It has been a general misconception that the anonymity of a city and the myriad opportunities of livelihood that it offers act as an antidote to the practice of untouchability. That the impact of the caste structure and the rigour of its operation is far more prevalent and debilitating in rural India. But the city is not immune to it either. Social interaction is grounded in a casteist paradigm in rural and urban India, and also among Indian communities settled abroad. The operation of caste dynamics in the city is subtle and invasive even as the city-culture offers transformative and enabling opportunities to the marginalized communities. Ambedkar viewed migration to the city as a route to emancipation of Dalit communities. To what extent does the city as a site of emancipatory modernity ensure vertical mobility and inclusivity for the Dalit communities is a question worth exploring. Deeba Zafir’s book Caste and the City undertakes this critical enquiry by examining literary representations in Hindi of the city as a site of Dalit aspiration and the lived experience of Dalits. In her book, she examines the short stories of Dayanand Batohi, Om Prakash Valmiki, Jai Prakash Kardam, Sheoraj Singh Bechain, Ajay Navaria, Rajat Rani Meenu and Anita Bharti to understand how Dalit aspirations and sensibilities engage with the challenges faced by Dalits in the city. Deeba Zafir’s critical engagement with writers from different generations and gender ably brings out the trajectory of Dalit experience in literary representation as well as aesthetic and formal interventions by Dalit writers in Hindi literary discourse.
Chapter 1 provides the much-needed historical overview and discusses the contribution of lesser-known pioneers in this domain. While it is a critical commonplace to posit Hindi Dalit Writings as a post-Mandal phenomenon, Zafir traces, in a historical overview, Dayanand Batohi’s short stories, pre-dating them to even Satish’s ‘Vachan Baddh’, published in 1975 (hitherto believed to be the first Dalit short story in Hindi). References to Swami Achutanand’s interventions in the print industry elaborate upon the rise of a ‘parallel public sphere’ that interrogated the prevailing aesthetic and ideological tenets in mainstream Hindi literary discourse. The trend of re-writing of canonical texts, re-telling of specific episodes to foreground the Dalit perspective is a notable feature in Hindi Dalit literature. This was set in motion by Achutanand’s narrative on Shambuk. Heera Dom’s ‘Acchut ki Shikayat’ in 1914 was yet another enabling moment for Dalit discourse in Hindi. The short story ‘Chhotke Chor’ by Mohini Chamarin in 1915 seems to be the lone woman’s voice in this less-researched space. As not much is known about her, not even her caste identity, this story is a telling tale on the nebulous space granted to Dalit women in both literary and social contexts. Zafir does not engage with the delayed Dalit articulation in Hindi literary space to explore any deliberateness or silencing of Dalit assertion. A critique of the gaps and the silences could have helped us understand the political implication of such a trajectory in Hindi as in other Indian languages, notably Tamil and Punjabi. The documentation of pioneering voices in Dalit discourse is as crucial as an unravelling of its ‘delayed’ self-articulation.
Zafir’s analysis takes an interesting turn as she traces the impact of modernity on the Dalit community through the print culture and migration to the city. The Dalit migrants were exposed to Ambedkarite thought and vision in the city, especially in the cantonment areas (Badri Narayan refers to this development as the ‘cantonment phenomenon’) where schools and libraries were established in Ambedkar’s name in the 1930s. The mushrooming of the printing press in major cities of Uttar Pradesh gave a further boost to the making of a Dalit public in the urban spaces. Critics like Gajarawala and Brueck have looked at Dalit writing posited as a counter public, as a mode of resistance to literary representation in mainstream writing. Deeba Zafir takes it forward to examine Hindi Dalit short fiction as rooted in an urban sensibility that capitalizes upon its critical and spatial distance from the village to ably critique the caste structure and casteist practices. It also problematizes the operation of caste dynamics in the city. Such an interrogative discourse unmasks the continued presence of a casteist structure in contemporary India, visibly strident in the village and menacingly subtle in the city.
