One of the many services that bonded workers of the Dalit community perform for their masters, to whom they are indebted for generations, in the rural areas of Salem district is ‘grave sleeping’.
Chellakannu (48) is a ‘grave sleeper’. He has to lie down in a grave dug for a member of the caste Hindu family for which he works before the body is laid to rest there.
How does it feel like to lie in a grave alive with people showering a few handful of earth on the face? Chellakannu’s vacant stare turns serious as he says: “So far I have been in 30 graves. Initially it was difficult, now I got used to it.”
When the land owning Udaiyars or Gounders die, Dalits are expected to lie on freshly dug graves as a mark of their last respects to their masters.
Chellakannu belongs to a dalit subsect, whose members are also grave-diggers. They also play the ‘parai’ (the traditional funeral drum). Upper caste people respectfully address the dalits during the occasion as Swami or Periyavanae, which means the one who leads a procession of birth or death. But what they are paid in return for their services shows their real position in society. For lying in the grave, “they give us clothes the dead man was wearing at the time of his death and his coir cot on which the body was laid after the death,” informs Chellakannu. “Some people also give a quarter (bottle of liquor)” he adds with a smile.
The practice is prevalent across Karumapuram, A N Mangalam, Eripudur, Minnamalai, Perumapallayam and Kullampatti and Kuppanur villages in Valappadi taluk. Jayam (37), whose family was once into this practice, says: “This is very humiliating. It is a reflection of the mindset of our masters. They think we are slaves for ever.” Some people are trying to fight the system. When people knocked the doors of Thayaka Mary (40) asking for her husband to come with them to lie in the grave of his master, she fought back saying, “Why should a living person enter in the grave of the dead? My husband will not do that.” Perhaps she gathered courage to do so because her husband had come out of bondage by then.