The persistence of Dalit history
The first time April was celebrated as Dalit History Month was in the year 2003. It was declared on the cover of a little-known little magazine called The Dalit. What occasioned this celebration of Dalit history? Part of it was the inspiration provided by oppressed people elsewhere in the world—the celebration of Black history in the United States every February was a model. But the desire to celebrate Dalit History Month also came from the persistent erasure of Dalit life from the story we are told of the modern Indian state. In this history, Dalits are relegated to being beneficiaries of Savarna largesse, not active agents of their own liberation. The Poona Pact is portrayed as a favourable compromise; caste as a relic of the past; reservations as an unnecessary evil; and Indian civilisation as a joyful tradition that ought to be eulogised.
With Ambedkar’s birth centenary in 1992, many of these assumptions came to be challenged. The counter-history which was marginalised for so long fought its way back into memory. The bravado of Ayyankali; the scholarship of Iyothee Thass; the larger-than-life presence of Ambedkar; the revolutionary politics of Dadasaheb Gaikwad; the fiery creative energy of Dalit Panther—all troubled the uneasy self-consciousness of India. Those who tell their stories don’t realise that they were themselves making history.
The protagonists of this history include artists like Durgabai and Subhash Vyam (pictured above), who translated Ambedkar’s life story into the universal language of art. It includes storytellers like Ajay Navaria, who tells us of the discomfort of a Savarna at having a Dalit boss: An experience that Ambedkar himself suffered (presented in graphic detail in Bhimayana). There is Gogu Shyamala, who infuses magic into the quotidian, and makes the stark reality of caste plumb the fabular depths of literature. There are poets like Namdeo Dhasal and N.D. Rajkumar, who turn their disgust at humanity into inhuman verses that point towards the future. This history includes memoirists like Bhagwan Das and Siddalingaiah, who in telling their own stories preserve the memory of a movement that would have been lost to time. It includes historians like Shailaja Paik and Gail Omvedt, who remind us to not let nationalist fantasies overshadow reality.
In an amnesiac world, it is easy to consign Dalit history to history. Struggles become a thing of the past, and the world as it exists haunts us as an unchanging spectre. Twenty-three years ago, Navayana undertook the task of shepherding Dalit history to the public. This history is not a dead relic but one that continues to be written in the present. And yet, old patterns persist. Those who struggle for an emancipated world are ostracised and persecuted, even as their forebears are made into icons and appropriated as symbols. Navayana will keep bringing you the stories of those who remind us of this ongoing struggle for a different, freer world. Join us this Dalit History Month in reading their stories.
All Navayana books are available at discounted rates throughout the month. You can also get all 72 Navayana titles by purchasing the library box-set.
Read yourself into history.
(Featured Image of Durgabai and Subhash Vyam, the artists who made Bhimayana, at the grand launch in London at the Nehru Centre, 21 April 2011; picture by Susanne Hakuba)