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…

About the Griefs of the Mangs and Mahars

An essay written by Muktabai, 14 years old and student at the school founded by Savithribai and Jotirao Phule, in 1855.

Excerpted from Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present  ed. by Susie Tharu and Ke. Lalitha

Published by Feminist Press, 1991

Excerpt first published on the anti-caste blog

 

[From the introduction]

…

We have little biographical information about Muktabai. We know only that she studied at the school in Pune founded by Savithribai and Jotiba Phule and when she wrote this essay in 1855 she was fourteen. Of what happened to her later, or indeed of any of her other writings, we have no record. Yet through her vivid and acerbic polemic we get an unmistakable impression of intelligence and self-confidence.
…

This piece was originally published in 1855 in Dnyanodaya,  an Ahmednagar journal that was designed to disseminate information about such new scientific disciplines as physics and astronomy and also discussed religion and morality. The essay was reprinted in the Dnyanodaya Centenary Volumes, edited by B. P. Hivale, in 1942. It is probably the earliest surviving piece of writing by a mang woman, an “untouchable.”

 

MANG MAHARACHYA DUKHAVISAYI (About the Griefs of the Mangs and Mahars)

If one attempts to refute, on the basis of the Vedas, the argument of these brahmins, the great gluttons, who consider themselves to be superior to us and hate us, they counter that the Vedas are their own property. Now obviously, if the Vedas are only for the brahmins, they are absolutely not for us. Teach us, O Lord, thy true religion so that we all can lead our lives according to it. Let that religion, where only  one person is privileged and the rest are deprived, perish from the earth and let it never enter our minds to be proud of such a religion.

These people drove us, the poor mangs and mahars, away from our own lands, which they occupied to build large mansions. And that was not all. They regularly used to make the mangs and mahars drink oil mixed with red lead and then buried them in the foundations of their mansions, thus wiping out generation after generation of these poor people. Under Bajirao’s rule, if any mang or mahar happened to pass in front of the gymnasium, they cut off his head and used it to play “bat ball,” with their swords as bats and his head as a ball, on the grounds. If the victim managed to save his life and Bajirao came to know of it, he used to say, “How dare they save their lives? Do these untouchables expect the brahmins to hand over their duties as revenue officers to them and to start roaming with their shaving kits, all over the town, shaving the heads of widows?” With such remarks he used to punish them.

Second, were these brahmins satisfied with prohibiting the knowledge of writing to us? No. Not them. Bajirao went to Kashi and died a dusty death there. But the mahars here, no less untouchable than the mangs, have absorbed some of his qualities through their contact with him, and consider themselves to be superior to the mangs, so much so that they do not allow even the shadow of a mang to fall over them. Do the merciless hearts of these brahmins, who strut around in their so-called holy clothes, ever feel even a grain of pity for us when we suffer so much grief on account of being branded as untouchables? Nobody employs us because we are untouchables. We have to endure miseries because we do not have any money. O learned pandits, wind up the selfish prattle of your hollow wisdom and listen to what I have to say.

When our women give birth to babies, they do not have even a roof over their houses. How they suffer in the rain and the cold! Try to think about it from your own experience. Suppose the women suffered from some puerperal disease, from where could they have found money for the doctor or medicines? Was there ever any doctor among you who was human enough to treat people free of charge?

The mang and mahar children never dare lodge a complaint even if the brahmin children throw stones at them and injure them seriously. They suffer mutely because they say they have to go to the brahmins’ houses to beg for the leftover morsels of food.

Alas! O God! What agony this! I will burst into tears if I write more about this injustice….

Translated from Marathi original by Maya Pandit

Castes of Mind

Some excerpts from the first chapter of Nicholas B. Dirks’ Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2001). The entire chapter is online here. Some links to reviews of the book are below.

