Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women's Testimonies

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Introduction

The growing number of recently published translations of dalit writings (mainly life narratives),¹ tempt one to think that a rupture of kinds may be taking place in our teaching and learning of caste studies. Two decades ago, for many of us studying social sciences in regional universities in India, caste was considered mainly a ‘sociological’ subject. Undeniably, it was central to the courses on Indian society. At the time, these were neatly compartmentalised into ‘social structure’ and ‘social change’ over two academic terms. The study of caste too was compartmentalised into reading studies on the features of the caste system in one term and modernisation and sanskritisation of caste in the other. Writings on/by Phule, Ambedkar, Periyar were not on the list of readings and most of us remained largely ignorant of the abrahmani²/ non-brahmanical perspectives on caste. The Satyashodhak and Ambedkarite movements did not have a place in courses on social movements and the post-independence dalit, tribal and women’s movements were often cluttered into one module. Not surprisingly, there were no selections from dalit literature and life narratives in our readings or classes and therefore the epistemological challenge posed by the dalit movement and literature to received social science frameworks was lost to us. A decade later, as teachers of sociology, we realised that the assumed Archimedean standpoint for the objective study of caste had persisted and caste in our classrooms continued to be practised much in the same way.

Indian sociology, as Deshpande (2003) has argued, seems to have done little to counter the tendency for caste to vanish from view in those very contexts where it has been most effective. Indian sociology seems to have invited us to ‘see’ caste only in villages, rituals, rites and so on and by doing so, seems to have suggested that caste had no active role in everyday urban life. Since the ‘upper castes’³ have dominated urban middle class arenas such as universities and research institutes, caste identity has hardly ever been an issue for public discussion. As an upper caste, middle class student on campus, I recall being part of a group that thought discussions about caste identities to be retrograde. In the women’s movement too, caste was rarely discussed as it was assumed that caste identities could be transcended by the larger identity of sisterhood among all women. The marginalisation of the non-brahmanical perspectives and experience in the institutionalised scholarship on caste has blurred our understanding of the relations between structural continuities and contemporary change in the social institution of caste. Engagement with anti-caste organisations and emergent dalit theoretical perspectives helped throw light on the pernicious divide between the ‘theoretical brahmans’ and ‘empirical shudras’ that social science practice in the last fifty years has continued to foster (Guru 2002) thus ensuring that classical models of caste as a consensual system based on complementarity persisted. The challenges posed in the last decade and more to the scholarship on caste further underlined the now apparent disjuncture between academic knowledge systems and social practices of caste. An engagement with these challenges initiated reflections both at the personal and political levels; calling forth transformative pedagogies that interrogate institutionalised disciplinary and curricular practices related to caste.

One important challenge to the scholarship on caste came in the form of the post-Mandal violence by savarna elite students, it posed a direct challenge to the assumption that caste identities in urban India were personal and private matters. The burden of caste in our universities and classrooms, as in other institutions, has always weighed more heavily on the dalit and bahujan student. The elite savarna students who decried the reservation policy claimed that it was the ‘lower castes’ who reiterated caste identities and that the upper caste student was secular and did not observe caste practices. The anti-Mandal protests challenged this assumption of/about the elite savarna students and drew attention to the new modes of reproduction of caste, whether it was through the idiom of citizenship or merit. The second important challenge came with the emergence of dalit feminist assertions and critiques of the dalit and women’s movements, both at the regional and national levels. In the early nineties, dalit feminist articulations, especially on the issue of quotas within quotas, challenged the conceptions of ‘genderless caste’ and ‘casteless gender’. The advocacy of dalit human rights in the context of the Durban Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination posed yet another challenge. As Kannabiran (2001) has argued, the inclusion of caste within the definition of racism by rewriting caste as a knowledge system had posed a challenge to sociological categories. Some sociologists like Gupta (2001) responded to these efforts to forge a common platform against caste and race discrimination by underlining caste and race as not only dissimilar but also incomparable. In the debate that followed, sociological categories were set as if against accounts that derived directly from lived experience and the politics of that experience.

