India (42 page)

Gandhi’s victory over the matter of separate electorates would later be portrayed by Dalits as a moment which retarded the community’s ability to advance. In
The Chamcha Age
, a book published on the fiftieth anniversary of Ambedkar’s climbdown, the Dalit leader Kanshi Ram used strong words:

In Kanshi Ram’s opinion, untouchables had allowed themselves to be made the chamchas, or stooges, of the upper castes.

Unlike the other founding fathers of independent India, Ambedkar is hard to read as a person (this may be because he has been neglected by Indian biographers, just as the culture of his community remains neglected by academics, except as a source of votes; many of the websites concerning Dalits are either kooky or run by evangelical Christians). In the 1930s he announced that Hinduism was beyond reform, and shortly before his death in 1956 converted to Buddhism along with his second wife, Savita, and many thousands of his followers. Despite his essential role in making the Constitution, Ambedkar was defeated by a Congress candidate in India’s first general election. In most photographs he appears opaque, giving nothing to the camera, and often he looks as if his mind is elsewhere, or as if he has seen enough. So rather than being a person, Dr. Ambedkar has instead become his myth, his portrait, his statue, holding a book in his left hand and gesturing at the world in bronze or blue plaster—blue being the chosen colour of the modern Dalit movement.

Until recently the outcaste who became the lawgiver was sidelined in pan-Indian history, as a fly in the ointment of the independence movement. The Hindi poet Omprakash Valmiki, a Dalit, stated that during the 1960s he never once heard Ambedkar’s name “from a teacher’s or a scholar’s mouth.” He went unmentioned on Republic Day. “I knew about Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Radhakrishnan, Vivekananda, Tagore, Saratchandra, Bhagat Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Savarkar, and so on, but was completely ignorant about Dr. Ambedkar.”
⁸

Valmiki was born in 1950, the year in which Article 17 of the Indian Constitution formally abolished untouchability. How different was life after this impressive, momentous change? In his book
Joothan
—the title means “slops,” referring to the waste food that people like himself were expected to collect and eat—Valmiki evokes a childhood of something like internal exile in an Uttar Pradesh village near Muzaffarnagar. His people, Chuhras, lived in narrow lanes filled with garbage and worse, and were expected to do whatever tasks they were commanded by the higher castes, sometimes
for no pay. If they refused, they risked being thrashed by Hindus and Muslims alike.

Valmiki’s memoir contains much information that can be revealed only by someone deep inside a social system: how Chuhras were at the limits of Hinduism, with their own deities, religious practices and sorcery involving offerings of pigs and alcohol. With great effort, his father had him admitted to a government school. Like Ambedkar, Valmiki sat apart from the other children and was forbidden from using the water pump. As well as studying, he did hereditary work: sweeping, cleaning, dealing with dead animals, skinning buffaloes. At weddings, the Chuhras would sit outside and wait to collect the leftover leaf-plates, and then scrape up the waste food, the joothan, for boiling, drying and storing. He admits, and it is a painful admission for both reader and writer, that he relished the chance to eat joothan, such was his desperation. “If the people who call the caste system an ideal social arrangement had to live in this environment for a day or two, they would change their mind,” he observed.
⁹

In
Joothan
, Omprakash Valmiki showed the effects of such long-term humiliation on an individual. Later, he became a poet and literary critic, and got a job at an ordnance factory in Dehradun. It was made clear to him in early adulthood even by some of his friends that they felt contaminated by his presence. They were worried, not without reason, by the possible consequences within their own family and community of, for example, being seen to share a meal with him. He tried in his writing to determine why this aversion was so potent but, like Ambedkar, failed to find an answer.

Casteism remains one of the aspects of Indian life that is hardest to understand. It is unlike other forms of prejudice, where antipathy is linked to envy or desire; an anti-Semite will ask why “they” do so well in business, and a white racist will fear and envy apparent black physical prowess. Prejudice against outcastes is built on the idea that you will be polluted if you go near them. They exist only to serve, and then at some distance. It is a uniquely powerful form of social control, since it is total and self-replicating. The higher castes can only remain high if they have others to look down upon. So in the not too distant past, a boy would brush against an elderly sweeper in a corridor and his mother might whisper to him: “Don’t touch, you will get a scale or turn into an insect!” A prayer of purification might follow. This would lodge in the child’s memory, and even as he grew older and less traditional—or even international, living in Europe or America—the instinctive response, the flinch, remained.

