|
Add to Interest Profile
Edit Interest Profile
Email This Message
Search
| Ambedkars Reply To Gandhi http://www.hrschool.org/materials/annihilation2.htm The Caste System http://www.investindia.com/newsite/social/castes.htm ************************* FIGHTING BACK INDIA'S UNTOUCHABLES ARE MOUNTING A REBELLION AGAINST UPPER-CASTE PRIVILEGE. THEIR WEAPONS ARE EDUCATION, VOTES AND, INCREASINGLY, GUNS BY TIM MCGIRK/KARISAKULAM WITH REPORTING BY FAIZAN AHMED/PATNA, MEENAKSHI GANGULY/BELAUR, MASEEH RAHMAN/LUCKNOW AND R. BHAGWAN SINGH/MADRAS http://www.time.com/time/magazine/1997/int/971020/asia.fighting_back.html A village was on fire, and the wind that swirled the flames high above the ancient banyan tree carried with it an unmistakable sound: a lone woman crying over a corpse. It was grief at its most elemental, purer than the wind and fire devouring this village in the dark night of southern India. The woman wailed and shuddered while cradling her dead husband. She is an untouchable, and so was her young husband, Perumal Radhakrishnan. An invisible line divides this village, called Karisakulam, and thousands of others like it across India, separating the untouchables--those beneath Hinduism's rigid caste hierarchy--from the upper-castes. Radhakrishnan had crossed that line. As a leader of the village's untouchables, he had dared to defy the higher-caste community of Thevars. That evening, Radhakrishnan, a thin and bare-chested man, had ambled over to the upper-caste side to watch the evening news on the village's only TV, rigged up under the stars. While he sat there, four men from the Thevar caste pinned him to the dirt while a fifth man pulled out a sword and butchered him. Enraged by the killing, the untouchables burned down the houses of all the Thevars in the village and slaughtered their animals. They even smashed the TV; its fragments lay scattered next to Radhakrishnan's corpse. Then the untouchables took fright--they were afraid the Thevars would rouse the upper-castes from nearby villages and seek revenge--and so they fled into a wasteland of thorn bushes, leaving Radhakrishnan's widow alone, silhouetted against the flames as she rocked her husband's corpse. A few years ago, these untouchables would have dragged away Radhakrishnan's body and cowered in their mud-huts, resigned to their subhuman status. But now, scenes of defiance like the rampage at Karisakulam are taking place throughout India. The country's more than 150 million untouchables (who prefer to call themselves Dalits, Hindi for "the oppressed") are striking back. They are instigating a social revolution that is long overdue, one whose aim is to topple the 2,500-year-old juggernaut of the Hindu caste system. Increasingly, Dalits are challenging Hinduism's tenets that a person is condemned to his caste--determining whether he becomes a doctor or a scavenger, whom he marries, which village well he drinks from, and his social standing in a complex, ordered hierarchy--all by his actions in a past life. In this rebellion, the Dalit's main weapons are education and the vote. But in some rural areas, where resistance to their demands for equality is entrenched, they are taking up the gun. "Power was gradual ly slipping through the hands of the dominant castes for several decades," says Ashis Nandy, director of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. "It had already slipped down to the lower castes and is now reaching the Dalits. This will help democracy." Or will it? Consider the caste warfare and chaos now engulfing the northern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, where Dalits are trying to grab what they believe is theirs after so many centuries. Dalits make up one-sixth of India's population, yet only a few have managed to occupy top places in society as politicians, lawyers and scientists. A poor Dalit from Kerala, Kocheril Raman Narayanan, encountered discrimination in school and work. And yet this year he rose to become India's President, the first untouchable to hold that post. Before, Dalits had to support their landlords' candidates or they were beaten away from the polling booths when they tried to vote; now they are asserting themselves with the ballot, and their newfound power has jolted all of the national political parties, especially the long-ruling Congress. Ram Vilas Paswan, a Dalit member of the Janata Dal party, is now serving in the United Front cabinet as Railway Minister. Twice now, a Dalit woman, Mayawati, has been elected Chief Minister of populous Uttar Pradesh state, though her last six months in office were squandered in a vendetta against high-caste rivals. Says Mayawati: "Earlier I had thought it would take longer, but chang e is now so rapid that in a few years we will have a Dalit Prime Minister in New Delhi." Politicians and their promises offer little, however, to the most radical Dalits. They would prefer an armed insurrection, and they are willing to settle scores with higher-caste landlords using guns and home-made bombs. Says Ram Prit, a 75-year-old Dalit laborer in Bihar: "If you keep pouring water into a rat hole, the rats will come out fighting." Religious sanction has allowed this apartheid to survive Muslim invasions, British colonialism and even 50 years of democracy. Defenders