Café Dissensus

By Anamika Purohit

“How is caste? Where is it?
It isn’t seen so does it live inside the body?” (Nimbalkar 123)

Despite the fact that Nimbalkar’s poem, “Caste”, grapples with the difficulty of defining caste in tangible terms, some of the rather specific and pointed definitions of caste come from Dalit Literature, indicating the pronounced existence of caste both as a marker of identity and a source of a lifetime of exploitation for those who are placed lowest on the hierarchy of castes created and propagated by the ideology of Brahmanism. While many of these definitions underline the experiential basis of caste, one may be able to unpack a distinctly physical or epidermal aspect to them that emanates from the politics of pollution by touch. In fact, the organic choice of the lower caste community to conceive of and actively use the bottom-up appellation, ‘Dalit’, instead of the hegemonically imposed term ‘untouchable’, is in itself indicative of a resistant desire to confront an entire ideological system of perpetuating marginalisation based on the dichotomisation of pure and polluting bodies, as it were. While it is assumed that anything on the surface-level is rendered superficial and bereft of any nuanced awareness or analysis, most of the articulations of caste exploitation in Dalit Literature exist in terms of wounded, violated, and supposedly contaminating skins of Dalit bodies and/ or spaces because it is on the epidermal surface that the supposed pollution of the so-called ‘un-touchable’ Dalit body resides, and it is on this surface that the violence born out of caste exploitation is experienced.

In her autobiographical essay, “The Story of My Sanskrit”, Kumud Pawde states: “[A]lthough I try to forget my caste, it is impossible to forget. And then I remember an expression I heard somewhere: ‘What comes by birth, but can’t be cast off by dying — that is caste.’” (97). Caste is, thus, experienced by Pawde as an undesirable, perhaps, polluting skin that cannot be cast-off, and is an undeniable element of the Dalit life-world. Waman Nimbalkar, in his poem, “Caste”, speaks of the experience of caste for a lower caste person in terms of thorns on the skin, and tears welling up in the eyes: “My skin would suddenly shiver with little thorns,/ My eyes could not hold back the tears” (123). Thus, despite the near-abstract existence of caste as something that cannot be tangibly seen on the body, as a colour or a mark, the experience of caste, for a Dalit, is acutely felt on the surface of the body in keeping with the Brahmanical concept of the polluting touch.

Pollution by touch marks an integral component of caste exclusion both in terms of body and space. In her analytical essay, “Representing Dalit Selfhood”, Anupama Rao recounts an incident written by Ambedkar about his childhood experience of being on a train where he was initially assumed to be an upper-caste child by the station-master only to be later subjected to a visceral response of revulsion once his real identity was revealed to the station-master. According to Rao, then, “Caste identity is … different since it is not manifest upon the body, permitting some amount of dissimulation” (n.p.). However, this dissimulation, as is made evident in the incident above, is perpetually precarious, and the revulsion of the upper-castes resulting from an eventual discovery of the caste identity of a Dalit individual is far greater in its horror of having contacted a polluting surface, as it were. The concept of pollution becomes further subject to interrogation since it does not necessarily equate with literal dirt or lack of hygiene, as it were. For instance, Pawde, in the essay discussed above, expresses a sense of bewilderment as a child, when, despite having rather high standards of hygiene, her very presence was seen as repulsive by the upper caste families in her village:

The girls who studied along with me were Brahmins or from other higher castes.  […] Right in front of me, the mothers would warn their daughters, ‘Be careful! Don’t touch her. Stay away from her. And don’t play with her. Or I won’t let you into the house again.’ […] Every day, I bathed myself clean with Pears soap. […] What’s more, if one were to compare houses, our house was cleaner than theirs. (99) [Italics added].

Pawde’s example indicating the horrifying response of the upper caste families with regards to the possibility of their children touching her is illustrative of the paradox of untouchability explained by Arjun Appadurai, in his essay, “The Haptic and the Phatic in the Era of Globalization”, which reverses the very conception of untouchability rendering the Brahmins as the ‘superior Untouchables’ on the basis of their “anxiety about touch that impels them to avoid touching others or being touched by others, especially by the lowest castes” (4). This paradox functions as a means to further unpack the caste hegemony that confers on the Brahmins the power to “determine the conditions of their touchability, while the unclean castes only endure theirs” (Appadurai 4).

