Death, Beauty, Struggle. Margaret Trawick
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a Dalit, success means ceasing to be what one was before, abandoning ways of life and ways of speaking that are identifiably low caste. In America, it is not necessarily uncool to speak or sing with a working class dialect. In India, it is.
In this respect, the situation of Dalits is in some ways the opposite of the situation of African Americans, some of whom deliberately choose to maintain and develop African American ways of speaking. If they can speak both like an educated white person and like an African American, as the situation warrants, their road to success may be smoothed somewhat as they can be comfortable in both worlds. William Labov has noted that in inner-city New York, blacks change their dialects so that they will not be understood by whites.17 As soon as whites catch on to the meaning of a word such as “foxy” (this was decades ago) and start to use that word, inner-city blacks change their usage so as once again to be beyond the understanding of whites. Everything depends on the image of African Americans as having something extra, a style, a fillip, a kind of soul that whites can never achieve. Young whites want to talk like them, to listen to their songs and learn them, even if the words may be hard for whites to follow.
In India, the opposite prevails. There, educated Brahmans and others with multilingual knowledge practice creative code-switching between English, Tamil, Hindi, and other languages, so that people who do not know all of the languages mixed cannot follow them and can only look on in dumb admiration.18 In displays of linguistic and intellectual virtuosity in South India, it is important that a person not show knowledge of low-class, low-caste, or nonliterate dialects, just as a high-caste person should not know how to do physical labor. Just as the clothing one wears has political significance, so does the work one performs and the language and dialect one speaks. This does not mean that all cosmopolitan and multilingual people are of high caste, however. Indira Peterson notes that in early eighteenth-century Tamil plays known as Kuṟavañci, the casteless Kuṟatti fortune-teller is sometimes adept in multiple languages, including English. The itinerant Kuṟavars I met in Tirurunelveli and Saidapet were also multilingual. For such a fortune-teller, multilingualism would have been both a practical and a magical advantage. The Kuṟavars were likewise cosmopolitan in the sense of having traveled to distant places, and some traditional Kuṟavars of modern days still make this claim of themselves. But Kuṟavars are not admired by Dalits of the present day. Conversely, despite differences in geography, history, and culture, modern Dalits have found inspiration in African American movements. The Dalit Panthers were thus named after the Black Panthers of the United States.
An obstruction to mobility, in addition to the other obstructions Dalit women face, lies in the obscurity, to outsiders, of present-day rural Dalit women’s verbal art. In some forms of oral literature, the obscurity may be intentional. But it is also a consequence of the details of locale, of the language and its use in some social situations, and of local dialect variations, which are not to be found in dictionaries—what is sometimes called “local knowledge.”19 Therefore, in order for one to know what is being said, one must know the place where the singer or writer lives, one must know the people who live there, one must know how they live, and one must know the language in which they speak, chant, or sing. Whereas there are universally knowable aspects of old and new Tamil literature, oral and written, when local realities are not understood, the flesh can fall away from the bones. This is true of popular English literature of the present age, which is meant to appeal to a wide audience, as it was true of literature, both oral and written, when few people could read or write, and rural people steeped in local knowledge could not be well understood except by others who spoke the same language/dialect. In the current millennium, cosmopolitan intellectuals may lose all knowledge that cannot be conveyed in a universalist medium. The modern Tamil Dalit poetry that I have seen so far is not in song form but in written free verse form and printed. The oppressors in the poems are often Brahmans, although in Tamil Nadu, the oppressors are not so much Brahmans as high-caste landlords who practice a form of Brahmanism involving notions of caste-based purity and pollution. In the Dalit journal Murasu an explicit aim is to universalize Dalit voices. The prominent young Dalit poet Meena Kandasamy writes mainly in English and has won national and international prizes for her poems. Some may say that she has moved too far from her Dalit “roots.” But who would want to go back there?
The unschooled are told that they cannot speak or write adequately. But the well-schooled, the powerful, the technicians, the managers, the professors, and some who wish to improve the lot of the very poor will not listen to and cannot hear what the unschooled have to say. Some of the privileged among those without privilege will learn the language of privilege. They are motivated to do so, after all. Few among the privileged will learn to speak, or think, like an old laboring woman from some village somewhere. Still less will they find the time to learn a “tribal” language. This is not just a matter of negligence and laziness, it is a matter of difficulty. The inability on the part of the highly schooled to learn the languages of the unschooled is a diminution of mental power for humanity. It is an intellectual loss for us all.
Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that every human mind is equal to every other. It is the reflection of one mind in another that is the real thing, the real mind, free from external restrictions, just playing for the sake of playing, thinking wild thoughts. All human minds are equal on that playing field. Lévi-Strauss valued the great diversity of human cultures and the essentiality of communication among them. He pointed out that the people once called “primitive” are in fact people without reading and writing. Such people are more aware than the highly literate of realities that the literate do not see. A sacrifice is involved in the transition to literacy, but without that transition the accomplishments of the literate, communication among them, cannot be achieved. It is a trade-off, then.20
I cannot agree with everything that Lévi-Strauss says—in particular the nature/culture divide, which among anthropologists today is rapidly dissolving, and his omission of women and children, to say nothing of animals, as people of interest—but I do agree with the general idea that without a connection of one mind with another, without a reflection of each in the eyes and the mind of the other, without a great number of minds all connected and all reflecting and refracting each other’s lights, there is no reality at all. For Lévi-Strauss, the story told, the myth, was more real than the minds that reflected and refracted it, like mirrors, among each other, without any awareness on the part of an individual mind that it was a vessel for the transmission of that myth. Likewise, for me, the act of communication, the fact of connection, is more real than anything to be found in a purportedly isolated mind.
A repeating theme of this book is the congruence between the verbal art produced by laborers in the fields of India and theories of the highly literate who come from far away. Is this congruence, this harmony, a sign that the theory works, or is it a sign that laborers in the fields of India have minds able to play in the fields inhabited by famous theoreticians? Lévi-Strauss’s dictum that the meeting of minds is what is important, whether they are studying me or whether I am studying them, and the discovery that something in the distant theoretician’s mind meshes with something in the proximal laborer’s mind, shows that these minds, on the profoundest levels, know each other.
How does this happen? Life is less a matter of binary oppositions than it is a matter of mutual perception, less a matter of inheritance than a matter of development, less a matter of growing up than a matter of reaching out, less a matter of not touching than a matter of touching.21
The abandonment of traditional ways, and the learning of the English language, is stressed not only by South Indian Dalits but also by North Indian ones, who see it as the only way for them to escape the oppressive caste system under which they are compelled to live.
The spirit world is not exactly the same thing as religion. Religions have rules. Spirits have only habits, which they may change. Spirits in India, including gods, have no fixed image, no fixed stories attached to them. They have personalities, but these personalities grow in multiplicity as time wears on. A spirit is not independent of mortals. If nobody sees it or believes in it, a spirit cannot exist. A spirit can turn into a god only if some people decide to make it so. A spirit is not a thing floating through the air. It is not a thing at all. A spirit is a memory, a feeling, a desire. A spirit may occupy a living person, or a statue or a temple or a rock. A spirit who is a god is a movement, with