Identity Politics & the Culture of the Dalits: The Purity Trials

By Anuxsha Bhagwat - India 

A Tragedy Erased 

There is a point at which the atrocity of human violence strips the mind bare of any concept of mourning: a point at which tragedy metamorphizes into the garden-variety news report, when the rape and murder of a Dalit woman and her family seems to be the trifling matter of a faraway, unsophisticated land where corrupt politicians and policemen lazing on mountains of bribe money rule the lives of the rural folk.

Tell that to Mrs. Bhotmange. Surekha Bhotmange was a Dalit woman, matriarch of her family in the small village of Khairlanji, in the Bhandara district of Maharashtra, a state in western India. The Dalits are the forgotten wheels of the Indian caste system - a system that originated in premodern Indian history, clearly documented and exhaustively moralised about in Hinduism’s religious texts. They are outcasts in almost every part of the country - from northern states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, states in the west like Surekha’s own Maharashtra, and southern states like Kerala. Of course, each state has its own traditions and special ways of torturing generations of ‘untouchables,’ yes - the Dalits are also called untouchables. You are forbidden to make contact. You are forbidden to pollute the purity of your presumably ‘higher’ caste through contact with about 200 million men, women and children of the country (Pillai, 2023).

Surekha is a woman whose courage and unbending insolence in the face of rigorous, entrenched casteism has been eulogized, poetically laid out before the eyes of several million Indians. But has she received justice? The fact is, it doesn’t matter if she has. She is dead. Her husband, the man who named the entire village as culprit to the crime, died of a heart attack eleven years after the incident.

What matters now, you ask?

The Way Forward 

What matters now is one thing: the systematic study of Dalit traditions. The combing over, the straightening out of every misconception about this community so that we can, once and for all, show complacent Indians that they have been sitting remorselessly, suffocating and unthinkingly whitewashing decades, if not centuries, of oppression. The culture of the Dalits is so immense and varied, that not only does it defy formal sociological documentation, but one look at the pain that has shaped and shapes their lives convinces us of the immense human capacity for adaptation and survival in the most hostile conditions. 

The tragedy of Indian right-wing jingoism is that it demonizes not only the individual, but also the tradition - higher-class Indian intellectuals shy far away from displays of solidarity and empathy for the Dalits - their simpering is instead directed towards abstract religious injustices and the general lack of awareness of the populace. To engage in contact with the Dalits, to sit and talk to them like they are people, and to openly declare that caste is and always has been one of the cruellest and most incompetent of human attempts at societal harmony is thought of as impossible (Roy, 2019).

The Caste System and Cow Idolatry 

Rural Indian society, up until modernization in the 19th and 20th centuries, depended on a system of favors or barters, where a service was extended in exchange for grain, cattle or sometimes, gold. With the rise of the Brahman came their increased association with the cow. The cow became sacred, since Indian society rapidly became pastoralist: the cultivation of animals for long-term gain replaced their butchering and sacrificing for sustenance and religious purposes. The Brahman became the local wise-guy with many cows and much gold. Somehow, he seemed to deserve it all simply through the particular serendipity of his birth. The cow further progressed to becoming the symbol of pious Indian culture ridden with the teeth of Hindutva through the lobbying of right-wing religious movements in pre- and post-independence India. ‘Go-matta’ is now a phrase used to denote the dearly cared for cows that wander the urban roads of India, chewing on discarded plastic garbage and looking more underfed and miserable than the dogs that are shunned by everyone in the country. The cow is a new and shiny idol of the neo-capitalist swirl of ultra-jingoistic ‘gaushalas,’ (gau- meaning cow, shala- a place where cows are kept and fed) where its own literal excreta is marketed as the holy cleansers of troubled souls. 

Historically, the Dalit was forced to eat beef (Chigateri, 2007), since it was the only meat cheap enough and high enough in protein that was affordable to his impoverished purse: it was the only meat, besides pork, discarded by the upper-castes. The other meats and foods consumed by the Dalits only serve to enforce the view of ignorant, media-drunk Indians that they are a savage, backwards and economically impoverished community. The media and the political atmosphere of India has termed the food of Dalits ‘impure,’ however, this begs the question; what is the concept of purity in Indian culture? Where did it come from, and where is it headed to? (Gittinger, 2017)

Purity is linked to the concept of identity in India. Inescapably, your identity is determined by how culturally or religiously pure your family or community is (Sathyamala, 2018). ‘Purity,’ in truth, is a simple idea: the adherence of a group to a set of ideals that have been arbitrarily determined by society as a means to cement ways of life that evolved naturally out of occupations or geography, and creating binaries of ‘pure-impure,’ ‘healthy-damaging,’ ‘pious-indulgent,’ etc. It is a cage, meant to keep people in their place, keep them standing stolidly in the primordial line. How, I ask, is the concept of purity in the Indian caste system different from Adolf Hitler’s ideas about Aryan purity?

Bibliography

Pillai, Geetha Sunil. “17 Years After Khairlanji Massacre: Reflecting on a Dark Chapter in Dalit History.” The Mooknayak English - Voice of the Voiceless, 29 Sept. 2023.

Roy, Arundhati. The Doctor and the Saint: The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate: Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste. Penguin Random House India, 2019.

Chigateri, Shraddha Veeranna. “Glory to the Cow: Cultural Difference and Social Justice in the Food Hierarchy in India.” SSRN Electronic Journal, Nov. 2007.

Saif, Shadi Khan. “The Jingoism That Can Fail India.” FairPlanet, fairplanet.org.

Gittinger, Juli L. “The Rhetoric of Violence, Religion, and Purity in India’s Cow Protection Movement.” Journal of Religion and Violence, vol. 5, no. 2, Jan. 2017, pp. 131–49. https://doi.org/10.5840/jrv201751540.

Sathyamala, C. “Meat-eating in India: Whose Food, Whose Politics, and Whose Rights?” Policy Futures in Education, vol. 17, no. 7, July 2018, pp. 878–91. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478210318780553.

Ghassem-Fachandi, Parvis. “On the Political Use of Disgust in Gujarat.” South Asian History and Culture, vol. 1, no. 4, Oct. 2010, pp. 557–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2010.507025.

DAWN.COM. “Religious Jingoism Has Gripped India.” DAWN.COM, 5 Feb. 2024, www.dawn.com/news/1811316.