Resisting Caste in Om Prakash Valmiki’s Joothan
Dalits have started to raise their voices against social, economic, cultural and political oppression. The literature written by them has gone a long way in propagating the principles of equality, liberty, fraternity, and compassion for the Dalits. These principles inspired the new generation of the Dalit writers. They have depicted in their works the untold miseries of human atroci ties through poetry, drama, short story, novel and autobiography. Autobiography is an interesting and vital genre of literature vastly used by stalwarts of the human society. Dalits have used autobiography as a genre in a unique way to tell not only their personal experiences but of their entire society across India.
Dalit autobiography has become an important organ of the Dalit movement across India especially in Maharashtra and North India. It has startled not only the Dalits but also the upper caste people of India when they came across the lives of the Dalits caught in a rigid, hypocritical, and orthodox Indian society. Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan (1996) has become a saga of Dalit consciousness representing the annals of suffering, humiliation, mental anguish, self-realization, rebellion, retaliation, and rehabilitation that are the life spirit of Dalit literature.
Joothan is the first Dalit autobiography in Hindi. Arun Prabha Mukherjee has translated it into English in 2003. It is the only Hindi Dalit autobiography which has been translated into English. It is not only the story of his life but his entire community. Valmiki has described how an entire community totally depends on the leftover food of the upper castes in return for their humiliating work of removing night soil, carrying it on their heads to dump outside the village. They are not paid in cash for this work but they have to depend on the mercy of the upper caste people. The protagonist of this autobiography is the author himself but his personal experiences instead of being the story of self-glorification or self-confession represents the predicament of the whole community of Dalits. The story is a reconstruction of writer’s own account of personal success from the state of darkness to the state of respect. Despite the pressures exercised by family and friends, Valmiki is able to assert his own choices to reconstruct his identity beyond the one imposed by his community.
Joothan is an argument of Om Prakash Valmiki to justify how far caste identity dominates all other identities. He expresses his resentment regarding the rigidity of caste conventions that have resulted in the socio-economic oppression of thousands of Dalits across the country. He has narrated the incidents related to schooling: how teachers forced him to do menial jobs, traditionally associated with his caste. As a Dalit student at every stage, Valmiki was forced to leave his education. In Joothan Valmiki has not only presented his painful ordeals but he has also reflected on inter-caste conflict among the Chamars and Bhangis. In Joothan the chain of painful memories helped him to express suppressed fury and rage buried in his consciousness. However, Valmiki’s exposure to new fields of knowledge and education mustered his confidence to break the barriers of caste-dominated identity and to register his protest against the convention and customs that are responsible for the wretchedness of Dalits. Valmiki says, “It is caste pride that is behind this centuries old custom. The deep chasm that divides the society is made even deeper by this custom. It is a conspiracy to trap us in the whirlpool of inferiority” (33).
In Joothan, Valmiki tries to assert the reasons behind the helplessness of Dalits in resisting exploitation. The lack of financial resources and education has made them weak and nervous. In this text, the focus of the author has been on the reconstruction of the issue, “Why is my caste my only identity.” In the analysis of this identity, he has painfully unfolded his real self layer by layer. Instead of guilt and shame, he has made a candid confession, “Why should one feel awkward in telling the truth? Those who say that these things don’t happen here, those who want to claim a superior civilization status, I beg to submit only he or she who has suffered this anguish knows its sting” (viii).
Om Prakash Valmiki has revealed two objectives in his autobiography. One is to contest the basis of caste discrimination. For example, in Joothan, Valmiki writes,
Being born is not in the control of a person. If it were in one’s control, then why would I have been born in a Bhangi household? Those who call themselves the standard-bearers of this country’s great cultural heritage, did they decide which homes they would be born into? Albeit they turn to scriptures to justify their position the scriptures that establish feudal values instead of promoting equality and freedom. (133-34)
The other clear narrative agenda of this Dalit autobiography is to expose the reality behind the institutional narrative that caste no longer functions as a significant force in the public sphere of modern India.
