The Dance of the Damned

Gohana village, Haryana. 50 Dalit houses burnt. The criminals – 1000 upper caste Jats with lathis and petrol cans. The reason – revenge for the life of one Jat who was reportedly the victim. In the latter case, four Dalits were picked up by the police. Fear: 2000 families left their homes. They knew the pattern. The backlash did take place. This time officials took their own time to even register a case. There are still arguments that say it is only 40 houses that were burnt. Does it matter?
* * *

Said Tulsidas in his epic Ramayana:
Dhol Ganwar Shudra Pashu naari,
Shakal Tadna ke adhikari…
(The drum, boor, shudra, animal, and women need to be beaten).

This is nothing new. It happens everyday in some part of India. Why bother to write and comment? There are those who are in denial. India is about achievements, they say, as they look the other way. Mere statistics do not reveal the true nature of the complete disregard for human dignity. After Gohana, the Dalits unleashed their anger in Punjab. They constitute 30 per cent of the state’s population. Why do we imagine and expect that they will not rise in revolt? A quarter of our people are considered backward and untouchable. All we get to hear is about how Dalits convert for a few rupees, how they go scrounging for special privileges, how they want to remain backward.

They don’t. Those familiar with the process called ‘sanskritisation’ will know that it was a diplomatic coup of sorts by the ‘backwards’ to be accepted – they shed their caste-based names, moved to urban areas where they thought they would not be noticed.

Is urban society any less prejudiced? On the contrary, there is more segregation. In the past at least it was rooted in ignorance. Today, it is those who are aware that cause harm.
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Could there be any valid reason for their resentment? A lot has already been said. One of the factors is that we covet things which we don’t need when we see that someone else will get it. We believe that the best way to keep people where they are is to force them to become what we have always known them to be.

I will give you an example of someone who is no ‘reservations’ hero that many smirk at, but does he cease to be society’s scourge?

* * *

Nothing can stay my glance
Until that glance run in the world’s despite
To where the damned have howled away their hearts,
And where the blessed dance
-W.B.Yeats

I waited to pounce on the howl, to pin it down. It was only the wind rustling through the barely-covered branches. It ceased to be a metaphor. It became the man – strong roots, no shade. The howl was the voice of Uttam Bandu Tupe.

Who is he? I had sincerely hoped that all those who had been sitting in the air-conditioned, acoustically perfect ambience of the spiffy auditorium to watch an experimental play “breaking new ground” were also asking the same question. For ‘Zulva’ was written by Tupe, a Dalit writer; “Written,” as he told me, “with my blood, in anger, with a sense of loss about the injustice.”

Before we stand to lose by pronouncing him a cribbing Dalit who brandishes his scars like a blunted weapon, we would do well to walk with him through those everyday moments that lengthened into a tortured life. He lived in a slum on the Mumbai-Pune Highway; he worked as a peon at a government office. When I had first sought him out in Pune, it turned out to be a tough task. There was a vague reference to his line of work as my only clue.

One afternoon I made my way there and found him: a slight, dark man who was as far from any image of a writer one might possibly have. He stood with his eyes averted to the ground, a habit his station in life had forced him into adopting. He stayed silent for a long time. Were the words stuck in his throat that he regurgitated only in the dim light from a lantern that cast long shadows? Were the dark crannies his comfort zone where he threw up the bile, mucous remnants sticking to his cheap pen as they traced patterns on bits of paper?

How far had he travelled, and how much did his feet and mind hurt due to the uneven terrain and jumping over barricades?

What was striking about him was that he waited for no respite; he kept writing, walking. It did not pay him much but he had found his voice. He had made his peace with turmoil. He sought an audience in an inclusive way as though he was afraid of how his own words would spit back at him.

Our meeting had, therefore, turned out to be not an interview but a group discussion where other peons and lower-grade office staff joined in. We sat on the hard floor in the scorching heat, unmindful of the crawling ants. We drank a concoction of sugar and milk with a few tea leaves thrown in. He started speaking with more confidence. Suddenly, the walls did not seem so grey at all.

