The Subterranean Caste in Kerala

It might seem hard to believe that discrimination based on caste exists in the modernized social set up in Kerala, the image projected being contrary to the fact, either as part of a well calculated programme of the implementation of caste system or as a social reality that is practiced without being aware of it. With the presence of the Progressive left parties, which sees all struggle as class struggle and only as class struggle, either straight or distorted, the reality of caste discrimination is back grounded, but never eliminated. It still pervades the society, with the perpetrators of it in Kerala being intelligent enough to do it with a fine sense of perfection and skill that it does not attract the atrocity act. Conversation with Prof. Yesudasan, the HOD of Department of English CMS College, Kottayam, Kerala, opened up certain “subterranean operation of caste system in Kerala”. This form of casteism can be broadly identified into politics and religion, though these are not the only manifestations of it.
Politics:
Kerala has a political set up which leaves the voters with practically no electoral choice- it is either the Congress led United Democratic Front [UDF] or the Left Democratic Front [LDF]. The prevailing notion that the UDF is a pro rich political group has resulted in the flourishing of the Left in the state, which commits the fundamental fallacy of overlooking caste as a reason for social discrimination. In addition, the pride that the society takes in calling itself educated and modern prevents it from blunt caste discrimination as is seen in other states of the country. This does not mean that Kerala society is caste free; neither is the Marxist Party. Caste discrimination still exists, with its long history of poverty and discrimination.
At the higher level, where Chief Minister of Kerala, Com. V.S. Achudananthan is projected as traditional, a non-techno man, ignorant of globalization, caste operates wrapped in what Prof. Yesudasan calls “scientific explanations”. At an intermediate level, Dalit women activists are rarely offered a post in the Party and are compelled to leave the Party, like C.K. Janu, the founder of the Adivasi Gothra Mahasabha. At a lower level, Marxism, one of the best humanistic ideologies, dehumanizes Dalits to the level of political hooligans, for the benefit of the higher ups in the Party. The diminishing number of membership in the Party in Kerala, as is expressed in the Coimbatore Party Congress 2008 can be traced to such inhuman tendencies.
As Kerala developed, sons of the forest were thrown on to the streets. They are deprived of all modernity, except for the way they dress. Their language is not educated, for that is yet to reach them. But the modern notion of wild life protection has reached them, displacing them of the right to have a living from forest. Neither of the political Fronts has been able to solve their problems. This led to recent agitations like the ones in Changara, referred to by Arundhati Roy in her interview. (Please find the interview at the end of the article). An attitude to extend a helping hand is lacking. But why? Is it because they are expected to tolerate, the strange argument being they are used to it? But who has made them so and why is nothing being done towards their cause? In an era of modernization, democracy and universal brotherhood, this lapse can be traced down to nothing but the operation of an undercurrent of caste discrimination by the rulers.
Religion:
The two major religions under consideration in the study of caste discrimination in Kerala are Christianity and Islam. Both do not recognize caste. The Muslims of Kerala have their internal divisions based on belief and class, not caste. Christianity has a peculiar attitude to caste and conversion. There are sects within the Christians, who believe in ethnic purity (the Knanaya Community for instance) and others who claim Brahminic identity (saying they were the decedents of the Brahmins who were converted to Christianity by St. Thomas). These Christians and Hindus share the same ritual purity and sacred rules. They harbor a pride and superiority, and practice endogamy to maintain this purity. Yet, there are Christian sects and missionaries who preach brotherhood and equality.
Conversions do happen in Kerala, though it does not concern the religious polity of the state. Interestingly, much of these conversions are either inter sect conversions or inter religious, with the Dalits forming the majority of the converts. This was mainly for a community identity, which was not possible in Kerala. While, in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu the Dalit working class was tied to the land of the landlord and thus fragmented, did not live as a community. Also, Christianity exposed them to modernity and modern education. Even though the plight of the Dalits is better in Kerala compared to other states, the plight of Dalit identity and sense of the Dalit community are more in other states. This unity was brought about by Christianity. The role played by the Pentecost church which is a Dalit church predominantly, has been great towards social reform. Yet what makes the attitude of Christianity in Kerala peculiar is its being modern and casteist simultaneously. The society looks down upon these Dalit churches.There are instances, as Sarah Joseph point out in her novel Othappu, where a converted Christian is allowed to take only a distorted form of the an original Christian name (Ousep for Joseph, Chacko for Jacob etc.). There are churches which consider the Dalits as the object of their charity, providing modern facilities, but hesitate to have a Dalit priest. *some text missing*
Need for Connectivity
In Kerala, the need of the hour is to unite the Dalits, by reforming the education system. Thanks to the lower financial status, majority of the Dalits attend government schools, while the non Dalits prefer English medium schools, more suited for professional courses. Apart from the quality of education, there is a serious ghettoization happening from the grass root level. Reservations are only a token help. What is required is a legitimate share in opportunities to reach a level when reservations are no more required. The scattered Dalit communities are required to unite to claim for itself a culture and tradition which is no inferior but at par with any other similar culture and tradition. As Prof. Yesudasan says, “Not denying education alone is not enough. The education provided should lead to the cultural connectivity and unification of the Dalit community.”

