Marginalisation, Memory and the
Notion of Caste: A Select Study of Dalit Autobiographies
Dr. Subhendu
Dutta,
Independent
Researcher,
Assam,
India.
Abstract: Dalits occupy
the lowest position in the Indian society. They are also called untouchables
and outcastes. They are crushed, oppressed and traumatised by the traditional
caste system that continues to divide India into higher castes and lower castes
on the basis of purity and pollution.
Dalits continue to struggle in this postcolonial world where the stigma
of untouchability compels them to occupy the lowest position. The bane of
untouchabiity acts as an adamantine barrier that prevents every Dalit from bathing,
eating, drinking and worshipping with the upper castes who crush them, While
Dalit men struggle against caste, Dalit women find themselves in a situation
that is far more challenging because they are victimised by the upper class as
well as by members of their own community. This leads to the double
marginalisation of Dalit women. At present, Dalits have become conscious of
their lowly position within the social sphere. This realization gets projected
by the emergence of Dalit literature that critiques the tenets of the caste
system. This paper, through a close
reading of Namdeo Nimgade’s In The
Tiger’s Shadow (2010) and Urmla Pawar’s The
Weave of My Life (2008) makes an attempt to understand the impact of the
caste system on the existence of Dalits-their experiences and position at the
bottom of the caste hierarchy. It looks into the process of writing personal
narratives where a complex picture of the marginalised Dalit community gets
documented with the active help of memory.
Keywords:
Double Marginalisation, Caste hierarchy, Untouchability, Oppressed, Memory,
Dalit literature, Outcastes
The unfair practice of the Hindu caste
system has left an indelible mark of pain and trauma upon the Dalit community.
The pangs of division and social inequality have ruined the Dalits in every
way. There are “ineradicable legacies of violent histories through generations”
(Schwab 1) that haunt and traumatise the Dalit psyche which opens up through
memoirs and autobiographies. Dalit autobiographies are narratives of the most
beleaguered members who constantly struggle for basic rights. The ironclad rule
of the Hindu caste system robs them of their personal freedom by denying their
right to work, education and adequate health care in a civil sphere which is shared
by both victims and perpetrators who consider them as untouchables:
Untouchability,
an ancient form of discrimination based upon caste, is a complex nd pervasive
problem within India, although its practice is not limited to India alone. For millennia,
the practice of untouchability has maginalzed, terrorized, and relegated a
section of Indian society to a life marked by violence, humiliation and
indignity. The discrimination is so pervasive that many Dalits come to believe
that they are responsible for their own suffering and exclusion, internalizing
the beliefs that perpetuate the practice of untouchability. (Jammanna and
Sudhakar 29)
Dalit
autobiographies aptly portray this sad scenario of Dalits who are maimed on the
basis of purity and pollution. They remain faceless and voiceless because the
caste system continues to thrive and break the backbone of their community by
inflicting verbal and physical abuse on their soul that declares:
…Dalit
means broken. Broken by suffering. Broken by caste: the world’s oldest,
longest-running dominator system, decreed in scriptures and enforced by
unspeakable acts of violence. Broken by the horror of the enormity of human
potential that was lost to this violent system-lives not fully lived, and souls
who never got to sing their full song. (Soundararajan 2)
The genre of
autobiography has always been a favorite medium of expression for individuals
who come from different fields. It is a literary form that “involves the
reconstruction of the movement of a life, or part of a life, in the actual
circumstances in which it was lived” and “its centre of interest is the self”
(Roy 9) whose journey is presented through a series of episodes. In India, the
tradition of autobiographies began with Banarasidas’s Ardhakathanaka (1641). This was followed by other prominent writers
who chose the medium of autobiography to showcase their individual
achievements. Thus the genre of autobiography slowly emerged as a major trend
and it has been observed that:
Indian
autobiographies are written by persons coming from different and divergent
fields of politicians, social workers, philosophers, civil servants, public
figures and others. While the autobiographies written by men outnumbered
women’s autobiographies, nevertheless Indian women had a dictinction in
narrating their personal-life stories in as early as second part of the
nineteenth century…Dalits, on the other hand, have started narrating their
life-stories only after independence because education was denied to them for
quite a long time. (Kumar 43)
Independent India gave the Dalits some respite from
the brutality of the caste system as it made education free and compulsory for
all. The power of education enabled them to understand the precarious nature of
their existence within the civil sphere. The new educated Dalits emerged as a
class that was able to articulate their position as victims of marginalisation
and subordination through their personal narratives. The caste system that has
resulted in the social stratification of the Indian society continues to
challenge the values of our civilization as it imposes a series of restrictions
on the lower castes who are given the status of untouchables on the basis of Manusmriti that served the interests of
the upper caste. Dalit autobiographies like Namdeo Nimgade’s In the Tiger’s Shadow (2010), Urmila Pawar’s The Weave of My Life (2008) and
Baby Kamble’s Jina Amucha or The Prisons We Broke (2008) critique
this particular aspect of the civil sphere where the life of every Dalit
remains under the shadow of hatred and aggression.
