Читать книгу Death, Beauty, Struggle - Margaret Trawick - Страница 9
ОглавлениеIntroduction
When you’re looking for something you haven’t yet seen, what you encounter may be entirely different from what you expect. Among my unsought experiences have been the people, the stories, and the songs appearing in this book. Franz Boas realized that the Inuit, then called Eskimo, knew more than geologists about the geology of the area that he studied and where they lived. This led him to the more powerful discovery that the Inuit language, though having no written literature, was as complex as any of the languages Boas already knew, and from there to the discovery that every human language is as complex, as intricately and precisely organized, as every other (Stocking 1974).1 For others, it may be the breakthrough that some barely literate person knows better than you (who are highly educated) how your shared world is constituted. This discovery may or may not lead you to reconsider a whole category of people you previously hardly knew, and further to reconsider the premises on which human beings are categorized in the first place—the premises underlying divisions of religion, gender, race, family, class, and nation.
The world I inhabited in India could not be more different from the world in which I now live. True, there are many different worlds in India. Some are hellish, some are heavenly, and most are a mixture of both. The art, the food, the way coffee is poured, how everyday work is turned into dance, the music, the stories, the smiles, the laughter, the weeping, the jokes, the puns, the scents of jasmine and sandalwood are heavenly. But the poverty, the cruelties inflicted on the vulnerable, the needlessly dying children, the diseases floating through the water, lying in the soil, and wafting through the wind are hell.
Coming from America, traveling to India, and living there for eighteen months with my own baby changed me. I became addicted to idlis and sambar, with Indian coffee on the side. Total immersion in the Tamil language made me better at conversational Tamil, a skill more valuable than either Tamils or Anglos could easily comprehend. Even some of those who have grown up multilingual do not perceive the value of this skill. I met babies who were taught two or three languages as they grew up. Those few with whom I have kept up have flourished.
The experience of living in India made me see, among other things, that people in India can and do live on less than I had been accustomed to. But beyond this I saw extreme poverty. I was waiting at a bus stop, with several other people, when a little boy came to us holding a limp, thin baby over his shoulder. The other people at the bus stop turned away. I had been taught not to give money to a beggar, even a beggar child, because the child would just take the money back to whatever adult was controlling him or her. I gave the boy some food I had just bought, and told him to share it with the baby. Later I witnessed other cases of children being used by adults in this callous way. It was clear that the baby at the bus stop would die if it did not get serious medical attention, and I thought to myself, what if that were my child? But if I took such a baby in my arms, how could I bring it back to life? Was there a doctor, an agency somewhere, that would do this?
Returning from India to America brought a series of new shocks. “Culture shock” it was called then, by returning Peace Corps volunteers. Over time we came to see that America and India have some things in common, bad things, in particular the fact that certain categories of people are subject to discrimination despite laws forbidding it. In both countries, such discrimination entails forced exclusion from some places, such as temples, where one might want to go, forced inclusion in other places, such as prisons, where one would not want to go, police violence, civilian violence, violence by men against women, violence by the highly ranked against those whose rank is low. And aside from violence is the sneering contempt for those one considers one’s inferiors. Poverty of people marked from birth by skin color, by caste, and by sex is an inevitable consequence of such practices. Neglect and hatred of such people in both countries promotes terrible violence. Most people here have no clue of what is happening there, and vice versa. In America, the outcastes are African Americans. In India, they are Dalits. Both African Americans and Dalits have been known by other, uglier names. In this introduction, a disproportionate number of words are spent on caste, untouchability, and poverty. In subsequent chapters, other topics assume priority.
The three words in the main title—death, beauty, struggle—indicate what Dalits of both sexes mean to the Indian world, what untouchable women strive to be and to create, and what their lives are, relentlessly, to the end.
I chose to keep the word “untouchable” in the subtitle of this book because India has not modernized to the extent that is sometimes claimed. Untouchability was outlawed in India in 1948, but still it remains. To an American, a black or brown person who belongs to one caste or jāti looks the same as a black or brown person who belongs to another caste. But to a person born and raised in India, subtle clues are enough to give a lower-caste person away. The caste system, with all its prejudices, remains deeply entrenched in Indian society. The term “Dalit” means “ground down, broken, oppressed.” This term indicates that it is not the fault of the oppressed people that they are oppressed; higher-caste people have caused them this harm. The use of the term “Dalit” is one of multiple efforts to change the caste system, based on old Hindu ideas of purity and pollution, and bit by bit, in some places, for some people, it has changed. But even for Dalits who make it into universities and colleges, the pain and the stigma remain.2
The word “women” in the subtitle is, on the surface, self-explanatory. I was not seeking out only women as informants, but it was easier for women to talk with me because I was also a woman. Women told me more than men did about their lives, and women are the main people in this book. The songs and stories relayed in this book are, with one exception, by women, and without exception about women. Numerous books and articles have been written by and about women in India. Few have been written about nonliterate Dalit women in India, real ones and not fictional ones. Perhaps even fewer of such women’s songs and narratives have been considered to be verbal art. To my knowledge, few of their words, sung or narrated, have been published, although this situation is changing.
The most problematic part of my subtitle is the last phrase: “create the world.” A widespread view holds that only the educated can understand what the world is about. Only the educated can philosophize and theorize. Only the educated can think. But that is not true.
The chapters in this book move over time, from oldest to most recent, as they also move over space from urban to rural to forest edge to placelessness, and back to urban again. Sarasvati/Māriamman lives in an accessible urban home and in a great temple. Siṅgammā comes from a nomadic tribe, and she herself is a wandering ghost, whose place of burial is inaccessible, whose name and story are obscure. It took this writer decades to get from the first to the last. There is an advantage to obscurity, to singing words with too many meanings, to being where one cannot be found. The disadvantages are both clear and abundant.
This book was made initially of memories—memories of personal experiences, of things read, of things said, of images created in my mind of realities that I never experienced. Reading gives me information, including memories, that I can come back to, or discover for the first time. Putting what I want to say into writing allows me to re-create all this and give it a kind of coherence. For people who cannot read or write, life is different.
