A Song that will be
sung
Anand Patwardhan’s paean to Dalits,
that took 14 years to compose, probes even as it praises, says Saroj
Giri
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THERE IS an entrenched tendency to
represent Dalits fighting for rights and reservations as just (another)
competitive bloc vying for self-interest and power. It leads to a pernicious
inversion: ‘Dalit rights’ dividing the nation along caste lines. Victim as
perpetrator! Anand Patwardhan’s film Jai Bhim Comrade takes us beyond
the grid of cynical power, revealing a vibrant and militant world. It is
structured around the double movement of a paean and an elegy. Yet it ends on a
note of optimism.
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This world is brought to life through intimate portraits of
ordinary people, activists and artists in their struggle and in the everyday,
often through a telling and retelling of the life and teachings of Dr BR
Ambedkar. You see Dalits able to distinguish their politics and struggle at the
level of a lullaby, resolve it at the level of school children, question the
existence of God or of ordinary people singing the virtues of reason and
celebrating festivals outside of the Hindu calendar — a wide and captivating
array of images.
The film brings this world to life without any apparent
mediation. No authoritative voiceover: it speaks through the voices of people
and music, through personal conversations, cultural expression and political
speeches. Patwardhan’s forte is his deep immersion in Dalit life, unaffected and
sincere, spread over 14 years. In particular, his close comradeship with the
late Vilas Ghogre, the Dalit-Marxist artist, inspired the film.
In spite of the immersive positioning, the film is not an
ethnography (as Patwardhan has pointed out elsewhere) since ‘politics’/struggle
is constantly in focus. And yet, the film avoids foregrounding the internal
struggle among the followers of Ambedkar on key political questions — something
which would have cast the Dalit world and the immersion in it in a different
light.
Scenes of Dalit workers engaged in back-breaking labour in
garbage dumps under abject conditions are juxtaposed with fiery speeches and
songs in progra - mmes by leaders elsewhere. The major running thread is the
aftermath of the Ramabai Nagar (Ghatkopar, Mumbai) police firing on Dalits
protesting the desecration of Ambedkar’s statue in July 1997. Ten Dalits were
killed and Ghogre committed suicide in protest and horror. Dalits narrate
accounts of gruesome atrocities elsewhere in Beed, Khairlanji and other places,
and the stony complicity of the state machinery. Official records show that two
Dalits are raped and three killed daily in India. The actual statistics are
higher.
Scenes of stark injustice contrast with equally stark
compromises and betrayals that slowly and depressingly unfold in Dalit politics.
Bhim Sena and Shiv Sena join hands, Narendra Modi garlands Ambedkar, Dalit
masses applaud. Dalit leaders hobnob with the Congress and the Shiv Sena or BJP,
precisely those who engineered atrocities. The politics of forgetting and
remembrance reaches a feverish pitch. Towards the end, the court verdict on
Ramabai Nagar again exonerates the prime accused, Manohar Kadam, the police
officer who ordered the firing. In a travesty of justice, he is let off on bail
and his punishment again recedes to the background.
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The vibrant, defiant spirit of Dalit life-world now seems to
be sapped. Corrupt and dubious forces do not reject this world but appropriate
it! The paean gives way to elegy. The film now tries to emerge from its
immersion, possibly wash it off and retrieve an optimistic point towards the
end. The way it does this recasts all that has gone before, revealing how the
film is silently structured.
This optimism is expressed in the agency and voice of the
Kabir Kala Manch (KKM), a cultural organisation which wants to start afresh.
They foreground the internal struggle within Ambedkar’s legacy, so that there is
no one Bhim. Sheetal Sathe and her team sing from a Spartan stage. She insists,
with a beaming face, on a new Bhim, opening a new register in the narrative.
KKM’s politics and aesthetics, crisp and rhetoric-free, avoid invoking Ambedkar
as an icon or messiah, instead appealing to the people to get mobilised — a
clear departure from the cultural performances and political speeches that raise
Ambedkar and let the Dalits down.
Now there is no one Dalit life-world in which to immerse or
just one Bhim to follow. There is not even an autonomous Dalit specificity based
purely on caste. ‘Dalit’ as a generic term for the oppressed and exploited
invokes the question of class. It’s a body blow to any kind of ethnography, a
kind of a critique of the film’s dominant trope of immersion — is this why the
film later invokes Sheetal’s mother who tangentially critiques or restrains the
KKM? Was the earlier immersion then enabled by ‘choosing not to choose’ to split
Ambedkar’s legacy?
