Death, Beauty, Struggle. Margaret Trawick
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of named scavenging castes are those who pick up all the discarded filth on the streets, by the railroad tracks, and in the sewers. This filth includes not only human feces but also human bodies, body parts, animal feces, and dead animals. Formerly members of these castes were called “sweepers.” They are subject to humiliation and early death.
One notch up in the ritual status hierarchy are agricultural workers. They are not itinerant, but they are still untouchable. Living as an agricultural laborer, or any kind of day laborer, is almost always a losing proposition. Most of the wealth is concentrated in the cities. People who live as small farmers or agricultural laborers suffer. Agricultural laborers have been the pariahs, the outcastes of former times, and to a great extent they still are. Some remain bonded, at the mercy of their owners. But some do escape that life and find employment in the cities.
Middle and higher castes do not generally see themselves as oppressed but feel severely threatened when lower castes gain power. Those considered to be members of “other backward castes,” as well as those who employ Dalits as agricultural laborers, fight harder than anyone else to keep the Dalits down (Narula 1999; Scuto 2008; Human Rights Watch 1999, 2008; Mayell 2003).15 Intercaste marriage is an especially contentious issue (Shaji, Kumaran, and Karthick 2012; Subramanian 2012; Jagannath 2013). While a well-placed higher-caste man may marry a Dalit woman for progressive ideological reasons, if a higher-caste girl marries a lower-caste man, the whole family may be shamed and the girl may be in danger and despised. Even if a low-caste girl marries a man of higher caste, she and her family are likely to be subject to shame, as are the boy and his family. Only the most progressive families can make such a marriage work. Again, these are notable exceptions to the general rule. Other backward castes, sometimes identified as Shudras, are said by some Dalits to be the main killers of Dalits. But “other backward classes” (OBCs) still struggle for dignity, which they can find only in a casteless society, by joining the Buddhist religion in the hundreds of thousands (Suryawanshi 2015). And the Hindu right is recruiting Dalits to become Hindus, from which category Dalits were previously excluded. Religions thus become political parties. For how long, in which countries, and by which religions has religion been used or not used for political purposes?
Before Dalits were invited to become Hindus, there was a movement in India called Hindutva, which still exists and professes to follow the social texts of ancient Brahmanism, equated by members of the Hindutva movement with pure original Hinduism. This movement controls the government of India now. From a different perspective, one may reasonably say that Hindutva represents a narrow understanding of what it purports to represent—that there was no original Hinduism, there were just assorted groups of people in what is now India, engaging in assorted practices, worshipping assorted gods and goddesses. As valuation of the Sanskrit language grew and as literacy also grew, Brahmanism took hold. In this view, a clear hierarchy of human beings existed, in which Brahmans owned and controlled the sacred texts. Brahmans in India became powerful because of their exclusive access to certain forms of knowledge. But Brahmans as a caste are not the chief oppressors of Dalits today. Some Brahmans, most notably Arundhati Roy, are supporters of the Dalit cause. By nature, one is not born a Brahman any more than one is born a Dalit. One must learn how to be what one is said by others to be. From this writer’s point of view, Brahmans are not the problem. OBCs are not the problem. The whole caste system is the problem.
While Hindutva continues, a movement exists among modern Dalits in Tamil Nadu against Tamil nationalism of any kind, because these Dalits consider that Tamil nationalists have used rhetoric in support of caste abolishment to advance their own cause while paying scant attention to the plight of real Dalits, who are sometimes themselves considered to be foreigners from the north, with a language of their own, and therefore not really Tamil (Omvedt 2015). Kuṟavars, technically a scheduled tribe, are romanticized and at the same time excluded from advancement because of their supposed otherness. Modern Dalits consider that such romanticization is harmful to them, just as Gandhi’s calling them Harijans and thereby romanticizing them actually demeaned them and did them no good. Some modern Dalits therefore may despise the image of Gandhi while elevating Ambedkar to first place in their movement.
As cosmopolitanism advances among Dalits, local knowledge and local dialects, most of all nonliterate dialects, fall by the wayside. But as long as violent oppression continues, a prime motivator of the old folk songs remains. Anger in traditional Paṟaiyar songs is directed toward the god of death (Yama), the blue sky, and the singer’s own departed kin. Low-caste singers dared not express direct anger toward higher castes in traditional laments because of possible reprisal. This was earlier. Now some are singing of their oppressors by name, and what they sing of is not pretty.
Understandably, modern, educated Dalits reject the traditions in which they have been trapped for generations. They have been wrapped in a cloak of death, filth, and slavery that has constituted their very identity, and they want nothing of that now. Some of them work at office jobs in the cities, they are educated, and they do not want to be associated with this old, horrible, village life, still less with the monstrosities that lie behind the rituals. It is an act of bravery for them to come to the villages in which they were born, speak to a foreigner collecting village songs and stories, and remind her that something else is going on, an effort to free Dalits from all this.
Traditional songs of untouchables and modern literature of Dalits are bound by the fact that both address the oppression and violence to which these lower castes are subject. As violence against Dalits continues, Dalits, both women and men, become more bold.16 Their boldness in turn provokes more violence against them. We have seen this before. The inseparability of caste oppression and gender oppression is clearly laid out in the songs of untouchable women, as in the song of Siṅgammā performed by Sevi. Violence against Dalit women is widely documented in modern Indian literature as well as in scholarly articles and media reports (Irudayam, Mangubhai, and Lee 2006; The Hindu 2013, 2014; Hopkins 2008; Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights 2013; International Dalit Solidarity Network, n.d.; Evidence Team, n.d.; Gaikwad 2012; Krishnan 2014; Soundararajan 2014; Fontanella-Khan 2014; Tamil Nadu Women’s Forum 2007). Domestic violence against women in India is carefully hidden within higher castes, in part because the better off have houses in which they can conceal what goes on within the family; but it is less easy for Dalits to hide. But what actually constitutes a “house,” vīḍu in Tamil, is not necessarily what Westerners think of as a house. This matter is addressed extensively in the chapters on Sevi and Siṅgammā. I have asked a Tamil friend living in New Zealand what is the Tamil word for “privacy,” and after some thought she declared that there was none. I looked it up in a Tamil dictionary, and the closest words I could find denoted “secrecy,” something quite different from privacy.
Learning, education, language, and literacy are combined topics addressed in this chapter and others. Barring of untouchable children from school hurts them not only educationally but socially. A young adult has no way to hide his caste identity if he is a member of a Dalit group who is admitted to a university where reservations are held for members of such groups, as the student must carry a card stating that he is a certified member of a scheduled caste (SC) or scheduled tribe (ST)—in other words, an untouchable—in order to prove his status as a student. Reservations were meant to level the playing field, but they have not made education easier for those admitted under the SC/ST rubric. Known untouchables are treated badly in school and university settings. Girls and women born to untouchable castes are easy prey.
Sociolinguistics includes the study of dialect variation marking place, gender, and rank. This discipline enables one to see, among other things, that the dialects of the unschooled are not inherently inferior to the dialects of the schooled, that they tell about life as it is lived, remembered, and dreamed by outcaste speakers and singers, and by those with long memories. In modern India, literacy is necessary for advancement. One must know how to read and write the language that one speaks. But knowledge of one’s own language is not enough. Knowledge of English is necessary. Such linguistic obstacles hurt Dalits. And oral literature by Dalit women, beautiful and telling though it may be, is ignored.
For Dalits, as well as for higher-caste people, linguistic cosmopolitanism is a key to success. Additionally for Dalits, success may mean abandoning, or “forgetting,” their village dialects, because