Individuals like Nimgade and Pawar get marginalised
by the caste system that compels them to remain in the periphery or the
margins. Marginalisation, as observed by Young, stands as the most dangerous
form of oppression because it excludes Dalits from social and economic spheres
and pushes them “into an environment that offers less chance of leading a
healthy and fulfilled life” (Stretch 313). Nimgade’s narrative is a record of
the torture inflicted on Dalits who lives get overshadowed by centuries of slavery
and oppression. The life of Nimgade and Dalits like him is a stark reminder of
the chaturvarnic order that compels the Dalit community to remain in the
periphery or the margins. This becomes clear when Nimgade describes the
pathetic existence of his Mahar community:
“…In
the village we untouchables lived apart from the others according to the old
saying, Mahar anhi gaon che bahar (Mahars should remain outside the village).
We could not even enter the yard of high- caste houses-especially in the
morning, after they purified their yards with a sprinkling of gobar (cowdung)
in water” (Tiger’s Shadow 40).
This short description presents “the
caste mentality” which is “based on categorical differences” and “can promote
inequality, xenophobia, prejudice, and racism (Weiss 120). The text by Nimgade
is filled with such descriptions that bring to light the marginal self of the
Dalits. A close reading of the text reveals that the entire autobiography is a
record of Nimgade’s pain and sufferings. There are six parts that vehemently
satirize the caste system that continues as an age-old Indian tradition. In
Part I, we are told about his family of bonded labourers that lives in an area
which is surrounded by jungles: “This was in the remote village of Sathgaon in
the state of Maharashtra, 500 miles-and a universe away-from what was then
Bombay…The landscape could change dramatically, from a rich green during
monsoons, to dusty parched land during droughts that deprived us of food and
water” and “there was no hospital, post office or paved road” (Tiger’s Shadow 4). This was Nimgade’s
small world that was remote, unsafe and humiliating and he shared it with his
seven siblings. They also had the burden
of age old tradition that compelled them to run barefoot in front of bullock
carts owned by the upper caste members and eat their leftovers:
It
was because of the curse of untouchability that we had to compete with animals.
This was but one of the several inhuman and very painful but “necessary” social
rituals devolving from chaturvarna, the Hindu code that created the caste
system. (Tiger’s Shadow 16).
The
school was one more place where Nimgade felt the curse of the caste-
convention. His caste became his status marker and thwarted his attempts to
achieve a sense of identity against caste oppression: “The Headmaster admitted
me under the strict condition that I, being untouchable, must never enter the
schoolhouse. Instead, I should have to stand outside with a handful of other
untouchables on the hot verandah and listen to lesson through a window (Tiger’s Shadow 27-28). Fortunately,
Nimgade was able to overcome all these obstacles. He was hard-working and in
Part II, we meet Nimgade with his B.Sc degree. The Banaras Hindu University
became his next destination and then he joined the Indian Agricultural Research
Institute. Nimgade’s eventful life is an example of an individual’s journey
from the periphery to the centre. He is determined and makes efforts to repair
his social conditions. The text reflects his philosophy which states: “one
should try to follow ones’s decisions, in dealing with hardships, and to listen
to ones’s gut feelings and intuitions. One needs to use common sense, and
listen to what one’s inner advice tells him or her to do… (Dobrovidel 220). The
text is indeed a long journey undertaken by Nimgade to show an individual’s
protest against injustice arising out of the caste system that denies the
equality of men. At the end, we find a proud Nimgade showing his caste identity
to a guard guarding India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Centre:
I
raised my right hand in the air and pulled up my shirtsleeve. There on my
forearm was the now blurred tattoo from my childhood in the village. Next to
the figure of a Hindu God was my name, “Namdeo Maratrao Nimgade.”
The
guard was astonished. ‘Sir.’ He said. You are evidently a highly educated
scientist, but you have this tattoo-the mark of a lowly village beginning! How
can that be?
I
related to him my story in a few minutes, essentially a synopsis of this book,
about how a poor and illiterate untouchable could leave the bonds and shackles
of poverty and discrimination by following the path of Dr. Ambedkar. Tathagat. Jai Bhim! (Tiger’s Shadow 288).
