About Namdeo Dhasal

Dilip Chitre is a poet of significance both in English and Marathi. He is a painter too. His contribution as a translator is also great. Of his translations,, two noted works are his translations of Tuka in Says Tuka and his translations of the Marathi Dalit poet Namdeo Dhasal. Tehelka had published an interview with Chitre about Dhasal in 2007. The interview was conducted by S Anand of navayana. Read the complete interview here. One of the questions Anand asks relates to the perennial question of the obscurity of the poem and their political stance. I like the way Chitre answers it.

 

S Anand: There’s something I’ve wanted to ask you, Dilip. His political followers — as you’ve told me — when he’s in hospital, there are some two hundred Panthers outside. Do they read his poetry, do they have an understanding of it? Or is there a split between Namdeo the poet, and this other, political, person?

Dilip Chitre: I don’t see it as a split in Namdeo; it’s the one-sidedness of his multiple audiences. His Dalit audience sees him as a charismatic leader, but they may not possess the literary sensibility demanded by his poetry. He’s not someone like Gadar, who will write these very simplistic poems, and some of them rank bad poetry, and express revolutionary sentiments and rouse people and so on. A middle-class person approaching his poetry does not know the Dalit situation, he does not even want to know. So he misses part of the poetry…

Namdeo dares you, as a reader, and as a translator. There’s something I describe as aesthetic subversion. Namdeo subverts bourgeois sensibilities, and that’s what appeals to me. A subversive act tries to undo the entire system on which your values are based. Namdeo is a guerrilla poet. In one phrase, one line, he’ll juxtapose dialect and the slang of Kamathipura with European references in very sophisticated Marathi.

 

Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, nationalism and caste

Raja Rao’s Kanthapura enacts some of the motifs of postcolonialism. In my previous post here I point out that Raja Rao critiques the simple position that the discourse of colonialism instituted a notion of the natural superiority of the colonising race and this was internalised by the colonized. In the second piece on the novel I point to how the novel problematizes viewing colonial modernity as having had a liberating impact on the Indian society. Let me take this reading further.

The problematising potential of the novel extends to anti-colonial nationalism too. In order to examine this let us turn to another dimension of the novel. The emergence of novel as a genre in 19^th century India raises the question of whether it is derivative. While there is a debate on this issue, the novel’s role in enabling the notion of nation-state to take shape is an important one. Benedict Anderson has argued that novel is partly responsible for a community to imagine itself as a nation. The novels written in 19^th century and even beyond in India may be used to support this claim. While in Kanthapura, the action is restricted to the village itself with none of the characters venturing too far out, yet the village is not insulated against the happenings in other places. In fact, the stimulation for action is not local. The grand events that form the focal points of the novel take place in response to events elsewhere – Lahore, Bengal, Gujarat, etc. The village community moves from an insulated identity towards a national identity. In one sense, Kanthapura chronicles the formation of a national identity within a remote village. This thematic is also supported by the manner in which the village becomes a kind of a microcosm of the nation. The narrative tends towards mythicizing. For example Moorthy’s fast, Ramakrishnayya’s death, the receding of the flood, and nationalist struggle itself are mythicized. The narrative takes recourse to Vedantic texts and Puranas and inserts nationalist struggle into them. For example, in a harikatha, Jayaramachar brings in an allegory between Siva, Parvati and the nation. The three eyed Siva stands for Swaraj. Later Rangamma standing in as the commentator of Vedanta after the death of her father reads the Puranas allegorically, interpreting hell as the foreign rule, soul as India and so on. Shall we say nation is thus constructed hermeneutically?

