CONSPIRACY OF UPPER CASTE ABOUT THE POPULATION OF DALITHBAHUJANS

 The purohits praised the Puranas and the Communist and rationalist writers wrote critiques of these Puranas. But nobody thought that we too have a soul and that soul needs to be talked about. Nobody thought that there are Pochamma, Maisamma and Potaraju who need to be talked about too. Even the Communists and rationalists spoke and wrote in the language of the purohit himself. Their culture was basically Sanskritized; we were not part of that culture. For good or ill, no one talked about us. They never realized that our language is also a language, that it is understood by one and all in our communities; not to forget the fact that these communities are not small in number; they are made up of lakhs and crores whereas the Hindu 'upper' castes are few in number. If our parents had been conscious about the conspiracy of this silent violence, they would have simply inhaled all the Hindus as nasham (likely they usually inhale tobacco powder). What was arrested and what was stifled was that consciousness. The consciousness of 'us' and of 'our' culture was never allowed to exercise our minds. Childhood formations are important for a person—female or male—to become a full human being. But our childhoods were mutilated by constant abuse and by silence, and by a stunning silence at that. There was the conspiracy to suppress the formation of our consciousness. For hundreds of generations the violent stoppage of the entry of the written word into our lives nipped our consciousness in the very bud. Even after schools were opened to us because of independence or swaraj, a word which even today I fail to understand, the school teacher was against us, the text language was against us. Our homes have one culture and the schools have another culture. If our culture was Dalitbahujan, the culture of the school was Hindu. The gap between the two was enormous. There was no way in which one resembled the other. In fact these two cultures were poles apart. What difference did it make to us whether we had an English textbook that talked about Milton's Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained, or Shakespeare's Othello or Macbeath or Shakespeare's Othello or Macbeth or Wordsworth's poetry about nature in England, or a Telugu textbook which talked about Kalidasa's Meghasandesham, Bammera Potanna's Bhagavatam, or Nannaya and Tikkana's Mahabharatham except the fact that one textbook is written with twenty-six letters and the other in fifty-six letters? We do not share the contents of either; we do not find our lives reflect in their narratives. We cannot locate our family settings in them. In none of these books do we find words that are familiar to us. Without the help of a dictionary neither makes any sense to us. how does it make any difference to us whether it is Greek and Latin that are written in Roman letters or Sanskrit that is written in Telugu? Right from school 'their' male children talked about 'their' initiation into the Hindu religion through the upanayana. From the day after the upanayana a white thread hangs around their bodies, and from then on they are known as twice-born, thus more pure and superior, whereas we always remain once-born, thus more pure and superior, whereas we always remain once-born. When we first heart about the upanayana, we too desired to wear such a thread. It is a different thing that many of us would have later thrown that thread into muddy waters as Basava did at the early age of twelve. But the fact is that at the age of seven or eight, if there had been an occasion when we became the focal point of the house and a priest came to initiate us into religion, we would have gained confidence. Not only that, when we learnt that in the Brahmin, Baniya and other 'upper' caste families, initiation into writing takes place at the age of four and that it is also a festive occasion, how much we resented it! In the olden days, after such initiation, the so-called upper castes used to send their sons to gurukulas (brahminical schools). Now they send them to English-medium convent schools; the very schools that were hated by the same Hindus during the freedom struggle. Even in the 1990s Hindutva ideologues condemn such schools as 'anti-Hindutva' schools-of course, only to send their children into the same schools promptly after the upanayana. The Hindus condemn English, yet they send their children to English-Medium schools. We have not yet acquired the consciousness to condemn the complete domination of Telugu medium schools by the Hindu scriptures. Having had no alternative we send our children to schools that teach only the Puranas, or the epics in every textbook. This is a paradox, and we live with many such paradoxes.

            When we were told that Hindu girls and boys were married even when they were children, we thought of these practices as familiar since child marriage was also part of our lives. But when we read in the textbooks that the girls whose husbands died must remain widows and have their heads shaved; that they were to be clad only in white, we found it strange. In our families, girls whose in-laws did not look after them well, got divorced very easily and within days second husbands were found for them. While marriages take place at home and are celebrated with one type of meal and drink, divorces also take place with food and drink. Seeking divorce from an irresponsible husband is as much a sanctioned social act as performing marriages. In my childhood, when I read about Savithri struggling against the death of her husband, because otherwise she would become a widow, I was very happy that our women do not have to struggle like her.

                Similarly, when we read that Hindu women ought to die along with their dead husbands I was extremely happy that our women do not have to die like that. I was so glad that we do not belong to such a religion because if suddenly my father were to die my mother would not have to die also. If she so desired she could get me a stepfather. What about history textbooks and Telugu textbooks that told us story after story about women who committed sati  but there was not a single lesson about our women who still lived after their husband's deaths, who worked, brought up their children and got them married? There was not a single lesson about women who found in difficult to get a divorce and had to struggle hard to make that divorce actually take place. There was not a single lesson which talked about the parents who had to struggle hard to get their daughter married three times or four times being husband after husband turned out to be a bad person. Not a single textbook gave us moral lessons that there were brave parents who never wanted to let down their daughters. The textbook morality was different from our living morality.