The text that comes next is Urmila Pawar’s The Weave of My Life (2008). It depicts the predicament of Dalit
women who have been marginalised by the caste-system that represents the
“brahmanical patriarchy” (Chakraborty 78). She is also a victim of domestic
violence committed by the Dalit man who uses her as his punching bag. The Dalit
woman has to face the bane of untouchabilty and at the same time carry the
burden of traditions of her community. She is forced to humbly submit and internalize
their lowly status as objects of sexual gratification. She has to follow the
dictations of patriarchy and silently suffer the attack of Hindu scripts and
religious institutions that celebrate gender inequality. Thus, Dr. (Mr) Shibu
Simon and Mr. Sijo Varghese C present a shocking picture when they describe her
as:
The
eternal other, the perpetual minor, an occasional and incomplete being. A kind
of imperfect man-a woman is everything but a person…At the lowest caste level,
a wretched landscape presents itself: Dalit women are paraded naked, raped; her
children and husband are forced to drink urine; she is made to carry shit on
her head and told to force it down her throat too. She is ostracized. She is
prostituted; her sexuality is religion’s playground. Even Dalit men have
debased her to a level lower than where they find themselves in; from where
they are crying for emancipation. (240).
This clearly indicates the plight of Dalit women who have been doubly
marginalised by the patriarchal order that holds women as an inferior entity or
the ‘other.’ Individuals like Manu has compared woman and the lower castes as
agents who must show unquestioning obedience and perform their duties within
the social sphere. The “androcentric assumptions” made by Freud paint a similar
picture where a man stands as a “normal human” while his female counterpart is
“a deviant human being lacking a penis, whose entire psychological structure”
constantly struggles “to compensate for this deficiency” (Lerner 19,21). Dalit
women writers like Kamle and Pawar have challenged these lopsided observations
made on woman and they have used the medium of autobiography to firmly assert
their identity as individuals who have the power to resist, question and
critique the tenets of patriarchy that govern social, political and economic
spheres. By doing so, these writers have broken the age-old tradition that
visualizes woman as a passive creature who must humbly submit to the pressures
of household chores bear the responsibility of motherhood. The act of writing
one’s autobiography is an attempt that enables an individual to embark on a
journey of self discovery because:
Writing about oneself is a
conscious act as it represents the subject’s desire to express-and thus
record-feelings and emotions, as well as events. Though an individual diarist
may start writing initially at random, the fact that the momentum is sustained
over a period of time implies that the act of writing is fulfilling a certain
role. It helps in the formation of a distinct identity and of a sense of self,
as the writer is able to physically view on palm leaves or paper what she feels
about herself. Often it can be followed by a period of reflection, observation
and even recantation. Out of all this, a being emerges, a creation often of
fractured, disjointed accounts of life, which do not always follow a
chronological pattern. Sometimes, this self expression comes at a specific time
of life when, due to a number of reasons, opportunities coincide with the
desire to write. (Karlekar 15-16)
The Weave of My Life (2008) is
a quintessential example of this process. The text presents Dalit women as
victims of double oppression- “by the upper caste men as well as by the men of
their own community. Their struggle is, on the one hand, for existence and on
the other, to protect themselves against the hostile social environment. This
hostility pervades all spheres-at home as well as outside (Kumar 6). Pawar’s narrative takes us to the the ruggrd
Konkan coast where she grew up as as a child. As a Dalit girl, she was always
under the pressure of caste, patriarchy and various other Dalit traditions. The
caste hierarchy placed her at the bottom and made her existence obscure. She
lived in a world where justice, dignity and social status were totally absent,
Her caste identity labeled her as a Mahar Dalit and she belonged to a community
that was weak and struggled with the unjust notion of pollution that was always
attached to its existence:
…the
Mahar community could be summoned anytime by the upper castes, or could be
attacked from all sides if anything went wrong. They were supposed to work hard
during the preparations of festivals like Holi but they were not entitled to
participate in it like the upper castes. If they tried to do so they were
beaten up till they bled ( weave of My
Life xvi-xvii)
Such occasional assaults were like
wounds that fractured their social status and compelled them to internalize the
tyranny of the upper castes in complete silence. They were like animals who had
to obey and then slowly perish like insects. Achille Mbembe presents a similar
portrait of the African natives who were considered inferior and useless by the
West that still describes Africa as a place “that is incomplete, mutilated, and
unfinished (Mbembe 1).
