Hindi Dalit Literature and the Politics of Representation

Sarah Beth Hunt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415736299
• eBook ISBN: 9781317559511
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study explores how Dalits in north India have used literature as a means of protest against caste oppression. Including fresh ethnographic research and interviews, it traces the trajectory of modern Dalit writing in Hindi and its pivotal role in the creation, rise and reinforcement of a distinctive Dalit identity.

The book challenges the existing impression of Hindi Dalit literature as stemming from the Dalit political assertion of the 1980s and as being chiefly imitative of the Marathi Dalit literature model. Arguing that Hindi Dalit literature has a much longer history in north India, it examines two differing strands that have taken root in Dalit expression — the early 'popular' production of smaller literary pamphlets and journals at the beginning of the 20th century and more contemporary modes such as autobiographies, short stories and literary criticism.

The author highlights the ways in which such various forms of literary works have supported the proliferation of an all-encompassing identity for the so-called 'untouchable' castes. She also underscores how these have contributed to their evolving political consciousness and consolidation of newer heterogeneous identities, making a departure from their long-perceived image. The work will be important for those in Dalit studies, subaltern history, Hindi literature, postcolonial studies, political science and sociology as well as the informed general reader.

1

The Beginnings of Dalit Literature in Hindi

The Field of Dalit Pamphlets

Along a winding lane of an old Lucknow neighbourhood, where the front porches of tall wooden houses lean precariously towards the street like ancient trees, stands the family home of Chandrikaprasad ‘Jigyasu’, one of the earliest Dalit writers and publishers of north India.¹ Sitting in the front room, Jigyasu’s son Brahmanand reminisced about his father’s lifelong career as a publisher and ‘man of service’ who continually invested what little money the family had into his publishing ventures. In fact, Brahmanand claims he was pushed out of the publishing business by his father who wanted him to become an engineer to support the family.² As he moved towards the back portion of the modest house, Brahmanand explained, ‘[s]ome people say that with [Jigyasu’s] death, this [publishing venture] has declined. This is one reason which has been inspiring me to not only revive it but to bring it back to that scale.’ With that, we entered a dimly lit room at the back of the house — the centre of early Dalit publishing activities in Hindi, from the 1930s until the mid-1960s. The old typeset Hindi press first used by Jigyasu was perfectly preserved and printing equipment hung from wooden rafters, while stacks of newly-printed pamphlets stood alongside the small modern press Brahmanand now uses to republish many of his father’s most popular pamphlets.

This small room gives us an important glimpse into the development of the field of Hindi Dalit pamphlet literature in north India. Excluded from the burgeoning Hindi public sphere in the early 20th century, both by their low-caste identity as well as by their topics of concern (caste, discrimination and Dalit history), ‘untouchable’ writers used alternative means of literary publication and distribution to establish a separate space for public intellectual exchange amongst members of their own community. Thus from its very beginnings, this field of Dalit pamphlet literature was established as a counter-public, which was consciously constructed by Hindi Dalit pamphlet writers to circulate discourse that contested those of the mainstream Hindi public sphere. Despite circulating amongst an exclusively Dalit audience, small-scale publishing ventures like Chandrikaprasad Jigyasu’s published literary texts written by ‘untouchable’ authors that spread across north India on a massive scale by the mid-20th century — some of them running into the tens-of-thousands after several decades of successive print runs.³ Small literary pamphlets of songs, poetry, dramas, short ideological articles and, especially, narratives recounting the ancient past were distributed at community gatherings, political meetings and annual community melas. These pamphlets were eagerly consumed by an emerging audience of literate SC readers.

This chapter explores the beginnings of Dalit literary production in north India and looks at the ways in which Dalit literary institutions and literary practices shifted in response to the changing social and political environment of the 20th century. It identifies three major historical phases of the development of a field of Hindi Dalit literary pamphlets. First, the institutions and discourses established by Swami Achutanand (1879–1933) in the 1920s and Jigyasu in the 1930s became foundational to the field of Hindi Dalit pamphlet literature for the rest of the century. Hence, I devote significant attention to this period, situating it within the long-term perspective of the pamphlet field as an arena for social activism. Second, the rise of Dalit institutional politics in the 1940s, including the SCF and the RPI, linked the pamphlet form to political and religious forms of assertion. Third, from the 1980s, the field of Hindi Dalit pamphlet literature has again shifted in the context of an increasingly popular ‘Dalit’ identity in north India from the 1980s, with the growth of the BSP, the Mandal Commission controversy and the impact of Hindutva politics. This chapter argues that early Dalit literary production in Hindi arose within a consciously constructed Dalit counter-public, marked by the publication of small, cheap pamphlets printed by privately-owned Dalit presses and distributed at the Dalit mela. This has remained the consistent form of Dalit literary production and distribution in this Dalit pamphlet literary field.

