Have post-colonial developments changed the relations between the Hindus and us? Has the notion of social equality, even within the limited domain of the semi-feudal and semi-capitalist economic structures that have gradually been established, changed the socioeconomic relations between the Hindus and us?

CASTE AND COLLEGE EDUCATION

  As I struggled through the educational institutions, I began to learn that the structures of the Sstate, the country and the world are far larger than those of our village. Later, as I pushed my way into the institutions of higher education at various levels, education began to appear more and more alien to me, more and more brahminical and anglicized.  As long as my education remained basically in the Telugu medium, my Telugu textbooks and history textbooks consisted of only brahminical narratives. Even mathematics was taught in a brahminical paradigm. Gods and Goddesses, who appeared in our books were brahminical, the men who were projected as heroes came either from the brahminical tradition or from the Kshatriya tradition. The history books were full of stories of Kshatriya kings: we read their love stories and their war stories; we read about their problems and prospects, their dreams. Dalitbahujan life figured nowhere in the curriculum. We have been excluded from history. In fact, it appeared as if our history was no history at all.

                As I entered the B.A. course the medium of instruction shifted from Telugu to English. There were other shifts too. From that point on, even the content of the texts changed. The brahminical framework was replaced by an European one. European systems, whether of religion or society or politics, presented a world which was totally different from the brahminical one. While the brahminical lessons had been conspiratorially silent about our castes and our cultures, the English texts appeared to be doing the opposite. They spoke of classes in Europe, and the textbooks described the cultures of both the rich classes and poor classes. In the English language textbooks we were introduced to writers like Dickens. In political science the cultures of different classes were presented as a part of our study of liberal democratic ideas of 'equality' and 'inequality'.

                As I look back, it is clear from the English textbooks that in class societies—which also have conflicting cultures—there is much less of a conspiracy of silence in comparison to caste societies. In the Telugu textbooks the conspiracy of silence is as loud as a thunderclap. A class which is so brazenly casteist in theory and practice is also branzely silent about its inhumanity in its literary texts. What is amazing is the eulogization of this casteist culture in all the literary texts and the condemnation of our cultures in the same texts. My generation was perhaps the second Dalitbahujan generation to enter higher educational institutions in South India and encounter only 'upper' caste teachers. However radical these teachers were—among them were liberal democrats, left democrats, and even occasionally left radicals—all of them kept silent about the question of caste discrimination, despite the fact that they were practising it day in and day out. They did not perceive brahminical culture as shaping their own existence. They continued to think of Hindu culture as a monolith. Even when they critiqued it, they perceived it only as class culture without realizing that the opposite of Hindu culture is actually Dalitbahujan culture.

BRAHMINICAL CIVIL SOCIETY

As we came to urban centres, which were what the expanding towns were, what were the agencies of power and institutions of civil society that we encountered? It was amazing to note that the hotels which were symbols of capitalist melting-pot cultures, where the caste system could have begun to be destroyed, were visibly brahminized. Every other eating-place bore a signboard 'Brahmin Bhojana, Coffee Hotel'. The food prepared in these hotels was cooked according to Brahmin tastes. The non-vegetarian hotels either bore the names of Kshatriya kings or Brahmin-Baniya national leaders. To this day I have not seen in any urban centre a 'Maalaa Hotel' or a 'Maadigaa Hotel' that serves all the non-vegetarian foods—including beef—cooked to suit their own tastes. I have not seen a Kurumaa hotel or a Goudaa hotel that serves the food that suits our tastes. It seemed as though Brahmin and Kshatriya tastes were the universal tastes. All these hotels and shops—even public places like schools and colleges—hung pictures and calendars of the Hindu Gods and Goddesses—Brahma, Vishnu, Maheshwara, Lakshmi, Saraswathi, Parvathi, and so on. Not only in the temples where a Brahmin occupies the supreme position of priest and where the murthies  of brahminical Gods and Goddesses exist, but also in the institutions of civil society such as schools and offices, pictures of the Dalitbahujans are never present. In hotels and shops the pictures or calendars of our God and Goddesses are simply not to be seen. As our people moved into urban centres we were forced to feel that there was no place for our culture in public places. Our own people began to feel that if they spoke of Pochamma they would be ridiculed and humiliated. In urban centres the Dalitbahujan masses began to feel that they were actually a minority—at least as far as visibility in markets was concerned.

                Of course, even in these urban centres, non-Hindu goods and commodities were being sold by Dalitbahujan shopkeepers, but they were few and quite invisible. One Dalitbahujan caste that was somewhat visible, were the Shalaas (weavers) who were in the cloth trade. They thought that Sankritization was the only way in which they could survive in the marketplace which had become thoroughly 'baniyaized'. Slowly they began to get Sanskritized. They too began to pretends that they were dwijas by tying a thread around their bodies. They were afraid of putting up the picture of Potuluri Veerabhmam who was responsible for their social upgradation (in Andhra Pradesh). even in this urban market, caste occupational relations continued to operate. The Shalaas became mainly retail sellers of clothes. But it must be remembered that the wholesale cloth business slowly shifted almost entirely into the hands of the Baniyas.