•   •   •

I met Anu Hasan in Chennai. She was in her late thirties and had led a varied life. She ran a marketing agency in far-off Calcutta, did modelling, starred in the 1995 movie
Indira
(which had a soundtrack by the double Oscar winner A. R. Rahman) and now presented a popular Tamil TV show,
Koffee With Anu
. In addition, she starred in the action soap
Rekha IPS
—IPS stood for Indian Police Service—about a woman cop. “I fight the baddies,” she said. “I do my own stunts with motorbikes and guns.” Anu Hasan had made a distinct career for herself, which in its singularity was expected. She was of normal weight, rather than looking starved like many of the Bollywood actresses, and more than anything she gave off an impression of healthy vigour.

“My mother’s a Tamil Brahmin from Andhra Pradesh and had an arranged marriage to my father. My grandfather was a lawyer. After marriage, my father shifted out of the joint family to live in a separate house. They moved to Trichy [Tiruchirapalli, in southern Tamil Nadu], though my mother went back to her home place to have her first child, my brother, as was traditional. My father trained us to be non-vegetarian, saying if we went abroad we should be able to eat everything and not have problems. He was involved in film production at Rajkamal Films, in partnership with his brother.” The brother was Kamal Haasan, one of India’s biggest film stars; Anu’s cousin was the actress Suhasini, who was married to the successful director Mani Ratnam. This family background was important to her, though she was down to earth, even offhand, when talking about it. “To other people they are stars, but to me they’re just family. When I’m in other parts of India, I think of myself as Tamilian, but when I’m in Madras I’m just ‘Anu.’ I’m not identified as a Tamil Brahmin.”

She was perhaps being optimistic here: the sentiment against the upper castes remained strong in the south. When a Madras-based newspaper,
The Hindu
, had called in 1908 for “natives” to be appointed as judges (they were only permitted to take junior judicial posts), the magazine
Tamilan
argued this would result in their further dominance: “The self-styled Brahmins migrated to this country from alien lands … If we give the power of District Magistrate to these people, they will employ the people of their caste and cheat common Hindus.”
¹⁰
What Anu meant, I felt, was that she did not promote herself on-screen as a Brahmin and tried to be fluid, modern and universal. The resentment against her community was not hard to locate or to understand. When
Tamilan
expressed a fear of further dominance,
83 percent of sub-judges in the Madras presidency, which covered much of the territory of southern India, were Brahmin, although they only made up 3 percent of the population. After the First World War, 72 percent of Brahmin men in the region were literate, against less than 4 percent of Paraiyars (or pariahs—this was the origin of the word).
¹¹
Unlike in the north, where Brahmins were often poor despite being of high caste, here they had also been landowners, which created further resentment. In the south, caste barriers started to break down in the 1920s, in part because of the radical reforms promoted by the ideologue and activist Periyar E. V. Ramaswamy. He was the Dravidian answer to Dr. Ambedkar and considered the ruling castes to be a greater threat than the British.

“I was twenty-four when I came out of college,” said Anu, “but I looked seventeen and my cousin asked me to act in a movie she was directing. So I did
Indira
. I got too old to play leads, so I had roles like sister or mother of the hero. There are nearly a hundred Tamil films a year—it’s the biggest regional industry after Bombay. I said I didn’t want to be the kind of actress who wears skimpy clothes and runs around a tree in a romantic scene with the hero. In 2006,
Koffee With Anu
happened.”