The process of imagining a community – of imagining nationhood – also underlines the homogenising tendency of nationalism. The congress workers, who so vehemently are ‘swadeshi’ and give up anything foreign, unwittingly embrace the European model of nation. This notion requires a nation state to have a singular form. A nation is a community of people who have a common language etc. Thus in Kanthapura, Congressmen including Moorthy follow the same model of the nation-state. Sankaru epitomises this: his insistence on speaking Hindi even to his mother instead of the local language Kannada; his fanatic resistance to the use of English and so on. This conception of the nation informs that of everyone: e.g. the narrator visualises Moorthy {when in prison} to be wearing kurta pyjama instead of dhoti. The Hindi teacher is not from any Hindi speaking region but a Malayali [Surya Menon]. Thus, the very conception of ‘Nation’, which is conceived after the European model of the nation-state, undermines the ‘Swadeshi’ spirit of nationalism. Any pure form of nationhood untouched by colonialism is seriously questioned.

Another problem arises when this novel is read as a record of a nation-in-the-making.  It would seem to exemplify Jameson’s argument that third world literature is necessarily a national allegory. When we keep in mind that Benedict Anderson’s thesis about the emergence of nation-state is a work on the emergence of nation-state in Europe, Jameson’s argument seems to put third world literature in the past of European literature. This only re-enacts the familiar theme that comes across in the colonialist historiography of Indian nationalism: that Indian nationalism is a learning process as has been pointed out by Ranjit Guha (Subaltern Studies I). This particular view of nationalism characterises Indian nationalism as a response to the stimulus of colonial administration. The view of the history of the colonised society as a march towards the teleological goal of becoming ultimately ‘Europe’ places them always at a past time in relation to the colonisers present time. The denial of coevalness of time is a necessity in the discourse of colonialism.

This view of India’s history being bound to Europe takes us to Dipesh Chakravarthy’s thesis that as far as history as a discourse is concerned, Europe remains the sovereign theoretical subject of all histories, including the one we call Indian (Provincialising Europe OUP, 2001). Further, he says, as opposed to other narratives of self and community, history is the meta-narrative that looks to the state/citizen bind as the ultimate construction of sociality. Other constructions of self and community speak an anti-historical consciousness. With modernity, history becomes the site where the struggle goes on to appropriate other collocations of memory. In Kanthapura, the narrative in the beginning reflects an ahistorical consciousness. The description of the village life is as a timeless continuum in the form of Sthalapurana. Or the Harikatha wherein nationalist figures become mythical. Whereas, colonialism disrupts the narratives of the community and introduces ‘history’. In as far as the change in the narrative technique, which becomes more linear while narrating the freedom struggle in Kanthapura, history really begins with Europe inhabiting Kanthapura. This is most clearly suggested in the loss of mythicizing tendency of the narrative in the later part when the arrival of newspapers, novels and pamphlets has exposed the first person narrator to techniques of historicizing.

This whole reading of the novel harps back upon the exchange between the coloniser and the colonised. The interesting insights offered by the novel are about the immense complications and violence that attend the arrival of colonial modernity in India.

The novel highlights with no subtlety the collusion between colonialism and Brahmanism. The manner in which Moorthy becomes an outcaste in the Brahmin quarters with his campaign against untouchability indicates the tension between Brahmanism and nationalism. For Brahmanism, the colonial ruler is not the enemy but Gandhi’s anti-untouchable movement is. The collusion between Brahmanism and colonialism is suggested through the alliance between Bhatta, Bade Khan the policeman and the Sahib of the Estate. Swami, who is waging a war against ‘caste pollution due to this pariah business’, sees British rulers as protectors of the ancient ways of Dharma. Swami receives a large amount from the govt as Rajadakshina and is promised that he would receive moral and material support in his war against caste pollution.

