Avva: A slab at the doorway

- Jupaka Subhadra

Original: maa avva dukkalni dunniposukunna tokkudubanda

From the Telugu Dalit Writing blog – A Shared Mirror blog featuring a selection of Telugu Dalit Writing in Translation

Avva, my mother

she is not a wick-lamp, that’s protected

she is the sun that went astray in sky’s rug

she is the famine in the stretched out sari-end^*

of the mother earth

Avva

she is a timeless full moon,

the embodiment of struggle sans dawn.

Her head placed in the mortar,

she is an empty grain bounced against the pestle.

The sun that rises at the cockcrow warms itself in her eyes

She sweeps the stars at the dawn,

smears dung-water on the front yard

wakes us, feeds us, and leaves for work.

Neither the cow in the forest

nor the calf at home would long for each other.

Avva

she is a slave unrecognized.

Quite often she falls in the furnace of ayya, father’s anger

because of over or under cooked rice

because of a sand grain or hair in the rice

or to grab her wages for drinking.

Avva

she is like served platters for us all.

A seed in the furrow,

she sprouts into green crops

planting and weeding in the knee-deep mud fields

even after the dusk,

that’s my avva!

It’s my avva

who blows the song into the village holding a spade.

Carves tunes shaping ridges in paddy fields.

When avva is at work,

her sweat turns into fountain in a desert-sink.

She becomes un-extinguishable fire in the mud stove.

I had no memories of clinging to the waist of my avva

I never heard lullabies or tales while being fed baby-food

with her soot-formed,  hardened hands.

I had no occasions of sleeping in her lap, yawning.

The memories of my screech for food

holding a dented bowl are not yet put out.

My avva

she is a drumbeat on the broken drum

she is a tune denied of crop.

Having taught the earth to bloom and to give fruit,

having become leather for the sandals,

hers is the agony of the top

to escape from the string in the hands of the landlords.

Though she fed the mother-earth by her breast,

they kept her at a distance from the plough.

My avva,

she is a slab at the doorway that gathered sorrow.

As an unfastened bundle of history,

having tightened the sari-end around her waist,

my avva is a question with a flaunting sickle in her hand.

The wretched alphabet!

It never accessed even the peripheries

where my avva had walked.

* * * * *

^*Dalit and sudra women stretch out their sari-ends forming like a bowl when offered grains, food etc

Translated by K. Purushotham

Read the poem on the Telugu Dalit Writing blog here

A Dalit view on climate change

Article dated 17.12.2009 from the International Dalit Solidarity Network website

Three Dalit women from Andhra Pradesh took part in a protest outside the conference area of the UN climate talks by ceremonially burning their conference badges. They felt that their voices had not been heard in the COP15 process.

When Narsamma Masanagari, Manjula Tammali and Sammamma Begari travelled from India to Copenhagen to take part in the UN conference on climate change, they wanted answers to some pressing questions.

“We came to find out if there is a real struggle against climate change, if the conference would include small and marginalised people like us, or if it is only for the rich?” Narsamma Masanagari from the village of Pastapur in Andhra Pradesh told this website during her stay in Copenhagen.

On the morning of 16 December, the three women presented their own answers to these questions outside the Bella Center where the COP15 talks are being held. Ceremonially burning their accreditation badges, a group of Indian activists protested against the lack of community participation in the climate talks.

“Climate communities must have a place in such a forum. It is important to bring in the voices of the small and the excluded. If you really want to understand climate change, then come and talk to people like us,” said Narsamma, who has felt the impact of changing weather patterns on her own farming community.

As Dalits, the three women already know a lot about being excluded. Nevertheless, by organising themselves and many other women in their communities, they have managed to gain respect and, to some extent, break out from a cycle of oppression and discrimination. They feel that they are owed the same level of respect by world leaders.

***

Read this article on the ISDN website here. There is also an interview with the women…

“Climate change does make it more difficult. If there is drought or unseasonal rainfall, the first thing that suffers is crop cultivation. If there are no crops, it is difficult for us,” says Sammamma Begari, a Dalit woman from the village of Bidakanne.