These issues of the 1990s also posed serious challenges to the women’s movement and feminist scholarship in India. Elite, savarna girl, students protesting against Mandal displayed their anxiety (evident in the placards they used in their protests) about finding ‘educated’ husbands, thus expressing publicly their commitment to caste endogamy (Chakravarti 2003). The writings and manifestoes of different dalit women’s groups underlined the fact that the unmarked feminism of the 1970s had, in fact, been in theory and praxis a kind of brahmanical feminism. The NGO Declaration on Gender and Racism issued in 2001 by the National Federation of Dalit Women⁴ suggested new directions for feminist internationalism. In the debates that followed, the absence of feminist comparative work on issues of race and caste became apparent. Over the last two decades, women’s studies in India has raised important questions about the invisibility, distortion and marginalisation of gender as a category of analysis in mainstream disciplines and their practices of canonisation. Despite feminist critiques of mainstream social sciences, the classical frameworks of caste have left their imprint on women’s studies too. Dalit feminist critiques of the 1990s posed challenges to feminist canons, curricular protocols and alliances with brahmanical power and privilege. Except for a few notable exceptions, women’s studies scholars did not seriously engage with dalit feminist critiques, and reflections on the transcoding of caste in feminist discourse and practices have been rare. Reflections on caste in the curricular protocols of women’s studies have been even fewer. This lack of engagement cannot be dismissed easily; either by the savarna feminist justification of being ‘frozen in guilt’ (what can ‘we’ say now, let ‘them’ speak) or by a resigned dalit feminist position that sees a ‘fit of caste identities and ideological positions’ (brahman and ‘upper caste’ women will be brahmanical). The former assumes that caste is solely the concern of dalit women and bypasses the need for all women to critically interrogate the complex histories of caste and gender oppression. The latter resigns itself to assuming the impossibility of transcending caste identities, thereby amounting to a slippage between brahman and brahmanical and non-brahman and non-brahmanical. As John (2000) commenting on the resurgence of caste and minority issues within ‘women’s issues’ argues, ‘The revival of reservations for women in the 1990s – after Mandal, Ayodhya and globalisation – offers us the chance to conceive of alternate modernities. This is nothing less than an opportunity to link rather than oppose women’s rights to rights based on caste, class or minority status in the broader context of a common democratic struggle’ (p. 3829). The recognition of caste as not just a retrograde past but an oppressive past reproduced as forms of inequality in modern society requires therefore that we integrate questions of caste with those of class and gender. For feminist pedagogues and activists who seek to engage with these challenges, it is politically and academically an exciting moment of reflection. It requires thinking out classroom practices in which the social and political heterogeneity of students is articulated and engaged with to search out new dimensions of the battles of our times.

Recognising differences, power and connections of class, caste and community means transforming subjectivities, politics and pedagogies. At the level of practice, for those of us who have been complicit in the power and privileges of caste, one of the first realisations is our lack of knowledge of cultures that have been violently marginalised. A large part of the feminist discourse of experience has been an autobiography of the upper caste woman, her conflict with tradition and her desire to be modern. As Bharucha (2000) has argued, ‘whether it is dalit culture or the grassroots secular culture of the mohalla committees of Mumbai, it becomes necessary to open ourselves to their turbulent processes of learning in order to challenge the manufacture of ignorance in which we are complicit through the privileges of class and education’ (p. 82).

The women’s movement and women’s studies have brought forth shifts in our ways of thinking but this does not mean that all prior assumptions have been discarded or even clearly stated. The relative lack of engagement with the non-brahmanical renderings of caste and gender in mainstream social sciences has been reproduced in women’s studies. For some of us involved in developing undergraduate and postgraduate courses in women’s studies, curricular transformation was the immediate site for engagement with this ignorance and projects with explicitly stated pedagogical functions were undertaken.

The first of these involved interviews and workshops with teachers to map ‘gender, caste and class inequalities’ as they appeared in the undergraduate and postgraduate curricula of seven universities in Maharashtra. Among several other issues, one of the findings of this exercise was the near total absence of the politics of lived experience of caste in the curriculum. The ‘Indian women’ in the curriculum were unmarked by caste, and the presence of minority communities in the syllabus was feminised through the usual topics on ‘problems of talaq, divorce etc’. The optional courses on women/gender were most often neatly dichotomised into western feminist theory and issues/problems related to women in India. There was a near complete absence of anti-race/Black/Third World centred feminist theory and Black and Third World women remained confined to modules on women and development. Most participants responded to observations about this invisibility or distorted representation with suggestions that can best be described as ‘adding the absent element and stirring’. Hence, the ‘problem’ of the invisibility of dalit women, of Black and Third World women and feminisms, could be ‘solved’ by suggestions adding on courses/modules on dalit/Black/Third World women. The question was therefore one of avoiding the dangers of ‘sprinkling a little bit of dalit women’s issues/ problems’ while leaving the courses philosophically and structurally unchallenged. Several questions emerged – how can we interrogate the much practised models that view caste as a social institution that is frozen in time? How can curricular and pedagogical practices move beyond these models that deny the agency of dalit women? In other words, how can ‘private’ lived experience and the ‘public’ practices of anti-caste struggles be brought into the analysis of caste and gender? How can the hegemony of White/brahmanical feminisms as default frames of reference in courses on theory be challenged? How can these critiques and self-analyses be helpful for subaltern students? Often despite the radical interrogative stance of the curriculum, as Jawaare (1997) has observed, the subaltern student remains at the receiving end of either neo-colonial condescension (we will help you speak like ‘us’) or the contempt of the dominant (‘they’ cannot follow theoretical debates). The subaltern student in the women’s studies classroom reacts to this situation by speaking (often outside the classroom) of the ‘real’ (even ‘unimaginable’ to the dominant in the classroom) victimhood of women in their everyday lived context. This victimhood is articulated in terms of the subaltern students being the more ‘authentic’ subjects of women’s studies as opposed to the elite sections in the classroom. The significance of the women’s studies classroom as a space where experience can be brought into the academy has been recognised and valued. However, we need to discuss the dilemmas and frustrations of navigating these discussions in a politically and socially heterogeneous Gender Studies classroom. All too often, the sharing of experiences gets locked into two positions – the subaltern women students claiming ‘authentic victimhood’ and the dominant sections articulating what, in classroom parlance, get labelled as ‘sensitive’ and ‘insensitive’ responses. The latter are often articulated by upper caste, middle class and older women in the classroom who seem to suggest that subaltern women are better off, since ‘they can at least publicly abuse or hit back at their drunken husbands’. Younger women from other disciplines who are also doing gender studies often feel such responses are insensitive. The irony is that this ‘sensitive’ group – who find the anti-race/Third world feminist critiques of the academy empowering – can often be heard speaking the language of merit and citizenship during discussions on reservations to do with caste and gender. We therefore need to more closely examine our failure as teachers and as students to connect the complex lived experience with critiques of disciplinary knowledge and the academy. How can pedagogical strategies address this and help develop critiques that empower subaltern students to represent themselves more positively? How can the more dominant students in the classroom interrogate their complicity in class and caste privileges without remaining locked in guilt? How can teachers and students address their ignorance about dalit and working class cultures? Discussions on these and other conceptual and pedagogical challenges point to the need for putting together teaching and learning materials that can promote political and interpretative engagement with issues of caste.

