Friday, June 6, 2014

Enough is enough

                              

                                  Enough is enough

   

Villagers near the site of crime at Katra Shahadatganj village where two sisters were gangraped and hanged from a tree, in Badaun district on Saturday.



ANAND TELTUMBDE

The images of two innocent Dalit girls hanging from a tree in Katra village in Badaun district of Uttar Pradesh and a crowd of spectators looking bewildered at them best describes our national character. We can endure any amount of ignominy, can stand any level of injustice, and tolerate any kind of nonsense around us with equanimity. It is no use saying if those girls were our own daughters or our own sisters, we would still stare at them, bewildered and resigned like anyone in that crowd did. In just the past two months, while we as a country were busy playing fiddle to Narendra Modi and his promise of acche din, there have been a series of gory rapes and murders of Dalit teens across the country.

But beyond the residual anger, there is hardly any real concern for these atrocities. The rulers are not concerned, the media is hardly interested, and then there is indifference of the progressive lot and Dalits’ own frigidity towards them. It is shameful that we take the rape and murder of innocent Dalits as an adjunct of our social environment and forget about them.Rapes aren’t Manu-ordainedWhenever we speak about castes, we bury our neck ostrich like into sands of mythic past and blind ourselves to our own times where contemporary castes have been constructed. All the stereotypical theories that are in vogue either promote inaction or intoxication with one’s caste identity – a veritable suicidal instinct. They absolve our rulers of their dirty intrigues that enlivened castes into modern times, with the alibi of social justice. The Constitution outlawed untouchability but not castes. It was not social justice but the ability of castes to splinter people that made the post-independence rulers wanted castes to survive. The reservations in an equality-aspiring country could be an exceptional policy, which it was as instituted by the colonial rulers. The scheduled castes, as identified on a solid criterion of untouchability in 1936 were such exceptional people wanting an exceptional policy. But during the constitution making, it was made open-ended, first by extending it to the tribes by creating a separate schedule with fluid criteria and then to all others that could be identified by the State as ‘educationally and socially backward’. The latter was appropriately used by our rulers in 1990 in the form of Mandal reservations taking the lid off the can of caste worms.This and their other intrigues have created the modern monsters who unleash caste atrocities on Dalits. With the rhetoric of socialism, they systematically drove the country in capitalist direction. Right from clandestinely adopting the Bombay Plan drawn up by the big capitalists in January 1944 as our first three five year plans, giving an impression that India was truly embarking on a socialist path, to implementing the calibrated land reforms and rolling out a capitalist strategy of Green Revolution, which together created a class of rich farmers out of the most populous shudra caste-band, as a rural ally of the central bourgeoisie. The erstwhile upper caste landlords were replaced by the rich farmers assuming the baton of Brahmanism. Dalits on the other hand, were reduced to be the rural proletariat, with the collapse of the traditional jajmani ethos of interdependence, utterly dependent on the rich farmers for farm wages. It soon gave rise to wage struggles, which were responded to by culturally unsophisticated new custodians of casteism by unleashing terror, using a weird amalgam of caste and class that precipitated into gory atrocities starting from Kilvenmani in Tamilnadu in 1968 to their intensification today in the age neoliberalism. The shudras which were potential ally of Dalits (ati-shudra) in the schema of Jotiba Phule were made the oppressors of Dalits by the intrigues of the new rulers.Atrocities are not statistics“Every hour two Dalits are assaulted; every day three Dalit women are raped, two Dalits are murdered, and two Dalit homes are torched”, has become a catchphrase since Hillary Mayell had coined it while writing in National Geographic full 11 years ago. Well, today these figures have to be revised upward as for instance, the rape rate of Dalit women has shot up from Hillary’s 3 to well over 4.3, a whopping 43 percent rise. Even the sensex has its ups and downs but the atrocities on Dalits have only shown rising trend. Still it fails to shame us. With characteristic cool we carry on with our business, occasionally demanding stringent legislation knowing well how the Atrocity Act also has been rendered toothless by the justice delivery system. Right since this Act was promulgated; there have been open demands for its repeal by the casteist outfits. Shiv Sena in Maharashtra for instance, made it as a centerpiece of its electoral campaign in 1995 and the Maharashtra Government literally withdrew 1100 cases registered under the Act.The reluctance to register crime against Dalits under this Act is proverbial. Even in Khairlanji, which even a layman identified as a caste atrocity, the fast track court did not find any caste angle to apply the Atrocity Act. Despite the glaring fact that the entire village attacked the Dalit family in concert torturing, raping and murdering a woman, her daughter and two sons, and that the women’s dead bodies were found naked with assault marks all over them, the trial court did not find a case of conspiracy or outraging women’s modesty. Even the high court did not feel it worthwhile correcting this abominable observation. Such travesty of justice is a legion in atrocity cases. The entire justice delivery system, right from police to judges is fraught with such glaring anomalies. In the very first case of Kilvenmani, wherein 42 Dalit labourers were burnt alive, the Madras High Court had observed that the rich landlords, who owned even a car could not be committing such a crime and acquitted them. The least said about the police in India, better it is; most of them being the criminals in uniform. They come clearly against Dalits in every case of atrocity. Whether it is faulty investigation and/or incompetent prosecution, even the courts have been suspect in creating an insidious pattern of judgements. Recently, the Patna High Court stunned the world acquitting all the criminals of Ranvir Sena in case after case of Dalit massacres that came before it. The Andhra Pradesh High Court also did the same in the infamous Tsundur case, where all the convicts by the lower courts were acquitted after years of running.Emboldening criminalsIt is this trend set by the justice delivery system that emboldens the criminals to commit any atrocity against Dalits. They do know that they would never be punished. Firstly, they see Dalits, who are dependent for their survival on them, would not ordinarily dare to go against them. Many cases of atrocities thus have still birth, mostly in remote parts of the country. But if they do not, the real culprits escape the police net and their minions are made to undergo the judicial process. The police manage it by deliberately leaving investigation faulty; the case is presented by incompetent prosecutor and ultimately ends in indifferent to biased judgement. This process thus becomes quite reassuring to the criminals.Can one imagine the temerity of the rapists in Bhagana where four teenage Dalit girls of 13 to 18 years age could be brutally gang-raped entire night and thrown up into bushes in the adjacent state, still hoping that everything would be hushed up? Can one imagine their pain in braving their dishonor, sitting in the capital along with their parents demanding justice for months and no one taking note of them? Can we imagine the subtle casteism of the so called progressives in the country who raised a nationwide fury over a rape and murder of a non-Dalit girl, naming her nirbhaya, but keeping silent over the plight of these Bhagana girls? Can we imagine the suffering of a 17 year Dalit school boy, Nitish of Kharda village in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra, the plight of his poor parents whose lone son he was, when he was beaten to death in broad day light just because he dared to speak with a girl who belonged to the dominant community? And can we imagine what might have befallen those two innocent girls who were devoured by the criminals entire night and then hanged to death? And these are not the only cases. There have been scores of such cases of atrocities in both these states that happened during the last two months but did not find much space in media. Can one imagine the perpetrators committing such heinous crimes without the support of the politicians? In all these cases the criminals are nakedly protected by the political biggies of the Congress in Haryana, the Samajwadi Party in UP and the NCP in Maharashtra.The lynching of black men in the US led to the black youth taking up guns and teaching the whites to behave. Do the casteist criminals want this specter to come alive in India?

