A Cartography of Resistance

Kalpana Kannabiran [in Nira Yuval-Davis, Kalpana Kannabiran & Ulrike Vieten eds. Situating Contemporary Politics of Belonging. London: Sage, 2006,] Introduction Caste has been central to debates around entitlements and constitutionalism in India for five decades. * My discussions with Ruth Manorama, Convenor of the National Federation of Dalit Women over the years has shaped my understanding of dalit feminist politics. I thank her for showing me ways of seeing. I am also grateful to her for generosity with her personal archival resources. My sincere thanks to Nira Yuval-Davis, Ulrike M. Vieten and Peter Fitzpatrick for pointing me in directions I had left unexplored and for useful discussions on earlier drafts. This period has also witnessed shifts in policy emphasis, jurisprudence, and politics around the issue of caste. Till the mid nineteen nineties, however, the debate was located within a ‘national context’ and caste itself constructed in terms of its ‘peculiarity’ to Indian society. The World Conference against Racism held at Durban in 2001 and the process that led to the WCAR in India witnessed the ‘freeing’ of caste from the confines of India into a larger international arena that held out greater possibilities for public debate, alliance building and more powerful resistance. The participation of dalits in large numbers at Durban generated an entire discourse in India on questions of funding, the ‘proper’ contexts of political resistance, the hierarchies of alliance building in resistance movements, and the theoretical/sociological validity of viewing caste through the prism of racism, among others. The question of violence is fundamental to any discussion on dalit politics in India. It is perhaps pertinent therefore to begin with questions. What is violence? How may we understand the playing out of ‘transgressive’ violence and ‘legitimate’ violence? In a society where some groups rhetorically and through the use of force (violence) occupy the ‘restful domain of reason and pacific order’ (the domain of passive dependence), the autonomous expression of belonging is by definition transgressive. Further, where it is generally argued that ‘[l]aw…must forever chase and mark itself against a transgressive violence,’ (Foucault 1987:34 cf. Fitzpatrick 2001:12) what place do we accord to the marking of resistance against transgressive violence within the domain of the law – the court especially [but also the criminal justice system] being a signpost in that domain? How do communities deal with long-term suffering and exclusion that continues unabated despite protections in public law? At the core, how does suffering shape the politics of belonging? There is need to look in different places for new and unexpected expressions of a new politics of belonging. Does this invocation of an alternative register of belonging then make for a ‘different’ governmentality, by re-mapping the possible field of action for others? This chapter focuses on the interpretation of caste as race by dalit groups, and the ‘different’ politics this process gave birth to. Martha Minow provides a rich analysis of difference. See Minow 1990. It will be divided into four sections. The first will attempt to set out a theoretical framework with the help of which the Durban process might be best understood; the second will attempt an analysis of caste, untouchability and resistance; the third will examine the debate on caste and race that was part of the Durban process; the fourth part will look at the specific articulations of caste as race by the National Federation of Dalit Women, that foreground the intersections between racism, sexism and the politics of becoming/belonging. The Politics of Becoming/Belonging The politics of becoming is immediately relevant to an understanding of the trajectory of Dalit politics in the context of Durban. And yet this politics is praxiologically inseparable from the politics of belonging. In putting in place the signposts for this argument, I am drawing on the work of Connolly (1996) and Minow (1996) on the one hand and Omi and Winant (2002) on the other. I could perhaps anticipate my argument by saying that the politics of belonging encapsulates within itself the politics of becoming. The politics of becoming occurs, in Connolly’s words, ‘when a culturally marked constituency, suffering under its current social constitution, strives to reconfigure itself by moving the cultural constellation of identity/difference then in place’ (Connolly 1996: 255-6. Emphasis added). It is a paradoxical politics by which ‘new cultural identities are formed out of old energies, injuries and differences’ (Connolly 1996: 261). While it is in motion, placing new identities on the cultural field, the politics of becoming also changes the shape and contour of established identities, thus bringing in its wake disturbance, distress and disruption, throwing in peril the stability of being through which dominant constituencies seek comfort. The politics of becoming in this moment of definition engages actively and comparatively with a number of different constituencies, shaping a regulative ideal in the process and never actually becoming completely conclusive or exclusive, or even completely synchronized with these other constituencies – the constitutive tension between suffering and cultural possibility opening out the field of public discourse in unimaginable ways (Connolly 1996: 274). Extending this argument somewhat, Minow (1996) suggests that the idea of the politics of becoming could be more usefully probed through a thematic exploration. Of the three themes she identifies, I find two – the first and the third, that is, the ‘we,’ and the place of ‘prior experience’ – particularly relevant. The politics of becoming clearly pre-supposes a community of belonging, a ‘we’. If the ‘we’ is constituted on the basis of suffering, as Connolly suggests, which suffering should be more worthy of response? That caused by the disruption of social order and dominant modes by subaltern groups or that caused by the suppression/subordination of resistance by dominant groups (Minow 1996: 280)? This question is fundamentally flawed, even while it evokes concerns ranging from caricaturing of resistance as ‘Oppression Olympics’ to ‘reverse discrimination’ caused by affirmative action – all of which are discussed in the context of the dalit experience later in this chapter. If it is conceded that domination is the source of pain and the cause of suffering, the uprooting of dominance – the removal of pain and suffering - can scarcely be described in the same terms as its infliction. In other words, there cannot, I would argue, be a theoretical equivalence posited between the uprooting of domination and the quashing of resistance to that domination, or a reinforcement of the status quo. Despite the fact of multiple identities, there is a solidarity of location in the context of social suffering that quite clearly separates the ‘we’ from the ‘not we’, so that even while re-inventing the ‘we,’ the politics of becoming keeps sight of location, of belonging. In this process the building of the constituency of belonging shatters hitherto unquestioned foundations of location and puts in place un-imaginable ones. Since people build on what they know, Minow suggests that the crafting of prior experience in a way that enhances the possibility for responsiveness, collective redress and openness to difference may prove enabling in confronting suffering and transforming society (Minow 1996: 283). ‘What experiences can be planted,’ she asks, ‘so that people relate new expressions of suffering to a pattern of responsiveness?’ ‘Why not cast for a broader we…? Why not realize the idea that a society progresses when misfortune becomes viewed as an injustice?’ (Minow 1996: 284). But, Minow sees the ‘we’ and by extension the construction of prior experience as contained within a ‘collective, national experience’ (285). This does not allow for the possibility that the ‘collective’ experience could be other than – opposed even to - the ‘national’, that the national – to the extent that the term evokes sentiments of citizenship – is not necessarily co-terminous with territory, and could in its mildest expressions undermine fundamental notions of territoriality, and finally, that the casting of the broadest possible ‘we’ since it keeps sight of location and is mindful of memory, could shatter every received notion of belonging in a society, in particular national loyalty/patriotism/territorial integrity. Both Connolly (1996) and Minow (1996) proceed on the fundamental assumption that plurality provides a condition of possibility for the politics of becoming and move towards a position that the politics of becoming necessarily solidifies into another form of being – a better, more ethical, collectively responsive form of being. However, it is often the case, as I hope to demonstrate later in this chapter, that pluralism does not preclude practices that are exclusionary and violently hegemonic. On the other hand, plurality provides the coherence that threads different groups and their diverse experiences into a single coordinated system. Practices of dominance, hegemony and exclusion are tied to social location within this system and cohere through (and tend to be masked by) the prism of plurality. It is the exclusion and the consequent systemic and systematic violence that provides the condition of necessity for the politics of becoming. By definition then, this politics and the assertion of different axes of belonging, of which it is an intrinsic part, are distinct from being. In sharp contrast, being is solid, hegemonic, ascribed, seeming to disintegrate but constantly re-congealing in new forms – scholarship on caste is illustrative, as I hope to demonstrate - without fundamentally new content. This process of becoming in the Dalit context draws in critical notions of race and racial formation, to demarcate a new field for the politics of becoming and mapping the route from becoming to belonging. Drawing on Omi and Winant’s formulation of racial formation as ‘the socio-historical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed’ (2002:124), I argue that the politics of becoming in the present context, is a project that attempts also to interpret, represent and explain racial dynamics, while simultaneously underscoring the need to reorganize and redistribute resources along racial lines (Omi and Winant 2002:125). The politics of becoming is a self-conscious movement – a re-invention of the ‘we,’ to echo Minow (1996) - towards a goal of belonging better somewhere else, interrogating the foundations of culture and solidarity, transgressing every notion of territoriality and ‘integrity’, in order not to arrive at a different level of being in the same space at the same time in different yet recognizable ways but to cross the black waters (the ocean, kaala paani, crossing which would defile an upper caste hindu) The punishment of transportation under Section 53 of the Indian Penal Code (repealed in 1949), also known colloquially as kaala paani, had its genesis in this taboo. to a different politics of belonging. What results is a politics of becoming/belonging as resistance to caste, patriarchy and the state and through that route resistance to all forms of descent based discrimination/exclusion. This transgression of territoriality and integrity is extremely significant because it obstructs and fragments the re-solidification of being. The politics of becoming/belonging then, is an essentially enabling, fundamentally transformative process that forges a larger community of belonging beyond borders; that merges histories of oppression as also those of resistance, creating new measures of solidarity and shared citizenship, and forces on states a public accountability outside of the ‘internal’ space of the nation, rupturing old comfortable ways of thinking about ‘social evils’ by re-naming the problem: Caste is not merely a social evil. Caste is Race. Discrimination based on caste is racial discrimination. This idea is immediately relevant to an understanding of resistance to social exclusion in societies where ‘race’ is not a standard measure of difference. Caste, Untouchability and Resistance Caste is the defining characteristic of Indian society. Views on caste vary. There are those that see it as a predominantly religious system, others who view it as merely social and economic and yet others who see in its elaboration the spiritual essence of the Hindu faith and view the aspect of discrimination as a mere aberration; several view it as the centrepoint of brahminical tyranny; some see it as the Indian equivalent of community. Dirks suggests that ‘caste, as we know it today, is not in fact some unchanged survival of ancient India, not some single system that reflects a core civilizational value, not a basic expression of Indian tradition. Rather…caste is a modern phenomenon, specifically the product of an historical encounter between India and Western colonial rule…[I]t was under the British that “caste” became a single term capable of expressing, organizing and above all “systematizing” India’s diverse forms of social identity, community, and organization’ (Dirks 2002: 5). To summarise the characteristics of caste (Kannabiran 2002) it is a hierarchical, hegemonic ranking of social groups found predominantly on the Indian sub-continent. A word of Portuguese and Spanish origin, the word ‘casta’ in the early sixteenth century embraced several meanings, one of which was ‘purity of blood’. By the eighteenth century, it was used to designate two levels of groups in the sub-continent: the jatis, roughly about 3000 or more are loosely grouped into four varnas, the latter finding systematic elaboration in the brahminical scriptural tradition of the Vedic period. In the Brahman/upper-caste construction, which is elaborated in the Hindu Dharmasastras, as part of a tradition of universal law, caste has its origin in the varna system, which was constituted by four orders: Brahman (priests), ksatriya (warriors), vaisya (traders), sudra (artisans, labourers, peasants, etc.). Of these the first three were the dvija (twice born ‘clean’) castes, the men of which are entitled to initiation into Hinduism. A fifth order, the panchama or the untouchables, slaves who performed “menial chores” (cleansing villages - in general engaged directly in production and connected closely to organic life) was included later. Dalits in early sociological and scriptural literature (a telling combination) referred to as panchamas, the ‘untouchable’ castes, have for centuries been confined in vadas (colonies), enslaved to the other four varnas in perpetual bondage. Dalit is a noun and adjective that can be used equally in the masculine, feminine and neuter genders. It means burst, split, broken