Venomous
Touch :
Meena Kandasamy and the Poetics of Dalit Resistance Abin Chakraborty
Abstract: Meena Kandasamy, hailed as the “first Indian woman writer, writing Dalit poetry in 1
English” , belongs to a long tradition of militant Dalit literature that not only focuses on the multifaceted atrocities faced by Dalits, along with their material and ideological p aradigms, but also articulates the need for active resistance. In the p rocess, her poetry, both in Touch and Touch and in the aptly titled Ms. titled Ms. Militancy, Militancy, offers a re-evaluation re-evaluation our supposed “national culture” and the icons of our supposed “national history”. Sparing neither Gandhi nor gods, her polemical, aggressive poetics scathingly dissects the complex matrix of subjugation which punctuates Dalit existence in India. In doing so, her poems sweepingly cover aeons of time as the y deal not only with the myth of Ekalavya, which has remained a source of abiding inspiration for Dalit poets, b ut also with elements of modern history such as the atrocities of Karamchedu, in 1985. What emerges in the process is an alternate history of India, marked by entrenched caste, class and gender hierarchies which have shaped thousands of years of casteist subjugation against which Kandasamy vehemently reacts. Functioning, according to her own analogy, as a guerrilla without guns, her poetry not only onl y offers a stringent critique of casteist ideologies but also excavates those abysmal crevices of our “imagined community” whose depths are inhabited by countless 2
subalternized communities. If an author is to be imagined as an a n “antagonist to the state” who 3
can give, in the words of Calvino “a voice to whatever is without a voice” , my paper would explore how Meena Kandasamy’s poems Kandasamy’s poems may be seen as products of a counter-hegemonic 1
“‘The “‘The struggle to annihilate anni hilate caste will be victorious’: victorious’ : Meena Kandasamy in Conversation with Ujjwal Jana”, Jana ”, Postcolonial Text , Vol 4, No 4 (2008) 3. 2 Salman Rushdie, Jaguar Rushdie, Jaguar Smile. Smile . New York: Viking, 1987. 50. 3 Italo Calvino, “Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature”, Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents, Documents, ed. Dennis Walder. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. 114. 35
discourse that seeks to scream into the national imaginary those subalternized Dalit voices which lie beyond fringes of political tokenism.
Keywords: Dalit, postcolonial literature, subaltern, women, resistance
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Venomous
Touch :
Meena Kandasamy and the Poetics of Dalit Resistance Abin Chakraborty
To surmount the situation of oppression, people must first critically recognize its causes, so that through transforming action they can create a new situation, one which makes possible the pursuit of a fuller humanity. But the struggle to be more fully human has already begun in the authentic struggle to transform the situation. Although the situation of oppression is a dehumanized and dehumanizing totality affecting both the oppressors and those whom they oppress, it is the latter who must, from their stifled humanity, wage for both the struggle for a fuller humanity; the oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead this struggle. (4) Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Italo Calvino once remarked, “literature is necessary to politics above all when it gives a voice to whatever is without a voice, when it gives a name to whatever is without a name, to what as yet has no name, especially to what the language of politics excludes or attempts to exclude . . . Literature is like an ear that can hear things beyond the colour spectrum perceived by politics” (114). It would be absurd to claim that Indian politics entirely excludes the issue o f Dalit subjugation which has been going on for centuries, especially in the post-Mandal Commission political scenario of India where a Dalit woman like Mayavati can even become the chief minister of India’s biggest state. However, one individual’s rise to power on the basis of electoral Dalit mobilisation in her favour in one state, along with several other political circumstances, does not render the issue of caste resolved in the political domain as everyday life in various corners of India remains haunted by spectres of caste-violence in various different forms. In fact, the laws of political arithmetic are such that while on the one hand political parties would say exactly the right things in Dalit-dominated constituencies, the same parties would also use antithetical arguments for campaign and choice of candidates in other areas, in order to capitalise on casteist sentiments for the sake of electoral victories. What remains unquestioned in the process is the very structure and discourse of caste which remains an indelible marker o f 37
