How it began

The idea for this blog grew out of an outburst of rage. Titled “Inside The Hindu Part 2: The thing that must not be named” – the piece that follows was written as a Facebook note, sequel to an earlier note about the ways in which internal censorship functions at The Hindu, Chennai. The first article was received with great rejoicing and carried lovingly on The Hoot and Kafila and Humanities Underground. None of them wanted to touch this one:) Caste, quite literally, should not be named, it seems…

Inside The Hindu Part 2: The thing that must not be named

aka. The bitch is back and she is so fucking angry

Dear internal censor, you shot down my proposal for an article on state expenditure for dalits. Then how dare you write this story? “While the UPA has focused on bettering the lot of the Dalit community, it is dominated by upper caste Hindus, very few of whom are genuinely concerned about the plight of dalits,” the American Embassy said in a cable sent under the name of Ambassador David Mulford” How dare you? I hereby declare war. Do you remember? I told you that successive Tamil Nadu state budgets showed a decline in expenditure of money intended for dalit welfare. In other words, the government that was empowering the poor with television sets was using for other purposes the funds intended for the Scheduled Caste population – funds which should not be diverted to other schemes or returned. I spent an afternoon poring over budget documents, I visited non-governmental organisations that were doing research in this area, I went to the office of an IAS officer who was being shuttled around departments because he questioned the diversion of these funds. “Do you really think The Hindu will carry this story?” he asked. I came to you and asked if I could give an article for the State pages about this. You said, “No. The budget was presented last week. How is this news?” And now you write about how a white man is concerned about the welfare of dalits? What is wrong with you? Why is it not news if your lowly brown-skinned reporter wants to write about this with more data to substantiate the claim? Here’s a quote for you: “While The Hindu has claimed to care about bettering the lot of the Dalit community, it is dominated by upper caste Hindus, very few of whom are genuinely concerned about the plight of dalits.” Take it and fuck off.

Oh, before that, the preface: First, yay! Contrary to what I told some of you, I do have more stories from The Hindu to tell. Second, to all the former and current journalists who have expressed sympathy, write your own stories also please. And leave us a link. Thank you. Third, I was spooked by the massive wave of love that engulfed my post on internal censorship at The Hindu. I mean this is the Internet, right? Have I been moved to a parallel universe? Where were the disagreeable trolls, the flaming comment wars? From across the political spectrum, I have received warm praise of my writing skills. So. Let’s raise the stakes. Let’s do something more difficult than growling about internal censorship in the media – something which both left and right seem to enjoy. Let’s talk about caste.

I estimate that 80 per cent of The Hindu’s workforce is Brahmin (of the Tamil Nadu population, they form less than 3 per cent). I might be exaggerating. This is based on a visual estimate. You work long enough in The Hindu, Chennai, you will be able to tell apart the Tamil Brahmins – the TamBrahms – with their distinctive features. Then it started making sense to me. So many people in this city reminded me of one of my favourite professors, I did not know why. They are all Brahmin. They have been marrying each other for so many generations that they have distinctive facial features – this fact horrifies me.

Once, I was called to office by the internal censor (of engineering-college fame) on an ‘urgent assignment’. I got there post-haste to be told that his blue-shirted highness who rules The Hindu roost himself wanted to show a white friend the Egmore museum. As a reporter who had written a couple of stories about the museum’s galleries and its environs, I obviously was the only person who could guide them around the place. The internal censor had to explain to me twice what was expected of me. I couldn’t wrap my fiercely-independent head around the fact that I was expected to play tourist guide to my employer and a visitor. At the museum, I had to confess my utter ignorance about the bronzes or Indo-Saracenic architecture or anything that the white lady wanted to know about really. “Would you be able to find someone who knows?” his highness inquired regally. I knew my way about the admin block there and found a curator who was simultaneously flustered and thrilled that the blue-shirted god himself was there to grant him darshan. He went pounding down the stairs ahead of me to the bronzes gallery in less than half the time it took me to move my portly form there. The white lady admired the stunning Ardhanareeswarar near the entrance of the bronzes gallery. “Exquisite,” she breathed. ‘Well, of course, it is,’ I grumbled inside my head. “What is that?” she asked, pointing to the thread that is depicted along the bust of Ardhanareeswarar’s male half. I had never noticed it till that moment. “The thread that the so-called twice-born wear,” said his highness. Ardhanareeswarar is FC, apparently. “This, this”, said our eager curator, pulling out and displaying his sacred thread.

