The thought of a Dalit has no value, so self-respect precedes #dalitlivesmatter Part 1-3

Raees Muhammad

Foreword

As a fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, I unearthed the buried and erased toilets in the Institute building, later in academics and then in Indian society. We have always loved to talk about how beautiful one‘s experience is when shitting in the open. Open defaecation is a much romanticised act. Indians always kept these two things away from their shit; their living space and their burial ground. Like our brother Malcolm X said “Chicken has come home to roost”, it’s now that Shit has come home to smell. The colonial architecture was not only an architectural marvel but its a place where one can study how the Britishers incorporated caste when they were in India. These architectures had their own life and these toilets were the place where the social life was incorporated into a building and buried.

This is a story of how the idea that I built brick by brick to this day has been standing alone all this while. It started somewhere in A10, Basheer Hostel of EFLU, but it had come out in an intervention in Bilaspur House toilet while shitting on the beautiful western commode revamping my memories of anti-caste movement and scavenging. I found that I have reached a dead end. This was the first thing that changed my research and life completely.  We have a situation in India where scavenging continues and we continue to write about the negligence of the state and civil society. Then there are the atrocities where we talk about the failure of state and civil society. This is the usual narration we have in our society about scavengers.  But I made an interesting intervention with the help of a small insight made by Rama Hansraj that all these people are migrants. This initiated my research. I found her insight to be true and until now no one including myself could make the issue of ‘migration’ of dalits as a burning point in academia, civil society or in the dalit movement.  Even in Tamil Nadu, the caste I belong to is addressed as migrants. The interesting departure I made in this research is through the argument that when we study scavenging or its population we have to look at whether they are actually a migrant or we want them to be a migrant. I argue that it’s not that they are migrants but that we don’t want to imagine them as natives. Because every language state is imagined and built as a ‘model’, (Kerala model, Tamil past, etc) which doesn’t want to take responsibility for the degrading human labor in a given state. For example, the Tamil nation’s imagination is pure and sacred and in that population, we cannot have scavengers as part of it. So they are never assimilated or even pushed out of a given society. I wanted to bring it as a book and due to Covid it has become difficult and hope it comes out soon.

As you know me coming to Dalit Camera full time was not a choice but I was forced and all academic doors (except for South Africa, University of West Cape, Department of Humanities) I don’t find I am welcomedHave not welcomed me. My passion was to write about the history of toilets in India. I sometimes jokingly say that what unites Indians across the borders is not their religion or language, but their shitting behavior. We prefer water and the Indian commode. In my study, I want to revisit the Indian civilization because I feel the toilet and the drainage practices are close to the Arab world, which cuts across Pakistan and Afganistan, and which can be closely related to the practices of the Muslim world. I am not born with a caste who could have the privilege to write a book to which everyone pays attention. This study can unravel so many things of Indian culture, especially the emergence of caste can be traced to it.

After I found out the societal references to scavengers as “migrant”, I started thinking in the Toilet what next. There has to be something apart from we shitting every day. Someone calling us migrants cannot be the crime or root of the problem. There has to be something and Zizek’s intervention that toilet is an ideology was eye-opening and I started to engage. I made another and a very important contribution in anti-caste study, and it’s writings. That unlike Zizek’s argument, in India its not about the toilet, but it’s about the social location of that given toilet is what unique. We don’t mind whether we shit outside, anywhere but we mind that space should not be next to our living space. This research took me to unravel all the caste Hindu sociologists / Anthropologists’ theorization of caste. I found they were the earliest bhakts who diverted our attention from caste discrimination to caste itself, that its not unique to India. The first person is Mary Douglas’ work “purity and danger”, prof. Veena Das and the feminist approach to caste; then it goes to the recent Prof. Sudipta Kaviraj, Prof. Sumit Guha and Prof. Dipesh Chakrabarthy. This travel was so enlightening that I was taken to the path of Islam not because I read its ideology or because I spoke to those muslims who embraced Islam. But because a decade long research on toilet in the India civilisation revealed that only Islam has a very revolutionary approach to it. Even Buddhism fails at this front, and it’s later that I started to engage with Islam I found so many concepts and practices that are revolutionary in its own way and this started shaping my entire idea of Islam and this is the reason I also embraced.

