There's a new biography out on Gandhi. It's true that the longer the time duration elapsed from a historical event, the clearer the eyes are that look back at the event. This book appears to be no exception. From the NY Times review:
"He made a host of enemies along the way — orthodox Hindus who believed him overly sympathetic to Muslims, Muslims who saw his calls for religious unity as part of a Hindu plot, Britons who thought him a charlatan, radical revolutionaries who believed him a reactionary. But no antagonist was more implacable than Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the brilliant, quick-tempered untouchable leader — still largely unknown in the West — who saw the Mahatma’s nonviolent efforts to eradicate untouchability as a sideshow at best. He even objected to the word Gandhi coined for his people — “Harijans” or “children of God” — as patronizing; he preferred “Dalits,” from the Sanskrit for “crushed,” “broken.”
Sometimes, Gandhi said Indian freedom would never come until untouchability was expunged; sometimes he argued that untouchability could be eliminated only after independence was won. He was unapologetic aboutthat kind of inconsistency. “I can’t devote myself entirely to untouchability and say, ‘Neglect Hindu-Muslim unity or swaraj,’ ” he told a friend. “All these things run into one another and are interdependent. You will find at one time in my life an emphasis on one thing, at another time on [an]other. But that is just like a pianist, now emphasizing one note and now [an]other.” (bolding mine)
So, in addition to being the Father of a Nation riven by its internal dissensions, he was a politician, compromising sometimes when it suited him, at least in the earlier years. The inflexibility of standing for principle seemed to have taken root in him as he aged, while Nehru was forced to play the role of compromiser-in-chief and took it up without much ado.
But the Dalits have come of age. They are no longer oppressed by the yoke of a loathed name, and have become a powerful voting block and forces in Indian politics, witness the rise of Mayawati, or Lalu Prasad Yadav, for instance. It was and is a messy process, but quite inevitable, and rightly so.
A few years ago, I wrote a review of 'Untouchables' by Narendra Jadhav, a clarion call to Dalits all over India to wake up and follow the path of Bhimrao Ambedkar to self-empowerment.
I was uncritical in my initial assessment, rather epiphanous and self-congratulatory at the time, but have now revised the review and put in additional comments based on what I observe of today's world. Here it is.
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“What kind of a tradition is this that treats Mahars worse than cats and dogs?” Damu yelled.
“I spit on these inhuman traditions. I am not going to abide by such traditions. I am a man of dignity and
I will not go from house to house begging for baluta*. What will you do? Kill me?”
From “Untouchables- My Family’s Journey Out of the Caste System in Modern India”
By Narendra Jadhav
*entitlements in kind, given for traditional duties performed
This expresses the rage of Damu, the author’s father, at the indignities perpetrated on him by higher caste people in his home village. He lashes out verbally but not physically against upper caste men who taunt him while performing the traditional Mahar duty of guarding dead bodies till they can be moved for the funeral. He refuses to pull a body out of a well on the orders of a village policeman, interestingly enough, on the grounds that it would be a sacrilege to handle the body of a higher caste person. The policeman and his cronies beat him up so badly that it takes the intervention of the village headman to save him.
The shocking beginning, preceded by a deceptively mild scholarly introduction and analysis of the history of untouchability in India by author Dr. Narendra Jadhav, currently Member, Indian Planning Commission, sets the tone for the rest of the book.
The story of Damu and Sonu unfolds at a leisurely pace, swinging back and forth in time without any particular chronological exactitude. The language, as translated from the Marathi original, is spare recounting, devoid of flowery verbiage, but none of that is needed in this tale. It is the perfect morphing of family mythologies into written legend.
The story, starts in 1920’s India, in an era where the Dalits (the now-preferred name for the ‘untouchable’ castes that Gandhi had tried to rechristen "Harijans") had just come awake and started to mobilize for their rights under the leadership of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, himself of the Mahar community, an added point of fellowship for Damu, who becomes an avid disciple. Following Ambedkar's precepts of “Educate, organize and agitate”, Damu strives mightily to keep his family’s hearth-fires burning, and shifts through jobs and joblessness, prosperity and penury, to provide his children with the education and inspiration to make good in the world. The author reconstructs his parents’ early lives from his father’s memoirs penned in rudimentary Marathi in the 1970’s and oral accounts from his illiterate mother Sonu.