Speaking through an interpreter in her own language, Telugu, she found time, in the middle of a busy day of demonstrations and meetings, to talk to this website at the alternative Climate Forum for NGOs in central Copenhagen.

The consequences of climate change affect small farmers more than big ones, the women contend. They also claim that the farming methods they use are more sustainable than the industrial methods applied by big farmers.

“Upper caste farmers use machines to plough their land, heightening the climate crisis with fertilizer and other things. Our impact on the climate is much smaller. Larger farmers grow money, we grow food,” says Narsamma Managari, another activist.

Protest at COP15

On 16 December, they women took part in a protest outside the COP15 conference centre. They believe that the poor and the excluded have had too little say in the talks. There are similarities between this exclusion and the type of discrimination they suffer as Dalits in India.

The degree of discrimination varies. In Narsamma Managaris home village of Pastapur, she has managed to gain the respect of the community. In other, more remote, villages, such as Edulapalli, where the third woman, Manjula Tammali, lives, things are different.

“In my village, we are not allowed entry into temples. In tea shops there is a system of separate glasses for Dalits, and we are not allowed to enter houses of upper caste people. Dalits are also left with specific occupations, such as digging graves for everyone in the village. It makes me angry, but it has helped to be part of this organisation,” she says.

Manjula is referring to the Deccan Development Society (DDS), a grassroots organisation working with women’s groups in about 75 villages in Medak District. All in all, about 5,000 women, most of them Dalits, are involved in DDS programmes. Manjula, Narsamma and Sammamma work with the DDS Community Media Trust and have brought digital video cameras to Copenhagen to document the COP15 event.

Grassroots work has enabled the women to take charge of their own lives and be less entrenched in centuries-old patterns of caste prejudice. In a number of communities, Dalit women are regarded with respect by their fellow villagers.

“We have shown that we are organised and have taken control of our own agriculture. We have no obligations towards bigger farmers. And through lots of activities, we have demonstrated the leadership skills of Dalit women. Dalits have become village council members and taken leadership of villages. If there is a conflict that needs to be resolved, our women are on the panel,” Narsamma Masanagari points out.

The women have fought hard for their rights, and their struggle has gone through different phases. They had to combat discrimination based on caste as well as gender. Now their different struggles have merged into what they call ‘food sovereignty activism’. In her lifetime, Narsamma Masanagari has seen a lot of changes.

“When I was a child, my mother was a bonded labourer for an upper caste household. I used to stand watch over the landlord’s fields. We have grown a lot since then.”

***

Read the interview on the ISDN site here.

Caste in children’s literature

Excerpts from the Himal Southasian Magazine May 2010 issue with a focus on children’s literature.

From Beyond the ‘national child’ by Deepa Srinivas and Deeptha Achar

Any intervention into the field of children’s reading in India must take into account the new investment in childhood that came following Independence. This included a major overhaul of the colonial education system, alongside initiatives such as the Children’s Book Trust, National Book Trust, Nehru Bal Pustakalayas and Bal Bhavans. Several key literary figures and artists were part of this endeavour, and a substantial number of remarkable children’s books were published. Popular initiatives such as the Amar Chitra Katha comics series also participated in this enterprise. Yet more than 50 years later, it comes as a shock to find, in book after book that came out of these projects, both protagonist and audience so obviously elite and upper caste.
…
In India, children’s reading materials were long (and continue to be) addressed to an urban, middle- and upper-caste child in ways that reflected his or her economic resources, family relationships, beliefs, school experiences, food habits and language. They recorded and endorsed the world, the sensibility and the authority of this child, resulting in a self-assured hold over the world that was later a key enabling factor in such children’s success. Other children, however, were not provided with such psychic support. In such books we hardly ever found a child who had come to school hungry and sits there dreaming about food, for instance, or one who had to scheme in order to acquire books for class. Children from different contexts sometimes did find a place in these stories, but were generally forced to establish their ‘smartness’. A tribal boy, for instance, needed to establish that his knowledge of the forest can be valuable for his urban, middle-class classmates; a disabled girl must excel as a craftsperson. Even in the case of middle-class children, only a restricted set of situations were generally admissible, thus glossing over the fact that children often lead complex lives. We rarely encountered a child whose mother was depressed or one who was coping with a death in the family – such children lived with the knowledge that they must anxiously guard such secrets.

