Poisoned bread: protest in Dalit short stories.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the state of Maharashtra in western India saw a resurgence of anti-caste political struggle and, simultaneously, an explosion of literature by writers from formerly 'untouchable' castes. (1) Writing often in anger and with a sense of urgency, the writers drew from a shared experience of caste subordination and from the low caste civil rights movement that had accompanied India's independence from the British in 1947. The writers identified themselves as Dalit, an old Marathi word meaning 'ground' or 'reduced to pieces', thus calling attention to the continuing oppression of untouchables in Indian society. Since the 1970s, the term Dalit has gained currency as a self-chosen name of political and cultural identity for untouchable communities throughout the country.

The greater political consciousness and exposure to literacy that Maharashtrian Dalits experienced are embedded in historical circumstances. The area that is now the state of Maharashtra was a central site of colonial industrial development, and Dalits in the region were able to access the relatively greater mobility that capitalist expansion created. However, more significantly, it was predominantly Dalits from the Mahar sub-caste that began to leave villages in search of work in the cities of Mumbai and Nagpur. The reason for Mahar flight from village life was rooted to some extent in the low position that they occupied in the internal Dalit caste hierarchy.

Mahars were the largest Dalit community in the region and were considered by other Dalit sub-castes as beneath them in status; they also did not have a hereditary specialised occupation like the Chambhars (leather workers) and Mangs (basket--and rope-makers) who were the other untouchable castes. Mahars in the village were used as 'all-purpose' servants performing ritually 'dirty' work, such as scavenging, along with other mandated duties like street-sweeping, wall-mending, being watchmen and making public announcements, often about death or disease in the villages. In return for their labour, they were entitled to gifts in kind such as a portion of the village harvest: their baluta, and a small share of land: their vatan. (2) Given the unstable nature of their function in the village, the changing parameters of feudal work, with the encroachment of modern forms of administration, and their position at the absolute bottom of the social pyramid, most Mahars found themselves in a battle for survival in which it became necessary for them to move to cities in search of waged employment. Employment in mills, factories, docks and in the British army (before 1892 only, when the colonial authorities, as an appeasement to the upper caste Hindu elite, banned Dalits from serving in the military) allowed Mahar children greater access to school. Rural Dalits in traditional occupations, on the other hand, did not have these same openings to formal education. The educational opportunities, which many Mahar Dalits drew on, were an impetus for the political mobilisation of later years, led by Dr B. R. Ambedkar (1892-1956), himself a Mahar Dalit whose father had been an enlisted soldier.

This article focuses on selected short stories from Poisoned Bread: translations from modern Marathi Dalit literature (1992), an anthology that also includes poetry, autobiographical extracts and political essays from the Marathi Dalit literary production of the 1960s and onwards. (3) The anthology is significant because it showcases seminal moments in Dalit writing and is also the only collected body of Dalit literature available in English translation to date. The publication of literature from India in international forums is still largely driven by the market demands of Anglo-American publishing houses that privilege cosmopolitan, diasporic literary trends, given their considerable success with western audiences. Because of this, translated work from Indian languages, Dalit or otherwise, has been of only slight interest to major Publishers.

Nevertheless, the efforts of Eleanor Zelliot, Arjun Dangle, Mini Krishnan and others have led to a few works being translated and published, among them Poisoned Bread, Vasant Moon's autobiography Growing up Untouchable in India and Bama's life story Karukku. (4) Poisoned Bread presents its readers with a broad representation of critically acclaimed work produced by Dalit writers in the post-independence period, but gaps and absences in the body of work that appears in the collection also point to some of the material conditions that dictate cultural production. There are few non-Mahar writers and few women contributors to the collection in Poisoned Bread. The dominance of Mahar writers in the anthology is an indication of the relatively higher economic mobility and political maturity that the Mahar community experienced during colonial times as a result of their early entry into the industrial working class. The relative lack of women's voices is a reflection of the great difficulty that Dalit women have in accessing literacy as well as gaining recognition in traditionally masculine literary circles. Yet, even with these omissions, Poisoned Bread is a powerful body of literary expression and an important social document indicting the caste system in India.