of the caste system usually cite a verse from the Upanishads, Hinduism's ancient sacred texts: "Those whose conduct on earth has given pleasure can hope to enter a pleasant womb, that is, the womb of a Brahman or a woman of the princely class. But those whose conduct on earth has been foul can expect to enter a foul and stinking womb, that is the womb of a bitch, or a pig, or an outcaste." A hymn from the sacred Rig Veda describes how this human stratification came about: a cosmic giant, Purusha, sacrificed parts of his body to create mankind. "His mouth became the Brahman, his arms were made into the Warrior (Kshatriya), his thighs the People (Vaishiya) and from his feet the Servants (Shudra) were born." Through the centuries, these four main divisions (called varnas), were slivered into more than 3,000 sub-castes, based on the purity of their professions. A goldsmith is hi gher up the ladder than a blacksmith, and a priestly Brahman, whose rituals bring him in touch with the gods, is highest of all. The untouchables, however, are off the ladder completely. By origin, many were India's dark-skinned first inhabitants, conquered by Aryans and assigned such awful tasks as burning bodies, skinning carcasses and removing "night soil"--human excrement--from latrines. For thousands of years, outcastes were burdened with these denigrating chores. In many villages, untouchables still live in poverty and subjugation. They are forbidden from entering temples or drinking from the same wells as upper-castes. It was customary for higher-caste landlords to deflower a Dalit bride on her wedding night, before her helpless groom. (To cleanse himself after such a dalliance, according to the more than 2,500-year-old Laws of Manu, an upper-caste man must give alms and make "daily mutterings" of prayers.) These Hindu rules are far from even-handed: even today in some parts of India, if an untouchable is caught sleeping with a high-caste woman, both he and the woman are executed. A Dalit also can be considered too uppity, and risks a beating, if he wears a wristwatch or trousers instead of a traditional dhoti or loincloth. In some places in the south, Dalits aren't allowed to use an umbrella. Some roadside tea stalls refuse to serve them out of ordinary cups, and often Dalit children are warned not to try sharing classrooms with upper-caste kids. In some villages li ke Vembakkotai, in Tamil Nadu, the Dalits are forced to live on the leeward side to prevent the wind that touches their bodies from defiling the upper-castes. Faced with such persecution, Dalits are finally running out of patience. What's surprising is that it took them so long, Their emancipation began only in this century, behind the efforts of India's two great social reformers, Mahatma Gandhi and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, an angry, brilliant Dalit lawyer and politician. Through a scholarship from the Maharajah of Baroda, Ambedkar, an impoverished village boy, was able to study abroad and eventually earned several degrees. He worked as a financial adviser to the Maharajah but quit in disgust because the prince's upper-caste servants would fling documents onto his desk, rather than hand them to him, for fear of contamination. Yet his genius was unstoppable, as was his grit. "Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system," Ambedkar once declared. "Nothing can help to save the Hindus and ensure their survival in the coming struggle except the purging of the Hindu faith of this odious and vicious dogma." As an author of the Indian cons titution, he secured guarantees for the advancement of outcastes. For decades, these promises were often blocked by upper-caste bureaucrats, but a new generation of Dalits inside the civil service is helping their downtrodden people. In Uttar Pradesh, for example, 150 positions are held by Dalits in the elite 540-member Indian Administrative Service. The government gives Dalits a lift by reserving 15% of all government jobs and college places for them. Many of these educated Dalit bureaucrats are infuriated when, on visits to their villages, they are mistreated by upper-caste neighbors poorer and less educated than they. Man Dahima, a Dalit who is one of the most senior civil servants in Bhopal, capital of Madhya Pradesh state, says he still encounters "feudal harassment" when he goes back to his village. "Even today, we're not allowed in some temples," he says. "There are no signs outside, but these things are well understood." Other urbanized Dalits seethe when being served out of coconut shells instead of teacups or when forced to sit at a village Brahman's feet. Says Ezhilmalai, a Dalit politician in Tamil Nadu: "The Dalit would rather die than live without self-respect. And when he prefers to die for honor, what is there to care for?" Ambedkar wanted to destroy the caste pyramid through democracy, but the rule of law has been slow in reaching many villages where upper-caste landlords, often in league with local police, are keeping the Dalits down. In such places, many Dalits are opting for armed resistance. "The condition of the Dalits in the villages is so bad that the concern for most is how to gain minimum self-respect and security," says a senior state official in Uttar Pradesh. "What they