So I worked on a paper for 3 years and I left everything for this paper and it was all that I had for me for the last three years. I forwarded this paper to my Director of CHR, UWC, he read it and said this paper has the potential to even contribute or critique one of Michael Foucault’s work. I sent this paper to few professors and they said all things discussed are new and that it is an important paper. But No one could offer a position or a fellowship to work on it for a book. Maybe they even felt it’s not as important. I felt I wanted to make a book and also wanted to get some validation from the academic community. I sent papers and applied for a post-doc fellowship. I hardly got any responses and it hurt a lot that after so much of labour to produce an idea, I did not get an audience. Sadly, in some places, I applied for a job and I was not even called for an interview. It was exactly the experiences I witnessed on the ground where dalit activists argue differently and the academia and English speaking spaces scrutinize whose voices are to be heard and whose to be buried. With this Dalit Camera platform, they might not succeed in suppressing my voice.

The ideas presented in this paper are not mine alone but it has been shaped by the Dalit camera activity and the innumerable activists who shaped this thought and interaction with my parents and friends. Since I was pushed out of academics, I find this space that kept me alive all along and keeps me rolling is the place I publish the article I wrote. If you enjoy reading it please do circulate to academics whomever you know, its important I engage with them. Last but not least a prominent sociologist from UoH humiliated me that I am not eligible to be a researcher. I remember her.

Abstract

The paper discusses Indian’s behavior in using and the reasons often considered constructing toilets. I argue irrespective of one’s religion spatial in India are treated as per the Hindu knowledge of purity and pollution.  This can be visualized by the way Indians demarcating spatial structures between the temple/house/public spatial and the toilet, likewise to humans the ideology divided between untouchables to touchable. This ideology was reinforced in individual houses by demarcating spatial between the toilet and the main habitable space in the house. This was also adopted in the government workforce while recruiting members from particular caste to cleaning work.  In this paper, I argue these demarcations are a fixed category to Hinduism and these categories are reinforced and reproduced through architectures and space.  

Purity, Pollution and the Politics of Space in Hindu Society

My grandfather named my father, ‘Beauty!’ Our landlord calls him, “Hey, Blackie!” Blacks are forbidden to have good names. It was said, “Knowledge and blackness do not go together”. When a male child is born in his house We ask, “Is the newborn, a prince?” If female we ask, “Is it a queen?” When we call, we usually get an answer with a ‘da!”  I am “Mr.Gunasekar”, when he visits my office. It’s my boy!” in the town It’s “Elay!”  in the cheri. [translated from Tamil by P. Rajani]

–        K.A Gunasekaran

Like in the poem, dalits in India have different names in different spaces, a characteristic peculiar to caste. Caste is a system which has many aspects to it, and is often discussed in relation to its community, class, division of labour, or endogamy aspects. I argue that the most unique aspect of caste is in its ideology of having two sets of people, the pure (caste Hindus) and the impure (outcastes). The impure (outcastes) are those who engage in the act of removing polluting substances. The non-polluted/pure (caste Hindus) are those who can access temples, and control the movement of the outcastes according to the pollution rules enshrined in the caste system. The main aim of the pollution rules is to keep the polluting substances away from the caste Hindus. For, in Hinduism, keeping oneself away from pollution is important not only to enter the temple, but also as an everyday activity, irrespective of whether one goes to a temple or not. 

But what does it mean to keep oneself unpolluted? The human body produces different kinds of waste such as mucus, urine, sweat, feaces, filth, menstrual blood, etc. The body always has polluted substances in it, but in Hinduism it is important to keep these polluted substances away from contact. Then, when does the substance, and in turn the body, become polluted? The substance becomes polluted after it leaves the body and sight. The body becomes polluted while releasing the substance. This polluted body can be cleansed with water to remove the pollution.

Since the polluted substance could pollute the body of the caste Hindus, polluted substances are restricted to certain spaces in a given village. The outcastes’ duty is to empty or remove or carry the waste to the designated space, away from caste-Hindu habitat. Untouchables, then, are important to keep the caste Hindus away from polluting substances.

In Hinduism, anything dead is considered polluted. Even when a caste Hindu person dies,  his/her family will consider the dead as impure and abstain from touching him/her. Hence, the untouchables are used to dispose of the filth or impure object.  Similarly, when the domesticated cattle die, they become polluted and caste-Hindus abstain from touching the carrion. Untouchables are assigned to remove these polluted bodies. The pollution rules become particularly stringent when it comes to those castes whose caste occupation is to remove human waste. At this stage, the pollution rules, although irrational, are rationalised by the caste system, and the enforcement of superiority on the pure creates a material inferiority for the polluted.

The caste Hindus police the outcastes to perform their duty, which is enshrined in pollution rules. The caste hindus also exercise control over the outcastes and the space they access. This practice has permeated into the culture of South Asia and influenced followers/practitioners of different religions and is not restricted to the followers of Hinduism alone. Unlike other occupations prescribed in the caste system, the outcastes are forced to provide  services without expecting anything in return. Rather than a service, the occupation of the outcastes is a form of servitude to the caste-Hindus, as I will outline below.