While this reading posits nationalism in conflict with brahminism, something more interesting is available if we push our reading a little further. Moorthy’s politics in the village mobilises people of all castes for the struggle against colonisers. In so doing Moorthy radicalises his sociality by visiting the untouchable quarters, and even having milk offered by one of them. Interestingly after this he is troubled by his action and takes a bath. Though he does not change his sacred thread as then he would have to do it daily, he does take a little Ganga water and we are promised that he would do that every time he visits the pariahs. His politics aims at assimilating the lower castes into the nationalist movement. This may also operate as a move towards containment. For example, the discourse of nationalism meets the discourse of religion at different levels in the novel. While Bhatta, Swami and their followers {who have often material motives such as Venkamma) resist Gandhism in the name of religion, in Kanthapura, the nationalists increasingly employ the religious discourse and customs and symbols for nationalist purposes. Religious resources are mobilised for the politicisation of the people. But the customs, rituals and symbols that become tools of nationalist mobilisation are primarily Brahminic: arthi, puja, conches, bells, Vedanta, bhajan etc. They do not include the cultural practices of the lower castes though their participation is prominent.

The overall idea I have of the novel is that it is an immensely clever novel that very ably reflects much of the nationalistic themes including the patronising attitude towards the lower caste society. The novel, much like hegemonic Indian nationalists, deploys anti-caste postures to dissemble the projection of brahminical culture as the legitimate national culture.

 

Dalit English Poet – Meena Kandasamy

Recently I came across an exciting voice in Indian English poetry: Meena Kandasamy. I first read her poems in a blog and found about her through blogs, her own as well of others. This is an indication in itself that blogging is beginning to be the dominant medium for accessing poetry. Blogging has several advantages in this respect as it unshackles the poets from being dependant on publishers or magazines. It is as democratic as is currently possible. More and more poets, despite their background, can find their  readers without being subjected to the humiliating process of the publishing industry.

Meena Kandasamy has some interesting things to say about blogging. She is a Dalit writer from Tamilnadu who writes poetry in English. She is also an active translator. Her blog makes for interesting reading. A new voice in the field of Indian English Literature, she is very articulate about the aspirations of the dalits. One of her recent blogs was insightful. Here she talks about blogging, caste oppression and women. Here is an excerpt:

Big media houses which own the major publications rarely give opportunity to Dalit (ex-untouchable) writers, and there’s an absence of Dalit/anti-caste writers who write in English. The elitist writers want to write the feel-good stuff, India Shining myths, and that’s the work that gets into print. So, I wanted to tap the power and enormous outreach of the internet: how anyone can write and be read/heard in the virtual space. I was not writing because anyone was commissioning me, I didn’t have to follow other people’s diktats, I could speak my mind. Google and tagging ensure that I can get heard without having my own column in any newspaper. Sometimes its helped me bring some happenings to light—such as the recent inside story of Dalit students being beaten up at a law university in Chennai (the mainstream media merely reported it as a “clash” at first) and so on. Blogging on feminist issues, with a caste perspective, was also something that I set out to do, because feminism in India forgets that caste exists at all, and that women at the bottom of the caste hierarchy do suffer more.

Since the cost of establishing alternative media in India is extremely high, activist groups have taken to the Internet in a big way. There is a hunger to use the potential of this media, and human rights defenders are doing it the right way. The campaign to free Binayak Sen; the exposes on state terrorism, fake encounters and police atrocities; the virulent speed in which fact-finding reports can be circulated; the ease with which the LGBT community in India came together and organized their shows of strength in every major city—these have all been possible because of the digital sphere and the space for social networking, discussion and dissemination that it allows.

She has another blog where she has posted several of her poems. She has published a collection of her poems called Touch. Kamala Das wrote the forward where she calls Meena an exciting writer. Believe her. Or decide after reading her poems. One of them is ‘Becoming a Brahmin‘:

Algorithm for converting a Shudra into a Brahmin

Begin.

Step 1: Take a beautiful Shudra girl.
Step 2: Make her marry a Brahmin.
Step 3: Let her give birth to his female child.
Step 4: Let this child marry a Brahmin.
Step 5: Repeat steps 3-4 six times.
Step 6: Display the end product. It is a Brahmin.

End.

Algorithm advocated by Father of the Nation at Tirupur.
Documented by Periyar on 20.09.1947.

Algorithm for converting a Pariah into a Brahmin

Awaiting another Father of the Nation
to produce this algorithm.

