Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Hamid Ansari
BOOKS
24/MAR/2019
Yasmin Saikia and M. Raisur Rahman (eds), The Cambridge Companion To Sayyid
Ahmad Khan. (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
1857 is etched in our memory as the year of the First War of Indian
Independence. That heroic struggle failed and the British dominance over
the subcontinent was formalised. Fewer people associate 1857 with a
decision of the British governor-general, on a recommendation made a
few years earlier by Sir Charles Wood, to formally introduce English
education in areas under its control. Its purpose was professedly altruistic
and unabashedly selfish: ‘to increase moral character in the Indian’s
mind and thus supply the company with civil servants who can be trusted
upon.’
The editors of this volume have done well to include essays on different
aspects of the socio-economic and intellectual challenges that confronted
Sayyid Ahmad Khan. The situational task did not admit of delay. He had
an acute perception that his community was out of step with the times
politically (in relation to the new rulers of the land) and economically
(lacking requisite qualifications for the job market). Underlying both was
an approach to tradition and religious dogma and the need, in his view, to
segregate the essential from the non-essential to enable the community to
develop a constructive view on modernity. He concluded that neither
could be neglected. His theological views and the resulting gap between
tradition and modernity, however, were totally out of step with orthodox
opinion in his own community. It was therefore made to take a backseat
to job-oriented education and, to use David Lelyveld’s words, ‘pay due
respect to the received pieties.’
The college he founded refrained from teaching and publishing his views
and elicited from a generation later the historian Mohammad Mujeeb’s
harsh judgment that ‘the higher values were discarded for the lower’ and
‘exchanged for the infinite spaces of religious and moral obligation; the
reconstruction of the social and economic life of a whole community
were sacrificed to secure recruitment in the lower grades of government
service for the sons of a few hundred Muslim families.’
Neither the college nor its founder lived in isolation from other
happenings in colonial India. The impulses then being generated sought
answers; Sayyid Ahmad responded in terms of his priorities. A later
generation would read meanings into this, and seek to mould political
opinion around it. Neither do justice to the founder and his single-minded
purpose.
CASTE
BOOKS
CASTE
24/MAR/2019
In the wake of Rohith Vemula’s suicide, New-York based
journalist Yashica Dutt decided to reveal what she had hidden for years –
her whole life – the fact that she is Dalit. Ever since her ‘coming out’ as
a Dalit, she has faced varying reactions, the most common being, ‘Oh,
but you don’t look like a Dalit’.
Dutt has now written a memoir about growing up in a Dalit family, and
the compulsions of hiding her caste while others flaunted theirs for social
capital. Her book, Coming Out As Dalit is not just her personal story, but
a commentary on the experience of being a Dalit in today’s India.
Your memoir is not just your story, but also a commentary on what
has been happening to Dalits at large. Was this meant to give it
context or was it, to use your own phrase, to avoid ‘the danger of the
single narrative’?
Including the stories of other Dalits, but doing that with data, facts and
research, was a deliberate choice. I’ve been a journalist all my life. So
the idea of just writing my own story was odd for me. I never wanted this
book to just be about my world.
After coming out as Dalit, you’ve received comments like, “Oh, but
you don’t look like a Dalit”. How did that feel?
That was the most common response. It was also one of the reasons I was
excited to see how people would react. The truth is that I don’t ‘look like
a Dalit’ – the kind of Dalit we are used to seeing in media, cinema, pop-
culture (when we see them at all). But that doesn’t change the fact that
Dalits – around all 250 million of us – don’t look the same.
Not all of us live in rural areas, just like not all of us live in the cities. I
can look, present, react, respond in any way I want and none of those
things make me (or anyone else) any less of a Dalit or my Dalitness any
less valid. This is the real danger of the single narrative. It perpetuates
this false idea that Dalits only have to be a certain type of person, i.e.
possibly uneducated or unable to speak English, possibly rural and
possibly at the receiving end of horrible discrimination and violence.