Events of the Past That Have Contributed to the Formation of Present Conditions
The history of people now called “untouchable” is an intrinsic part of the history and prehistory of the South Asian subcontinent.3 In present times, the presumed original people of India are called Adivasis and are considered by caste Hindus to be untouchable. The actual first human beings to settle in the subcontinent arrived fifty thousand years or more ago, with the first coastal migrations out of Africa (Pope and Terrell 2008; Wells 2002). Some may have followed the ocean coasts entirely. Some may have traveled up rivers like the Indus. But those who kept on, generation after generation, through centuries, went as far as they could go until they reached Australia, beyond which further travel eastward was not possible. As they traveled they left settlements along the way, including settlements in Sri Lanka, the Andaman Islands, and the southern part of the Indian subcontinent. Modes of living in the subcontinent moved from fishing and forest dwelling to small-scale farming and herding; to countless different ways of living, of speaking, of organizing families and communities; to walled towns, to warfare, temples and palaces, kingdoms and empires. People came and went throughout the subcontinent, and to and from distant lands. As time went on, in addition to solo travelers and small groups of travelers, there came large invasions, mass migrations, conquests, bigger wars. And as all of this was happening, all the other modes of living continued, albeit becoming increasingly marginalized.4
The Indus Valley Civilization was the first civilization in South Asia and the largest of the three great civilizations in the world at that time. It had no boundaries. People in that civilization practiced agriculture and horticulture, irrigation, trade with distant countries, metallurgy, and remarkable art. The cities had well-laid-out streets and well-engineered water management and sewage systems. There was writing but it has not yet been deciphered. The language spoken may have been Proto-Dravidian or Austroasiatic. No clear sign of royalty or religion has been found by archaeologists of the last century and a half, although some of the artwork could be interpreted as religious. Archaeological research remains ongoing. The civilization continued as such until around 1500 BCE. Possible causes for its decline and end are many, including immigration of new people, drought, and deforestation (Bryant 2001, 159–60; Lawler 2008, 1282–83; Knipe 1991).
Subsequently Vedic cultures came into their own. There were few or no horses in South Asia until around 1500 BCE, when horsemen came from Central Asia across the Himalayas, bringing not only horses (Doniger 2009, chapters 4–5) but their language and culture with them, including long poems that they had memorized. It is difficult to know when their technique of memorization began, as they had no writing system before they entered the subcontinent. The earliest written Sanskrit texts were called the Vedas (“what is known”). They were transmitted orally through generations of ritual specialists. Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas, an Indo-European language related to Latin and Greek, spread throughout the whole subcontinent, but mainly through northern India. The oldest and best known of the Vedas was the Rig Veda. It is said to have been composed in northwest India somewhere between 1700 and 1100 BCE. That would have made it nearly contemporaneous with the Indus Valley Civilization and geographically close to it.5
The Rig Veda contains some beautiful, evocative poems, beginning with one that says:
There was neither existence nor non-existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose protection? Was there water, bottomlessly deep? There was neither death nor immortality then. There was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day. That one breathed, windless, by its own impulse. Other than that, there nothing beyond. Darkness was hidden by darkness, in the beginning. With no distinguishing sign, all this was water. The life force that was covered with emptiness, that one arose through the power of heat.…Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen? Whence this creation has arisen—perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not. (Doniger 1981, 25)
Doniger (2009, chapter 4) argues that a merger between Vedic cultures and Indus Valley cultures resulted in the Hindu cultures and religions that came after these two cultures met. But—again according to Doniger (2009, chapter 5)—whereas the Indus Valley cultures appear to have been benign (Doniger 2009, chapter 3), Vedic cultures were violent from the beginning. Distinguishing the beauty from the horror of the Vedic texts is not an easy job. An elderly Brahman who lived in southern Tamil Nadu told me that there were parts of the Vedas so cruel he had to wash himself after reading them. But the ideological construct of purity and pollution far predates my friend. Certain acts are polluting. Certain acts are cleansing. But no amount of fire or water can drive away certain memories. How could it have felt to sacrifice something as full of life, fine, and beautiful as a horse? The Purusha Sukta hymn in the Rig Veda describes the origin of humankind from the sacrifice of the Cosmic Self (Purusha). That self was divided into pieces, which became different kinds of human being. To whom could such a level of abstraction, with such a current of violence running beneath it, be satisfying?
A Vedic religion developed based on the Rig Veda. At first only wandering ascetics taught these ideas. But as time went on, Brahmanism grew as a religion. Brahmanism is a form of Hinduism, from which religion the idea of varnas arose. This idea was codified in a book called in Sanskrit Manavadharmashastra, or in English, the Laws of Manu. It was said to have been written about 200 BCE. The term varna meant “color” for adherents to Brahmanism and also meant a category of human being. There were four varnas: Brahmans, whose work was to be priests and teachers and whose color was white; Kshatriyas, whose profession was to be kings and warriors and whose whose color was red; Vaishyas, whose profession was to be merchants and traders and whose color was yellow; and Shudras, whose job was to be servants and workers and whose color was black. The top three groups were “twice-born” or dvija. The fourth group was not. Below the Shudras were people who were of mixed birth. The twice-born were inherently privileged. Brahmans were the most privileged of all. They were considered to be gods on earth. Their word was not to be gainsaid. Apologists for the varna system say that it has nothing to do with skin color. Others say that Brahmans were people who came from the north, and that is the reason they are white. The current love of white skin in India is said to be an aesthetic preference only. But the social damage done to dark-skinned people in India, most of all dark-skinned women, is enormous.
Before the varna system was established, there were kingdoms as well as many endogamous groups of people throughout India, and probably also exogamous ones. These groups were not necessarily ranked against each other. One may trace concepts of ranked castes and untouchability back to the ideological development in the subcontinent that started with the Vedas. This ideology moved on and took hold and still is powerful in India. The subjugation of women and of working classes was and remains part of this ideology. According to the Laws of Manu, women are carnal creatures and should never be trusted, while molten lead should be poured in the ears of a low-caste person who hears the Vedas.
Any hierarchical social system can be maintained only by violence. Vedic society was hierarchical and violent from the beginning. The situation of people categorized by social rank, prescribed types of work, color, and sex in India extends to the first implementation of Vedic ideology. The text by Manu is still considered sacred by many Hindus. Not all Hindus follow it, though. Some Brahmans abhor the level of cruelty preached in the Vedic texts. The Tamil text Thirukkuṟaḷ, said to have been composed during the fifth or sixth century CE, teaches kindness, love, and generosity toward all, including wife and children. It is a much read, much adored book among Tamil people. Manu, who wrote the Laws of Manu, is believed to have been a Brahman. Thiruvaḷḷuvar, who wrote the Thirukkuṟaḷ, is said to have been a Jain, a Paṟaiyar, a weaver—definitively the first, but conceivably all three. In Tamil Sangam poetry, written about two thousand years ago, Kuṟavars, now classified as untouchable, were described admiringly.
Alternatives to Vedic Hinduism were always there, and they too developed and drew followers. Buddhism and Jainism were strong movements. Christian communities became established in India from the coming of Thomas the Apostle in the third century CE. Muslim traders lived in India from shortly after Islam was founded in the seventh century CE. In southern India, around the sixth century CE, an intensely emotional form of self-sacrifice developed. The saints were worshippers of Siva or Vishnu, two Hindu gods. Caste differences were not acknowledged. Personal devotion was everything. This form of religion continues in southern India. It is called bhakti. Christianity and Islam continue in India as minority religions. Buddhism flourished for centuries then moved to other parts of Asia.
