| F |
IVE WEEKS BEFORE INDIA CELEBRATED
its 50th year of independence, in Mata Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar in
suburban Ghatkopar East, a part of northern Mumbai where many Dalits
live, someone placed a garland of footwear around the neck of a statue
of Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the Dalit lawyer who drafted the Indian
Constitution that |
guarantees the fundamental rights that all Indians take for granted.
Even if not the worst atrocity committed against Dalits, it was a mean,
insulting act: many Dalits live in abject conditions; many are
routinely abused; and many have faced far worse physical atrocities.
The act of garlanding the statue with shoes was entirely unprovoked. It
seemed it was meant to incite a reaction; if not, at least to remind
the Dalits that they had to submit to those who had treated them with
contempt for centuries.
Ambedkar not only wrote the
rules by which India governs its society, he also empowered his
community to assert its rights, reclaim its dignity, and be proud of
its identity. And so, that July morning, Dalits gathered round the
statue, protesting what many viewed as desecration.
One has to be careful using a
word like ‘desecration’ while talking about Ambedkar, because he wasn’t
one for placing individuals on a pedestal. Indeed, in Anand
Patwardhan’s new documentary
Jai Bhim Comrade, which is
inspired from the incident at Ramabai Nagar, a leader says as much in a
speech to a crowd of Dalits: “Unfortunately, we gave up 330 million
gods, but made Ambedkar into a god. We wear Babasaheb (as he was
affectionately known) Ambedkar’s photo around our neck. On waking up,
we say ‘
Jai Bhim.’ Before sleeping, it is ‘
Jai Bhim,’ and when having a little drink, it’s ‘
Jai Bhim’.” Blind faith was not for him. Another speaker reminds his audience that they should not be Ambedkar
bhakta (devotees); they should be
anuyayi (followers).
But on that day, 11 July 1997,
the Dalits were angry and wanted to protest. The city’s police force
turned up at the site, and Manohar Kadam, then a sub-inspector with the
State Reserve Police Force, ordered his men to shoot. The protesters
were unarmed, and 10 died, including an autorickshaw driver who had
left his vehicle on the main road to see what the commotion was about.
Many years later, Kadam was found guilty for having ordered the firing
without adequate reason or warning. In May 2009, the Sessions Court
sentenced him to life. A month later, the Bombay High Court suspended
the sentence and released him on bail. The legal process continues.
Few believed the police account
of that day that the Dalit mob had turned violent. Over the next few
days and months, much of the police evidence of mob violence (including
the burning of an oil tanker) began to fall apart. But the case drags
on.
Meanwhile, the incident claimed
one more victim. Six days after the firing, Vilas Ghogre, a Dalit
balladeer who sang for the left-leaning theatre group, the Avahan Natya
Manch, ended his life. Ghogre, who used the
ektara to anchor
his revolutionary songs, had been depressed: he had recently been
suspended from Avahan because he had performed for Dalit politicians to
make ends meet, and the theatre group believed that his dalliance with
mainstream politicians eroded discipline.
Taking these fragments of the
story—an insult to a statue, police killings and an activist
balladeer’s suicide—Patwardhan has put together in a film shot and
edited over 14 years an extraordinary, engrossing and understated
history of Dalit and communal politics in Maharashtra, tracing the
origin of reforms to Jotiba Phule in the 19th century, who with his
wife Savitribai pioneered the education of women, and introducing us to
the brimming confidence of two cheerful, bright young Dalit sisters,
aptly named Samata (equality) and Pradnya (wisdom). He juxtaposes this
development of Dalit narrative with the cultural stagnation among the
upper castes, with their fetish for skin-lightening creams, and the
popularity of websites like SimplyMarry.com that advertise Brahmin
grooms and perpetuate the caste system, all within the framework of the
resurgence of exclusionary upper-caste pride in politics.
At nearly 200 minutes,
Jai Bhim Comrade is longer than
Sholay, GP Sippy’s 1975 blockbuster, or
Gandhi,
Richard Attenborough’s 1982 biopic, but I didn’t need to look at my
watch even once. That doesn’t mean it is fast-paced; it does mean it
lingers just long enough over an episode to gently move to the next.
