Separate ... and unequal

I hated my undergraduate college for a number of reasons.  At the top of the heap was the air of intellectual apathy.  Nobody cared!

There were a few good things that also came about from that miserable experience.  Topping the list was the fact that for the first time I was interacting with my peers fully cognizant of our respective religions and castes.

All the way through high school, while there was no ignorance of the religious and caste differences that existed, the college experience was new.  We were adults and seeing each other for who they were in the highly stratified Indian society.  It was a quick immersion learning experience for me.  And I learnt a lot.

At the first major semester break as all of us prepared to head home, one of my peers said he was staying back in the hostel (dorm.)  Out of a genuine interest, I asked him why he was not going home.  His reply was not one that I would have ever imagined in a million years.

He explained that back in his village, even the kids of upper-caste folks would call his father by name and order his father around.  Therefore, he didn't want to go home and deal with those issues.

I was stunned.

As kids from an industrial town, whenever we went to grandmas' villages, we could never bring ourselves to calling any of the domestic workers by name.  If we wanted them to do anything, we would simply walk up to them and tell them whatever it was.  The discomfort of childhood had now grown into a serious issue in adulthood.

As some of my cousins and I in the extended family started getting away from the traditionally arranged marriages, and instead found our respective spouses, I began to understand that there also existed various levels of tolerance and intolerance.  An Iyer/Iyengar marriage was not the most blessed event but was acceptable.  A spouse who was a brahmin from another language/culture was, well, ok.  Then began an exponential decrease towards intolerance and hostility.  At the rock bottom of non-acceptance and potential excommunication was marriage to a Muslim or a Dalit.

Caste and religion continue to wreak havoc in the old country.

I had always hypothesized that most immigrants to the US bring along with them oversize baggage of religion and caste.  Maybe people have written about them and I have missed their work.  This multi-part series from PRI's The World and WGBH promises to look into it.  "Dalit activists and respondents to a 2018 survey say that — when surrounded by others of Indian descent — caste bias follows them to the land of the free."  The four-part series, will "explore this stigmatizing effects of India's caste system that immigrants have imported to the United States"

The aboriginal Tamils

I have blogged, talked, and written about how the formal education system from elementary school onward is rarely about understanding the big picture.  Instead, it is mostly about monetizing what one can do.  Learning languages and history, reading and appreciating poetry, are some of the prominent losers among many in such an education framework.

Poetry, history, language and more are all what I am learning by reading David Shulman's Tamil. In school, we were taught more about Western history and poems than about anything Indian.  Most of even the little bit that I know about India's past has been despite the school's best effort to make sure we didn't know a damn thing!

Thus, now, I am stumped at everything that Shulman offers.  A guy who was born in Waterloo, Iowa, who immigrated to Israel, seems to know more about Tamil than all but a handful of the 80 million Tamil-speakers put together!  His respectful appreciation of the language, culture, poetry, and more, makes me want to sue my old school and the government for having failed to educate me.

When writing about the Sangam literature, Shulman spends a few pages about Tirukkural, which is "a part of the larger set of the eighteen minor works."  Of course, anybody who is from Tamil Nadu knows about this collection and its author, Tiruvalluvar.  But, like almost everybody, that is all I know.  Nothing more.

After quoting and discussing a few of the couplets from Tirukkural, Shulman writes that "the reader is warmly advised to find his own favorites in translations such as P.S. Sundaram's or the beautiful French one by Francois Gros."

Shulman writes about a popular account of Tiruvalluvar as the son of a Brahmin father and a Dalit mother: "his Paraiya-Dalit nature is integral to the thick web of stories woven around him in both premodern and modern times."

"Paraiya" is no longer used for a good reason--it is like the "n" word in the US.  But, it is one of the many words that has been brought into the English language thanks to the bastard raj.  We refer to, for instance, Kim Jong-Un's North Korea as a "pariah state." 

We cannot ever retract that word from the language.  But, perhaps we ought to celebrate how this out-caste word has gone global.

Here's one of the couplets of the Brahmin-Dalit Tiruvalluvar that Shulman writes with appreciation:

If I tell her I love her more than anyone, she asks:
"Which anyone?"

The shitty priorities!

In this post a couple of days ago, I wrote about the geographic separation of religions and castes and subcastes that has been the condition in India forever.  I added there:

Had the randomness in the cosmos made me a Dalit and not a brahmin by birth, I know for certain that I would have been an angry young man, an angry middle-aged man, and perhaps a bitter old man, unable to forget the atrocities that were committed against my people.

The coexistence in India is a false narrative.  An overwhelming part of India operates within its own.

India is a fraternal society. There is a Brahmin society, a Reddy society and a Dalit society. Within each society, there is a sense of fraternity, but they don’t want to come out of that circle.

This is what I too had noted in my post, when I wrote, that the paths don't seem to cross much.  Unlike me, the one who remarked about the warped sense of fraternity in India is the Magsaysay awardee, Bezwada Wilson.

Bezwada Wilson has been fighting for the eradication of manual scavenging for three decades now. Born in Kolar, Karnataka, to a family of manual scavengers, he founded the Safai Karmachari Andolan in 1994 with retired IAS officer S.R. Sankaran and Dalit activist Paul Diwakar.

What he has been doing is simply invaluable.  According to his group, about 160,000 people continue to work as manual scavenging.  In the 21st century, as 2017 comes to an end!

Bezwada Wilson says:

Sanitation is reserved for Dalits. So there is no development in that field. We have apps to deliver food home without involving human beings but they can’t discover a technology to clear human waste. Caste is the reason behind this discrimination.

Launching rockets is a priority. Serving as the back office for US and European firms is a priority.   But, developing an appropriate technology to remove human shit is not a priority because it is not a priority for the upper castes, whose priorities are elsewhere.

Every field has extensive research, but in sanitation, no research is ever done. We are over 130 crore people, we defecate every day. We have a caste to clean it up. We don’t even think about it.  

When I was young, and a wannabe commie, all I knew was that the societal priorities were messed up.  As I got older, I figured that I did not have the balls to be an activist.  The best I could then do was to at least intellectually begin to understand the issues and engage with a few people about it.

After all these years, I am all the more convinced that there's something seriously wrong with the world, and I can't do a damn thing about it!