I am not twice-born. In my earlier birth, I was a water buffalo – I have retained the generously rounded form for one, not to mention a love for the placid lifestyle. Also, I like to plod and gaze at the world through large, limpid eyes, wondering at the indecent haste of human life. Ok, ok, I might be deliberately misunderstanding what twice-born means. Apparently the twice-born or the dvija is a Brahmin, Kshatriya or Vaishya who undergoes a physical birth and a spiritual one. Also, “A dvija does what he ought to do rather than what he wants to do. He does not avoid what he dislikes rather he avoids what ought to be avoided.” That settles any lingering doubts I might have had – I am definitely not a dvija, I am not even a ‘he’ to begin with. Are Brahmin women twice-born or not? Expert replies would be welcome. For this post, I am going to presume they are.

So, there was the time when I plodded into the editorial section at The Hindu to find people at their various desks standing upright and facing the same direction with cow-like expressions. (Us buffaloes find cows to be plain silly) I wondered, uneasily, if I had walked into some barbaric ritual that editorial performed while no-one was looking – they did like to massacre the occasional innocent story and play with torturous headlines, I’d noticed. Then I realised that a puja was on and standing up, wearing suitably devout expressions, was apparently the right way to acknowledge it. The gods presided over the reporting and editing sections at The Hindu, Chennai, in size A3 Technicolor. Some were quite the Ravi Varma-esque beauties, others were just in bad taste. Presumably, the deities must have been driven distraught by all those treats of cake and murukku and what-have-you that we kept giving each other inside reporting. So, the ordained members of the twice-born would try to propitiate them by half-heartedly waving plates with flaming camphor and other paraphernalia and ringing beautiful hand-held bells at them. In counterpoint, the Muslim woman who briefly was my colleague was directed, after much delay, to a cramped place with barely any space to kneel when she requested a room to use for her daily prayers during Ramzan. There were fringe benefits to this communal celebration of being Hindu – gorgeous saris for Pongal and Deepavali for the ladies, and for another of them festivals – I forget which – generous-sized bags of puffed rice for everyone. Yummy.

Less palatable was seeing how caste marks this predominantly-Brahmin workforce. The meetings of their favourite caste association would get coverage and column-inches, of course, but that didn’t annoy me quite so much. The normal-food eaters can’t eat their food in the canteen, because the smell of their non-Brahmin food is offensive to the nostrils of their twice-born colleagues. They can’t eat inside the reporting section’s room, without remarks along the lines of “Which walking, swimming, flying thing are you eating today?” Some twice-born colleagues would ask this same question practically every time one unfortunate normal-food eater opened her tiffin box in office. I would have given anything to hear our normal person to say, “What the fuck do you care, you eater of grass?” Instead, she would meekly submit the menu for the day and receive some more ‘good-natured’ (read caste-ist) ribbing.

Also, like most newsrooms in the city, The Hindu too had its mandatory sprinkles of Nairs and Menons. I write this letter for them:

Dear Malayalee people,

Get a grip. This is Tamil Nadu. You must know by now that caste names have been painted over, whitewashed and legislated out of existence in this state. Caste cannot be named any longer, except in matrimonial columns and rental ads (Don’t ask me why. Parents arranging marriages and landlords are the torchbearers of caste apparently). It has been driven underground in the public sphere – you might be allowed to say the ‘Gounder-votebank’ but that is about it. You cannot stand up in a public meeting here and say ‘this person is of the Nair community’. I have seen this happen in Kerala. No kidding. People were introduced caste-wise with a noble intention (to show that the group was inclusive and diverse) but it still left me gobsmacked. You might find the co-existence of caste hierarchies and the left ideology charming, but the rest of us think it beyond weird. We do not use caste names if we can help it. Yes, there are some Thevars and Nadars and Gounders and Chettiars out there who hold on to their caste names like they are badges of pride. There are also some of them Iyers (not to forget the Aiyars) and them Iyengars, all of whom we will glare at with polite loathing. However. Walking around with your caste affiliation clinging to the backside of your name, like some smelly rem(a)inder of centuries of discrimination is so last century. Get with it.

Yours condescendingly, Malar.

P.S. Dear Reddys, Consider yourself implicated in this shit as well. Snarl, M.

