Palash Biswas On Unique Identity No1.mpg

Unique Identity No2

Please send the LINK to your Addresslist and send me every update, event, development,documents and FEEDBACK . just mail to palashbiswaskl@gmail.com

Website templates

Zia clarifies his timing of declaration of independence

What Mujib Said

Jyoti basu is DEAD

Jyoti Basu: The pragmatist

Dr.B.R. Ambedkar

Memories of Another Day

Memories of Another Day
While my Parents Pulin Babu and basanti Devi were living

"The Day India Burned"--A Documentary On Partition Part-1/9

Partition

Partition of India - refugees displaced by the partition

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Fwd: [PMARC] Dalits Media Watch - News Updates 26.02.10



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre-PMARC <pmarc2008@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:56 PM
Subject: [PMARC] Dalits Media Watch - News Updates 26.02.10
To: Dalits Media Watch <PMARC@dgroups.org>


Dalits Media Watch

News Updates 26.02.10

Mangalore: Dalits Threaten to Hold Funeral at Village Office... - Daiji World

http://www.daijiworld.com/news/news_disp.asp?n_id=72878&n_tit=Mangalore%3A+Dalits+Threaten+to+Hold+Funeral+at+Village+Office...+

RBI nod for loans up to Rs. 1 cr. to SC/ST entrepreneurs - The Hindu

http://www.hindu.com/2010/02/26/stories/2010022660910600.htm

Dalit outfits to contest Arundhathiyar quota - Express Buzz

http://www.expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?Title=Dalit+outfits+to+contest+Arundhathiyar+quota&artid=QfQDhtKFcfQ=&SectionID=lifojHIWDUU=&MainSectionID=lifojHIWDUU=&SEO=&SectionName=rSY|6QYp3kQ=

SC ST Cricket Champions trophy - Central Chronicle

http://www.centralchronicle.com/viewnews.asp?articleID=28064

Untouchable prejudice - The Age

http://www.theage.com.au/world/untouchable-prejudice-20100226-p94d.html

Where have the flowers gone? - Bangalorean Mirrior

http://www.bangaloremirror.com/article/36/2010022420100224211714869b1a2f196/Where-have-the-flowers-gone.html

Words That Touch

India's Dalit writers come into their own - The Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126703360108751027.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Daiji World

Mangalore: Dalits Threaten to Hold Funeral at Village Office...

http://www.daijiworld.com/news/news_disp.asp?n_id=72878&n_tit=Mangalore%3A+Dalits+Threaten+to+Hold+Funeral+at+Village+Office...+

Daijiworld Media Network—Mangalore (RS/CN)

Wednesday, February 24, 2010 11:28:33 PM (IST)

Mangalore, Feb 24: Members of the Dalit community protested the loss of their cremation ground, which was acquired for the airport, near Kenjar in Bajpe under Malavoor village, by making arrangements to cremate a woman's body in front of the village office.

The community members and relatives of the dead woman started demanding a cremation ground at the village office on the morning of Wednesday February 24.

When the officials failed to respond in a favourable manner, the community members backed by the local activists of the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) started their protest by preparing to cremate the woman in front of the village office. They started to dig the land and arranged wood also.

The deceased woman is Gulabi (58), a member of the Godda community. There are about 50 houses in Kenjar area, which have been deprived of a cremation ground after the acquisition of land conducted several years back.

When village office personnel saw the protest turning serious with the people preparing to cremate the body in front of their office, they informed the Tahsildar.

Tahsildar Ravichandra Naik arrived at the spot and assured that land for cremation would be allotted in ten days as it is a long process to pinpoint government land in the area.

Seeing the problem of the people, a local landlord provided land for the funeral of the woman.

The community leaders were informed that the protest for the cremation ground will continue if the village office failed to allocate the land in ten days.

The Hindu

RBI nod for loans up to Rs. 1 cr. to SC/ST entrepreneurs

http://www.hindu.com/2010/02/26/stories/2010022660910600.htm

Special Correspondent

HYDERABAD: The RBI has cleared a proposal made by the State government to give loans up to Rs. 1 crore to SC/ST entrepreneurs without collateral security to encourage them as industrialists.

Announcing this in the Assembly on Thursday in reply to a question by G. Nagesh and P. Ramulu (both Telugu Desam), Major Industries Minister K. Lakhsminarayana said as the RBI approval was available now, a trust would be constituted shortly with an amount of Rs. 5 crore to stand guarantee for the loans given to these entrepreneurs through State Finance Corporation. The Telugu Desam members cautioned the government that some people with bogus caste certificates might apply as the loans were being sanctioned with huge subsidy.

