VILLUPURAM: Peace eludes the Dalits of Kazhuperumpakkam village in Villupuram district even after their deaths. For over a century, they have been seeking adequate space to bury their dead but their struggle shows no signs of coming to an end.
P Ramalingam, a 70-year-old resident of Kazhuperumpakkam Colony in Vanur taluk, says that the fight for a new cemetery began during his grandfather’s time and has continued to this day, with his grandsons now taking it up. “Many years ago, our forefathers settled here as farmhands. During that period, the landlords had given us 12 cents of land on the western side of the village to be used as a burial ground. Today, there are 300 families residing here and there is not much space left,” says Ramalingam.
As this small piece of land has run out of space, the Dalits have been petitioning officials and politicians one after the other to allocate a new burial ground for them. Of course, they can’t even imagine asking for the right to bury their dead in the common burial ground of the village – it is a well-settled norm in most villages in Tamil Nadu that Dalits needs to be segregated even in their deaths, with separate burial grounds for them and for caste Hindus.
Recently, officials have started the process to lay a new road to the old cemetery, despite the Dalits telling them that there is no space left there. The Dalits have instead been seeking the allocation of a small portion of the poramboke land in the village as a burial ground for them. This seems to have put them in conflict with the caste Hindus of the village, some of whom have built buildings on the land.
"We are demanding a new cemetery in the poramboke land, which measures more than three acres. We just need some space in that. We have been demanding this for more than a hundred years but a few years ago, some caste Hindu people built a few houses and a shop, and are now opposing the cemetery in that poramboke land," said M Ramani, a resident of Kazhuperumpakkam Colony.
She said that government officials had promised a peace meeting last week to settle the issue between them and the caste Hindus. But until Monday, there was no communication from them.
When Express contacted a revenue official in charge of the region, he said, “We found that one person of the same village, who is a caste Hindu, has constructed his house near the poramboke land, where the villagers are demanding a cemetery. He has got a stay order from the Madras High Court against allocating the land for the cemetery. Due to this, we couldn't allocate the land for this purpose. As an alternative solution, measures are being taken to acquire land to lay a proper path to the old cemetery.”
He promised that work to pave a path for the old cemetery will be started within a week, as the paperwork was already underway. However, villagers said that laying a road to the old cemetery will be of no use as there is not much space left there and demanded that the district administration take action to solve the issue in court, and get the poramboke land for their cemetery.
The Dalits say with 300 families now in the Kazhuperumpakkam Colony, the old cemetery is hardly adequate and it had always been an ordeal whenever one of them dies. The areas surrounding the old cemetery have, over time, been cultivated with casuarina, making it difficult for villagers to carry out the funeral procession. “Most of the time, farmland owners, who are caste Hindus, water the land deliberately when a Dalit villager dies, forcing us to walk in the mud,” said Muthukannu, another villager. It becomes even worse during rainy days.
Muthukannu says there is a government school nearby. The teachers in the school have to send their students home when there is a body to be cremated because the fumes engulf the premises.
When a body is cremated (some Dalit families perform cremation as per their beliefs), around five people usually circle the body, ready with bucketfuls of water in case the fire spills over to the casuarina trees of the nearby farm. With the lack of adequate lighting, it is also imperative that the body is buried or cremated before dark.
Villagers added that they had submitted a petition to the collector three weeks ago after which revenue department officials and Vanur constituency MLA M Chakrabani visited the spot. Villagers had blockaded them and demanded a new cemetery.