or torn asunder, scattered, crushed or destroyed. The use of the word asprsya (literally ‘untouchable’) was first used in the Visnusmrti, which prescribes death for any member of these castes who deliberately touches a member of a higher caste. Much later in the twentieth century, Dumont cites the instance of a Candala appearing before two kshatriya girls – the girls had to wash their eyes and the Candala beaten for such indiscreet appearance (Dumont 1970:52). The critique of caste has its origin in the work of Jotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule in Maharashtra in the nineteenth century, E.V. Ramaswami Naicker ‘Periyar’ in Tamil Nadu in the early twentieth century and B.R. Ambedkar in the twentieth century. Gandhi condemned social exclusion and practices of untouchability but did not extend this to a fundamental critique of Hinduism itself as these others did. And yet, the critique of untouchability itself hit at the base of the caste system eroding caste supremacist ideologies. Phule and his associates founded the Satyashodhak Samaj (Truth Seeking Society) in 1873. The overarching themes of Phule’s addresses at meetings of the Samaj were on the character and unity of the labouring classes, the unequal division of labour between women of different castes and the vital contribution of peasant women to production. He established the first school in all of India for shudratishudra (dalit today) girls in 1848, following it up with another school for girls of all castes in 1851 (Deshpande 2002:3). His seminal work, Gulamgiri (Slavery), juxtaposes the situation of the sudratisudra with the Negro slave in America: ‘This system of slavery, to which the Brahmins reduced the lower classes is in no respects inferior to that which obtained a few years ago in America. In the days of rigid Brahmin dominancy…my Sudra brethren had even greater hardships and oppression practiced upon them than what even the slaves in America had to suffer…This is even true at the present time…the Sudra…is so far reconciled to the Brahmin yoke, that like the American slave he would resist any attempt that may be made for his deliverance and fight even against his benefactor’ (Phule [1873] 2002:31-32). Tarabai Shinde’s Stree Purusha Tulana (A Comparison between Women and Men])([1882] 1994) also part of the Satyashodhak tradition, confronts brahmanical patriarchy as well as patriarchy within non Brahman castes. In mapping a Non-Brahman worldview through the Self Respect Movement launched in 1925, Periyar stood the caste system on its head. The new social order, samadharma (equality) could emerge only through a radical transformation of structures of feeling and material conditions. This immediately freed women and Adi Dravidas (Dalits) from caste bound traditions, created a moral ground in which women exercised choice and consent, both in matters of marriage and sexuality and eliminated the priesthood and the chanting of Vedic hymns in marriage solemnities (Geetha and Rajadurai 1998). Ambedkar, an intrepid advocate of formal rights for the untouchables, belonged to the untouchable Mahar caste. He coined the word ‘Dalit’ (literally ‘downtrodden’) to designate untouchables as a political entity and spoke of the caste system as one of graded inequality – a system of hierarchies built on notions of relative superiority and inferiority, with the Dalits occupying the last rung in the system and thus bearing the brunt of a cumulative domination by all the other castes. During the struggle for independence in the early part of the twentieth century, Ambedkar’s concerns centred on finding ways in which Independence could bring freedom to the oppressed. As an architect of the Indian Constitution, he instituted constitutional safeguards for the depressed classes against exclusion [social boycott] and active discrimination by majority upper-caste Hindus in Independent India. Significant among these provisions was the right to substantive equality through reservations in education and employment. In general, the early twentieth century witnessed the consolidation of resistance to the caste system in different parts of British India. At the time that the resistance to practices of caste was gaining ground colonial ethnography had reached its peak in the subcontinent. Ideas about the racial dimension of caste derived from European interpretations of Indian society that began with William Jones in the eighteenth century. Bayly for instance points out that many pre-independence ethnographers from Britain ‘portrayed India as a composite social landscape in which only certain peoples, those of superior “Aryan” blood, had evolved historically in ways which left them “shackled” by a hierarchical, Brahmanically-defined ideology of “caste.” At the same time large numbers of other Indians – those identified in varying racial terms as Dravidians, as members of “servile” classes, aborigines, wild tribes, and those of so-called “mixed-racial origins—were portrayed as being ethnologically distinct from this so-called Aryan population, and were not all thought to belong to a ranked Brahmanical caste order’ (Bayly 1995:170) Jaffrelot observes that the British administration gradually propagated these categories in society so that ‘[g]radually, Non-Brahminism and Dravidianism coincided and the low castes looked at themselves as forming an ethnic category’ (Jaffrelot 2003:152). In contemporary India, the three themes that we find constantly recurring in the field of caste are untouchability, Article 17 of the Indian Constitution. violence, The Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955 and the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. and affirmative action through reservations in education and employment. Article 16 of the Indian Constitution. These are also the points at which the institution of caste comes in direct contact with the state. In the year 2001, Dalits from the Indian sub-continent stormed into the World Conference Against Racism at Durban, pushing debates on caste and untouchability out of the narrow confines of ‘insider debates’ within the subcontinent into an international forum that held possibilities for alliance building and international advocacy in unprecedented terms. The Dalit question had been discussed in the UN’s Sub-Commission on Promotion and Protection of Human Rights since 1996. The proceedings were largely closed (Thorat and Umakant 2004: xiii-xxxv). This alliance building had a history. In 1873, Jotiba Phule had dedicated his work ‘Slavery’ to: the good people of the United States as a token of admiration for their sublime disinterested and selfsacrificing devotion in the cause of Negro Slavery; and with an earnest desire, that my countrymen may take their noble example as their guide in the emancipation of their Sudra Brethren from the trammels of Brahmin thralldom’ (Phule [1873] 2002: 25) It is was this legacy the Dalits drew upon in tracing their kinship along lines of race in the Durban process. Although this was not a legacy that was stated beyond invoking Phule as a forefather of the anti caste movement, the influence of Phule’s writings on Dalit movements and anti caste ideologies is so pervasive that this connection is self evident. Racial Formation of Caste Apart from the provisions in favour of non-discrimination in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination adopted in 1965 defined racial discrimination as ‘any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference, based on race, colour, descent, national or ethnic which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise on an equal footing of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life’. In 1996, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination stated that the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination does not refer only to race, but that ‘the situation of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes falls within [its] scope’, further observing that despite legal safeguards provided to members of these groups, ‘the relative impunity of those who abuse them point to the limited effect of these measures.’ Cf. ibid: p. vii. The shift from race alone to descent and occupation-based discrimination, and the recognition that it was not the physical appearance or race, but their membership in ‘an endogamous social group that has been isolated socially and occupationally from other groups in the society,’ led to the CERD General Recommendation: “Reaffirmed that discrimination based on ‘descent’ includes discrimination against members of communities based on forms of stratification such as caste and analogous systems of inherited status which nullify or impair their equal enjoyment of human rights. To take measures against any dissemination of ideas of caste superiority and inferiority or which attempt to justify violence, hatred or discrimination against descent-based communities. To educate the general public on the importance of affirmative action programmes…” R.K.W. Goonasekere, ‘Discrimination based on occupation and descent’, Working Paper of the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, presented at its 53rd session in 2001, cf. Thorat and Umakant, p. xx. The Indian government however persisted in its view that descent in the Convention referred specifically to racial descent and responded to the query with respect to untouchability by citing legislations as evidence of justice and non-discrimination on the ground, and has consistently refused the UN Special Rapporteur on Racism and Racial Discrimination permission to ‘evaluate the situation in cooperation with the government and the communities concerned.’ Report of the Special Rapporteur, E/CN.4/1998/79, paras 57-59. cf. Paul Divakar and Ajai M.(2004), ‘UN Bodies and the Dalits: a historical review of interventions, in Throat and Umakant (eds) Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications: 11. The official position cited The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: ‘On balance, the evidence that the Indian caste system is racial in origin and that India is or was a racist society is unconvincing. Race and caste are mentioned separately in the Indian Constitution as prohibited grounds for discrimination. They are not considered to be interchangeable or synonymous. The principal architect of the Indian Constitution was Dr. Ambedkar, a Dalit. He certainly knew the distinction between race and caste. If the concept of caste was included in race, there was no reason to mention them separately.’ The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, volume 15: 361. Cited in Soli Sorabjee (2002), ‘The Official Position’, in Thorat and Umakant (eds) Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications: 47.e H Deliberation on the kinship between caste and race meant not just re-mapping the field of caste in the new context of race, but also investing other groups in similar social location in that context with the marks of caste, thus creating a multi layered field for deliberation – interest, relation and assertion attaining new and more effective possibilities both within the country and within the international arena of the WCAR (see Fitzpatrick 2001) Take for instance the following statement that represents the stand of the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights: …the term Dalits refers to the people of South Asia who were outside the pale of the hierarchical caste system, and, therefore, deemed outcastes. Regarded as the most marginalized of the castes in society, they were and are still considered polluted and assigned the occupations deemed too defiling for other castes to do…Born into her or his caste, a Dalit could not hope to escape her or his low social status… Conceived more broadly, the term Dalit could be extended to communities, which suffer discrimination on the basis of descent and occupation. This would include such communities as the Burakumin in Japan, Osu in Nigeria, Roma-Shinti (gypsies) in Europe…Considered in this broad term, that is, those that suffer discrimination based on descent and occupation, would constitute the single largest discriminated community on the globe today. (Divakar and Ajai 2004) Apart from theoretical frameworks to understand the modern history of caste, the focus on practices of forced labour akin to slavery – bonded labour, made the navigation on the argument of caste as race easier, but more importantly, this single issue bonded the dalit experience with the experience of peoples of African descent in slavery. The estimate of 1.25 million people in bonded labour in the state of Tamil Nadu alone in 1995, drawn up by the Commission on Bonded Labour appointed by the Supreme Court despite the legal prohibition of bonded labour by the Bonded Labour (Abolition) Act, 1976 and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989, was cited in the Anti Slavery International’s submission to the Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery of the United Nations Economic and Social Council Commission on Human Rights in 2000 (Divakar and Ajai 2004). The contentious terrain of the deliberations around caste and race were not confined to the space of the WCAR alone. Caste in India has been a major sociological concern, straddling colonial and postcolonial academes. Like other realms of subcontinental realities (criminal law, for instance), scholarship on caste in postcolonial India drew on colonial scholarship in deeply problematic ways, informing state policy, pre-empting any rupture that might be caused by the deliberations in the Constituent Assembly or through pro-active legislations. There were as a result, two separate streams of governmentality on the caste question. The first related to the implementation of anti untouchability provisions both as law and policy (a stream influenced considerably by the Ambedkarite formulation); the second related to the production of official knowledge regarding reasonable, theoretically tenable and legitimate articulations of caste (a stream influenced by ‘standpoint-free sociology’). The second stream, while discussing in great ethnographic detail the realities of micro systems of caste in different pockets of the country, or in different scriptures, leaves out of the reckoning any theorising of violence that this ethnography throws up. Dumont offers us the best example of this: The literature [of the dharma or religious law]…shows the transition from …occasional or temporary impurity to the permanent impurity of certain human groups. The laws of Manu say, ‘When he has touched a Candala, a menstruating woman, an outcaste, a woman who has just given birth, a corpse…he purifies himself by bathing’. Here the occasional impurities are identified with that of the ‘outcaste’ and Candala, who is none other than the old prototype of the Untouchable. There is another list in the same book… ‘A Candala, a domestic pig, a cock, a dog, a menstruating woman and a eunuch must not look on Brahmans while they are eating.’