Recently, the Andhra Pradesh-based Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies did a study in a few government schools in and around Hyderabad, and found a disabling gap between children’s home life and the assumptions on which school culture was built. Most of the children who attended these schools shouldered responsibilities in their families, and contributed towards their economic survival; these children’s sense of worth was positively constituted through the role they played. Yet such lives had no legitimate space in the education system. In fact, set against this dominant culture, these childhoods could only appear as deficient, deprived of play, pleasure and parental guidance. Children often dropped out because the school remained a forbidding place, identified not only with abuse from upper-caste teachers but also with the absence of recognition and endorsement of themselves or their home lives.
…

Deeptha Achar teaches English at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and Deepa Sreenivas is with Anveshi, the Research Centre for Women’s Studies in Hyderabad.

Read the full article here

 
From Between Literacy and Reading by V. Geetha

In post-Independence India…Books that featured ‘modern’ situations, however, remained rare; when works did so it was only in a generic way, without attempting to recreate a lifelike world that might delight a child. In their anxiety to avoid the indecencies of caste and the tensions of faith-related issues, those few ‘modern’ tales courted a decorous artifice, and created happy nuclear or extended households that abounded in moral stereotypes: the good father, the indulgent grandmother, the naughty younger brother and so on. Names of characters were self-consciously Tamil, as if this took care of caste and other identities. While poverty, labour and the natural world were part of these fictional universes, they were present as mere rhetorical tropes rather than as descriptions of existing situations.
…
Also during the era immediately following Independence, Tamil publishing gained from an unexpected quarter. As happened in other languages of the region, the publishing scene was enlivened by books from the Soviet Union. Though the translations were often literal and even tendentious, these works made available to young readers far and wide wonderfully visual worlds that were novel. Furthermore, the brilliantly sure plots, the magic of poetic-sounding places and names, and the diverse universes that came alive in these books sustained several generations of young readers. Through all of this, however, avid young readers were – and remain – a small group, often restricted to those from the middle and lower-middle classes, with only a smattering of children from peasant and working-class households. Family reading habits, the openness or otherwise of local librarians, and the interest that the occasional teacher might show in a child’s linguistic development were crucial factors in creating and sustaining a child’s love for books.

…

V Geetha is editorial director of the Chennai-based publisher Tara Books.
Read the full article here

Interview with Kancha Ilaiah

Excerpts from an interview published on Ambedkar.org and Roundtable.co.in

…
Kancha Ilaiah is a prolific writer in both Telugu and English. His book Why I Am Not A Hindu, a critique of Hindutva from a Dalit-Bahujan perspective, turned out to be a best seller. Here he talks to Yoginder Sikand about how ‘Dalitisation’ alone can effectively challenge the threat of Brahminical fascism parading in the garb of Hindutva.

Q: Tell us something about your background. How did you come to be involved in the Dalit-Bahujan struggle?
A: I was born in a village in a forest area in the Warangal district of Andhra Pradesh. The entire area had been given by the Nizam of Hyderabad to Mahbub Reddy, a local landlord, as his fief. My family belongs to the sheep-grazing Kuruma Golla caste. They had earlier migrated from Warangal proper to the forest belt. My grandmother had settled the village. After her death my mother took over the leadership of the caste. I was born three years after the Police Action in 1948. The communists were then very active in our area. In the course of the Telengana armed struggle they killed two people in our village—both were village Patels.

Because of the struggle, Mahbub Reddy began selling his lands off, and our caste people, who, till then owned no land at all, began buying small plots. So this was a time when the feudal system had begun disintegrating. Later, at school I came into contact with Marxists, with Marxist literature, and became involved in the students’ movement, and that is how I got involved in the struggle for justice.

Q: What or who has been the major influence on your thinking and your politics?
A: The most important influence on my life was the village in which I was born. As a child in the village I learnt how to breed sheep, till the land and make ropes, but what was particularly instructive was the interactions and contradictions between the different castes within the village—Kurumas, Kapus, Gowdas and Madigas. And it is this personal knowledge of the dynamics of caste that is central to my thinking and all my writings.