Muslim rule in northern India started in the thirteenth century. Until the sixteenth century, Persianate Muslims (with Persian language and culture) ruled most of northeast India. They were supplanted by the militarily superior Mughals (Mongols), who claimed descent from Genghis Khan. A hybrid Muslim empire developed in India, where they remained as warriors, conquering almost all of India except the very far south. Though militarily mighty, they are said to have been good rulers and good administrators. They also introduced fine Muslim art, literature, textiles, architecture, and maritime and administrative skills. These rulers were not in principle opposed to Hindus or any particular caste. Islam teaches the equality of all men. Therefore caste differences were not officially recognized by Mughal rulers, but status and rank remained in the form of zamindars, whose positions were sometimes hereditary; they owned vast tracts of land and taxed the peasants who worked on that land. The zamindars maintained military organizations, took royal titles, lived in lavish splendor, and acted as sovereign kings. When the British proceeded to gain control of India by military means, zamindars fought the British who challenged them. Area by area, the British won. Muslims did not recognize women as the equals of men. Neither, for that matter, did the British, some strong and valiant queens notwithstanding. In Pukkatturai, the small town where I lived for a year, there was an old broken temple that had been destroyed by the Muslims, I was told. The family deity of the Hindu household was a grandmother who killed her grandchildren to save them from Muslim depredations. There is no way to ascertain whether this actually happened. But there are still antagonisms, sometimes murderous riots, between Muslims and Hindus in India. Partition between India and Pakistan, implemented at the end of British rule, contributed to this antagonistic division of people and religions.
Subcontinental thought changed with the British Raj, which brought in its own ideas about people in India and how they should be organized, classified, and characterized. Every tribe and every caste was considered to be what it always was and what it always would be. Absolute determinism was law. Nobody could change caste and nobody could take on an occupation different from that of his or her parents. All forest-dwelling tribes and all itinerant tribes were judged by the British Raj to be criminal because they were able to live outside the organizations established by the Raj. They were outlaws in a sense, therefore outcastes, but they were not necessarily killers or thieves. Laborers who worked for landowners were slaves, bonded to the land on which they worked. The caste system was solidified under the British then pronounced illegal by the early postindependence government. This law could not be enforced. Subsequent laws prohibiting untouchability and discrimination against lower caste individuals were passed with little effect. Cross-caste marriage was encouraged by the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, C. N. Annadurai, in 1967, and a number of marriages between Brahman women and men of scheduled castes have happened after that and have been successful.6 But in 2007, the Supreme Court of India ruled that social organization based on caste is inherited and cannot be changed.7
Events of the past remain also in the form of stone carvings and written materials. Experiences of the past are inscribed in bodies of the present. Hunger is passed down through generations. If a woman cannot eat well, her baby will be smaller. If her baby grows up and has a baby, that baby will be smaller still. And so on. Events of the past held only in memory are free to change. Bodies may take generations to recover from trauma. Written materials, whether old or new, can be read and discussed today, and they may change people’s lives today. But written materials are fixed. These are inaccessible to the nonliterate. Literary information comes to them from a variety of sources, all of them human, most of them having their own agendas. To a nonliterate Dalit they may say, from a distance, “Your job is to do such-and-such and not so-and-so,” and some Dalits may accede to this command. Others may not.
Memory is selective. The British Raj did much to rigidify caste boundaries.8 When the Mughals ruled, they ruled over a hierarchical civilization which they themselves helped create. Hindu kingdoms before them managed varna hierarchies. The histories of peasants have been mostly forgotten, as have been the histories of forest-dwelling peoples. Victorian mores together with the necessity of caste and the oppression of women have been accepted as primordial by many people in India who call themselves Hindu. But none of the people now classified as scheduled castes or scheduled tribes were always untouchables. A few centuries ago, some histories say, they were respected and honored. It is safe to say that ten millennia ago, when people were as human as they are now, there were no hierarchical orders in South Asia at all. To have a hierarchy you need material surplus. Before the Neolithic age, people had no such surplus. Descendants of those who lived in South Asia then still live in South Asia now. This concept may be hard to grasp for Americans whose ancestors came to this continent just a few centuries ago or more recently still. Native Americans are as marginalized here as Adivasis are in India today.
Poverty and Disease
As early as the Sangam period in Tamil Nadu, drought for lack of rain was named in the texts as a danger. Rain is praised lavishly in ten early verses of the Thirukkuṟaḷ. During British rule, famines in India took countless lives. Millions of Dalits in the Madras Presidency, now Tamil Nadu, died from the famine of 1876–78 (Kolappan 2013). During famines in the British period, grain was hoarded by landholders. British in India took what was grown as food and sold it overseas. The workers were the ones that died. These events have been remembered by survivors. Food is carefully looked after. Food is the most important thing. No hungry person must see another eating. The necessity of feeding another before one feeds oneself is an unwritten rule, closely followed. But in a hierarchical social system, which direction the food goes in is of utmost concern, and the direction is down. The lowest eat the leftovers. Those who own the crops own the world. Hunger is always just around the corner and has been that way for millennia in southern India. Memories are passed on through generations. Seeds are cherished, planted, and reaped. The memory of a past better than the present remains. In the struggles of the present, little space remains in the mind to consider the long-term future. And honestly, how much can anyone predict? Memories of mythic heroes and heroines played out in street and temple dramas, Bible stories, stories of gods, stories of sacrifice, battle, triumph, and slaughter all enter into the lives of people who watch them as street or temple theater. Such stories from long ago are reenacted in household and family dramas, in village dramas, and in song. In such dramas, a man may beat or kill his wife or sister if he deems her faithless. A landlord may beat or kill a worker if he catches the worker stealing. Epic battles of higher versus lower castes are carried out. People of lower castes may be deemed monkeys. But children are to be loved, cherished, enjoyed, dressed up.9
Disease does not affect only the poor. Communicable disease spreads to everyone. Immunities can protect a person but not completely. Bacteria and viruses change every year so that an immunity from last year will not necessarily help this year. And there are many different diseases caused by many different kinds of organism. All diseases caused by microorganisms spread. Some can be prevented and some can be treated; others one just has to live through. Most preventions and treatments fail to reach everybody. Those who are not reached can only pray, recover by themselves, or die. In India, countless millions are not reached.
The people who must clean up raw human excrement and untreated sewage in India are people of the lowest castes. Manual scavenging of underground sewers by men, and of above-ground excrement by women, continues throughout India to this day. Disease and death from this work are not uncommon (Times of India 2015; Campbell 2014). This is a special problem in the cities and in tropical areas.
Poverty causes hunger, which weakens a person and makes them more vulnerable to disease, which in turn can kill the afflicted. Babies and little children are the most vulnerable. They get into contaminated water, get diarrhea, and die of dehydration. Antibiotics and careful rehydration combined with nourishing food can save a child in danger of dying. Cholera is a big killer of children as well as of adults, but again, skilled treatment can save the sufferer from death. If there is no therapy available, the person, whether adult or child, dies. In India, for the very poor, no prevention is available, and likewise no therapy can be had. Wherever people, including children, defecate in the open, other children are likely to get sick. Some will recover and some will die. There are simply not enough doctors in India willing and able to treat so many sick and dying children. I once saw a doctor turn away such a dying baby, washing his hands and telling me, “That baby is dead.”