Monday, March 3, 2014

Caste is worse than Aparthied

           Caste is worse than Aparthied



Hundreds of millions of untouchables (Dalits) have been
subjected to humiliation, degradation, untouchability, starvation,
murder, rape and what not for about 3000 years. Indian society
has been divided into four classes or Varnas (castes); on the
top is Brahmin (priestly class), next to them are Kshatriyas
(warrior class), then we have Vaishya (business class), and at
the bottom are Shudras (untouchables). These untouchables
can not share any public platform with, and even their shadows
pollute the so-called upper castes. Manusmriti, which regulates
social and political life of Hindu society in India, bars untouchables
from reading, pronouncing and hearing the holy books like Vedas
and if they hear them, molten lead is to be poured in their
ears, their tongues are to be cut off if they pronounce them
and eyes are to be pierced with red hot iron. Even African
brothers have not faced such a draconian social and religious
norm. The Indian Government may say that the old
Constitution - Manusmriti has been replaced by modern Indian
Constitution framed by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, but, because of
non-implementation of the present Constitution, the old
Constitution holds the order of the day in day-to-day life.
Because of this dilution of reservation (a Constitutional provision
to provide jobs in Government services and politics according
to population ratio), rape and murder of Dalits and discrimination
in every walk of life are the order of the day. Even the Supreme
Court of India is engaged in eroding the base of reservation by
delivering adverse judgment after judgment.
The world may not believe our nightmare as truth but it
Religious Freedom ( 2 )
is so. Why apartheid problem caught the attention of the
world is because nature and religion did not help in masking the
reality. Blacks and whites are both creations of nature and this
realization has helped in exposing the discrimination of brothers
with black skin. Such discrimination was not backed by religion,
be it Christianity or Islam. But in our case the social
discrimination, which has pervaded all walks of life, is caused by
Hindu religion. The untouchables have been consoled to live a
dehumanized life because they are said to be condemned to it
by the desire of gods. Accordingly, it is considered good if they
suffer because they are washing away the sins of their past life
and their present suffering will liberate them in the next life.
According to Article 1 of the UN Convention on Elimination
of Racial Discrimination (CERD), caste discrimination is included
in racial discrimination, as formally interpreted and explained by
the CERD Committee in 1996, ICCPR (International Convention
on Civil and Political Rights) in 1997 and the UN Sub-Commission
for protection and promotion of Human Rights in 1999;when on
the one hand the Indian Constitution recognizes discrimination
on the basis of which reservation is given, then how caste
discrimination can be denied at international human rights for
a? When Indian Government and its dominant castes do not
feel shy of associating with UN Bodies and developed countries
in the field of health, education , rural development and the
like then how can they say that only caste discrimination is an
internal matter ? Even most developed countries like USA and
Japan have gracefully accepted discrimination in their respective
countries. At no point, they said that their internal problems
have been internationalized; when nature-created differences
like blacks and whites are being fought then why manmade
social norms, which sprang up due to Varna Vyavastha (caste
system), can not be fought ? Our problems are more severe
than apartheid. Can anyone deny that killings, rapes, starvation
or social discrimination of Dalits are not rampant ? Isn't it a fact
that safeguards like reservation provided in the Constitution are
frequently flouted? After independence Indian Parliament should
have first taken up the issue of elimination of caste and
imparting of compulsory and equal education and by now India
would have reached the pinnacle of progress. Isn't it true that
today also untouchables are carrying human excreta on their
heads? Isn't it a fact that even in the wake of the Tsunami
tragedy that struck coastal Tamil Nadu, many relief camps
were put up by Govt. and other voluntary bodies, wherein
Dalits were not allowed to share food and shelter side-by-side
with upper castes and others? Even in case of death, they
were treated separately. Among human beings, caste
discrimination still continues to be practised there which proves
that the dominant castes cannot change their mind-set. Those
who are settled in western countries, like Silicon Valley, have not
changed a bit. Rather, being in minority outside of India, they
become more fanatic and parochial and support RSS ideology
Whatever progress has been made by untouchables is
due to reservation in services and politics. Dalits constitute
about 25% of the total population of India. So far, reservation
has not been fully implemented, e.g., out of 120 Secretaries in