Early Dalit Literary Production: 1920s–1930s

The first Dalit literary texts by members of the SCs were jati histories, written as part of late 19th- and early 20th-century Kshatriya reform movements. As we shall see, these literary works argued simply that their jati had been incorrectly registered in the colonial census as SC (i.e., ‘untouchable’) and should instead be listed as Kshatriya. Thus, early ‘untouchable’ assertion in north India emphasised the primacy of the jati community and used the varna system mainly as a malleable structure to advance their social position. Literary production remained integral to this assertion, both in terms of the legitimising force of the text in society (particularly for a largely illiterate community) and as a space in which ‘untouchable’ writers could explore questions of their jati’s relationship to other social groups.

However, by the 1920s, a new radical stream of pamphlet literature was initiated by Swami Achutanand, intimately linked to his Adi Hindu movement.⁴ The discourse embodied in the Adi Hindu literature made previous jati histories seem apologetic and conservative to a number of low-caste individuals. These ‘untouchables’ began to reject both categories of jati and varna, instead embracing new imaginations of themselves as non-Hindu, part of a larger community of indigenous inhabitants called ‘Adi Hindus’ (original inhabitants). This section argues that it was the pamphlet literature associated with the Adi Hindu movement which determined the basic institutional and discursive structures that later came to define the field of Hindi Dalit pamphlet literature. These included a discursive imagination of ‘untouchables’ as a united community of non-Hindus descended from the indigenous inhabitants of ancient India, a dependence on privately-owned printing presses and literary distribution at community gatherings.

The pre-history of the pamphlet field

Pamphlet literature in Hindi by authors belonging to so-called ‘untouchable’ castes first took the form of jati histories, written in support of petitions sent to the British colonial government to change the varna status of their jati as listed in the colonial census (Dirks 2001; Rawat 2011). As their claims to a higher social status depended on proving their relationship to an ancient Kshatriya lineage, in addition to the letter of petition, a body of caste histories written by members of the lower castes flourished during the early decades of the 20th century, alongside the large corpus of upper-caste booklets, which were making similar efforts to document their ancestry.⁵ While these pamphlets certainly constituted the first publishing efforts by members of the ‘untouchable’ castes and, in a way, laid the foundation of the future field of Dalit pamphlet literature, the radicalism denoted by the name ‘Dalit’ only became apparent in the writings of Adi Hindu-inspired activists. Therefore, I argue that the beginnings of what we might call the field of Hindi Dalit pamphlet literature can only really be seen with the Adi Hindu movement, when writers first rejected the natural superiority of upper-caste Hindus and instead began to imagine a new collective and politicised identity for all members of the so-called ‘untouchable’ castes.

Jati history-writing among members of the SCs reveals how the concept of jati identity was conceptualised by many members in the early 20th century as a self-contained community, which had no stronger relationship to other SC jatis than it did to communities of higher caste. Understanding the reasons for the decline of their once-great jati was of central concern for these authors. Consequently, these jati histories illuminate how early SC writers attempted to explain ‘the fall’ of their jati from the high position of Kshatriya kings to the degraded ‘untouchables’. Unlike the discourse of early Hindu nationalists, who explained their ‘fall’ and subsequent suppression under Muslim rule as the result of ‘decadence’ (thus placing both the blame and the possibility for revival squarely on the shoulders of the Hindu community), the SC authors could not afford to take on such culpability for their low social position (Orsini 2002: 175–92). Consequently, their ‘fall from grace’ was most often understood in the context of some trickery or deceit.⁶

Ramnarayan Rawat’s work on the history of the Chamars has been particularly illuminating on this subject. In his book, Reconsidering Untouchability (2011), he looks closely at several examples of early Chamar-authored jati histories. One is U. B. S. Raghuvanshi’s Shri Chanvar Purana, written around 1910 and published from Kanpur, which claims that the Chamar jati was originally a community of powerful Kshatriya rulers renamed ‘Chanvars’. Raghuvanshi mobilises the narrative authority of the Puranas to support his history by claiming that his text is based on a ‘Chanvar Purana’, discovered by a rishi in a Himalayan cave and translated from Sanskrit by the author (Rawat 2011: 123–24). In it, Raghuvanshi writes, ‘It is commendable that our Hindu brethrens [sic] have such faith in the Puranas, and it is our humble request that they will show similar devotion to the Chanvar Purana’ (ibid.: 124). Here, the author is clearly addressing an audience beyond the jati community, revealing how the text was also intended for an audience whose notion of community was informed by data presented in the colonial census, in accordance with the goals of the Kshatriya reform movements.