It is important to understand the role of post-colonial political parties. The only two kinds of political parties known to us in our college days were those of the liberal democratic and communist schools. The main political force that represented a liberal democratic political ideology was the Congress. The Congress was systematically moulded into being a bhadralok party. They talked about the welfare of the Dalitbahujan castes, while all the state resources were cornered by the Hindus. The relationship between an 'upper' caste man and a Dalitbahujan caste man within the Congress was like that between Rama and Hanuman. It is common knowledge that Hanuman was a South Indian Dalit who joined the imperial army of Rama to fight against the South Indian nationalist ruler—Ravana. Hanuman worked day in and day out in the interest of 'Ramarajya' (an anti-Dalitbahujan and anti-women kingdom), yet his place in the administration was always marginal and subservient. Similarly, all the Dalitbahujan activists who joined the Congress party were given subservient places in the party hierarchy. Their main task was to mobilize the masses, and organize 'praise melas' of 'upper' caste Congress leaders in whose names they would carry the party flag. They would organize photographers to publicize the 'images' of the 'upper' caste leaders. The aims of an average 'upper' caste Congress leader would be to mould every Dalitbahujan into a trustworthy Hanuman. While Ambedkarism was creating a small force of conscious people among Dalitbahujans who were trying to organize themselves into an autonomous political force, a large number were (perhaps for the sake of fringe benefits that the Congress administration could offer, perhaps for other reasons) willing to be Hanumans.

                It was thus, that the modern political party system was moulded in the form of a classical social system callled Ramarajya.  The Congress party, as a liberal democratic party, began structuring itself in a Hindu fashion.  The Congress "upper" caste leaders lived a Hindu life.  If there was a Congress Brahmin leader, even at the village and town level, one of his relatives would be the priest in the temple while another relative would be an officer in the government.  These people had common political aims and interests at various levels.  The nexus between them was total, and they were able to manipulate the system.  Their entire life was a modernized Hindu life.  But the Dalitbahujans, who by imitating them were trying to get assimilated into this politicized Hinduism or Hindutva, were never allowed to be equal partners.  The establishment of a liberal democratic party like the Congress which has ruled this country for nearly fifty years, has not improved unequal caste relations, and the gap between Hindu 'upper' castes and the non-Hindu Dalitbahujans within the party ranks has never been bridged.  The relationship always remained antagonistic and distrustful.  The distrust is not a result of differing ideologies or loyalties.  It is a result of Hindu leaders consistently treating Dalitabhujans as the Other both in religious and cultural terms.

                For all the top Congress leaders, the party office provided wealth and social status.  A few, very few, Dalitbahujans did acquire wealth, yet they have not succeeded in being assimilated into the Hindu fold. Their status within the upper layers of the party remained very low. The relationship between a rich Maalaa or Maadigaa and a wealthy 'upper' caste person was identical to the relationship between a poor 'upper' caste person and a poor Dalitbahujan. The poor 'upper' caste person thinks that he or she is always superior. Similarly the rich 'upper' caste people also think that they are always superior. Acquiring wealth does not change the relative social status of Dalitbahujans within a particular class. Even within a rich class, caste distinctions continue to operate.

ROLE OF UPPER CASTE COMMUNIST

            Did the Communist upper' castes give up the Hindu way of life? Certainly not. Their social relations continued to be within their caste circles. Marriages took place within the caste structure; their 'personal friends' remained within their own caste circles. They never declared themselves to be against Hinduism. They have not built a critique of the Hindu Gods. For example, all the Hindu Gods, beginning with Brahma, Vishnu, Maheswara to the last of the Dashavatara (ten incarnations) were anti-Dalitbahujan weapon-wielding heroes who built a system against Dalitbahujans.

                In all of Indian communist literature, there is no text which has critiqued these Gods. As most of the Communist intellectuals happened to be Brahmins they never really distanced themselves from such Hindu Gods and their culture. Even as the Communists talked about the counter-culture, their counter-culture never distanced itself from Hindu notions of life. This is a unique characteristic of Indian Communists, and it is a result of the caste that the leaders belong to and the Hinduism of which they are a part. They may say that they do not go to temple as ordinary brahmins or Baniyas do, but they simply forget the fact that they have converted their central committees into Hindu-power management centres. They converted Marx, Engels and Lenin ‘communist God’s where people were supposed to find solutions into in their theories for every social, economic or political problem that Indian casteist society was suffering from. Persons coming from Dalitbahujan castes were not allowed to become self-confident leaders. It is a brahminical Hindu strategy to destroy the basis of that self-confidence in Dalitbahujan masses.