the Government of India, there is hardly anyone from this
community. In 1997 the Department of Personnel & Training
issued five anti-reservation orders on the basis of Supreme
Court judgment which have eroded the base of reservation.
The All India Confederation of SC/ST Organisations has been
struggling since 1997 for restoration of benefit of affirmative
action and its implementation. The untouchables do not have
any participation in the fields of industry, trade, commerce,
higher education and judiciary, profession and art and culture.
Imagine what would be happening to them if there were no
reservation. Why this truth remained masked is precisely
because of upper caste dominance in all fields like media,
communication, key places in Government etc. India is among
those countries which join the cause of human rights outside
India, but when it comes to the cause of human rights within
the country, it says that it is an internal matter. Developed
countries like USA and Japan have accepted gracefully and
honestly that discrimination does exist in their countries but
they did not say that their internal matter had been
internationalized. But, Indian Government is pleading that it is
an internal matter. Going by the logic of Indian Government
then every Genocide and Xenophobia happening in any country
becomes the internal matter of that country.
The United Nations Organization has failed to appreciate
the exploitation and discrimination in India in time. Justice delayed
is justice denied; however, it has still time to include caste based
discrimination in its programs. Human Rights are not only inborn,
inalienable, indivisible, universal but they transcend nation state
boundaries. Irrespective of political, nation state boundary and
other considerations, the whole humanity is having the obligation
to protect and promote the cause of humanity. The U.N.O.
should not succumb to any kind of pressure opposing the inclusion
of caste based discrimination.
It is often said that truth can not be masked for a long
period but it is so in India. Whatever standard hypotheses and
parameters are there to gauge the truth- human mentality,
faith and persuasion - they all fail when applying to so called
human beings of Brahminical Social Order (BSO). The entire
media is in the hands of BSO in India and nothing much can
appear either in print or electronic media which goes against
them. Some of the electronic media are controlled by western
people but the upper castes have pervaded in such a way that
nothing goes against them. Whatever they feel like is covered
and western journalists and media have not understood it till
now.
The upper castes rule the roost in every sphere and
whenever westerners try to understand the truth, they have
failed to see through it. The simple reason for this is that they
understand only English and prepare socio-cultural schemes
based on projections of upper castes so that scholarships and
fellowships are given to them only. A warrior only can know a
warrior; similarly, Christian brothers, being above such a heinous
caste system, could not understand it.
Buddhism was born in India before the birth of Jesus
Christ and it spread to most parts of the world during its peak;
however, it declined in India because of internal weaknesses
and manipulative actions of Brahminical forces, i.e., so called
upper castes. If at all there is a need to serve humans it is in
India as most of the societies in the world have overcome
acute forms of exploitation and discrimination, but in India till
today the caste system - graded inequality- exists in the most
brutal and crude manner which leads to the most inhuman
form of exploitation and discrimination. India has been the cradle
land of Buddhism but it was systematically weakened because
of the caste system and this became possible because people
were not conscious and educated but in today's world this is
not going to be the case and this exploitation and discrimination
in the name of caste system would not continue. There is
complete unrest, frustration and agony amongst DALITS - so
called lower castes/untouchables who constitute more than 25
per cent population of India. I do not think that more than 250
million people would be living in such nasty and wretched
conditions any where in the world.
The Lord Buddha Club and All India Confederation of
SC/ST Organisations have been waging a relentless war for
equality, justice, rights and harmony for the last 7-8 years.
Reservation in Government Services was given to Dalits after
huge, concerted efforts and hardships and it is like the
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION for BLACKS in the UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA, but now it is being snatched away by the upper
castes under one pretext or the other. We had organized four
mammoth gatherings on 26th November 1997, 16th November
1998, on 13th December 1999 and 11th December 2000 of
about 0.1 million, 0.5 million, 1.0 million and 1.5 million
respectively,followed by rallies in subsequent years, demanding
rights for these children of a lesser god but the rulers have not
relented and there is no hope that they would accede to the
demands.