During a wedding, when the guests and the baratis – the bridegroom’s party –ate their meal, the Chuhras (the caste that the author belongs to) would sit outside with huge baskets. After the baratis have eaten, the dirty pattals or leaf-plates were put in the Chuhras baskets, which they took home, to save the joothan sticking to them. The little pieces of pooris, bits of sweetmeats, and a little bit of vegetable were enough to make them happy. The joothan was eaten with a lot of relish. The bridegroom’s guests who did not leave enough scraps on their pattals were denounced as gluttons. Valmiki gives a detailed description of preserving and eating the joothan after reprocessing it, during the “hard days of the rainy season” (9). The memories of his childhood associated with joothan, often come back to haunt him and cause him renewed pain and humiliation. At the first blush, the passage seems to be giving a glimpse of the scale of poverty and suffering due to hunger in Valmiki’s community. The passage also highlights the association of the Dalits with the notion of pollution.
As mentioned earlier, joothan or leftover food carries the connotation of ritual pollution, when used in relation to anyone other than the original eater. It is this association with ritual pollution, and the stigma and discrimination resulting thereof, that sets apart the Dalits from the other deprived groups or ‘have-nots’ in the Indian society. And it is this association with ritual pollution that is invoked to explain and justify the infra-human status assigned to the Dalits by the caste system. “You are taking a basketful of joothan. On top of that, you want food for your children. Don’t forget your place Chuhri. Pick up your basket and get going” (11). This dialogue proves my argument that the very act of giving joothan or leftover food to the Dalits is an exercise of power by the upper castes.
Another aspect of this association with pollution is the Dalit’s engagement with the so-called ‘unclean’ occupations. Certain occupations – mostly associated with death and human bodily waste – are regarded as unclean and degraded. Therefore, they are assigned to those considered to be outside the pale of humanity. In fact, the link between the Dalit as embodying pollution and the polluting occupations follows a circular logic: Why are the jobs polluting? Because the Dalits performed the polluting jobs. Why are the Dalits polluting? As they perform polluting jobs.
Valmiki decided quite early in his childhood that he would not go into the line of work that his ancestors had been doing for thousands of years, “I had written to Pitaji, informing him of my decision to leave college and learn this technical work in a government factory. He was delighted. He kept saying repeatedly, “At last you have escaped ‘caste’”. But what he didn’t know till the date he died is that ‘caste’ follows one right up to one’s death” (77-8).
The result is that although Valmiki tried to forget his caste, it was impossible for him to do so. Here I would like to refer Kumud Pawde’s who has mentioned, “What comes by birth, but can’t be cast off by dying – that is caste.” (112). Valmiki also shares same views on caste as Pawde has:
I was kept out of extracurricular activities. On such occasions, I stood on the margins like a spectator. During the annual functions of the school, when rehearsals were on for the play, I too wished for a role. But I always had to stand outside the door. The so-called descendants of the gods cannot understand the anguish of standing outside the door. (16)
In the above excerpt, Om Prakash Valmiki, the author talks about his experience of exclusion in school, where all the teachers and the majority of the students were from the Upper Caste Tyagi community. Even though expressed in plain and simple language, the passage generates a sense of disturbance in the reader. I agree with R. Niruphama and others who have highlighted the attitude of the mainstream society, “Why is it that the representations of injustice and exclusion in the mainstream literature on justice remain confined to figures and statistical enumeration” (17)?
I was unable to conduct experiments during that whole year. Not only did I do very poorly in the lab tests in the board exam, I also got low marks in the oral, even though I had answered the examiner’s questions quite correctly. When the results were announced, I was among the failures. I had good marks in all other subjects except chemistry. I had failed the lab tests. This turn of events had put a barrier in my path. I no longer felt interested in studying. I felt surrounded by darkness. (65-6)
Here the protagonist Valmiki is an individual, and yet those who see him only as a faceless member of his community often stifle his individuality – to them he is nothing more than a ‘Dalit’, ‘Chuhra’, ‘Bhangi’. In other words, the protagonist continually faces a clash between the negative identity imposed on him by the upper castes and his own positive self-ascribed identity. The protagonist’s own subjective autonomy is also bound up in a close relationship with his caste community. He faces personal discrimination and is deeply sensitive to the pain of other oppressed Dalits, with whom he identified largely and he seemed to experience their pain himself.