The question assumes salience since this perspective takes
us back to the period after Ambedkar’s death in 1956 to a tradition within
Ambedkarites that examined caste through class and land relations. Recall the
famous ‘Jail Bharo’ campaign for the redistribution of surplus land to the
landless peasants in Konkan region of Maharashtra. It was led by the ‘rustic’
Dadasaheb Gaikwad, eventually sidelined as unfit to carry on in the footsteps of
Ambedkar as a ‘saheb’ doing high politics, with university degrees and law books
in hand. Or RB More, a close associate of Ambedkar and chief organiser of the
Mahad Satyagraha (1927), who parts ways with Ambedkar by joining the Communist
Party.
So class was a live issue even among Ambedkarites like
Gaikwad. The Left might have been one-sided in their focus on class but that
cannot be a pretext to then drive class out of the picture. For that will
undermine even an effective caste struggle — which is the real (disavowed?)
lesson of the film. The question unasked: if the Shiv Sena-BJP is able to co-opt
Dalit voices, was there something in the iconisation of Ambedkar which allowed
this to happen?
PATWARDHAN’S EARLIER masterpiece Father
Son and Holy War (FSHW) wonderfully exposed the ideals of machismo
underlying Hindutva politics — how high symbolic politics derives from certain
enduring social mores in the mundane everyday practices. But is Dalit politics
or Left politics too informed by such or a different kind of a machismo? In
Jai Bhim Comrade, an elderly woman claims to follow Ambedkar’s critical
approach but is unsure of extending it to her relationship with her domineering
husband. An FSHW moment?
The film is a repository of a rich and textured lived social
history where caste and class intertwine. Ghogre, the story goes, was wearing a
blue band (Ambedkarite colour) at the time of his suicide, thereby apparently
affirming his ultimate castigation of Left politics as unable to address the
caste issue. Let us accept this castigation. But recall Ghogre singing a working
class song, Ek Katha Suno Re Logo, Hum Mazdoor ki Karun Kahani in a
working class area in Mumbai with tall buildings in the background — a striking
image. The associated affect and the emergent structure of feeling are
absolutely revolutionary and proletarian. It has a richness accruing precisely
from an absence, without a grand stage, without the symbolic excess or rhetoric
of the kind we see in the other Dalit cultural programmes that one way or
another overlap with mainstream Hindu programmes. No wonder the filmmaker too
seems more attached to what can be seen as a proletarian singing scene, which is
neither specifically Dalit nor neo-Buddhist. Is class and its symbolic field
entering the picture again? There are several other instances like this in the
film.
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Can we then say that the film’s portrait of Dalit politics
unfolds into an elegy of a pure caste-based politics? Isn’t Patwardhan, in spite
of his apparent conscious intentions, reinstating class and giving it its due?
Nothing to be depressed about, however. One starts with caste and wants to stay
with it (the rational conscious movement of the film), partly to make up for the
apparent blind spots of the Left parties. And yet, in the search for optimism,
class sneaks in (the disavowed movement) not to undermine caste but to firm it
up, to make it politically legible and efficacious for a radical politics —
happening here under the sign of a new Bhim. Thanks to the rich complexity of
the film, such fine conjunctures of caste and class are made visible.
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This has immediate resonance. With the upward mobility of
the OBCs (responsible for most recent attacks on Dalits), caste as the basis of
atrocities on Dalits attains a deadly efficacy when it is stamped by the
distinction of class. More starkly, this concerns Dalits themselves: the case in
Khairlanji is a gruesome illustration. Dalits in top administrative posts
refused to side with Dalits facing terrible violence at the hands of upper
castes. As is well-documented, having undergone ‘class transformation’, Dalits
in top administrative posts sided with upper caste perpetrators of the heinous
attacks on poor Dalits.
Finally, the basic dilemma of Left politics today comes to
the fore. Popular movements and electoral mobilisation of the marginalised are
appropriated by mainstream or right-wing parties, the judiciary and courts again
and again let you down, while those who still resist and dissent (like the KKM)
are labelled Maoists. And not making matters easy is Sheetal’s mother who has
this to say: “At every performance, my children assured me that they’d never
take up arms, that they’d change the world only through song and drums.” What is
to be done? The film is an artiste’s passionate plea to pose the question again
for radical politics. It is a powerful intervention.
Giri teaches Political Science at the University of
Delhi.
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