English: the Dalit goddess?

Sat Aug 30 16:56:37 UTC 2008

August 30, 2008

Crusader Sees Wealth as Cure for India Caste Bias

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

AZAMGARH DISTRICT, India — When Chandra Bhan Prasad visits his
ancestral village in these feudal badlands of northern India, he
dispenses the following advice to his fellow untouchables: Get rid of
your cattle, because the care of animals demands children's labor.
Invest in your children's education instead of in jewelry or land.
Cities are good for Dalit outcastes like us, and so is India's new
capitalism. Mr. Prasad was born into the Pasi community, once
considered untouchable on the ancient Hindu caste order. Today, a
chain-smoking, irrepressible didact, he is the rare outcaste columnist
in the English language press and a professional provocateur. His
latest crusade is to argue that India's economic liberalization is
about to do the unthinkable: destroy the caste system. The last 17
years of new capitalism have already allowed his people, or Dalits, as
they call themselves, to "escape hunger and humiliation," he says, if
not residual prejudice.

At a time of tremendous upheaval in India, Mr. Prasad is a lightning
rod for one of the country's most wrenching debates: Has India's
embrace of economic reforms really uplifted those who were consigned
for centuries to the bottom of the social ladder? Mr. Prasad, who
guesses himself to be in his late 40s because his birthday was never
recorded, is an anomaly, often the lone Dalit in Delhi gatherings of
high-born intelligentsia.

He has the zeal of an ideological convert: he used to be a Maoist
revolutionary who, by his own admission, dressed badly, carried a
pistol and recruited his people to kill their upper-caste landlords.
He claims to have failed in that mission. Mr. Prasad is a contrarian.
He calls government welfare programs patronizing. He dismisses the
countryside as a cesspool. Affirmative action is fine, in his view,
but only to advance a small slice into the middle class, who can then
act as role models. He calls English "the Dalit goddess," able to
liberate Dalits. Along with India's economic policies, once grounded
in socialist ideals, Mr. Prasad has moved to the right. He is openly
and mischievously contemptuous of leftists. "They have a hatred for
those who are happy," he said.

There are about 200 million Dalits, or members of the Scheduled
Castes, as they are known officially, in India. They remain socially
scorned in city and country, and they are over-represented among
India's uneducated, malnourished and poor. The debate over caste in
the New India is more than academic. India's leaders are under growing
pressure to alleviate poverty and inequality. Now, all kinds of groups
are clamoring for what Dalits have had for 50 years — quotas in
university seats, government jobs and elected office — making caste
one of the country's most divisive political issues. Moreover, there
are growing demands for caste quotas in the private sector.

Mr. Prasad's latest mission is sure to stir the debate. He is
conducting a qualitative survey of nearly 20,000 households here in
northern state of Uttar Pradesh to measure how everyday life has
changed for Dalits since economic liberalization began in 1991. The
preliminary findings, though far from generalizable, reveal subtle
shifts. The survey, financed by the University of Pennsylvania, finds
that Dalits are far less likely to be engaged in their traditional
caste occupations — for instance, the skinning of animals, considered
ritually unclean — than they used to be and more likely to enjoy
social perks once denied them. In rural Azamgarh District, for
instance, nearly all Dalit households said their bridegrooms now rode
in cars to their weddings, compared with 27 percent in 1990. In the
past, Dalits would not have been allowed to ride even horses to meet
their brides; that was considered an upper-caste privilege.

Mr. Prasad credits the changes to a booming economy. "It has pulled
them out of the acute poverty they were in and the day-to-day
humiliation of working for a landlord," he said. To prove his point,
Mr. Prasad recently brought journalists here to his home district. In
one village, Gaddopur, his theory was borne out in the tale of a
gaunt, reticent man named Mahesh Kumar, who went to work in a factory
300 miles away so his family would no longer have to live as serfs,
tending the animals of the upper caste.

When he was a child, Dalits like him had to address their upper-caste
landlords as "babu-saab," close to "master." Now it is acceptable to
call them "uncle" or "brother," just as people would members of their
own castes. Today, Mr. Kumar, 61 and uneducated, owns an airless
one-room factory on the outskirts of Delhi, with a basic gas-fired
machine to press bolts of fabric for garment manufacturers. With money
earned there, he and his sons have built a proper brick and cement
house in their village.

Similar tales are echoed in many other villages across India. But here
is the problem with Mr. Prasad's survey. Even if it chronicles
progress, the survey cannot tie it to any one cause, least of all
economic changes. In fact, other empirical studies in this budding
area of inquiry show that in parts of India where economic
liberalization has had the greatest impact, neither rural poverty nor
the plight of Dalits has consistently improved. Abhijit Banerjee, an
economist at M.I.T. who studies poverty in India, says that the reform
years coincide with the rise of Dalit politicians, and that both
factors may have contributed to a rise in confidence among Dalits.

Moreover, Old India's caste prohibitions have made sure that some can
prosper more easily than others. India's new knowledge-based economy
rewards the well-educated and highly skilled, and education for
centuries was the preserve of the upper castes. Today, discrimination
continues, with some studies suggesting that those with familiar
lower-caste names fare worse in job interviews, even with similar
qualifications. The Indian elite, whether corporate heads, filmmakers,
even journalists, is still dominated by the upper castes.

>>From across India still come reports of brutality against untouchables
trying to transcend their destiny. It is a measure of the hardships of
rural India that so many Dalits in recent years are migrating to
cities for back-breaking, often unregulated jobs, and that those who
remain in their villages consider sharecropping a step up from day
labor. On a journey across these villages with Mr. Prasad, it is
difficult to square the utter destitution of his people with Dalit
empowerment. In one village, the government health center has
collapsed into a pile of bricks. Few homes have toilets. Children run
barefoot. In Gaddopur, the Dalit neighborhood still sits on the edge
of the village — so as not to pollute the others, the thinking goes —
and in the monsoon, when the fields are flooded, the only way to reach
the Dalits' homes is to tramp ankle deep in mud. The land that leads
to the Dalit enclave is owned by intermediate castes, and they have
not allowed for it to be used to build a proper brick lane.

Indu Jaiswal, 21, intends to be the first Dalit woman of Gaddopur to
get a salaried job. She has persuaded her family to let her defer her
marriage by a few years, an audacious demand here, so she could finish
college and get a stable government job. "With education comes
change," Ms. Jaiswal said. "You learn how to talk. You learn how to
work. And you get more respect." Without education, the migrants from
Gaddopur also know, they can go only so far in the big cities that Mr.
Prasad so ardently praises. Their fabric-pressing factories in and
around Delhi have been losing business lately, as the big textile
factories acquire computerized machines far more efficient than their
own crude contraptions. One man with knowledge of computers can do the
work of 10 of their men, they say. Neither Mr. Kumar, nor the two sons
who work with him, can afford to buy these new machines. Even if they
could, they know nothing about computers.

The village Dalits do not challenge Mr. Prasad with such
contradictions as he travels among them preaching the virtues of
economic liberalization. He is a big man, a success story that makes
them proud. Among the broad generalizations he favors, he says that
Dalits aspire to marry upper-caste Brahmins to step up the ladder. He
married a woman from his own caste, who, he proudly points out, is
light-skinned. Across the caste ladder, fair complexion is still
preferred over dark. "Economic expansion is going to neutralize caste
in 50 years," he predicted. "It will not end caste."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/world/asia/30caste.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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