Unlike a lot of people who become apologetic, Tupe just played his song his way. There was no attempt at finding a chair for me or of opening the windows. It was quite obvious he would not have to work hard at getting the realism right, for he did not have to be ‘committed’ to a cause. He was the cause. How did he view someone like Vijay Tendulkar (the writer of works like ‘Ghashiram Kotwal’, ‘Shantata! Court chaalu aahe’, ‘Kamla’ ‘Ardh Satya’ – the latter two made into films -- among several others) whose lifestyle and literature appeared to be at odds with each other? Tupe had a simple answer, “He is a different kind of writer. He uses power and the status quo. I use my emotions.”

Could such a life denied even the potency of touch be lived on the strength of emotions? “Earlier I did not even know what life was. I thought things would be easier here. Now I know reality. I talk of freedom, but it is only for the rich and powerful. Here the poor work and someone else reaps the benefits. Yet I feel that if I had the money, I would not be able to do anything.”

He wrote over 12 books, including ‘Zulva’ and the larger ‘Ketyuwarchi Pota’, in the belief that, “If I can write small things, then why not the big ones?”

The small things were little poems, folklore kind of stuff, smelling of the muck from the sewers and soiled with the very dirt flung at him and those as lowly in the human-created social hierarchy. He saw it all as a child in Satara where, while taking the cattle to graze, he’d notice the sad life of the people – his people. He’d see them being beaten up, he’d see them weep, and he decided that this was not what he would have done to him. Instead, he used the experience, every whiplash became an inspiration. “Each line is now mixed in my system,” he said.

He was not surprised that his play got a good response in a large metropolis like Mumbai where exploitation is a matter of course. But the exploitation he knew about was different: “We Dalits are like animals. The moment we are born we are on our own. There is no support system. We are constantly made aware that we are apart.” However, he held no grudges against the English language press that had ignored him. In fact, after I had first written about him and sent him a copy of the publication, he mailed me a postcard which stated simply in Marathi, “Thank you, but I do not understand the language you wrote in”!

If such a paradox were not enough, those he wrote about often could not read. His own language was more accessible to the ‘literate’ public, the kind who would cringe at the pus oozing out of his prose. He had no place for bandaging wounds, “If I write about things as they are, then I must use raw expressions. I cannot waste time on technical flourishes. I don’t know if it reaches my people – some day it will. My experiences are always on their way.”

He takes the personal as the political seriously. “I hang my head on the ceiling fan, and then let it move as it wants. One thing can be seen in different ways. It is my existence and your imagination.” Existence, for him, has meant moving so close as to become one with what wrenches him and tugs at his entrails. ‘Zulva’ was about devdasis, who often end up as prostitutes sanctioned by religious decree. To get completely involved, Tupe stayed in the border areas of Karnataka dressed as a woman. By clothing himself in female garb had he, as a consequence, succeeded in stripping his conditioning? Didn’t his gender act as a barrier to genuine empathy? “I admit I thought like a man. It would be foolish to say that the play was about female exploitation. It was really about my conflict with it.”

It was not a rationalisation. He just had to plumb the depths. He would find coal or he would just be mining the vacuum, darkness discovering darkness. He would expend the energy even if it meant spending almost 40 days over a mere 35 lines. “Mine are not superficial emotions. And I am not afraid of being rootless, of moving on. That is the only way to find new creative avenues.”

Somehow these contradictory forces in him -- of being anchorless and yet moored to his one identity -- were not jarring. Perhaps because he did not whip up a frenzied logic to support his stand. “Our shadows give us something in the morning and take it away in the evening. So, why just two lives? A man can live as many lives as he wishes. At home I am one person, in the office another, and as a writer someone else. And talking right now to you I could be a fourth.”

I wonder which one could silence the howl of the damned and do the dance of the blessed.