My mother exercised a seminal influence on my thinking, too. She was a strong woman and the leader of our caste. You see, among the Dalit-Bahujans, women have an important role within the family and the caste. They set the moral norms themselves, through interaction with the productive process and in the process of struggle with nature, unlike among the Hindus [Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Banias], where women do not work in the fields, and whose norms are dictated by an external agency—the Brahminical texts. My mother was in the forefront of the struggle against the forest guards who would constantly harrass the Kurumas and not allow them to graze their animals in the forest. In fact, she died in one of these confrontations, being fatally beaten up by a policeman while protesting against their brutality. She was then only 46 years old.

I’ve written a Telugu piece about my mother. It’s called The Mother’s Efforts And Her Struggle. There I have tried to show that it is not simply the big ‘political’ struggles against the state which alone are important. Rather, one should look at everyday struggles as well—in this case, a mother’s constant struggle to educate her children, challenging patriarchy, struggling with nature in the productive process, sustaining the culture of the caste. Most Marxist texts look only at grand ‘political’ struggles, party mode of struggles, struggles led by men. In my writings I have sought to also focus on micro struggles, the stories of ordinary people, including women.

…

Q. How would you envisage this project of writing Indian history from the point of view of Dalit-Bahujans as subjects, as the central actors?

A: To be honest, I am seriously opposed to the writing of what is called the ‘history of sorrow’—simply narrating all the oppression and sufferings that the Dalit-Bahujans have had to suffer under Brahminism, although that, too, cannot be ignored. But I feel that the more you cry, the more the enemy beats you. If you want to defeat the enemy, you cannot remain contented with merely critiquing him, because even in that case he is the one who sets the terms of discourse and you are playing the game according to the rules that he devises, so naturally it is he and not you who wins in the end. Thus, rather than dwell simply on our historical oppression or the dangers of Hindu fascism, keep the focus on the process of Dalitisation, and thereby set the terms of discourse and debate yourself. For that you have to present a Dalit-Bahujan alternative as a workable and better solution. If you don’t do so, and restrict yourself to simply criticisng Brahminism by quoting slokas from one Brahminical text or the other, they will put forward yet another sloka to disprove you. But if you write from the Dalit point of view they have no way to rebut what you want to say.

Central to that task would be re-writing Dalit-Bahujan history to show, for instance, their knowledge systems, their role in the productive process, their great contributions to the development of technology or in the realm of spirituality or how their societies afford women a much higher status than the Brahminic. Sati and dowry have historically been specifically Hindu problems never ours. So history re-writing will have to be informed with Dalit pride. You have to show that Dalitisation, and not Hinduisation, is the answer to our ills, because unlike Brahminism, which is rooted in texts that do not spring from real-world experience in the productive process, Dalitisation reflects the interaction of human beings with nature in the labour process.

Unless you present Dalitisation as a superior alternative, you can’t win the battle. Take the Buddha, for instance. His greatest contribution was not his critique of Brahminism, important though that was, but his founding of the egalitarian community of the faithful—the sangha—as a superior alternative to Brahminical caste society. Or take Marx for that matter. To my mind, his greatness lies not so much in his critique of capitalism but in his presenting a superior alternative in the form of a communist society.

 

Q: Have you attempted anything of this sort yourself?

A: I think you can see this in most of my writings. To give but one example, I wrote this piece on the leather-working Madigas titled ‘The Subaltern Scientists’ and another piece on the Madiga Dalits called ‘The Productive Soldiers’. Presently, I am working on a book dealing with the discoveries and inventions of certain Dalit-Bahujan tribes and castes. There’s so much to be done to recover Dalit-Bahujan knowledge systems. I mean, for instance, you would have to trace industrialisation in India not to Lancashire but to the Madiga wadas [localities], where the Madigas first perfected the art of turning raw leather into shoes, or to our barbers who invented the knife.

 

Q: One last question. What made you give your book the title Why I Am Not A Hindu? How was the book received?