This book is a part of the two projects that were undertaken with the objective of fulfilling this pedagogical function in the area of Gender and Dalit Studies. The first, located in an emergent field of dalit cultural studies, seeks to build an empirically researched history from below of the events in the Ambedkarite calendar. It documents the booklet and music cultures of the Satyashodhak and Ambedkarite counterpublics⁵ seeking interpretative engagement with these practices that contest the power of the upper caste elite to represent and name modernity. The present book is a part of the second project, which seeks to ‘translate’ into English the lived experience of caste as articulated in dalit women’s ‘autobiographies’ and, at a later stage, histories of U.S. anti-race feminism into Marathi.

Notes

1. The term life narrative has been used in this text as a wideranging term for exploring diverse modes around the autobiographical.

2. The word non-brahmanical as used in this text refers to an English translation of ‘abrahmani’ and is different from ‘brahmaneter’ literally meaning all except the brahmans and which has been translated as non-brahman. The concept abrahmani has been articulated in the voluminous work of comrade Sharad Patil, the founder of the Satyashodhak Communist Party, and continues to be rigorously debated (see especially Patil 1988). Patil argues that the epistemological conflict in Indian Philosophy is between brahmani and abrahmani schools and that these categories have evolved from the history of social conflict in Indian society. He argues that the Sankhya, Lokayata, Buddhist, Kauala, Shaiva, Tantra and in the modern period Phule, Periyar and Ambedkar schools of thought represent the abrahmani tradition. The category abrahmani suggests perspectives emerging from, and directed towards the annihilation of caste, class and the oppression of women, and is thus more specific than categories like transformative and progressive. Patil (1988) in discussing the parameters of abrahmani and brahmani literature clarifies how Ramayana and Mahabharata are brahmani literature not because their subjects are kshtriyas and brahmans but because of their justification and propagation of varna-ashrama-dharma. He explains how the brahmani school may include brahmani non-brahmans and the abrahmani may include abrahmani brahmans. Recently scholars have mapped the possibilities of bringing abrahmani perspectives into the academy especially in doing feminist history and understanding Indian society from non-brahmanical perspectives (Bhagwat and Pardeshi 1998; Ilaiah 2001 and Dahiwale 2004).

3. Words like ‘Untouchables’, ‘upper and lower castes’, have been put within quotes the first time they appear in the text, following the practice of scholars who explicitly distance themselves from the ideology in which these linguistic practices emerge.

4. For details of the Declaration on Gender and Racism issued at the World Conference Against Racism, 28 August–7 September 2001, Durban, South Africa, See Rao (2003).

5. The liberal conception of the public sphere assumes the bracketing of status differentials and the formation of multiple publics is viewed as a move away from the ‘common good’. In our work the idea of counterpublics draws on feminist and Black scholarship which conceives of the public sphere as an arena for making of hegemony and cultural common sense and which is distinct from the State and market relations. They have demonstrated that the alternative or counter publics develop in keeping with the fundamental stratification of a society. See for example Fraser (1993) and Dawson (1994).

Debating the Consumption of

Dalit ‘Autobiographies’

The Significance of Dalit ‘Testimonios’

¹

In the last couple of years, there has been a spurt of interest in mainstream English publishing in dalit life narratives.² S. Anand (2003) argues that though the creativity of dalits has been thriving in various Indian languages, the effort to render these writings into English has been lacking. While it is a positive development that this has now started to happen, several questions about the politics of translation and publication, which have been raised, cannot be bypassed. S. Anand’s invitation (2003) to publishers, writers, translators, scholars and teachers of dalit studies to reflect on the politics of consumption of dalit literature provides important insights into the issue. In what follows, we review these invited reflections on issues relating to the prioritisation of certain kinds of literary production and the control of publishing by non-dalits who often make tokenist additions to canons. Ravikumar, activist-theoretician of the dalit movement in Tamil Nadu, argues that while the spurt in translations ensures that dalit voices do become accessible and casteism is exposed, it is important also to remember that there is a politics of selection at work in terms of what is translated and by whom. Writer Arundhati Roy agrees that people’s ‘own histories’ have to be written but policing the territory of representation into a formal policy can become counterproductive. Mini Krishnan, translator and editor, argues that while one may be critical of the reasons behind the sudden spurt in books by dalit writers, we need to remember that a new area is always dangerous and fascinating and that the role of dalit writings in sensitising the young should not be understimated. Publisher Mandira Sen argues that the increase in books by dalit writers may well be because it is now fashionable and politically correct to publish dalit books but the end result can only be positive in that this will surely draw these writings out from the margins. Several participants in the debate have also drawn links between the increase in translations of dalit writings with the globalising economy and neo-liberal markets. Historian of the dalit movement Gail Omvedt, and author and editor Sivakami, see this development as a consequence of the more global alliances made by dalits since the Durban World conference against racism. Chronicler of the dalit movement Anand Teltumbde argues that in neo liberal markets, linkages between the movement and literature weaken and the increase in dalit books may therefore be seen as a strategy of containment by the State and the imperial order.