What poverty does to people, most of all to people categorized as untouchable, is painful to contemplate. Poverty can mean humiliation. Poverty can mean starvation. It can mean not having enough. It can mean having to decide which children to feed how much. Poverty can lead to malnutrition, which can cause vulnerability to disease and ultimately to death. The prospects of poverty, starvation, and death are terrifying to anyone who must face them. Dalits are most likely to face poverty, because they are considered dispensable by landowners and indeed by anyone of a higher caste. If they can make themselves indispensable by any means, then they can eat. But they will not necessarily eat well. This topic is addressed most poignantly in Chapters 1 and 5 of this book.
Pregnancy and childbirth are dangers afflicting only women. These dangers are well known. Healthy young women with good midwives and/or doctors available, and modern technology to assist, are in less danger of suffering and dying. Such care was not always available even for the wealthy. Now it is. But the poor in India, above all untouchables, have little or no access to such easy amenities. Doctors are often not kind and not fair. Fair treatment means treating all patients with the same degree of competence and concern.
Breast-feeding a baby for as long as three years or more is, among the poor in India, one of the best ways to keep a child healthy. Babies are passed around. In some societies, women will share the breast-feeding of babies. I don’t know if this happens in India, but I have seen a grandmother nursing a grandchild of hers in a village of Tamil Nadu. Such practices are considered backward by modern Indians. In other contexts, they make perfect sense.
In India, people who live in cities stand a better chance of making a living than people who live in the countryside. But life for the poor in an Indian city is no easier than in the countryside. The poorest in the countryside flock to the cities, where giant slums have grown and continue to grow. Raw sewage runs in the streets, iridescent black or green and toxic. People sleep wherever they can. If they have a work space, they sleep in the work space. The hardest working, most ingenious people in the world live in Indian slums. While information technology and other computer technologies have become a source of employment for educated Indian youth, the slums are where recycling of plastic and other useless waste is done, not by machines but by human hands. Dharavi in Mumbai is the largest, most renowned slum. But there are slums in every city. Infectious disease is the biggest killer. Starvation, mostly of children, continues. Tiny, skeletal, barely alive bodies may be seen with their mothers in railway stations. A starving girl child may still be dressed in pretty clothes.
Contempt of the poor is undisguised. Most Dalits are poor. Although India is, in name, a democracy, democratic sentiments are scarce in that country. The continued reality of caste discrimination is both cause and result of the long-standing malice against the poor and people of the lowest castes. Maltreatment accompanies malice. Neglect fosters poverty and death. The feeling expressed again and again is that the poor deserve their fate, just as low-caste people deserve theirs. Poverty in India is severe, with rural Dalit women and children faring worst of all. Meanwhile some Dalits, in efforts to raise their status, are encouraged to join right-wing political parties which promise that everyone who joins their party may “become a Hindu”—as though Hinduism were a club. The reports go on and on.
Polarization of wealth is now more serious than ever in India, as it is in America. Political corruption, use of political office to enrich oneself and one’s friends, and use of wealth to obtain political office have reached new heights in recent decades. New opportunities for individuals and corporations to amass enormous wealth have increased with globalization, and cheap labor is easily found in India. The tremendously wealthy benefit directly at the expense of the very poor. This is happening in the United States, too, but the poorest are not as poor as the very poor in India.
Most of the people I have written about in this book lived in poor villages. Even the children of landlords about whom I have written previously were malnourished. They lived in crumbling old houses. Brahmans, and those who sought to be like Brahmans by adopting a Brahman diet, were badly disadvantaged unless they owned many cows and could provide their children with ample milk and milk-based products. But owning and maintaining even one milk cow was out of the range of some landlords. A buffalo would have been more practical. Goats and chickens would have been more practical still. But all of these animals require space, water, and feed.
Those who lived and worked in the fields and forests were sometimes better able to handle poverty than people whose lives were more rule-restricted even than untouchables. People of the lower castes were sometimes better nourished than Brahmans and those who aspired to be like Brahmans, because lower-caste rural people had a more diverse diet than poor Brahmans. Lower-caste people ate wild food, including field crabs and snails and wild greens, all of which the higher-caste people abjured. People of lower castes ate meat when they could get it, including beef and pork, and raised chickens and ducks when they had the means. But as the forests are destroyed and farmland is depleted, options for living are reduced.
Young people of every caste often aimed to get out of the village and into the city, where they had chances of getting better jobs. Decent nourishment in the hinterlands, when available, was not in itself enough to provide for a decent job. Good education could only be gotten in the cities. Some children moved up in this milieu. The children who moved up and out of poverty were those whose families valued education, who accepted this value, and got university degrees and good work in the cities. These children were both boys and girls. But they had to be allowed into school before they could be educated, and for most Dalits, school was a distant dream.
Those who came from families where literacy and learning were not part of the tradition had to work harder to learn and get ahead. Moreover, Dalit children were often excluded from village schools where caste children studied. Therefore they had little choice but to continue as physical laborers.
Unless one is a landowner, trying to make a living in rural Tamil Nadu is difficult if not impossible in most of the state because of droughts and desertification. Educated people born in villages head to the city for work. So do some uneducated people. But it is dangerous for a woman or girl to travel to a big city. She is in danger also if she stays in the rural village where she was born or into which she married. Thus being born a rural Dalit female is a multiple curse.
The Situation of Dalits in Southern India Now
One event affecting everyone in India, including Dalits, is the rise of the Internet. The accessibility of the Internet has greatly increased the quantity of available information about Dalits, much of it coming from Dalits themselves.10 But most Dalits, in particular the ones I write of here, have no access to the Internet, and so, no matter how insightful and useful what they say may be, they are effectively silenced. No newspaper story, no matter how accurate the content, no matter how riveting the account, can tell what nonliterate Dalit women may be thinking and saying as you sit, stand, or walk with them.
The word “Dalit” comes from the Maratha language and means “ground,” “suppressed,” “crushed,” or “broken.” These are people who until very recently were called “untouchable” in different languages throughout India. In Tamil, “untouchable” is tīṇḍā. People of higher castes have not automatically complied with the recent change of nomenclature. Untouchability was outlawed in India at independence. But most people have ignored this law. Nobody told the untouchable people that they were no longer untouchable.
People tagged as untouchable are not to be touched because their caste-assigned work is to clean away human feces, prepare human corpses for burial or cremation, skin dead animals and tan the skins, consume the meat of cattle who have met their end, and catch and eat other animals, including field rats, termites, and disease-bearing bandicoots (peruccāḷi in Tamil; translated word for word as “big rat”). A person born to a tīṇḍā caste is herself tīṇḍā. Regardless of what such a person eats or does not eat, touches or does not touch, does or does not do, she is considered poisonous, inferior both in body and in mind, inherently diseased and infectious. Even high-caste people who know that the system is wrong are disgusted at the thought of eating food prepared by a person of a much lower caste, no matter how clean in body and habits the person actually is. The word tīṇḍā indicates that a person so designated is inherently poisonous. That property is within her and she cannot change it, any more than a venomous snake can change the fact that its bite can kill.
