Dalit Discourse and Centre-Margin Politics:
S. Hareesh’s Moustache
|
Dr. Ranjit Kumar Pati HOD Department of
English GIET University, Gunpur, Rayagada, Odisha, India |
Padala Sesagiri PhD Research Scholar GIET University, Gunpur,Rayagada, Odisha, India
|
Dr. Gagana Bihari Purohit Reader in English, R N J Coleege, Dura, Berhampur, Odisha, India
|
Dalit literature in India has come to
reckoning immediately after independence.
Emerging from Marathi background, it has later spread to other parts of
the country. Literary characters like Gangi, Velutha, Bakha bear witness to
powerful representation of the marginal status of Dalit community. Bama’s
Karaku, Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit
Literature by Shravan Kumar Limbale mark significant progress in the
area. Like a life writing, it deals with their suffering and humiliation at the
hands of the caste people. The more acute and intense the suffering and pain, the more evocative
and poignant is the literature of the community. B. R Amedkar’ influence in
uplifting the Dalit cause is unparalleled and beyond doubt which is duly
acknowledged by many prominent Dalit writers and Dalit activities across the
country. They decry the harsh treatment in their day to day living and their writing
is a protest to better their living in the society. Their literature, in a
sense, is their life and its challenges
marked by the untold suffering and atrocity they have undergone time and again.
It is high time they demanded a better standard of living. All fixed centers
concerning the Dalit life and literature have been either dismantled and repudiated
or redefined and reoriented to cater to changing contours of their cultural
upbringing. The paper makes an attempt to redefine the centre and margin dichotomy
emphasizing that centers can be subjected to frequent scrutiny in order to find
out all fault lines that come in the way of the beleaguered community’s growth
and progress. Their protest and resistance is their new panacea, the emerging
trend is a great sign of recovery of the lost ground, and they have conceded a
considerable degree of their autonomy and freedom which would not stand them
good steads in future.
Keywords: Center-Margin politics, Dalit
discourse, Lived reality, Mainstream culture, Marginally, Moustache, Plural
possibility
Caste constraints have become, in addition to other things, the major
stumbling block in forming a unique identity of Dalit discourse in a democratic
country like India. When the struggle is for existence and livelihood, forming aesthetics
of Dalit literature is nothing short of a far cry. It owes its origin to and
mission of rise and development of independent existence to Ambedkar’s stature
as a leader of the masses. Dalits have been marginalized in and excluded from
their own country, waging a war on epic scale for self exploration and
exclusive identity. They have been fighting bitterly on social, economic and
political fronts against caste discrimination and the oppressive system. What
they were subjected to is never out of sight but what they can do about their
upliftment and empowerment now hogs the limelight. After centuries of bitter struggle and
consistent fight, Dalits are trying to represent themselves with much insight,
innovation and clear vision now, their struggle and fight is not over, though. How and why they had have suffered catering
to the needs of an oppressive caste system is still a million dollar question.
Their slave-like suffering has attained a saturation point from where they
could launch a tirade of bitter fight against the dominant culture
successfully. However, such a difficult yet attention grabbing journey has been
possible only with the help of some visionary people who have come forward to
contribute to the cause of Dalit empowerment.
People like Ambedkar
and Narayan Guru have pushed the Dalit agenda forward with their unconditional
contribution to and wholehearted and sacrificial focus on the peripheral
position of the concerned community. Obviously, these people enjoy a cult
status among the Dalits who are celebrating every occasion associated with
these icons with much fun and gaiety. Drawing upon the rich cultural heritage
and historical tradition, mythological treasure, and vast practical experience,
leaders like Ambedkar have argued for a strong Dalit discourse. His foundational
contribution has paved the way for the political, social, economic resurgence
Dalit community who has been able to represent themselves through a solid
literary and cultural discourse. For writers like Limbale, Ambedkarite ideology
has laid the foundation stone of a Dalit discourse that informs their lived
reality and traumatic experience. Similarly, the Marathi, writer, activist and
editor, Arjun Dangle, has been able to garner mass support by uniting the Dalit
people in Maharastra to fight for the Dalit empowerment. What matters most is
their self respect, which is their birthright and they have made it a point to
achieve it, either amicably or by force.