Everyone I met in south India seemed to watch this soft, light-hearted chat show, done in Tamil with occasional asides in English. It was based on a more irreverent Bollywood show,
Koffee With Karan
, presented by the director Karan Johar, who had made hits like
My Name Is Khan
and
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai
. When I watched a few episodes, Anu, wearing a frilly dress or a formal sari, greeted the guests with joined palms and sat them down on a swish but homely set. “We’re not looking for their bad side. People here expect a certain sort of behaviour. One of the actresses—Namitha—was wearing a top that showed a bit of cleavage, and we had complaints. Things like ‘Have you forgotten what Tamil culture is?’ A while back there was a problem when a woman in a skirt was photographed crossing her legs while the chief minister was speaking. There’s no porn industry in Tamil Nadu—most of it is imported from Kerala.” This was not quite accurate: there was Tamil porn, but the performers were restrained and usually took off only their tops. In one film, a man writhed around with a woman who wore cycling trunks, and she pacified him in a maternal fashion.

What did it mean to be a Tamil Brahmin in modern India? “We’re known for being highly educated, intelligent, a shade arrogant. Everything is distinct—there’s a special language, and a particular way of tying a sari if you are a Brahmin.” She did a sketch of an extra long sari pulled up at the waist. “Within our community, there’s a distinction whether you are
Iyengar or Iyer. There was a court case about a new temple elephant at Kanchipuram. The priests at the temple were arguing whether the elephant was Thengalai or Vadagalai—which are Iyengar subsects—and went to law over it. I believe it took seventy years before the judgement was made, which was that for six months of each year the elephant was Thengalai, and for six months it was Vadagalai.” How would they signify that the beast followed one sect rather than the other? “By the ‘naamam’—the mark on its forehead—which is like the one the followers of the religious tradition wear. One is a ‘U’ shape and the other is a ‘Y’ shape. I believe the elephant died soon after the judgement, though depending on who you are speaking to it was either while the ‘U’ or the ‘Y’ was being applied.

“When I am with a non-Brahmin Tamil, I will use a different vocabulary, I will say ‘thanni’ for water, ‘rasam’ for rasam [a peppery, sour tomato soup]. With a Brahmin, I would say ‘jalam’ for water, ‘saathamudhu’ for rasam. Our food is different. Traditionally, a woman would bustle around in the house and she wouldn’t go outside. If my grandmother was ill and a non-Brahmin doctor came to the house, a silk cloth was put over her wrist so he could take her pulse. The old rules started to break down a while back. We have ‘madi’—the idea that you must do things in a particular way, like being bathed and clean before you cook, or that you should wash your hands before serving rice, again before you serve sambar, again before you serve vegetables. Now you might just do it symbolically, with a splash of water, if elders are there. We don’t hug or show emotions; it’s considered infra dig to do so. A boy who is really timid, you will say he’s ‘thayirsaadham’ or ‘thacchimammu.’ It means ‘curd and rice’—that he’s so well-behaved he’s like curd and rice. Drinking is seen as all right, though many people are still shocked if a woman drinks, or smokes cigarettes.

“I went to a convent school and for college I had to go to BITS Pilani up in Rajasthan—if you are a Brahmin here you have to score higher to get a place. I wanted to do engineering and I got 94 percent, but here in Tamil Nadu I needed 98 percent, while the disadvantaged communities would be on 70 percent.” Anu did not seem resentful of this: it was just the way things were. “My father gave me a lot of freedom, but responsibility came with it. I lived in Calcutta for seven years, marketing credit cards and home loans. I married a north Indian man. He was in the army, a Jat and a below-knee amputee. My parents thought I could do better financially and were worried he was from the north, so far away. I realized after a year the marriage wasn’t working, but I stayed, and after ten years came back to the south. My entire family stood by me when I divorced. It’s fantastic being
an Indian now, and fantastic being a woman in India. I speak English better than the Americans. Actually most Indians do.”

Anu Hasan’s caste background, and the liberal form in which it was expressed during her upbringing, had not left her religious. “I’m borderline atheist. My mother would pray to a particular god, but I don’t. In the film industry, you always start by taking a shaved coconut—you put a lighted camphor cube on the wedge of the coconut and take it around. Everyone except me will touch it and pray before filming. People do black magic on each other here. They really think it can kill you, but I believe half of them die out of fear.”
¹²
Anu was unusual in her rejection of religion and of the superstitious aspects of faith. Even Indians who were secular and modern usually had a devotion to an aspect of Hindu tradition—a photo of a favourite godman which would receive daily homage or an image of Hanuman secreted in a bottom drawer.