Most of the recently published dalit writings are autobiographical in nature, a circumstance that has led some scholars to question the radical potential of the increased accessibility of dalit writings. Can reading and teaching of dalit autobiographies radicalise the perception of readers? Do readers conveniently consume these narratives as narratives of pain and suffering refusing to engage with the politics and theory of Ambedkarism? Translator and teacher Arun Prabha Mukherjee argues that autobiographies are not ‘sob stories’ but stories of anger against injustice. Narendra Jadhav whose life narrative ‘Amcha Baap Aani Amhi’ (Our Old Man and We) has been translated into English (Jadhav 2003) and French, argues that first person accounts generate empathy among non-dalits. Anand Teltumbde finds the autobiographical narratives too individualistic, often glorifying the author, romanticizing dalit backgrounds and failing to represent collective pain. Guru (2003), on the contrary, underlines the sociologically illuminating, politically subversive and aesthetically interesting character of dalit autobiography. He argues that the dalit autobiography that flourished under liberalism has come to be excluded from the cultural taste of Indian middle classes under neo-liberalism.

Another issue of pedagogical significance discussed in this debate relates to the token inclusion of dalit writings in the academy, with dalit studies becoming a fad within academia. Omvedt comments on the important role played by dalit writings in increasing critical awareness about brahmanical domination among sensitive ‘upper caste’ academics in India and scholars of South Asia in the United States. Yet, as sociologist K. P. Singh comments, this has not reached a point where it has become fashionable to ‘do’ Dalit Studies. Teacher and translator Alok Mukherjee too directs attention to the persistence of gatekeeping in academia where, particularly in journals, dalit writing is still seen as not representing ‘universal themes’ but as appealing to a ‘specific readership’. Courses on dalit writing continue to be optional, never becoming integral parts of the curricula. K. Satyanarayana, teacher of Dalit Studies, underlines his refusal to add on courses or modules on dalit literature and propagates a broader concept of Dalit Studies, which brings in new perspectives towards understanding Indian reality. Drawing upon the above mentioned debate (S. Anand 2003), we tease out below other issues that form part of the reflections, some of which have for long been subjects of debate in dalit literary circles in Maharashtra.

Since the 1960s, there has been considerable debate on issues related to the politically appropriate nomenclature for the literature of protest and revolt and the significance of dalit life narratives. It is important to recall here that Babasaheb Ambedkar had coined the word ‘dalit’ in 1928 in his writings in Bahishkrut Bharat (India of the Ex-communicated) and the concept of dalit literature came to be accepted by the 1950s. However, at the second dalit literary meet organised in Pune in 1961, the term ‘dalit’ came to be contested and a resolution was passed to rename the literature ‘Buddhist’. Since then, there have been several debates on whether the literature that emerges from perspectives challenging the given social structure and cultural practices can be called dalit, Phule- Ambedkarite, Ambedkarism-inspired, Buddhist, rebellious or non-brahmanical (Ratnakar 1997).

Several dalit scholars argued against dalits writing autobiographies and compared the process to ‘digging out stench from hateful waste bins of the past’. Defending the importance of the genre, others outlined the specific characteristics of dalit life narratives and their significance fur the community. Important questions relating to the origins of the genre of dalit life narratives, its political significance, as well as its limitations and the challenges it poses to the genre of bourgeois autobiography were raised in the course of these debates. Can the dalit life narrative be called an atma charitra (autobiography)? Is it better described as dalit atmakathan/ svakathan (defined as narratives of dalit self and community)? Are dalit life narratives a moral source for political movements or reminders of a hateful past?