                In all these stories and lessons we read about ideal men and women and of cultures that were very different from ours. In the Hindu texts, a knowledgeable man was one who knows the Vedas, a courageous person was one who kills enemies—even if the enemies are friends and relatives. In the Ramayana and the Mahabharatha, knowledge and courage were defined in these terms. But in our real life a knowledgeable person is one who has knowledge of social functions—one who knows about sheep-breeding, agriculture, rope making; one who can fight tigers, lions, snakes, wild bulls; who can travel deep into forests, swim the rivers and find the missing goat and sheep.

In Brahmin waadas and families, narratives about heroes and heroines do not exist within a human context. This is because Brahmin life is alienated from the kind of socioeconomic environment in which a real hero or a heroine can be constructed. Their social settings are the reading of slokaas or mantras with proficiency. The greatest achievement is learning the whole of the Ramayana or the Mahabharatha or the Bhagvad Gita by heart. Womanhood is discussed in terms of devotion to the husband and cooking with purity and pollution in mind. In fact brahminical culture eulogizes negative heroes and negative heroines. For example, Krishna who encourages one to kill one's own relatives is a hero. Arjuna who killed his relatives is a hero. In these narratives acquiring private property (the whole of the Mahabharatha is constructed around land becoming the private property of minorities, who are not involved in production) is idealized.

In 'Sudra' waadas it is just the opposite. There are a number of real-life situations from which ideal heroes and heroines emerge. Their daily working interaction with nature provides the scope for their formation. One who kills relatives, for whatever reason, and one who commits crimes, for whatever reason, becomes a crook. One who encourages killing is not a God but a devil worth condemning. A Pochamma did not become our heroine because she killed somebody, a Kattamaisamma did not become our hero because he killed somebody. They became our heroines and heroes because they saved us from diseases, or from hunger, and so on. Hindu morality is just the opposite of our living morality. Take another example. An ideal woman in a Hindu text is one who does not eat and drink the presence of older women and men of all ages. A woman is not supposed to smoke and drink even if the man is a chain-smoker and the worst drunkard. But in our homes no one talks badly about a woman who smokes or has a drink. All our women drink toddy or liquor along with our men. Our women smoke chuttas (cigars made with leaves and tobacco) at home and in the fields. They try to be at least notionally equal to men in all respects.

Those who say that all of us are Hindus must tell us which morality is Hindu morality? Which values do they want to uphold as right values? The 'upper' caste Hindu unequal and inhuman cultural values or our cultural values? What is the ideal of society today? What shall we teach the children of today? Shall we teach them what the Hindus or what the Dalitbahujan masses of this country want to learn has taught? Who makes an ideal teacher? Who becomes a good hero? One who produces varieties of crops, one who faces lions and tigers or one who kills the relatives and friends, simply because what 'upper' castes think is dharna and what others think is adharma? Where do we begin and where do we end? We must begin by creating our history and we must end by changing this very social fabric.

The Brahmin-Baniyas think that their non-productive ritualistic life is great and the Dalitbahujan non-ritualistic working life is mean. This philosophical make-up moulds the child population of these two communities differently. The Brahmin-Baniya 'upper' caste children think that they are the greater race, and that they are better bred. All this was proclaimed so consistently that it went into our psyches as if it might be true. Thus Brahmanism consolidated its own socio-cultural position in society. Since our parents have been denied education, which alone could have enabled them to assess their own position realistically, whatever social status the Brahmin, parading as an ayyagaaru, assigned to our parents, they passed on to us. Right from childhood, in spite of the fact that we had such great skills, we remained diffident. Once Brahmanism had unnerved human beings who were so much mightier and powerful, the diffidence was passed on from generation to generation. The whole lot of us—the whole Dalitbahujan population—were made to see things upside down.

Brahmin-Baniya temples were not only far from us, but the Gods sitting and sleeping in those temples were basically set against us. There were Brahmin-Baniya houses within our villages, but the very same houses built up a culture inimical to ours. The Brahmin Baniyas walked over the corpses of our culture. They were the gluttons while our parents were the poor starving people-producing everything for the Other's comfort. Their children were the most unskilled gluttons, whereas our children were the contributors to the national economy itself. Their notion of life was unworthy of life itself, but they repeatedly told our parents that we were the most useless people. Having gone through all these stages of life, having acquired the education that enabled us to see a wider world, when we reflect upon our childhood and its processes it is nothing but anger and anguish which keep burning in our hearts.