A focus on protest in the writings in Poisoned Bread is not inadvertent. The collection is predominantly drawn from the literary output of Dalit Panthers writing in the 1970s in a climate of political militancy. The first Dalit literary conference held in 1958 went almost unnoticed in mainstream literary circles, but Dalit literary production continued to gather momentum in the next two decades. In 1972, Dalit literature took a consciously political turn with the coming together of several Dalit writers and poets, led by Namdeo Dhasal and Raja Dhale, to establish a movement called the Dalit Panthers in Mumbai. Taking their inspiration from the militancy of the Black Panthers and the civil rights struggle of the 1960s in the US, these writers began to theorise Dalit literary output and to connect it to political change. As Arjun Dangle, the editor of Poisoned Bread and himself a former Dalit Panther, asserts, 'Dalit literature is not simply literature. Although today, most Dalit writers have forgotten its origins, Dalit literature is associated with a movement to bring about change' (xii). Arguing for a sociological, materialist approach to Dalit literary criticism, Dangle also emphasises that literature in itself is inadequate as a medium for transformative change:

If we examine literature in the light of social change, we note that it is not the one and only medium to bring about that change ... It is inevitable that values of life are spread through literature, but if one does not have a correct estimate of this medium, one cannot use it effectively. It is an illusion to believe that literature alone can create a revolution. To bring about a revolution, one should have the necessary philosophy and a plan of action, and a group to implement them. (257)

Writing with hindsight, Dangle implicitly assesses the failure of the Dalit Panthers to move beyond their literary success into a broader sphere of influence in political praxis. However, while their literary legacy was ultimately more enduring, the political intervention that the Dalit Panthers made in Dalit theory was radical and necessary.

The Dalit Panthers closely identified with Black literature from the US, drawing a parallel between the oppression of Blacks in American society and their own. The Indian political climate, too, had been in a state of turmoil; atrocities against Dalits in the villages had been rising, often directly as the result of an upsurge in Dalit self-confidence and assertion. In some states, such as Andhra Pradesh, the Maoist Naxalite peasant revolt recruited the support of hundreds of rural Dalits. The Dalit Panthers in Maharashtra, however, although making a self-identification as modern (in opposition to feudal Hindu) and proletarian, did not dissolve ideologically into the Naxalite movement. Instead, they differentiated their political emphasis by seeking to critique both the economic (capitalist) realm and the cultural (Hindu) one in an attempt to enmesh the two in their writing and theorising.

In 1975, the Panthers split on the question of whether Buddhism or Marxism should provide the ideological framework for Dalit liberation. The Buddhist faction argued for an anti-Hindu, identity-based movement rather than class struggle and claimed that the Marxists in the group had become the tools of upper caste Marxist leaders and had, as such, betrayed their Dalit roots and struggle. Although the Dalit Panthers are not a significant force in Indian politics today, their legacy continues to enrich our understanding of Dalit cultural output and their relevance to social change in India. The readings in Poisoned Bread reflect many of the theoretical and philosophical concerns of the Dalit Panther movement: the tremendous value of literacy and education, along with recognition of their limitations as agents of social change; strategies of relating to or confronting Hindu society; and the difficult terrain that lies ahead in the fight for political and social equality.

The anti-caste movement, while making concrete demands--entry into schools, jobs and public space, in a very literal sense--was also fighting a discursive battle to constitute a Dalit identity, not defined in the terms of the high castes as filth and absence, but as a proud and powerful presence. Dalit literature plays a significant role in this shaping of identity. Its social realist narrative strategies describe a severe outer reality that goads the moral imagination of readers, demanding ameliorative action. At the same time, the narratives create the Dalit self as presence, threatening and talking back to a Hindu audience. While the development of subjectivity was also the focus of nationalist literature written by upper caste writers, Dalit stories, unlike most early nationalist narratives, do not always give us splendid, fully constituted subjects that suffer but are recovered as 'whole' at the end. In the short stories examined here, the emphasis is on a certain unfeasibility of subjecthood, as the inhabitants of the stories feel the pull of modernity, but are punished, fragmented in the process of seeking entry into it. Thus, even as Dalit subjectivity is brought into existence in the short narratives, it is dismantled. I argue that resistance in the narratives is registered in this impossibility, in the disintegration of the Dalit body--literally or symbolically--as death or mutilation.