identity that becomes manifest in the form of nom enclature, language, residential area and ev en physical appearance. It is this pervasive presence of caste that ensures the persistent perpetuation of casteist violence because of which thousands of Indians, despite constitutional safeguards, suffer from a subalternized existence that threatens their very survival and corrodes in the process the foundations of the “imagined political community” (Anderson 15) of the nation, which still remain largely Brahmanical. This is where literature, as conceived by Calvino still has an important function and Meena Kanadasamy’s poetry offers significant beacons of light in this regard as it rigorously militates against the very discourse of caste and that myth of Brahmanical glory which continues to prevail in various areas of India’s national life. It is not as if the nature and extent of this crisis is not acknowledged by the government of India and its various administrative sections. For example in a report on prevention of violence against members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in 2004, we are explicitly told that while communal violence is a relatively recent phenomenon rooted in the events leading to partition, caste violence has a much longer history and a firmer anchorage. It also has the distinctiveness of being embedded in the social structure of the dominant community itself which lays down the norms of conduct between its more privileged groups and the subdued and subordinated segment. It is this age old caste relationship in Hindu S ociety which is getting disturbed by pressure of forces both from above and below. The frequency and intensity of violence is an offshoot of desperate attempts by the upper caste groups to protect their entrenched status against the process of disengagement and upward mobility
38
among lower castes resulting from affirmative action of State Policy. The violence takes brutal forms and turns into acts of atrocities against a whol e group of people, such as massacre, rape, burning of houses and through more subtle methods like social boycott, which are intended to block their access to basic necessities and services. (Saxena 1) What is even more alarming is the fact that despite the enactment of several laws and the constitution of different governmental agencies and organisations to safeguard the interests of the Dalits, casteist violence is on the rise across India. According to available reports, while in the year 2000 there were 486 registered cases of murder of persons belonging to scheduled castes and 1034 cases of rape, according to the 2008 reports the numbers have shot up to 626 and 1457 respectively. What we must also note here is the growing public apathy towards legal remedies and judicially administered justice which leads to a vast nu mber of atrocities that remain unregistered, coupled with deliberate manipulation of actual repo rts by police officials for their vested interests. As the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) report itself mentions, with regard to cases lodged under the Civil Rights Protection Act (1955), of the total number of 2,086 cases, 1,216 (58.29%) are still pending with police and only 618 have been charge-sheeted (29.63%). The position in respect of pendency in Courts is even worse. 7,366 cases out of 9,949 cases, were pending with Courts. Only 271 (02.72%) cases have ended in conviction while as large as 2,312 (23.24%) have ended in acquittal. (Saxena 25)
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The same inadequacy is also true with regard to various other laws which also remain handicapped by similar problems of implementation born out of bureaucratic and political prejudice and unconcern. The NHRC report therefore lamentfully concludes: The dynamics of implementation of protective arrangements strikingly illustrate how different interests and forces are heavily loaded against SC s which circumscribe the efforts at administering social justice to them and their conspicuous lack of strength and ability to ne utralize this formidable resistance at the current level of their social status. Thus the elaborate legislational architecture of protection in their favour does not present a viable and smoothly exercisable option to significantly alter the disabilities imposed on them by the caste based social order. (Saxena 136) Such disabilities not only refer to the kind of atroc ity that they experience at the hand of upper caste members but also the marginalization that they face in terms of education, economic status or the possession of assets, as can be seen from various reports. According to the report of the International Dalit Solidarity Network, entitled Cast an Eye on the Dalits of India, If you are a Dalit in India . . . You can expect to have 4 years less to live than others. You can expect more than half of your children to suffer from under-nutrition. One third of the women in your community will be anaemic. For every 100 Dalit children born in your community, 12 would already be dead before they reached their fifth birthday.