(Inconvenience caused due to inadvertent delay
is sincerely regretted.)

While this poem is a frontal attack, there is a nuanced poem which is rich in irony yet trenchant in its critique of the caste system – varna system.

TOUCH

Have you ever tried meditation?
Struggling hard to concentrate,
and keeping your mind as blank
as a whitewashed wall by closing
your eyes, nose, ears; and shutting out
every possible thought. Every thing.
And, the only failure, that ever came,
the only gross betrayal—
was from your own skin.
You will have known this.

Do you still remember,
how, the first distractions arose?
And you blamed skin as a sinner;
how, when your kundalini was rising,
shaken, you felt the cold concrete floor
skin rubbing against skin, your saffron robes,
how, even in a far-off different realm—
your skin anchored you to this earth.
Amidst all that pervading emptiness,
touch retained its sensuality.
You will have known this.

Or if you thought more variedly, about
taste, you would discount it—as the touch
of the tongue. Or, you may recollect
how a gentle touch, a caress changed
your life multifold, and you were never
the person you should have been.
Feeling with your skin, was
perhaps the first of the senses, its
reality always remained with you—
You never got rid of it.
You will have known this.

You will have known almost
every knowledgeable thing about
the charms and the temptations
that touch could hold.

But, you will never have known
that touch – the taboo
to your transcendence,
when crystallized in caste
was a paraphernalia of
undeserving hate.

Photo from: Meena Kandasamy blog.

 

Caste consciousness and the sociology of public culture in India

In his book Mistaken Modernity Dipankar Gupta has an essay presenting a sociological explanation for the unclean public spaces in India. The apparent dirt in the public environs is something everyone comments on. Everyone notices it. Many attempts to clean up have been made both by the state and by the individuals. But the general habit of dirtying up the outside-the-home-environs seems to defeat all efforts to clean up our environment. Surprisingly, in our society with regards to inside-the-home, the general habit is the opposite of this: there is an excessive concern to clean the house.

This attitude finds itself expressed in public parks, tourist centres, bus and railway stations, hospitals, roads, and even cinema halls. Spitting and urinating in the public, littering the place with polythene bags and pieces of paper, tossing cigarette buts or food crumbs onto the road are all too common to shock us. You can rarely find a public utility place – hospital or a bus-stand – which is not spattered with the colours of pan or gutka.

Is this so because we are a dirty tribe? Such a characterisation can fall into the essentialist trap because what can explain a habit common in our society though across any recognisable commonality of social practice? Dipankar Gupta in fact gives exactly such an explanation by invoking that which is common across the country and that which inculcates a certain attitude to cleanliness in us. He contends that this has to do with caste consciousness. Gupta argues that the attitude to cleanliness in our society is related to caste. He points out that the idea of there being castes to clean up the toilets and the gutters meant that cleaning the public place is an inferior job meant, in the caste conscious mind, for the ‘lower caste’. This attitude leaves the responsibility of keeping the public places clean on the ‘cleansing castes’. In short, Dipankar Gupta, much more clearly and persuasively than my summary can do here, argues that the Indian middle class does not consider it their responsibility to keep their environs clean as they take it for granted (a) that it would lower their status to do so and (b) that it is someone else’s job (the cleaning castes).
This argument is very convincing. It also leads me to think that we should be able to find explanations for several of our social evils in this manner. Ambedkar in his “Annihilation of Caste” does a similar sociological analysis: he points out that the reason why there is so much political disunion is to do with the caste feelings in this society.

I think it is important that we conduct such a sociological theorisation explaining social phenomena with respect to caste because otherwise these tendencies will be seen as natural. For example, through the analysis of caste consciousness in the society we must try to find the reasons for such general habits as:

i. easily accepting inferior quality in any work

ii. easily resorting to destruction of public property

iii. failure of our education system, even in private sector institutions

iv. extreme disregard for environment in every endeavour

v. extreme disregard for public hygiene and health in manufacturing sector

vi. extreme disregard for public convenience or safety in our town planning

vii. etc.