The chapter ‘Dalits in the City’ is a lucid account of how the city occupies a core place in the Dalit literary imagination. If Ambedkar pointed out that the village negates the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, Dalit writers transfer their aspirations for a liberating space, free from the casteist stratification of rural India to the cityscape. They hope to be treated as equal citizens and empower themselves through the opportunities in higher education available in the metropolitan cities. A close examination of the short stories of Batohi, Om Prakash Valmiki, Jai Prakash Kardam foreground, Zafir argues, the enormous gaps and fissures that refuse to accommodate the Dalit, albeit in ways different from the explicit ones in the village they left behind. Valmiki and Namishraya point out the refusal of mainstream critics and editors to recognize the literary merit of Dalit writings or appreciate their formulation of the aesthetic, as a reflection of the pervasive influence of the caste structure in post-Independence India. Batohi’s ‘Surang’ (1990) and Valmiki’s ‘Ghuspaithiye’ (2004) expose the resentment and intimidation of the Dalits’ presence in institutions of higher education, medical science and academic research. Deaths of Dalit students due to caste bullying are officially reported as suicides; their agency is undermined; their aspirations mocked at, and they are humiliated and segregated from the larger student bodies. Zafir examines many stories of Valmiki and Kardam that have made significant interventions in the Hindi Dalit discourse and impacted the course of literary criticism in Hindi. Her detailed analysis of Valmiki’s ‘Salaam’, ‘Kahan Jaye Satish’, ‘Pachees Chuka Dedh Sau’, ‘Yeh Ant Nahi’, ‘Ghuspaithiye’ or Kardam’s ‘Raaste’, ‘Mandir’, ‘Housing Society’, ‘No Bar’, ‘Comrade ka Ghar’,
‘Zaroorat’ and other stories draw the reader’s attention to the range of themes, concerns and standpoints of the two writers.
She notes the use of English vocabulary, often in the titles as well as in the dialogues of the stories as indicative of the urban sensibility and middle-class position of Dalit writers/writings. While the writers critique the curbing of Dalit agency by individuals and institutions in the city, they also engage with the intersectionality of class, caste and gender in the urban settlements that stand embedded in privilege, entitlement and arrogance of bureaucratic power. The process of concealment of one’s caste identity and the tragic fall-out on being ‘discovered’ is dealt with poignantly in many of these stories. Zafir also underscores that ‘many non-Dalit issues, characters and themes’ emerge ‘while continuing to keep the Dalit agenda of fighting against oppression at the centre of its narrative’ (p. 49).
She also examines the short fiction of the second generation of Dalit writers in Hindi, notably Sheoraj Singh Bechain and Ajay Navaria. In her analysis of their writing, she argues that while Bechain’s stories focus on an ‘agenda-driven narrative’, often disregarding the expectations regarding the formal features of the short story, Navaria’s stories are bold in their formal experimentation and innovative re-ordering of form and content. She examines the ‘shrill’ and ‘subtle’ tone and substance of Bechain and Navaria’s short fiction respectively, as reflecting the trajectory of Dalit writing in Hindi during this phase. The two modes of narrative ably dismiss the discourse of nostalgia and prefer the city as the chosen habitation of Dalits. Both the writers explore the dilemmas and predicaments of Dalits in the city of the twenty-first century, underlining the insidious manifestation of caste discrimination in the metropolis. They take up issues like inter-caste marriage, possibilities of romance in the social matrix of caste, a critique of Dalit leadership, the impact of the affirmative Reservation for Dalits, concealment as well as assertion of Dalit identity and the dynamics of power relations among people drawn from different castes. Bechain’s stories foreground the more venomous aspects of caste discrimination and deprivation of citizenry for the Dalit community. He is critical of the misuse of the reservation policy which is viewed by the Savarnas as an opportunity to grab power. The act of acquiring ‘fake caste certificates’ by Savarnas in ‘Honahaar Bacche’, for instance, exposes the messy execution of affirmative action. Issues like privatization of education deny equal opportunities to the Dalit community. The book offers an engaging account of Navaria’s short stories as insightful representation of casteism as cultural praxis in contemporary city life.