The short story, unlike the novel, does not give us narrative continuities, but rather instances. Dalit writers effectively use the condensed form of the short story to focus their final narrative instant on the subject's dissolution. This concluding moment is essentially tragic. The 'deaths' in the stories examined here do not reflect a celebration of the fragmented subject, but a mourning, a constructed act of remembrance of those who do not 'make it' into the temples of modern progress. In his essay 'History, narrative, and Marxism', Terry Eagleton suggests that '[h]istory may be thought of as a train which will deliver us to our destination, but even if you think in these curiously teleological terms there's always the problem of those who died in the tunnels and perished in the sidings'. 'What the dead give us', Eagleton elaborates, 'isn't primarily a set of tactics, an exemplary political history or a range of nourishing memories but precisely their death, in a particular form of finality and (literal) irrecuperability.' (5) In this discussion, I explore the narrative moments of 'irrecuperability' and their function as protest in Dalit short stories.

Alienation, both social and psychic, is an overarching thematic concern in the Poisoned Bread collection. However, while a strictly Marxist analysis of alienation would focus on its manifestation in industrial society, in the case of Dalit alienation as described in the literary texts, I would argue that the process of separation has already occurred in a feudal, non-mechanised environment. Unlike in many other narratives of early industrialisation, where the pastoral 'whole' subject becomes alienated after contact with the urban, industrial landscape, the Dalit protagonists in Poisoned Bread are already socially estranged and psychologically fragmented in the village, and those who arrive in the cities take on capitalist alienation as another layer of estrangement.

While Marx's notion of alienation, in its focus on western feudal society, did not contend with the dimension of caste, Marxist methodology can make visible the economy of exchange in Hindu feudal society and enable a discussion of the alienating impact of the caste system. As many of the narratives here are centred on the labouring Dalit body, a theoretical frame that highlights the material basis of labour and alienation can be used productively in this discussion. Historically, despite urban alienation and exploitation in the cities, the collectivist nature of the capitalist labour force made it possible for the anti-caste struggle to emerge. In many ways, the internal social cohesiveness of the caste system was in itself a source of sustenance for Dalits in urban ghettos. These historical threads are reflected in the writings in Poisoned Bread, but the writers also shape their narratives to project and imagine possibilities for transgression and resistance.

My discussion of the texts is divided into two broad categories according to their strategies for presenting protest: 1) through a relentless focus on an almost 'crazed' level of desperation; and 2) through a projection of self-consciously 'defiant' Dalit subjects that talk back within the parameters of the narrative. There is, of course, some fluidity between the two categories, but both storytelling strategies, even those that project themes of 'passing', convey an essential dissent--a rejection of the legitimacy of caste as the arbitrator of human worth.

In the first 'cluster', the narratives of despair, come Amitabh's short story 'The cull' and Bhimrao Shirvale's 'Livelihood'. Both these texts vividly detail an exterior world that pushes its Dalit inhabitants into a subhuman marginality. A pervasive motif of animality, of the scavenging beast, is especially strong in 'The cull'. The narrative opens with the discovery of a dead cow, Timaji Patil's 'sacred one', and the excitement that ensues from that find (191). Caste Hindus have taboos against eating carrion, but Dalits cannot afford such restrictions in their struggle to avoid sheer starvation. (6) In this story, the Dalit being is reduced to the level of other animal carcass-eaters, the crow, the jackal and the stray dog. Beef is, of course, not eaten by caste Hindus, and Amitabh's choice of carrion, a temple cow, underscores that the untouchable stands outside the caste Hindu domain by not participating in the most entrenched of its practices. Here, however, the sacred cow is already dead and of no concern any more to the powers that be. The Mahars of the village then spring into action, claiming their 'rightful' share not of the "surplus', but of the unwanted, already decaying, discarded waste.