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Only 1 out of every 5 children in your community would not drop out of school, and only about half would even become literate despite that fact that around 2/3 of Indians are literate. You would have less than 1 in 600 chance of gaining a postgraduate diploma (if you are a women, make that 1 in 1,200). You have an unemployment rate of 5% compared to 3.5% for others, you are half as likely to have fixed capital assets and four times as likely to become a bonded labourer, joining the estimated 24.4 million other Dalit bonde d labourers. One in every three in your community will be poor while the “touchable” communities will have a 4 in 5 chance of escaping poverty. (IDSN 7) All these material factors together constitute the matrix of subalternization within which Dalits in India have to function. What also aggravates this situation is that their material subordination leads to a simultaneous cultural subjugation on a ccount of the hegemonic dominance of Brahmanical Hindu culture and its multifarious manifestations which compounds the Dalits’ material distress with intense identity crises and existential angst. As Kancha Illaih reports, while a large number of Dalit children fail to enter schools or drop out after a few years, even those who continue are always under the domination of teachers and syllabi, conditioned by Brahmanical thoughts, leading to an abject suppression and tragic silencing of Dalit cu lture: The textbooks taught us stories that we had never heard in our families. The story of Rama, poems from the Puranas, the names of two epics called Ramayana and Mahabharata occurred repeatedly . . . The language of textbooks was not the one our communities spoke . . . To date I have not come across a Telegu textbook which is written in this production-based communicative language. I have not
41
encountered a lesson on Pochamma, Potaraju, Kattamisamma, Katamaraju or Beerappa, the goddesses and gods whose names were familiar to us from childhood. (Illaih 176) These are precisely the considerations which prompt us to ponder over what Pramod Nayar calls the processes of “ postcolonial subalternization” (69) which refer to those constitutive forces of the Indian nation which establish the n arrative of the nation by banishing various different groups, based on class, caste, gender, se xuality and other considerations, to the margins. It remains questionable, however, if it is at all possible for the margins to write back to the center and overhaul the hegemonic narrative by reconstituting the centre or to even create those spaces from where alternate structures of imagining and experiencing the n ation may emerge. The problem of course lies with the preponderant hegemonic authority of the centre itself which either nullifies the sporadic assertions from the margins or co-opts them within its own fold. Therefore, as Kancha Illaih states “the condemned must learn to condemn the others” and that “unless the culture and consciousness of the oppressed is put forward visibly in public debate, unless this culture is prepared to clash with the cu lture and consciousness of the enemy in public, a society of equals will remain an illusion” (Illaih, 169, 168). The polemical thrust of his arguments is justified in advance by his declaration that “the dalitbahujan experience — a long experience of 3000 years at that — tells us that no abuser stops abusing unless there is retaliation. An atmosphere of calm, an atmosphere of respect for another is never possible unless the abu ser is abused as a matter of shock” (Illaih 168-69). Much of extant Dalit poetry recognizes this truth and operates on this basis. So Raj Kumar ND writes in his “A Wish”:
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He who desires peace Under oppression Is a fraud.
It is human tendency to disturb And attain clarity in the fight For liberation. (23-28) Similarly, Rama Prabhu claims his “Remainder ”: Don’t search for anything intoxicating In my words
The ash of half-burnt bones And the spirit of dead ancestors Will be mixed in them.
The blood oozing from the fingers Will be known from the stench Of my lines. (1-8) The poetics of Meena Kandasamy operates along similar lines and her poetry, especially in Touch (2006), is filled with relentless militant assaults on those structures, customs and conventions which have persistently been used to justify and then gloss over Dalit subjugation of various kinds.
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The title itself is replete with multifarious significances that not only “touch” upon aesthetic considerations and sensual human bonds of affection or desire but also refers to the rigid hierarchies of caste which had rendered thousands of Indians untouchable by birth and thus relegated them to a sub-human level as their mere touch was considered to be polluting to members of the upper castes. Yet, the entire Brahminical scriptural philosophy is also fraught, on the other hand, with innumerable indictments of physical, corporeal existence which is bound to be decayed and the concomitant privileging of man’s spiritual being, away from all tactile considerations. It is this hypocritical contradiction within the entire discourse of Brahmanical Hindu philosophy which Kandasamy scrupulously highlights as she states: 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. (36) The male Brahman addressee is thus made aware of the fact that despite all his persistent attempt to transcend touch, it remains the unden iable everyday reality for thousands of people
