Dalit Paradigm
Author : Priti Nath Saxena
Publisher : Rawat Pubns
Price : Rs 595
Readers will find in this book the basics for understanding Dalits — history of the term and the meanings attached to it, related movements, and the approach of the nation towards ‘them’, writes SHEENAM BATRA
Priti Nath Saxena’s book attempts to critically engage with the Dalit identity; its definition, representation and conceptualisation. She delineates the genealogy of the word Dalit from a plethora of interdisciplinary references (literary, historical, political and sociological) across the diverse temporalities of Indian history — from the Aryan age to Bhakti period, to colonial India to post colonial India. This genealogy is extremely resourceful as it helps the author to make pertinent observations and draw their attention to the readers. A panoply of interdisciplinary references along an expansive frame of time elucidate that the Dalit has been a persistent concern though injudiciously treated. Saxena highlights the paradox of the fluid slippages that have occurred with time in the definition of the Dalit and yet, the rhetoric of the Dalit which is never allowed to dissipate. She identifies this as a manoeuvre to subtly keep alive the oppression of the Dalits and with varied representations and definitions to exploit them according to the leisure or urgency of political suitability. But through these modifications in the idea of the Dalit, the author also records multiple registers of the evolution of the Dalit consciousness and the Dalit movements.
Saxena produces a nuanced reading of the Dalit movements and the latter’s inability to flourish into mass scale movements. The author underlines the fragility of the Dalit movements and the political parties which are vociferous yet inefficacious in articulating Dalit concerns. She shows how these movements can easily be splintered and compromised because the Dalits are seen as instrumental only for synecdochic access to the vote bank and agenda for political parties.
Yet, Saxena is not completely distrustful or dismissive of the political efforts. But she maintains that political lure to define and understand the Dalit is not efficacious. The author offers us an alternative perspective, with its premise in the neo-caste realist theory, to envisage and understand the Dalit. This theory challenges the rigid stratification of the society along the lines of the caste and it proposes that the sanctity and rigidity of tasks allocated along the parochialism of caste are not and cannot always be followed and how some of these tasks cut across the caste lines. The neo-caste realist theory proposes a more dynamic, pragmatic and egalitarian approach for the formation of society.
The author in her book draws various parallels and intersections of a particular caste job across various other castes and class. She offers an example that if the Dalits' traditional duty is to pick and clean excreta, detritus, it is also a duty of a mother to clean her baby, or the duty of a nurse towards a patient, or the duty of a cognate towards a bed-ridden person, or one’s duty towards oneself in our daily ablutions. The author makes such categorical and rigorous ideas of duty related to a particular caste nebulous. She makes them more flexible and points out to the readers that such stringent notions of caste and duty are not viable when it comes to everyday practice in our culture.
Saxena’s argument appeals and stems powerful because she chooses quotidian instances to disturb the barriers drawn by caste and duty. This is an extremely prolific strategy as the author promises through these pedestrian examples a commonsensical, personal and a democratic critical reflection and engagement in the readers. Through these commonplace examples, she shifts the onus on the self and therefore, induces ethicality to interrogate the idea of the Dalit and at the same time redeems the latter from the taboos.
The author tells the readers that the word Dalit comes from Dalan which means oppression. She adopts a more generalized meaning of the word Dalan and irrespective of temporality and spatiality cites various instances of oppression in the form of patriarchy, rape, terrorist attacks, etc. Thus, the author offers a pan-Indian, universal, globalised and a hybrid model and anticipates a paradigm which is a constructive, expansive and a humanitarian approach to integrate various oppressed collectives seamlessly cutting across gender, class, race and other tautological power oppressive equations. Through a basic exercise and understanding of the word Dalan, the author naturalizes the idea of Dalit. In a sense that each one of us is oppressed in a way, we are Dalits. Therefore, the author understands the Dalit not in a particular, typical and homogenous fashion but in a more generalised and heterogeneous manner which prioritizes the collective and a sense of solidarity over the personal.
Though the author proposes a visionary and an idiosyncratic paradigm for the Dalit, nevertheless, there are a few difficulties with her argument. Bringing the various oppressed collectives in solidarity, definitely shatters the conventional idea of marginality as inconsequential, nevertheless, to subsume all the oppressed collectives within the matrix of a singular, seamless paradigm would necessarily compromise, neutralize and dilute the politics and the essential concerns of those individual groups of collectives. Further, her emphasis on the collective over the personal pushes the trauma of individual experience to the periphery.
The author at times offers a partisan view of political parties without substantially elaborating their intentions and efforts. The book makes references across various disciplines, temporality and spatiality which are sometimes naively elementary and cursory. The lexicon of the book and its arguments need to be a little refurbished as the book seems to be a little compact compared to the ideas the author desires to articulate.
The reviewer is an Assistant Professor and a research scholar in the Department of English, University of Delhi