CHENNAI: It is the first day of school. I am 10 and have recently returned to India from ‘abroad’. A group of girls stand around me. I am asked my name, where I am from, and why my hair is so short. The close ‘boy cut’ is a novelty in the sea of slickly oiled double braids, folded and festooned with blue ribbons.
I am asked my religion. Hindu, I reply.
“What’s your caste?”
I have no idea and admit the same. The girls do not believe me but I am told to go home and find out.
I return the next day and provided them the information. “Iyer or Iyengar?” comes the next question.
Again, I have no idea.
I find out that afternoon that I am an Iyer and what that means. When the information is shared, they file it away somewhere in their minds and that is that. The situation repeats itself in the first few months of school: different students and sometimes even teachers ask me. Then I am no longer new and interesting, or rather, every one now knows. The questions stop.
Fast forward a couple of decades and I am now the mother of two boys. They are 6 and 3, and we are watching the Mahabharata on TV in Tamil. I am acting as translator. Karna enters an arena, ready to fight on behalf of the Kauravas but is barred from doing so, as he is the son of a charioteer.
“Why can’t he fight?”
I stumble.
“Because he’s the son of a charioteer. They say he isn’t good enough.”
“That’s nonsense. Why not?”
“They’re Kings and he isn’t.”
I can’t bring myself to talk about caste. They may be small but will have questions. They will want to know. For the rest of the series I skirt around the issue and use euphemisms.
A year later, I find Tulika Books’ ‘Bhimrao Ambedkar: The Boy Who Asked Why’ and pick it up.
The book promises ‘a straightforward telling… a man whose story will raise their awareness of discrimination — leading them, perhaps, to ask their own whys.’
We read the book together and there indeed many ‘whys’. I realise how poorly equipped I am to answer them. I try to explain to my seven year old the basis of the caste system and how it was formed. He thinks it all sounds silly. We agree on this.
Silly. What a trivial word to apply to something that looms large over the heads and lives of so many. That determines whether they go to school, get an education, a mid day meal or a job. Whether they live or not.
But silly is what a 7 year old understands.
Perhaps I should leave the whole topic. Ignore it. But I cannot. They shouldn’t find themselves confronted one day with questions from strangers about who they are and then have an identity foisted on them that they had no say in. Of course, I write that and realise that that is exactly the reality of millions. They are not afforded the luxury of such navel gazing. I have no answers or solutions. Only questions myself. Did your parents talk to you about it? Do you plan to talk to your children about it? What will you say?
@menakaraman
(The writer is a former copywriter whose parenting philosophy is: if there’s no blood, don’t call me)