India (41 page)

Professor Ramappa’s success had depended on a challenge to paternal expectations, but he was also an instinctive conservative (he had supported the Emergency, before recanting) who was worried by the social changes that were now taking place in Bangalore. “You get sons,” he said to me, “who earn three times as much as their fathers and become bold with them, doing as they like and speaking without respect. People are not so courteous now. If I wanted to tell my father something, I would say it to my mother and she would inform him. We don’t display wealth here in southern India. It’s not like the Punjabi culture. Look at the message of the Ramayana: a man should have only one wife, be obedient to his parents, respect his teachers, honour his older brothers and always speak the truth. People in the southern parts of India are peace-loving, and the communal situation is better than in the north. We have a certain passivity. I mean that in a good way; I don’t want it to change.”
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When I went to visit Ramappa at his residence—we had already met a few days earlier at Koshy’s coffee house—he was dressed in a crisply pressed pale blue shirt and a dhoti. He was formal without being reserved, and like many people in India he was content to chat openly, although he felt
strange to be asked about his life in such detail. The sides of the path leading to his front door were decorated with rangoli, symmetrical designs done in chalk or colours by the women of the house at daybreak, which gave a sense of older times. A Sony television was on in the sitting room. I noticed that although Raju Kshatriyas have no caste restriction on eating meat, the family were vegetarian. So Ramappa had come full circle: as a child his parents would have been too poor to buy meat, in his middle years he was able to eat it, and now he and his wife had become pure vegetarian like their Bangalore neighbours, eschewing even eggs.

In the city, which was changing so fast, with children earning big salaries and behaving in very different ways to their parents, the household had a solid and old-fashioned feel. Ramappa’s journey had been exceptional, this barefoot landless labourer’s son who had become a university professor. Today, such a leap could still be executed, but only with a similar dose of ambition and good fortune. The Indian state would not help you in times of trouble: that job fell to your family and community, and if they were unable to offer immediate support and protection, you might end up anywhere, even chained in a quarry near Mysore.

The answer to the question “How many generations would it take to turn a junior Venkatesh into a software engineer?” was, in this case, only one. Ramappa had a son who was a successful computer scientist and a nephew working in California who said to me proudly: “The very first thing you see on the Yahoo! homepage is me.” Mack.

D
R
. A
MBEDKAR
has a story about a journey he made as a child. It took him nearly fifty years to bring himself to write it, which is not surprising when you learn what happened. He had been born to a disadvantaged community; the year was 1901; his mother was dead and his father was posted as a government cashier some distance from Bombay. Ambedkar and his siblings had been living with their aunt, but it was now decided they should be sent to join their father. “Great preparations were made. New shirts of English make, bright bejewelled caps, new shoes, new silk-bordered dhoties were ordered for the journey,” he wrote.

“The Railway Station was ten miles distant from our place and a tonga (a one-horse carriage) was engaged to take us to the station. We were dressed in the new clothing specially made for the occasion, and we left our home full of joy but amidst the cries of my aunt who was almost prostrate with grief at our parting. When we reached the station my brother bought tickets and gave me and my sister’s son two annas each as pocket money, to be spent at our pleasure. We at once began our career of riotous living and each ordered a bottle of lemonade at the start. After a short while, the train whistled in and we boarded it as quickly as we could, for fear of being left behind.”

Ambedkar’s words give us an anticipation of trouble; we feel the riotous
living might end badly. The children reached their destination in the afternoon. Everyone else went on their way, walking confidently out of the railway station, but because of a miscommunication their father was not there on the platform to meet them. After all the excitement of the journey, they were unsure what to do. The stationmaster approached:

“We were well-dressed children. From our dress or talk no one could make out that we were children of the untouchables. Indeed the stationmaster was quite sure we were Brahmin children, and was extremely touched at the plight in which he found us. As is usual among the Hindus, the stationmaster asked us who we were. Without a moment’s thought I blurted out that we were Mahars. (Mahar is one of the communities which are treated as untouchables in the Bombay Presidency.) He was stunned. His face underwent a sudden change. We could see that he was overpowered by a strange feeling of repulsion. As soon as he heard my reply he went away to his room and we stood where we were. Fifteen to twenty minutes elapsed; the sun was almost setting. Father had not turned up, nor had he sent his servant, and now the stationmaster had also left us. We were quite bewildered, and the joy and happiness which we had felt at the beginning of the journey gave way to a feeling of extreme sadness.”
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What were they to do? The children resolved to take a bullock-cart to the place where their father was posted, although they had no idea how long the journey might last. So they carried their luggage to the front of the station, where carts were plying for hire. Word had however got around that the stranded children were untouchables, and not one of the cartmen, even when offered extra money, was willing to contaminate himself by driving them. Eventually the stationmaster brokered a solution: a cartman would walk alongside his cart while the children drove it. He would receive double the usual fare. They set off. As night fell, it became apparent the cartman’s promise that the journey would take three hours was a lie. It was nearly midnight by the time they reached a toll-collector’s hut, and they were still a long way from anything that looked like a town. By now, despite eating the food in their tiffin basket along the way, the children were hungry and above all thirsty.

They were also wise to their situation. Bhimrao Ambedkar, all of nine years old, approached the toll-collector and explained in Urdu that they were Muslim children on their way to Koregaon. Could he please give them some water? The toll-collector was not deceived. He said they should have made arrangements for someone else to keep water for them. There was none to be had.

