‘Fiction helps us understand and make sense of our lives’
Diplomat and debutante author Devyani Khobragade speaks to Srija Naskar about her first book of fiction, which draws as much on her political philosophy as on her personal experiences.
The White Sari?
It’s not a shift but an extension, an evolution. Diplomacy involves understanding and connecting with different cultures and people, and communicating your worldview with them. Writing is much the same. Life led me to writing fiction. Fiction is where we go to understand our deepest emotions and to make sense of life, which can be more surreal and ethereal than fiction. It can help transcend stereotypes and make us get out of our own smaller worlds. Hence, when Chiki Sarkar asked me to write two stories on Dalits for Juggernaut, I thought I would give it a try. The White Sari is a wrap in which I wanted to present an aspect of our social reality. Caste inequities and romance do exist side by side in our lives. As someone growing up in this reality, I wanted to share the interplay of these conflicting ideologies and realities in a fictionalised form.
A. Q. Did you face any particular gender- or castebased discrimination during your years growing up in Maharashtra — incidents which informed your writing process? A.
While I am fortunate enough to be a secondgeneration Dalit who has received benefits of education and economic progress which would not have been possible without the Ambedkar movement, the fact remains that each generation, including mine, has faced its own form and degree of caste discrimination, bias and humiliations. The White Sari, however, is less about discrimination faced by the protagonist, Ratna, and more about the emergence of and pride in Dalit as a socio-political identity. This identity entails seizing of the reality of being the discriminated one but at the same time having the will to reject and discard that position of the oppressed and victimised.
Q. So what drew you towards the Ambedkar movement?
A. The White Sari has a deep connection to Ambedkar’s philosophy and movement. It is a story about the evolving social consciousness of a modern Dalit woman in the post-Ambedkar era. The protagonist and her community have a strong social and political identity as Dalits. This is a direct result of the Ambedkar movement which has brought freedom, pride and progress to millions of untouchables, including to my family. The Ambedkar movement has been part of our family for three generations now. My grandfather passed on Ambedkar’s teachings in his village through the oral tradition and was a grassroots worker of the movement. My father, Uttam Khobragade, was one of the founding members of the Dalit Panthers which held its first meeting in Siddhartha Vihar Hostel in Wadala, where he used to live as a struggling student. He imbued Ambedkar in me when I was five years old through an Amar Chitra Katha illustrated book on Ambedkar’s life. It has been an organic part of my upbringing, and continues to be so even now.
Q. In your book, the protagonist Ratna says, “My mother warns me to keep away from all men, especially high-caste men. Not that our men are paragons of virtue. Here, we are the Dalits within the Dalits” — a very important critique that often gets undermined among Dalit activists and academicians. A.
It is axiomatic that Dalit women face discrimination and alienation twice over. They are at the receiving end of the exploitative caste hierarchy and patriarchal order. This despite the fact that historically, leaders like Mahatma Phule and Babasaheb encouraged their wives to leadership positions and exhorted Dalit women to participate actively in social and political life. Unfortunately, thereafter this dimension was not developed, and was indeed lost. Dalit women are excluded from Dalit movement, as well as from the larger sisterhood of Indian feminist movement — both of which do not pay attention to their unique experience of the twice marginalised. That is why they carved out in the 1980s their own understand- ing of their realities under the term “Dalit Womanism”, inspired by the term “Womanism” coined by Alice Walker and other black activists in the US. This exclusion of Dalit women from empowerment struggles in India is also reflected in Dalit literature, which seeks to include them merely as a victim or an appendage. For long, Dalit women writers have been by and large invisible as compared to men. There is now, however, a significant body of literature produced in recent years. These women writers have written their own experiences, in autobiographical forms, which at the same time, express the realities and collective experiences of their communities. Significant among them and those which have touched me are the works of Bama Faustina, a Dalit Christian, Urmila Pawar and Baby Kamble. In the academic sphere too, there has been some robust work carried out on Dalit womanism/feminism by Sharmila Rege, Gopal Guru, Cynthia Stephen, Gail Omvedt, etc. Hence, just as the double discrimination against them, their deliverance is also to be two-fold: against caste discrimination and against patriarchy within and outside their castes.
Q. Would you then like to call Ratna a Dalit feminist? How would you describe her in a nutshell? A.
Ratna is “Babasaheb’s tigress”. She is a sensitive girl trying to face her own emotions and her social identity. She is aware and proud of being a Dalit. She understands that this exploitative order must change. She is also aware of how her gender impacts her life and circumstances within the Dalit community and outside in the larger Indian context. In this sense, she is a representative Dalit feminist/womanist character.
Q. The story has references to Bheem Sangeet as well. If you could shed some light on it for our readers. A.
Bheem Sangeet is integral to the popular culture of the Dalit Movement. As any oth- er music, it is best imbibed and felt viscerally rather than translated. Moreover, these popular songs as also the iconography of the Dalit movement are more appreciative of the feminist aspect of Dr. Ambedkar’s teachings and give more credit to his wife, Ramabai, and the reformative struggle of Dalit women that Babasaheb engendered through her. Earlier these songs were sung by the local village artists but later as the Dalit movement took a stronghold, many activists and artists contributed to the body of the work. With the advent of the internet and democratisation of the media, and as Dr. Ambedkar’s ideals are adopted universally, these songs have gained a new character, now even sung by mainstream singers like Hariharan, Shankar Mahadevan and even Sonu Nigam!
Q. As a diplomat and now as a writer of fiction which deals with the complexities of inter- caste marriages in India, how have you seen caste consciousness grow in your state and abroad? A.
Dalits and Adivasis constitute 19% of the state’s population, but last year, only 1% of all FIRs registered by the police were filed by members of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Of these, the Atrocities Act was applied in less than 40% of the complaints. The conviction rate under the Act has been even more dismal, an average of 7% in the last five years. A staggering 87% of the cases are still pending trial. It is a fact that progressive change in attitudes to inter- caste marriage has come about. Urbanisation, westernisation, modern professions have contributed to the same. But the most important reason is education and economic empowerment of the traditionally marginalised sections. As Dr. Ambedkar has pointed out, endogamy is the foundation of the caste system. Caste is perpetuated through marrying within the caste, and not giving girls to a lower caste in marriage. Intercaste marriages are far more common now but the touchstone remains how willing is a high-caste family to “give” its girl in marriage to a lowcaste boy. Even the reverse is not without pockets of challenges. In a traditionally stratified society, growth of caste consciousness is inalienable from social and political empowerment of the marginalised. It is a reality. Democratic polity in such a society has led to further entrenchment of caste identities. There is no running away from this fact and more and more, we see the process of Sanskritisation, i.e. the lower castes aspiring to be like the upper ones, turned on its head. However, in a country as diverse as India, which I have the privilege to represent abroad as a diplomat, various types of identities converge as concentric circles at the national level. We all belong to some caste, language group, state, class, etc. at the same time. The uniqueness of the Indian identity and the complex process of the association of diverse groups, castes and communities with it is a fascinating aspect of our national existence.
“The White Sari has a deep connection to Ambedkar’s philosophy and movement. It is a story about the evolving social consciousness of a modern Dalit woman in the post-Ambedkar era. The protagonist and her community have a strong social and political identity as Dalits. This is a direct result of the Ambedkar movement which has brought freedom, pride and progress to millions of untouchables, including to my family.”