want today is not jobs, but to be able to live without being humiliated and harassed." In Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, caste conflict is rife, and it has spread to other states such as Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. Many Dalits, along with forest-dwelling tribals, have signed up with armed leftist groups like the Maoist Communist Center, Liberation and People's War Group, which go around shooting or slitting the throats of feudal upper-caste landowners and policemen. This communist insurgency, which flared in the 1970s, still rages in the backward regions of central and eastern India. Not surprisingly, the upper-castes are hitting back. In Bihar, high-caste landowners raised a private army called the Ranvir Sena, and hardly a day goes by without caste killings. Even Rabindra Chowdhary, a Ranvir Sena leader, concedes that the landlords had cruelly exploited the Dalits. "We were abusive and did not treat these people well," he says. "We do not believe in killing. But if we do not kill, they will think that we are weak." Tension runs high, and even the most nonsensical incident can trigger a bloody outburst. In Tamil Nadu, a game of tag between Thevar and Dalit schoolboys led to the beheading of a Dalit and the revenge killing of 13 people, both Thevars and Dalits, many of them dragged off a bus and hacked to death. In Bihar's Belaur village, a tiff over a pack of cigarettes led to a mini-war between Dalits and the upper-caste Bhumihars that ultimately left 16 dead and dozens wounded. Even today, that feud festers: more than 350 Dalit families have deserted the village, and the Bhumihars--who patrol their village at night with guns and spears, ready for attack--cannot hire laborers for their fields. Some Dalits are even refusing to carry out their repugnant jobs. "My generation is fighting," says Sri Prakash, a Dalit whose house was set ablaze in a caste feud. "We've told the Thevars we're not going to cremate their dead any more. Let them do it themselves." Says Sociologist Nandy: "The Dalits are much more aggressive. Now that they have tasted power, they don't want to be denied it." A mini-partition based on caste lines is taking shape in areas where Dalits are especially politicized. In some districts, police say, Dalits are probably better armed and organized than their upper-caste adversaries. It has become too dangerous for a Thevar family to live among the Dalits. Thevars are migrating to villages where they are in control, while Dalits are moving to places where they are in the majority. A Thevar knows better than to wander into some villages in the Srivilliputhur district, where Dalits humiliate upper-caste strangers by making them walk through the village with their sandals on their heads, ridiculing Vedic order by putting the lowliest on top. Dalits toiling in stone quarries and match factories have allegedly pilfered enough explosives to gain a lethal edge. Says Mahboob Batacha, a Tamil social worker in Madurai: "There's no village around here where the Dalits aren't armed. Now, more Thevars are getting killed than Dalits." Envy is often the spark for caste warfare. It is not usually the top-rung Brahmans and Kshatriyas who clash with the Dalits but rather the castes lower down: those slightly above the untouchables, such as the Thevars in Tamil Nadu and the Yadavs in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. As Dr. K. Krishnaswamy, a prominent Dalit politician in Tamil Nadu, explains, "Some Dalit youth are climbing fast through reserved government jobs. Others have gone to the Gulf for employment, and they are all bringing back TVs, refrigerators and vcrs. This is causing a lot of heartburn among the other castes." Krishnaswamy's own life is an illustration of this jealousy. When he was granted a scholarship to a prestigious college, the upper-caste postman pocketed his admissions letter, and Krishnaswamy never found out that he was accepted until too late. Eventually he made it to medical school and, after leaving, set up practice near his village. Many of his patients were Dalit women who wanted abortions after being raped by upper-caste land owners. "I went to the upper-caste men and told them this wasn't right. They should marry these girls," he says. It was not a popular idea; a mob of 1,000 upper-caste men besieged the doctor's house one night, attacking him and his family. After a month in the hospital, he returned, full of fight. "It made me angry, more determined than ever," he says. Today, Krishnaswamy is one of only a few Dalits elected to Tamil Nadu's assembly, even though Dalits comprise about 20% of the state's voters. His life has been threatened so often that, while driving through upper-caste-dominated areas of the state, he is accompanied by two armed bodyguards. Says Krishnaswamy: "The political parties are the real culprits for keeping the caste conflict going." But caste politics is alive and well, and is contributing to a stirring-up of anti-Dalit sentiment in Bombay. In July, slum-dwellers awakened to find that their statue of the bespectacled Ambedkar had been garlanded not with the customary flowers but with a wreath of dirty sandals. That was all it took to start a riot. Hundreds of angry Dalits poured onto the streets, hurling