Mangalore, Dec 2017

Some cities are like Bollywood songs. You might forget the lyrics but you’ll still remember the tune, one or two specific words, the hero’s jataks, and the heroine’s mataks. Mangalore is that ooru. I’ll only know it through its sounds.

The frogs are alive and croaking, the trucks on the Kottara Chowki highway drone on so familiarly that they become happy background scores to the long whistles of pressure cookers that fill the house with Dalithoy smells. It’s the only city that makes me appreciate music.

 

Perhaps also because my uncle who never gets lyrics right is still convinced that Shah Rukh is not calling Preity Zinta ‘Pretty Woman’ in Kal Ho Na Ho, he is calling her ‘Hari Rumaal.’ Or my aunt who thinks that Kareena & Vivek are not singing ‘Begaana Begaana Begaani’ in Yuva. They are singing ‘Madonna Madonna, Madonni’

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P for Political. A for Aadhar

Sometime in the month of October, I wondered if my blog was developing a certain direction. It’s because I read and wrote more about caste than I have about anything else this year. A lot of my posts and essays this year were attempts at making sense of my life, work, and relationships and I could only have written them after I had seen caste. It’s not something you can unsee after seeing.

It took me a while to see caste in my life. What do I mean by that?

My parents have protected me for as long as they could. They still do. Sometimes I think it’s a miracle that I even know my caste. That’s how hard they’ve worked to ensure my safety in a world they grew up in. I wonder then –  would I be craving to know more about my caste were I an engineer or a doctor today? I don’t know. But I’m glad I’m in a profession that demands writing and reading from me vigorously, tirelessly.

I’m glad that my job includes dialogues with students. Because it’s here in the classroom that I get to meet some fascinating, talented, also arrogant students. And it’s also here – in this space that my parents cannot protect me.

‘Why isn’t Vj political about her identity?’ was something someone once asked.

I was amused because it is a stupid question. What did they want me to do? Wear a board that said ‘I am Dalit’ and walk around?

I was writing then just as much as I am writing now. What can be more political than writing?

Maybe they wanted me to be politically active on Facebook. So if I had shared a couple of newspaper/magazine articles on the atrocities against Dalits, that would have made me political about my identity no? I have come to hate this word – political. At one point, I wanted to get a dog and name it poly – short for political. Because I don’t know – just.

Sometimes the English-speaking Savarna students in classrooms demand that everyone be as ‘political’ as them even if there are students in the classroom whose everyday life is political with or without Townhall. I don’t understand this demand. How often do they look into their own lives and find themselves guilty of having been blissfully Savarna? When you say other people in the class or your teachers are not political enough for showing for a protest. Ask yourself if you even know them well enough to see that their very survival is a protest. What is the savarna student imagining as political thought? It’s just as bad as making Aadhar mandatory or making the entire theatre stand up for the national anthem. Because all these demands come from the same place. The demand to see your response. To check. To see if you meet expected standards.

As Christina Dhanraj once pointed out – ‘Is our personal your political?’

But what is the point of showing up to a protest in town hall if you are there only to mark attendance of those absent?

I have arrived at this point in my life at my own pace. That’s how it is with most people. There’s no need to be Meena Kumari if people decide to go watch Bahubali first day first show instead of attending your radical talk on ‘freedom of expression.’

Maybe there’s genuine freedom of expression happening when a bunch of 45 -year -old middle-class housewives look forward to something more important than the return of sons and husbands from office. So they wake up one morning knowing that by the end of the day, they’ll know why Katappa killed Bahubali – that is perhaps more political than finding out what great revolution is happening in the lives of a privileged few who have the mind-space to go to a protest.

It took me a while to reach and read Ambedkar and understand why he is so important to my history. But now that I have, he is permanent in my life.

Even so — within the boundaries of a classroom, I wonder how it is for the many other Dalit teachers out there. While classrooms can be a space for growth, knowledge blah blah… they are also spaces of violence. I have heard of stories where teachers have been prejudiced against Avarna students. But what happens when a Savarna student with a certain kind of education and a certain kind of English decides that a Dalit teacher has nothing to teach them? How is it visible?

From my experience, it is visible in the way they patronize you, in the way they treat the assignments you give them in class, in the way they decide that they can learn more and better without you, and the amount of time they spend in coaxing other students to lose respect for you.

