The Hindus (108 page)

Then the goddess arrived. Originally a smallpox deity (called, apotropaically, Sitala [“the Cool”] because she brought fever), she became for the Adivasis a force for social reform and a vehicle for protest against their exploiters, the Parsis. Though the Adivasis had resisted the educational forces of Hinduism and spurned the help of higher political powers when the nationalists had tried to help them, they did not reject the Higher Power of the goddess, in a move that anticipated Alcoholics Anonymous by a decade or two. The goddess possessed certain women and spoke through them, and the women then led demonstrations, courted imprisonment, and persuaded the men to refuse the tax; they held the men to the mark and goaded them on.

Speaking through the women, the Devi persuaded the men to drink tea instead of liquor, which broke their economic bondage to the Parsis. The solidarity that they had formerly expressed in communal drinking bouts they now symbolized by
not
drinking. Though there was a certain amount of recidivism and the occasional great debauch to celebrate a new recruit’s final renunciation, by and large it worked. They sang songs (
bhajans
) to Krishna, some of which exhorted them to give up liquor and stand up against the liquor dealers, while other songs (spiked by the words of the Devi herself) commanded them not to become Christians, to resist the missionaries who were active in their district.

This was not Sanskritization. Like many tribals, the Adivasis realized that they would be very low caste if they became Hindus and so did not claim a rank as a caste (though Hindus often regarded them as a caste). Some of them, however, asked to be regarded as Kshatriyas, who could maintain their high status even while indulging in impure practices such as eating meat and addictive vices such as drinking liquor. This is what has been called Rajputization or Kshatriyazation, the upward mobility of castes that do
not
give up their “impure” habits. But the Devi’s command to give up toddy and
daru
doubly empowered them by helping them simultaneously to appropriate the “purer” values of the regionally dominant high-caste Hindus and Jainas and to assert themselves against the most rapacious of the local exploiters, the Parsis.

Indeed, as the Devi movement grew in strength, the Adivasis began to treat the Parsis as Pariahs, taunting them that they should go back to Persia, and forcing Parsi women, for the first time in their lives, to do the tasks of scrubbing, sweeping, and washing. Some Adivasis refused to talk with Parsis or even be touched by them, thus, of course, perpetuating the evils of the caste system. Some Parsis and their strongmen, assisted on occasions by tax officials, retaliated by seizing Adivasis, holding them down, and pouring liquor down their throats (thus making them break their vows and become ritually impure once again) or by pouring toddy into village wells so that the Adivasis would be forced to drink alcohol with their water.

The inspiration of the Devi gave the Adivasis the courage to rebel. Unlike the priestly spokesmen of the Hinduism they had avoided in the schools, the Devi did not require them to worship gods like Krishna or Rama (though some of them did) but allowed them to go on worshiping their old gods and goddesses so long as they did not perform blood sacrifice. The goddess often became incarnate in an old buffalo cow who wandered freely from house to house, and one man became richer after the cow defecated
^kv
and urinated in his house.
⁵⁴
But there were, from the start, skeptics who regarded the cow as a public nuisance, beat her away with a stout stick, drove her out of their crops, and sold her at a public auction. And although most of the Adivasis attributed their new social activism to the goddess, they had learned that change was possible and that they could make it happen by their own actions, long after many of them decided that their supposed champion was no more than a figment of the imagination.
⁵⁵
The Devi took the place of the intellectuals who, in other times and places (Russia in 1917, to take a case at random), came in from outside to inspire the oppressed peasants to rebel. This was entirely a tribal movement. The myth, once again, made history possible.

The Devi movement was eventually crushed in many places, through the punishment of its leaders. Often the Devi then departed, in a formal ceremony, but sometimes the movement went on without her. In 1922 one reformer managed both to keep the villagers from drinking and to prevent animal sacrifices (by arguing that sacrificial animals and humans had the same souls). The movement became increasingly secular, and increasingly accommodating. As people noticed that those who went on drinking liquor and eating meat did not experience the divine wrath that they had been threatened with, they followed suit, often within a year of the Devi’s departure. Sometimes, quitting before she was fired, the Devi possessed a few Adivasis and proclaimed that they could once more eat meat and fish and drink
daru
and toddy.

As a kind of transition between the Devi movement and the nationalist movement that eventually caught up the Adivasis, a deified form of Gandhi replaced the goddess for a while.
⁵⁶
(The prohibition of alcohol had been high on the list of things
^kw
that Gandhi wanted the British to grant.
⁵⁷
) Some of the Adivasis said that spiders were writing Gandhi’s name in cobwebs; they also saw Gandhi in bottles of kerosene, in the rising sun or the moon (a man—a very particular man—instead of a rabbit), and in wells, where the wheel for the bucket became the spinning wheel (
charkha
) that Gandhi was to make so famous. Eventually Gandhi himself put a stop to all this mythologizing of his image.
⁵⁸

Gandhi had chosen for the exemplary hero of his paradigm of fasting with love a son who fasts for a father who drinks. But fasting was not the only measure that could be used to control the drinking of a parent or spouse. A far more extreme version of the pressure that women could exert by fasting or withholding sexual access was suttee, a moral control available to women who had no other powers, a desperate but sometimes effective measure. Rajput women in Rajasthan tell this story about their husbands, who, like all Kshatriyas, are expected to drink liquor, but not too much too often:

Here it was not a goddess but a human sati whom the women called on to protect their families.

Fast-forward: In the 1990s, in Dobbagunta in Andhra Pradesh, rural women attending a literacy class discovered that they all suffered from their husband’s addiction to
arak,
the local alcohol. So they launched a campaign to ban it.
^kx
The antiliquor campaign spread across the entire state of Andhra Pradesh. This time too there was no Devi.