That in order to, somewhat, justify affirmative action or reservations, we
need to look downtrodden. Only then will society agree to acknowledge
the thousands of years of systemic injustice that’s been inflicted on us.
How does class enter the picture? How do you see the
intersectionality of caste, class and gender, especially in the Indian
context?
Yashica Dutt
Coming Out As Dalit: A Memoir
Aleph Book Company
Even in Rohith Vemula’s story, his class was among the biggest
deterrents along with his caste. Because of their class position, Radhika
Vemula had to take up multiple odd jobs to put her children through
school and college. Rohith also had many such jobs to support himself.
Hyderabad University was aware of his situation and still wielded their
power over his fellowship money to stop him from questioning their
policies.
Even in death, his fellowship money, which was his only source of
income and which he had also not received for several months at the
time, was among his biggest concerns (something he mentioned in his
last letter). Our lower class leaves us defenceless against discrimination.
Escaping that does not stop the discrimination, but it does give us the
ways and means to navigate that more easily. Which is why the
affirmative action policy of reservation is still so critical for Dalits. It is
one of the few lifelines that help us transcend class, and escape the
heinous conditions of our caste-based professions.
How difficult was it to write about the domestic violence your mother
experienced? Why was it important for you to write about it?
It has been one of the largest, most present realities of my existence since
I was a child. Along with a keen understanding of my caste, I also grew
up extremely aware of the vulnerability of my mother, whom I always
considered to be an exceptionally strong person. The contradiction that
someone like that could still be treated this way, and be helpless about it,
shaped how I understood the world around me.
It also made aware that often choice cannot surpass our circumstances,
especially if those circumstances belong to a Dalit woman with three
children and a family who doesn’t necessarily share her ambition for her
daughters.
As a result, I grew up wanting and learning to push back against her kind
of helplessness. I also learned to be fiercely protective of her. The fact
that she endured what she did just to send her two daughters to good
schools and give them a life that was in no way lesser than her son’s has
been the driving force behind most of my decisions.
It certainly wasn’t easy to write about it, especially because I had to keep
revisiting that trauma with each edit and every rewrite (there were four).
But I had to do it because my mother and her unwillingness to
compromise with my education and freedoms allowed me to become the
person who could grow up and write this book. Also, as I was discarding
my shame around caste and even my lower class, I also gained pride in
my mother’s struggle, in her resilience and grit and her endless resolve to
somehow never give up.
I also wanted to make a larger point about patriarchy and misogyny and
how it didn’t magically disappear just because we were Dalit. Especially
in Rajasthan, which has among the worst records of killing female
foetuses, patriarchal attitudes can be especially noxious and my mother
was all the worse for it.
A lot of the physical violence she endured was as a result of her failing to
fall in line, her refusal to mutely agree to the decisions of the men in her
family and her demands for equality for her daughters. I was writing a
book about how Dalit lives look in hiding and the violence my mother
faced was a dark reality that lurked in those same shadows.
I didn’t come out as Dalit until I moved to New York. I never covered
politics or took an interest in writing anything political when I was
working in Delhi because I was worried that I might write a story or
express an opinion that might reveal my caste. While I didn’t experience
this personally, but several reports I read (and have cited in the book)
discuss the discomfort of Dalit journalists with their ‘upper’ caste peers
in newsrooms ganging up against reservation, whether in journalism
institutes like IIMC or ACJ or other universities and colleges.
Those who were open about their caste talked about being pigeonholed to
the ‘caste beat’ and the lack of opportunities for them to rise through the
editorial ranks. Which makes sense, since we don’t know of many (any)
Dalit senior editors or editor-in-chiefs so far. Too many ‘caste
stories’ get them branded as rebels who are difficult to manage. But even
though caste might not an open question in English newsrooms, like with
me, caste is still being consistently evaluated.
Also Read: So the Term ‘Dalit’ Can’t Be Used But ‘Brahmin’ and 6,000
Other Caste Names Can