Zafir elaborates how Navaria’s stories adopt a cinematic idiom; the narrative, for instance, in ‘Patkatha’ is structured like a screenplay and his formal innovations match his refreshing ways of handling the content. Navaria’s stories also mirror different coping mechanisms across multiple generations of Dalits from the same family or village to underscore both the unchanging pressures of the caste structure and the struggle for survival and subversion of casteist practices and presumptions. Navaria’s use of pastiche, and the pervasive deployment of animal imagery to highlight violence against Dalits weaves memory of the oppressed across generations to critique the continued presence of caste in the city and the village alike. Zafir’s insightful analysis of Navaria’s ‘Naya Qaida’ and ‘Yes Sir’ help the reader reckon with the urban workplace, the office corridors, academic spaces as embedded in casteist hierarchy and biases. The intertextuality in Navaria’s stories as in ‘Uttarkatha’ point out Navaria’s concerns as a nuanced and eloquent analysis of the pressures of caste on all communities. His literary lens is unsparing and empathetic towards persons hailing from all castes. Navaria’s core belief that ‘A woman is a Dalit in all communities,’ lets him explore the possibilities of finding love and comfort together by Savarna women and Dalit men. He underscores the points of intersection in the history of their oppression. His astute references to the Constitution, religious freedom and the constitutional guarantees to the Dalits have enriched Dalit literary discourse in Hindi. The vision of liberty continues to occupy Dalit writings even as they engage with recurring patterns of discrimination.
Deeba Zafir turns her attention to women Dalit writers like Rajat Rani Meenu and Anita Bharti to examine the presence of Dalit Patriarchy and its subversion by Dalit Feminist standpoint reflected in their short stories. It comes as a rude shock to us to note that ‘there is no anthology of collected stories by Hindi Dalit women writers even today’, although individual writers have brought out collections of their stories. This reveals the constrained space in the ‘Hindi Dalit public sphere’ (p. 80). Bharti and Meenu engage with a wide range of concerns including inter-caste marriage, reservation dynamics, the redundancy of homogenizing the issue of women’s rights and social identity. They vociferously critique Dalit patriarchy as detrimental to Dalit liberation and the community at large. Meenu takes up colourist biases and argues that challenges faced by Dalit women are different from those faced by Dalit men. Her stories delineate how an issue impacts Savarna women and Dalit women differently, for instance surrogacy rights or access to resources.
The section on Anita Bharti locates her formulations on Dalit Feminism in her book Contemporary Feminism and the Dalit Woman’s Resistance (2013) in the context of her short stories and offers an insightful discussion. Bharti’s rewriting of canonical stories by Savarna men are brilliant in their effort to rearticulate the stories from the perspective of a Dalit woman. Phaniswar Nath Renu’s ‘Teesri Kasam’, Premchand’s ‘Thakur ka Kuan’ are re-written by Bharti underscoring her belief that ‘emancipation’ carries a social rather than an individual connotation. Her stories also examine Dalit women’s bonding with both Dalit and non-Dalit women. The chapter on Dalit women’s writings is engaging and maps the pointers of difference effectively.
Deeba Zafir’s book is a timely reminder that Dalit aspirations in the city live on even when they are ceaselessly undermined, deferred or challenged. One hopes that in the next edition, Zafir would examine the critical reception to Dalit literature in Hindi and probe the influence, if any, of Dalit writings on other languages. The insularity and hegemony of Hindi should not impair the aadan-pradan in the domain of Dalit literary discourse.
B. Mangalam teaches English at Aryabhatta College, University of Delhi, Delhi. She has published on Tamil Dalit literature.