Mainstreaming the subaltern
K. SATCHIDANANDAN
The roots of Dalit literature in Kerala and Tamil Nadu lie
in the strong corpus of oral and ritualistic literature that interrogated the
caste system and the practice of untouchability.
Dalit literature began to be mainstreamed in India with the
appearance of the English translations of Marathi Dalit writing. An
Anthology of Dalit Literature, edited by Mulk Raj Anand and Eleanor
Zelliot, and Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit
Literature, originally published in three volumes and later collected in a
single volume, edited by Arjun Dangle (both published in 1992, the latter
reissued recently in a new edition by Orient BlackSwan), were perhaps the first
books that popularised the genre throughout India.
Not that there was no Dalit writing earlier: the origins of
Dalit writing can be traced back to Buddhist literature; Dalit Bhakti poets
like Gora, Raidas, Chokha Mela and Karmamela; and the Tamil Siddhas, or
Chittars (6th to 13th centuries C.E.), many of whom must have been Dalits going
by hagiographical accounts like Periyapuranam (12th century). But it was
after the democratic and egalitarian thinkers such as Sree Narayana Guru,
Jyotiba Phule, B.R. Ambedkar, Iyothee Thass, Sahodaran Ayyappan, Ayyankali,
Poykayil Appachan and others cogently articulated the sources and modes of
caste oppression that modern Dalit writing as a distinct genre began to emerge
in Indian languages.
The Dalit Panthers of Maharashtra (formed in 1972) and the
writers like Baburao Bagul and Namdeo Dhasal who spearheaded the movement gave
an impetus to Dalit writing in Marathi following Ambedkar’s famous statement
addressed to Gandhi, “Mahatma, I have no country.” The rest of the story, from
the publication of Dhasal’s Golpitha (1972) onwards, is history. Now we
have a significant corpus of Dalit literature in several of the Indian
languages like Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Odiya, Punjabi, Tamil,
Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, and representative works from these are getting
translated into other languages, including English.
Over the past one decade or so, more than five anthologies
and quite a few autobiographies and works of fiction besides theoretical works
and works by individuals, including Dhasal, have been published in English by
various mainstream and alternative publishing houses in India. While I hope to
discuss some of these in future, let me confine myself here to the two volumes
of writings from South India published recently: The Oxford India Anthology
of Malayalam Dalit Writing, edited by M. Dasan, V. Pratibha, Pradeepan
Pampirikunnu and C.S. Chandrika, and The Oxford India Anthology of Tamil Dalit
Writing, edited by Ravikumar and R. Azhagarasan (OUP, 2012), the first two
volumes in a whole series of similar anthologies under preparation. (Let me not
fail to mention here No Alphabet in Sight, another anthology of new
Dalit writing from South India, edited by K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu and
published by Penguin Books in 2011 whose first dossier too had carried
translations from Tamil and Malayalam. The Penguin and OUP anthologies
complement each other.)
The editors of The Oxford India Anthology of Malayalam
Dalit Writing have an important message for readers in their prefatory
note: “Readers will discover the limitations of their reading practices as they
encounter the emotional, intellectual and aesthetic demands of this collection
and might feel uncomfortable at the challenge it poses as they realise their
complicity with the status quo. These selections will also bring the mainstream
critics and reviewers face to face with their own prejudices, who,
insufficiently equipped to understand or accept the truth of Dalit experiences
and perspectives, often label this body of writings ‘bitter’, ‘biased’,
‘militant,’ ‘angry’, etc., and might, therefore, have dismissed it as not
serious literary writing.”
Dalit literature has indeed created its own alternative
aesthetic by redrawing the map of literature, by discovering and exploring a
whole new continent of experience that had so far been left to darkness and
silence, by helping literature overcome stagnation through a cleansing renewal,
by disturbing the sterile complacency of the dominant social groups, and by
challenging their set mores and fixed modes of looking at reality, their stale
habits of ordering knowledge, beauty and power and their established literary
canons, bringing to focus neglected, suppressed or marginalised aspects of
experience, vision, language and reality and forcing the community to refashion
its tools and observe itself critically from fresh and different angles.
Dalit poetry, for example, challenges the assumptions and
injunctions of classical poetics by breaking its rules of “propriety”,
“balance”, “restraint” and “understatement”. Dalit literature also questions
the middle-class notions of linguistic “decency” by using words that classical
aesthetics would consider “uncouth” ( chyutasamskara ), “rustic” ( gramya)
or “obscene” ( asleela).
Both the anthologies carry exhaustive introductions that
trace the origins of Dalit writing in the respective languages and put this
non-canonical body of writing in its social, historical and cultural contexts
and provide readers with a conceptual framework that is sure to help them
appreciate the discourse better. They contain selections from both creative and
critical genres and reveal the range of concerns, forms, styles and
perspectives encompassed by the standardising term “Dalit writing” that often
conceals its thematic and idiomatic diversity.
The term “Dalit” began to be used in Kerala only in the
1970s chiefly as the hegemonic discourse of the Kerala renaissance, despite its
reformative zeal, succeeded in camouflaging the specificity of Dalit discourse
and its difference from the dominant discourse of the time. It is to be noted
here that the gaps and silences of the discourse of the Kerala renaissance
began to be discovered and critiqued by subaltern intellectuals only in the
last one decade or two when the famous “Kerala Model” of development also found
its astute critics.