Dolas (1995) argues that some dalit readers of life narratives have questioned the relevance of highlighting that which has been negated by the community. Their dissatisfaction with life narratives, he further argues, stems from the fact that many dalit life narratives focus more on the pre-Ambedkarite era and thus do not adequately represent the history of agitation and progress. Jadhav (2001) makes a case against dalit autobiographies being labelled revivals of memories of a hateful past. He argues that the continued stream of dalit life narratives over three generations and more suggests that there is no reason for either embarrassment or blame. Baburao Bagul, a leading dalit intellectual, has explained how dalit literature is not defined by anguish, waiting and sorrow alone but is a historical necessity in promoting human freedom (Bhagwat 1976). O.K. Bedekar, a leading Marxist scholar had also mapped the direction of dalit literature as moving from the articulation of the experience of humiliation to humanism and from agitation to transformation (Dangle 1978). Scholars like Guru have argued that the dalit middle classes and politicians find life narratives a source of embarrassment, as they would rather not summon an undesirable past into the cultural present. He further claims that these narratives remain inaccessible to common dalits, who do not really need to ‘discover their life world’ and who continue to resist on an everyday basis without aspiring for representation (Guru 2003). Some scholars have argued for the political significance of dalit life narratives by tracing the origins of the genre to the writings and speeches of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar (Pantawane 1993). Kharat (2001) has pieced together a life narrative from the autobiographical reflections of Dr Ambedkar as articulated in his speeches, writings, letters and lectures. He mentions that Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar had meant to write his life narrative and that three notebooks marked for the purpose had been found in his study (p. 3). Daya Pawar whose life narrative Balut³ was one of the early writings in this genre, traces the origins of the genre to the diary of Kalappa Yeshwant Dhale written during the period 1911-28. Pawar retrieved this diary from Dhale’s family who had kept it carefully for over seventy years. In his diary Dhale notes the exploitative character of caste-based society; giving details of violence, as well as processes of labour and resistance through education (Pawar 1985). The entire debate on whether the hateful past should be written and brought into the present suggests the complex relationship between official forgetting, memory, and identity. Dalit life narratives cannot be accused of bringing an undesired past into the present, for they are one of the most direct and accessible ways in which the silence and misrepresentation of dalits has been countered. My argument here is that dalit life narratives are in fact testimonios, which forge a right to speak both for and beyond the individual and contest explicitly or implicitly the ‘official forgetting’ of histories of caste oppression, struggles and resistance.

Dalit life narratives challenge the bourgeois genre of autobiography and pull at the boundaries of what are considered the parameters of the life-world (Pantawane 1993). These narratives have established themselves as a distinct genre,⁴ which emerged from the creative dialectics between exploring and interpreting self and society and the conflict within these. (Jadhav 1991; Lokhande 1994). These narratives came to represent not the journey of an individual voice, emotion and consciousness but rather a social and community-based chorus of voices (Waghmare 1984). In consciously violating the boundaries set by bourgeois autobiography, dalit life narratives became testimonios that summoned the truth from the past; truth about the poverty and helplessness of the pre-Ambedkarite era as also the resistance and progress of the Ambedkarite era. Writing on Faustina Bama’s testimonio, Pandian argues that dalit life narratives have violated genre boundaries by depleting the I – an outcome of bourgeois individualism – and by displacing it with the collectivity of the dalit community (Pandian 1998). Dalit life narratives are testimonios; acts testifying or bearing witness legally or religiously. A testimonio is a narrative in book or pamphlet form, told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events he or she recounts and whose unit of narration is usually a ‘life’ or significant life experience (Beverley 1992: 92–93). In a testimonio, the intention is not one of literariness but of communicating the situation of a group’s oppression, imprisonment and struggle. The narrator claims some agency in the act of narrating and calls upon the readers to respond actively in judging the situation (p. 94-97). As subjects of historically and culturally specific understandings of memory, experience, embodiment and identity, narrators both reproduce the cultural modes of self-narrating and critique the limits of these modes (Smith and Watson 2001). In doing so they create new generic possibilities and invite different ways of being read. Dalit life narratives thus historically created the genre of testimonios in which the individual self seeks affirmation in a collective mode. Yet we need to remember that by bringing into the public domain details of life, they also challenge the communitarian control on self (Guru 2003). This dialectics of self and community assumes further significance in dalit women’s testimonios for, situated as women in the community, they articulate concerns of gender, challenging the singular communitarian notion of the dalit community.

It should be fairly clear from the preceding discussion that dalit life narratives cannot simply be reduced to mere ‘narratives of pain and sorrow’ or ‘memories of a hateful past’. These narratives violate the parameters set by bourgeois autobiography and create testimonios of caste-based oppression, anti-caste struggles and resistance. What then are the ‘uses of dalit testimonios’ for critical pedagogies?

The understanding of caste as an ideological system based on an irreconcilable opposition of the principles of purity and pollution has dominated disciplinary knowledges. Such an understanding of caste was derived from what Berreman (see Gupta 1991) calls ‘talking with brahmans’ and Mencher (1974) describes as a view from ‘top to down’. Chakravarti (2003) argues that the perspectives highlighting caste as a system of consensual values (for example Dumont 1972, Moffat 1979) were conveniently more popular than those that challenged the top down view of the system. The linkages between the brahmans’ control over knowledge and the canonical understanding of caste cannot be ignored. Chakravarti has succinctly summarised this politics of the knowledge of caste.

It is not surprising that sociological writing – whose practitioners have mostly been men – often intellectualizes and thereby masks rather than explains the structure of the caste system. It gives an overemphasis on the ideology of the caste system, namely, on its ritual aspect, to the exclusion of material conditions and questions of power. This is a consequence of focussing on the brahmanical view drawn from brahmanical texts. It completely evades the views of dalit writers who provided a counter view on the caste system by focusing on the experiential dimensions of caste based oppression (Chakravarti 2003: 6–7; emphasis original).