There are accounts of daily life as Sonu grows from young girl (only about 10 years old when she married Damu) to young bride living with her husband and his family. Damu’s narrative switches from his and Sonu’s leaving the village for a new life in Nashik back to his early years in the village and a few years in Mumbai where he was taken briefly under the wing of a kind Englishman who is the first 'upper-class person' to treat him with simple human dignity, and provided him with an education and smattering of English.
As Damu makes his own personal strides from downtrodden villager to a man with a sense of his own dignity and worth, Sonu matures from meek housewife to a more socially aware matron, to the point where she questions Damu’s blind obeisance to Ambedkar in casting off Hinduism and converting to Buddhism. In a telling line in the book, when she is interviewed in later years and asked what qualities she liked the best about her husband, she simply states "He never drank, never abused me. Best of all, he never raised his hand to me."The pity of it is that this statement still defines the 'ideal husband' for so many women world-wide in this day and age. Things haven't changed all that much since Sonu's times.
The author concludes with his own account of life with his parents in post-Independence India, when they have achieved some measure of financial stability thanks to his father’s employment in the Mumbai Port trust, supplemented by his mother’s thriving small business. Education is the mainstay of the early lives of the author and his brothers as they work hard to achieve Damu’s dream that they too will become be-suited and be-tied luminaries like Dr.Ambedkar. For all his lack of education, Damu never fails to amaze with his common sense and wisdom when he asks young Narendra when he returns home victorious with his doctorate in 1986 “ How will this help the common man?” He warns “ If all that you study, all your research, is not going to help the man on the street, it’s a big waste.”
An addendum by Apoorva Jadhav gives us the perspective of the third generation in this remarkable novel.
She was, at the time of the book's publication, a student at Johns Hopkins University, a far cry from the family’s humble origins.
One feels a sense of skepticism though, when she confidently asserts:"Caste is definitely not an issue anymore; race, if anything, is. You hear about atrocious hate crimes committed against various ethnicities, especially in the wake of 9/11, and realize that that is the important question and problem in the world today."
Perhaps she has seen only the easier side of life, having stepped outside the pattern in India when her father sent her to school in the US. She is blinkered when she assumes that what she sees in the US is all there is. Just as Obama's election did not mean the death of racism, one swallow (or even a few hundreds of thousands) does not a summer make. Casteism is still alive in India, and is unlikely to die for another few generations. It becomes less important with the passing years and blurring of caste lines, but old prejudices among the old and powerful die hard, and will fade away only as those generations pass on.
In such an uplifting tale, there are many moments when the march from downtrodden to empowered takes on a propagandistic flavor, with the descriptions of the worshipful reverence for Dr.Ambedkar.But placed in the context of the magnitude of Damu’s achievements in life and that of his progeny, the hyperbole is entirely justified. Come to think of it, that is an important part of the main point of the book. Dr.Jadhav hoped to provide a sort of roadmap to upliftment for his brethren by highlighting the struggles of his father, followed by the education and success of his and his children's generations.
In that goal, he has succeeded admirably.
Good to read the post titled "From Crushed to Whole (Sujatha)"
Got some good perspective.But even today the horrific "Caste System" exists in Indian Society and now it is being exported to other countries.Recently read some article of "high caste versus low caste love marriage " and the families opposing it in United Kingdom.But the British civil authorities rescued the couple.This is what India exports its blunder to the World.
Hope the younger generation "Annihilate the Caste-System " and live in society based on Universal principle of Love,Fraternity,Liberty and Equality and Compassion towards the fellow being.
Once again I thank the Author for this good piece of article.
Posted by: Amar | August 29, 2011 at 08:10 AM