something else is going on, an effort to free Dalits from all this.
Traditional songs of untouchables and modern literature of Dalits are bound by the fact that both address the oppression and violence to which these lower castes are subject. As violence against Dalits continues, Dalits, both women and men, become more bold.16 Their boldness in turn provokes more violence against them. We have seen this before. The inseparability of caste oppression and gender oppression is clearly laid out in the songs of untouchable women, as in the song of Siṅgammā performed by Sevi. Violence against Dalit women is widely documented in modern Indian literature as well as in scholarly articles and media reports (Irudayam, Mangubhai, and Lee 2006; The Hindu 2013, 2014; Hopkins 2008; Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights 2013; International Dalit Solidarity Network, n.d.; Evidence Team, n.d.; Gaikwad 2012; Krishnan 2014; Soundararajan 2014; Fontanella-Khan 2014; Tamil Nadu Women’s Forum 2007). Domestic violence against women in India is carefully hidden within higher castes, in part because the better off have houses in which they can conceal what goes on within the family; but it is less easy for Dalits to hide. But what actually constitutes a “house,” vīḍu in Tamil, is not necessarily what Westerners think of as a house. This matter is addressed extensively in the chapters on Sevi and Siṅgammā. I have asked a Tamil friend living in New Zealand what is the Tamil word for “privacy,” and after some thought she declared that there was none. I looked it up in a Tamil dictionary, and the closest words I could find denoted “secrecy,” something quite different from privacy.
Learning, education, language, and literacy are combined topics addressed in this chapter and others. Barring of untouchable children from school hurts them not only educationally but socially. A young adult has no way to hide his caste identity if he is a member of a Dalit group who is admitted to a university where reservations are held for members of such groups, as the student must carry a card stating that he is a certified member of a scheduled caste (SC) or scheduled tribe (ST)—in other words, an untouchable—in order to prove his status as a student. Reservations were meant to level the playing field, but they have not made education easier for those admitted under the SC/ST rubric. Known untouchables are treated badly in school and university settings. Girls and women born to untouchable castes are easy prey.
Sociolinguistics includes the study of dialect variation marking place, gender, and rank. This discipline enables one to see, among other things, that the dialects of the unschooled are not inherently inferior to the dialects of the schooled, that they tell about life as it is lived, remembered, and dreamed by outcaste speakers and singers, and by those with long memories. In modern India, literacy is necessary for advancement. One must know how to read and write the language that one speaks. But knowledge of one’s own language is not enough. Knowledge of English is necessary. Such linguistic obstacles hurt Dalits. And oral literature by Dalit women, beautiful and telling though it may be, is ignored.
For Dalits, as well as for higher-caste people, linguistic cosmopolitanism is a key to success. Additionally for Dalits, success may mean abandoning, or “forgetting,” their village dialects, because Dalit dialects are in themselves stigmatizing. Thus for a Dalit, success means ceasing to be what one was before, abandoning ways of life and ways of speaking that are identifiably low caste. In America, it is not necessarily uncool to speak or sing with a working class dialect. In India, it is.
In this respect, the situation of Dalits is in some ways the opposite of the situation of African Americans, some of whom deliberately choose to maintain and develop African American ways of speaking. If they can speak both like an educated white person and like an African American, as the situation warrants, their road to success may be smoothed somewhat as they can be comfortable in both worlds. William Labov has noted that in inner-city New York, blacks change their dialects so that they will not be understood by whites.17 As soon as whites catch on to the meaning of a word such as “foxy” (this was decades ago) and start to use that word, inner-city blacks change their usage so as once again to be beyond the understanding of whites. Everything depends on the image of African Americans as having something extra, a style, a fillip, a kind of soul that whites can never achieve. Young whites want to talk like them, to listen to their songs and learn them, even if the words may be hard for whites to follow.
In India, the opposite prevails. There, educated Brahmans and others with multilingual knowledge practice creative code-switching between English, Tamil, Hindi, and other languages, so that people who do not know all of the languages mixed cannot follow them and can only look on in dumb admiration.18 In displays of linguistic and intellectual virtuosity in South India, it is important that a person not show knowledge of low-class, low-caste, or nonliterate dialects, just as a high-caste person should not know how to do physical labor. Just as the clothing one wears has political significance, so does the work one performs and the language and dialect one speaks. This does not mean that all cosmopolitan and multilingual people are of high caste, however. Indira Peterson notes that in early eighteenth-century Tamil plays known as Kuṟavañci, the casteless Kuṟatti fortune-teller is sometimes adept in multiple languages, including English. The itinerant Kuṟavars I met in Tirurunelveli and Saidapet were also multilingual. For such a fortune-teller, multilingualism would have been both a practical and a magical advantage. The Kuṟavars were likewise cosmopolitan in the sense of having traveled to distant places, and some traditional Kuṟavars of modern days still make this claim of themselves. But Kuṟavars are not admired by Dalits of the present day. Conversely, despite differences in geography, history, and culture, modern Dalits have found inspiration in African American movements. The Dalit Panthers were thus named after the Black Panthers of the United States.
An obstruction to mobility, in addition to the other obstructions Dalit women face, lies in the obscurity, to outsiders, of present-day rural Dalit women’s verbal art. In some forms of oral literature, the obscurity may be intentional. But it is also a consequence of the details of locale, of the language and its use in some social situations, and of local dialect variations, which are not to be found in dictionaries—what is sometimes called “local knowledge.”19 Therefore, in order for one to know what is being said, one must know the place where the singer or writer lives, one must know the people who live there, one must know how they live, and one must know the language in which they speak, chant, or sing. Whereas there are universally knowable aspects of old and new Tamil literature, oral and written, when local realities are not understood, the flesh can fall away from the bones. This is true of popular English literature of the present age, which is meant to appeal to a wide audience, as it was true of literature, both oral and written, when few people could read or write, and rural people steeped in local knowledge could not be well understood except by others who spoke the same language/dialect. In the current millennium, cosmopolitan intellectuals may lose all knowledge that cannot be conveyed in a universalist medium. The modern Tamil Dalit poetry that I have seen so far is not in song form but in written free verse form and printed. The oppressors in the poems are often Brahmans, although in Tamil Nadu, the oppressors are not so much Brahmans as high-caste landlords who practice a form of Brahmanism involving notions of caste-based purity and pollution. In the Dalit journal Murasu an explicit aim is to universalize Dalit voices. The prominent young Dalit poet Meena Kandasamy writes mainly in English and has won national and international prizes for her poems. Some may say that she has moved too far from her Dalit “roots.” But who would want to go back there?
The unschooled are told that they cannot speak or write adequately. But the well-schooled, the powerful, the technicians, the managers, the professors, and some who wish to improve the lot of the very poor will not listen to and cannot hear what the unschooled have to say. Some of the privileged among those without privilege will learn the language of privilege. They are motivated to do so, after all. Few among the privileged will learn to speak, or think, like an old laboring woman from some village somewhere. Still less will they find the time to learn a “tribal” language. This is not just a matter of negligence and laziness, it is a matter of difficulty. The inability on the part of the highly schooled to learn the languages of the unschooled is a diminution of mental power for humanity. It is an intellectual loss for us all.
Claude