…the animals mentioned feed on refuse and filth…the Candala is relegated to the cremation grounds and lives on men’s refuse…(Dumont 1970: 52) For Phule, as we saw earlier, this same reality demonstrated the enslavement of the sudratisudra and women by the Brahmins. For anti-caste activists, this is a violent demonstration of social exclusion and the most vicious expression of apartheid/segregation. Further, postcolonial ethnographic accounts of caste focused on the microsystems of caste without mapping the microphysics of power that named social exclusion. These accounts also resisted any comparisons with race as being theoretically untenable. The genealogy of this resistance to caste-as-race formulations may be traced to the colonial ethnographic project, which was without doubt deeply problematic on questions of racial classification and enumeration. Beteille, writing in the context of the Durban process, argued that not only was the linking of caste to race ‘scientifically nonsensical’,(Beteille 2004b:52) it was also ‘bound to give a new lease of life to the old and discredited notion of race current a hundred years ago’ (Beteille 2004b:51). However, from the debates generated by dalit groups in the country, it is clear that they were tracing their genealogy not to European scholarship on caste/race but to the legacy of Phule, which stood in stark contrast. The second part of the resistance to the caste as race debate located it within North-South politics, making a clear distinction between ‘internal’ and international issues. Dipankar Gupta argued that by taking caste to the UN, Indians were merely ceding ‘knowledge advantage to the West on one front after another – beginning with the economic, then flowing on to the political and now we need tips on how to handle cultural discrimination as well… How do the enthusiasts who want to go to the Durban conference imagine that international agencies will help fight caste in India? Have they thought this through? Will the UN sanction a bombing raid on Delhi? An economic embargo? Or…provide intellectual and strategic direction, as if we haven’t had enough of that already.’ (Gupta 2004a:53-54. Emphasis added) Gupta then goes on to hold the government responsible for ‘washing a whole lot of dirty linen’ – poverty, leprosy, AIDS, Kashmir – in front of strangers so that it lost the right to argue that caste was an ‘internal’ matter. Beteille on the other hand has no objection to discussing things in the open, he himself having done so at numerous conferences, ‘[b]ut the discussion should be in good faith.’ (Beteille 2004a:65. Emphasis added) Radhakrishnan charged the Dalits with the ‘political appropriation of the caste system,’ arguing that ‘their existential problem cannot be isolated from that of the rest of society’ (2004: 60). The crux of the dalit intervention, which provided a counterpoint was that social exclusion cannot any more be an ‘internal’ matter – it had to be settled and accounted for in full view of the world, drawing on the constitutional framework of the absolute non-negotiability of fundamental rights –especially to life and dignity. The third set of arguments related to affirmative action, reducing the demand for affirmative action to a ‘game of numbers and proportionate representation. It does not employ reservations to uproot caste identities in public life, but rather to perpetuate it’ (Gupta 2004b:82). Interestingly, yet again, what gets demonstrated is the kinship of caste and race, in this instance through the prism of reactions against affirmative action, echoing the debates particularly in the United States. Finally, the question of the authentic voice is one that gets foregrounded in this debate. Gupta argues that it can only be victims of untouchability who can speak about it. Yet he also observes that having transcended the oppressions of caste through mobility, ‘ex-untouchables’ only want to move on, not continue to be identified as untouchables. Who will then speak? Those that espouse the cause of the Dalits – for the most part dalit intellectuals and activists – don’t ‘belong’ to that experience because they have tasted the fruits of liberalization and economic success. They also don’t belong, by this argument, because essential to the fact of belonging for a dalit is mobility and amnesia – the compulsion to sanskritisation, Srinivas would say. Untouchability therefore cannot lead to ‘mandalism’ (a pejorative allusion to the unequivocal demand for affirmative action) – Dalits who press for proportionate reservation, in laying a claim to affirmative action in education, employment and politics, fall within the ranks of the ‘imposters’ (not the genuine sufferers) because they persist with caste identities. Claiming representation, this argument goes, entrenches caste rather than uproots it. And after all, caste is about belonging, not just for Dalits but those above them as well in the social hierarchy. The circle of the second stream of governmentality is complete. Violent exclusion is argued out of the theoretical scheme of caste through sociological acrobatics, a process that uncovers for us the collusions between the production of knowledge, processes of dominance and hegemony, and the conferment of legitimacy in governance. The counter production of knowledge becomes critical therefore to this process of destabilizing hegemonic knowledge: ‘Untouchability produces repulsion in the minds of non-Dalits at the very sight, approach and touch of Dalits. The Dalit touch for them brings impurity and defilement. There being no biological differences either in terms of the skin colour or the body structure between Dalits and non-Dalits, the knowledge of caste identity becomes a pre-condition of discrimination.’ Anon. ‘Dalit Women in India: A Case of Discrimination by Birth,’ unpublished note, Readings for the First National Leadership Training Institute for Dalit Women: Enhancing Capacities and Building Leadership, organised by the NFDW, 24 November 2003 - 4 December 2003, Bangalore. Personal Archives of Ruth Manorama Evidence of the violent exclusionary practices could be found in the experience of the Chakkiliyar caste, the members of which could only light a fire in their homes if there was a dead animal in the village. At all other times they had ‘to survive, much like slaves, on the crumbs that fell off the table of those who happened to be their masters.’ Ibid. The rationalization of these practices - in stark contrast to the ‘spiritual’ brahminical frameworks - were located in the material conditions of village life – consuming carcasses being the way that dominant castes ensured removal of defilement and environmental pollution. The other aspect of the dalit experience is the question of segregation of entire villages consequent on untouchability – ‘hidden apartheid’. Statement by the International Dalit Solidarity Network to the First Preparatory Committee for the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, Geneva, 1-5 May 2000, published in Communalism Combat, May 2000: 10. ‘ “Untouchables” may not cross the line dividing their part of the village from that occupied by higher castes. They may not use the same wells, visit the same temples, drink from the same cups in tea stalls, or lay claim to land that is legally theirs. Dalit children are frequently made to sit in the back of classrooms, and communities as a whole are made to perform degrading rituals in the name of caste’ (Human Rights Watch 2000). Caste for dalit peoples is what race is for peoples of African descent in the Americas and South Africa. Becoming is the route to belong where one belongs. Belonging is shaped by radical ideas of the ‘we’ that are based on historically established and documented ‘prior experience’ that forges an identity of interest through an identity of location – regardless of territorial citizenship. Caste, Gender and Race: The National Federation of Dalit Women ‘To bounce like a ball that has been hit became my deepest desire, and not to curl up and collapse because of the blow’. (Bama 2005: vii) How does gender figure in this entire discourse around caste and race? While gender has been central to the constitution of the caste system, it was theorized only much after the major mainstream formulations were already in place. In the excerpts from Dumont cited above, there are very specific ways in which women’s experiences and bodies are structured into the caste order, indeed very specific ways in which bodies are gendered – reproductive capacities being central to that definition (the menstruating woman, the new mother and the widow being equally sources of pollution in the brahminical schema, as also the eunuch). Within this framework, women and slaves figure as subjects, women by nature fickle and unchaste, whose sexuality, bodies and minds must be reined in by the ‘dharma’, the Manusmriti epitomising this view. Evidence from the eighteenth century points to the vulnerability of all women, irrespective of jati, to enslavement for infringement of moral codes. In relation to women from the panchama groups (categorized broadly as asprsya or untouchable), which were tied in perpetual bondage, the additional implication for women of these castes was sexual slavery. However, this proscription on physical contact did not extend to sexual relations between upper caste men and Untouchable women, sexual labour being part of the physical labour provided by slave women and appropriated by the upper caste owner/master (Kannabiran 2004: 273-308) In modern India, gender within caste society is ‘defined and structured in such a manner that the “manhood” of the caste is defined both by the degree of control men exercise over women and the degree of passivity [and complicity] of the women of the caste. By the same argument, demonstrating control by humiliating women of another caste is a certain way of reducing the “manhood” of those castes.’ (Kannabiran and Kannabiran 1991). Spaces – domestic and public – are similarly structured both along lines of caste and gender. The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, recognises the gendered nature of caste experience, especially for dalit women. In the definition of Atrocity therefore, it makes explicit mention of the kinds of violence that women may be subjected to – sexual assault, non-consensual contact using the position of dominance, stripping and parading naked, are acts which fall within the meaning of atrocity in the law. A critical part of the effort to re-articulate the issue of caste in the theoretical/political context of anti-racism has been the mobilizing of dalit feminist resistance by the National Federation of Dalit Women in India, which began its work in the year 1995. The manifesto of the NFDW sets it apart from autonomous women’s movement in India on the one side and the ‘male dominated secular and progressive movements’ including the dalit movement on the other side – underscoring the need for critical reflection on caste- based discrimination and the violence inflicted on dalit women (see also Thorat 2001). NFDW endeavours to seek and build alliances with all other progressive and democratic movements and forces, in particular the women’s movement and the wider Dalit movement at the national level. It thus aspires in a significant way to widen the democratic spaces while at the same time to create and preserve its identity and specificity. This framework will enable the Dalit women’s movement to seek the roots of its oppression, the diversities, the nature of changes, if any, in specific regions and historical contexts and in particular, perceive the varied levels of consciousness that exist within it. Transforming Pain into Power: The Manifesto of the National Federation of Dalit Women, nd. National Federation of Dalit Women, Reading Materials of the First National Leadership Training Institute for Dalit Women, Bangalore, November-December 2003. Unpublished. Personal Archives of Ruth Manorama. This project, while it got submerged in the larger dalit mobilization in Durban, is one that must be examined in greater detail, raising as it does questions of the relationship between gender and racism as reflective of questions of intersectionality in feminist struggles, even while examining the specificities of the dalit woman’s question in India. Central to the question of belonging of course are questions of identity, diversity and power. How has feminism in India fashioned a new politics of identity and belonging that resists sexism and casteism-racism in very direct ways? Within the larger politics of becoming, dalit women attempted to combat both racism and sexism together wresting space within the larger dalit mobilization for a representation of interest and identity as women, and occupying space without – in opposition to other socially dominant groups within the country and the Indian state on the one hand, building solidarities with other groups suffering descent based discrimination in different locales across the world on the other. The pivotal bridge was with women of African descent. The recognition of diversity and difference was set against the homogenising practices of majoritarian hindu nationalism on the one side and the appropriating spaces of show-casing of ‘exotic’ dalit-bahujan cultures and their commoditisation by the state on the other. The deliberation on the dalit woman’s position therefore was based on notions of dignity of labour, cultural expression and democratic politics, the notion of belonging for dalit women situated firmly within an autonomous space that drew its strength from the resistance to appropriation and the building of alliances on equal terms. Transforming Pain into Power: The Manifesto of the National Federation of Dalit Women, nd. National Federation of Dalit Women, Reading Materials of the First National Leadership Training Institute for Dalit Women, Bangalore, November-December 2003. Unpublished. Personal Archives of Ruth Manorama. In terms of the delineation of issues, the NFDW focused on the specific interpretation of civil and political rights, the recognition of productive contribution to society in terms of equality, dignity, fair wages and popular perception, the guarantee of security of person and freedom from the threat of sexual and physical assault, right to freedom of religion in a context where conversion for a better life resulted in denial of protections and the right to leadership – a claim pitted against non-dalit men, dalit men and non dalit women. Drawing on the definition of racial discrimination in Article 1 of the CERD, the NFDW asserted in the Durban process that discrimination based on caste is indeed a specific form of racism, intertwined with gender since Dalit women ‘face targeted violence from state actors and powerful members of dominant castes and community especially in the case of rape, mutilation and death; they face discrimination in the payment of unequal wages and gender violence at the workplace that includes fields [as agricultural labourers], on the streets [as manual scavengers and garbage pickers], in homes [as domestic workers], and through religious custom…’ National Federation of Dalit Women, NGO Declaration on Gender and Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, World Conference Against Racism, 28 August - 7 September 2001, Durban, South Africa. National Federation of Dalit Women, Reading Materials prepared for the National Consultation on Gender and Racial Discrimination, New Delhi, February 2001. Unpublished. Personal Archives of Ruth Manorama The NFDW argues that it is necessary to look at the intersectionality of gender, race and caste in order to appreciate dalit women’s location adequately. Dalit women are ‘dalit among the dalits’, because they are thrice alienated – on the basis of caste, class and gender. The oppression of Dalit women echoes issues of state violence, denial of land rights, social and legal discrimination, infringement of civil liberties, inferior status, dehumanizing living and working conditions, total impoverishment, malnutrition, poor health conditions, the adverse effect of various contraceptives and new family planning devices, social ostracism and untouchability. Transforming Pain into Power: The Manifesto of the National Federation of Dalit Women, nd. The role of dalit women, the NFDW argues, is critical, to dalit liberation and dalit identity – the dalit woman is by definition feminist, non-patriarchal, non-hierarchical and positively oriented towards ecology. The charter of rights of dalit women, formulated in 1999, and christened the Delhi Declaration sets out the guiding principles of dalit women’s rights. Marching into the New Millennium: Delhi Declaration (Dalit Women Declare the Charter of Gender Rights and Demands), New Delhi, December 1999. Unpublished. National Federation of Dalit Women, Reading Materials prepared for the National Consultation on Gender and Racial Discrimination, New Delhi, February 2001. Unpublished. It declares that dalits are one of the indigenous peoples of India, who as a people are sovereign, with a distinct identity, history, culture and religion. As the original inhabitants of the land, they have a right to the ownership of the knowledge resources of the country as well as the fruit of their labour. Further, the declaration states that the ancient history, culture and tradition of dalit people is one in which there is equality between men and women. In this context, dalit women build their identities on cultures of resistance against the homogenising hegemonic cultures of brahminical Hinduism and the caste system, and assert their right to free speech and expression and their right to dignity especially with reference to the ‘heinous practice of untouchability’. Significantly, dalit women in this charter declared ‘solidarity in the common cause of women’s rights in India and the world at large for the establishment of gender partnership in an egalitarian society’. This charter documents the process of transition from becoming into belonging. Finally, the charter sets out the measures that central and state governments must take in order to demonstrate due diligence in eliminating violence and discrimination against Dalits in general and dalit women in particular. The first of these measures is to recognise dalit women as a distinct social group, rather than masking them under the general category of women. Further, the charter demanded that all statutory commissions take note of the specific experience of dalit women; that land be distributed by the government to Dalits and that this land be registered in the name of dalit women in each household; that wage revision and gender parity committees be constituted to ensure equal agricultural wages for dalit women, alongside enacting a comprehensive Dalit Agricultural Workers Act; that mechanisms to monitor and check the commission of atrocities against dalit women be put in place; that a ban be imposed on private armies of dominant caste landlords and that the government ‘distribute weapons and train dalit women to handle them in self defence against the perpetrators of crimes and atrocities.’ The diversity and radicalism of this charter of demands is a demonstration of the fact that ‘[o]ppressed, ruled, and still being ruled by patriarchy, government, caste, and religion, Dalit women are forced to break all the strictures of society to live’ (Bama 2005: vii) In trying to break shackles, and propel themselves forward, Bama observes, Dalit women have had to roar their defiance and learn to mock the class that oppressed them, finding through this, the courage to revolt (Bama 2005: vii). The intersectional articulation of the dalit woman’s political position is most evident when the charter affirms that ‘Dalit women have the right to self protection in the face of dominant caste male and female aggression, of Dalit male aggression, and of aggression committed by law enforcing machineries of the State’. Bama presents to us the creative articulation of this political standpoint very powerfully in her novel Sangati (2005) where extreme forms of patriarchal violence within the family are matched by the intense vulnerability to sexual assault by the men of dominant castes and the economic oppression of dalit men and women by dominant caste landowners and factory owners. Dalit feminist resistance in this context is an everyday resistance against everyday casteism and exclusion – minute, persistent, cumulative, intense. The charter crystallizes this resistance into a consolidated critique of state and society, forcing the state to grapple with the new measures justice that this particular feminist praxis threw up. From being an oppressed class, thrice oppressed, dalit women declare sovereignty and occupy a moral high ground demonstrating the possibility of being democratic, egalitarian and humane on the one hand and reaching out to other movements of women’s rights in a spirit of solidarity on the other. This assertion of a distinct identity and simultaneous forging of a collective identity in several struggles at once marks the dalit women’s movement in very specific ways. The mapping of identity is superimposed on the mapping of the violence of the caste system and the specific ways in which that violence is gendered – the violence of denial, of degrading work, of religion, of atrocity, of aggression on the body of the dalit woman, of language and abuse. Conclusion This chapter has attempted to explore the traditions of feminist resistance in India through the work of the National Federation of Dalit Women. In looking at this particular political formation, what has got immediately foregrounded is the convergence of protective legislations, claims to entitlements, social locations, contestations about that location both by the state and in civil society and the forging of a larger kinship of belonging as a method of enforcing greater accountability and transparency on local forces that repress with impunity. What we witness is also a convergence between the everyday and political society. The use of international soft law mechanisms and parameters of intersectionality in race theory provide