 

Dalit Poetry in Kannada III – Moodnaakadu Chinnaswamy

There are some excellent dalit poets writing in Kannada these days. I don’t have too good an access to the latest dalit poetry emerging in Kannada as my visits to Karnataka are not vary frequent. I try my best to get as much as my friends can send me. Continuing my earlier posts, here and here, I present a translation of another Kannada Dalit poet. This time another well known name: Moodnakadu Chinnaswamy. I am familiar only with a few of his poems and they are very good. Here is one ‘Footwear and me’ in my poor translation. I read it in a magazine and can’t find that copy around me. So I am a little unsure if this is the complete poem or if I managed to translate only a fragment. I am sorry, I haven’t done enough homework on this. But I promise I will soon rectify this deficiency. I also don’t have a picture of the poet M. C. If anybody has one, do share, please….

Footwear and me

* Moodnaakadu Chinnaswamy

When I go to the temple

The footwear is not left outside

It is I who is outside

Shoes on cobbler’s feet

Makes as much news as when

A man bites a dog

Taking off the shoes

Everyone’s feet

tread all over me

I am a plant:

and they just don’t realize

that under their feet are my roots

Like a crane craning her neck

to the dried up lake’s spring

I stand on my toes

and peep in to steal

as much of god’s form as I can see

 

Girish Karnad, Caste system, Hindu fascism

In a response piece in The New York Review of Books Karnad says

I wonder if Mr. Griffin isn’t confusing the caste system with untouchability, which certainly could be described as “the greatest single evil in the modern world.” The two are distantly related but not identical, which tends to mislead many Westerners unfamiliar with India.

Since Mr. Griffin is interested in today’s India, he might like to know that it has been argued that, given that 88 percent of India is Hindu, the internal diversity resulting from the caste system may be our main defense against a Hindu fascist state controlled by the traditionally advantaged classes.

NYRB, Volume 47, Number 10 · June 15, 2000.

from: google images

I for one didn’t understand this distinction, nor the rationality behind making such a distinction. I know that caste system is something far beyond untouchability, which is one of its sins. As a system it has  pernicious customary differentiations within the so called ‘touchable’ castes.

Yet, Karnad puzzles me.What is the benefit of suggesting that ‘untouchability’ and caste system are ‘distantly related’? Can we say it is not intimately maintained by caste system? What is more shocking is his statement that caste system has the benefit of defending against a fascist rule. He seems to ignore completely that caste system is equally evil as (if not more evil than) fascist rule. Defending caste system on the ground of the possible Hindu fascist rule is a very very strange idea. Caste system has been encouraging fascist practices for ages. Now to defend it as a defense against a danger being perceived in today’s society is weird.

But his plays visit caste issues interestingly. While his Fire and the Rain is one such play dealing with the issue of caste system directly, Taledanda, obliquely, there are other plays that deal with it symbolically.

Some of Karnad’s plays have the theme of metamorphosed beings. For example: Hayavadana (Horseheaded Man); Nagamandala (Snake-circle). These plays are seen as presenting the motif of shape-shifting, metamorphoses. I wonder if we could also see these mixed-species beings symbolically and relate these to the concept of ‘varna-sankara’ or caste-mixing. ‘Sankara’ within the brahmin protocols is the mixing of caste through certain kind of ‘touches’. In Karnad, the shape-shifted beings could be telling a story ‘between the lines’.

Any thoughts on the symbolic connection between Karnad’s metamorphosed figures and caste system? Share with me.

 

Caste and capital – the struggles ahead

I came across an interesting blog – observation on issues related to caste, and the struggles against it. I want to quote some of it.  from Beyond Capital:

the revolt against caste system (or casteism in a capitalist society) is a revolt against the material and ideological division of workers, against labour market segmentation, against the individualist-competitive ethic (a petty bourgeois tendency) among workers (which frequently takes identitarian forms). Only by questioning and destroying the whiteness of the “white” workers, a larger united working class movement could be posed in the racist societies like the US. Similarly in a casteist society like India, only by attacking the “upper/middle-caste-ness” among workers, a working class alternative could be posed. A drastic reorientation of the dalit movement (and therefore of the working class movement) is needed if it has to pose a real challenge to the caste system and casteism, as Ambedkar understood them. Dalit Movement has to re-emerge as the vanguard of the working class movement.