stones and setting up roadblocks with burning tires. Fearing the rioters would set fire to a parked gas tanker, police started shooting in the shanty lanes, killing about a dozen people. Once news of the deaths spread, Dalits began protesting in the neighboring states of Gujarat, Karnataka and in the capital, New Delhi. The police shootings also revived antagonism between the Dalits and Maharashtra's ruling Shiv Sena party. Its militant Hindu leader Bal Thackeray has often attacked job reservations and the renaming of a university after Ambedkar. The Bombay incident also revealed the Dalits' disillusionment with their own leaders. When a former State Minister and Dalit leader visited the shantytown the day after the killings, he was attacked and had to run for his life. The funeral procession for those shot by police was attended by 150,000 Dalits, but not one Dalit politician dared to show up. Says Savita Ambedkar, the 81-year-old widow of the Dalit leader: "If we can stay together, we have the power to make a party succeed. But it's a great disappointment that the movement has been captured by people who cannot really lead it properly." A doctor and a Brahman who became Ambedkar's second wife, Savita now lives alone in a shabby house in central Bombay. She has written a biography of her late husband, but because of her high caste, she was never really accepted by Dalits. Ambedkar's grandson Prakash hasn't fared much better. Ambedkar died in late 1956, soon after founding the Republican Party of India, but grandson Prakash, who now leads one of its many factions, lacks his visionary fire. Desperate, the Dalits in Bombay's slums are flailing for an alternative leadership--or at least a godfather. Shortly after the funeral of the slain Dalits, a lower caste Bombay underworld chieftain named Arun Gawli offered himself as their savior. When the gangster called a Bombay rally, thousands of Dalits flocked to it. Says social worker Sushoba Barve: "After the killings, many Dalit youth felt that the only way to protect themselves was to ally with someone who could give them protection." Elsewhere in India, Dalits are feeling equally deceived by the national parties, which are top-heavy with high-caste politicians. Dalits have yet to unite. "All that keeps India from having a bloody revolution is that we Dalits are a divided lot," says civil servant Dahima. Even among the Dalits, strong caste rivalries exist; one study discovered 900 Dalit "sub-castes" in the country. Basically, everyone is squirming not to fall to the bottom of India's massive pile of humanity. Predicts one Dalit official: "As benefits trickle down, the conflicts between sub-castes are bound to sharpen." Lately, a number of regional leaders have been trying to bring unity to lower-caste aspirations. Several could easily cripple their state capitals with 100,000-strong demonstrations. So far, the only Dalit politician to challenge the mainstream parties is Kanshi Ram, 63, a former technician at a government defense laboratory. Armed with wiliness and an ability to survive in the venal world of Indian politics, Ram has no qual ms about forming alliances with his high-caste adversaries if it brings his Bahujan Samaj Party to power. His abrasive protege Mayawati governed Uttar Pradesh for six months in alliance with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, many of whose followers adhere stoutly to Manu's ancient law. During her term, Mayawati ordered 13,000 statues of Ambedkar and began work on a $30 million park in Lucknow in honor of the Dalit leader. She also reshuffled 1,400 bureaucrats and police officers. Dalit civil servants, whose promotions had been mothballed by their high-caste superiors, were elevated to top posts. State funds and projects for roads, schools and electricity were channeled to neglected Dalit villages. Above all, Dalits were treated to the spectacle--unimaginable a few years back--of an acid-tongued Dalit like Mayawati ordering around upper-caste grandees in the administration who in the past had either bullied or, at best, ignored them. Mayawati made plenty of enemies, though. She arrested thousands of low-caste political opponents, while her own Dalit-run administration was accused of corruption. Some Dalits proved as nasty as their one-time tormentors, and police were often used to settle old grievances against the upper-castes. A law meant to check atrocities against Dalits was mis-used to send scores of innocent people to jail. Bail was denied, but bribes were gladly accepted. One former bureaucrat recounts how his own Brahman servant was accused of banditry back in his village even though the servant was then in Lucknow, hundreds of kilometers away. "It turns out the police officer in charge was a Dalit," the former bureaucrat explains. "This militancy," according to sociologist Nandy, is "the price we have to pay. We are seeing an attempt by the Dalits to reaffirm their dignity. I won't say they're being provocative, but they are no longer turning the other cheek." All national parties are now appealing to Dalits, which is perhaps one reason why Narayanan's bid for the presidency (a largely symbolic post) went unopposed. The President is the fourth of seven children born to a father who practiced traditional