A: I thought it was important for Dalit-Bahujans to make a powerful statement against the Hindutva propaganda that we, too, are Hindus. As for how the book was received, well, Dalit-Bahujans, of course, were very excited about it. Predictably, orthodox Brahmins were angry, but so too were some ‘socialist’ Brahmins. Actually, that did not surprise me at all, because they read Marx’s Capital just as they read the Vedas—reciting it—not a critical reading. But I did get quite a few responses from Brahmins in Tamil Nadu. They wrote to say that they had read a lot of Periyar, but he had only criticised them but never told them where they had gone wrong. They said that it was after reading Why I Am Not A Hindu that they discovered what was wrong with their religion and culture and how they must change if they are to survive.

 
Read the full interview here.

 

 

Caste in academia and activism: In conversation with P.D. Sathyapal

P.D. Satyapal is an anthropologist, professor and BAMCEF speaker. In conversation, he has shared his experience of caste and gender and his experiences of caste inside educational institutions. In this concluding excerpt from the conversation, he shares his experiences as an anthropologist and of his work at the interface between activism and academia.

I came back to Andhra University for my Ph.D. and took the topic, ‘inequality among the tribes’. So far, sociologists and anthropologists have been saying that there are two different groups of society – caste society, inequal, hierarchical and so on, and societies of tribes, where there is no hierarchy and they are relatively homogenous. I had seen multi-tribal villages, like multi-caste villages, where we find very clearly the system of caste, or discrimination on the lines of caste. So, I studied that. For my M.Phil., I had worked in the Andaman and Nicobar islands. I was there for five and a half months, studying tribes in isolation. I had been to more than 12 islands. That was a very good experience for me. We always dream of anthropologists as adventurers, so that satiated some of my fantasies of working alone with groups on tiny islands. Then I came to the Andhra-Orissa border and stayed for nine months in a village. That is a usual routine for anthropologists – we do our fieldwork by a methodology called participant observation, so the stipulation is that we must stay with the community we are studying for nearly a calendar year. That does not always happen, but I managed to stay for nine months in a small village. I had to walk for 17 kilometres from the nearest bus stop to reach that place, established rapport with the villagers, stayed in a hut that was abandoned, and studied inequality there.

Later on, I joined the Department of Anthropology in Andhra University. In between, I became president of research scholars, we used to have some 920 research scholars. As research scholars, we had some agitations about how appointments were being made, along with the Teachers’ Association. We had a Scholars and Teachers Action Committee, had bitter fights with the Vice Chancellor. There were several questions hurled in either direction, the government came down and make a commission with the Chief Secretary and Vice Chancellor, those sort of things went on. There, too, I was looking at rosters, seeing how they manipulate with the rosters.

I joined the same university as a teacher. Since my area of interest is inequality and my passion is for Ambedkarite thought, I picked up those papers that deal with Indian society, culture, stratification, democracy, human rights, things of that sort. Till that time, I had never worked specifically in any Ambedkarite organisation. I used to go to Ambedkar Bhavan, participate in some protests sporadically, talk at events, that’s all.

As a teacher, I tried to reflect upon the syllabus and pedagogical things. Nowhere do we find that the real problems of society are being dealt with. Even at the post-graduate level, where we are talking about things like society, where we read about caste – even there, with regard to theories and origins of caste, and how mechanisms of caste work, caste in relation to economy, politics, religion – we do not see our viewpoints there. Of what Ambedkar I have read, these people – they don’t matter at all – people like M.N. Srinivas, Dubey, they are all talking about their own small concepts. In India, so far, nobody has given a theory in anthropology, there is no grand theory of anthropology as the Indian contribution, from any of the Indian anthropologists. Concepts like Sanskritisation, they are only small concepts, they were fashioned after anthropologists like Robert Redfield and others. So Srinivas and Dubey and people like them are treated as authorities on caste and are believed to have done many things on caste. I am not convinced. Dr. Ambedkar’s work and contribution is much more, his ideas are more rigourous. The looking at concepts analytically – I don’t find those qualities here with Indian anthropologists. The observations that we were made to teach, I had a feeling that these were all peripheral.

I was a young teacher, I had been expressing some of these opinions but it was to no avail. Noone was taking me very seriously at that time. That was when I thought I should get abreast of this subject first. I started teaching and started changing my papers almost every year, six, seven years, it went on like that. I was reading Ambedkar, I was participating in events. Till 1997, 1998, I only had these stray attachments, very very thin attachments to the Ambedkarite movements.