The introduction of dalit testimonios as historical narratives of experience is a way of introducing the counter views on the caste system. As Guru (2003) puts it succinctly, testimonios have the ability to convert ‘what is considered pathological into subversive chemicals’. These writings perform a double function; they inflict an inferiority complex in the minds of adversaries by resurrecting dalit triumphalism and bring out guilt in the minds of ‘upper castes’ by recording social wrongs done by ancestors (Guru 2003:71). The role of critical translations for foregrounding the social and political content of the testimonios cannot be undermined. Reading dalit ‘autobiographies’ minus the political ideology and practices of the dalit movement does stand the risk of making a spectacle of dalit suffering and pain for non-dalit readers. However read as testimonios of caste based exploitation, everyday resistance and organised anti-caste struggles, they bring new insights and theories into elite brahmanical institutions of academia. The ways in which we construct curricula, pedagogies, and position the narratives, that is, how we learn, are at least as important as what we learn. We cannot ghettoise the testimonios in separate optional courses on dalit writings and expect to radicalise our understanding of caste. When the purpose of reading is one of democratisation of knowledges rather than colonisation, locating the narratives historically and relationally becomes crucial. In bringing dalit women’s testimonios into the curricula there has to be a deliberate exercise in thinking out issues. Some of the questions that have arisen are: Why dalit women’s testimonios? Do dalit women ‘remember and write differently’? How may this ‘difference’ be historically located in the articulations of caste and the women’s question in the Marathi public sphere? Before we turn specifically to these questions, for readers not very familiar with western India, a brief introduction to the processes of caste, class formation and gender in Maharashtra may be in order.

An Introduction to Gender, Caste and Class Formation in Maharashtra

With the arrival of the British rule, old laws have been totally drowned,

Onions and vegetables, ghee and sugar, all kinds of flours now cost the same,

The methods and ways of the moneylenders have changed,

In broad daylight, homes now collapse under the weight of the Marwaris’ loans.

Amounts in thousands noted on paper, Homes are being auctioned

As defaulters come to be put immediately behind bars.

Women have become immoral, all modesty and shame lost,

Conjugality has now become a matter of their will.

Upper, middle and lower varnas all are in haste,

Imagine, even the lowest of castes, mangs and mahars all draw water using the same vessel!

Had heard about ‘adharma’ and now I see it here,

The madness that is creating so much of chaos!

(Shahir Parshuram as quoted in Phadke 1989: 5)

Shahir Parshuram, a noted composer at the later Peshwa court describes thus the changes brought forth by the establishment of Company rule in western India. Many of the shahirs (folk composers) of the eighteenth century metaphorically referred to Maharashtrian society under Company Rule as a forehead without the vermilion mark and a neck without the mangalsutra (Shaligram 1879 as quoted in Phadke 1989: 5). The Peshwai had fixed notions of brahmanism, rigid hierarchies of caste and a strictly regulated code of conduct for women. The prescribed codes differed to some extent according to caste but were always the index in fixing ranking within the caste hierarchy (Chakravarti 1998:17). It is therefore not surprising that the imagery of the decline of the Peshwa rule came to be expressed in terms of the breakdown of caste and gender regulations. Caste constituted the bedrock of Maharashtrian society and has influenced the social life of Maharashtra more than any other factor (Kumar 1968: 37).

The traditional caste hierarchy was headed by the brahman castes – the deshasthas, chitpavans, karhadas, saraswats and the chandraseniya kayastha prabhus. The deshasthas, considered to be the native brahmans, were the accountants in the villages under Maratha rule. In the eighteenth century, under Peshwa rule, the chitpavan or konkanastha brahmans who came to occupy feudatory positions, eclipsed the position of the deshasthas. Some of the chitpavan families were the main moneylenders of the Peshwas. The karhadas had a small numerical strength and the brahman status of the saraswats originally from the south Konkan region was contested by the chitpavan brahman regime of the peshwas.

The prabhus were the ‘writer’ caste, similar to the kayasthas of northern India. The large cluster of peasant castes, best known as the maratha-kunbi castes, constituted a stratified caste cluster. The term ‘kunbi’ is a generic term for all those who toil on the land, in this sense the term did not refer to a sub-caste. It was possible for families of koli or the fisher caste to take up agriculture and be accepted as kunbis in the local community. The application of the term ‘Maratha’ had changed considerably since the beginning of the nineteenth century. But it is still possible to conclude that the term Maratha centered among the kunbi – the peasant cultivators – and reached up to the aristocratic shahannav kuli (96 royal clans). The ‘lower’ cultivator castes included mali (gardener), aagri (salt makers) and bhandari (toddy tapers) castes. The mang (rope makers), sutar (carpenters), lohar (smith), kumbhar (potters), nhavi (barber), dhobi (washerman), champar (tanner), sweepers and scavengers constituted those entitled to baluta, a share in the grain for services rendered. These artisan castes made up for almost 10 per cent of the population and involved mainly the castes directly related to production and were described as karu/naru or balutedar. The sonars (goldsmiths) were at the top of the artisan category and came to be considered one of the ‘advanced’ castes under colonial rule in the Bombay region. The mahars who constituted 10 per cent of the population were not included among the artisans and were the village watchmen entitled to the service lands or watans and a share of the baluta. The maratha-kunbis, the mahars and the brahmans accounted for half the total population. The commercial classes were constituted by the gujars and marwaris, often referred to as the vanis and who had migrated from Rajasthan to the region in the early seventeenth century.