 

Dalit Autobiography in Kannada

Siddalingayya’s Ooru Keri is one of the most important dalit autobiographies in Kannada. Other notable ones include Arvind Malagatti’s Government Brahman, Ramayya’s MaNegara and Govindaraju’s Manavilladavara Madhye. I think Siddalingayya’s autobiography is important not only because he is an important dalit poets in Kannada. I think his book has a larger importance for dalit literature as a whole.

from: lifevisionkcftc.org

Among dalit autobiographies we see two distinct types: autobiographies by those who are already notables in the society; by those who became notable because of the autobiography they have written. Siddalingayya was already an important public persona – an established kannada poet, a mass leader, a major figure in the Dalit Sangharsha Samiti (DSS), – unlike some of the Marathi authors of autobiographies, who came to obtain social notability through their autobiographies.  In this respect autobiography is not the means through which individuality is claimed by Siddalingayya.

Ooru Keri means ‘neighbourhood’ roughly, it refers to residential colony anyways. In this respect it is similar to Vasti an autobiography by the Marathi writer Vasant Moon. It has been pointed out by many that dalit autobiographies, contrary to other autobiographies, focus on the collmunity rather than the individual. That is, an autobiography also becomes ethography as it were, but one from within.

The remarkable feature of this book is that it is less a record of pain and suffering than of joy and success. The reader will perceive the oppression that Siddalingayya and his community go through but the author makes the reader see the power of dalits too. Dalit solidarity, struggle become frequent motifs here. No wonder in his afterword to this book D R Nagraj speaks of the ‘power of poorman’s laughter’. The reader of this book is repeatedly invited to laugh out at the naughtyness of the protagonist, or his friends, at the humorous side of occurences.

While the narrative does not trivilise the experiences, it nevertheless does not become a record only of the power of victimisers but tells how dalits wrest power for themselves. Importantly it relates the determination and the commitment of the dalits to shape their own life even when they are caught in highly subjected situations.

The language used is standard kannada unlike some of his revolutionary poems which use dalit dialects. It has been translated into English by S. R. Ramakrishna and published by Sahitya Academy. Availability is thus an issue. But you can easily get it on Flipkart here.

 

Caste as Human Rights Violation

The ongoing UN session has drafted a resolution which considers caste discrimination as a human rights violation. This is a welcome development considering India’s consistent opposition to allow internationalisation of the issue of caste. Foreign policy of a nation quite often is based on reasons of false pride. In refusing in 2001 a resolution linking caste to racism India had displayed the same pride. Now with Sweden (EU) and Nepal going with the resolution, let us hope that India wont manage to block it.

The TOI says:

The draft principles specifically cited caste as one of the grounds on which more than 200 million people in the world suffer discrimination. “This type of discrimination is typically associated with the notion of purity and pollution and practices of untouchability, and is deeply rooted in societies and cultures where this discrimination is practiced,” it said.

UN treating caste as human rights violation might help in drawing the attention of the international community to the ancient horror that still thrives. If this increases the visibility of the practice of caste system we can hope it will bring greater pressure on the Indian civil society to emerge out of complacency. You may want to read this on the same issue.

from: ambedkar.org

Unless caste system, as Ambedkar taught us, is annhilated there is no real progress for this country.