SEZ, Land and Dalits

The alienation and exploitation of tribal and Dalit populations continue in the face of modern India with the latest onslaught on their lives being brought about by the implementation of the SEZ act. There is an ensuing battle in our country to be fought on two fronts. The first enemy is the forces of global capital, which is penetrating our daily lives in every way possible. The second is off-course the more ‘traditional’ instance of caste based discrimination, oppression and exclusion. Neo colonization by means of global capital is taking over our nation, and its ally is clearly upper class elites who have hardly anything material to lose. Dalits have almost always been losers in gambles such as this. 12 out of 14 official deaths in Nandigram were Dalit deaths. All women who were gang raped were Dalit women. Even in cases of movemental operations, limelight and the political imperative seems to lie with upper caste leadership whose civil society operations hardly stall the forces of this colonization in some cases falling prey to them too easily.
According to official data till November 30, 2007 there are a total of 760 SEZs in operation or been approved. There are more awaiting approval. The central government expects over 300000 crores worth private investment in SEZs. A claim of about 3-4 million new jobs being created has been made by the likes of Minister Kamal Nath. Till date around 48,000 hectares of land has been acquired for the SEZ. Yet again there is a tall claim made by the government of about Rs 43,133 crores investment already incurred and around 35,000 jobs being created out of them. Apart from discrepancies in the claim it is also a necessity to point out the fact that for around Rs. 1.24 crores investment in such projects there is 1 job being created. Also significant is the composition in terms of the nature of the industry that these projects are fostering. 65% of the 193 notified SEZs are for IT and IT enabled services; and 15% for pharmaceuticals, textiles and multi-product activities. Over half of the notified SEZs (55%) are to be found in states of South India; 22% in the West, 18% in the North, and 4% in the East. The specialists are definite beneficiaries of these SEZs and unskilled labor might not be that relevant to the nature of the capital-intensive industries being drawn up. The Arjun Sen committee set up by the P.M. himself submitted its report on July 7th, 2007. According to the reports, on January 2005, the total employment in the Indian economy was 457 millions, the unorganized sector accounting for 395 million or 86%. In the unorganized sector, agricultural employment was around 253 million, 142 million being in non-agricultural sector. Point number 7 of the report says,' over the decades while the percentage of the population below the poverty line has come down, in 2004-2005, 77% people, totaling 836 million, had an income less than twice the official poverty line or below Rs 20 per day per capita. These are the poor and vulnerable segment of the Indian population. About 79% of the unorganized workers, 88% of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled tribes, 80% of the OBCs and 84% of the Muslims belong to this category of the poor and vulnerable. Contrary to the trend in the number of people below the official poverty line, the number of people in this segment has steadily increased over the years.' How the employment promises of the SEZ act brings into scope all these people in terms of numbers and qualitative job-profiles remains to be seen. The Arjun Sen Gupta committee has reported government's policy on SEZ, rehabilitation due to dams, urban planning by displacing millions of urban slum dwellers as ‘major areas of concern’. For ‘backward’ states (normally with high concentration of Dalits and tribals), the minimum land requirement has been eased to 200 hectares and 50 hectares respectively for multi-product and sector specific SEZs.
The Madhya Pradesh government has stated in the Supreme Court that there is no available land to be given to those displaced. Given the fact that Madhya Pradesh, has a fair amount of vacant land and still cannot allot any land for rehabilitation of the tribal, other states like Uttar-Pradesh, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Maharastra, Orrissa and Rajasathan and West Bengal are going to find it extremely difficult to relocate any displaced population with most of the land belonging to upper caste landed elites in large chunks. Also, most jungle land to be taken has been the source of livelihood of tribal populations.
Over 1.31 crore people are landless in India. Habitation land is also a luxury for these sections that live on and till communal land or at the mercy of the other. The Uttar-Pradesh government recently passed a notification that all the Dalits who ‘own’ any communal land till May 13 2007 will have legal entitlement to that land. The issue is how many Dalits have possession of the village communal land? Such notifications are hollow palliatives for the grass root level Dalit.