At the foot of a hill they unyoked the bullocks and laid the cart at an angle to the dry ground. They were parched and desperate. Ambedkar’s elder brother suggested two of the children might rest beneath it while the other two kept watch in the darkness, in relays, since they had gold ornaments. The cartman slept elsewhere. In the morning they began again, and reached the safety of their father’s house by noon.

It is not hard to see why this experience lodged in Ambedkar’s mind. He was at an age when children drink in information about the workings of the world. Before that, he had known of his pariah status, but only in a structured environment. At school he was not allowed to touch a tap, and could only have water when a peon turned one on for him. He had to bring a piece of gunny cloth, or sacking, to class each day and sit or squat on it during lessons, while the upper-caste children sat at desks. At home, the family would cut each other’s hair and wash their own clothes, and it was not until he grew a little older that he understood this was because the barbers and dhobis, or washermen, would not touch either them or their clothes. The constraints on untouchables varied from place to place and included rules such as not being able to enter a Hindu temple, wear good-quality clothes, ride a horse in a marriage procession or sit in the presence of the upper castes.

More than a century after Ambedkar’s unhappy childhood journey, individuals who would never, at any moment in India’s history, have been able to make their way in the world, are assuming positions of political power. The outcastes are answering back, and in some cases biting back. The extent of this shift is still not clear, but it has much further to go. Despite the genuine advances of recent years, Dalits remain undereducated and under-represented, and their collective importance as an Indian community is not recognized. To equal the number of Dalits in India, you would need to add together the populations of Albania, Australia, Belgium, Israel, Kuwait, Libya, the Netherlands, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Or to express it in a different way: if every sixth person on the planet is an Indian, every sixth Indian is a Dalit.
²
In 1996 a memorable article was published by B. N. Uniyal, “In Search of a Dalit Journalist”: he could not find one among the 686 accredited correspondents of the Delhi press corps.
³
In many professions, the situation still remains the same.

Throughout his life, Ambedkar tried to figure out why “caste” Hindus had an obsession with defilement. He studied texts like the laws of Manu, which specified that anyone touching a Buddhist or a member of various outcaste groups should purify himself at once with a bath. Ambedkar’s
theory was that old wars between settled and nomadic tribes, and between Brahmins and Buddhists, had led to the expulsion to the edge of villages of “Broken Men,” who followed the teachings of the Buddha and ate beef.
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They became the untouchables. His supposition about Broken Men and their social, cultural or religious origins does not depend on any clear evidence, but it shows how he was attempting to understand and imagine the historic position of a group that had been recorded mainly by others. Because he is remembered as the father of the Indian Constitution, it would be easy to believe Ambedkar was part of a wave of people of similar background, examining their origins and trying to create a new social contract. Rather, he was in an unusual position at every stage of his career. His Mahar community was at the upper end of the scale of untouchability, respected in the region around Bombay for military service; he had won a scholarship sponsored by the Maharaja Gaekwad of Baroda, studied at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, published books, including
The Problem of the Rupee
, and by the late 1920s was both a legislator and a professor at the Government Law College in Bombay. Although a related movement for social reform and self-respect had started in the south, guided by Periyar E. V. Ramaswamy, most untouchables in India remained oppressed—a situation which Ambedkar found ever more frustrating as he grew older.

As the country moved towards political reform and independence, his ambitions to represent depressed communities (soon to be known as the Scheduled Castes, because their names were listed on a long taxonomic schedule attached to the Government of India Act of 1935) were restricted by the growing power of the Indian National Congress. Like an anaconda, Mohandas Gandhi intended to squeeze his opponent by appropriating the untouchables as his own. He had renamed them “harijans”—or “children of god”—which looked to Ambedkar like a patronizing means of maintaining the birthmarked position of his community. “What is Gandhism?” he asked, angry at the Mahatma’s ability to appeal to the Indian heart rather than the head. “Barring this illusory campaign against untouchability, Gandhism is simply … militant orthodox Hinduism. What is there in Gandhism which is not to be found in orthodox Hinduism?” In his passion and clarity, Ambedkar reads here like Orwell. He translated Gandhi’s characteristic but baffling words from his Gujarati journal
Navajivan:

As on many things, Gandhi’s views on caste and interdining altered as he went along. He had declared in 1921 that he wished personally to be reborn as an untouchable “so that I may share their sorrows, sufferings and the affronts levelled at them … I love scavenging.” Imitating the hereditary work of a sweeper would be a way of “cleaning Hindu society.” For Ambedkar, this elevation of the spiritual role of the sweeper—Gandhi’s suggestion certainly had a strong Christian ring to it—was a distraction from the factual, political reasons for his community’s oppression: “Can there be a worse example of false propaganda than this attempt of Gandhism to perpetuate evils which have been deliberately imposed by one class over another?” he wondered.
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Gandhi kept a harijan in his ashram as a symbolic gesture, but Ambedkar wanted practical, legal change and the creation of separate electorates for untouchables.

At the Round Table conferences in London in the early 1930s, Ambedkar put this case forcefully and the British government agreed to his demand. He was at an advantage in a foreign setting, since European prejudice was predicated on race rather than caste, and an untouchable was treated like any other Indian delegate. Gandhi thought separate electorates were a ploy to damage national unity during the struggle for self-rule, and responded with a “fast unto death.” Ambedkar, under great pressure now and fearing reprisals against untouchables if Gandhi were to die, met him and retreated. Their agreement became known as the “Poona Pact.” When the agreement failed to deliver any obvious benefit for his community, Ambedkar said Congress “sucked the juice out of the Poona Pact and threw the rind in the face of the untouchables,” treating them like “dumb-driven cattle.”
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