The article, the blog post, and the comments section about India’s caste system.
Two article excerpts:
“There was found to be great, and at times violent, intolerance of displays of well-being, or public celebrations by Dalits. In many villages, bans operated on wedding processions on public (arrogated as upper-caste) roads. In 10 to 20 per cent villages, Dalits weren’t allowed even to wear fashionable clothes or sunglasses. They could not ride their bicycles, unfurl their umbrellas, wear chappals on public roads, smoke or stand without head bowed. Restrictions on their entry into Hindu temples averaged 64 per cent in 11 states, ranging from 47 per cent in UP to 94 per cent in Karnataka.“Untouchable” Dalits are a horrifying reminder of the absence of a global now, of a temporality that is devoid of lived praxis. A project last semester saw me investigate the heterogeneity of global time as evidenced by the existence of pre-modern (mob) social formations that, although coexistent with global capital, are built on codes that are antithetical to it. The phenomenon of untouchability, however, has greater if more personal stakes, through its embodied practices.
The research established that such restrictions endured even after conversion of Dalits to egalitarian faiths. In punjab, 41 of the 51 villages surveyed reported separate gurdwaras for Dalit Sikhs. Dalits who worshipped in gurdwaras frequented by upper-caste Jats were served in separate lines at the langar and were not permitted to prepare or serve the sacred food. In Maharashtra, despite mass conversions of the Mahars to Buddhism, Dalits were denied temple entry in 51 per cent villages. In Kerala and Andhra, there are divisions in the church between Dalit converts and others, and discrimination even against ordained Dalit priests.”
Although I was very young when I lived in India, I clearly remember both the pride and distance I felt when old men, bodies creased with years of farming labor, would call me “Dorah” or “Chinna (small)-Dorah.” Translating the word is not within my ken, but it implied a title, a class based on landownership, weighed down by a tradition of respectful reserve that I did not feel justified invoking.
Historicizing the notion of a “global now” would probably take us to the creation of standard time and the concurrent industrialization that needed such mechanisms. However, cognizing a singular temporality that we all share has the effect of both dehistoricizing the particularity of a lived present and subsuming the temporal ruptures in the grand colonial-industrial narrative of a past-backwardness and present-enlightenment. Moreover, this progress narrative is deployed as judgment and categorization based on the lived actions, which themselves are imbedded within other narratives (religious, political, caste). Less abstractly, the prohibitions on Dalits to wear sandals, ride their bicycles, smoke, etc., are simultaneously conditioned by social narratives, the lived praxis of these narratives, and reinscribed into the “global now” to evince their backwardness and justified persecution.
The strange injunction against wearing fashionable clothing and sunglasses is based precisely on this logic. Such cultural signifiers would begin to close the temporal gap through bodily inscription, through a lived praxis, that announced their presence as constitutive of the present. Other prohibitions would be forced to shift away from the logic of “backwardness” and place greater emphasis on the historically rooted practices of exclusion, which in turn are troubled by the absence of temporal dissonance.
Wearing sunglasses is admittedly being politicized in this context, but is certainly not being offered as a solution to the complex and deeply imbedded insanity of caste prejudice. Rather, I am attempting to think through the bodily inscription and lived praxis of temporality, which both ruptures and responds to the “global now,” while negotiating the particular exigencies of a situation.
The swarming mosquitoes are scattered by the ceiling fan now turned to high and spinning so vigorously that I am sure it will dislodge and decapitate me. Thickening night and mating crickets are interrupted by a group of young voices whose eyes I just begin to see. I lift the flashlight (torch) next to the door and point it outside only to hear scurrying footsteps. On the bed again, I fix my gaze to the TV and wait for my favorite tv show. The young voices approach without distracting my awareness and are suddenly at the door. Children my age, dark and dressed in soiled scraps, lean in and smile. I launch from the bed and shoo them away, surprised by how naturally I imitated my uncles’ responses to stray dogs and beggars. Twice more, I run at the door shouting threats as they dart into the adjacent field; it’s become a game and I’m enjoying it.
Dad returns from the bathroom and has one of the children by his side. I…pause, baffled. He goes back to the door and yells for them, “Come here! Come on!” using the ‘ra’ suffix, appropriate for a Dorah talking to others.
Two or three sit next to me on the bed, five or six are on the hard cement floor and we all watch our favorite tv show.