Thursday, January 16, 2014

Stigma and labour: remembering Dalit Marxism

                                Stigma and labour: remembering Dalit Marxism


ANUPAMA RAO


                   AMBEDKAR’S relationship to Marx-ism is a persistent and unresolved issue for those interested in his thought. It is clear that Ambedkar had a long and contentious engagement with the Communists during the 1930s and 1940s, and that this struggle defined postcolonial Dalit politics in Maharashtra as it tried to manoeuvre between the Maratha Congress, the Communist Party, and later, the Shiv Sena.1 Yet, the precise nature of Ambedkar’s engagement with Marx’s thought remains understudied. This essay uses the recent screening of Anand Patwardhan’s film, Jai Bhim Comrade, as an occasion for engaging the longer-term trajectory of Dalit Marxism in Maharashtra, including B.R. Ambedkar’s complex engagement with caste-class. The essay argues that the critique of labour exploitation enabled its ironic opposite: a more complex representation of the ‘difference’ of caste.
Jai Bhim Comrade had its inaugural screening at the Bombay Improvement Trust chawls in Byculla on 9 January 2012. The occasion was the death anniversary of Bhagwat Jadhav, who was killed at a protest rally in 1974, during riots between the Dalit Panthers and Sena supporters in the BDD chawls at Worli and Naigaon. The film was an apt choice for commemorating lost worlds and lost lives. Jai Bhim Comrade pays-homage to Dalit martyrs, known and unknown, though the focal point of the film is shahir (balladeer) Vilas Ghogre, of the Avhan Natya Manch (associated with the M-L far left), who committed suicide in the aftermath of the July 1997 police firing in Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar.
Patwardhan’s film is an archive of Dalit Marxism: the film recalls affinities between the critique of labour as exploitation and caste as degradation, but it also indicts the party which expelled Ghogre, humiliated by lifelong poverty, for ‘left deviation’. Some may argue that the film elides the complex inter-dynamics, and ideological inconsistencies of Indian Communism with regard to caste. (Patwardhan represents Dalit Marxism as caught between the betrayal of upper caste Communists on the one hand, and opportunistic Dalit leaders on the other.) However, Jai Bhim Comrade also provides occasion to extend, rather than to reproduce the long-standing caste-class debate, and to ask what that binarism forecloses. The film is poignant witness to the end of an era in Maharashtra’s Dalit politics, defined by the struggle to represent a complex Dalit political subjectivity caught between caste-as-labour, and caste-as-identity.