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who are humiliated, discriminated against and violently subjugated precisely by those Brahmanically encoded hierarchies of caste that make “touch” indeed a matter of life and death. Kandasamy therefore mordantly scoffs at the vaunted Hindu philosophy of non-dualism, revered by people around the world, by emphasizing that foundational binary or duality, between the touchable and the untouchable, between the upper castes and the outcastes which the ancient texts codified and naturalized:
One
More
Fina
Question
Can
My
Untouchable Atman And
Your
Brahmin
Atman
Ever
Be
One ? (37) The sarcasm directed at such scriptural texts is an integral element of a counter-discourse that seeks to displace altogether the supposed glory of ancient Hindu religion and the associated cultural framework because it is these discursive frameworks that also provide the basis of the various massacres and atrocities that keep occurring in the nam e of caste, as exemplified by either the familiar legend of Ekalavya or the Karamchedu massacre that Kandasamy herself writes about in “Liquid Tragedy: Karamchedu 1985”:
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Buffalo Baths. Urine. Bullshit Drinking Water for the Dalits The very same Pond. Practice for eons. A bold Dalit lady dares to question injustice. Hits forth with her pot. Her indignation is avenged. Fury let loose. Violence. Rapes. (52) As Kathi Padma Rao, a former leader of Dalit Mahasabha, explains: Two Kamma (upper caste) youth, Potina Seenu and Rayineedu Prasad, took their buffaloes to the drinking water tank in Madigapalle. They fed the buffaloes with washings of rice in buckets. While they were washing the dirty buckets in the tank, Katti Chandraiah, a Dalit boy, objected to it. His courage angered Seenu and Prasad. They were about to beat up Chandraiah when Munnangi Suvaartha, a Madiga woman, came to the tank to collect water. She tried to protect the boy from the attack of Kamma youths. Seenu and Prasad threw hunters at her. She lifted her vessel and warded off the hunters. S uvaartha’s lifting of vessel in selfdefence became a pretext for Kammas, who were itching for a fresh qua rrel with Madigas after the election clash . . . They raided every Dalit’s house, drove Madigas into fields. The blood thirsty Kammas beat Madigas, stabbed them and axed them. They raped Dalit women . . . The murder and mayhem had no parallel in the Indian subcontinent. (para 4)
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These axed Madigas as well as the assaulted or raped men and women of Karamchedu operate as those silenced subalterns of post-independence Indian history whose anguish seeps into the poetics of Meena Kandasamy and provokes that militant rhetoric which prompts her to remark: “Aggression is the best kind of trouble-shooting” (38). It is this “aggression” which prompts her revision of the Ekalavya episode of Mahabharata and the Ekalavya she envisions does not meekly accept Dronacharya’s diktat and vanish into passive oblivion. The consolation that remains, within Kandasamy’s poetic world, is that of active a rmed resistance by Ekalavya’s modern counterparts, against the violence that they have endured for generations — violence such as that witnessed in Karamchedu: You can do a lot of things With your left hand. Besides, fascist Dronacharyas warrant Left-handed treatment. Also, You don’t need your right thumb, To pull a trigger or hurl a bomb. (44) Interestingly, as newspaper reports explain, “the People’s War Group killed the key accused Daggubati Chenchu Ramaiah” and the Naxalites claimed that “the murder of Ramaiah was a fitting reply to the upper castes of the village” (Times News Network para 6). Just as colonial history is littered with innumerable instances of violent subaltern self-assertion, however ephemeral, local or misdirected, postcolonial India too remains scarred b y various such cycles of
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violence and counter-violence and Kandasamy’s poetics represents an impassioned involvement with this process of subalternization and its various consequences. However, Kandasamy of course realizes that resistance does not only flow from the barrel of a gun. It is important to acknowledge that structures of oppression can only be altered through both material and discursive resistance. This is precisely wh y Kandasamy’s exploration of the Dalits’ history of subjugation and suffering is always complemented by a stringent critique of various elements of dominant Hindu culture an d the self-congratulatory narratives of nationalism, voiced through sarcastic barbs that spare neither Gandhi nor gods. Therefore, not only are the gods verbally abused as “indifferent bastards” (46), the poet even mocks their actual inability to intervene in any way by referring to roadside walls, adorned with images of divinities, which however are also covered with layers of urine: And yet, the Gods are covered with layers of smelly urine —they don’t retaliate.
Tolerance is a very holy concept.