The Devi movement was as much about caste as about addiction. The British, as we have seen, did little to displace caste and much to enforce it, despite the many voices raised in criticism of Hindu injustices. Eventually both the reform movement and the anti-British initiative passed to a new English-educated Indian elite.
⁶⁰

 

THE CHAMARS AND THE SATNAMIS

One Pariah caste whose polluted status was directly connected with cows was the Chamars, a caste of leatherworkers who had always borne the stigma of their traditional caste
sva-dharma
and whose contact with the carcasses of cows excluded them from Hindu temples. But the Chamars in Chattisgarh, in central India, changed their lives in ways that mirror, mutatis mutandis, similar movements throughout India. The Chamars often owned their own land or worked as sharecroppers and farm servants and formed about a sixth of the local population. But in the 1820s, according to Chamar legend, a Chamar farm servant named Ghasidas (c. 1756-1836) threw the images of the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon onto a rubbish heap and rejected the authority of the Brahmins, the temples, and Hindu
puja,
as well as the colonial authority. Ghasidas proclaimed belief only in the formless god without qualities (
nirguna
), called the True Name (
satnam
), thus affiliating himself with the larger sect of Satnamis that had been founded in the eastern Punjab in 1657. Other low castes joined the Satnampanth (“Path of the True Name”). They all abstained from meat, liquor, tobacco, and certain vegetables, generally red vegetables like tomatoes, chilies, and aubergines (well, a sort of purplish red), and red beans, and they used bullocks instead of cows as their farm animals.
⁶¹
In this way they simultaneously rejected Brahmins and took on a Brahminical, Sanskritizing, purifying set of values; they became the people they had rebelled against, replicating among themselves the hierarchy that had excluded them.

The Satnamis developed a new mythology, based on their own oral traditions, in which gurus replaced gods as the central figures. These myths were not written down until the late 1920s, and then only by someone who probably sanitized them, appropriating them to the concerns of a largely reformed Brahminical Hinduism. Yet the written forms did not vary significantly from the myths later collected in the oral tradition. We have questioned the pervasiveness of the Brahmin filter for Puranic stories; it may have been equally loosely constructed here, or, on the other hand, the revised written collection may have fed back into the Satnami oral tradition by the time those stories were collected.
⁶²

There were other filters to which the Satnami tradition was also exposed. In around 1868 the evangelical missionaries began to convert some of the Satnamis to Christianity, reworking the Satnami oral traditions with Christian teachings and forging connections between Ghasidas and the gurus, on the one hand, and Christ and the missionaries, on the other. And, finally, the most bizarre filter of all: In the 1930s, the Satnamis constructed a new genealogy for their group, with Brahmin ancestors, drawing upon
Manu,
of all things, but reversing Manu’s arguments, in an attempt to persuade the provincial administration to enter the group as Hindus rather than Harijans in official records, but still to retain the advantages accorded to what were then called the Scheduled Castes (now Dalits). That is, the Satnamis wished to establish their superiority to other castes within the category of Scheduled Castes, once again reproducing the hierarchy. The administration rejected this petition, arguing that all Harijans were Hindus in any case.
⁶³

In our day, the advantages of what Hindus call reservation (and we call affirmative action), such as the 1980 Mandal Commission, which reserved nearly half of all government and educational places for the underprivileged castes (whom they called Scheduled Castes), has stood Sanskritization on its head, leading to what we might even call Dalitification. Some Brahmins burned themselves to death in protest over the Mandal recommendations, but the conflict between the so-called Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and (other) Scheduled Castes is sometimes greater than the one between Dalits and Brahmins, as castes not particularly disadvantaged in any way often manage to get themselves reclassified as Scheduled so as to win a share of the new opportunities.
⁶⁴
In Rajasthan, the Gujars (or Gujjars), an Other Backward Caste, clashed with the Meenas (Dalits), because the Gujars wanted a
lower,
Scheduled status. This was precisely the outcome that Gandhi had feared when he insisted that Harijans decline the chance of being a separate electorate. As Gary Tartakov has put it, “It was evil enough that such racializing degradation was claimed by caste Hindus; it was worse that that is what the members of the Schedule Castes and Tribes accepted themselves to be,
if they remained Hindus.
”
⁶⁵

The idea that the solution to the problem of the Dalits was precisely not to remain Hindu was one of the strategies adopted by Ambedkar.

 

UNTOUCHABLES AND DALITS, BUDDHISTS AND AMBEDKAR

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a Dalit who was one of the group who drafted the Constitution, agreed with Gandhi that Untouchability had to be stopped, but Gandhi thought you could still keep caste, and Ambedkar said you could not. At first, Ambedkar tried to reform Hinduism; he resisted movements that attempted to convert Dalits to Islam or Christianity. Then he reasoned that since the Hindus viewed their tradition as eternal, they regarded basic elements of that tradition, such as class injustice and Untouchability, as eternal too and impossible to eradicate.
⁶⁶
“Gandhiji,” he said, “I have no homeland. How can I call this land my own homeland and this religion my own wherein we are treated worse than cats and dogs, wherein we cannot get water to drink?”
⁶⁷
In the end he converted to Buddhism, translating the Buddhist concept of individual suffering (
dukka
) into his own awareness of social suffering, discarding a great deal of Buddhism and inserting in its place his own doctrine of social activism. Though he had the good sense to keep a number of Buddhist stories in his platform, one that he did not keep was the story, so basic to the Buddhist tradition, that the future Buddha was confined within a luxurious palace until one day when he had grown up, he went outside and happened to see a sick man, an old man, a dead man, and a renouncer.
⁶⁸
Ambedkar objected to this story because it “does not appeal to reason” that a twenty-nine-year-old man would not have been exposed to death by then.
⁶⁹