the theoretical framework within which the solidarities between race, caste and gender are forged at the local, national and international levels by Dalit women, through resistance and struggle. The disjuncture between justice and the law in this case is stark, with justice lying ever beyond the pale of law. It is impossible for women to belong any more without deliberation - responsible belongingness necessarily means active engagement in deliberation – the community providing commonality of interests and location but not justice. Women, dalit women in particular, constantly negotiate space for the insertion of justice into that common ground – marking its separation, difference and distance from the larger public domain in general and public law in particular, not easily conceded by the community of belonging, not standing on its own either, but seeking to govern in similar ways on different terms. The politics of becoming then shapes the politics of belonging and transforms the idea of community itself. The larger questions that are relevant to this debate have to do with the politics of masculinity and misogyny in civil society and women’s responses to it; the politics of gender within communities and the resistance to sexism from within; the resistance to sexism and xenophobia in the ‘national’ space by re-defining body politics; the demonstration of ‘better’ politics of belonging by moving back and forth between the political and the moral, rather from the political to the moral. Another useful way of looking at this question is to do so through the lens of social exclusion, tracing the paths of exclusion and thereby contextualising the struggles of resistance to exclusion. These are questions that are immediately relevant to an understanding of the ways in which dalit women have organized themselves over the past decade in India. Resisting pacific order for dalit women has been critical to survival, since order has for them specifically been based on foundational violence - within the family, in the larger multi caste communal space and in the terrain(s) of citizenship(s). The Dalit feminist standpoint, and more specifically the National Federation of Dalit Women, provides in very clear terms a cartography of governance that forces an official reckoning of a new way of seeing. References Bama (2005) Sangati, (translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström), New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bayly, Susan (1995) Caste and Race in the Colonial Ethnography of India, in Robb, P. (ed.) The Concept of Race in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Beteille, Andre (2004a) Caste Consciousness: Initiate an open discussion in Durban, in Thorat and Umakant (eds), Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications: 65-68. Beteille, Andre (2004b) Race and Caste, Reprinted in Thorat and Umakant (eds), Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications (first published in The Hindu in 2001): 49-52 Connolly, William E. (1996) ‘Suffering, Justice and the Politics of Becoming,’ Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 20: 251-77. Reprinted in Connolly, William E. (1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 47-71. Deshpande, G.P. (2002) Of Hope and Melancholy: Reading Jotirao Phule in our Times, in G.P Deshpande (ed.), Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule, New Delhi: LeftWord Books:1-21. Dirks, Nicholas (2002) Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Delhi: Permanent Black. Divakar, Paul N. and Ajai, M. (2004) UN Bodies and the Dalits: A Historical Review of Interventions, in Thorat and Umakant (eds), Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications:3-30. Dumont, Louis (1970) Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications, Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Fitzpatrick, Peter (2001) Consolations of the Law: Jurisprudence and the Constitution of Deliberative Politics, Ratio Juris, IV(3) September 2001: 281-97. Foucault, Michel (1987) Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside, in Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot eds), Faucault/Blanchot. Translated by Brian Massumi, New York: Zone Books. Geetha, V. and Rajadurai, S.V.(1998). Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar, Calcutta: Samya. Gupta, Dipankar (2004a) Caste is not Race: But Let’s go to the UN Forum anyway. Reprinted in Thorat and Umakant (eds), Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications: 53-56. Gupta, Dipankar (2004b) Caste, Race Politics, in Thorat and Umakant (eds), Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications: 69-84. Human Rights Watch (2000) Violence against and Exploitation of ‘Untouchable’ Women in India, Report prepared for the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, 20 January. Jaffrelot, Christophe (2003) India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Low Castes in North Indian Politics, Delhi: Permanent Black. Kannabiran, Kalpana (2002) Caste, in Routledge International Encyclopedia on Women, Volume 1, New York: Routledge: 142-44. Kannabiran, Kalpana (2004) Voices of Dissent: Changing Gender Values in Hinduism, Robin Rinehart, (ed.), Contemporary Hinduism: Ritual, Culture, and Practice, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO: 273-308. Kannabiran, Kalpana and Kannabiran, Vasanth (1991) ‘Caste and Gender: Understanding the Dynamic of Power and Violence, in Economic and Political Weekly, 14 September: 2130-33. Minow, Martha (1990) Making All the Difference: Inclusion and Exclusion in American Law. Ithaca:Cornell University Press. Minow, Martha (1996) Comments on ‘Suffering, Justice and the Politics of Becoming by William E. Connolly, Presented as the Roger Allan Moore Lecture, 11May, 1995. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 20: 279-86. National Federation of Dalit Women, Reading Materials prepared for the National Consultation on Gender and Racial Discrimination, New Delhi, February 2001. Unpublished. National Federation of Dalit Women, Reading Materials of the First National Leadership Training Institute for Dalit Women, Bangalore, November-December 2003. Unpublished. Omi, Michael and Winant, Howard (2002), Racial Formation, in Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg, (eds), Race Critical Theories: Text and Context, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers: 123-45. Phule, Jotirao (1873; 2002) Slavery, in G.P. Deshpande (ed.), Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule, New Delhi: LeftWord Books. Radhakrishnan, P. (2004) Dalits and Durban, in Thorat and Umakant (eds), Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications: 57-64. Sorabjee, Soli (2004) The official position, in Thorat and Umakant (eds), Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications: 43-47. Shinde, Tarabai (1882; 1994) A Comparison between Women and Men, translated and edited by Rosalind O’Hanlon, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Thorat, Sukhadeo and Umakant (2004) Introduction, in Thorat and Umakant (eds), Caste, Race and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context, Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications: xiii-xxxv. Thorat, Vimal (2001) Dalit women have been left behind by the Dalit movement and the women’s movement, Communalism Combat, May 2001: 12. Notes Cartography of Resistance: The National Federation of Dalit Women PAGE 19