Though Patwardhan’s film is resolutely contemporary in focus, the screening’s location recalled the importance of central Bombay as the home of working class radicalism, and Ambedkarite politics. The chawls of the Bombay City Improvement Trust, constructed in the aftermath of the notorious plague of 1896, and of the Bombay Development Directorate (1919-1926) were important sites of Dalit life, labour, and political activism. These included: marches and political processions of the Samata Sainik Dal (formed in 1924 by Dalit military pensioners to protect Ambedkar); the first celebration of Ambedkar Jayanti on the BDD chawls’ maidan; study circles organized by Dalit Communists associated with the Delisle Road Friends’ Circle; performances of Ambedkari jalsa, especially by the Scheduled Caste Federation, and the establishment of the offices of the Independent Labour Party, and the Municipal Kamgar Sangh in the area. Indeed, central Bombay was Dalit Bombay: Ambedkar lived here until he moved to Dadar’s Hindu Colony, and almost all of his organizational and publishing efforts were localized in the area.
Jai Bhim Comrade does not engage this past; neither does it address the complex reception of B.R. Ambedkar as a theorist of caste-class. Instead, the film begins with the stark bodies lifting waste at the Mulund garbage dump, a major site of Dalit activism where Ghogre’s musical talents were first discovered. The film then takes us on a tour of subaltern urbanity through places of waste, refuse, and informalized existence where Dalit critique ‘lives’. Dalit critique lives as sound, and especially as song: Jai Bhim Comrade traces the development of Dalit critique through the musical traditions of tamasha and jalsa, Ambedkari geet, and the performances of Ghogre and the recently banned Kabir Kala Manch. Indeed, the film begins where Patwardhan’s earlier film on urban demolitions, Bombay Hamara Shahar ends, with the unforgettable voice of Vilas Ghogre, who offered a stinging indictment of state violence and caste dispossession in life, as in death. Ghogre chalked his suicide note on the wall of his zhopadi like it was graffiti, that quintessentially urban form of insurgent, subaltern speech, ‘I salute the martyred sons of Bhim. Hail Ambedkarite unity. Shahir Vilas Ghogre.’

As Patwardhan tries to understand what produced Ghogre and others like him, Ambedkar becomes central. This is an insurgent Ambedkar, who remakes Dalit self and community. It is true that this audacious thinker of Dalit universality struggled with caste and class, stigma and labour as supplemental, yet incommensurable categories. To anticipate my argument in this essay: it seems worth reminding ourselves that ultimately, the struggle for Ambedkar was with specifying caste (and untouchability) as a peculiar kind of body history. Ambedkar addressed this complex (and elusive) form of dehumanization by taking recourse to terms such as class and labour, but always to forefront the ‘difference’ of caste, and the specificity of its social experience.

Despite extensive differences within Marxism, it seems possible, nonetheless, to argue that the theory assumes a unique (and ethical) relationship between labour and political subjectivity. In Marx’s account, the proletariat, as living labour, compensates for a history of indifference and the misrecognition of their dead labour – now congealed in the commodity – through the work of politics. Labour universalism is by definition antagonistic to the global and universalizing force of capital, though produced by it.
Ambedkar engaged labour universalism in his famous 1917 essay in the Indian Antiquary, ‘Castes in India: Their Genesis, Mechanism, and Development’, where he described caste as an ‘enclosed class’. Ambedkar held the regulation of female sexuality responsible for producing caste as a deformed version of class; it was this biopolitical element of caste that differentiated it from class.
In later writing, Ambedkar specified Dalit identity as it emerged from a conflictual relationship with Hindu history, and argued that the Dalit was a negated subject of historical violence; that she was a form of remaindered, detritus life produced by the historic conflict between Buddhism and Brahminism in subcontinental history. From efforts to specify the civic disability of caste (and untouchability), Ambedkar’s later writings expanded to cover a millennial frame: Dalit dehumanization was located in the Indic past, but disaggregated from what might appear to be the shared history of Buddhism and Brahminism in order to give the Dalit an agonistic role in Hindu history.2 
Ambedkar distinguished his account from Shudra history, which was the story of the birth of a fourth varna, the Shudras, from a class of degraded Kshatriyas excluded from the right to perform the upanayanam (thread) ceremony. Ambedkar understood Shudra identity to be unstable because Shudra critiques of caste came from a desire for incorporation into the caste Hindu order, rather than from the position of symbolic negation, as was the case with Dalits.