The social structure contained three major elements; the brahmans, non-brahmans and ‘untouchables’. The caste-based system of occupations, the balutedari system, served to integrate the exploitative division of labour with the ritual order. While there were several regional variations in the ranking of the balutedars, the hegemonic status of the brahmans and the dominant land owning caste, the Marathas remained more or less constant. There were broadly three types of balutedars: religious servants and officials of the village constituted mainly by brahmans; artisans or shudra castes who constituted the bulk of balutedars and the disposers of dead animals, messengers, general village servants constituted by the untouchable or ati-shudra castes. In addition to these balutedars, there were the communities who moved with their pala or temporary settlements from village to village as they were not allowed to stay in a village for more than the stipulated number of days. These castes (now referred to as Denotified and Nomadic Communities) have been broadly categorised into four groups: the entertainers; customary beggars, those related to the village economy through their labour, hunters (Karve 1968; Kumar 1968; Omvedt 1976; Lele 1990; Kharat 2003).

Several well-known accounts of social change in nineteenth century Maharashtra have offered an in-depth analysis of the changing patterns of caste-class relations in the region (Kosambi 1962; Kumar 1968; Masselos 1974; Omvedt 1976; Phadke 1989; Lele 1990). In the last decade feminist scholarship has underlined the significance of incorporating gender in the analysis of political and social change in the nineteenth century in western India (Bhagwat 1997; Chakravarti 1998). Drawing upon these we shall trace an introductory map of the complex relations between caste, class formation and gender in Maharashtra. The rule of the Peshwas ended with the arrival of the Company Raj in 1818, which marked the introduction of new land settlements. In this first phase of colonialism, the introduction of new land settlements – Khoti in the Konkan and Ryotwari in the Deccan region – marked a disruption in the structure of land relations. The administrative, maritime and mercantile establishments in Mumbai were spruced up. As official trade of cotton and teakwood alongside the unofficial dealing in opium flourished, Bombay took over the place of pride occupied by Pune under the Peshwas.

Sensing the need for a disciplined cadre of lower order administration, the British had set up several educational institutions in Bombay, leading finally to the establishment of a University in 1857. The setting up of the Public Works Department in the 1840s improved transport and communication between Bombay and Pune and by the 1870s, Pune came to be a cultural and educational centre. It was in the second phase, beginning with the Government of India becoming directly responsible to the Crown, that the systematic organisation of cotton trade and production began. Following the failure of the American crop in 1846, the textile industries grew and the impoverished kunbis began to migrate to urban centres, a pattern that continued until the economic crisis of 1880s. The 1870s were marked by repeated famines, which had left the peasantry hopelessly indebted. At the peak of the Peshwa rule, chitpavan brahman families of Pune, who had been the moneylenders, came to be replaced by gujars and marwari moneylenders. The already impoverished peasantry became further indebted under the even more rigid system of revenue collection under the Ryotwari. Peasants of north central Varhad region were severely affected by the famines of the late 1890s and though textile mills had been set up in this region in 1877, the region remained predominantly a supplier of cotton to’ the Bombay mills.

The 1931 Census gives a caste wise distribution of the population and classifies castes in the Bombay Province into Advanced, Intermediate, Other Backward, Primitive and Depressed. In the context of this classification, it is important to trace the class structure that developed in the region after the 1840s. The two phases of commercialisation in Maharashtra (1847–73 and 1880–1920) led to the emergence of a distinct commercial bourgeoisie. The class of moneylenders, traders and rentiers was constituted by the brahmans, gujars (vanis) and marwaris. After 1850 the business of contracting for the Public Works Department became an important source of wealth. The komti, vanjari and telgu munurvar communities from the Andhra region played a major role in the newly emerging area of public works contracting and thus in the building of Bombay. The telgu phulmalis, as they were referred to, were in the construction business as contractors, middlemen and workers. Members of the Marathi mali community were also contractors in road building and canal building works and at least a small section of non-brahmans could thus become a part of the commercial bourgeoisie (Kadam 1999). The old feudal intermediaries retained significant holdings but did not venture into moneylending, trade, lower administrative or contracting work. It was the class of non-brahman contractors rather than the surviving Maratha feudatories who became the sponsors of the non-Brahman movement. By the second decade of the last century, there was an English, Gujarati, Marwari, Parsi and Muslim bourgeoisie in the textile industry. Further, the petit bourgeoisie, the primarily Marathi urban working class, the peasantry, the landless proletariat and adivasis constituted the other major social divisions of Maharashtra (Lele 1990; Omvedt 1976). While British rule had pushed the mahar community further into the ranks of marginal peasantry and agricultural labourers, new opportunities opened up in the textile factories in urban centres. The mahars had a more tenuous link with the traditional caste order; they did not have a traditional occupation nor the same commitment to the varna order as the other two ex-untouchable communities of mangs and chambars had. This allowed some members of the community to leave the village for jobs in the military, railway building and textile mills. Though small in size and scattered, this class of mahars with access to education in missionary schools played a major role in initiating a self reform movement in the 1890s (Gokhale 1993).

It is evident that in western India, the British were anxious to consolidate the brahmans as a class. Matters of caste custom, norms related to marriage and purity of caste came to be regarded as matters of religion and were to be executed through the caste panchayat. Women were dispensable to the agenda of the British in early rule in western India though the attitude to gender was clearly influenced by caste and class considerations. In the several cases of contestations of caste status that came up for hearing, gender was a crucial component in the disputes. In establishing caste status, the purity of women was often more important than the right to Vedic rites and rituals. For instance, in the brahman-Maratha conflict of the 1830s, the charge of violation of endogamy by Maratha women was one of the main allegations of the chitpavan brahmans against the Marathas. The Marathas, in turn, had underlined the strict code of seclusion followed by their womenfolk (O’Hanlon 1985; Bhagwat 1997; Chakravarti 1998). It is important to note that in most of these disputes for caste status, not only did caste hierarchy remain unchallenged but brahmanical gender codes were further consolidated. Chakravarti (1998) has drawn attention to the ways in which caste ideology thus worked to make the upper caste practices hegemonic and thus limit the cultural imagination of the lower castes to reconceptualise society.