medicine in Kerala using herbs and plants. Often, his parents could not afford school fees, and Narayanan was punished for missing class until his father scraped up the rupees. He rose to become India's ambassador to the United States before entering politics. "A diplomat," Narayanan once said, "should have a thick skin. I got mine through experiences such as standing on a bench in front of the whole class." Narayanan likes to see himself as the President of all Indians, but many Dalit militants fault him for not using his exalted office to help lift his downtrodden community. Not surprisingly, many Dalits have tried to escape caste fetters by converting from Hinduism to Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, which preach that all men are equal before God. Ambedkar led the way in 1956, when he organized a public rally at which he and nearly half a million of his followers publicly left Hinduism to become Buddhists. Pointedly, he held this mass conversion in Nagpur, headquarters of a right-wing Hindu movement, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Dalits also complain that the caste system has crept into other religions, so that a Dalit convert is not treated as well as, say, a Brahman or a Kshatriya. Some Dalit activists insist that Dalits should try to erase Hinduism's prejudices against them from inside the faith. Says Krishnaswamy: "Religious conversion is not an escape. It's a temporary shelter. We are the original owners of this country, so why should we lose our identity?" Despite past attempts at reform, Hinduism's phobia against the Dalits runs deep. A Dalit girl named Kumud Pawde once heard Vedic hymns coming from the home of high-caste neighbors. She stopped, transfixed by the oceanic chants, the lamps, the fragrance of incense. In Poisoned Bread, an anthology of Dalit writing, Pawde describes how a woman in pearls and brocaded sari emerged from the house and yelled: "Hey girl! What are you staring at? Here, take a ladoo [a sweet] and be off!" Pawde was so entranced by the Vedas that she decided to study Sanskrit, braving the taboo that forbade all but Brahmans from learning the sacred language. She is now one of India's few Dalit professors of Sanskrit. She recalls the despair on the faces of some high-caste students as they asked themselves: "In what former life have I committed a sin that I should have to learn Sanskrit even from you? All our sacred scriptures have been polluted." Many Hindus felt just as scandalized when a Dalit, Suryavanshi Das Tyagi, was made priest of the elegant Mahabir temple in Patna, the capital of Bihar. He is perhaps the only Dalit priest among northern India's 300 million people. "When I was appointed, there was enormous resentment," says Tyagi, 55, "But now, even the Brahmans touch my feet." Nonetheless, Brahman priests tried to bar Tyagi from the temple until a senior official intervened. All around India, Dalits are demanding free access to their gods. Not far from Patna, Kunti Devi, a woman from the much-despised Dalit community known as Musahars, the rat-eaters, strode into a temple devoted to Durga, the Hindu goddess who slayed an evil demon. Kunti had her own demons to slay. By simply laying an offering of flowers before Durga, she effectively opened up the temple to her fellow Dalits. "The upper-castes knew I'd gone in," she boasts. "But they didn't dare say anything. They knew I had supporters who would beat them up." Instead of risking confrontation, many Dalits are heading for the cities. For them, the urban centers offer hope, an escape from some caste barriers. As Bindeshwar Pathak, a New Delhi social worker, says, "Can we check who cooked the meal in a hotel, or who sat beside us on a bus? Can we stop someone from living next door?" But the choice of jobs for illiterate newcomers is grim. In Bhopal, Munni Bai, mother of nine children, earns $22 a month emptying 40 latrines a day. She carries the excrement on her head, in a wicker basket she carefully lines with old newspapers. And the smell? She shrugs. "Just to fill my belly I've had to do these things," she replies. Munni Bai at least has some freedom. She probably considers herself better off than the Dalits of Khajuri, just 20 km from Bhopal, who have never heard of the great emancipator Ambedkar, who can't read or write and who are paid about $14 a month toiling for their upper-caste landlord. "There's a terror in the village. We can't speak against them or we'll be beaten," whispers one old man. Money is breaking up caste prejudices faster than any law can, and therein lies India's hope of shedding its ancient, shameful yoke of discrimination. Even by doing such menial jobs as washing dishes or sweeping factory floors, the Dalit in the city is better off than many of the higher-caste folks back in his country village. He may not be able to read or write, but his children will. One Dalit returned to his Rajasthan village on a break from his city job. "The priests stop us from going into the temple. But their sons come into our house because they want to watch TV," he says. "For years they said we were dirty. But now we look much cleaner than they do." --With reporting by Faizan Ahmed /Patna, Meenakshi Ganguly /Belaur, Maseeh Rahman /Lucknow and R. Bhagwan Singh /Madras |