Pawar grew up in a family that was
poor. She lost her dad when she was in the third standard. Fortunately her
mother was there to support her studies. Like Nimgade, she too was a victim of
caste politics that made her childhood traumatic. Her teacher, Kerlekar Guruji
terrorized her because she was a Dalit. He slapped her because he thought that
their cow Kapila had made the class dirty. Pawar was asked to clean Kapila’s
dung and when she refused, she was severely punished. Her swollen cheeks were
enough to trigger her mother’s anger who immediately rushed to the school and
demanded for justice:
My
girl studies in your class, Guruji! What did she do today that you beat her up
so much? She pulled me towards him and showed him my swollen cheek. ‘Your white
cow shits in the verandah.’ ‘Our white cow ? She shits there, eh? Why, did you
see her doing that? Look, I am a widow; my life is ruined. Yet I sit here,
under this tree and work. Why? Because I want education for my children so that
their future will be better…(Weave of My
Life 68-69)
Pawar’s classmates were equally offensive and brutal Her sad
recollections of the school picnic serves as a shocking incident in which Pawar
lost her self dignity. The recollections of Baby Kamble in her autobiography
are similar: “A majority of girls in our class belonged to the higher castes.
For the first time in their lives, they had girls like us- who could pollute
them-studying with them. They treated us like lepers, as if our bodies dripped
with dirty blood or as if pus oozed out of our rotten flesh (Prisons We Broke 108).Thus, poverty and
humiliation come together to haunt every Dalit. Pawar, too, was a leper who was
allowed to join the picnic but was also told not to touch anything:
They
did not allow me to touch anything though we all ate together. I really enjoyed
the meal. The next day I was horrified to hear that my eating had become the
hottest topic for juicy gossip. Girls were whispering in groups about how I had
eaten, ‘She ate like a monster,’ someone said. Another endorsed it, ‘God she
ate like a goat,’ She ate so much of everything! Awful! It was so humiliating
that I died a thousand deaths that day! (Weave
of My Life 102)
Such deaths are psychological in nature
because they kill your inner peace. Both Kamble and Pawar have experienced it
along with their community. Bama is one more towering figure among Dalits who
narrates another startling tale of oppression. She became a Christian but her
religious conversion did not improve her status as a Dalit. She became a
catholic nun and later realized that the new religious order had members from
the upper caste who were uncooperative and critical about Dalit Christians like
her. Later Bama resigned and returned to her community life where she witnessed
a life “without a paisa in one’s hand” (Karukku
102-103). Bama’s Karukku (1992)
records all these incidents in spoken Dalit Tamil and this was a deliberate
attempt to challenge the standardized written Tamil that carried the signature
of the upper caste writers in Tamil Nadu:
Bama’s
conscious choice of spoken Dalit Tamil, ungoverned by the tyranny of elaborate
grammatical rules, as a medium to voice the story of her community is indeed
instructive. In a spirit of defiance, it obviously challenges the authority of
literacy over orality, a divide which was ratified and nourished by Tamil
Shaivism or Tamil nationalism of different hues, including mainstream
Dravidianism during this century. But at an equally important plane, it is an
effort by Bama to break free from her proficiency in standardized written Tamil,
a result of her privileged education in schools and colleges, and to lose
herself in the community of Dalits. (Pandian 132-133)
Urmila Pawar creates a similar landscape which has a “regional flavor”
by using words like “aai” (mother), “kaka” (uncle), “nanand”(husband’s sister),
“sasu”(mother-in-law), “vahini” (brother’s wife) etc. Thus she “uses the
vocabulary with its raw usage which becomes illustrative of her silent voice”
and establishes her “connection closer” to her Maher community. Her
confessional mode of narrating her relationship with her husband,
Harishchandra, is one more interesting aspect of her unique style that reminds
us of Kamala Das. Pawar’s husband was a typical Dalit man who tried to dominate
her and was not at all happy with his wife’s educational qualifications. Her
progress bruised her “husband’s ego” who slowly moved away from her (Singh and
Rauthan 28). Pawar was also blamed for her husband’s illness and failed
ventures:
Even
in his last days, I got squarely blamed for Harishchandra’s illness. First it
was said that he was completely heartbroken by is daughter’s rebellious
marriage. Gradually, my education, my job, my writing, my social work, my
meetings, my programmes and finally I, because of what I was, were held
responsible for his illness. But nothing affected me anymore! Nothing! Neither
Harishchandra’s harsh words, nor his tantrums, nor our fights! All that I was
able to see was a great wave of darkness, pitch-black as coal powder, rolling
towards Harishchandra who faced it with his back turned to me… (Weave of My Life 317)
As a man, Harishchandra could not
appreciate Pawar who was constantly criticized for asserting herself as a
symbol of courage and determination. Urmila’s husband expected her to be like
the “village woman whom he had seen in his youth” but she was not ready to submit to the “archaic
gender rules” that gave rise to domestic violence and tightened the “patriarchal
hold on women’s lives” (Weave of My Life xx-xxi).