POST-COLONIAL UNIVERSITIES

            As late as the 1990s one could see the striking cultural differences between the Hindu castes and the Dalitbahujan castes.  In the universities the Brahmins and the neo-Kshatriyas acquired hegemony.  In certain universities only the Brahmins are in control of everything.  Whether it is medicine, or engineering or scientific research centres or social science educational research departments, or arts faculties, the socio-cultural behaviour of the Hindu 'upper' caste teachers and students and the Dalitbahujan students and non-teaching staff, who entered these institutions, was distinctly different.

                When I started teaching in Osmania University I began to realize that no amount of scientific education and Western exposure actually changed Hindus into rational beings.  Modern science has not made any impact on them.  One reason for this is they have never lived amidst the productive fields.  They have never undergone the life experiences that an average working Indian has undergone.  Therefore they do not understand the meaning or value of knowledge that emerges from work.   This is one of the reasons why they continued to argue even as late as 1990 (at the time of the Mandal movement), that youth who come from the Dalitbahujan castes are less meritorious and therefore do not deserve teaching jobs in universities.  To our surprise we realized that an average Hindu teacher is an irrational being who does not understand that knowledge is rooted in productive castes, which gives rise to creativity.  In comparison, an average Dalitbahujan teacher is a rational being because he never believed in the principle of merit.  In his/her view, it is work that produces merit.  It appears that the Hindu notion of life gave rise to irrationality that defined everything in inverse order.  That is why it is almost impossible to convince an 'upper' caste mind that Dalitbahujan productive knowledge is much more valuable than brahminical textual knowledge.  Brahminical notions of knowledge are book-centred.  Because of their Vedic background, 'upper' castes perceive knowledge as reading and reciting.  In the process they have rendered all higher educational institutions into textbook recitation centres.

                Their parents and grandparents did not regard Dalitbahujans as human beings.  They treated tilling the land as a lowly, mean job, weeding as wretched, shoe-making as a dirty occupation of Chandalas.  Did these notions change after these people had studied science?  No.  An average Hindu 'upper' caste person, particularly a Brahmin, thnks that the prayers of their grandparents are both science and art.  Hindu teachers rarely developed the courage to conduct a dialogue in the classroom.  Dialogue or dialectics have never been in the traditon or life-blood of a Hindu.  Hindus do not have the life experiences that lead them to experiment or to take risks, without which scientific knowledge cannot develop.  Experimentation and taking risks become possible only when consciousness is grounded in a variety of real-life tasks-tilling the land, lifting bricks, weaving cloth, cutting the hair, making the shoe-all these should be real alternatives for making one's living.  A Hindu 'intellectual' working  in any centre of education is not mentally prepared for such alternatives.

                If the inability to experiment and take risks in order to strike new paths is only an individual problem, a system can suffer such an individual without much loss.  But if it is the character of all the hegemonic castes, the system cannot afford the luxury of their leadership and dominance, for the brunt of such a system has to be born by the Others who are constantly engaged in experimentation and risk-taking. In fact the whole risk of experimentation was  borne by the Dalitbahujan castes.  Thus, science has survived in Dalitbahujan houses in very ;many ways, but in Hindu houses, in spite of acquiring so many electronic gadgets that help them enjoy modern comforts, the philosophical notion of living itself remains unscientific.  For example,  an average 'highly  educated'  Brahmin mind cannot understand the simple scientific principle that inter-caste marriages can substantially improve the health of Indians.  A Hindu-particularly a Brahmin-does not understand the fact that their historical experience of interacting with nature is getting minimized as the whole caste group is completely divorced from agrarian productive activity.  As modern urbanization increases and the Brahmin population is becoming concentrated in urban centres, their social relations get confined to alienated urban colonies.  The Brahmin population does not understand the simple fact that the only way to extricate itself from this alienation is to enter into close social relations with other castes which are part of the process of agrarian production.  But this is unthinkable for most of them.  The mind of an average Brahmin or Baniya is thoroughly blocked by its Hindu idiosyncrasy.

                A Dalitbahujan mind is quite the opposite of this.  In  spite of three thousand years of violent opposition to its getting educated into letters, the initiative, the effort and the ability that the very first generation of educated teachers, scientists, engineers, doctors and civil administrators coming from the Dalitbahujan castes have shown is unbelievable.  In exhibiting the basic skills in universities, colleges, officers, laboratories they are not second to any average Brahmin.  Moreover, Dalitbahujan people have an enormous in-built strength to keep their minds open.  The amount  of experience that each one of us has gained in that long journey from the village-single-teacher-local-dialect school education to acquiring a university master's degree has made very one of us a rich preserve of knowledge.  In the long journey from one's familiar village caste waada to urban modern educational centres each one of us had to encounter many cultures, face many contradictions, assimilate several new ideas and unlearn many mythical notions that our castes also were victims of.  All this was possible only because we were never bound by the Hindu idiosyncrasies of life.  The mind of a Dalitbahujan person is like  the body of a person in a circus.  It is ready to learn anything in any condition.  But for this make-up of the Dalitbahujan mind, it would have been impossible for us-first generation of educated Dalitbahujans-to acquire the skills that we have acquired today, despite such hostile educational environments.