The literature they
represent comprises their protest, resistance and rearguard action against the
caste atrocity, the marginal other and the received representation of their
culture and identity by the dominant culture and literature. In other words,
they want to write their own literature based on their experience, not what the
dominant discourse thinks right for them which has hitherto removed them from
their own roots and reality. It is the idea of involvement, not detachment, to
write about what describes their atrocity, “deprivation, misery, indignity and
exploitation in which Dalit Community have been compelled to live for
centuries” (P.Kumari 25).
Some scholars have compared, rightly so, the Dalit oppression with that
of the racial oppression of the black people who have successfully defended
their own culture and identity, distinct from and based on what they have been
subject to, which is a far cry from their own everyday reality and that
borrowed notion has rendered them helpless and ineffective in their own
land.
Dalit characters did
not find their presence in either Indian Literature in English or Bhasa
litratures until 1970 when the emergence of writers like Jyotiba Phule, B.R.
Ambdkar and other social reformers in Maharashtra. They tried to dispense with
the old customs, traditions and religious beliefs that gave rise to inequality,
discrimination and caste-ridden atrocities. Thus, the Dalit literature
flourished in Maharastra with a humanist thrust on fundamental values like
equality, fraternity and brotherhood. Other localities in India have lagged
behind to contribute to the cause of Dalit upliftment. The writers did not lack
talent, they have been deprived of the opportunities to thrive and flourish.
The mainstream culture would not concede any space for the beleaguered
community to express themselves freely. However, it has become a force to
reckon with in the 1970s when sufficient representation of Dalit literature is
felt across Maharashtra of which Arjun Dangle writes,
Dalit literature is not simply literature. Dalit literature is
associated with movements to bring about change. At the very first glance, it
will be strongly evident that there is no established critical theory or point
of view behind them i.e. [Dalit writings], instead, there is new thinking and a
new point of view. (Dangle vii-viii; P.Kumar 27)
Being activist writers,
Dalit writers in Maharastra have been influenced by the Dalit Panthers focusing
largely on better social recognition. What they needed is an authentic
discourse which would help them to create an independent body of literature
repudiating the exiting representations and foregrounding a new identity based
on their lived reality. The “Foucoldian Power-knowledge paradigm” (P.Kumar 27) forms the basis of such a literature. Limbale writes: By Dalit literature, I mean writing about
Dalits by Dalit writers with a Dalit consciousness. The form of Dalit
literature is inherent in its Dalitness and its purpose is obvious to inform
Dalit society of its slavery, and narrate pain and suffering to upper caste
Hindus. (Limbale 19; P Kumar 27).
For Dalit writers emphasis on Dalit consciousness is important than
aesthetic beauty of mainstream literature. Hence, Dalit literature would
represent the testing times, their trial and tribunals, atrocities and
sufferings related to caste discrimination so that they can go on to challenge
the realities facing them, and not play to the tune of what are being dictated
and doctored by the established notion of the knowledge that informs their body
of literature. Omprakash valmiki’s autobiography Jhootan (1985)has all
the ingredients of the Dalit consciousness which was inspired by the Dalit
activism in Maharashtra. Writers like Daya Pawar, Sharan Kumar Limbale,
Yashwant Manohar, Waman Nimbalkar have enriched Dalit Poetry immensely.
Inpsired by marxist ideology West Bengal and Kerala have soon formulated the
idea that economic inequality is the root cause of social inequality. Writers
like Manaranjan Bypari, who wrote his imprisonment experience as a Naxalite in There
is Much Gun Powder in the Air, narrating his struggling and intimate
experience as an inmate and how a chance encounter with Mahasweta Devi, another
prominent writer about Adivasi and marginal cultures, has changed the course of
his career, has been explored with much poise and intensity. Arundhati Roy’s
Booker winning novel, The God of Small Things (1997) also
describes the plight and finally the triumph of Dalits in a much more
pronounced way In Kerala, the caste equation is even worst where even the
shadow of a Dalit would defile the caste people. An acute sense of alienation
and excluson of Dalit representation marks the Dalit consciousness in Odia
Literature. But the arrival of Akhil Nayak’s Bheda in Odia scene has
bridged this void immensely. Published in 2008 Akhil Naik's Bheda is credited with being
the first Odia novel by a Dalit writer. How people of Dom community, the caste
to which Naik himself belongs, were treated as untouchables despite so much hue
and cry about caste discrimination and how Naik's family, his father was a
teacher in local school, was not allowed water from the village well constitute
the crux of the matter around which the novella revolves around. They were, and
still are, treated as bonded labourers. The instance of the son being treated
as bonded labourer for his father's loan from caste money lender is quite
common in remote regions of Odisha even today. The novel shows how the young
radical protagonist Laltu represents the problem of caste politics by
questioning the caste hegemony; consolidating and subverting it in the course
of the novel. Laltu is not able to eliminate caste discrimination completely,
but by questioning it's ways of operation, he has started the trend of
subversion of dominant ideology as an important marker of Dalit solidarity. It
also questions the constructed production of caste representation. S Hareesh, a thought provoking and controversial writer, brings out the
plight as well as retaliation of Dalits through the proactive protagonist
Vavachan who is both real and surreal at the same time. The present paper deals
in detail about Dali representation, resistance and truimph of the protagonist
of the Novel Moustache (2000)
Hailed as a “contemporary classic”, S. Hareesh’s Moustache (2020), which won JCB prize for
literature, imbibes myth, magic, metaphor into its corpus creating ripples in
literary circles both in India and outside. Probing into “the ethical, moral
and rational” standards of the contemporary society, the narrative promotes a “post
human, magical and ecocentric ways of thinking and being”(Akhya Kumar X).