Policing Space and Bodies

In the caste system, having control over each caste’s spatial location and place of living is crucial to control the polluted. The system does not stop with the location but also polices the movements of outcastes in each village, similar to the working of institutionalized apartheid in South Africa and slavery in Europe and Western countries. Ambedkar, who fought and wrote an extensive amount of literature on the caste system observed that  caste system is a system equal to slavery. I quote,

‘Slavery is a very ancient institution of the Hindus. It is recognised by Manu, the Hindu lawgiver and has been elaborated and systematised by the other Smriti writers who followed Manu.’ (Vol 5: 9)

While differntiating between  slavery and free labour he wrote,  

‘Under slavery a breach of contract of service is an offence, which is punishable with fine or imprisonment. Under free labour a breach of contract of service is only a civil wrong for which the labourer is liable only for damages. Judged in the light of this criterion, scavenging is a legal obligation imposed upon the Untouchables which they cannot escape.’ (Ambedkar Vol: 5)

This policing of the worker, whose body is considered polluted also extended to his physical being and the manner in which he was expected to carry himself. As the Manusmriti notes:

‘[52]. Their dress (shall be) the garments of the dead, (they shall eat) their food from broken dishes, black iron (shall be) their ornaments, and they must always wander from place to place.

[54]. Their food shall be given to them by others (than an Aryan giver) in a broken dish; at night they shall not walk about in villages and in towns.

[55]. By day they may go about for the purpose of their work, distinguished by marks at the king’s command, and they shall carry out the corpses (of persons) who have no relatives; that is a settled rule.’

This is what distinguishes caste from say, a racist social system, however it doesn’t mean both are different. For here, members of the outcastes – the most polluted –  cannot be distinguished by color every time, but through markers such as shabby dress, where men should wear only their undergarment, remove their dhoti, and keep it between their hands, and women should tear the saree into small pieces and use that to cover the upper body. Most importantly the outcaste members most speak in a lower tone. The outcaste should not wear slippers, ride a cycle,  or sit in the bus.  In many places, dalit students should wear specific color wrist band to distinguish them from other students, and so on. These rules differ in different states. Though these markers have been becoming less prominent in the present generation, the inferior and the superior feeling ingrained in the system continues to exist through regulation and management of space and body. And should spatial boundaries be transgressed, punishment is severe.

As J V Pawar (2018) notes :

‘In 1972, Bawda village of Pune district, two dalit women were stripped and paraded naked at Brahmangaon (literally Brahmin village) in Parbhani district of Maharashtra. Their offence was that they were on their way to a well that belonged to an upper-caste(caste Hindu) sopan Dajiba to quench their thirst. Before they could even have a sip, the casteist villagers spotted them and used thorny branches of babool trees to hit their naked bodies.’

Transgression of spatial markers extends to all other things – objects and acts – that mark spatial purity. Dalits suffer and are hurt when they seek to own these objects and acts. When People’s Watch, an NGO working as a watchdog against caste violence based in Madurai, Tamil Nadu discusses the reason for 100 dalits houses being burnt down in Coimbatore, they pointed out that the violence was the result of enforcement of rules which ensured spatial purity in the village:

‘Dalits are not allowed to walk in the streets of the upper-caste Hindus, denied entry to the village Mariamman temple for worship. The tea shops have separate glasses or tumblers for the Dalits and the upper-caste Hindus. Dalits are neither allowed to walk on the streets freely, discussing or talking among themselves. In public, Dalits are forced to lower their heads to demonstrate their inferior status. Caste-based abusive language, intimidation and humiliation, often coloured by sexual references are typically used against the Dalits; Dalit women especially undergo sexual harassment and assault.’ (People’s Union for Civil Liberties 2004).

In addition to being punished for any attempts at spatial transgression, Dalits were also forbidden spatial autonomy of any kind. On 16th September 1954, Ambedkar while discussing the motion Untouchability (offence) Act 1955 in the Rajya Sabha, in the 7th session said:

‘Under the customary Punjab law, the snamilat [common] land could be shared only by those communities which were called zamindars, hereditary land-owning communities. The others were non-zamindars. They were called Lamina, that is to say, they belonged to a low class, and they were not entitled to share in the land. Consequently, they could not build their houses in a pucca form on the land on which they stayed. They were always afraid lest the zamindars[feudal lords] of Punjab may, at any time, turn them out. And the people did not venture to build permanently.’ (2426)

Continues………..Part 2 will be published on 18th and part 3 will be published on 19th.

write to the author Raees Muhammad [email protected]