Or like someone said, the Caste Gods deserve the treatment they get. (72) The same rhetoric is also used in her second book of poems, Ms. Militancy where she either scoffs at Brahmma as “villain who willed our deaths / . . . four-faced, dour-faced father figure/ who fucked up our lives” (43) or uses the myth of Indra splintering the fetus of Diti, the
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mother of gods, into forty-nine pieces, in order to lash out at the Brahmanical violence, ingrained in vaunted scriptural texts of ancient India, b y identifying Indra as being a worse psychopath than Herod or Hitler. The nature of her condemnation is further illustrated on other occ asions when she hurls her vitriolic invectives at some of th e other gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, who, however, have no presence in Dalit beliefs and whose processions never enter the Dalit localities: We understand why upper caste Gods and their ‘good-girl’ much-married, father-fucked, virgin, vegetarian oh-so-pure Goddesses borne in their golden chariots don’t come to our streets. (53) Her ire is particularly directed at the figure of Saraswati about whose o rigins there remains a lot of ambivalence in the puranas. While on the one hand she is supposed to be the daughter of Brahmma, on the other hand she is also presented as one of the wives of Brahmma. As a Dalit, what makes such contradictions all the more sickening is the fact that Dalit women have been vilified for generations as women o f “loose morals” and have been subjected to the sexual gratification of upper caste men occup ying several positions of social or political authority. Furthermore, while such scriptural protestations of purity have become a part of dominant, mainstream culture, there has also continued a relentless process of sexual violence against Dalit women, as evident from the increasing nu mber of rapes recorded in the data of the
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National Crime Research Bureau. It is in acknowledgement of this particular crisis that she scoffingly states: “Dalit Girl Raped” is much too commonplace. Humiliation gnaws the sixteen year old. Gory scars on a wrecked body, serve as constant reminders of disgrace, helplessness. (58) What makes such blatant injustices all the more brutal is the fact that the offenders are often able to go scot-free as various arms of the administration collude to ensure their safety on account of their upper-caste status. As Kandasamy ex plains: “ . . . the criminals have / already mainstreamed — / Their Caste is a classic shield” (58). The history of the recently concluded Vachathi case may be cited as one example of the obstacles Dalits generally face in securing justice as the caste -identity of the perpetrators enabled them to manipulate the judicial and administrative system in various ways. One of the rapevictims of that atrocity later recalled: “I was just 13 then when dragged me by the hair, abused me in foul language and raped me on the bund of a lake . . . When I pleaded that I was a small girl studying eighth standard, the men in khaki responded saying ‘Being a girl is enough’” (Palaniappan para 2-3). This is precisely the kind of double-subordination that Dalit women generally face and this is further amplified through the phenomenon of witch-hunting which operates on the basis of
50
a nexus between casteism and patriarchy and ends up humiliating, assaulting or even killing Dalit women identified as witches by upper-caste members of the society, especially those who are defiant and rebellious. As Kandasamy herself explains in “Dangerous Dalit Women and Witch-Hunters”: It is no surprise that almost all the “witches” have been Dalit or Adivasi women. Nowhere else in Indian history can we see such an explicit tie-up between patriarchal oppression and casteist subjugation. Witch-hunting is a powerful tool in the hands of caste-Hindu men who want to persecute assertive Dalit and Adivasi women who might directly challenge caste he gemony, or indirectly subvert local power equations . . . A Dalit woman, Badam Bai was beaten to death by four men at Bhunein village in Sultanpur in Kota district. Lajwanti Harijan of Kamolar village in the same district met with a similar fate. When a Dalit woman in Tarra village in Raipur district claimed rights to her dead husb and’s land, she was killed after being branded a witch b y her brother-in-law. Memki Bai Bhajaat of Varlipahada village and Sakri Bai Meena of Sailana village of Udaipur district were branded witches because of property disputes . . . An Adivasi woman panchayat president in Udaipur district in Rajasthan was declared a witch by caste-Hindu villagers who wanted to settle political scores. (para 5) This is precisely why Kandasamy herself assumes the role of the witch in order to launch a scathing attack both against the individuals who perpetrate these crimes and the system that allows them to do so with impunity: I fancy myself being a witch.
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Broomstick borne and black as pitch. Thin, stark-naked and with fire for eyes. Killing men whom I despise . . .
Haunting oppressors to shave their heads. Cutting all their holy threads.