Politics of real and unreal, man/ animal, nature/ society binaries are
addressed in the narrative blurring the boundaries between the text and the
actual world view. The concern of the present paper is to bring out the post
human and ecological world view that Hareesh thrives through his use of magic
realism focusing on the interconnectedness between human and non-human beings.
Thus, the narrative would be able to communicate to us a fresh vista of
perspectives where human and non-human connection can vie for peaceful and
mutual co-existence. The paper also argues, in contemporary parlance, that it
is in the interest of man and nature that their relationship be based on mutual
respect, and it should not be one of one-upmanship. Human beings have
undoubtedly altered the course of the planet through their act-only mission of
prioritization. But nobody bothers about the cost of such personalized
priorities at the expense of addressing majority interests. Sooner or later man
has to realize that things would go out
of his control when giving the minority their due is lurking already and it is
not at all out of place in this context that the caste people are doing all
this only at their own peril. The seed
of self annihilation, resorting to marginalization, is sown by the caste people
and what fruit it will bear is well known to us. Whether we want to survive a
mutually agreed social order or to cherish constant relegation of the masses to
the periphery is a question we need to address fast and on urgent basis, where lies
our vision for future prosperity?
Dalit Discourse questions the validity of the
politics of centre and maintains that the margin is equally valid and important
in the totality of literature that tries to uphold the values related to and
focused on humanity. S Hareesh’s Novel Moustache represents the politics
of centre and margin adequately. And the mode of magic realism narrative makes
Vavachan, a dailt from Pulyan community, a super hero. In order to understand
the center-margin politics, we need to explore marginal epistemology further.
Forums of discussion and debate with a thrust on marginal esquires is what we
need for the purpose of examination and exploration of this paradigm. The
relegated reality has to be depicted in its true light, one needs to pay equal
attention to what the marginal literature wants to convey. It must be empowered
with agency it desperately needs for an independent representation.
The race between the center and the margin
for assuming agency and empowerment is very complex and crucial in the present
context. What the centre tries to project, the priority of we first, you next
characterizes such an argument, is often a forceful exclusion of the voice of
the margin with a logic of omission without examination. In other words, the
received notion of reality related to the marginal masses needs an immediate
and urgent scrutiny; the imposition of the mainstream culture must be dispensed
with to accommodate the voice and the ideas of the marginal. The simple method
of listening to the needs and requirements of the masses would enable the
mainstream caste people that they have enjoyed enough agency over the people on
the margin for long. It s high time they reviewed their outlook about the need
of the empowerment of the masses than the elite minority. It is argued that,
above everything else, what binds us together is the mantra of humanity which
must be preserved at whatever cost we might pay for it. The aesthetics which
excludes humanity is dangerously moving towards the politics of division, not
unification, which has inflicted much pain on the Indians since the period of
colonial invasion. Conceding the much deserving space to the marginal community
would help the main stream people restore their pride with respect. Any
dereliction in this direction would reduce the center to the status of
insignificance and non-starter. The sooner the center realizes this equation of
equality, the better for their mutually inclusive ideology. Otherwise the Dalit resurgence would reduce
and rescind their authority for ever from which recovery is considered the
second to none. The game of hide and seek best describes such a paradigm shift
in ideology, which is represented in Hareesh’s novel with meticulous brilliance
and superb authenticity.
