Love means never having to say you're sorry

Events in India, or essays that I read, often compel me to spend time thinking about India's atrocious caste system.  Because I don't spend enough time thinking about this, I approach this topic with a great deal of hesitation.  A worry lingers that I could end up writing something that can be easily misinterpreted only because I have not thought through the topic.  Yet, I venture--like in this post from a while ago, for instance.

There is so much of who I am that is a result of the caste into which I was born.  It has been a conscious struggle sifting through the baggage that was hoisted on my shoulders from the very minute of my birth, looking to see if there is anything that I should retain before I throw out the proverbial bathwater.  It was an awful realization early on that even the Carnatic music that was so adored by the family and which I naturally took to was structurally not merely religious but awfully caste-based too--issues that the musician TM Krishna discusses in detail in his polemical A Southern Music.  

Sometimes, the weight of the baggage is simply unbearable.  So much so that I want to convey my most sincere apologies.  But then, to whom should I apologize for the system that, according to B.R. Ambedkar, was (is?) worse than the slavery in America?  What good will my apology be?  

I referred to Ambedkar because reading an essay that is a review of a new annotated edition of his Annihilation of Caste was the trigger this time.  

The book-review essay is by one of my favorite contemporary intellectuals--Martha Nussbaum.  Now, she is an academic.  She is a thinker.  It is a shame that the world grants idiots like me also an academic status!  Nussbaum notes that Ambedkar--a "remarkable human being" and one of the "distinguished founders" of modern India--needs an introduction to people outside India.  I suspect that even a vast majority in India need an introduction to Ambedkar; people there might have heard of the name, but nothing beyond that:

The palm of unjustified obscurity, however, goes to a man who was very likely the greatest intellect of all the Founders, and one of the most impressive legal minds of the twentieth or any other century, B. R. (Bhimrao Ramji) Ambedkar (1891-1956), who, as Nehru’s Law Minister, became the primary architect of the Indian Constitution. 

Nussbaum then gives a quick intro that starts with "B. R. Ambedkar was born in 1891 into the untouchable Mahar caste, traditionally sweepers."  (emphasis mine.)  What did it mean to be an untouchable?  How about this:

He was forced to sit on a piece of gunny sack that no other child would touch, and he was forbidden to drink from the common tap.  ...  If the school servant was present, that servant could pour the water down to him from a height.  If the servant was absent, as he often was, then no water. 

My grandfathers, who were only a few years younger than Ambedkar, did not have to suffer through those tortures in school.  After all, they were brahmins!  At least Ambedkar was allowed to go to school; most untouchable kids during my grandfathers' school going years were never even taught to read and write and they died as illiterates.  The fact that my grandfathers went to school, and then to college, made it easy for me to work my way to the United States.  Had my ancestors been untouchables ... ?

Bob Dylan commented a couple of years ago that "This country is just too fucked up about color."  If that is the case here in the US, then one can easily imagine how fucked up life is in the old country where, according to Ambedkar, "slavery was not as bad as untouchability."

Sometimes I wish that I had the ability to slip into denial and not even acknowledge my own brahminical origins.  But then a life of introspection and the pursuit of truth means that there is no place for denial.  I can't wait for the day that the baggage will be lifted off.

Quote (excerpt) for the day!

Hysterically funny, if only this weren't true!

New Hampshire state Rep. Nancy Elliott, at a recent state Judiciary Committee meeting on a proposal to repeal the state's same-sex marriage bill, described the issue of gay marriage as follows: "taking the penis of one man and putting it in the rectum of another man and wriggling it around in excrement." Rep. Elliott continued, irrelevantly, "and you have to think, I'm not sure, would I allow that to be done to me?" (Elliott has since apologized for the portion of her remarks in which she falsely claimed that because gay marriage had been legalized, New Hampshire's fifth-graders were being taught to have anal sex in the public schools.)

This is the best introduction, I have read in a long time, to an essay .... in this case, the essay is by my favorite legal issues commentator, Dahlia Lithwick, writing about Martha Nussbaum's book From Disgust to Humanity

Time and again, Nussbaum argues, societies have been able to move beyond their own politics of disgust to what she calls "the politics of humanity," once they have finally managed to see others as fully human, with human aspirations and desires.

I can relate to one of the examples of disgust cited there--that of untouchables in India.  My grandmothers grew up in a world where they believed that they ought not to even accidentally touch one, or be touched by one .... and, it was fantastic to watch them go through a transformation and they shed that thought.  It was wonderful in fact that the doctor who treated my grandmother--this was back in the late 1970s--when she was in the hospital was not a person whose physical touch would have been appreciated fifty years prior .... this doctor later was elected as a member of the Parliament as well.  With the other grandmother, the moment I knew she had let go of the old ways of thinking was when we were watching on television a movie (can't recall the name!) about the very caste issues--it featured a phenomenal actress, Sharada, who was a Meryl Streep in her own ways.  Somewhere along in the movie, I heard my grandmother comment very sympathetically towards the lower caste character.  That empathy for the lower caste character in a movie meant a lot to me ... I think this is the humanity that Nussbaum refers to ....

We might have our own biases--because of the contexts within which we grew up.  I suppose the key is what happens when we are presented with evidence to the contrary.  It is those folks who refuse to discard their biases who worry me--not any bias by itself.