The term Dalit implies that the oppression, the breaking, the grinding to pieces of Dalits was performed by someone other than the Dalits themselves, by foreigners and by higher-caste Indian people. A high-caste man said to me of the Dalits who worked for him in his village, “They call themselves ‘people who have been put down [tāṛttappaḍḍavarkaḷ].’ Did anyone order them to live as they do?” Even children of higher castes cannot play with children of the lowest castes, because then the higher-caste children would become “like them” (Trawick 1990, chapter 3, section 2).11 The very proximity of a tīṇḍā person could change you, who were innocent, into tīṇḍā. The concept of venom, of poison, is joined with the concepts of danger, of beauty, and of womanhood. These concepts are shown in Chapters 5 and 6 of this book.
In principle, possession of such a dangerous characteristic could confer a certain power on the person who was tīṇḍā, and in some villages such people did have an indispensable place in the ritual order. In some villages, certain deities with certain powers are controlled by the Dalits of that village, who benefit from this control. If they withdrew their services, the village could lose protection from malevolent spirits (Mines 2005). But as the status of a deity grows, the deity’s Dalit association may change. The politics surrounding ritual power and privilege is complex and involves all castes, from the highest Brahmans to the lowest untouchables. Extracting oneself, partly or entirely, from the bonds of Hindu ritual is a difficult task. Today the great inequalities imposed on those classified as tīṇḍā eclipse any ritual privileges they may have.
The poorest of the poor include the tīṇḍā. They are poor largely because they are tīṇḍā. When you are born into poverty, when you are turned away at every turn, when your children are not allowed in the village schools and you can’t afford schooling for them anyway, when you are forbidden to enter holy places and subject to scorn and discrimination in countless other ways, it is not so easy for you as an individual to raise your status higher. Members of lower castes have been working collectively to raise their status for generations.12 They try to raise the status of their caste as a whole—to behave as well-regarded people behave, to get education for their children, to secure reserved seats in governments and in universities, to make money. Housing and ownership of land can make the difference between prosperity and poverty, between food to eat and starvation. Those who seek to raise their living standards commonly think in terms of raising their caste status and think less of individual breakaways from tradition. Such breakaways happen, but they can carry high costs. Few people renounce the caste into which they were born. Although cross-caste marriage has been encouraged and rewarded by members of the Periyar movement and by M. G. Ramachandran of the DMK party in Tamil Nadu, such marriage is risky for the families involved. If one family member behaves in a forbidden manner, or even if a woman is shamed through no fault of her own, the whole family may be brought down. Hence “honor killings” continue to happen and continue to be honored even when relegated to the past.
The question of what it means to be Dalit brings in values of rank and caste, matters affecting, whether positively or negatively, Dalit social mobility and the role of language in Dalit social mobility.
It has been said that Dalits in modern South India accept the caste system as a whole; they just do not accept their place in it (Moffatt 1979). There is a ranked caste system among Dalits in some parts of Tamil Nadu. Those who are low in the overall system find people still lower than themselves. The overall caste system has been replicated on a smaller scale among Dalits in some places. Reports have recently (December 2014) appeared on the Internet of Paṟaiyars beating, raping, and killing members of the lowest castes. These reports come from members of the lowest castes, called Chakkilis or Arunthathiyars. Such reports indicate that solidarity among different Dalit castes is minimal. The power of the caste system appears ironclad on all levels. A highly educated Tamil friend of mine, who lives in Canada now, has suggested that the caste system is so widespread and entrenched because it is “sexy.” I disagreed with him when he said that, but maybe he had a point. Caste and sex in India go together hand in glove for more than a few men.13
Like people in India, people of all classes in the Anglophone nations are concerned with the minutiae of social rank. Likenesses between caste in India and race in America have been drawn by some scholars.14 The likenesses do not overshadow the differences, but the likenesses are indisputable. African Americans in the United States are regarded by some with fear and contempt just as untouchables in India are.
Nowadays the untouchable status of Paṟaiyars is linked to the ritual jobs that only they are allowed to do, jobs that are considered by caste Hindus to be severely polluting. The concept of pollution among caste Hindus is as entrenched as the caste system itself. In the American south, slaves could be cooks, and still today, black people cook in the homes of wealthy southern whites. They also clean the house and mind the children. Proper southern ladies do not do such work. In the days of slavery, a slave woman might nurse the baby of her white owner while the slave’s own baby would be left alone in the fields. Songs about this practice are sung even now. No antipathy toward the owners, no anger comes through.
Dalits in India are considered too polluting to cook for non-Dalits. Only Brahmans are allowed to cook in Brahman homes, at weddings, and at vegetarian restaurants. Just as untouchables are considered inherently impure, Brahmans are considered inherently pure. I knew one Brahman man in Madurai who sent others out to kill a snake in his backyard. It was considered wrong to kill a snake, so this Brahman sent his servants to do it for him. This Brahman’s morality and mine were strangers to each other. In some areas of Tamil Nadu, Dalits treat ritual jobs as a niche market reserved for them and guard that privilege because it is also one of their main sources of income. Others disdain all such work.
The most numerous Dalits in Tamil Nadu are Paṟaiyars, whose numbers give them power. Close in status are those who by tradition are nomadic forest dwellers, but there are not so many of them. These are so-called tribal people, those outside the caste system, who once lived as hunters and gatherers and now have nothing to hunt or gather. Some have homes and land, but others move from place to place, gaining subsistence by a range of means that will be detailed in Chapter 4. Some of those who have been given homes and land cannot use them because they have no water there, and they have no income and no jobs.
By far the worst off are truly homeless people in India who have been lost to or rejected by everybody, including their own families, and have neither a home where they belong nor a group who will take them in. The bodies of such people are picked up in the morning by members of scavenging castes and discarded in places not named in news stories.
Members of named scavenging castes are those who pick up all the discarded filth on the streets, by the railroad tracks, and in the sewers. This filth includes not only human feces but also human bodies, body parts, animal feces, and dead animals. Formerly members of these castes were called “sweepers.” They are subject to humiliation and early death.
One notch up in the ritual status hierarchy are agricultural workers. They are not itinerant, but they are still untouchable. Living as an agricultural laborer, or any kind of day laborer, is almost always a losing proposition. Most of the wealth is concentrated in the cities. People who live as small farmers or agricultural laborers suffer. Agricultural laborers have been the pariahs, the outcastes of former times, and to a great extent they still are. Some remain bonded, at the mercy of their owners. But some do escape that life and find employment in the cities.