BRAHMINICAL COLONIES

CASTEIZATIOIN OF CAPITAL

            What Hinduism has done is that through manipulative hierarchization, even in the socialist era, it has retained its hegemony over the managerial posts in the urban centres.  In every industry the working masses are Dalitbahujans whose notions of life and work are non-Hinduistic, whereas, the entrepreneurs and managers of the factories-the directors, supervisors, engineers-are Brahmin, Baniya or Neo-Kshatriya.  As a result, there is a total cultural divide between the managerial class and the working class.  If some factory workers starve or if workers get injured or die because of an accident, the managers do not feel for them because there is no social relationship between them. They are separated not only by class but also by caste. Thus the worker's suffering or death is seen as that of the other. Thus, alienation between workers and managers is twofold.  There is no institution or social organization that forces the managers’ families and the workers’ families to meet; no institution where, at least an explanation, or repentance, is required. In Europe and in other countries, the church and other religious institutions provide this minimal meeting ground, but in India there is no scope for such interaction in the temple. Brahminical culture never allowed the Malaas and the Maadigaas even to enter the temples.

                Thus, even in capitalist production, caste operates, and this is what the ‘cateization of capital’ means. Such casteization of capital results only in inhuman exploitation. Because of the caste alienation of workers from capital, the nature of exploitation in Indian industries is a hundred times more inhuman and cruel than compared to that of the West. No Brahmin or Baniya entrepreneur feels that the workers are part of his or her Hindu religious culture. No Baniya shop owner in the urban center feels that the Dalitbahujan employees working in the shop are part of their culture. The priests operating in the huge urban temples, unlike the rural priests, wear trousers, travel from their homes to temples on scooters and cars and use multinational products at home. Yet in  terms of cultural consciousness they remain Brahmin patriarchs. In spite of such a modernized material life, their philosophy of life does not accept even the idea of a Brahmin woman becoming a priest, much less a Dalitbahujan becoming one. The Hindu temple is the preserve of Hindu males. The ‘upper’ caste factory manager or engineer, or the ‘upper’ caste bureaucrat all think that the urbanized priest has a right to modernize and practise casteism simultaneously.

                Even though some of us Dalitbahujans are professors, top bureaucrats, doctors and engineers we cannot rent a house in a Brahmin-Baniya localty. ‘Upper’ caste landlords  or landladies put up boards which read ‘house rented only to vegetarians’. ‘Vegetarian’ is a synonym for ‘Brahmin’, and this expression is used to drive away all Dalitbahujans from their localities. Even if some Dalitbahujans construct or buy houses in Brahmin localities, such houses are culturally isolated and social relations with the other residents do not develop. Even the children are encouraged to avoid interaction. We need only to listen to the experiences of Dalitbahujans who constructed houses in Brahmin localities to perceive the nature and extent of casteism in urban centers.

                Many Dalitbahujans have attempted to Sanskritize themselves. They changed their original names into brahminical names. Muthaiahs became Murthies. Gopaiahs became Gopalakrishnas. Their children’s names extend to post-Sanskritized Brahminism. Their sons are called Vishnus, Ajays or Vijays. Their daughters are called Swapnas, Sandhyas, Lakshmis and Saraswathis. But all this did not change the heart of urban Brahmism. Whatever name a person has, the urban brahminical forces discover the caste background of a person within days and he or she will be treated accordingly.

                Many Dalitbahujans educated their children in English-medium schools. These schools bear names like St. Ann’s, St. Thomas, St. Mary, and so on. In these schools, the parents hoped that the Dalitbahujan children and the Hindu Brahmin-Baniya children would be educated on an equal basis. But even here they forgot the fact that the majority of the teachers came from brahminical castes and no textbook ever presented Dalitbahujan culture as an integral part of Indian culture. Further, the moment the children returned home, they were pulled back into the culture of their respective castes. Some of us have tried other methods, like assimilating into ‘upper’ caste cultures. There are several Dalitbahujan officers, politicians, academics and doctors who try to be more Hindu than the Hindus themselves.  The brazenly celebrate Hindu festivals. Even in public they speak of their parental culture as low and mean. They refuse any connection with Pochamma and Maisamma. They condemn these Gods as ‘Sudra Devathalu’. Short of turning themselves into twice-born castes, these people make every attempt to Sanskritize themselves.