Somebody tell the marxists: you can’t ignore caste

Sypical of the modern Dalit voices being heard currently, writer Sujatha Gidla is not one  to flinch from speaking her mind and sticking to it.

HYDERABAD: Sypical of the modern Dalit voices being heard currently, writer Sujatha Gidla is not one  to flinch from speaking her mind and sticking to it. The author of the controversial book Ants Among Elephants, equates caste with race in  the US and says India’s system of social hierarchyhas not been properly acknowledged for what it really is, neither by Gandhi, nor by the Marxist parties, not even the  Maoist groups. In a wide-ranging interview to The Sunday Standard, she says, “Unfortunately, we do not  have anybody telling Indian Marxists that, “Look you cannot ignore caste”.’

Sujatha Gidla’s controversial remarks on Gandhi at the recent Jaipur Litfest should not surprise anyone who has read her debut book Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. She describes the book as ‘family stories’ but it is also an unflinching examination of caste against the backdrop of India’s independence, the Naxalite movement, and the agitation for Andhra statehood. The ‘family story’ is told from the perspective of her maternal uncle K G Satyamurthy, one of the founders of the People’s War Group, and that of her mother Manjula. It is an exceptional endeavour in documenting the history of a family. But based as it is on the memories of the key players, it is perhaps subject to the frailty of memory. In Andhra and Telangana, left-leaning activists and writers who witnessed the Movement unfold first hand have raised objections to her account of events. Gidla is unfazed, however. In a close-to-90-minute conversation on Skype, the writer, a former Wall Street professional, discusses caste, the limitations of India’s reservation policy and how she remains a Marxist but not an Ambedkarite. Excerpts from the interview:

The introductory note to the book is dated 2012, and the book came out in 2017. So when did you start working on this?
I would say towards the end of the last century (laughs). In 1999 or so. But I didn’t start it as a book... I started it to find the relationship between caste and religion. I called my folks and they told me these stories and I thought, “Wow actually they do know how we became untouchables, and they do know how we became Christians.” And I started writing them down and in the process it became a book. That wasn’t my idea at first. And also I have to work, so it took a long while to do this along with my work.

So over a span of almost 20 years, have you found the answer to the relationship between caste and religion?
I definitely have. Caste has nothing to do with religion. It only looks like that but it really is a social institution. If you look at America, race is not a religion, right? So it’s the same way (with caste). Except that it looks like Hinduism because Hinduism is a religion, in my view, tailormade to support caste’s social system. So it is basically a prop for the caste system with some mysticism added. Whereas Islam and Christianity they were born elsewhere, not in a caste society, but when they came to India they had to fit themselves in.

There are two main characters in the book: your mother and your uncle. Your uncle was well-known and kind of steals a lot of attention. Was it your intention for the book to be about him or did that just happen, that he just happened to be a former Naxalite?
Yeah, his life was very eventful, more removed from average life. My mother’s life is also eventful but a lot of women have the same issues. Whereas Satyam’s life was not like the average man’s life. Also I’m not so much of a feminist like people in my circles should be. I’m more of a Marxist than a feminist. Marxism absorbs the women’s question; not that it ignores women, Marxism subsumes feminism.

Would you say that the Marxist ideology absorbs caste as well?
Yeah it does. You know Marxism is a framework and a worldview. Like, Marxism teaches you how to multiply one number with the other. You know, like two times four. So you have to view caste in that framework. It’s not that it doesn’t apply. It has to be applied using Marxist methods. In special circumstances like race in America and caste in India.

Are Communist parties blind to the caste issue?
Yes. They call themselves Marxists. They are not real Marxists. As you can see CPI and CPM, they behave just like any other normal party in the sense that the CPM, when it came to power in West Bengal, also unleashed the police and military on poor peasants, right?... Even other ML parties, the Naxalities, they don’t say anything about caste. They did not study Marxism very well and they think Marx only talked in terms of class not caste even though it is staring in your face. It was the same case in America also. The Communists said race is not part of Marxism so we should not address it separately and Lenin and the Bolsheviks told them that they should take into consideration that race is a reality.

Does reservation for Dalits work?
No, it does not (help). You know like... let’s say. How do I put this... (long pause). So the thing is that people should be able to go to school, right?... When Dalits reach higher education, the obstacles are really stacked against them. Recently there was an IIT-Kanpur kid who was harassed for the way he spoke, that he lacked English. So, in a way he was hounded out. Then practical exams are really another way that they keep you down. You could do well in writing exams, but the professors will fail you in the practicals... Reservation is a kind of joke that is perpetrated on Dalits and it is getting harder and harder to even use it. The thing is that Ambedkar fought for reservation and they grudgingly gave it. But they have so many loopholes that it cannot be properly used.

Did leaving India make it easier for you to find what might be called your Dalit articulation? Would your book have had the same response if you had written it while you lived in India? Would it have been published?
Zero chance of it ever getting published if I wrote it in India. You know there is a saying in Telugu that unless you put it through the conch the water won’t become holy water? Same thing. Unless you get recognition abroad, Indians would not recognise a book like this... Of course, what surprised me is that there is a liberal layer (of people) right now who seem to be sympathetic to this caste issue. Which didn’t exist actually, as far as I know, when I was there.

What created that layer?
Since 1991, market liberalisation, some things changed. There are bad things but there are also some good things. Like people have more sources of information like TV channels and magazines and newspapers and also intercourse with people abroad, I mean foreigners. Like they see what happens in America such as the riots when that black man was killed. They see all of this and they also see how Americans are reacting to those very same kind of things and if you are trying to westernise and become like an American, listen to their music and read their books, you are also influenced to look at things their sort of way. It’s the same thing with homosexuality. No one wants to say anti-homosexual (things) openly. Right now, I think this  influenced people in India also to be, at least pretend to be, anti-bigotry.
 
The articulation of white anger in the US arguably led to Donald Trump becoming President. You can see similarities in the Indian discourse right now where a certain kind of bigotry has become acceptable. Do you see that as a parallel?
I think that worldwide neoliberals lost the trust of people, you know, like the Democrats here, supposedly pro-working class, pro-women, pro-gay and all of that stuff, but their rule produced no results, you know. So they brought in Obama who has black skin and so just by dint of his skin people believed that Democrats are good people. It didn’t happen, you know. More racial killings in his regime than before and he (Obama) dropped more bombs on Syria and Yemen and places like that. So people lost all trust that liberals are any good. Anti-incumbency is part of Trump’s victory and in Britain also it’s like that and India too to some extent is that way... but in India what the BJP and RSS are mainly doing that nobody understands is that under the garb of their nationalism they are most willing to sell India away to foreign corporations… And that’s why they terrorise people. In the end it is in the interests of big business that they are doing this so that people will be too scared to protest.

Is there a space or a need for a Dalit party per se?
No, I don’t think that because the Dalit problem is not just a Dalit problem. It is the problem of the entire society not just in a rhetorical sense but caste is the central thing in India and its maintenance causes all kinds of different evils in India. You know, the women question is very much linked with caste... So the Dalit struggle is not just their struggle, it is the struggle of all oppressed people in
India, all who are denied equal rights.

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