Experiencing joy as they bleed. Dance, rejoice my black black deed. (49) These wrathful remarks are poetic cannonades aga inst casteism which ends up claiming the lives of hundreds of Dalit women who are not even supposed to love members of other castes: . . . Our passionate love, Once transcended caste. Let it now Transcend mortality . . . Fear not beloved, In Love — Life is not compulsory. (51) Such statements allude to the continuing orthodox reaction against inter-caste marriages which even lead to death of the lovers, as evident from the recent spate of “khap killings” across a large area of northern India where casteist prejudices still remain entrenched. These silenced individuals represent what Ranajit Guha calls the “small voice of history” (1) which is exactly
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what Kandasamy tries to recuperate as she excav ates the violent ruptures of both our historical past and our everyday present: poured poison and pesticide through the ears-nose-mouth/ or hanged them in public/ because a man and a woman dared to love and you wanted/ to teach/ other boys and other girls/ the lessons of/ how to/ whom to/ when to/ where to/ continue their caste lines (60) What complicates and worsens the matter even further for Dalit women is the fact that patriarchy also constitutes the internal structures of Dalit communities themselves and even there women are forced to endure various forms of humiliation and violation at the hand s of men belonging to their own castes. This is exactly the dilemma that Kandasamy confronts in “ Narration” where the violated woman may give the impression of being raped by the landlord or disrobed by the lecherous glances of the priest — they have been the familiar victimizers of Dalit women — only to conceal the greater agony of being violated by a man from her own caste: “How can I say / Anything, anything / Against my own man? / How?” (60). Kandasamy’s attempt to explore the perplexed silences refers to the integrity of her commitment which refuses to seek refuge in comfortable silences and starkly confronts the difficult intersections where class, caste and gender meet to render easy categorizations unviable. This is precisely why her pages are dotted with anguished cries and interrogations such as “ India, what is the caste of sperm? / India, what is the cost of life?” (62). Based on the pervasive context of Dalit subjugation and the poetic documentation and analysis of such crises in Kandasamy’s
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poetry, such interrogations pierce through the heart of the narrative of the nation and highlight either a foundational crisis in imagining the nation or a miserable failure to realize that “imagined community” of “horizontal comradeship” (Anderson 16) which was supposed to be born out of India’s tryst with destiny. It is precisely because of this crisis that the nation-space emerges in Kandasamy’s text as a site of countless ruptures and takes us to the postulations of Homi Bhabha who asserted that we are confronted with the nation split within itself, articulating the heterogeneity of its population. The barred Nation It/Self , alienated from its eternal selfgeneration, becomes a liminal signifying space that is internally marked by the discourse of minorities, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural difference. (148) Quite naturally, her frustration and anger are especially directed tow ards the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, who as his history with Ambedkar shows, was tangled in an ambivalent relationship on the question of caste. While it is undeniable that he indeed attempted to end untouchability and persistently tried to infuse awa reness against caste-discrimination and violence among the people, it is also true that he never really tried to abolish caste altogether and as Ambedkar himself illustrated with several quoted remarks by Gandhi, h e repeatedly eulogized the significance of caste and varnashram-dharma as an integral feature of Indian society. For example, in an article in Navajivan in 1921-22, Gandhi declared to destroy caste system and adopt Western European social system means that Hindus must give up the principle of hereditary occupation which is the soul of the caste system. Hereditary principle is an eternal principle. To change it is to
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create disorder. …These being my views I am op posed to all those who are out to destroy the Caste System. (Ambedkar, para 4) In other words, despite exercising immense national authority over the p opulace he did not utilize that authority for the abolition of caste a nd thus pave the path for an independent India which could emancipate itself from the stigma of casteism. This is only one of those man y critical hopes which have been subjected to either blatant distortion or infinite deferral by the post-independence Indian state. And despite using Gandhi’s name, image and ideas to legitimize itself, the nation-state continues to unleash violence of one kind or another against the new subalterns, including casteist violence, implemented on the basis of u pper-caste nexus across social institutions, administrative machinery and the political establishment. It is in acknowledgment of this hypocrisy and farce that Kandasamy explosively exclaims “Bapu, bapu, you big fraud, we hate you”, and adds: That trash is long overdue. You need a thorough review. Your tax-free salt stimulated our wounds We gonna sue you, the Congress shoe . . .
You knew, you bloody well knew, Caste won’t go, they wouldn’t let it go. It haunts us now, the way you do with a spooky stick, a eerie laugh or two. (54-55)
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However shocking such statements may seem, the y are quite natural from an ardent, selfconfessed follower of Ambedkar as Ambedkar himself had consistently castigated both Congress and Gandhi through such texts as What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables, where he went on to declare the social ideal of Gandhism is either caste or varna. Though it may be difficult to say which, there can be no doubt that the social ideal of Gandhism is not democracy. For whether one takes for comparison caste or varna both are fundamentally opposed to democracy. It would have been something if the defence of caste system which Gandhism offers was strong and honest. But his defence of the caste system is the most insensible piece of rhetoric one can think of. Examine Mr. Gandhi’s arguments in support of caste and it will be found that every one of them is specious if not puerile. (Ambedkar para 25) Kandasamy’s critique is only a poetic version of this long-standing critique of both Gandhi and the kind of Gandhi-centric nationalist narrative that has acquired dominance in postindependence India where the prevalent Brahmanical discourse still holds sway, as already illustrated by the various statistics and examples. Kandasamy’s poetry may be seen as one discursive step towards an actual rebuilding of prevalent society by dismantling the ideological paradigm which ensures the reproduction of material reality. Kandasamy’s poetry also articulates this hope and resolutely states: We will learn/ how to fight/ with the substantial spontaneity/ with which we first learnt/ how to love.