Middle and higher castes do not generally see themselves as oppressed but feel severely threatened when lower castes gain power. Those considered to be members of “other backward castes,” as well as those who employ Dalits as agricultural laborers, fight harder than anyone else to keep the Dalits down (Narula 1999; Scuto 2008; Human Rights Watch 1999, 2008; Mayell 2003).15 Intercaste marriage is an especially contentious issue (Shaji, Kumaran, and Karthick 2012; Subramanian 2012; Jagannath 2013). While a well-placed higher-caste man may marry a Dalit woman for progressive ideological reasons, if a higher-caste girl marries a lower-caste man, the whole family may be shamed and the girl may be in danger and despised. Even if a low-caste girl marries a man of higher caste, she and her family are likely to be subject to shame, as are the boy and his family. Only the most progressive families can make such a marriage work. Again, these are notable exceptions to the general rule. Other backward castes, sometimes identified as Shudras, are said by some Dalits to be the main killers of Dalits. But “other backward classes” (OBCs) still struggle for dignity, which they can find only in a casteless society, by joining the Buddhist religion in the hundreds of thousands (Suryawanshi 2015). And the Hindu right is recruiting Dalits to become Hindus, from which category Dalits were previously excluded. Religions thus become political parties. For how long, in which countries, and by which religions has religion been used or not used for political purposes?
Before Dalits were invited to become Hindus, there was a movement in India called Hindutva, which still exists and professes to follow the social texts of ancient Brahmanism, equated by members of the Hindutva movement with pure original Hinduism. This movement controls the government of India now. From a different perspective, one may reasonably say that Hindutva represents a narrow understanding of what it purports to represent—that there was no original Hinduism, there were just assorted groups of people in what is now India, engaging in assorted practices, worshipping assorted gods and goddesses. As valuation of the Sanskrit language grew and as literacy also grew, Brahmanism took hold. In this view, a clear hierarchy of human beings existed, in which Brahmans owned and controlled the sacred texts. Brahmans in India became powerful because of their exclusive access to certain forms of knowledge. But Brahmans as a caste are not the chief oppressors of Dalits today. Some Brahmans, most notably Arundhati Roy, are supporters of the Dalit cause. By nature, one is not born a Brahman any more than one is born a Dalit. One must learn how to be what one is said by others to be. From this writer’s point of view, Brahmans are not the problem. OBCs are not the problem. The whole caste system is the problem.
While Hindutva continues, a movement exists among modern Dalits in Tamil Nadu against Tamil nationalism of any kind, because these Dalits consider that Tamil nationalists have used rhetoric in support of caste abolishment to advance their own cause while paying scant attention to the plight of real Dalits, who are sometimes themselves considered to be foreigners from the north, with a language of their own, and therefore not really Tamil (Omvedt 2015). Kuṟavars, technically a scheduled tribe, are romanticized and at the same time excluded from advancement because of their supposed otherness. Modern Dalits consider that such romanticization is harmful to them, just as Gandhi’s calling them Harijans and thereby romanticizing them actually demeaned them and did them no good. Some modern Dalits therefore may despise the image of Gandhi while elevating Ambedkar to first place in their movement.
As cosmopolitanism advances among Dalits, local knowledge and local dialects, most of all nonliterate dialects, fall by the wayside. But as long as violent oppression continues, a prime motivator of the old folk songs remains. Anger in traditional Paṟaiyar songs is directed toward the god of death (Yama), the blue sky, and the singer’s own departed kin. Low-caste singers dared not express direct anger toward higher castes in traditional laments because of possible reprisal. This was earlier. Now some are singing of their oppressors by name, and what they sing of is not pretty.
Understandably, modern, educated Dalits reject the traditions in which they have been trapped for generations. They have been wrapped in a cloak of death, filth, and slavery that has constituted their very identity, and they want nothing of that now. Some of them work at office jobs in the cities, they are educated, and they do not want to be associated with this old, horrible, village life, still less with the monstrosities that lie behind the rituals. It is an act of bravery for them to come to the villages in which they were born, speak to a foreigner collecting village songs and stories, and remind her that something else is going on, an effort to free Dalits from all this.
Traditional songs of untouchables and modern literature of Dalits are bound by the fact that both address the oppression and violence to which these lower castes are subject. As violence against Dalits continues, Dalits, both women and men, become more bold.16 Their boldness in turn provokes more violence against them. We have seen this before. The inseparability of caste oppression and gender oppression is clearly laid out in the songs of untouchable women, as in the song of Siṅgammā performed by Sevi. Violence against Dalit women is widely documented in modern Indian literature as well as in scholarly articles and media reports (Irudayam, Mangubhai, and Lee 2006; The Hindu 2013, 2014; Hopkins 2008; Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights 2013; International Dalit Solidarity Network, n.d.; Evidence Team, n.d.; Gaikwad 2012; Krishnan 2014; Soundararajan 2014; Fontanella-Khan 2014; Tamil Nadu Women’s Forum 2007). Domestic violence against women in India is carefully hidden within higher castes, in part because the better off have houses in which they can conceal what goes on within the family; but it is less easy for Dalits to hide. But what actually constitutes a “house,” vīḍu in Tamil, is not necessarily what Westerners think of as a house. This matter is addressed extensively in the chapters on Sevi and Siṅgammā. I have asked a Tamil friend living in New Zealand what is the Tamil word for “privacy,” and after some thought she declared that there was none. I looked it up in a Tamil dictionary, and the closest words I could find denoted “secrecy,” something quite different from privacy.
Learning, education, language, and literacy are combined topics addressed in this chapter and others. Barring of untouchable children from school hurts them not only educationally but socially. A young adult has no way to hide his caste identity if he is a member of a Dalit group who is admitted to a university where reservations are held for members of such groups, as the student must carry a card stating that he is a certified member of a scheduled caste (SC) or scheduled tribe (ST)—in other words, an untouchable—in order to prove his status as a student. Reservations were meant to level the playing field, but they have not made education easier for those admitted under the SC/ST rubric. Known untouchables are treated badly in school and university settings. Girls and women born to untouchable castes are easy prey.
Sociolinguistics includes the study of dialect variation marking place, gender, and rank. This discipline enables one to see, among other things, that the dialects of the unschooled are not inherently inferior to the dialects of the schooled, that they tell about life as it is lived, remembered, and dreamed by outcaste speakers and singers, and by those with long memories. In modern India, literacy is necessary for advancement. One must know how to read and write the language that one speaks. But knowledge of one’s own language is not enough. Knowledge of English is necessary. Such linguistic obstacles hurt Dalits. And oral literature by Dalit women, beautiful and telling though it may be, is ignored.
For Dalits, as well as for higher-caste people, linguistic cosmopolitanism is a key to success. Additionally for Dalits, success may mean abandoning, or “forgetting,” their village dialects, because Dalit dialects are in themselves stigmatizing. Thus for a Dalit, success means ceasing to be what one was before, abandoning ways of life and ways of speaking that are identifiably low caste. In America, it is not necessarily uncool to speak or sing with a working class dialect. In India, it is.