Valmiki wrote, “Gandhiji’s uplifting of the untouchables was resounding everywhere. Although the doors of the government school had begun to open for untouchables, the mentality of ordinary people had not changed much. I had to sit away from the others in the class, and that too on the floor” (2). Here one can easily see how the upper caste people smother the constitutional rights of the Dalits. The upper caste teachers, students and other members of the village laugh at the concept of equality. This is true in every part of India. Whenever a Dalit reads an autobiography of a Dalit in any part of India he feels it is the story of his own life. Thus, the Dalit autobiographer plays an important role of a leader who unites all the Dalits to work to regain their dignity and self-respect. Thus, he paves the way for the Dalit Movement.
R. Niruphama and others have mentioned that how the Dalit writers raise questions on upper caste myth of caste in modern India.
Besides the feeling of demotivation and helplessness suffered by the author, the reader is made to confront the systemic and institutionalized nature of exclusion practiced in education in modern India. The passages above (on lab test) pose a significant counter-point to the idea of ‘meritocracy’, which is based on the premise that students are evaluated strictly based on ‘merit’; irrespective of their caste identity and that, caste-discrimination in education is a myth. The passages, which I have presented, are live testimonies of continuing caste discrimination in the secular public sphere, which also help in positing caste as the central fault line in modern India. (22)
Having escaped the confines of the village, availed of reservation, and having experienced a rise in their class status, these writers continue to experience caste-based discrimination despite their many ‘successes’. The continual resistance of caste-based discriminations lead me to agree with Iris Young who points out that “it is a mistake to reduce the idea of justice to distribution of resources alone” (34).
Raj Kumar has pointed out,
It is quite important to note that Valmiki consciously divides his readers into two camps: ‘we’ the ‘Dalits’ and ‘they’, the non-Dalits. This he does deliberately. By doing so the author clearly draws a line between the oppressors and the oppressed. He mentions names of all the perpetrators and condemns their evil acts. He believes that the sole motive of the non-Dalits is to exploit the downtrodden for their personal gains. Many Dalit writers believe that as long as the caste system continues, India cannot truly be a nation-state because caste generally divides people. (198)
Arun Prabha Mukherjee, the English translator of Joothan comments, “Valmiki does not, cannot, claim the authority to address a national collectivity. On the contrary, he aims to point out the exclusion of people like him from the imagined community of the nation” (xxxviii).
Shobha Shinde has remarked, “Joothan is one among a body of Dalit writings that is unified by an ideology, an agenda and a literary aesthetic. The text becomes a part of a social movement for equality and justice” (97-8).
It is through the politics of identity that Dalits have successfully re-negotiated narrative authority since the nature of autobiography itself means that Dalit identity confers on the autobiographer a kind of uncontestable authority to speak. Paul Gilroy has claimed that “for African American autobiographies, that is, a process of ‘self-emancipation’ in the creation of a ‘dissident space’ within the public sphere” (11). At the same time, as Gilroy claimed, they are also, a process of ‘self-creation’ through the narration of a public persona. Thus, autobiography also serves as means for Dalit writers to reclaim narrative authority over the construction of the Dalit self.
References:
- Gilroy, Paul in “ Autobiograpghy and Black Identity Politics: Racializationin twentieth century America” Ed. Kenneth Monstern. Cambridge U.K.: CUP, 1999.p.11 Print.
- 2.Kumar, Raj. Dalit Personal Narratives: Reading Caste, Nation and Identity. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2010. Print.
- 3.Mukherjee, Arun Prabha. Trans. “Introduction.” Joothan:A Dalit’s Life. Kolkata: Samya, 2003. xi-xlii. Print.
- Niruphama R., Saptarshi Mandal, and Shritha K. Vasudevan. Three Studies on Law, and The Shifting Social Spaces of Justice. Kolkata: Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, 2008. www.mcrg.ac.in. Web. 13 May 2010.
- 5.Pawde, Kumud. “The Story of My Sanskrit.” Poisoned Bread: Translations from Marathi Dalit Literature. Ed. Arjun Dangle. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2009. 110-122. Print.
- Shinde, Shobha. “From Erasure to Assertion: The Text and Context of Joothan.” Critical Practice Vol. XIV (2007): 97-8. Print.