The anxiety of pollution, indicated in the aforementioned example, primarily emanates from an ideological association of the Dalit body with manual labour that is deemed as subordinate, and therefore, soiling, by the upper-castes, who have hegemonised the superiority of mental labour (‘White-collar’ labour, as it were), which lies in their exclusive custody. However, the nature of the manual labour that is specifically thrust upon the Dalits is further subject to investigation, for it functions as a means to unpack that which is deemed as filthy, contaminating or polluting about such a labour by the Brahmins. Sukirtharani, in her poem, “Portrait of My Village”, published as recently as 2012, foregrounds the inhuman labour of waste disposal and scavenging that is still (perhaps, forcefully) thrust upon the Dalit community in her village.

“When the single measure of paddy –
flung to us for carrying away and burying
their dead animals – turned to chaff,
the tormenting hunger that followed
still moves in the memory” (n.p.)

Not only do these lines underline the exploitative working conditions of the menial manual labour thrust upon the Dalits, but they also bring to the surface the need for the upper castes to designate members of an outsider caste to deal with the filth of waste-disposal and scavenging.

“Our bare feet are drenched
by the pain of caste that drips from our lips
as we drink tea from palm-leaf cups,
standing at an untouchable distance…” (n.p.)

The unequal wages (mostly paid in kind) tendered from an ‘un-touchable’ distance helps unpack the sense of abject horror that the upper-castes experience in relation to the Dalit hands “carrying away and burying their dead animals.” Critical thinker, Julia Kristeva, in her book, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, explains the concept of abject in terms of the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a sudden collapse of meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between categories of subject and object or self and other. Thus, abject horror emanates from the fear of the loss of the boundary that exists between and establishes the formal sanctity and distinctness of the categories of subject/ object, self/other, as it were. For Kristeva, then, the abject is about “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules…” (4).

Kristeva’s concept aligns with Appadurai’s analysis of the constant struggle of the Brahmins toward the insulated, pure, untouched ‘Sacred Brahmin self’ that is free of the “slavery to their own blood, semen, fecal matter, sweat, hair and saliva.” According to Appadurai, despite the power to determine the terms of their own touchability, the supposed insulation and purity that Brahmins aspire for themselves is always subject to cracks and fissures given that “touching can never be entirely avoided in a world of human exploitation” (Appadurai 4), and the human “body is always dragged back into its urine, its feces, its semen, its sweat, hair, nails and menstrual blood, all of which are built to exit the body, only to grow and return forever” (Appadurai 8). It is, therefore, not surprising in the least that the laborious tasks of waste disposal are relegated to the charge of Dalits, who, in Appadurai’s conception, are paradoxically turned into saviours constantly safeguarding the myth of the pure Brahmin body by isolating it from all possible filth: “The Untouchable, in his role of scavenger is the slave who saves, for he ceaselessly tries to carry away this abhorrent filth, becoming him or herself a sort of moral infrastructure, more important than all castes, or any castes, but the key to their constant effort to resist the haptic intimacy of their own bodily leavings” (Appadurai 8). Practices of untouchability, thus, become a crucial foundation of caste exclusion, and a means for upper castes to perpetually bring into existence their assumed corporeal purity each time they shun any physical contact with the lower castes or express visceral horror at such a possibility. Sukirtharani, thus, in “Portrait of My Village”, mentions the exact bodily posture to be maintained by the Dalits even while receiving the wages for manual labour – “received with palms cupped and raised” (n.p.) – so as to avoid being seen and acknowledged by the upper castes.