Revolving around the Ramabai Nagar firing, the film makes transitions
to different stories using music as the glue that binds, ensuring that
the framework becomes stronger with each new layer of complexity. Built
upon a series of probing interviews that express sympathy for the
victim and raise tough questions to those who acquiesce with the status
quo without taking obvious sides, the film’s effect is sobering, with
the camera doing all the talking.
 |
Vilas Ghogre was a Dalit balladeer who sang for the left-leaning
theatre group Avahan Natya Manch. |
Ghogre was a balladeer, a
shahir, like the
powadé
singers of the past, who narrated heroic tales to educate their
audiences. Music is an essential aspect of Dalit politics: the loud
dholak; the occasional harmonium; the
ektara; but, above all, the
pawād, the rousing, booming voice. And, of course, words, words that inject pride, inspire courage and reinforce dignity. Such
jongleurs and balladeers go from slum to slum, colony to colony,
basti to
basti,
village to village, singing songs that resonate with contemporary
meaning and inspire people so that they don’t give up hope. Armed only
with the
ektara, some of these singers trace their tradition to devotional singers like the 16th-century Sant Tukaram, whose
Abhanga
(devotional poetry) continue to offer solace to many. The lyrics of
these modern-day balladeers may not be high poetry, but they lift the
spirits of the Dalits and give protest poetry a new rhythm.
So why would a balladeer like
Ghogre, whose lyrics were meant to offer hope, kill himself? Trying to
understand the motive behind any suicide is difficult, but Ghogre took
his own life at a time when the future of Dalit politics in Maharashtra
looked dismal. The right-wing Hindu nationalist alliance of the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Shiv Sena had come to power in
Maharashtra for the first time in 1995, following widespread communal
riots in Bombay in 1993, which had occurred within weeks of the
destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The inclusive, cosmopolitan
city Bombay had shrunk into a narrower identity—Mumbai, the ‘old’ name
being officially changed in 1996.
In a chilling scene in the film shot during this phase, the Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray refers to Muslims as “
landya”
(meaning ‘small penis’, a crude, contemptuous reference to ‘circumcised
Muslims’) before a large gathering of followers. As the Srikrishna
Commission, which inquired into the riots of 1993, shows, Thackeray
used that pejorative often in his speeches during those years.
Concurrently, the
marginalisation of Dalits became even more pronounced. Their party—the
Republican Party of India (RPI)—was disintegrating. I can remember at
least eight factions of the RPI active at various times, each named
after the leader who attempted to claim supremacy: Ramdas Athavale,
Prakash Ambedkar, Jogendra Kawade, (the late) BD Khobragade, RS Gavai,
BC Kamble, Raja Dhale and Namdeo Dhasal, each forging alliances with
mainstream political parties.
The rise of Hindu nationalism
coincided with the splintering of Dalit political consciousness among
many claimants to its primacy. With the Hindu right resurgent, what
would happen to the state’s Dalits who had emphatically rejected
Hinduism?
Patwardhan is easily among
India’s most thoughtful filmmakers: his documentaries force viewers to
think and to demand change. While overtly political, Patwardhan’s tone
is not didactic. I remember young people in the audience in tears after
an early screening of
Hamara Shahar (
Bombay: Our City;
1985), which humanised the lives of those who lived in the slums so
well that it shook the complacency of the city’s elite, who looked
disdainfully at the slums and wanted them removed. In
Ram Ke Naam (
In the Name of God;
1991), Patwardhan presciently observed the creeping Hindu nationalism
of the anti-Babri Masjid Ramjanmabhoomi movement, and how it could
destroy the intricately interwoven tapestry of a multi-everything
society like India.
Jang aur Aman (
War & Peace;
2002) was made during the years when India and Pakistan tested their
nuclear bombs, becoming de facto nuclear-weapon powers. The film
travels through the world of peace activists, focusing on the
belligerence of India and contrasting it with the pacifism of Japan.
 |
A man is being rounded up for protesting the police firing in Ramabai
Nagar that killed 10 Dalits on the afternoon of 11 July 1997. |
Patwardhan has made other
films, too, such as on the unionisation of Sikh farmworkers in Canada,
on ‘Shaheed’ Bhagat Singh, and on the livelihood of fishing communities
in India and Bangladesh. Throughout his long career, he has made films
without compromising his message: of compassion for the vulnerable. He
has challenged the powerful without shouting at them, letting the power
of his images, his irony and his deft cuts speak for him.