Dalit critique was also unstable, but for a different reason: Dalit history could only become a ground for a Dalit future as negative example. Stigmatized identity produced a gap between history and the future because stigma could not become the ground for political organization; unlike labour, it could not be ‘in’ and ‘for’ itself. Or, one might argue that stigma is a limit concept in Ambedkar’s thought because it is a form of embodiment that cannot be abstracted, or universalized.3 
What do we mean? Like labour, stigma was history, yet it could not be detached or abstracted from the body.4 Stigma could not be valorized like value-producing labour. Rather than deriving a model of emancipation through labour as Marx proposed, Ambedkar argued that without a regime of rights, outcaste labour was fated to be marginalized and hyperexploited. The response to Dalits’ dilemma did not call for politicizing labour as such via the general strike. Rather, it required, as a first step, the dissolution of Dalit-ness by bringing Dalits into the domain of the labour contract. Capitalist modernity was to be applauded because the ideas of abstraction and equivalence that were central to it also enabled Dalits to cast off stigma: by bringing Dalits within a field of abstract mediation, capital also took them outside the culturalism of caste.

For this reason, Ambedkar supports socializing capital and redistributing resources, rather than annihilating the capitalist state; he understands the wage labour contract, like liberal rights more generally, as an instrument that abstracts and universalizes. The claim to the universal – as with claiming wages, instead of performing customary labour – is what allows one to mark the stubborn materiality of stigma which resists abstraction, and which cannot be ‘scaled up’. Indeed, the moment of politics lies in laying claim to the universal while marking the non-identity of the subaltern subject of rights from the normative, universal rights-bearing subject. We may note here that Ambedkar is a profound thinker of the power of the negative: he marks the intimacies of caste by describing the Dalit as non-Hindu; as a subject who is dehumanized through contact with caste Hindu ideology; and as negated existence, or detritus life.
Ambedkar thus engaged the political universal as a way to insert Dalits into a global history of dehumanization. In addition to addressing caste in a millennial frame, Ambedkar made repeated reference to slavery in the Greco-Roman period, and to American plantation slavery; he would often use the example of Balkanization in the interwar period to discuss the perilous politics of minority rights. These efforts speak to his sense that a global, comparative perspective opened up critical possibilities foreclosed by a resolutely Hindu, upper caste cultural nationalism. Though important, the critique of nationalism (and its sociological base) was not enough: Ambedkar’s commitments to eradicating Dalit subalternity in all its manifestations required engaging a global history of ‘stigma’, if by this we understand a form of embodied antagonism situated somewhere between the biologism of race, and the affective claims of territorial nationalism.

On another plane, the engagement with the idea of proletarian emancipation was critical, but it was also not sufficient. Labour was political because the identity of labour derived from its antagonism to capital. Thinking stigma through labour appeared to be productive and useful. Yet, to fully transform caste into class would ignore caste’s history as (Hindu) violence. Like religion (and Hinduism), labour too was ultimately only a partial force in accounting for Dalit dispossession. Here we should recall that Ambedkar would have been well aware of the tradition of eastern Marxism, for instance, Lenin’s extension of the model of class struggle to anticolonialism based on arguing that imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism. This foreclosed the question of politics within aspiring nations in colonial territories, as much as it appeared to create novel, global linkages among them with respect to the imperial centre.5 While new political connections were forged between colonized nations, the internal problem of how to render caste ‘political’, that is, of how to think its proximity to labour without rendering ‘caste’ into ‘class’, became impossibly difficult.6 

Labour offered a metaphor – but not a formula – for associating the identity of a collective, with their experience of dispossession.7 Instead, naming became a technique for specifying social oppression: from Ambedkar’s description of the class-like character of the Depressed Classes, to addressing them as Dalit or paddalit (crushed underfoot), non-Hindu, and Buddhist, naming connected social experiences through analogy, rather than equivalence.8 This was similar to the manner in which labour was described in the period in its concreteness through such terms as dari-dryata (impoverishment, destitution), bekaar (unemployed, worthless), or bhukekangal (pauperized). Viewing naming and description as a form of theorizing allows us to appreciate the importance of literary and cultural production for the development of Dalit Marxists.