…

Caste thus continues, even as it continues to trouble. But despite the tone here–and I will be critical of the British role in the reification of caste even as I am critical of those, Indian or Western, who advocate the values of the caste system–I do not seek to join the chorus of those who view caste as either emblematic of Indian civilization or as opposed to modernity. Although my principal concern will be to unravel the historical process that has worked to naturalize the idea of a (uniform, all-encompassing, ideologically consistent, Indologically conceived) caste system, I am particularly concerned to register my conviction that caste has at times been the necessary vehicle of social and political mobilization, even as it carries as many traces of the modern as the institutions it is said to inhibit or oppose. When figures such as Ambedkar in western India or Periyar in the south organized political movements around caste, they worked to transform both the cultural meanings and the political uses of caste in ways that went well beyond the colonial mandate. On occasion, caste has indeed been a worthy synonym of community in the best of senses, even if political movements have all too often failed to transcend in any way the problematic relationship of caste to exclusion. Nehru observed that “In the constructive schemes that we may make, we have to pay attention to the human material we have to deal with, to the background of its thought and urges, and to the environment in which we have to function. To ignore all this and to fashion some idealistic scheme in the air, or merely to think in terms of imitating what others have done elsewhere, would be folly. It becomes desirable therefore to examine and understand the old Indian social structure which has so powerfully influenced our people.”More to my point, since I can share neither Nehru’s precise pronouns nor his own political project, leave alone his understanding of caste, I would argue that caste endures and is so significant today because it has been the precipitate of a powerful history, in which it has been constituted as the very condition of the Indian social. This book is principally about the historicity of caste, the ways caste has come into being, and as such been conditioned by history to condition (and make conditional) any possibility of a future beyond, or without, caste.

…

Caste is a specter that continues to haunt the body politic of postcolonial India. Whether in constitutional claims about the abolition of caste discrimination or in political claims about the formation of the national community, it has become the subject of national shame. In part this is an extension of the “women’s question” that emerged so powerfully in relation to social reform debates and movements of the nineteenth century. Most of the issues that attracted the attention of social reformers, from widow burning to prohibitions around widow remarriage and controversies over the age of consent, were embedded within caste protocols and related to caste status. The fundamentally gendered character of caste as an emergent cultural system will only occasionally be remarked in the argument that follows, even as I must note at the outset that many of the most egregious effects of caste have been expressed through gender.  Colonial sociology was almost as silent as nationalist sociology about the ways in which caste encoded the treatment and management of women in Indian society; it either assumed the pervasiveness of India’s abuse of women or anthropologized the whole set of questions around marriage, reproduction, and the family.

…

Caste has become the focus of progressive movements and of debates–both local and national–about the character of postcolonial politics. It has also become the uncomfortable reminder that community is always segmented by class, gender, and region, that the nation might be threatened less by religious difference than by other pervasive grounds of difference; it is a reminder that all claims about community are claims about privilege, participation, and exclusion. Caste has been the site of collisions between patriarchy and tradition; in its valorization of Brahmanic ideals around the status of women and the general subservience of women to marriage rules and domestic conditions, caste has simultaneously preserved the patriarchy of premodern society and worked to sanction the continued oppression and exclusion of women in nationalist reimaginings of the past. But it has also made it clear that neither Brahmanism nor Hinduism can be the genuine basis for a national community, even as religion itself cannot be sequestered (indeed never has been so sequestered) into a private sphere, whether in traditional or modern terms. And caste haunts all assertions of return to a premodern past, all claims about the glories and values of tradition. Caste may be the precipitate of the modern, but it is still the specter of the past.

…

A sampler of reactions to the book:

“In spite of the failure to do justice to pre-colonial accounts of Hindu consciousness, Dirks has produced a seminal account of how caste became the basis on which India was imagined,” writes the author of Thuppahi’s Blog

Maria Brun situates her critique of the book [link to a pdf file] within her research on female infanticide and caste.

If you have seen other reviews online, do leave the links in the comments section. Do write about your reactions to this book.

Waiting for a Visa

- B. R. Ambedkar

…

The first incident, which I am recording as well as I can remember, occurred in about 1901, when we were at Satara.

…

The train arrived at Masur at about five in the evening, and we got down with our luggage. In a few minutes all the passengers who had got down from the train had gone away to their destinations. We four children remained on the platform, looking out for my father or his servant whom he had promised to send. Long did we wait–but no one turned up. An hour elapsed, and the station-master came to enquire. He asked us for our tickets. We showed them to him. He asked us why we tarried.

We told him that we were bound for Koregaon, and that we were waiting for father or his servant to come, but that neither had turned up, and that we did not know how to reach Koregaon. We were well-dressed children. From our dress or talk no one could make out that we were children of the untouchables. Indeed the station-master was quite sure we were Brahmin children, and was extremely touched at the plight in which he found us.