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So/ now/ upon a future time/ there will be a revolution.
It will begin in our red-hot dreams that surge that/ scorch that/ scald that sizzle like lava/ but never settle down never/ pungently solidify. (61) It is this combination of critique, struggle and utopian ho pe which characterizes that growing body of Dalit poetry, whether in English or in translation, of which Kandsamy is a part and together they effect an “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” (Foucault 81-82) in the sphere of Indian poetry which contributes to a re-imagining of the nation by excavating from erasure the persistent history of Dalit subjugation. Kandasamy thus assumes the role of a “consciously political” poet, who is aware of her “historical responsibility”. And as Adrienne Rich explains, “historical responsibility has, after all, to do with action — where we place the weight of our existence on the line, cast our lot with others, move from an individual consciousness to a collective one” (145). It is in acknowledgment of this historical responsibility that Kandasamy declares in an undated interview: The annihilation of caste is a historic necessity, and at the same time, it is a historic inevitability as well. So, I am sure that it is a dream that I share with thousands of others. I think that such a change can come about only through a social revolution . . . And I think it is in the hands of writers to make p eople think
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about it. Writers have the power of the written word, and they can plead with people to unite for change. (3-4) Kandasamy has cast her lot decisively with Dalits and she places the whole weight of her individual and collective existence as a Dalit on her poetry. As the self-confessed Ms. Militancy she authors a poetic discourse that not only castigates the prevalent modes of subjugation but also resolutely strives towards futures that are yet to be born.
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Works Cited Ambedkar. B.R. What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables. 30 August 2012. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Print. Bhabha, Homi. K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Calvino, Italo. “Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature”. Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents. Ed. Dennis Walder. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. 114-116. Print. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. Trans. Colin Gordon et al. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Print. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed . 30 August 2012, . Guha, Ranajit. “The Small Voice of History”. Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Eds. Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1996. 1-12. Print. Illaih, Kancha. “Productive Labour, Consciousness and History: The Dalitbahujan Alternative”. Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Eds. Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1996. 165-200. Print. International Dalit Solidarity Network. Cast an Eye on the Dalits of India. Copenhagen: International Dalit Solidarity Network, 2007. 30 August, 2012
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Kandasamy, Meena. Touch. Mumbai: Peacock, 2006. Print. th
---. “Dangerous Dalit Women and Witch-Hunters”. April 14 , 2008. 28 Oct. 2011 ---. Interview for Orupaper.com with Dr. Krishna Kalaichelvan, n.d. 28 Oct. 2011 . ---. Ms Militancy. New Delhi: Navayana, 2010. Nayar, Pramod, K. Postcolonial Literature: An Introduction. Hyderabad: Pearson Longman, 2008. Print. ND, Raj Kumar. “A Wish”. Muse India, Issue 9 (September-October 2006): n.pag. 30 August, 2012 . Palaniappan, V.S. “A long agonising wait for justice ends”. The Hindu, 30 September 2011. 30 August, 2012 Prabhu, Rama. “Remainder”. Muse India, Issue 9 (September-October 2006): n.pag. 30 August, 2012 . Rao, Kathi Padma. “History of Karamchedu and what actually happened?” Thursday, 21 July 2011 15:23. 30 August, 2012. Rich, Adrienne. Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986. Print.
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Saxena, K.B. Report on the Prevention of Atrocities against Scheduled Castes. New Delhi: National Human Rights Commission, 2004. 30 August, 2012. Times News Network. “SC convicts 31 in Karamchedu Dalit massacre”. Times of India, 20 December, 2008. 30 August, 2012.
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Abin Chakraborty is currently Assistant Professor, Dept of Humanities, Budge Budge Institute
of Technology. He is also pursuing his doctoral thesis from the Dept of English, University of Calcutta on the representation of subaltern characters in the plays of Utpal Dutt, Girish Karnad and Mahesh Dattani. His research interests are postcolonial studies, Indian Writing in English, Subaltern Studies, diasporic literature, and translation studies.
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