly 'untouchable' castes. (1) Writing often in anger and with a sense of urgency, the writers drew from a shared experience of caste subordination and from the low caste civil rights movement that had accompanied India's independence from the British in 1947. The writers identified themselves as Dalit, an old Marathi word meaning 'ground' or 'reduced to pieces', thus calling attention to the continuing oppression of untouchables in Indian society. Since the 1970s, the term Dalit has gained currency as a self-chosen name of political and cultural identity for untouchable communities throughout the country.
The greater political consciousness and exposure to literacy that Maharashtrian Dalits experienced are embedded in historical circumstances. The area that is now the state of Maharashtra was a central site of colonial industrial development, and Dalits in the region were able to access the relatively greater mobility that capitalist expansion created. However, more significantly, it was predominantly Dalits from the Mahar sub-caste that began to leave villages in search of work in the cities of Mumbai and Nagpur. The reason for Mahar flight from village life was rooted to some extent in the low position that they occupied in the internal Dalit caste hierarchy.
Mahars were the largest Dalit community in the region and were considered by other Dalit sub-castes as beneath them in status; they also did not have a hereditary specialised occupation like the Chambhars (leather workers) and Mangs (basket--and rope-makers) who were the other untouchable castes. Mahars in the village were used as 'all-purpose' servants performing ritually 'dirty' work, such as scavenging, along with other mandated duties like street-sweeping, wall-mending, being watchmen and making public announcements, often about death or disease in the villages. In return for their labour, they were entitled to gifts in kind such as a portion of the village harvest: their baluta, and a small share of land: their vatan. (2) Given the unstable nature of their function in the village, the changing parameters of feudal work, with the encroachment of modern forms of administration, and their position at the absolute bottom of the social pyramid, most Mahars found themselves in a battle for survival in which it became necessary for them to move to cities in search of waged employment. Employment in mills, factories, docks and in the British army (before 1892 only, when the colonial authorities, as an appeasement to the upper caste Hindu elite, banned Dalits from serving in the military) allowed Mahar children greater access to school. Rural Dalits in traditional occupations, on the other hand, did not have these same openings to formal education. The educational opportunities, which many Mahar Dalits drew on, were an impetus for the political mobilisation of later years, led by Dr B. R. Ambedkar (1892-1956), himself a Mahar Dalit whose father had been an enlisted soldier.
This article focuses on selected short stories from Poisoned Bread: translations from modern Marathi Dalit literature (1992), an anthology that also includes poetry, autobiographical extracts and political essays from the Marathi Dalit literary production of the 1960s and onwards. (3) The anthology is significant because it showcases seminal moments in Dalit writing and is also the only collected body of Dalit literature available in English translation to date. The publication of literature from India in international forums is still largely driven by the market demands of Anglo-American publishing houses that privilege cosmopolitan, diasporic literary trends, given their considerable success with western audiences. Because of this, translated work from Indian languages, Dalit or otherwise, has been of only slight interest to major Publishers.
Nevertheless, the efforts of Eleanor Zelliot, Arjun Dangle, Mini Krishnan and others have led to a few works being translated and published, among them Poisoned Bread, Vasant Moon's autobiography Growing up Untouchable in India and Bama's life story Karukku. (4) Poisoned Bread presents its readers with a broad representation of critically acclaimed work produced by Dalit writers in the post-independence period, but gaps and absences in the body of work that appears in the collection also point to some of the material conditions that dictate cultural production. There are few non-Mahar writers and few women contributors to the collection in Poisoned Bread. The dominance of Mahar writers in the anthology is an indication of the relatively higher economic mobility and political maturity that the Mahar community experienced during colonial times as a result of their early entry into the industrial working class. The relative lack of women's voices is a reflection of the great difficulty that Dalit women have in accessing literacy as well as gaining recognition in traditionally masculine literary circles. Yet, even with these omissions, Poisoned Bread is a powerful body of literary expression and an important social document indicting the caste system in India.
A focus on protest in the writings in Poisoned Bread is not inadvertent. The collection is predominantly drawn from the literary output of Dalit Panthers writing in the 1970s in a climate of political militancy. The first Dalit literary conference held in 1958 went almost unnoticed in mainstream literary circles, but Dalit literary production continued to gather momentum in the next two decades. In 1972, Dalit literature took a consciously political turn with the coming together of several Dalit writers and poets, led by Namdeo Dhasal and Raja Dhale, to establish a movement called the Dalit Panthers in Mumbai. Taking their inspiration from the militancy of the Black Panthers and the civil rights struggle of the 1960s in the US, these writers began to theorise Dalit literary output and to connect it to political change. As Arjun Dangle, the editor of Poisoned Bread and himself a former Dalit Panther, asserts, 'Dalit literature is not simply literature. Although today, most Dalit writers have forgotten its origins, Dalit literature is associated with a movement to bring about change' (xii). Arguing for a sociological, materialist approach to Dalit literary criticism, Dangle also emphasises that literature in itself is inadequate as a medium for transformative change:
If we examine literature in the light of social change, we note that it is not the one and only medium to bring about that change ... It is inevitable that values of life are spread through literature, but if one does not have a correct estimate of this medium, one cannot use it effectively. It is an illusion to believe that literature alone can create a revolution. To bring about a revolution, one should have the necessary philosophy and a plan of action, and a group to implement them. (257)
Writing with hindsight, Dangle implicitly assesses the failure of the Dalit Panthers to move beyond their literary success into a broader sphere of influence in political praxis. However, while their literary legacy was ultimately more enduring, the political intervention that the Dalit Panthers made in Dalit theory was radical and necessary.
The Dalit Panthers closely identified with Black literature from the US, drawing a parallel between the oppression of Blacks in American society and their own. The Indian political climate, too, had been in a state of turmoil; atrocities against Dalits in the villages had been rising, often directly as the result of an upsurge in Dalit self-confidence and assertion. In some states, such as Andhra Pradesh, the Maoist Naxalite peasant revolt recruited the support of hundreds...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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