This shows the physical and psychological struggle that a Dalit woman has to
face in both the public and private domains. She is like a dumb animal that
gets tormented and abused by the patrons of Dalit patriarchy and the ideology
of caste system:
In
those days, at least one woman in a hundred would have let her nose chopped
off. You may well ask why. It’s because of the sasu, who would poison her son’s
mind. These sasus ruined the lives of innocent women forever. Every day the
Maharwada would rebound with the cries of some hapless women in some house or
the other. Husbands flogging their wives, as if they were beasts, would do
until the sticks broke with the effort. The heads of these women would break
open, their backbones would be crushed, and some would collapse unconscious.
But there was nobody to care for them. (Prisons
We Broke 98)
The narratives of both Kamle and Pawar
aptly portray this physical abuse and psychological trauma of Dalit women who
face “triple exploitation” of “caste, class and gender.” Their stories “unlike
the Dalit male narratives, are more inward looking” as they not only
“interrogate the evil practices of Dalit community” but also highlight the the
tensions that exist between the upper caste men and the Dalits (Prisons We Broke 160-163). Their texts
can be considered as an “act of a conscious self which is documented through
the active help of memory’ (Kumar 3). Their texts narrate the miserable plight
of an entire community that continues to suffer the religious sanctions of the
caste system designed to champion the hegemony of the upper castes.
Works Cited
Primary Sources:
Nimgade, Namdeo. In The Tiger’s Shadow: The Autobiography of
an Ambedkarite. Navayana Publishers, 2010.
Pawar, Urmila. The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s
Memoirs. Translated by Maya Pandit. Stree, 2015.
Secondary Sources:
Bama. Karukku. Translated by Lakshmi Holstorm,
Macmillan, 2000.
Chakraborty, Uma. Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens. Popular
Prakashan, 2003.
Dovrovidel,
Chavdar. The Silver Paradigm in the
Emerald Heaven. Trafford Publishing,
2009
Jammanna, Akepogu
and Pasala Sudhakar. Dalits’ Struggle for Social Justice in Andhara
Pradesh (1956-2008). Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016.
Kamble, Baby. The Prisons We Broke. Translated by Maya
Pandit, Orient Blackswan, 2014.
Karlekar, Malavika.
Voices from Within: Early Personal
Narratives of Bengali Women. Oxford University Press, 1991.
Kumar, Raj. Dalit Personal Narratives: Reading Caste,
Nation and Identity. Orient Black Swan, 2010.
Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarch. Oxford
University Press, 1986.
Mbembe, Achilles. On the Postcolony. Translated by A.M.
Berrett, Janet Roitman, Murray Last,and Steven Randall, University of
California Press, 2001.
Pandian, M. S. S.
“On a Dalit Woman’s Testimonial.” Gender
and Caste, edited by Anupama Rao, Kali for Women, 2003, pp. 129-135.
Roy, Pascal. Design and Truth in Autobiography. Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1960.
Schwab, Gabriele. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and
Transgeneratonal Trauma. Columbia University Press, 2010.
Simon, Dr. (Mr.)
Shibu and Mr. Sijo Varghese C. “ Dalit: The Silence of the Marginalised and the
Oppressed.” Dalit Literature: A Critical Exploration, edited by Amar Nath
Prasad and M. B. Gajjan, Swarup & Sons, 2007, pp. 233-245.
Singh, Manish
Prabhakar and Dr. Shakuntala Rauthan. “Weaving the Narrative: Urmila Pawar’s
Quest in The Weave of My Life.” Bodhi
International Journal of Research inhumanities, Arts and Science, Vol. 8,
no. 3, 2024, pp. 25-29.
Soundararajan,
Thenmozhi. The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit
Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition. Norh Atlantic
Books, 2022.
Stretch, Beryl,
editor. BTEC National Health Studies. Heinemann,
2002.
Weiss, Timothy. On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V.S.
Naipaul. Univ of Massachussets Press, 1992.
Young, Iris. “Five
Faces of Oppression’. Oppression.
Privilege & Resistance, edited by Lisa Heldke and Peg O Connor. McGraw
Hill, 2004, pp. 1-4,
mrdevin.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/five-faces-of-oppression.pdf. Accessed
7March, 2019.