Once upon a time, a Brahmin Tamil teacher asked us, her class six students, “All the upper caste students, please stand up.” This was in an elite school, the most progressive one in Madurai. The Brahmin daughter of the head-mistress stood up. Then another guy. After some thought, I stood up. I had no clue what caste was – I only vaguely knew that my father owned a car, unlike those of some of my classmates. Another girl, who actually knew that she belonged to the same caste as my family, stood up. I told my parents, they went up in flames and called up the principal and our teacher never so much as mentioned the word ‘caste’ again. But I never had any trouble afterward if I told her that I had not finished my homework. “Never mind, child,” she would say indulgently, when before the standing-up census, I would have been summarily dismissed from class.

Now, in Chennai and after my stint at The Hindu, I understand anew the impetus of the non-Brahmin movement. This city has the highest concentration of English-speaking Brahmins in the state. I have had my share of them in Madurai – the ones that served coffee to my family and to their family in different tumblers at a golu, the one that walked into my house and said “Oh! I have never seen a Christian house that was kept so clean!” (I fought down my impulse to bash her on the head with the ugly brass vase stuffed with the artificial flowers that my mother so favoured). In Chennai, their concentration is mind-blowing. Astounding numbers of rental ads for Mylapore, Adyar, Thiruvanmiyur, Triplicane, Nungambakkam and other expensively Brahmin ghettoes will state that they want ‘vegetarian’ tenants only. I have been asked my caste by several landlords while house-hunting in the city. I have been told off for contacting landlords who wanted only Brahmin tenants. The TamBrahms also have their own communal theatre groups and performances inside their private little Sabhas in their own private dialect that they claim is Tamil infused with Sanskrit (though the rest of suspect it is just another ruse to be able to tell the twice and the once-born apart. Do they say ‘say’ or ‘shay’?).

Staying with the dialect theme, some of my colleagues at The Hindu could talk to everyone in one standardised Tamil. There were other specially-anointed twice-born who could switch effortlessly between TamBrahm and standardised Tamil, depending on who they were talking to. On the phone to a government official, this side to another twice-born, on the other side to the former water buffalo. It’s quite something to watch. How do they do it? Is there a filter in their heads that is going Brahmin/non-Brahmin all the time? There would be these conversations that I would not be able to make head or tail of, let alone participate in – about special poojas and maamis and rituals and all the insider jokes about the music season. For some days, the blog of an anonymous Brahmin woman poking fun at her caste’s many rituals became all the rage inside The Hindu office. Everyone was talking about it. I could not understand the damn blog. It was talking in an alien language about a culture I did not know. Oh, the ways in which exclusion functions.

Also, the arts that were stolen from the Devadasis and re-furbished for respectability and are celebrated every December? The arts that have been shrouded with impenetrable layers of holiness and technical detail? Yeah, those arts now function as another ruse to separate out the normal-food eaters. The twice-born and the occasional once-born would gather in warm little groups to discuss the ins-and-outs of the season each time it came around. The rest of the once-borns were left out in the Margazhi cold, typing forlornly at stories about the increased chill factor and what two-wheeler riders should do to take care of themselves. The music reviews that would appear in The Hindu did nothing to dispel the impenetrable air of mystery that surrounds these forms. When Nalli Kuppuswamy Chetty lost to The Hindu’s own Murali for a post in the Music Academy, some of the staff came around distributing sweets. What were they celebrating? That the sacred domains continue to stand in the face of attacks from the once-born? My only brush with the Music Academy happens when I have to cross the signal at that junction – I always curse the place for taking up so much space for parking while the pavement on the RK Salai side is less than 30 cm wide. It used to be 20 cm. Then they generously demolished and rebuilt the wall to donate a little less than 10 cm for the welfare of pedestrians.

I was born into a formerly untouchable caste that has clawed its way up the caste hierarchy to backward caste status, possibly with the help of commerce and strong intra-communal networks. My mother pointed to the ubiquitous palmyra trees that line highways across Tamil Nadu, sometime after the standing-up census, and said that our ancestors used to climb those trees and make arrack for a living. Some of them converted to Christianity and, so, we found respectability, she claimed. I didn’t believe her. I knew Hindu friends of the same caste had similar socio-economic standing. But, because I was not born Hindu, the changes and the homogenising in the majority religion are starkly visible to me – Vinayaka Chathurthi beginning to be celebrated in Madurai in the 90s, the stripes of saffron with tinsel edging that I see commuters tie to their vehicles in increasing numbers, the appearance of a BJP flag at a street corner in Chennai – all cause my feeble minority heart to tremble for its very existence. The twice-born, on the other hand, will always find it easy to ally with the right. When another internal censor at The Hindu casually announced that he had voted for the BJP because he did not want to vote for the Dravidian parties, I could only gape at him.

