chose to keep the word “untouchable” in the subtitle of this book because India has not modernized to the extent that is sometimes claimed. Untouchability was outlawed in India in 1948, but still it remains. To an American, a black or brown person who belongs to one caste or jāti looks the same as a black or brown person who belongs to another caste. But to a person born and raised in India, subtle clues are enough to give a lower-caste person away. The caste system, with all its prejudices, remains deeply entrenched in Indian society. The term “Dalit” means “ground down, broken, oppressed.” This term indicates that it is not the fault of the oppressed people that they are oppressed; higher-caste people have caused them this harm. The use of the term “Dalit” is one of multiple efforts to change the caste system, based on old Hindu ideas of purity and pollution, and bit by bit, in some places, for some people, it has changed. But even for Dalits who make it into universities and colleges, the pain and the stigma remain.2
The word “women” in the subtitle is, on the surface, self-explanatory. I was not seeking out only women as informants, but it was easier for women to talk with me because I was also a woman. Women told me more than men did about their lives, and women are the main people in this book. The songs and stories relayed in this book are, with one exception, by women, and without exception about women. Numerous books and articles have been written by and about women in India. Few have been written about nonliterate Dalit women in India, real ones and not fictional ones. Perhaps even fewer of such women’s songs and narratives have been considered to be verbal art. To my knowledge, few of their words, sung or narrated, have been published, although this situation is changing.
The most problematic part of my subtitle is the last phrase: “create the world.” A widespread view holds that only the educated can understand what the world is about. Only the educated can philosophize and theorize. Only the educated can think. But that is not true.
The chapters in this book move over time, from oldest to most recent, as they also move over space from urban to rural to forest edge to placelessness, and back to urban again. Sarasvati/Māriamman lives in an accessible urban home and in a great temple. Siṅgammā comes from a nomadic tribe, and she herself is a wandering ghost, whose place of burial is inaccessible, whose name and story are obscure. It took this writer decades to get from the first to the last. There is an advantage to obscurity, to singing words with too many meanings, to being where one cannot be found. The disadvantages are both clear and abundant.
This book was made initially of memories—memories of personal experiences, of things read, of things said, of images created in my mind of realities that I never experienced. Reading gives me information, including memories, that I can come back to, or discover for the first time. Putting what I want to say into writing allows me to re-create all this and give it a kind of coherence. For people who cannot read or write, life is different.
Events of the Past That Have Contributed to the Formation of Present Conditions
The history of people now called “untouchable” is an intrinsic part of the history and prehistory of the South Asian subcontinent.3 In present times, the presumed original people of India are called Adivasis and are considered by caste Hindus to be untouchable. The actual first human beings to settle in the subcontinent arrived fifty thousand years or more ago, with the first coastal migrations out of Africa (Pope and Terrell 2008; Wells 2002). Some may have followed the ocean coasts entirely. Some may have traveled up rivers like the Indus. But those who kept on, generation after generation, through centuries, went as far as they could go until they reached Australia, beyond which further travel eastward was not possible. As they traveled they left settlements along the way, including settlements in Sri Lanka, the Andaman Islands, and the southern part of the Indian subcontinent. Modes of living in the subcontinent moved from fishing and forest dwelling to small-scale farming and herding; to countless different ways of living, of speaking, of organizing families and communities; to walled towns, to warfare, temples and palaces, kingdoms and empires. People came and went throughout the subcontinent, and to and from distant lands. As time went on, in addition to solo travelers and small groups of travelers, there came large invasions, mass migrations, conquests, bigger wars. And as all of this was happening, all the other modes of living continued, albeit becoming increasingly marginalized.4
The Indus Valley Civilization was the first civilization in South Asia and the largest of the three great civilizations in the world at that time. It had no boundaries. People in that civilization practiced agriculture and horticulture, irrigation, trade with distant countries, metallurgy, and remarkable art. The cities had well-laid-out streets and well-engineered water management and sewage systems. There was writing but it has not yet been deciphered. The language spoken may have been Proto-Dravidian or Austroasiatic. No clear sign of royalty or religion has been found by archaeologists of the last century and a half, although some of the artwork could be interpreted as religious. Archaeological research remains ongoing. The civilization continued as such until around 1500 BCE. Possible causes for its decline and end are many, including immigration of new people, drought, and deforestation (Bryant 2001, 159–60; Lawler 2008, 1282–83; Knipe 1991).
Subsequently Vedic cultures came into their own. There were few or no horses in South Asia until around 1500 BCE, when horsemen came from Central Asia across the Himalayas, bringing not only horses (Doniger 2009, chapters 4–5) but their language and culture with them, including long poems that they had memorized. It is difficult to know when their technique of memorization began, as they had no writing system before they entered the subcontinent. The earliest written Sanskrit texts were called the Vedas (“what is known”). They were transmitted orally through generations of ritual specialists. Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas, an Indo-European language related to Latin and Greek, spread throughout the whole subcontinent, but mainly through northern India. The oldest and best known of the Vedas was the Rig Veda. It is said to have been composed in northwest India somewhere between 1700 and 1100 BCE. That would have made it nearly contemporaneous with the Indus Valley Civilization and geographically close to it.5
The Rig Veda contains some beautiful, evocative poems, beginning with one that says:
There was neither existence nor non-existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose protection? Was there water, bottomlessly deep? There was neither death nor immortality then. There was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day. That one breathed, windless, by its own impulse. Other than that, there nothing beyond. Darkness was hidden by darkness, in the beginning. With no distinguishing sign, all this was water. The life force that was covered with emptiness, that one arose through the power of heat.…Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen? Whence this creation has arisen—perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not. (Doniger 1981, 25)
Doniger (2009, chapter 4) argues that a merger between Vedic cultures and Indus Valley cultures resulted in the Hindu cultures and religions that came after these two cultures met. But—again according to Doniger (2009, chapter 5)—whereas the Indus Valley cultures appear to have been benign (Doniger 2009, chapter 3), Vedic cultures were violent from the beginning. Distinguishing the beauty from the horror of the Vedic texts is not an easy job. An elderly Brahman who lived in southern Tamil Nadu told me that there were parts of the Vedas so cruel he had to wash himself after reading them. But the ideological construct of purity and pollution far predates my friend. Certain acts are polluting. Certain acts are cleansing. But no amount of fire or water can drive away certain memories. How could it have felt to sacrifice something as full of life, fine, and beautiful as a horse? The Purusha Sukta hymn in the Rig Veda describes the origin of humankind from the sacrifice of the Cosmic Self (Purusha). That self was divided into pieces, which became different kinds of human being. To whom could such a level of abstraction, with such a current of violence running beneath it, be satisfying?
A Vedic religion developed based on the