The consequences of the British policy of education that had been guided by the needs of administration became evident by the middle of the nineteenth century. A class of administrators, clerks, journalists and writers – a professional class, which was the backbone of the middle class – emerged. The caste composition of the emergent intelligentsia is clearly indicative of the fact that with the British policy of education, upper castes such as saraswats (shenvis) and prabhus could consolidate their hold over the scarce opportunities. A non-brahman Ryot had, in 1823, commented that the power of the brahman had doubled since they lost the country (Ballhatchet 1957:153). Before the downfall of the Peshwa rule, in 1815, there was only one school started by the missionaries for orphans in Bombay. Between 1827 and 1848, several schools of the Elphinstone institution had started and 152 students had completed matriculation. Of these 152 students, 71 were prabhus, 28 Parsis, 16 brahmans, 12 saraswats and 25 belonged to the lower castes. In the New English school in Pune, out of 982 students registered in 1886, 911 students were brahmans (Phadke 1989: 33). In his autobiography, Dadoba Pandurang recalls how the upper castes exerted their caste authority to remove students of the kunbi, koli, bhandari castes from these schools (Priyolkar 1973). In 1886, of the 384 persons employed in the elite Indian administrative hierarchy, 211 were brahmans, 37 prabhus and only one shudra (Omvedt 1976). These figures give a picture of the control of the brahmans and prabhus over the local administration, and the brahmans over teaching and public service. For a caste that constituted only 4 per cent of the population, the brahman representation in these spheres and their overwhelming dominance amounted to monopolisation. It is important that we briefly trace the contestations to this dominance of brahmanism lest it seem that the dominance of brahmanism as an ideology was continuous and uncontested.

Despite, the conscious brahmanic position of the Satvahana King from about the first century B.C. to the third century A.D., the archaeological evidence suggests the strength of both Buddhism and Jainism in the region (Chakravarti 1998). Brahmanism became a dominant ideology in the twelfth century and the work Chaturvarg Chintamani, a text written by Hemadri at the court of the last Yadava king, brought forth a codification of brahmanical rites and rituals drawing upon earlier religious texts. A critique of this work was offered by the Mahanubhav and Varkari sects, which opposed brahmanic ritualism and the caste system (Kosambi 1962). The Varkari sants came from different castes; Namdev was a shimpi, Gora a kumbhar, Chokhamela a mahar and Tukaram a kunbi. There were several women sants too and their choice of gurus shows a transgression of the boundaries of caste. Janabai was herself a shudra slave and a follower of Namdev of the tailor caste while Bahinabai, an upper caste woman, had Tukaram, a shudra, as her guru (Bhagwat 1995a). It was during the Peshwa regime that the leadership of the Varkari tradition was taken over by the brahmans and its message reinterpreted and delivered by brahman mendicants and storytellers. This decay of a cultural tradition shared by masses across caste boundaries has been noted as by far the most damaging legacy of the Peshwas (Lele 1990). The Peshwa regions had seen the proliferation of the Ganesha cult, temple building and increasing control of Brahmanism. As noted earlier, strict observance of the purity and the pollution taboos and the purity of women became the two pillars of brahmanism. Adultery remained the most important offence resulting in stringent action from the community and the State. The Peshwai expanded State control over the settlement of caste status, the imposition of strictures on caste based occupations and the maintaining of distances (Gavali 1981). The old association of higher castes with skills of literacy, combined with the policies of the British, had meant that clerical and professional positions in the British administration belonged to the upper castes and to brahmans in particular (Omvedt 1976). However, this hegemonic control of the upper castes did not go uncontested. There were contestations of both kinds, those that claimed brahman or more often kshatriya status and others that proposed real critiques of the ideology of the caste system. Contestations for higher (kshatriya or brahman) status within the given hierarchy do not challenge the cultural hegemony of the brahmans and their conceptualisation of the caste system. The acceptance of brahmanical hierarchy meant stricter regulatory codes for women of castes seeking higher status. As against this, there were real critiques that posed a direct threat to the cultural hegemony of the brahmans and articulated the exploitative politics of the caste system (Chakravarti 1998). Such real critiques came in modern Maharashtra with Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj and Ambedkar’s call for the annihilation of caste, which also opened the cultural imagination to more emancipatory gender codes.

The response of different sections of society to the inroads being made by the capitalist economy was complex and full of mixed patterns of resilience, continuity and change (Lele 1990). The burgeoning of educational institutions run by Protestant missionaries opened up new opportunities for men like Jotirao Phule and other ‘lower caste’ men and women. Yet, a broad congruence between caste and class was sustained throughout the nineteenth century. The last two decades of the century are marked by a crisis in brahman identity. A pattern of steady growth and expansion of white-collar opportunities marked the period between 1850 and 1880. In the 1880s, as an economic crisis set in, the prospects