Just to make that loud and clear: The Hindutva brigade threatens my existence and questions my right to life – I am unable to understand or engage with them – I only think of them as propagators of hatred – I do not understand how anybody can vote for the BJP.

The many articles I have read about representation in the media, about the absence of Dalits in the media, all make much more sense after working in an overwhelmingly Brahmin newsroom and studying in a overwhelmingly Brahmin institution.

Kancha Ilaiah faced incomprehension and hostility when he presented his opinions about Brahmins and their gods at the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ) when I was there. Which is not surprising at all. The entrance exam to this esteemed institution is an excellent example of the utter meaninglessness of entrance exams. I got in exclusively on the strength of my English. I doubt if I got full marks on even one question in the general knowledge paper. I know, dear Media Development Foundation (of which the blue-shirted god is a trustee), that you chose me for the money my father had and his ability to send me to a posh school, in short, for my skill with English. So, it logically follows that a substantial portion of your intake will be twice-born. I slipped in somehow – damn this 69 per cent affirmative action in Tamil Nadu, huh? Lets in all the wrong sorts. The ACJ is entirely progressive in its teaching and practice. But how much can you teach a preponderantly twice-born group?

Inside the computer lab once, a male classmate started off a giggly discussion, “What is your gothra?” These barbaric Hindi-speakers are beyond the pale, I thought to myself, while struggling with the intricacies of page layout. Then the TamBrahm girls also joined in. I fought down the impulse to stand up and say, “How nice! I’m so happy for all of you. Shall I arrange your marriages right away or do you want to keep it for later?” I might have also chosen to keep my peace because I was among the two once-borns in a group of around ten. I continued struggling with my page layout. Then the twice-born bimbo next to me leaned over and switched off MY computer, instead of hers. Ok, her’s was next to mine, but it was still a bloody stupid mistake. My layout was lost. She gaped at me out of cow-like twice-born eyes and said, “Oh.”

One of those girls later made a presentation on utilitarianism and vegetarianism – apparently vegetarianism made sense because it was a utilitarian thing to do. Right. During the discussion, I wanted to know why she had not discussed caste at all, when the concepts of normal and vegetarian food were so closely tied to caste in India. A professor told us at the end of that class that the aim of asking questions was to get information, not show off how much we know. It might have been directed at the class in general, but seeing that he was (also) a Menon, I decided to take it personally. Sir, I want to put it on record that I was deeply hurt by that statement. Thank you for understanding. Ah, ACJ, ACJ. The place where a Brahmin girl burst into tears when she realised she had eaten beef (I did not understand the concept of retroactive grief, she had not even realised she was eating meat while she was actually eating it). Where a stylish Mumbai girl said, “I don’t eat beef, I am Hindu”, where other Hindus would head for the beef biriyani down the street with much gusto. And have you considered the complications of eating out when certain elements of your cuisine are anathema to your friend? The faces they can make are quite frightful and can put you right off your crispy fried beef.

Please don’t write ‘awesome piece’ in the comments section. Write your personal narratives of your experience of caste, if you can. That would be so much more useful than sniping about ‘merit’ and that one rich dalit student you knew who was living off the largesse of the state while the poor FCs have to slog it out for the few remaining seats – I cannot begin to count the number of times I have heard this ridiculous claim – if there were really so many rich Dalit students, The Hindu will not be the den of the twice-born that it is today. What are the implications of running a media organisation for over a century with an overwhelming number of twice-born? What are the implications of creating a feeder organisation (read ACJ) to ‘train’ more twice-borns for this work? What sort of training can an organisation run and taught almost exclusively by the twice-born offer? How can you maintain this obscene proportion of twice-born employees in a state that is a trend-setter in affirmative action? And how many of you who loved and shared my last piece will share this one?

P.S. The internal censor I have ripped into in the first paragraph is the man who made me cry by belittling the work I had done for three years, when I asked to be paid more than freshers. So, yes, you could read this as personal vendetta. He might be a nice guy otherwise. To quote the last lines of an article that I read as an adolescent in The Hindu’s Sunday Magazine and was profoundly marked by: “Question everything. Even this.”

- Malarvizhi Jayanth aka. The Water Buffalo aka. எருமை மாடு