The novel portrays the simple yet subtle shifts
in the life of the protagonist Vavachan focusing on the primarily pervasive
nature of caste system which it s author, S. Hareesh is quite familiar with. In
his notes, Hareesh elaborates on this caste hierarchy thus:
At the time period covered in the story, the impact of caste on everyday
life was felt more acutely. It controlled every
aspect of people’s lives – the jobs they id, the clothes they wore, the food they ate and who they ate
with, how they socialised, who they touched, who they married or had sexual
relationships with, the rituals of marriage, birth and death, what and how they
worshiped, the type of housing they lived in, etc. (X)
The caste equation has “doubly marginalized women” which reduced them
into insignificance considerably. Hareesh writes: “Nair women, meanwhile, were
required to engage in relationships with men of other upper castes who, in
other areas of life, did not considered them to be fully human”. (XI). The
writer gives a vivid account of the acute caste hierarchy that was prevalent in
Kuttnad , the locale of the narrative:
“as in other parts of India, the division of society in castes based on
rules of pollution and purity existed in Kerala.... At the time period covered
in the story, the impact of caste on everyday life was felt even more acutely”
(Hareesh 5). By birth, the protagonist is located in the lower strata of the
society: “Vavachan-moustache is a Pulayan converted to Christianity.... Until
the end of the eighteenth century, upper-caste landowners treated
Pulayans like property and exchanged them along with the land” (Hareesh
6). the protagonist’s transformation
from a commodity being meant for selling to a man with independent identity sporting “the enormous moustache”(Rafid C 368) marks
Vavachan’s progress to a mythic state with a divine status: Tonight, I had an
interesting story to tell my son, the story of a Moustache who could
simultaneously appear in different places, and disappear at will. He had a
magical moustache with curved ends that touched the sky, and a spotted eagle
had built a nest in it. (Hareesh 47). The deliberate emphasis on Capital ‘M’
makes the protagonist a megastar of epic proportion emerging as potential
threat to makers of the caste hierarchy. The plot problemtises the center-margin equation subverting the
powerful caste structures with a radical elevation of the protagonist to the
status of a super hero from being an object of exchange or sale.
Sthathis Gourgouris’ idea of Poiein is used
effectively by Rafid C to understand
marginality, a practice With “plural possibilities and alterities of Reading”.
istead of fixities regarding marginal existence, Poiein provides a
paradigm of multiple ways of approaching marginality where the reading of
reform replaces the received experience of marginality. Poiein works as a
method of robust transformation where “Its working is a perpetual reworking, a
thorough reworking, which would not spare even itself as an object of that
work” (Behdad 80; Rafid 362). It provides the model for reading texts on
marginality which alters the central structures radically, the way Hareesh’s
protagonist Moustache does for himself and his Pulyan caste equation,
deliberately thwarting caste people’s dominance over them.
French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy’s
book La Communauté désœuvrée (The Inoperative
Community 1986) conceptualises a
community the power equations of
“setting and upsetting” which provides choice understand the problem of
centre-margin equation. He writes, ‘political’ is “is the place where community
as such is brought into play. It is not, in any case, just the locus of power
relations, to the extent that these relations set and upset the necessarily
unstable and taut equilibrium of collectivity” (38; Rafid C. 362). Nacy’s
arguments on the political can effectively employed while reading Hareesh’s
Moustache as an open ended text with multiple options of subverting the
hegemony of the centre in favour of the margin or the other.
Marginalization has become a way of life for women and they do not any
choice to get out of this impasse. The atrocious caste representations has been
acutely described by Damodaran, a character who works with Ezthuchachan, the
play’s director in which Vavachan acts as a policeman and gets the fame as
‘Moustache’. their birth is like a curse to them personally and to the community they represent owing to
their low upbringing over which they hardly have any control. The pertinent
portrayal of the caste of the community is significant here.:
Like all men of Pulayan caste, he was coal black, as though he would
turn the water black if he entered a river, as though if, like a dark spirit,
he jumped up and touched the sky, black rain would fall. Only his face had lost
some colour...a dense growth of hair covered his cheeks... Pulayan men usually
did not have this kind of hair growth on their face... have it forcibly shaved
off with a razor sharpened on a handy stone. (33)
The vivid description of Vavachan’s colour indicates the deep seated
caste bias in Damodaran’s consciousness. Belonging to the lower strata of caste equation, the
Pulyan community could not dare to challenge the mainstream caste people.