 

Globalization, Public Policy and the Secret Agents

Bhupinder Singh has an interesting post on globalization (here). I am inclined to think that globalization or not, things remain the same with us. I don’t buy the argument that with a better economic policy, one that is less committed to globalization, we would do better. This is so because, in our society, despite economic factors, underdevelopment and misery are socially maintained. I mean to say, as long as we keep the caste system alive, no amount of economic force will eradicate hungry masses. Because, caste is both a social and an economic structure. Elitism in India is caste determined. Class therefore largely becomes an insufficient category for both mobilization as well as analysis, as discovered by some communist intellectuals in the recent past.

In India caste framework is the source of the nature of much of the public policies and their implementation. Let me take the example of primary education. By and large, the aim of primary education for all has been achieved as far as the upper castes are concerned. Now, illiterates are nearly always from the ‘lower’ castes. This is not entirely wrong in the case of health care too. I am sorry I am not providing the necessary data here, but I am sure my readers would upon reflection find enough signs of the truth of this statement around them. So this means that implementation of policies is not always a problem; nor is it always the policy that is wrong. I agree that India boasts of some of the most radical social policies and initiatives. Globalization may have lessened this urge among our legislators. But, when it comes to implementing policies that would undermine the dominance of the upper castes in any field, we see a problem. True, there are millions of upper caste poor. It is true that the country hasn’t yet been able to feed all the upper caste masses. But, if we do see the proportion of the upper caste society that has benefited from any of the system since modernity came to India with the British and compare it to the proportion of the oppressed castes’ social improvement, we see the truth of my statement.   

Globalization’s present avatar is doubtlessly discriminatory and in countries like India, it will benefit a few by dis-empowering many; it wears the mask of progress, while it hides the millions who are no more even exploited, just thrown out of the system. But, in a caste ridden society most policies will not fare better. Indian socialism never addressed annihilation of caste oppression. What I believe is urgent is the creation of a public sphere which is public enough for the policies to represent the interests of all social groups in India not only at the level of framing it but also at the level of implementing it. When we have a situation where terrorist attacks invite the full fury (justifiably) of the country but not when a colony of the dalits is burnt; when caste oppression becomes the affair only of those castes and not of the ‘society’, we are miles away from making a system work for the benefit of all.

 

Nissim Ezekiel, U. R. Ananthmurthy and the insensitivity to the ‘Other’

Here is an excerpt from Nissim Ezekiel’s poem ‘The Railway Clerk’:

I am never neglecting my responsibility,

I am discharging it properly,

I am doing my duty,

but who is appreciating?

Nobody, I am telling you.

 

My desk is too small,

the fan is not repaired for two months,

three months.

I am living far off in Borivli,

my children are neglecting studies,

how long this can go on?

The poem goes on in this manner, listing the railway clerk’s grievances about his lower middle class life full of economic hardships and the difficulties springing from them. It is one in a series of ‘Very Indian poems in Indian English’ that Nissim wrote.

For sometime now, poets, novelists and linguists have begun to take Indian English seriously and there have been attempts to provide formal descriptions of this variety of English language. The use of Indian English sometimes is employed for ‘subversive’ purposes. In poetry such an example may be found in Kamala Das’ poems.

I remember Anita Desai’s acclaimed novel In Custody which chronicles the decadent Urdu poet whose recent life is being researched by the protagonist, a Hindi lecturer. It is highly unlikely that this Hindi lecturer requires to speak in English to his acquaintances or with the great Urdu poet about whom he is writing an article. So, as readers we grant that the novel is recording events in translation, and that the conversations we hear are reported in English. We, nevertheless, find Anita Desai making a character speak in Indian English. Pray, why is one speaking in English? Why should a speaker who in the situation portrayed should be using Hindi or Urdu made to use Indian English in the narrator’s recording of it? Not to forget, the narrator for her prose uses the British English. It intrigues me when writers cannot even resolve such simple issues. It for me indicates only a cynical and almost capricious view of both the character being portrayed and the language being used.