In this respect, the situation of Dalits is in some ways the opposite of the situation of African Americans, some of whom deliberately choose to maintain and develop African American ways of speaking. If they can speak both like an educated white person and like an African American, as the situation warrants, their road to success may be smoothed somewhat as they can be comfortable in both worlds. William Labov has noted that in inner-city New York, blacks change their dialects so that they will not be understood by whites.17 As soon as whites catch on to the meaning of a word such as “foxy” (this was decades ago) and start to use that word, inner-city blacks change their usage so as once again to be beyond the understanding of whites. Everything depends on the image of African Americans as having something extra, a style, a fillip, a kind of soul that whites can never achieve. Young whites want to talk like them, to listen to their songs and learn them, even if the words may be hard for whites to follow.
In India, the opposite prevails. There, educated Brahmans and others with multilingual knowledge practice creative code-switching between English, Tamil, Hindi, and other languages, so that people who do not know all of the languages mixed cannot follow them and can only look on in dumb admiration.18 In displays of linguistic and intellectual virtuosity in South India, it is important that a person not show knowledge of low-class, low-caste, or nonliterate dialects, just as a high-caste person should not know how to do physical labor. Just as the clothing one wears has political significance, so does the work one performs and the language and dialect one speaks. This does not mean that all cosmopolitan and multilingual people are of high caste, however. Indira Peterson notes that in early eighteenth-century Tamil plays known as Kuṟavañci, the casteless Kuṟatti fortune-teller is sometimes adept in multiple languages, including English. The itinerant Kuṟavars I met in Tirurunelveli and Saidapet were also multilingual. For such a fortune-teller, multilingualism would have been both a practical and a magical advantage. The Kuṟavars were likewise cosmopolitan in the sense of having traveled to distant places, and some traditional Kuṟavars of modern days still make this claim of themselves. But Kuṟavars are not admired by Dalits of the present day. Conversely, despite differences in geography, history, and culture, modern Dalits have found inspiration in African American movements. The Dalit Panthers were thus named after the Black Panthers of the United States.
An obstruction to mobility, in addition to the other obstructions Dalit women face, lies in the obscurity, to outsiders, of present-day rural Dalit women’s verbal art. In some forms of oral literature, the obscurity may be intentional. But it is also a consequence of the details of locale, of the language and its use in some social situations, and of local dialect variations, which are not to be found in dictionaries—what is sometimes called “local knowledge.”19 Therefore, in order for one to know what is being said, one must know the place where the singer or writer lives, one must know the people who live there, one must know how they live, and one must know the language in which they speak, chant, or sing. Whereas there are universally knowable aspects of old and new Tamil literature, oral and written, when local realities are not understood, the flesh can fall away from the bones. This is true of popular English literature of the present age, which is meant to appeal to a wide audience, as it was true of literature, both oral and written, when few people could read or write, and rural people steeped in local knowledge could not be well understood except by others who spoke the same language/dialect. In the current millennium, cosmopolitan intellectuals may lose all knowledge that cannot be conveyed in a universalist medium. The modern Tamil Dalit poetry that I have seen so far is not in song form but in written free verse form and printed. The oppressors in the poems are often Brahmans, although in Tamil Nadu, the oppressors are not so much Brahmans as high-caste landlords who practice a form of Brahmanism involving notions of caste-based purity and pollution. In the Dalit journal Murasu an explicit aim is to universalize Dalit voices. The prominent young Dalit poet Meena Kandasamy writes mainly in English and has won national and international prizes for her poems. Some may say that she has moved too far from her Dalit “roots.” But who would want to go back there?
The unschooled are told that they cannot speak or write adequately. But the well-schooled, the powerful, the technicians, the managers, the professors, and some who wish to improve the lot of the very poor will not listen to and cannot hear what the unschooled have to say. Some of the privileged among those without privilege will learn the language of privilege. They are motivated to do so, after all. Few among the privileged will learn to speak, or think, like an old laboring woman from some village somewhere. Still less will they find the time to learn a “tribal” language. This is not just a matter of negligence and laziness, it is a matter of difficulty. The inability on the part of the highly schooled to learn the languages of the unschooled is a diminution of mental power for humanity. It is an intellectual loss for us all.
Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that every human mind is equal to every other. It is the reflection of one mind in another that is the real thing, the real mind, free from external restrictions, just playing for the sake of playing, thinking wild thoughts. All human minds are equal on that playing field. Lévi-Strauss valued the great diversity of human cultures and the essentiality of communication among them. He pointed out that the people once called “primitive” are in fact people without reading and writing. Such people are more aware than the highly literate of realities that the literate do not see. A sacrifice is involved in the transition to literacy, but without that transition the accomplishments of the literate, communication among them, cannot be achieved. It is a trade-off, then.20
I cannot agree with everything that Lévi-Strauss says—in particular the nature/culture divide, which among anthropologists today is rapidly dissolving, and his omission of women and children, to say nothing of animals, as people of interest—but I do agree with the general idea that without a connection of one mind with another, without a reflection of each in the eyes and the mind of the other, without a great number of minds all connected and all reflecting and refracting each other’s lights, there is no reality at all. For Lévi-Strauss, the story told, the myth, was more real than the minds that reflected and refracted it, like mirrors, among each other, without any awareness on the part of an individual mind that it was a vessel for the transmission of that myth. Likewise, for me, the act of communication, the fact of connection, is more real than anything to be found in a purportedly isolated mind.
A repeating theme of this book is the congruence between the verbal art produced by laborers in the fields of India and theories of the highly literate who come from far away. Is this congruence, this harmony, a sign that the theory works, or is it a sign that laborers in the fields of India have minds able to play in the fields inhabited by famous theoreticians? Lévi-Strauss’s dictum that the meeting of minds is what is important, whether they are studying me or whether I am studying them, and the discovery that something in the distant theoretician’s mind meshes with something in the proximal laborer’s mind, shows that these minds, on the profoundest levels, know each other.
How does this happen? Life is less a matter of binary oppositions than it is a matter of mutual perception, less a matter of inheritance than a matter of development, less a matter of growing up than a matter of reaching out, less a matter of not touching than a matter of touching.21
The abandonment of traditional ways, and the learning of the English language, is stressed not only by South Indian Dalits but also by North Indian ones, who see it as the only way for them to escape the oppressive caste system under which they are compelled to live.
The spirit world is not exactly the same thing as religion. Religions have rules. Spirits have only habits, which they may change. Spirits in India, including gods, have no fixed image, no fixed stories attached to them. They have personalities, but these personalities grow in multiplicity as time wears on. A spirit is not independent of mortals. If nobody sees it or believes in it, a spirit cannot exist. A spirit can turn into a god only if some people decide to make it so. A spirit is not a thing floating through the air. It is not a thing at all. A spirit is a memory, a feeling, a desire. A spirit may occupy a living person, or a statue or a temple or a rock. A spirit who is a god is a movement, with fans and followers, who give money to keep it going, or in some circumstances offer their own suffering to the spirit, even sacrifice their own lives, to achieve a certain desired goal. Protect my son who has gone into combat. Protect my father who has lost his ability to work. Protect my sister from danger. Protect my children from hunger and disease. Protect the world. A spirit can give protection or cause harm, just as a living human being or animal may do. A spirit may instigate a war or fight on one side or the other. A person may believe or disbelieve in a particular spirit, or in a category of spirit. For instance, a man may say that Māriamman does not exist but that ghosts definitely do. A ghost (pēy) is the spirit of someone who has died. It is scary, and a person may die of fright from seeing it. But a pēy may be turned into something else.