Dalits and tribal people had been excluded from the idea of
Malayali identity as even the historic Malayali Memorial, the mass petition
submitted to the Maharaja of Travancore in 1891, did not demand jobs only for
these sections. The class discourse too was used to render invisible the “cultural,
symbolic and social capital” that their elite caste status had conferred on
them. Many of the upper-caste reformers who pioneered the renaissance were
progressive within their community but reactionary outside it.
Their idea of emancipation was confined to their own
respective communities. It was this context that forced Dalit organisations
like the Sadhujana Paripalana Yogam to claim a distinct political space within
the scenario of the emerging colonial modernity, leading to the struggles for
the rights to education, hygiene, land and modern citizenship itself.
Ayyankali, who wore clean clothes and a turban like the aristocrats and
followed their physical postures, provided historical agency to the Dalits and
turned the Dalit body into a site of resistance to feudal servitude and the
Dalits’ labour and identity into negotiating signifiers. His anti-caste
approach displeased the leaders of post-Independence parliamentary politics,
but he would be the last to collaborate.
Other movements followed, throwing up leaders like Poikayil
Appachan, Pampadi John Joseph, K.P. Vallon and organisations, including the
radical SEEDIAN (Socially, Educationally and Economically Depressed Indian
Ancient Natives) of the 1970s and the current DHRM (Dalit Human Rights Movement).
The most important struggles in Kerala, like those in Muthanga and Chengara in
the last decades, were led by Dalits and Adivasis who found that they had no
seats in the international socialist feast and that the Marxist scheme of the
class struggle might never fully grasp the complex cultural issues of
anti-caste struggles.
The roots of Dalit literature in Kerala as in Tamil Nadu
lie in the strong corpus of oral and ritualistic literature that interrogated
the caste system and the practice of untouchability and suggested an
egalitarian spirituality and an organic humanism that encompassed the whole of
creation. Both Poykayil Kumaragurudevan and Potheri Kunjambu, two of the
pioneers of Dalit literature, reveal this tendency. The paradigm, however, undergoes
a change in contemporary Dalit writers who share a modern literary sensibility
and a great sensitivity towards language.
Poets such as S. Joseph, M.B. Manoj, M.R. Renukumar,
Vijila, Binu M. Pallippad and S. Kalesh and fiction writers such as T.K.C. Vaduthala,
C. Ayyappan, Raghavan Atholi and P.A. Uthaman create a language of their own,
often retrieving from oblivion words and phrases seldom used in mainstream
Malayalam literature, though these stylistic nuances are difficult to capture
in English. The anthology also carries examples of autobiographical writing by
Kallen Pokkudan, an environmentalist, and critical interventions by thinkers
such as K.K. Kochu, K.K. Baburaj, Kaviyoor Murali, Sanal Mohan, Sunny Kapikkad
and Rekha Raj, among others.
Tamil Dalit discourse follows a different trajectory.
According to Ravikumar, who has written the introduction to the Tamil
anthology, Vedic Brahminism gained ascendancy in Tamil Nadu only after the
retreat of the relatively egalitarian Buddhist and Jain religions. Caste
formation seems to have taken place some time in the 12th and 13th centuries
C.E. though it had been preceded by some form of social stratification. But the
Brahmins were a minority and were prevented from entering Dalit residential
areas; hence, the oppression they could inflict was rather minimal.
It was with the formation of the South India Welfare
Association in 1906 and the launch of the “Non-Brahmin Manifesto” in 1916 that
Dalits began to face isolation and torture more than ever before as the non-Brahmin
space was entirely captured by high non-Brahmin castes, who were far larger in
number than the Brahmins. Their Justice Party was clearly in favour of these
castes, so much so that M.C. Rajah, a Dalit leader, had to lead a delegation to
the Governor to complain about the injustices committed by the Justice Party on
Dalits.
The movements of certain backward castes like the Vanniyars
only helped non-Dalits as some of these castes came to be designated as the
Most Backward Castes (MBCs). The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and All India Anna
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam politics also gained from such movements. The
implementation of the Mandal Commission report, too, benefited these sections,
further marginalising Dalits. In the 1980s, small-scale Dalit movements began
to emerge, producing in their wake a body of Dalit writing inspired to some
extent by the African, Afro-American and Latin American literatures of
resistance. However, they failed to link it up with the Buddhist past of the
Tamil people. For the Marxists it was an expression of class oppression and for
the followers of ‘Periyar’ E.V. Ramasamy, a new flowering of non-Brahmin
literature. One can go beyond these stereotypes only if one understands
thinkers like Lakshmi Narasu—who inspired Ambedkar —and Iyothee Thass, who read
Tamil literature from a Buddhist point of view. This was a new kind of critique
of Brahminism, different from the anti-Brahminism of the non-Brahmin leaders
rooted in Hinduism.
