Father May Be An Elephant, and Mother Only a Small Basket, But…

This is a collection of short stories, written with the mix of innocence and experience that characterise the best fairytales, about daily village life as experienced from a Dalit – the ‘untouchable’ caste in India’s notorious class system – perspective. The final tale included here, ‘A Beauteous Light’, takes untouchability, literally, as its central theme. It focuses on the dilemmas that result from a Dalit girl touching a Brahmin (the highest caste) boy, rendering him impure, in order to save his life. Without spoiling too much, it’s fair to say that by the end of the tale, to the Brahmin’s family he might as well have died, and the Dalit community then have to take responsibility for his life. Overall, the stories here span from the ridiculous to the horrific. In another episode, a father secretly sends his daughter to a convent school in order that she not be ‘married to the village’ (and used as the sexual property of its high-status men). The price for his going against the ‘natural’ order of things is a life-threatening beating and exile.

While the plight of Adivasi and Dalit peoples has become something of a staple of translated literature from the Indian subcontinent (the work of Mahasweta Devi being a prominent example), Shyamala – who, unlike Devi, is a Dalit herself – is among the more insightful commentators when it comes to the way in which this (often technically illegal) injustice and oppression gets normalised, by upper and lower castes alike. ‘We should protect our interests at any cost,’ declares a Brahmin to his castemates on the subject of Dalits getting uppity in one story. ‘The only diffculty is that we cannot do agricultural work… If we kill them [the Dalits], who will do the agricultural work?’ But it’s ironic that, in many of Shymala’s tales, Dalit characters, thinking around their own oppression, exhibit an opposing idea of the responsibility to care from their Brahmin masters: ‘Does a tree throw away a person who has taken shelter in its shade?’ they ask. There is a certain amount of literary Romanticism in that.