In his famous address at the Dalit Sahitya Sammelan of 1958, the Mang shahir Annabhau Sathe, one of the founders of the Lalbavta kalapathak (Red Flag performance troupe) associated the invisibility of outcaste labour with the devaluation of labour more generally. Sathe argued that Dalit’s capacity for struggle and hardship, kashtha, produced wealth: because Dalits’ labour created the world, it also made Dalits the malaks, or proprietors of that world. In his famous words, ‘Hi Prithvi Dalitancya Talahatavar Tarleli Ahe.’ (This world turns/dances to the Dalits’ tune) While the economic basis of exploitation was clear, Dalit marginality and stigma was distinctive. Thus, if Sathe’s Marxism allowed him to forefront outcaste labour as a particular instance of the general invisibility of labour, it is to Bhimrao that he attributes the inspiration to change the world in his famous novel, Fakira.
The famous Dalit writer, Baburao Bagul (1930-2008) acknowledged Sathe as a founder of Dalit literature. However, Bagul’s exposure to race and African-American literature9 – not to mention the keenness of his urban eye – marked his singular ability to represent what Aniket Jaaware terms the ‘unbearability’ of (caste) ethics.10 Bagul’s depictions of slum life inMaran Svast Hot Ahe (Death is Becoming Cheaper) present the space as teeming with visual difference: the mob, or the lumpenproletariat here appear as so many life forms – deformed, drunk, violent, and violated; but also capable of giving ‘care’ to others equally dispossessed and downtrodden. Slum here attains thick description, and begins to exist as a form of life: in the hands of those Dalit cultural producers who also identified as Marxists, caste existence had increasingly morphed into a critique of urban life, and of stigmatized existence more generally.

Namdeo Dhasal’s Golpitha (1972), was the iconic text of insurrectionary speech, and the power of renaming and resignification.11 Dhasal embraced an aesthetic politics, and a politics of the street in his representation of informal livelihoods and lumpen lives.12 Dhasal’s investment in violent visibility challenged the logic of bourgeois valuation. In this, Dhasal was also implicitly challenging the regime of value and visibility that Ambedkar had earlier championed: bringing Dalits into the framework of contractual liberalism in order to place a value on stigmatized labour so as to underscore its productivity. Instead, Dhasal and the Dalit Panthers in Maharashtra emphasized the symbolic efficacy of violent language, not to mention the instrumental efficiency of street fighting.
Dalit precarity and informality – rather than an aberration from the narrative of class formation – increasingly enabled Dalits to assert their right to the city because they existed as a form of political life or stigmatized humanity whose claim to recognition was the mere fact of their survival. That they existed on a continuum with the city’s detritus (excreta, garbage, scraps) – scarred by human violence (theft, rape, child abuse), and excised from sanctioned circuits of production and reproduction – enabled a set of associations between Dalit life and urban form. (I suggest that Jai Bhim Comrade also addresses this critical tradition of naming and describing, albeit in sound and song: Dalit Marxism draws inspiration from the critique of labour, but it simultaneously acknowledges its limitations through the turn to aesthetic politics.)

Ambedkar’s long-standing engagement with the project of Dalit emancipation is well known, at least in the form of a schematic political history, from his demand for separate electorates to constitutionalism. What I have tried to do here, however, is to mark a productive and unresolved tension regarding adjacencies between labour and stigma; to argue that we think of the analogy between caste and class as a strategic move on Ambedkar’s part to resist the depoliticization of caste by labelling it ‘Hindu’. This helps challenge the reduction of these complex forms of thought to an ‘either-or’ position on caste and class, which ensues from focusing solely on party politics. As we have argued, Ambedkar’s engagement of the dual logic of exception and universality allowed him to mark the unique historical status of Dalits by laying claim to the Dalit-Buddhist, as the universal subject of rights. Indeed, Ambedkar’s Dalit critique was the practice of agonistic thought, it was radical democratic thought.

We might then ask how Dalit critique allows us reframe an enduring preoccupation of colonial and postcolonial history with the problem of ‘difference’. As is well known, the critique of colonial knowledge has consisted in challenging the adequacy of European concepts for understanding Indian social forms because of the ideas of progress and development surreptitiously encoded in the former. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s signal call to ‘provincialize’ Europe is among the most compelling articulations of the inadequacy of European concept to non-western forms of life.13 Chakrabarty’s account is compelling because it presumes the putative universality of Europe as the frame within which critique is possible in the first place, while simultaneously marking the structural exclusion of Europe’s periphery. Thus, ‘provincializing’ Europe is both necessary, and impossible.