The frenzy with which they attack the dead animal only reinforces their 'otherness' in the caste economy. In a parodic inversion of high caste Rajput warriors going to battle, Amitabh describes the savage energy of the attack on the dead cow by the Mahars:

[They] pounced upon the prey, raising a full-throated battle cry ... young and old, all marched forth, flashing their knives. Everyone had an eye on the thick thighs and buttocks. They pulled and tugged at the carcass. Tens of knives were sawing at the chest at once. Whatever piece, small or big, they could manage, they cut and put into their containers. The knives slashed and sliced, chunks and chunks of meat were piled into the hampers and baskets ... They were all covered in blood as if they had played Holi. Their hair was red. Their limbs were red. The dirty rags they wore were red. From top to toe they were all dyed in the same colour--red. (193-5)

Amitabh starkly highlights the violence of the exchange, embodying the exploitative roots of this brutality, and marks its bloody excess on the Dalit body. Ironically, Amitabh's invocation of Holi, the Hindu spring festival of riotous, carnivalesque play, only reflects the electric momentum of the crowd; their snarling desperation, however, conveys no joy.

The village Mahars are reduced to competing with each other and with other animals for scraps:

The kites, vultures, and crows now sprang into action. The dogs, alerted, attacked the skeleton. The crows hovered over the heads of the people going home and swooped down on the troughs they carried on their heads ... The men and women, used to such attacks, held on to their baskets and troughs tightly with one hand and with the other brandished their knives and twigs picked on the way to ward them off. (195)

As the human and animal challengers clash, some invariably fail, as does Nilya, the scholar and asthmatic, who 'had been reading till late night in the light of the kerosene lamp' (192). Nilya arrives last, reluctantly, after the carcass is almost completely stripped. As he makes home with the few pieces of meat that he finds to feed his large family, he is attacked by the animals, emboldened to find an isolated, weak target, and he is left bleeding on the ground, most of the meat stolen or fallen in the dirt. Somehow he manages to 'rescue' his pot containing a few bones covered with dust.

The narrative pointedly positions Nilya, whose pursuit of reading is an activity not in compliance with his position in the caste economy, as an outsider and as falling behind in the race for survival because of his transgression. As the story concludes, 'the birds are still hovering over his head, swooping and pecking, the dogs are barking. But Nilya is busy filling up his pot' (196). The village becomes a space of terrifying competition not between Dalits and caste Hindus (the margins of this conflict are deliberately rendered invisible in the narrative), but between animals and fellow untouchables. Nilya cannot choose to step outside of the boundaries of socially sanctioned Dalit labour without disastrous, isolating consequences. His bloodied body becomes the locus of resistance in the text; the intellectual self (that reads by night) is reduced to a cowering animal by day. The narrative casts the responsibility for this deconstruction back on the collective conscience of high caste Hindus, who not only accept but also expect such debasement from the untouchables.

The significations of labour in Dalit consciousness are inextricably linked to the ideology of the caste system itself. While caste had a material base in the feudal economy, whereby Dalits were the unwaged labourers who generated surplus for the village, the exchange derived its ideological legitimacy from religion. A wider justification for the decrees in scripture also lies in the philosophy of karma that sees untouchables and other 'low' people (women, Shudras) as being in debt to the larger community for the sins of their previous birth. In effect, this justifies an indentured existence for life without allowing for any conception of egalitarian 'justice' in the modern sense of the term to operate in favour of the oppressed. Many Dalits have found it in their interest to try and break free of this economy of karma and enter the capitalist market-place, whose relatively less rigid and impersonal currency of exchange allows for a shattering of at least some of the oppressive underpinnings of the village economy.

In the next short story, the setting shifts from the village to the city slum and it becomes clear that the conduits of economic mobility for untouchables in the city are still precariously grim and often replicate feudal patterns of segregation and occupational choice, although the ideological constraints may be more tenuous. Dalits who had migrated in the years before independence had been relatively better off, with established working-class jobs in the docks or textile mills. The scarcity of such permanent wage occupations in later years meant that a large section of Dalits found employment only as seasonal workers and many survived as beggars or petty thieves.

