Memory That Keeps Getting in the Way of History

My suspicion started
when the anyam household
raised their brass tumbler in a different way
to pour water into my cupped palms
during my high school days.

Then, when, as we fought at play,
someone called me
‘mala bastard’,
the suspicion smarted with a grazed knee and heart.

History presses itself upon us in the ever-unfolding present. It burgeons in a forever-happening future. There’s no better time to conduct the business of history than now. In this physical world, a deeply unequal caste-world, our history project is a partisan one. One that Soumyabrata Choudhury calls the ‘real history of factional sequences that add up to the star mark on the university form by the column for Scheduled Caste students’ and not the stardust that Rohith Vemula spoke of – and so we ought to develop a bias towards equality. It is a bias that Choudhury, in Ambedkar and Other Immortals: An Untouchable Research Programme, celebrates as an ‘Ambedkarite’ exercise in ‘Dalit rigour’ in a book that I just published at Navayana.

What are the stakes of the ‘untouchable research programme’ that Choudhury, who teaches in the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, delineates? It is our thinking about the star mark. The asterisk that forces caste society to offer the ‘compensation’ of reservation under legal duress. But the inclusion of the Dalit into the realm of equality – through reservations or the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act­ – has come to be seen as an exercise in the exclusion of the touchable. That asterisk of condescension exhibited on a departmental notice board of a university, for what’s often termed administrative convenience, serves the same function as the recent Supreme Court ruling. That is, the assertion of the habitual right of the touchable to dehumanise an untouchable in public view without legal consequences.

To put it in the way one hears it unflinchingly said on Delhi’s streets: ‘What do you call a chamar but a chamar?’ To most of caste society, backed by the wisdom of its courts, this seems a fair question to ask. Variations of this are easily obtained across villages, towns and cities. Caste is a habit – a habit of violence that flourishes in everyday language. Exactly ten years ago, the Jat ‘farmer’ leader Mahendra Singh Tikait swore at Mayawati in public in similar terms when she was the chief minister of UP. The PoA Act of 1989 challenges this well-worn habit, especially with its clause that deems it a punishable offence should anyone who’s not “a member of a Scheduled Caste or a Scheduled Tribe intentionally insults or intimidates with intent to humiliate a member of a Scheduled Caste or a Scheduled Tribe in any place within public view”.

Concurring with what the Shiv Sena, Samajwadi Party, Telugu Desam Party, Pattali Makkal Katchi and various parties since 1995 – when rules for this Act were framed – the highest court of the land has concluded that it is the touchable who needs protection from the petty inconveniences that the very thought of equality, triggered by a Dalit’s fraternal presence, can cause. This is also something that the silent protests led by the Marathas for the past two years have been demanding. The extreme end of this spectrum has come to be just as ubiquitous: say, tying up Dalits to a jeep, stripping them and mauling them without fear of consequences.

And so, the suspicion of the poet grows:

When Mr Chayanulu wondered
during an interview
why a reservation fellow
should sport a foreign shirt,
Pilot pen and Bata shoes,
my suspicion grew bigger.

With his dissident extraction of Ambedkar the thinker, Choudhury supplies us with the apparatus for thinking equality with Ambedkar and, of course, other immortals of his ilk. He offers us a militant reading of Ambedkar as both the politician and activist ­– in fact, his impious readings dare us to label the man as one and not the other. If Ambedkar was just a well-educated young Mahar leading some 3,000 people, mostly untouchables, to drink water at the Chavadar Tank in Mahad in March 1927 – not to quench thirst but to commit an unprecedented act of establishing ‘the norm of equality’ – why should we come to regard it as a watershed moment that is ‘plugged into a shared teleology of universal human progress’? Equality was indeed thought of before Ambedkar. But as Choudhury says, ‘these upsurges though incomparable to each other, between themselves, form a kind of reversible eternity. There is no hierarchy of axioms, no history of one historical immortal owing a debt to another.’ Upon considering such a constellation of ‘exemplars of radical egalitarian logic’, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek concurs: ‘I find incredibly forceful the idea of the community of ‘immortals’ — mortal people personifying an immortal Idea.’

Ambedkar and Other Immortals tells the story of how and why Ambedkar’s militant fidelity to equality must govern any project of emancipation that is to come. Meanwhile, Shikhamani the poet arrives at this conclusion in 'Steel Nibs Are Sprouting' (translated from the Telugu by Kiranmayi Indraganti):

When in literary discussions
my two Brahmin friends found
my language inept—
my suspicion came home to stay.

‘Is Shikhmani SC?
I mistook him for OC—
judging by his poetic sensibility.’

S. Anand is a poet, translator and the publisher of Navayana books. He is working on a book on raga music.

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