In Nissim’s above quoted poem we see the same capriciousness. The clerk is frustrated with the difficulties of modern urban life. This is a common motif in modernist poetry and in Nissim specially. But, Nissim in this poem is not talking about the modernist urban anxiety. His use of irony in many other poems with similar motif presents a critique of the social milieu. But, in this poem (and in general in his Very Indian poems in Indian English) his target of irony and satire is the speaker of Indian English. Satire in literature is a technique that is aimed at attacking the immoral, unethical and suchlike. But it is rare to find a poem where the character’s lack of fluency in a language other than his own becomes the target of satire. Nissim does precisely that. His irony towards the railway clerk is with reference to his inability to speak ‘correct’ English and not that he is morally culpable or his grievances reveal his idiocy.

I feel this reveals the superciliousness of the poet towards his subject – a lower middle class clerk not fluent in English. I think this also indicates the manner in which Nissim becomes elitist. There are other poems where we find further proof for this conclusion about Nissim.

This elitism in some of the Indian English writers is seldom questioned, busy as we are either in a debate over why Indians shouldn’t write in English (dumb) or with the postcolonial thematic. I am not for a minute suggesting that this malaise is to be found only among the Indian English writers or this is the only form of elitism in their work. One does find a variety of other ways in which some of the Indian English writers project their elitist perceptions of the society.

In fact we also see the superciliousness hidden in the works of many other Indian writers, whether in their literary works or in social / political prose. Here I am looking at a particular kind of insensitivity. In Nissim’s poem if we find it in the manner in which the clerk’s lack of fluency in English becomes a target of satire, we do find such insensitivity in many other forms. Let me take a writer who writes in Kannada and occasionally, some socio-political pieces, in English. U. R. Ananthmurthy is a major public intellectual. In one of his articles, titled “
India of the Rich & Bharat of the Poor”, Ananthmurthy criticizes the exclusivist private schools of today where only the rich students study. He argues that this disables them by not giving them an opportunity to meet and interact with people other than their type and thus limits them. He campaigns for inclusive system where a school accommodates not people of only one class but from all classes:

These days in expensive private schools the children of the rich don’t have an opportunity to expand their experience by coming to know of the rich life and culture of the poor of this country. This will create two countries, the
India of the rich and the Bharath of the Poor. I want common schools empowered again so that all the children of this country have an opportunity to share their joy of learning together and also learning from one another in a mixed school.

Valid point. No disagreement here. Ananthmurthy is basically a story teller. So his social or literary commentaries also have anecdotes or little narratives. In this article he refers to his school days and says, “The school opened up my world for I sat there with all boys and girls who belonged to all castes in the village”. I am sure Ananthmurthy’s gratitude to his school atmosphere where he was able to study with students from other castes is genuine and he is thankfulness is because he was able to go beyond the caste limits. But the question that comes to my mind is: what happened to the children of other castes who studied with him? Did they also grow up to thank their school life? Did the schooling as it did exist then that enabled Ananthmurthy to grow out of narrow caste limits, helped those from the other castes to grow without the social stigma? In the essay alluded here what to me appears insensitive is the neglect of this. The author tells of the benefit he got and not of the benefit that the other students got. Considering that Ananthmurthy is recommending a pattern of schooling in the essay, we might conclude that he recommends the kind of schooling that his anecdote makes a reference to.  But, the schools of his time are hardly remembered by the victims of caste system as an ideal place. Even a little knowledge of the history tells us that those days caste system was much worse and schools were no exception. Given this broader context, how can Ananthmurthy evoke nostalgic anecdotes about the educational system of the past in an argument about the desired form of schools he wishes to recommend for today’s society? Ananthmurthy in his article articulates the reform he was able to undergo living within a caste society. Good. But, he fails to show sensitivity by denying to record what the system, which proved good to him, did to those from the lower castes. In his novel Sanskara too one finds the same problem. The novel concerns itself with the degradation of the brahmin society, but does not bother to record the state of affairs with that of other social groups. This results in Sankara with a situation where the brahmins are seen mobile whereas those from other castes inert, undergoing no change, not even degradation! This restricts the novel’s view of the society and accords to the lower caste society a very limited space, relegating them to the sidelines.