This happened with Siṅgammā. The spirit of a woman who has died in childbirth is both honored and feared. A memorial stone is created for her, to soften her anger. An ancestor who has performed some horrible valorous deed, such as killing her grandchildren to save them from Muslim raiders, may become a family deity. Some live human beings are treated like gods. If a person gets high enough in politics, he can be a god if he wants to. Narendra Modi, the current prime minister of India, had a temple built to himself. Spirits like nice homes that belong only to them. Māriamman told me to build a temple for her to spread her fame. Siṅgammā demanded that a home be built for her, and so it was. If she grows in popularity, her home may grow into a regular temple. But such a growth is unlikely, as her people have turned to a more secular life. There is no structure to the spirit world. It is not in itself an organization. A spirit, great or small, may slip through anyone’s fingers, in or out of a person’s mind, or of many people’s minds simultaneously. A great spirit such as Draupadi (Chapter 6, note 4) has done that.
Sarasvati (Chapter 1) had skills and experience that, in America, might have brought her higher education and a career. In Chennai and environs, she went to all the temples and participated in their rituals, but she considered that people who appeared to enter a state of trance were fake. She laughed at them and mocked them. I agree with her that some are surely fake, but you never know. At the temple, she slipped into the spirit world, or it slipped into her, when a Māriamman temple was being consecrated and she found herself desiring proof that, although the people she mocked were fake, the spirit world itself was real. The consecration ceremony was a conjunction between ritual and the spirit world. Sarasvati prayed to the god of the temple, Māriamman, that the god come for real into somebody, anybody. Then Māriamman came into Sarasvati herself. “She came into my person [en peyarle] only.” At that point Sarasvati knew that she was special. From then onward, she and Māriamman were one.
The Paṟaiyar singers did not show any sign that they thought themselves specially blessed. In their situation, how could they imagine such a thing? They did not mention any god but Yama, the god of death, and that mention was only in passing. Although they did not think themselves special, when they sang they became different people. Anyone who sings may feel this. The singers whose songs I recorded had no text, but they remembered, and somehow the song, fully formed, came out from them and the tears flowed. When you sing, something comes upon you or into you that carries you beyond yourself.
Kanyammā was by inheritance an Iruḷar, a person of the darkness, of the forest, and the forest was a spirit world in itself, a world that Kanyammā could bring forth only with difficulty. And Kanyammā was a woman who had lost her home, the forest itself, the whole boundless forest that was scary to some but mother and father to others, animated by many beings with many voices. Now, from the point of view of those above, she was little more than a ghost, or worse still, a useless half-dead body. But still she could sing. She sang of life in the forest.
By the time I learned of her, Siṅgammā had been dead for decades, her body buried in pieces behind a mill that had later been built after she died. The area behind the mill was surrounded by barbed wire, and I was not allowed to go there. In her life, Siṅgammā may well have sung, as singing was part of her work of selling birds in the marketplace. Sevi, the woman who sang the story of Siṅgammā, was not one of Siṅgammā’s people. Sevi was of a caste considered higher than the one Siṅgammā belonged to. In her song, Sevi cast doubt on Siṅgammā’s virtue. But the song was so beautifully performed that perhaps Sevi silently cared about Siṅgammā, regretted what had happened to her, and on a certain level saw the similarities between herself and the girl who had died.
Veḷḷaiccāmi performed a narrative/chant/song to and about Siṅgammā. In this performance there is no question that Siṅgammā, having died as a girl, lived on as a possessing spirit, attacking young, recently married girls of the area and ultimately becoming a deity of beauty, generosity, and power. Whether she will continue as a deity or will cease to exist is questionable.
At the end of this introduction are two questions: How does it feel, how must it feel, to be an untouchable woman? And how do creativity and insight arise from situations of abjection?
It must be said, first, that every woman who sang or spoke to me or for me was different from every other. Any generalization about Dalit women must be approached with care. Shared environments, shared memories, shared experiences, shared longings are some of the things that bind them to each other. In Chapter 1 of this book, Māriamman told me, “For Tamil women only, I will do much good.” Tamil is a language different from any other. It is an old language. It is a world embracing emotions, pain, and oneness of self with other. Every language creates and is created by some world, some cultural ontology. The concept of Tamil womanhood both precedes and transcends caste. Caste is something that Tamil women have fought but have not been able to break. Instead, many of them are broken by caste. Such brokenness comes through in every chapter of this book.
Creativity, insight, and abjection are at the heart of the book I am writing now. It is not that you have to be suffering to make beautiful songs. Many fine singers/songwriters can attest to that fact. The question is why and how people living in deep misery are able to create things of beauty nonetheless. One is reminded of Maya Angelou’s book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Here the similarity between the situation of African American women and the situation of Indian untouchable women makes itself known. Given all the great horrors that both groups had to endure, it may seem trivial to point out that both African Americans and Indian pariahs were denied education. But certainly both cultures were affected by this deprivation. Their songs may have given them the strength to carry on.
The similarity between African Americans and untouchables in India has been discussed by Gerald Berreman (1960) and more recently by Gyanendra Pandey (2013). A defining feature of African American memories and history is that they were slaves for hundreds of years and still are treated as inferiors and worse by some white Americans. Before independence, untouchables in India were slaves. Those then called pariahs included farm laborers, who could be used at will by their owners (Viswanath 2014).22 Some, such as Kanyammā in Chapter 4 of this book, are virtual slaves now because they cannot run and have no place to run to. In other parts of the world there are child slaves and prostitute slaves. Does slavery in itself bring song from the slaves? It can, if the slaves do not mention the cruelty of their masters. If they do, they must be very brave. Kanyammā was very brave.
All of these topics are intertwined and inseparable from each other. Throughout the whole book, some named topics appear as parts of others. So does writing of my own experiences to the extent that they bear upon the topic at hand.
The people I knew in India were all good people. The ones I have written about in this book were brilliant and original narrators and singers who struggled with the handicap called womanhood, who were poor, had no schooling, were despised by the people they worked for, and were subject to domestic violence, as well as to the violence of men outside their families and castes. They never spoke or sang to me about such violence directly, except for Sevi, who spoke of the terrible violence against her sister, whom she never named, and against a Kuṟavar girl who died before Sevi was born.
I have been tempted to suggest that the very fact of suffering gives rise to beautiful creations. After all, what were these beautiful songs but laments? What were they but displays of pain? However, in the midst of terrible suffering you may scream out, but you do not sing. Afterward you sing laments, songs of sadness, songs of feeling blue. But while it happens, you lack the ability to speak. And about shameful and painful things that happen to you, you never speak or sing a word, ever. Generations later, your story may be told.