Apart from the displacement and land acquisition, non-existence of the implementation of Land Ceiling Laws has always led to serious plight for Dalits. The biggest farmers and politicians of India have a lot of land, illegally held and almost impossible to acquire by the state. The state governments in conjunction misuse the Supreme Court’s orders with the rural power elite. Dalits and tribals- victims of India's racist caste structure have hardly any scope to claim land unless land ceiling act is implemented. Accessible land is concentrated in the hands of powerful farmer communities, who are politically very mobile and violent. It would be almost impossible to take the land from Jaats, Gujjars, Rajputs, Bhoomihars, Bramins, Kurmis, Reddys, Thewars, Marathas and Yadavas. Caste prejudices of the ruling groups became obvious in the Shaheed Udham Singh Nagar district where 1164 hectare of the ceiling land was not redistributed to Dalits but to immigrants Sikhs from Punjab who allegedly paid huge bribes to powerful bureaucrats and political leaders. The governments have hardly any power to seize chunks of land in Tarai region from the owners who have almost relegated the tribal to a state of bonded labor. Land in masses was acquired by NGOs, big CBOs as well as for Ashrams, Gowshalas (cowherd). India is one of the few countries where land can be had in the name of religious book. There is no ceiling on farmland, land for temples, mosques or Gurudwaras; The NGOs, social movements hardly mention such gross discrepancies. The upper caste leaders of these groups thus are almost inevitably disqualified to speak for Dalit land rights.
The government has promised ‘humane’ displacement and relief and rehabilitation. However, the historical record denies the validity of this claim: an estimated 40 million people (40% of which are Adivasis and 25% Dalits) have lost their land since 1950 to large development projects. At least 75% of them still await rehabilitation.
A new relief and rehabilitation policy has been tabled in Parliament recently. It promises a ‘Social Impact Assessment’ of development projects, which displace human populations involuntarily. It also promises ‘compensation, rehabilitation and resettlement ahead of displacement.’ These assurances encompass landless families who are to be trained to be ‘self-employed’ and/or given jobs in construction projects. The experience of Singur runs counter to this claim where the private enterprise to set up a car factory has clearly said that it needs specialized workers on its firm. Also, landed families losing land to development projects are to be allotted land elsewhere. There are also special R&R measures for displaced SC/ST groups. Yet again these are yet to be employed or even considered in any state policy as such. Additionally, these promised measures are almost paradoxical to the existent SEZ measures and which measures gain priority is really up to the government to decide.
Apart from all of this there are legal violations made in the course of SEZ policies which should have significant negative influence on the Dalit community:
•Relaxation/inapplicability of many labour laws (including under the Industrial
Disputes Act, Contract Labour Act, Factories Act, Minimum Wages Act, Trade Union Act).
•Violation of Panchayat Raj Act (1996) for local self-government.
•Violation of laws granting rights and control to Adivasi communities over their land.
It is also common knowledge that post reforms (after 1991) with the private sector taking over public enterprises; SC/ST employment has gone down in figures. With no laws of the Indian state being applicable to SEZs, there will obviously be no question of jobs being reserved in the SEZs for SC/ST candidates.

Caste in Cinema

Caste is a central fault line of modern India. Indian Social Science has a tendency to study it as a displacement of more fundamental identities like class or ethnicity, despite the fact that the public spaces of modern India are inflected by violence against Dalits and subordinated castes and its domestic spaces structured by strict discrimination against caste miscegenation. Portrayal of the conflicts of caste has rarely been part of the commercial mainstream cinema in India. Pitching my argument in this context I’d like to discuss about caste as dealt with in Indian cinema. Taking off from a more recent and popular cinema, Swades is a film which directly addresses the Dalit problematics.
The main story revolves around the protagonist, Mohan Bhargav, played by Shah Rukh Khan, a scientist in NASA. Mohan decides to come back to India in search of Kaveriamma, his namesake mother. The director plays upon the contrast that the location causes: from a highly clinical environment of the NASA research centre, to the Indian capital, to one of the remotest of villages in India. Within the filmic structure the director plays subtly with the obvious. We may fail to register first time, this social condition that we are dealing with, and which, though seems to be “far away” is hardly a few kilometers from the modern spaces we are moving in. The film tries to hit home the fact that modern India is not very far away from the “reality”, which it tries to hide behind the garb of “liberal thinking” and outlook. As we arrive in the village, we become aware of the lack of electricity, telephone connection, a proper school, etc., all of which comes as a stark contrast to the air conditioned caravan, which the protagonist drives, the fancy watch, the electronic foot massager, the expensive brand of cigarette.