According to Raghuvanshi’s caste history, while the Chanvars were once both powerful and just rulers, the lineage declined after the great king Chamunda Rai was tricked by the devtas (gods) into worshipping a murti (statue) in violation of his worship of the god Vishnu. In an attempt to investigate this deviance from Chamunda’s previously devoted worship, Vishnu himself appeared to Chamunda as a Shudra (for reasons unexplained). When Chamunda chastised the disguised Vishnu for reciting the Vedas, an act forbidden to the lower castes, Vishnu revealed himself and replied that a man is not a Shudra by birth, but by actions. In his anger, he cursed Chamunda’s lineage to be Chamars, a community even lower than Shudras. After many appeals, Vishnu added a final prophesy — the Chanvar lineage would have another opportunity to rise and become great in Kaliyug (the dark age) when the birth of a new rishi (identified by the author as Ravidas) will reveal the true history and heritage of the Chamars as ancient Kshatriyas (ibid.: 125–26).

In this way, Raghuvanshi contextualises ‘the fall’ of the Chamars as the accidental misfortune of King Chamunda, who is first deceived by the gods and then fails to recognise a disguised Vishnu. Astonishingly, the very cause of the Chanvars’ fall is their adherence to Hindu strictures, which forbid anyone of lower-caste origin to recite the Vedas. Thus, the narrative positions the Chamar jati squarely within the Hindu religion, and shows them to be devoted followers of Hindu law. At the same time, Vishnu’s assertion that one is Shudra by actions rather than birth and his prophesy of redemption through a new rishi are narrative strategies that strengthen the case for the Chamar jati to reassume its previous social position as Kshatriyas. Like the discourse of the Hindu reformers, Raghuvanshi’s Shri Chanvar Purana insists that the jati’s decline has continued because Chamars have forgotten their glorious past, and that the path to revival is in remembering this true history (Rawat 2011: 123–27). In these early jati histories, Sant Ravidas is symbolically positioned as an upper-caste figure; in Raghuvanshi’s Shri Chanvar Purana, the narrative begins with Ravidas’s attempt to enter the devlok (world of the gods). The narrator, identified as Narad Muni,⁷ tells the story of the Chanvar lineage and the fall of Chamunda in an attempt to convince the gods that Ravidas’ entry into the devlok is not a sinful transgression, since Ravidas is not a Shudra, but is actually of Kshatriya descent. In such jati histories then, Ravidas becomes the saviour of the Chamars when he reveals to them their true historical ancestry as upper castes. Later, as we shall see, Ravidas is repositioned by the Adi Hindu pamphlet writers as a prophet who discloses lower castes’ true identity as indigenous inhabitants of India.

From their inception, jati histories were intimately linked to the institutional structures of ‘caste associations’ and supported the reforms these associations promoted amongst their members. This institutional foundation was especially important for early publishing ventures in terms of their financial support and it is not surprising, therefore, that the majority of early low-caste jati histories were published by caste associations. In Agra, for instance, the Jatav Veer Mahasabha (Jatav Men’s Association) established in 1917 by Manik Chand, Khemchand Bohare and Ramnarayan Yadavendu provided the institutional basis for the local Chamar community’s claim to Kshatriya status as ‘Jatavs’, associated with the Yadavs and, hence, the Yadu lineage of Krishna.⁸ Pandit Sunderlal Sagar’s Yadav Jivan (Life of the Jatavs, and originally entitled Jatav Jivan; 1929) and Ramnarayan Yadavendu’s Yaduvansh ka Itihas (The History of the Yadu Race; 1942), were both published in Agra with the support of the Ja...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Beginnings of Dalit Literature in Hindi: The Field of Dalit Pamphlets
• 2. Writing Dalit History
• 3. The Rise of the Autobiographic Field of Hindi Dalit Literature
• 4. Dalit Autobiography: Personal Pain as Political Assertion
• 5. The Meaning of Dalit Literature
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index