As is usual among the Hindus, the station-master asked us who we were. Without a moment’s thought I blurted out that we were Mahars. (Mahar is one of the communities which are treated as untouchables in the Bombay Presidency). He was stunned. His face underwent a sudden change. We could see that he was overpowered by a strange feeling of repulsion. As soon as he heard my reply he went away to his room, and we stood where we were. Fifteen to twenty minutes elapsed; the sun was almost setting. Our father had not turned up, nor had he sent his servant; and now the station-master had also left us. We were quite bewildered, and the joy and happiness which we had felt at the beginning of the journey gave way to a feeling of extreme sadness.

After half an hour, the station-master returned and asked us what we proposed to do. We said that if we could get a bullock-cart on hire, we would go to Koregaon; and if it was not very far, we would like to start straightway. There were many bullock-carts plying for hire. But my reply to the station-master that we were Mahars had gone round among the cartmen, and not one of them was prepared to suffer being polluted, and to demean himself carrying passengers of the untouchable classes. We were prepared to pay double the fare, but we found that money did not work.

The station-master who was negotiating on our behalf stood silent, not knowing what to do. Suddenly a thought seemed to have entered his head and he asked us, “Can you drive the cart?” Feeling that he was finding out a solution of our difficulty, we shouted, “Yes, we can.” With that answer he went and proposed on our behalf that we were to pay the cartman double the fare and drive the cart, and that he should walk on foot along with the cart on our journey. One cartman agreed, since it gave him an opportunity to earn his fare and also saved him from being polluted.

…

(The English text of Waiting for a Visa is available here. ‘விசாவுக்காக காத்திருக்கிறேன்’ முழு உரையை வே. தனசேகரின் வலை பதிவிலும், தமிழச்சியின் வலைத்தளத்திலும் காணலாம். )

விசாவுக்காக காத்திருக்கிறேன்

- பி.ஆர்.அம்பேத்கர்

…

எனக்கு நினைவிருந்து நான் பதிவு செய்யும் எனது முதல் அனுபவ நிகழ்வு நாங்கள் சதாராவில் இருந்தபோது 1901-இல் ஏற்பட்டது.

….

மாலை 5-மணிக்கு இரயில் மாசூரை வந்தடைந்தது. மூட்டை முடிச்சுகளை எடுத்துக் கொண்டு நாங்கள் இரயிலை விட்டு இறங்கினோம். சில நிமிட நேரத்தில் அந்த நிலையத்தில் இரயிலை விட்டு இறங்கியவர்கள் அனைவரும் தங்கள் தங்கள் இடங்களுக்குப் புறப்பட்டுச் சென்றுவிட்டனர். எங்கள் தந்தையோ அல்லது அவரது சேவகரோ வருவார் என்று எதிர்பார்த்து நாங்கள் நால்வரும் இரயிலடியிலேயே காத்திருந்தோம். வெகுநேரம் காத்திருந்தும் எவரும் வரவில்லை. ஒரு மணி நேரம் கழிந்த பின் ஸ்டேஷன் மாஸ்டர் வந்து எங்களிடம் விசாரித்தார். பயணச் சீட்டு இருக்கிறதா என்று அவர் எங்களைக் கேட்டார். நாங்கள் எங்கள் பயணச் சீட்டுகளை அவரிடம் காட்டினோம். நீங்கள் ஏன் தயங்கி நின்று கொண்டிருக்கிறீர்கள் என்று அவர் எங்களைக் கேட்டார். நாங்கள் கோர்கான் செல்ல வேண்டும் என்றும், எங்கள் தந்தையோ அல்லது அவரது சேவகரோ வருவார் என்று நாங்கள் காத்திருப்பதாகவும், கோர்கானுக்கு எப்படி போவது என்று எங்களுக்குத் தெரியவில்லை என்றும் அவரிடம் நாங்கள் கூறினோம்.