The first encounter with the issues of caste and caste-based oppression takes place when we hear the village Head frowning down upon Mohan for having had food cooked from a lower caste. The urban individual is distanced from how the government legislation works at the grassroot level. He is fascinated to watch a Panchayat in progress, behaving like an outsider, only highlighting the fact how distanced an urban individual is from the grassroots, which forms the bulk of the country’s population. The film raises the question of how the governmental policies are being implemented and whether they are reaching all and reaping the benefits for which they were formulated. At the same time it comments on the role of every citizen in nation building, doing away with their differences and reservations. It talks of education and the increasing trend of dropouts which the government is struggling to cope with.
While the film tried to pin down the lacunae of the government to meet these teething problems that are standing in the way of development, it also emphasizes the need for personal awareness of each individual. Education is caught in a thousand year old orthodoxy that leads to children not getting proper education so that they can aim for a better life.
The character of Birsa is an archetype of the caste oppressed populace of modern India. For him when the village is a forbidden territory, how ca he even think of sending his children to school there. Another future crushed under the foot of evil custom. The rampant practice of child-marriage is also an issue that the film has tried to capture by focusing on this one family.
The scene where the entire village is assembled to watch a popular film is another instance of the practice of discrimination. The Dalits and the higher castes sit on either side of the makeshift screen, the Dalits watching the entire movie in the opposite direction. The narration brings home the fact that we as a nation need to unite, doing away with our differences. The director brings this notion together when they show how if the entire village could pool their energies, they can make a huge difference to the life. The film, commercial as it is, plays within the rules of it but makes a strong statement. It makes the point explicit through the use of the visual media as well as the presence of a strong star cast. Swades is one of the few instances when Indian commercial cinema dares to take a bold stance against a wide social condition that has been in existence for over a millennium. However, Indian cinema can boast of a number of such films that deals with this issue.
Mathamma is a documentary capturing a peculiar but exploitative practice of the Arundhati community in Tamil Nadu. It is about the tradition of offering female children to their deity Mathamma, similar to the practice of offering cattle. Then the offered female child becomes a property of the temple and the village. And she is called the Mathamma thereafter. As she becomes a God's consort, the girl is forbidden from marrying anyone else. But she can live with any person whom they wish to, as Devadasis do. Men exploit them sexually and then desert them. The documentary tries to find out the root causes for the tradition being alive today.
In Arohan we witness the continuing struggle, symbolic of the endless battle of the underprivileged and the landless, for justice. Parai reveals the status of Dalit population in India with the South Indian village Siruthondamadevi as a classic example. "An injury to one is an injury to all" (Martin Luther King) is the baseline of the film. Siruthondamadevi, a village in Cuddalore, Tamilnadu, continues to live with the "official" lie that atrocities against minorities are a thing of past. Here 600 odd Dalits are under assault everyday by 6000 strong Oppressor caste. Untouchability, sexual harassment, rape, assault, exploitation of labor against the SC population are shockingly prevalent in this village. Almost 90% of the women are subject to sexual violence with their men helplessly acknowledging the oppressions. The documentary leaves the question on the constitutional concept of "Justice to All". After 56 years of self rule and independence, a major section of the Indian society still lives oppressed in the name of caste.
Break the Shackles challenges the new economic policies posed before Dalits in India. The film focuses on how the three-track policy of globalization, privatization and liberalization, without the interest of social justice in a highly unequal social structure of country like India, becomes more discriminative to the Dalits.
Similarly, Bimal Roy’s Achyut Kanya and Sujata sought to alert public opinion about the ill effects of caste distinctions. Satyajit Ray’s Sadgati is the story of Dukhi,an out-caste, who approaches the village Brahmin requesting him to set an auspicious date for his daughter's upcoming wedding. The Brahmin promises to perform the task in exchange of Dukhi slaving over household chores in return. Already ailing and weak due to a recent fever, Dukhi agrees and begins with cleaning the Brahman's house and stable. Working in scorching sun, hungry and malnourished, the he dies. The corpse lies close to the road used by the Brahmins to go to the village well. The untouchables shun it for fear of police investigation. What can be done with the corpse of an untouchable that no one will touch? Late in the evening, when no one looking, Brahmin ties a noose around its ankle, slides it out of the city limits and sprinkles holy water on the spot on the road to cleanse it of the untouchable’s touch.
Thus, as Saikat Bhattacharya (director) aptly says, “I believe that cinema and cinema alone can bring about the desired emancipation of the masses by awakening them to the maladies of our society.”