Is there a way out of this? There is and I learnt more about it this year.

After Ambedkar, AM is an inspiring example. There was a point when I used to call him Grammar Nazi. But then he called me Grammar Jew and I resigned. I know now why he taught himself to be perfect in the things he does, and in the things he says and writes. It’s so that no Savarna idiot could point a finger at him.

When he writes, it’s impossible to not be overwhelmed by his power over language. As far as I can see – this is what pisses them (whoever) the most. That they cannot point out flaws with his argument because they can’t point out flaws in his language.

Writer Sujatha Gidla once told me – ‘English is a weapon in the hands of Indians. You can fend off casteism to a small extent by wielding it’

It’s what Ambedkar did. It’s what AM does. And it’s also what I am slowly learning to do.

***

An incredible event this year was the Dalit Women Speak Out conference. It was a turning-point of sorts because it’s the most powerful thing to have ever happened to me. It forced me out of loneliness in a world that is run by making people invisible. AM had once said – ‘If spaces matter to you, you must claim them to create them’

And that’s what we must do. In the classroom and outside. Claim spaces. Make noise. Sing songs. Dance loudly. And it’s what numerous Dalit women did that day on stage.

When I walked out of the auditorium, I was shaking. I saw Gee outside and something just went off. We both broke down and clung to each other. We didn’t have to say anything or explain anything.

Someone creepily took off one picture and I am not complaining because this is my favourite picture of the year 🙂

You can read my report here.

Here’s something that made me happy today. I must be doing a lot of things to piss people off but then I must also be doing something right. @Gobblefunkist – Thank you!

Sometimes I wish

Sometimes I wish I had no ambition

So that when I get back home at 8 one evening

and my mother asks me why I’m not married yet

I can tell her –

Tomorrow I will marry.

 

Sometimes I wish I wasn’t someone who likes spending time alone

so that when my father pulls me out of solitude and

demands to know when I will marry

I can tell him

Tomorrow I will marry

 

Sometimes I wish I was already married

So when I come home at 4 in the noon

my husband sighs and says

I love you

-I can say: I love you too

and when he says where is my chai

I can say —

Fuck you bro

 

Sometimes I wish I didn’t like reading and writing

because somewhere

it is costing my mother a lot

to see me alone

having no idea that this is the happiest I have been

and the happiest that I will ever be.

Tuesday, 6:45 pm, Department

Alison Bechdel, Virginia Woolf, Nagraj Manjule

Strange day.

Finished reading Alison Bechdel’s ‘Are you My Mother?’ this morning. She took me to Woolf like no one else has – not even Woolf herself. Bechdel’s dream sequences are told and drawn with so much ferocity that they begin to seep into the non -dream sequences as well. She gets you curious about desire, shame, words, and anger in a way that only your body can teach you.

I pulled out all my Freud books and set them aside. Later, in the department I spent sometime trying to warm up to Freud. The man is bloody unreadable. I turned instead to Woolf’s To the Lighthouse – hoping, like Bechdel, to find more answers about Psychoanalysis than psychoanalysts can give.

Stopped often – moved to A Writer’s Diary – then back To the Lighthouse.

Screened Fandry for a class – the fourth time this year – felt more disoriented than the last time. Thought of Jabya – thought of my brother – thought of his empty fair & lovely tube that he sometimes squeezed cream out of. Thought of the godforsaken woman on twitter who attacked my Sairat essay. Some Azadi woman. Chee. My ‘review’ was a glowing savarna review I believe and that’s why she didn’t ‘agree’ with it.

My friends told her to shut up. And because she realised she’d spoken too soonly, she apologized.

It may have been fuck-all writing but I now have this to say to her – ‘You are not required to agree with it. You are not even required to read it. It’s not a review, it’s an essay’

And then my head got all fuzzy like it does when I have jumped from one thought to another too quickly. Towards the end of Fandry, I had swallowed the guilt I feel everytime I watch it. Don’t know through what manner of luck, unluck – or through the hard work of parents –  some of us are able to escape fate.

Then my guilt became something else entirely –

For the first time, it became clear to me that I’ll never know if I’m good enough. I’ll never know for real if I’m actually good. There is no language that friends or enemies can use to tell me if I’m good or bad. Maybe it’s because they will never be able to separate it from the knowledge of what they think I deserve or don’t.