This took a turn, because I came in touch with an organisation called BAMCEF, the All India Backward And Minority Communities Employees Federation, with which I work even now. Here I find a different kind of argument, a rigour, ideologial clarity. Here, there is very fine analysis, it gives scope for the right kind of perspective, so that we can understand a society quite well. So with the influence of BAMCEF and my reading in Ambedkar and other people, I thought this is the time I should intervene into my study area. I started taking on these guys, I’ve become much more vocal. In 5-6 years I had understood that professor is the top position you can get academically. All other posts like warden, dean, VC are all honorary position. In anthropological association, there are honorary positions and much of these people are handpicked. So with the influence of BAMCEF on my personality, I decided not to go after these posts and take up activism as my passion. Then I grew bolder, I started arguing with senior teachers. I started facing difficult times, if I talked about one thing, they used to change the topic to something else. In university seminars, you know what happens, if you are pointing out one thing, they will try to shift to another. They tried, in fact, to baffle me, intimidate me with their presence as senior teachers an all. I’ve seen all that and it took me one year to retaliate. I make very calculated and sharp criticism. That is how I started taking on these so-called Indian anthropologist who are not well-versed with the subject of caste.

I am not paid for my work in BAMCEF. I have to travel and speak to groups. I am travelling on many weekends. I am lucky in that my wife shares my passion for this struggle against caste and does not have a problem with my work. Some of my colleagues complain that it is difficult to take their family’s complaints about their work. I luckily don’t have any problems there.

Caste and gender: In conversation with P.D. Sathyapal

P.D. Satyapal is an anthropologist, professor and BAMCEF speaker. In a conversation, he shares some of his experiences of caste and gender that led him towards Ambedkarite thought…

I was in born in a small town, a place called Baptla. It has many educational institutions, an agricultural institution, a few colleges, so many students used to come there. Other than that, it doesn’t have anything, like, it’s not a commercial centre. So, it is quite removed from the rural setting.

My mother is also a teacher. I am the eldest of six. She used to work, cook everything for us, pack lunch. She used to work very hard. At times, that male chauvinism used to be there in my father, though my mother is equally educated. When she complained about the load of domestic work, he would say, ‘What you’re complaining, it is just cooking, eating and washing’. He couldn’t see how difficult it was. So that was the relationship I see among many of my relatives – all of them are not highly educated – there are people working as teachers, clerks.

During my holidays, I would go to see my relatives, friends, whenever my father allowed me. I had gone to a place called Burrapalam (in Tenali), my grandfather’s native place. We had relatives there. I had friends among the relatives my age. Incidentally, one of my classmates from Loyola College, Vijayawada, he is of the same village. He belongs to the Kamma caste, they own a rice mill and lands. Whenever I go there, I visit him.

When I was in Plus Two – this is in 1977 – I have seen a strange thing: this guy, who is an adolescent, used to talk about his friendship with so many girls. He was economically well off and many people work in his field and the rice mill. He talked about having relationships with girls with ease. Always, he pointed out the place where my relatives stayed – that’s the cheri – and said, I’ve had sexual relations with that girl, this girl. He used to talk about that. Then I wondered, how is this guy talking about having very easy sexual relationships with these girls? So I asked him. He said, ‘They’re very easy’. So that was the first thing – he was talking about girls from relatives’ families – I’m a friend to him. We are talking at the same wavelength, but at the same time, it is a painful feeling in my mind because he is saying that all my relatives’ girls are loose.