The ideology of the polluting touch may further be seen in the spatial exclusion of Dalits in rural as well as urban spaces, which is often spoken of in corporeal terms in Dalit Literature. Namdeo Dhasal, in his poem, “Kamatipura” reconstructs the locality of Kamathipura, a well-known red-light district in Mumbai, and a home to the dispossessed population of the city, such as the hoodlums, the petty thieves, the pimps and the prostitutes, by using the analogy of a porcupine that comes alive in celebration of the dehumanisation and violence of the worst kind: “As the night gets ready for its bridegroom, wounds begin to blossom” (44). For Dhasal, the epidermal surface of Kamathipura, a Dalit ghetto of marginalisation and exploitation, is rendered perpetually defiled by the violence of syphilitic sores, deformed iron eyes, and blossoming wounds (44). Dilip Chitre elaborates on the subordinate status of the Dalit ghettos in Mumbai that are often termed as the ‘number two’ or do-number world connoting “the black market, unaccounted money, the contraband, the illegitimate and the clandestine – or in short, of criminal origin and character. In Namdeo’s usage, the word acquires further shades and deeper connotations: it means second-class human beings, a second-hand world, a subordinate society, and inferior zone and so forth” (Chitre, 100-101) [Italics in Original]. In his poem “Kamatipura”, Dhasal conceives of this marginalised locality as a violated Dalit body that has crude bodily movements and is perpetually wounded. In fact, he urges the supposed outsider middle-class-upper-caste reader to imagine the experience of shedding this skin that has thus been violated by a lifetime of exploitation. Specifically foregrounding the sex workers who often bear the pain of sexual violence and exploitation on their skins, Dhasal urges for their wombs, that are often poisoned to prevent any scope of birth, to be rendered disembodied, thereby violating the very sanctity of the inside and outside of a human body:

“Shed your skin, shed your skin from its very roots
Skin yourself
Let these poisoned everlasting wombs become disembodied.
Let not this numbed ball of flesh sprout limbs
Taste this
Potassium cyanide!” (44)

For Bali Sahota, in his essay, “The Paradoxes of Dalit Cultural Politics”, this desire of relinquishing the body that has been dehumanised, deemed as polluting, and has undergone generations of pain and exploitation is an integral component of Dalit Literature: “What becomes most manifest is the struggle to relinquish the untouchable body for something more ethereal and less particularly marked. And yet this struggle makes the body all the more acutely felt. In Dalit poetics, a body deemed polluted and thus inassimilable to a larger ruling society becomes an object of ironic negation” (200).

Moreover, as Aniket Jawaare argues in his work Practising Caste: On Touching and Not Touching, a significant aspect of the regulation of norms of touchability by the upper castes is to control the very traces of the lower-caste bodies, “such as heat on a chair or a bed and body smells that are left behind” (173), which are an iteration even further than the epidermal surface. The attempt of the upper-castes to regulate even the traces that emit from the bodies of the lower castes, which, according to Jawaare, are, in fact, diffusions because of their multiplicity, and slippery, unintentional quality, is akin to a Foucauldian form of capillary-like, all pervasive power (that Jawaare refers to), and renders the practice of caste exclusion all the more widespread (and effective) based on the ideology of the polluting trace, which goes even further than touch. It is interesting to recall Dhasal’s poem, “Speculations on a Shirt”, in this context, for it ends with what seems like a fitting response to this pervasive regulation of the supposedly contaminating trace of the lower-castes:

“A human being shouldn’t become so spotless.

One should leave a few stains on one’s shirt.

One should carry on oneself a little bit of sin” (Dhasal, 62).

In “Kamatipura”, Dhasal attempts to eventually embrace, and claim the space of Kamathipura, for it is on the wounded, polluted but tangible surface of this violated space that he locates the possibility of transformation, and hope – a lotus to bloom, indicating in the organic and fecund quality of this space the Dalit community’s possibility toward inventiveness and transformation on their own terms instead of awaiting a change from the external world:

“O Kamatipura,
Tucking all seasons under your armpit
You squat in the mud here
I go beyond all the pleasures and pains of whoring and wait
For your lotus to bloom.
— A lotus in the mud” (44)

Sukirtharani extends this sense of resistant transformation to apply to the entire geography of the Dalit body, and the space of a village in her poem, “Nature’s Fountainhead”. The speaker of this poem militantly claims and reclaims the space of her body, and her village by using the analogy of excess. Surface in this poem is configured as a boundary, a constriction or limitation, which needs to be broken or destroyed by breaking that very surface (epidermal and geographical) that records or absorbs caste oppression, violence, or exploitation. The speaker, thus, re-embodies herself as those forces of nature that defy all regulations by rising above the surface, and are perpetually in excess:

“Say you bury me alive.
I will become a green grass-field
and lie outspread, a fertile land. […]
You may frame me, like a picture,
and hang me on your wall;
I will pour down, away past you,
like a river in sudden flood.
I myself will become
earth
fire
sky
wind
water.
The more you confine me, the more I will spill over,
Nature’s fountainhead.” (n.p.)