நாங்கள் அனைவரும் நல்ல உடை அணிந்து இருந்தோம். எங்களின் உடைகளிலிருந்தோ, எங்கள் பேச்சிலிருந்தோ நாங்கள் தீண்டத்தகாதவர்களின் பிள்ளைகள் என்பதை எவராலுமே கண்டுபிடிக்க முடியாது. நாங்கள் பார்ப்பனர்கள் என்று எண்ணிக் கொண்ட ஸ்டேஷன் மாஸ்டர் எங்கள் பரிதாப நிலையைக் கண்டு மிகவும் வருந்தினார். இந்துக்களின் வழக்கம் போல நீங்கள் எல்லாம் யார் என்று அவர் கேட்டார். ஒரு சிறிதும் யோசிக்காமல் நாங்கள் மஹர்கள் என்று நான் உளறிவிட்டேன். (பம்பாய் இராஜதானியில் தீண்டத்தகாதவர்களாகக் கருதப்பட்ட சமூகத்தினரில் மஹரும் ஒன்று) அவர் முகம் திடிரென மாறிவிட்டது. அதிசயிக்கத்தக்க வெறுப்பு உணர்வுக்கு அவர் ஆட்படுவதை எங்களால் பார்க்க முடிந்தது. எனது பதிலைக் கேட்டவுடனே அவர் தனது அறைக்குச் சென்றுவிட்டார். நாங்கள் இருந்த இடத்திலேயே நின்று கொண்டிருந்தோம். பதினைந்து, இருபது நிமிட நேரம் சென்றது. சூரியன் மறையும் நேரம். எங்கள் தந்தையும் வரவில்லை; சேவகனையும் அனுப்பவில்லை. ஸ்டேஷன் மாஸ்டரும் எங்களை விட்டுவிட்டுப் போய்விட்டார். நாங்கள் மிகவும் அதிர்ச்சி அடைந்தோம்; பயணத்தின் தொடக்கத்தில் நாங்கள் கொண்ட மகிழ்ச்சி எல்லாம் மறைந்து எங்களை மிகுந்த சோக உணர்வு ஆட்கொண்டது.

அரைமணி நேரம் கழித்து வந்த ஸ்டேஷன் மாஸ்டர் நீங்கள் என்ன செய்யப்போகிறீர்கள் என்று எங்களைக் கேட்டார். மாட்டு வண்டி வாடகைக்குக் கிடைத்தால் கோர்கான் வெகு தொலைவு இல்லை என்பதால், நாங்கள் உடனே புறப்படுவதாகக் கூறினோம். வாடகை சவாரிக்கு வரும் மாட்டு வண்டிகள் பல அங்கிருந்தன. ஆனால் நாங்கள் மஹர்கள் என்று ஸ்டேஷன் மாஸ்டரிடம் நான் கூறிய செய்தி அனைத்து மாட்டு வண்டிக்காரர்களுக்கும் தெரிந்துவிட்டபடியால், தீண்டத்தகாதவர்களைத் தங்கள் வண்டியில் ஏற்றிக் கொண்டு சென்று தங்களை இழிவுபடுத்திக் கொள்ளவோ, தங்களை அசுத்தப் படுத்திக் கொள்ளவோ அவர்களில் எவரும் விரும்பவில்லை. இரண்டு மடங்கு கட்டணம் தருவதாக நாங்கள் கூறியபோதும் பயன் ஏதுமில்லை.

எங்களுக்காகப் பேசிக் கொண்டிருந்த ஸ்டேஷன் மாஸ்டர் என்ன செய்வது என்ற தெரியாமல் பேசாமல் நின்று கொண்டிருந்தார். திடீரென அவருக்கு ஒரு யோசனை தோன்றியது. எங்களைப் பார்த்து “உங்களால் வண்டி ஓட்ட முடியுமா?” என்று கேட்டார். எங்கள் இயலாமைக்கு ஒரு தீர்வு காண முயல்கிறார் என்ற உணர்வு எங்களுக்கு ஏற்பட்டது. “எங்களால் வண்டி ஓட்ட முடியும்” என்று நாங்கள் கூவினோம். இந்தப் பதிலைக் கேட்ட அவர் வண்டிக்காரர்களிடம் சென்று, “வண்டிக்கு இரண்டு பங்கு வாடகை கொடுத்துவிட்டு வண்டியை அவர்களே ஓட்டிவருவார்கள்; நீ வண்டியின் பின்னே நடந்து செல்லலாம்” என்று கூறினார். இந்த ஏற்பாடு தனக்கு வாடகை சம்பாதித்துக் கொடுப்பதுடன் தன்னைத் தீட்டடையச் செய்யாமல் காப்பாற்றும் என்று கருதிய ஒரு வண்டிக்காரன் இதற்கு ஒப்புக் கொண்டான்.

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(‘விசாவுக்காக காத்திருக்கிறேன்’ முழு உரையை வே. தனசேகரின் வலை பதிவிலும், தமிழச்சியின் வலைத்தளத்திலும் காணலாம். The English text of Waiting for a Visa is available here.)