The Coming of Reason

How even the liberalising winds of change forgot the dark Dalit quarters of India

IFTINDER CAME LATE to some homes, it didn’t come to mine at all. My cousins and extended family found it supremely normal to ignore because we are still learning how to negotiate love-marriage discussions with our Dalit parents. Girls in my immediate world continue to have sari-related troubles with love and relationships more than anything else. In 2013, a cousin was made to leave an ongoing conversation with a prospective groom to go wear a sari and ‘show’—she promptly went to her room, locked herself in, and watched Grey’s Anatomy on full volume for the next 30 minutes. Her embarrassed parents and his slightly angry ones spent the next 30 minutes nursing their teacups and smiling painfully at each other.

Or, like in 2018, when another cousin was almost engaged and the groom’s family made a request. “Please tell her to wear a sari next time?” Her family said of course. A week later when they met again, my cousin wore a beautiful silk sari and said “no, thank you”. It is a strange position to be in: the young women in these instances had an odd power to say no differently but they continue to be trapped in a world they cannot entirely say no to.

This year, after decades of being solidly against love marriage, my mother took me aside at a family function and whispered, “We will accept a Muslim or a Christian boy also.” This is the same mother who wanted me married at 18 (not to the Hindu boy I was then in love with) and now has to deal with the idea that her 31-year-old daughter might never want to get married.

For the urban Dalit parent, this decade has been harsh and enigmatic in equal measure. When they moved to cities in the previous decade, they only had to prepare young Dalit adults to be competitive in school and college and then at work. But when they were saddled with the task of dealing with these adults as thinking individuals, who feel desire and fall in love, they were caught unawares. Nor were we prepared to deal with what was to come next. Negotiating with Dalit parents who are growing old in a Savarna world is challenging at various levels. When they raised us, with a firm hand covering their past, they brought us up to forget their histories and embrace things even they didn’t know how to own. In a world where there is a Savarna stranglehold over narratives of love and violence, Avarna desire is set up to fail even before it is known. The bitterness my generation of Dalit adults feels towards parents is a tangle of emotions, because it carries both anger and empathy; we confront our parents first as Dalits and then as parents.

In 2009, I made a modest contribution to the ‘pink chaddi’ campaign against the moral-policing excesses of rightwing conservatism. Later that year, I was devastated to learn that my father had made a generous contribution to Pramod Muthalik and his Sri Ram Sene—a sum of ten thousand rupees, donated ‘to protect Indian culture’. I was angry and exhausted, so I sent one more underwear and gave up. Some time ago, an Ambedkarite publisher asked me why my father was so rightwing and anti-Dalit. I laughed. What else did he expect a Dalit man in a Savarna world to be?

Although the 2010s was a decade of moral policing and love jehad, and protests against them both, and featured other watershed moments such as the repeal of Section 377, we are slowly, finally alighting on the truth that Dalit families, urban and non-urban alike, do not occupy the same time and space as real-time news does. We are either too far ahead, the news barely catching up with us, or so far behind that it sometimes feels like we are still in the ’90s. We don’t seem to live in real time even though the consequences of our survival play out in real time. It is not easy to have a good sense of what is happening in this country if one hasn’t lived in it in real time. In a bizarre twist, Twitter, of all places, seems to have become the haunt where the younger generation of Dalits experiences a sense of real time. For many Dalit women, being in such a real-time community is a first. Activist Asha Kowtal, general secretary of the All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch, says community love is much more valuable to her than the love between any two people.

However, for Christina Dhanaraj, advisor for alternative social media network Smashboard, a community does not always guarantee that. “Lack of love is at the heart of our oppression,” she says, adding that “Dalit women, and specifically those that aren’t conventionally pretty or Savarna-like, will need to work hard at receiving love. This means they give, and give a lot, in many different ways, to get back crumbs. And you can still be undervalued in the community and inside relationships”.

The other thing this decade has produced is a kind of feminism that is finding it more and more inconvenient to accommodate Dalit women. At its core, this represents a failure of Savarna structures to understand love, violence or even desire that is different from their own. They are quick to censor and dismiss older versions of self in the face of rapidly developing newer versions. There was something familiar about Preethi, the mute heroine in the 2017 hit Telugu film Arjun Reddy, that I found hard to be repulsed by. Her incapacity to say ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘don’t’, ‘get lost’ bothered me, but only enough to remind me that 10 years ago, I was worse. Back in 2007, the violent, abusive Arjun Reddy kind of love was the only one I knew and wanted to know more of—the rage and its passion, its drama and its dullness. Not because there was violence at home or because I was consuming Bollywood or Tollywood, but because it was happening all around me, to friends, or their sisters. Not to mention that I too caught myself desiring girls like that. These were mostly straight-haired uppercaste girls whose demure appearance and behaviour I tried and failed to imitate. They were pretty but didn’t find any joke funny. Together, we were puzzled and put off by extremely different things, but the fact that they were equally popular with boys and girls made me believe that love stories (it didn’t matter what kind) were only made for girls like that. I didn’t think myself fit enough to be loved or desired in a way that could evoke any kind of passion, much less aggression. Today, I can say ‘thank god’ for that. But I shouldn’t be able to do this easily without nodding at all my previous selves. On a more significant note, the insistence—whether feminist or not— on calling out violence in films does not seem to have room for reconciliation with our older selves, when we mindlessly defended said violence or perhaps didn’t even recognise it. Had there been room, the changing and complicated nature of desire would also perhaps have merited a much more rigorous conversation. It is also baffling that a film produces more outrage than something more real and violent like the dehumanising Trans Bill, which, as of December 5, 2019, has received the President’s assent, and is now law.

IN A WORLD WHERE THERE IS A SAVARNA STRANGLEHOLD OVER NARRATIVES OF LOVE AND VIOLENCE, AVARNA DESIRE IS SET UP TO FAIL EVEN BEFORE IT IS KNOWN