The crises emanating from living under the infamous 'poverty line' of economic theory resonate in Bhimrao Shirvale's 'Livelihood'. The text also oscillates between social realistic detail and symbolism in order to dredge up the grotesque and deformed 'products' of Dalit work. However, this narrative, unlike many stories in Poisoned Bread, does not explicitly name caste as a factor in the abuse that its protagonists suffer. The focus here is on an underclass that subsists in the margins of the urban economy. The invisibility of caste in the narratives may not be accidental: the anonymity of the city seems to erase the mark of caste ideology on the Dalit body. However, as the narrative delineates, there is little to celebrate in this erasure, as the weight of class oppression overwhelms its central Dalit characters. At a psychological and material level, their bodies go into crisis as circles of cultural subjugation and capitalist exploitation intersect.

'Livelihood' is situated in the slums of Mumbai and its focus is on the sexual appropriation of labour from the body of a Dalit woman, Kashi. In the story, Kashi is assailed by death and disappearance at every step of her precarious existence. First, her mother is killed by an oncoming train as she collects coal off the tracks to sell for a living. Kashi's newly-wedded husband Dharma, with "some education, but no qualifications' (173) and without work, finds it hard to stay on the 'straight' road. Finally, he pawns a brass pot, one of his dead mother-in-law's only valuable possessions, to a Marwari pawnbroker. The broker, however, swindles him and, in a fit of rage, the husband kills the man and is hauled off to jail. With both her protectors taken away from her, Kashi is left to face the perils of the city on her own:

The dawn broke. A Bombay dawn. This dawn doesn't break with the crowing of a cock. It breaks with factory sirens, the shattering thunder of trucks, milkmen, vendors, newspaper boys. Their raucous voices together wake the Bombay sun. It was dawn and Kashi still lay awake in her rented hut. How was she going to pay the rent now? How was she going to live? ... But when Kesu Ghatge the bootlegger came to console her with a ten-rupee note first thing in the morning, she knew that life without Dharma was going to be dark and dangerous. (175-6)

Kesu had once been beaten by the police and had torn a tendon in his leg and been blinded in one eye. As a result, his face looks hideous. He had also been in prison, and the narrative projects the amorphous anger in his character at the rest of the world.

At first, Kashi resists Kesu's advances and throws burning coals at him, which disfigures his appearance further. But Kashi later rationalises that she needs Kesu's 'protection' and becomes his mistress. Soon she is pregnant with his child, but, insane with jealousy, Kesu continuously abuses her. One day, he stuffs lime into one of her eyes and permanently blinds it. Any sign of attractiveness in Kashi is a threat to Kesu's ownership of her body and needs to be expunged. Meanwhile, he cannot find regular work and his gruesome appearance is detrimental to his quest for employment. Eventually, he is arrested for trying to rob a couple on Marine Drive and sentenced to three years in prison. Kashi goes into premature 'labour' upon hearing the news and delivers her child on the pavement. The product of her labour is, however, horrifically deformed:

With a distended stomach and limbs like match-sticks, the creature bore no resemblance to humanity. And it had begun to scream from the moment it was born. Kashi grew fearful of the child's terrifying ugliness. She saw in its noseless, lipless race an image of Kesu's cruel race, and she felt the urge to strangle it on the spot with her own hands. (179)

How close this labour is, imaginatively, to Marx's description of alienated labour: '[the worker's] labour becomes an object, an exterior existence ... it exits opposite him ... the life he has lent the object affronts him, hostile and alien'. (7)

Kashi also falls into an extreme depression because the source of her 'security', her body, has now betrayed her; she is 'loose and flabby' and no longer desirable to men. However, she soon discovers that her son, the 'monster', is a saleable product. She sets out to beg on the streets with the child on her lap, where people throw coins at her 'on account of the terrifying ugliness of [the] baby's face' (180). She transfers the exploitation of her own body to that of her son....