In conclusion, Dalit Literature assists in rearticulating the definition and experience of caste by helping readers unpack the ideology of pollution by touch. This alters the conventional perception of ‘skin-deep’ as less significant, or superficial. It is, in fact, on the epidermal surface of Dalit bodies and spaces that the highest form of caste exploitation, marginalisation, and violence is made to reside, thereby making the epidermis the centre of any definition of caste, and altering the very conception of ‘untouchability’. This article has probed into selected examples from Dalit Literature, as well as secondary essays on it in order to analyse the hegemonic conception of pollution, norms of touchability, and their application in varied contexts of caste exploitation in urban and rural spaces. The article has further located possibilities of resistant and inventive transformation within the very examples of Dalit Literature chosen for analysis in order to invest hope in the efforts of a subaltern community to rearticulate the status quo of caste-exploitation, and to interrogate ideological concepts and practices associated with caste-hierarchy. The epidermal surface exists at the centre of this analysis.

Note: The quoted line is from the poem, “Kamatipura”, by Namdeo Dhasal. For complete citation details, check the Works Cited.

Works Cited

Appadurai, Arjun. “The Haptic and the Phatic in the Era of Globalization.” Glocalism 1. Mar. 2022. https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/glocalism/article/view/20483. Accessed 28 February 2024

Chitre, Dilip.  “Namdeo’s Mumbai”. A Current of Blood by Namdeo Dhasal. Translated by Dilip Chitre. Navayana Publishing, 2011

Dhasal, Namdeo. “Kamatipura” A Current of Blood. Translated by Dilip Chire. Navayana Publishing, 2011

Dhasal, Namdeo. “Speculations on a Shirt” A Current of Blood. Translated by Dilip Chire. Navayana Publishing, 2011

Jawaare, Aniket. Practising Caste: On Touching and Not Touching. Fordham University Press, 2019

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia UP, 1982

Nimbalkar, Waman. “Caste”. Translated by Graham Smith. An Anthology of Dalit Literature (Poems). Edited by Mulk Raj Anand and Eleanor Zelliot. Gyan Publishing House, 1992.

Pawde, Kumud. “The Story of My Sanskrit”. Translated by Priya Adarkar. Poisoned Bread: Marathi Dalit Literature. Edited by Arjun Dangle. Orient Longman Limited, 1992.

Rao, Anupama. “Representing Dalit Selfhood”. Dalit Perspectives: A Symposium on the Changing Contours of Dalit Politics, Feb. 2006 558 Anupama Rao, Representing Dalit selfhood. Accessed 30 January 2024

Sahota, Bali. “The Paradoxes of Dalit Cultural Politics.” Claiming Power From Below: Dalits and the Subaltern Question in India. Edited by Manu Bhagavan and Anne Feldhaus. Oxford University Press, 2008

Sukirtharani. “Portrait of My Village”. Translated by Lakshmi Holmström. Lyrik-Line. https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/portrait-my-village-13096. Accessed 30 January 2024

Sukirtharani. “Nature’s Fountainhead”. Translated by Lakshmi Holmström. Lyrik-Line. https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/natures-fountainhead-13097?showmodal=en. Accessed 30 January 2024

Bio:
Anamika Purohit is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Jai Hind College, Autonomous. She has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Mumbai, and specialises in the fields of English literature and Culture Studies. Her doctoral work examines the relationship between the geographical entity of the city-space and the literary entity of the ‘city text’ using spatial criticism as a tool. She has had many research publications in noteworthy journals. Apart from being a researcher, Anamika enjoys creative writing in English as well as Hindi, and has had a few of her creative pieces published in books and on different online platforms. In her free time, she loves to dissect popular music and films.

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