Patwardhan knew Ghogre, whose
music he had used in an earlier film—so his death troubled him; in
Ghogre’s despair, Patwardhan saw a helplessness that was at odds with
the revolutionary optimism of his songs. Ghogre’s politics was shaped
by two progressive movements—the left, which challenged economic and
political power structures, and the Dalit movement, which challenged
the social hierarchy in India. Maharashtra’s Dalits had shocked the
state out of its complacency when Shiv Sena-Dalit Panther riots broke
out in January 1974 in the Worli BBD chawls in Bombay. (The Dalits had
adopted the ‘Panther’ identity in 1972 after the Black Panther Party
formed during the civil rights movement in the US in the mid-1960s.)
When the Republican Party of India began to pull in different
directions, Ghogre aligned with the left. But, as noted earlier, the
left suspended him because it disapproved of his singing for Dalit
politicians and extolling their activities. That blow hurt him; his
life began to unravel, and the firing at Ramabai Nagar may well have
pushed him over the edge.
Using Ghogre’s passing as his
hook, Patwardhan sets about probing the history of Dalit activism in
Maharashtra. The resulting film is an education for India about the
extent of the discrimination and injustice that Dalits continue to
face, the cynical way political parties attempt to co-opt them, and the
tone deafness of the upper-caste middle class, which believes not only
that it is superior to Dalits, but is also convinced that the Dalit
problem has been solved.
Patwardhan also castigates the
Dalit leadership. In the scene where Thackeray is spewing venom at
Muslims, the camera sees, a few feet away, Namdeo Dhasal, the legendary
Dalit activist-poet who will receive a special Sahitya Akademi Golden
Jubilee award this November, and who, married to Mallika, a Muslim, has
somehow made his peace with Bal Thackeray, writing a column for the
Shiv Sena mouthpiece,
Saamana, and sharing a platform with the then RSS
sarsanghachalak
KS Sudarshan in September 2006. Patwardhan doesn’t have to say
anything; the image says what the words can’t convey about the Dalit
tragedy.
| AMIT CHAKRAVARTHY / TIME OUT |
 |
Anand Patwardhan at the first screening of Jai Bhim Comrade at BIT Chawl in Byculla, Mumbai. |
Patwardhan also shows the
renewed swagger of upper-caste Hindus, ranging from the sinister to the
ridiculous. Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, gets valorised
in Pradeep Dalvi’s play,
Mi Nathuram Godse Boltoy (‘I’m
Nathuram Godse Speaking’), and members of the audience come out
strutting, saying to the camera that Gandhi was wrong in taking up the
cause of Dalits. Konkanastha ‘Chitpavan’ Brahmins (or KoBras, the
acronym for Konkan Brahmins) demand that their genetic superiority be
recognised. In a bizarre cymbals-clashing and smoke-emitting tableau of
BJP leaders making a stage entrance as if floating in from outer space,
Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi emerges like an avatar, wearing a
mukut and spinning a chakra, accompanied by senior BJP leaders and serenaded by Lata Mangeshkar’s rousing rendition of
Vande Mataram from the 1951 film
Anand Math.
The coda is even more brazen, with a BJP candidate for the 2009 Lok
Sabha elections, Kirit Somaiya, canvassing for votes in, of all places,
Ramabai Nagar—where the firing took place under the rule of the Shiv
Sena-BJP alliance. And, yet, public memory is so short that even some
Dalits think it was the Congress in power at the time of the firing.
Patwardhan’s focus on
Maharashtrian Dalits may have been practical. He is from the state, and
understands its politics. But there is a deeper story here. This is the
state where Ambedkar was born, a state that divides north from south.
Go south of Maharashtra, and you enter a zone of accommodation where
the upper castes have accepted the rise of the lower castes. They live
with the reality that a large proportion of college seats and
government jobs are reserved for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled
Tribes. But north of Maharashtra, the upper castes revolt at the merest
hint of reservation, thinking that jobs and seats in colleges are
their
entitlement. It’s an entitlement they clothe in the language of merit,
implying that merit is hereditary and extending the life of Manu’s
appalling doctrine that codifies customary Hindu practices. Maharashtra
sits at the centre, a line of demarcation that is itself unable to
decide whether it should embrace progressiveness or resist it.
To be sure, reservations have
created an elite class within the Dalit community, too—a creamy layer.
But for anyone suggesting that the Dalits are now doing fine and don’t
need any further support would be wrong or blissfully unaware or
deliberately disingenuous. Think of the track record that says
otherwise: insults continue to be heaped on Dalits—as recently as the
1970s, human excreta was being flung into their wells; if they marched
in protest (as a Dalit woman recalls in the film), ‘they’ would throw
large grinding stones on the marchers from their highrise buildings.
