The Hindu Business Line : Stark reality of Dalits

A WHISTLE and an air-conditioner in the early morning breeze sweeping the roads of Borivili had intimations of an innocence for Lachman Singh and me. The crows had not yet started on their cawing, the frogs were lying quiet in the water puddles and the usual crowd was not in place on the road. We were enjoying the rare luxury of emptiness. For Omprakash Valmiki, the Hindi Dalit writer from Barla village, in Muzzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, there was no innocence to the start of his life.

Joothan (Leftover) is the tale of Valmiki the Dalit in post-Indepedence India and the English translation by Arun Prabha Mukherjee brings out the pain of being an unwanted human being in the Hindi original.

In the preface Valmiki writes: "Dalit life is excruciatingly painful, charred by experiences. Experiences that did not manage to find room in literary creations. We have grown up in a social order that is cruel and inhuman. And compassionless towards Dalits". The translator admits to Joothan being the first of its genre "in the annals of Hindi literature. He, therefore, has broken new ground, mapped a new territory".

Over the last week, Lachman Singh's family had some trouble when Mumbai's rains drilled holes in the roof of Lachman's shack in the middle of rice fields. At around midnight, Lachman with grand-daughter Utsav in arms, came over and one pleaded with Lachman to stay on till the end of the monsoon when repairs could be made. In about five days, Lachman repaired his home and took back his family leaving Utsav with us. With the rains Lachman has little work to do. In his spare time Lachman Singh has been reading one's collections of English writing by Indian authors such as Amrita Pritam, Narayan, Kavery Nambisan and others. But when Vidya bought Valmiki's Joothan, Lachman got the first right to read as Valmiki writes about UP in a stark style. "Our house was adjacent to Chandrabhan Taga's gher or cowshed... . All the women of the village, young girls, older women, even the newly married brides, would sit in the open space behind these homes at the edges of the pond to take a shit. Not just under the cover of darkness but even in daylight. All the quarrels of the village would be discussed in the shape of a Round Table Conference at this same spot... . The pigs wandering in narrow lanes, naked children, dogs, daily fights, this was the environment of my childhood," goes Valmiki's life-song.

Walking with the breeze on our backs, Lachman brought up Joothan. "Bachpan mein, humlog Dalit basti ke pass nahin jaate the. Mataji mana kar thee thi aur pitaji na bolte the (In my childhood I never went near the Dalit basti. Mother banned us from going there while father always said no)," Lachman recalled. And added, "Joothan padne ke baad dukh lagtha hai (After reading Joothan one feels bad)."

Kancha Ilaiah's Why I am not a Hindu, Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature and Joothan cannot be easily kept aside; Valmiki solders one with guilt. If you kick a human he can only double up in pain and not write poetry, Lachman Singh intoned.

The writing is straight reportage with some bare poetry peeping out as Valmiki is a practicing poet working in the Ordnance factory in Dehradun, from where Lacman Singh comes.

Valmiki writes: "Pigs were a very important part of our lives. In sickness or in health, in life or in death, in wedding ceremonies, pigs played an important role in all of them. Even our religious ceremonies were incomplete without pigs. The pigs rooting in the compound were not the symbols of dirt to us but of prosperity and so they are today. Yes, the educated among us, who are still very minute in percentage, have separated themselves from these conventions. It is not because of a reformist perspective but because of their inferiority complex that they have done so. The educated ones suffer more from this inferiority complex that is caused by social pressures."

During a wedding the Chuhras waited outside wedding halls for "the little pieces of pooris, bits of sweetmeats, and a little bit of vegetable were enough to make them happy. The joothan was eaten with a lot of relish."

Being an outsider, Valmiki has re-worked the norms of Hindi literature by doubting the idyll of a village scripted by topline poet, Sumitranandan Pant. For Valmiki and Dalits village life has never been wonderful and is a "lie."

The Italian poet Eugenio Montale has written somewhere, "and I shall go on quiet among the men who do not turn, with my secret." Valmiki and the Dalits cannot stay quiet any more.

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