This difference is what made possible a novel like Poomani’s
Piragu (1971) or the works of Imayam, P. Sivakami and Bama. This is also why
the stories of, say, Cho. Dharuman, J.B. Sanakya or S. Thenmozhi and the poems
of Ravikumar, N.D. Rajkumar or S. Sukirtharani go beyond the discourse of
victimisation and celebrate the Dalit past and cultural identity. It is also
complex as it tries to discuss the question of the differences of caste and
gender within the Dalit discourse as in Bama’s Sangati (1994) or Vanmam
(2002). Thenmozhi’s essay “Power that transcends: Physical Body, Social Body,
Dalit Body” in the anthology looks deep into the problems of the construction
of Dalit subjectivity within the discourse of power and resistance. Bama’s Karukku
(1992) was a significant exercise in autobiographical fiction though it did not
lead to a flood of self-writing in Tamil as it happened in Marathi. It was
mainly in the 1990s that modern Dalit literature established itself as a
special genre of writing in the history of Tamil cultural expression.
The best of writing in these anthologies is highly nuanced
and uses invective, sarcasm and irony in articulating the Dalit dilemma. C.
Ayyappan’s Malayalam story, “Madness” (translator: Abhirami Sriram) is a good
example. It is the monologue of a Dalit teacher, Krishnankutty, who refuses to
accompany his sister when she is taken to the mental hospital or visit her in
the asylum. In the course of the monologue, he explains to his friend why he
had pretended not to see his sister when she was being thus taken by his
neighbours and friends.
As a teacher he now belongs to the middle class; his wife,
though a Dalit, is fair-skinned and comes from a higher-class background and
their daughter shares the mother’s features as well as attitudes, refusing even
to meet her dark grandmother in her unclean clothes. Not only that, none of
them would visit his sister and they would certainly resent his visiting her as
it would mean owning up that she was his sister and supporting her. If he
accompanies or follows her, the neighbours would come to know that his sister
is mad and that he is “low” caste. He would also have to confront his poor,
dark-skinned, ill-clad relatives in the hospital, who would claim him as their
kin. So he decides to disown her with little remorse in order to save his
social standing and himself from the ire of his wife and daughter.
Let me close this discussion by referring to some of the
poems in the two collections. Ravikumar tells his childhood friend how they
belonged to the same village and the same street and shared the same interests
as children, but now she, the companion, has turned a stranger to him and he
does not seem to belong to the same place. He invites the friend in a language
reminiscent of Sangam poetry: “Where fragrant screw-pine reeds/ lean against
the canal slope/ at our bathing ghat,/ is a black rock rubbed yellow with the
holy root of turmeric/ the sign of home/ to bear witness/ as we slip off our
clothes/ without letting them/ touch the water,/ pile them on our heads,/ and
wade across/ to a pool between the fields/ thick with a tangle of lilies that
I’ll pick/ for you./ Come” (translator: Vasantha Surya). The poet tells readers
if they have not listened to the cry of the rain, to the wailing of the wind
and the prayer of the abandoned woman at least not to pass blindly by the
outspread hands of begging children: “For what the ears have missed/ the eyes
can hear,/ sometimes” (“Have You Heard the Rain Crying?”, translator: Vasantha
Surya).
These poets realise that “a stiff stance of mere bravado/
just will not match/ the sheer daring of a rod/ that’s been bent/ many times”
(“A Lesson in Action and Reaction”, Thai Kandasamy, translator: Vasantha
Surya). There is perceptible anguish in Sukirtharani’s lines: “Our bare feet
are drenched/ by the pain of caste that drips from our lips/ as we drink tea
from palm-leaf cups/ standing at an untouchable distance,/ while the portrait
of our village/ frames itself at a place of double existence,/ always vigilant”
(“Portrait of My Village”, translator: Lakshmi Holmstrom). S. Joseph’s “Group
Photo” and M.R. Renukumar’s “Silent Beast”—both Malayalam poems—echo similar
sentiments in very different ways. The old woman in Thenmozhi’s poem “Urn”
mourns the loss of her childhood along with everything she had loved. Her
grandson scares her while she remembers her thatha with fondness.
“Rocked by a lullaby/ of memories,/ her head nods,/ non-stop” (translator:
Vasantha Surya).
Bama finds her mother’s scent living on in her even though
she herself is now a mother (“The Scent of Mother”, translator: Malini
Seshadri). Kabilan echoes the hapless rickshaw-puller, the woman-helper in the
construction job, and the sad housewife in his poems. M.B. Manoj sums it all up
in his Malayalam poem: “Who weighs more,/ an outcaste or a cow?/ Don’t feel
afraid:/ A dead cow weighs/ five times a live outcaste./ A live cow’s weight
equals/ two hundred and fifty million outcastes” (“Survey of India”,
translator: K. Satchidanandan).
--
.Arun Khote
On behalf of
Dalits Media Watch Team
(An initiative of “Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre-PMARC”)
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Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre- PMARC has been initiated with the support from group of senior journalists, social activists, academics and intellectuals from Dalit and civil society to advocate and facilitate Dalits issues in the mainstream media. To create proper & adequate space with the Dalit perspective in the mainstream media national/ International on Dalit issues is primary objective of the PMARC.
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