Shit

Now that the Indian government has enacted the National Rural Employment Guarantee Bill (the bill was taken up in the Lok Sabha a little over a week ago), it's time to spare a thought (or perhaps even a museum) for...toilets. Not just for hygienic reasons, but also because the vast majority of those who clean latrines or remove excrement in rural India are Dalits or members of other "low" castes. The demeaning and dangerous nature of the work (commemorated occasionally in art, such as in this sculpture from the Banaras Hindu University museum) should be apparent enough, but it also serves to preserve and perpetuate a feudal mindset whereby one's status is fixed -- and in the case of the Dalit, fixed as "unclean" or "impure."

Installing (new or better or, depressingly, adjective-less) toilets won't solve the problem of caste-based discrimination (indeed one could argue that it might occlude the problem, signalling a societal willingness to remove an apparent marker of one's "low" status without addressing the problem of baseness in general), but it will remove a daily slight, a slight independent of the work involved because it proceeds from the fact that only certain sorts of people feel compelled to do such work. Such slights go a long way toward explaining the tone of India's various Dalit movements (more accurately of the texts emanating from the movements), both wounded and strident, shaming the reader by the urgency of a call that is impossible to resist. It is a tone that many find offputting and/or extreme (perhaps directly proportional to the extent to which it proves disquieting?), but it is a tone that must be heard and appreciated, and placed in the context of the material situation of 15% of India's population. Placed in that context, it isn't surprising that Chandrabhan Prasad finds it hard to be sanguine about the national budget.

On a somewhat related note, it was refreshing to see the issue of caste tackled squarely in Mangal Pandey: far too often the hero is depicted as being above the sort of prejudice that infects others (typically minor, uglier characters) around him -- indeed such was the case in Lagaan as well -- but not so in Mangal Pandey, where Pandey is depicted as pre-occupied with maintaining his caste purity typically in the face of sweeper Nainsukh's insolent taunts (yes, about those cartridges). It gets to the point where Pandey flinches when prostitute Rani Mukherjee first tries to touch his face; now that takes some serious willpower.... Sure, he sees the light by the end of the film, but his road to Damascus is memorialized by a haunting line: "We are all untouchables now, and in our own land..." (though not, and this should never be forgotten, in the same way as Nainsukh).

On the subject of cinema: quick trivia question: which was the last commercial Hindi film where the hero or the heroine played a Dalit character? Um, actually, a better question would be: have there been any? The only two I can think of are Achoot Kanya (1936) and the Big B's bhaiyya blockbuster Ganga ki Saugandh (1978) (both featured heroines playing Dalits, Rekha in the second film; heroes playing Dalits apparently need not apply). Contrast this absence with the plethora of Muslim characters in Hindi films (no, I won't provide links, there are simply too many to list), an indication, perhaps, of the fact that the liberal secularist's conscience is pricked by communal issues in a way it just isn't by caste-based disadvantage (conversely, of course, because "the Muslim" presents an ideological issue, this "other" may also be depicted as threatening or hostile; the point is that the Dalit is neither "good" nor "bad" in Hindi cinema-- (s)he typically isn't there at all).

The above notwithstanding, there have been some stupendous attempts to interrogate caste-based disadvantage in the context of commercial Hindi cinema. Sultan Ahmed's hokey-but-fun (and politically startlingly prescient) Ganga ki Saugandh is one such film; one of my all-time favorite's, J.P. Dutta's visionary Ghulami (1985), is another. Both films don't have much in common, except for a willingness (especially evident in Ganga ki Saugandh) to confront the issue with a directness that is beyond our contemporary filmmakers.