Workshop at EFL-University.
Workshop Day 1- Dalit Writings
Kalyan Rao, Dalit writer, has written Untouchable Spring which was released in Telugu ten years back. He came to promote the English translation. He spoke eloquently on Dalit writing, on how they borrow from their grandmothers and how the arts, music and oral culture of the Dalits have been marginalised and kept out of history. The Dalit page is missing. His art of writing comes not from the Western masters, his art is inherited from his grandmother would could not read or write but who could tell wonderful tales. Kalyan Rao vehemently argued for space for Dalit writing and art.
Gogu Shyamala, a Dalit writer and activist, spoke about the necessity for land reforms and Dalit lands which needs to be given back to them. She spoke in Telugu. She has written books for children which are not regular tales but about the life of Dalit children.
Next came Susie Tharu, who spoke on the Dalit writing.
Workshop Day 2 Dalit and Women's writing
Maya Pandit spoke about women's writing.
Parthasarthi spoke about colonialism and caste and Venkat Rao spoke about Dalit conversion and Christianity. There was an interesting discussion following Partha's presentation when Javed Alam challenged Nicholas Dirk's and Bernard Cohn's assumptions that the census and enumeration solidified caste. He asked pertinently, what was colonial about enumeration. Was caste the same in pre-colonial times. He warned about blindly follwing Dirks and Cohn without adopting a critical lens.
Workshop Day 3 History and Hyderabad
Narendra Luther, spoke of the History and Culture of Hyderabad. His presentation was dumbed down by the fact that he gave the history of the kings and showed slides of palaces and all. What was he saying which was new which we couldn't find in normative history textbooks?
Rajagopal spoke about the history of nationalism in South India.
Hoshang Merchant, known gay writer and critic, gave a lively and provocative paper on homosexuality.
Worshop Day 4- Media
Padmaja Shaw spoke on TV and print Media, giving facts and figure without showing what it amounted to.
Aniket Alam, asssistant Editor of EPW, spoke about the history of print media in India. He raised an interesting point of how newspapers were read collectively and was a collective act rather than an individual one.
Madhav Prasad spoke on motherhood in Hindi cinema, showing a clip from Mother India and then from Wake Up Sid, to show how the role of the mother has changed.
The last paper was a respite from the other two, and there was a casual and aimless discussion which amounted to nothing, which was indeed frustrating.
Workshop Day 5- Economics and Politics in India
This was the most intersting session, with the father and son duo of Aniket and Javed Alam making presentations.
Aniket Alam spoke on the political economy of India. He made interesting points. One was that the capitalist class in India emerged along with the democratic movement in India. It gained political support form the anti-colonial movement. I asked him to elaborate on this and give a few examples. He replied that traders such as the Tatas and the Birlas allied with the nationalist elites, thay allied with Congress, became Gandhians and often followed a simple lifestyle. In the following discussion, Javed Alam commented that when calculating economy one needs to take care of non-monetary and monetary economy. At the same time, the purcahsing power parity is different for India. For instance, a person can have three meals in India on 1 $ a day. One needs to take into account this difference in prices.
Aniket, himself a Leftist, towards the end became vehemently critical about the Left. He said that when FDI comes into India, The Left makes a big hue and cry, but what happens to them when Indians buy agricultural land in Ethiopia and other African countries? Can't they see that Indians too are being exploitative and emperialist?
Javed Alam spoke next. Alam is the Chairman of the Indian Council of Social Sciences. He is a well-known Marxist and has written various books, including Who Wants Democracy published in 2004. Here is what he said.
Each society develops its own model of democracy. That is why democracy in India is more appropriate to Indian democracy.
India is not a multi-cultural society but a culturally diverse/plural society. Multi-cultural society, the term has come from the Canadian context which includes immigrant experience and the diaspora, where there is no meeting point. In a culturally plural society there are meeting points, there are common philosophical concepts.
The democratic universals of liberty, equality, dignity etc are actualised in two ways. One, these values are actualised through policies, and two they are actualised through institutions. The battle for equality in India is in terms of community: coomunity access to education, medical facilities etc.
Indian capitalist development has happened very fast, yet it is unable to solve India's social problems. There is hierarchical inequality in India. The Dalits and the Backward Castes have an unfreedom which is different from that of the European model. Their unfreedom is one of jati. It is a collective unfreedom, in ascending and descending order.
Democracy has not solved the problem but has instead provided sites of struggle, it has provided space which was not there earlier. The Dalits and an disadvantaged group have verbal inadequacies. When they argue, there is a din, but yet they are operating with a rationality which demands equality, freedom, dignity etc.
Democracy in India is resilient in the face of institutional decline. With the democratic upsurge, people enter as direct actors, this is marked by the entry of the Dalit in politics. This is the era of self-representation. TV is the most unrepresentative of mediums, there are no Dalits of OBCs there.
There are participatory demands and contraction of liberal values. The trajectory from community to individual autonomy is done complete.Communities still demand full allegiance. This absence of the autonomous individual stands in the way of liberal values but not in the way of participatory values. Have participatory values been producing results in the absence of liberal values? Yes.
The fight for freedom is done through communities. The privilidgentsia (elite) occupied earlier the middle classes. Now the Dalits are occupying it, there is the emergence of a new middle class. The Jati is internally egalitarian, but not externally so. The new middle class, is in a hurry to acquire the benefits which are making them break the queue, they are flouting the rules of the game. This legitimacy is acquired by simply being in the democratic process.
The caste system as it existed earlier has disappeared. The Dalits and other lower castes don't believe in the Varna ideology. They don't believe that they are lower. It is only a section of the upper caste which still believes in this ideology.
There is also no Sanskritisation is put forth by MN Srinivas. Instead, the the individual castes are fighting for secular demands: job, education, medical water etc. The castes are becoming akin to communities. Alam was also critical of Partha Chatterjee and Ashish Nandy's positions.
The discussions were lively, so were the presentations.
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