This kind of double bind is also evident in the positing of Dalit identity as caught between (political) universality and (historical) exception. And yet, and perhaps because Ambedkar succeeded in viewing European problems as analogous to the Indic problematic, it might be more apt to suggest that Dalit critique took as its project to use caste as a universalizing optic rather than a means of provincializing Europe.


Footnotes:

1. For an important discussion of Dalits and Communists in late colonial Bombay, see Gail Omvedt, ‘Non-Brahmans and Communists in Bombay’, Economic and Political Weekly 8(16), 21 April 1973. For an analysis of the divergences between Buddha and Marx in the Dalit Panther period, see Anupama Rao, Chapter Three, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2009, pp. 182-216.
2. Ambedkar was especially keen to challenge the perspective put forward by Hindu nationalists such as Tilak, regarding the role of Vedic India, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, in incubating ideas of social equality, and non-violence. See e.g., Tilak’s Gita Rahasya, and Arctic Home in the Vedas. Therefore, Ambedkar dates the Bhagvad Gita to the post-Buddhist era, in his essay, ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India’.
3. Thus efforts to define waste management as Dalit labour, and offer government protection for safai karamcharis are a violence committed in the name of labour abstraction: their effect is to universalize Dalits’ association with waste, rather than defining all labourers as Dalit. Ambedkar’s struggle was for the latter, of course, beginning with the establishment of the Independent Labour Party in 1936.
4. One of the more significant histories of stigma we live with is the narrative of Jesus’s crucifixion, and the idea of suffering ‘for’ others. Addressing caste as stigma enacts a move away from this burdened history. I am grateful to Aniket Jaaware for noticing (and emphasizing) this shift in my argument.
5. This is the classic debate between M.N. Roy and V.I. Lenin, on the ‘national and colonial question,’ and earlier, between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin on socialist internationalism. For an important reading of this debate, see Sanjay Seth, Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics: The Case of Colonial India. Sage, New Delhi, 1995; and more recently, Kris Manjapra, M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism. Routledge, London and New Delhi, 2010.
6. The writings of Maharashtrian Marxists – from S. A. Dange, to D.D. Kosambi, D.K. Bedekar, and more recently, the Marx-Phule-Ambedkarvad of Sharad Patil – has involved efforts to historicize caste and/as capital. Gail Omvedt’s extensive writing on this subject also belongs to this tradition.
7. No doubt Phule’s category of the shudra-atishudra already encoded within it a critique of labour exploitation, e.g., in Shetkaryacha Asud. Ambedkar’s Dalit was distinguished from the broader category of shudra-atishudra partly, I argue, through Ambedkar’s engagement with theories of value, abstraction, and equivalence, not to mention the explicit insertion of Dalits into global history.
8. Marx explains the disconnect between class position, and political agency in The Eighteenth Brumaire, by describing the heterogeneity of the poor and working classes. The literary theorist Peter Stallybrass has argued that the lumpenproletariat are a sartorial category for Marx. We will remember, of course, that Frantz Fanon described the colonized as the damned, or the wretched of the earth precisely as a way to specify the complexity of the colonial encounter beyond class oppression.
9. One of the founding members of the journal Asmita, M. N. Wankhede, Professor of English at Milind College (Aurangabad) had been to the United States as a Fulbright Fellow, completed a Masters at Indiana University (1962), and received a Ph.D in English from the University of Florida-Gainesville, in 1965. Wankhede, who was exposed to the African-American literary canon – including the writings of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and LeRoi Jones – exhorted Dalit writers to emulate this radical literary tradition. Prabuddha Bharat, ‘Dalitano Vidrohi Vangmaya Liha’, (Dalits, Write Revolutionary Literature!).
10. Aniket Jaaware, Kale-Pandhare Asphut Lekh. Hermes Prakashan, Pune, 2011; ‘Destitute Literature’, delivered as the Mahatma Phule Lecture, Bombay University, 4 December 2011.
11. It is worth noting that the prostitute appears more generally as a symptom of Dalit urbanity. She is represented in Dhasal’s writings, as well as in Prakash Jadhav’s famous poem, ‘Under Dadar Bridge’, as a symbol of detritus life, her body sucked dry and left to shrivel, and die.
12. See Namdeo Dhasal’s political autobiography, Ambedkari Calval Ani Socialist, Communist, (Ambedkar Movement And Socialists, Communists) for an account of how his political critique developed.
13. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000.
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