Virulent upper-caste opposition to reservations continues. If a Dalit
falls in love with someone from an upper caste, violent retribution,
while no longer exactly common, is hardly unusual. A Dalit demanding
rights is often made an example of, usually violently: recall, if you
will, the Khairlanji episode of September 2006, in which all four
members of the Dalit Bhotmange family in Bhandara district were lynched
(the two women were paraded naked before being killed). It happened in
Maharashtra, the frontline of both the regressive north and the
progressive south.
And it is in
Maharashtra that Ambedkar showed a new path to the Dalits, urging them
to discard centuries of oppression by taking leave of Hinduism, even if
it meant turning their backs on the well-meaning but patronising
embrace of Mohandas Gandhi. While Gandhi meant well, his aim was not
the emancipation of Dalits but the reform of Hinduism. He wanted the
Dalits to remain part of the culpatory fold; his calling them Harijan
(Children of God) was well-intentioned but, according to Gandhi’s Dalit
critics, the rubric reinforced the existing hierarchy that the Dalits
wanted to overthrow. They sought equality, not tolerance, and Ambedkar
turned to Buddhism in the belief that its non-hierarchical ethos would
empower the Dalits: they would no longer feel beholden to the upper
castes; they would shed their fear. And many did.
In a telling sequence in the
film, Patwardhan takes us to Beed district in the Marathwada region,
where upper caste men raped a young woman. When her family challenged
the attackers, they were also beaten up. An old man from the family
tells Patwardhan’s all-seeing camera: “We are responsible for this. We
never got organised or converted to another religion. Had we done it,
we could have mentally discarded caste and made others understand we
are humans. We, Mangs, bear the brunt of injustice.”
Patwardhan asks him: “But those who converted to Buddhism have also faced atrocities.”
“Yes, it happens to Buddhists, too,” the old man says. “But they now have the strength to retaliate. We lack that strength.”
Inarguably, the Dalits who
heeded Ambedkar’s call have acquired this pride, this courage, their
empowerment coming primarily from education. And even as they demand
their rights, powerful and recalcitrant elements among the upper castes
want to crush their spirits even more. The film refers to an edict from
Manu: if the Dalits want to study, pour molten lead in their ears.
These ancient tables of caste are truly turned when you see, in a
terrific scene, school-going Dalit children laughing when a Brahmin
priest on a Hindi TV channel tells viewers they should utter a
particular mantra to cure themslves of some ailment.
How is an upper-caste stalwart
to tame such temerity? Perhaps garland with shoes a bronze statue of
Ambedkar to remind the Dalits of their long history of being
subjugated. Your leader may have written the Constitution, an
upper-caste hothead might say, but for us, he means nothing: That’s the
message of the footwear festoon.
What the Dalits seek of their
effrontery is not just nominal equality, but also respect and
dignity—it’s an inalienable right, but that right remains elusive.
Early in the film, Patwardhan takes us to a large garbage dump where we
meet a man whose job is to sort through the rubbish and load it on
trucks. In the waste he must clear is human excrement, which he must
carry on his head in a basket that has holes that often leak, and when
they leak, the human waste smears his body. He stinks. Why wouldn’t he?
He isn’t allowed to board buses; in trains, people don’t sit near him;
nor can he afford a rickshaw. So he must walk.
 |
|
During the rains—Mumbai’s
monsoons are harsh—his employers won’t give him gumboots or raincoat or
mask or rain-hat. This man has worked for 10 years at this site, 10 to
12 hours a day. At the end of each day, he takes home
73 ($1.40).
Through Jai Bhim Comrade,
Patwardhan shocks our senses and appalls our smugness continuously by
exposing us to such facts without embellishing them. Even as he shows
us raw injustices, Patwardhan notes the failure of the better-off to
see how the worse-off live. A student at an elite college in the city
says, with entirely misplaced certainty, that Dalits face no
discrimination, and that their situation has improved in the past
decade. On the screen you see plain data noting that each day, three
Dalits are raped and two are killed—and that the conviction rate of
crimes against Dalits is about one percent. Patwardhan then asks the
student if he knows any Dalits, or if he has had any direct experience
in support of his claim that their situation has improved. The student
looks slightly hesitant, and then shakes his head.