That was the first year. I started hating my relatives. I thought, these people don’t know how to raise their girls, these girls are not moral in their behaviour. That is a time when I begin to ask why it should happen like this. Deliberately, next holidays I went there. I’ve been talking to these girls. As a youth, I’m thinking, if he can have relationships like that…so I’m also feeling romantic. When I’m with him, I think, so Burrapalam is like a free area. Again, he was talking to me about these things – very innocently, from his own background, you understand – so I asked how it works and all that. So, he said, ‘I go through this person.’ ‘He arranges things for me,’ he used to boast, well, not boasting, he was right. Even those girls who get married when they come back to their natal homes, he can continue the connection, he said. He can go to their homes in the night, the parents themselves will arrange for this. The first time, I had a negative feeling about the girls, now I’m having such feelings about their parents. How could they be so bad? Don’t they have any self-respect? Though this guy is a landlord and all…that was a painful thing for me. I didn’t talk to anybody about it. He told me, this guy would arrange girls for him. There is a cinema hall there. Choosing from the girls who come to the theatre, he would tell this man and he’ll arrange.

Then I asked the one who arranges – I don’t call him a pimp, but that’s his job – he works at the rice mill, so I asked him, ‘You also belong to the same caste.’ I belong to a Scheduled Caste called Mala. I asked him, ‘So it seems you arrange many good girls to my friend Ramu, why do you do that?’ Then he asked me, ‘You also want girls?’ I was hesitant to say yes or no. I just smiled. Then he told me, ‘Don’t harbour any such thoughts, it is a very bad thing. Don’t think that these people do it because they fancy it.’ He said that it is their necessity. I didn’t understand what this kind of necessity is. Then I started observing things and again asked him. Then he took me to the rice mill. They used to have two, three shifts. After one shift is over, workers ready to sell their labour will be ready at the gate. This persion is the one who picks up who should come for the next round of work. There I observed that he is picking up only few people, so I asked him why. He said, ‘That’s the secret, that’s the key.’

I sat with this man, also my relative, the manager, the one who is supplying all these girls to my friend. He told me that it is because all these people are labourers. Working in the mill or the field is the only thing they can do for a living. He said that the parents agree to send these girls because, unless they do it, they can’t be guaranteed regular continuous work. He would select only those parents or members of that family who satisfied this guy. I was totally disturbed. That was the time when I didn’t understand that hunger is so deep, that it also allows you to let your girls go and do this. These are the very parents who, when he visits their homes in the night, would vacate their houses, take their cots, and go away from their house, so he could have privacy with their daughter. That was one gory experience I have had. Before that, I was hating my relatives, thinking that they are not educated or good. Now I understand that because they are poor and have to sell their labour – and for the guarantee of work – they are taking up this thing.

I went to Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) to study social work. My father wanted me to go to that school and then come to the church and work as a social worker. Loyola College was a boys college. TISS was co-ed and the hostel had boys in one wing and girls in one wing. I was pinching myself. Later on, I found there was not much to be happy about, all the girls used to make us run errands. [laughs]

My professor used to be very harsh on the boys – only 3 of us in a class of 26. Every month, we have to go for a week of project work and give a report. Girls would be sent to hospitals, the boys to do projects on beggary, I was given a project on the leper colony – near Elephanta there was an island where more than 3000 lepers were rehabilitated. Then she sent me to work on prostitution. It was very difficult for me that time. Suppose she sent me to work on beggary – I didn’t know much Hindi, didn’t know Marathi at all – so I had to find those beggars who could converse in English. I would always get poor marks. There is an area in Bombay called Kamathipura – that time, in 1982, more than 36,000 licensed prostitutes were in that one area. For the first time, I’ve seen something like a prostitute India. For different states they have select houses – they call this as Andhra House, they call that as Assam House, Kashmir House, you have a choice. I went to the Andhra House. It was difficult to get there, we had to do a lot of pleading with managers and all that. Three of us made surveys, we surveyed the caste composition, socio-economic compostition of the prostitutes there. When I was doing all these calculations, I found that more than 68 per cent were from SC/ST/OBC background. It was the first time, I had seen prostitution from up close. Otherwise, we have some romanticised ideas of prostitution. That experience, I correlated with my experience in Plus Two. There and then, I was looking at this thing: They are all poor. I had framed a question: how many people still retain their relationship with their family while dong prostitution. In my survey, more than 58-59 percent of these girls still have connections with their family. More than 52 percent of their parents visit them, come to them, see them, take money. Which means parents are allowing them to do this. That means it is poverty that makes people sell their bodies. That is one area, I could correlate two experiences like this.

In Part II, P.D. Sathyapal shares his experiences of caste inside educational institutions…