Growing a moustache is caste people’s discretion; marginal people cannot sport
a moustache which still considered a taboo in some parts of the country. This
is nothing less than systematic repression of the wishes of the marginalized
community which is reflected I the killing of a Dalit groom for daring to ride
a horse in his marriage ceremony in front of the caste people.
Through the moustache, Vavachan
sheds off his marginality and assumes the center stage metaphorically and
challenges the mainstream morale considerably: ‘felt that their age old fear of
mythical, discarnate being of darkness, such as Rakshas and the Makkan, had
finally taken physical form and appeared before them. (36)
After the play, his role as a policeman ends but Vavachan refuses to
shave of his moustache. This is perhaps his first but significant act of
resistance that furthers him from the Pulayan margin. His performance in the
play slowly breeds stories about him, mostly fantastic. His remarkably huge moustaches
are the central object that renders him somewhat supernatural, magical aspects.
As Wendy Faris puts it, ‘Many of these texts take a position that is ant-bureaucratic,
and so they often use their magic against the established social order’ (Faris
179).
When Vavachan, in search of Damodaran, enters the house of Kesava
Pillah, a respected landlord, the latter gets scared and in reversal of roles,
‘...the old fear made him rise from his chair with a sense of anxiety and
reverence. The apparent transformation of their master confused his companions.
(44). Such episodes indicate that Vavachan’s transformation into Moustache
brings him to the centre but it also criminalizes him since the upper caste
people cannot accept a pulayan, oppressed being toppling the hierarchical order
of the caste system. His normal behaviour is presented in a grotesquely
exaggerated manner. For example he just kicks a coconut pole in an exasperated
way, the witness recounts: ‘He caught me by my legs and raised me to the sky...
He wanted to crack my head open on the ground.’
Vavachan’s rebellion has given goose bumps to the caste people because
his ways of operation defies the hitherto dominant hegemony of the case
equations. He resorts to violent ways only when his position in the society is
thwarted. His is an act of symbolic of retaliation, either violent or peaceful,
to become the Dalit voice in a society apathetic to the needs of their identity
formation and political existence. The question of center -margin debate has
been effectively answered through Vavachan’s able act of defiance. The
subaltern has been able to represent himself defying a sea of odds stacked
against him. Thereby raising his stature
as an epic hero through his supernatural feats making his Moustache a symbol of
Dalit resistance, if not their victory on a panoramic scale.
The use of Dalit discourse in Hareesh’s Moustache defies
mainstream culture to redefine center - margin equation subverting the hegemony
of caste people considerably. The writer uses Magic realism, a narrative
effectively employed by Marquez of One Hundred Years of Solitude and
Rushdie’s novels, imbibing intersection of real and fantastic in a very
poignant manner, to put forth his agenda of Dalit dialogue and possible empowerment in a way that would
stand Dalit empowerment in good steads.
Works Cited
Ashcroft, Bill.et.al. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Second
Edition. Routledge, 2006.
Billson, Janet. “No Owner of Soil: Redefining the concept of
Marginality” Marginality,
Power, and Social Structure: Issues in Race, Class and Gender Analysis. edited by. Dennis, Rutledge, editor Elsevier Ltd, 2005. pp. 29-43.
Dennis, Rutledge M. Marginality,
Power, and Social Structures: Issues in Race, Class, and Gender. Elsevier, 2005.
Faris, Wendy. “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by L. Parkinson and W. Faris. Duke
UP,1995. 163-190.
Hareesh, S. Moustache: A Novel. Translated by Jayasree Kalathil, Harper Collins, 2018.
Kumari, Pramad. “Dalit Literary Discourse : Mapping the Journey from
Pain to Tale”,Dialogue : A Journal Devoted to Literary Appreciation,Vol
XVIII, No. 2 December 2022.
Mishra, Aswini Kumar. Voice of Dalit in South Asian Literature.
Google Search. Web
Nancy, Jean Luc. The Inoperative
Community. Translated by Peter Connor,
University of Minnesota , 1991.
Rafid, C. “Poiein and Infinite Identity: A Meta-critical Inquiry into Marginality”
International Journal of Social Sciences and English Literature, Vol 7, issue
2, March- April, 2022.
Ranusubhe, Suryanarayan, D. . "Dalit Literature in India". Journal
of Literature & Aesthetics. 8 1 & 2 (Jan-Dec. 2008): 29-35
Sreenivasan, S. "Why does Dalit Literature Matter?"Journal
of Literature and Aesthetics. 8. 1 & 2 (Jan. – Dec. 2008): 41-46.