Other upper-class (and
upper-caste) Indians appear callous. One couple complains about the
crowds of Dalits that come every December to Dadar’s Chaitya Bhoomi, a
Buddhist memorial to Ambedkar, with a gate resembling an ornate Shinto
shrine torii and a white dome like a stupa, located where the ‘Father
of the Constitution’ was cremated in December 1956. When Patwardhan
asks if those crowds are any different from the ones that take over
Mumbai’s streets during Ganesha Chaturthi in the late monsoon, a woman
responds, “You can’t compare
this with
Ganeshotsav (the festival of Ganesha)!” suggesting that whatever she thinks
this is, it is disgusting.
Another man complains about the
mess the Dalits leave behind in his nice middle-class neighbourhood. He
doesn’t seem to know much about Ambedkar either. When Patwardhan asks
him if he has read the Constitution, he responds, derisively: “Yes,
yes, yes, we the people, for the people…,” at once conflating the
opening lines of the Indian Constitution with a misremembered phrase
from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The man’s offhandedness
reveals just how deracinated he is, how alienated from his milieu. He
is a resident non-Indian, an ‘RNI’.
| I |
T IS INSTRUCTIVE that Patwardhan has titled his film Jai Bhim Comrade.
Some think that the Dalits should have been the natural constituency of
India’s left, but the Indian left never liked Ambedkar: in his
constitutionalism, they saw the postponement of ‘revolution’, and
collusion with the Indian state that they so wanted to overturn.
Ambedkar’s focus on |
caste, not class, interfered with Marxist orthodoxy. The founder-member
of the Communist Party of India, Shripad Amrit Dange, worked to defeat
Ambedkar in the 1952 Lok Sabha election. In 1975, when Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency, Dange—and the CPI—supported that
authoritarian retreat from democracy. (Patwardhan astutely observed
after a recent screening in New Delhi that like all Indian major
political parties, Brahmins dominated the communist leadership, too.)
(And the communists do have
apparently more pressing priorities. The week I saw the film in Delhi,
the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was hosting a major meeting of
its politburo. At a time of grave disenchantment with the Indian state
over charges of corruption, debasement of the polity, violence upon the
poor, marginalisation of the vulnerable, and increased
authoritarianism, the issue that divided the leadership—and which led
to a walkout—was whether to call North Korea and China socialist
anymore.)
The film also shows that neither the slogan “
Jai Bhim” not the word “
comrade”
will do much for the Dalits. An Ambedkar who becomes an icon will no
longer be their comrade. But the comrades don’t appear to have a clear
strategy of wooing the Dalits either.
The film does not set out to be a critique of the Indian left, and wisely so.
Jai Bhim Comrade
steers clear of Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party and its politics, in
particular, and of Dalit politics elsewhere, in general. But
Patwardhan’s film is not unremittingly bleak. Towards the end, he shows
us the emergence of a spirited musical troupe from Pune, Kabir Kala
Manch. This leftist cultural group, founded in 2002, with students and
professionals as its members, draws inspiration from Kabir’s poetry,
and conveys its social message—of denouncing injustice and
oppression—through public performances. The film introduces us to a
lively singer, Sheetal Sathe, who married a fellow group member not
from her caste and against her family’s wishes. She has a lovely voice,
full-throated and high-spirited, and sings about feminism, casteism,
equality and unbridled capitalism.
The state doesn’t like her
music. Maharashtra’s Anti-Terrorism Squad is after her, and she is on
the run, along with other group members, because they have been accused
of being in contact with Maoists. S Anand of Navayana Publishing,
referring to the plight of the Kabir Kala Manch, pointedly observes in
his April 2012 essay on
Jai Bhim Comrade published on the
blog, Pratilipi that the Indian media, which rightly championed the
protests against Binayak Sen’s detention, hasn’t shown much interest
when the victims are Dalits. Whether that’s because of the media’s
caste prejudices or not is a legitimate debate. But it can no longer be
out of plain ignorance, for in a film with many heroic victims, Sheetal
Sathe’s winsome personality and cheerful spirit make her a very special
heroine. There should be posters demanding that she should be free to
sing; there should be Facebook pages celebrating her. Yes, one can
hope.
Sheetal’s mother hasn’t seen
her daughter for a year, and must hope she returns safe one day. The
film shows that belief in an ideology, or faith, can become an
illusion. You have to break that illusion and take charge of your life.
You have to reclaim your dignity—and you alone can do it
Source -
http://www.caravanmagazine.in/Story/1394/The-Revolution-Will-Be-Sung.html#