'Bhu Bharati' flayed

'Bhu Bharati', a project launched to survey lands in Nizamabad district, to begin with, as an experiment, was severely criticised by P. Srinivas Reddy (Telugu Desam) who said it had only helped some people to line their pockets. Scotching him, Revenue Minister D. Prasada Rao said 13.42 lakh out of 13.83 lakh acres of farm lands in the district was surveyed under the Rs. 21-crore pilot project.

Kerosene quota

Women members of the Telugu Desam, led by Satyvathi Rathod, tried to rush to the podium resenting scrapping of kerosene quota to households in the urban areas having LPG connections.

They, however, resumed seats following appeal by Speaker N. Kiran Kumar Reddy, while Civil Supplies Minister J. Krishna Rao denied having scrapped the quota.

Express Buzz

Dalit outfits to contest Arundhathiyar quota

http://www.expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?Title=Dalit+outfits+to+contest+Arundhathiyar+quota&artid=QfQDhtKFcfQ=&SectionID=lifojHIWDUU=&MainSectionID=lifojHIWDUU=&SEO=&SectionName=rSY|6QYp3kQ=

Express News Service

Last Updated : 26 Feb 2010 09:17:53 AM IST

CHENNAI: Puthiya Tamilagam (PT) and five other Dalit outfits will file a case in the Madras High Court against the Tamil Nadu government's order providing for a three per cent exclusive quota for the Arundathiyar community (a Dalit sub-caste) within the 18 per cent reservation for SCs.

The National Commission for Scheduled Castes had recently objected to exclusive reservation, and the remarks of commission's vice chariman N M Kambley that the State government was not doing enough for the welfare of Adi Dravidars has earned the ire of Chief Minister M Karunanidhi.

A week later, PT founder Dr K Krishnasamy, along with leaders of a few other Dalit organisations, told the media on Thursday the government had not filled up over a lakh jobs earmarked for SC candidates in various government departments.

He also accused the government of not spending the special allocation made in the Union budget for the welfare of SC people. When the government had not done these things, what right did the Chief Minister have to hit out at the SC Commission, Krishnasamy asked.

He demanded a report from the government on the social, economic and educational development of Dalits in the state and also on how much land had been distributed to them.

Central Chronicle

SC ST Cricket Champions trophy

http://www.centralchronicle.com/viewnews.asp?articleID=28064

Category » Bhopal Posted On Thursday, February 25, 2010

By Our Sports Reporter,Bhopal, Feb 25: :

For 5th State level SC ST cricket tournament "Champions Trophy", first match of the day was played between Aryan Ekta Club and Yuva Shakti B on Thursday, Feb 25: 2010 at Babeali stadium. Batting first Aryan club scored 139 runs for the loss of 8 wickets in 20 overs. Pinto Narware scored 45 runs with 2 Sixes and 2 Fours Deepak scored 39 runs. For Yuvashakti B, Captain Nitin took 4, and Ravindra took 2 wickets. In reply Yuvashakti B club scored 7 runs less than target of 139 and made 131 for th loss of 8 wickets. Pinto Narware won declared man of the match In another match Amar club B played with Lions Club. Amar B club made 151 runs in stipulated 20 overs. Opening the innings Dhruv Malviya scored a fast 68 runs with 2 sixes and 12 fours in just 24 balls. Yash scored 12runs and Captain Ashwin scored 18 runs. Sonu took 4 and Manish took 2 wickets. In reply Lions club was allout on 92 runs. Amar B club won the match by 59 runs. Dhruv Malviya was declared Man of the Match.

The Age

Untouchable prejudice

http://www.theage.com.au/world/untouchable-prejudice-20100226-p94d.html

AMRIT DHILLON, NEW DELHI

February 27, 2010

A VIBRATION of sympathy ran through the audience at the recent Jaipur Literary Festival in Rajasthan as author Omprakash Valmiki, his voice trembling with indignation, spoke of the daily humiliations suffered by his community.

As one of India's 160 million ''untouchables'', Valmiki is part of an emerging genre of writers now telling their stories of centuries of abuse under the rigid and hierarchical Hindu caste system. Brimming with anger and bitterness at the injustices meted out by upper caste Hindus for more than 2000 years, the writing has a singular quality to it: raw and jagged, full of anger and pain.

His people, Valmiki told the audience, were not allowed to wear decent clothes, ride on a horse during marriage processions, draw water from the village well or remain seated while an upper caste person was standing.

Indeed, the very word ''untouchable'' hurts - denoting a status so lowly it falls outside the caste system, a system that deems untouchables too filthy for higher castes to touch, and which has in the past decreed that molten lead be poured into the ears of untouchables who tried to memorise Hindu sacred texts, and that the tongues be cut from upstarts who dared to read them.

Hardly surprising then that many of India's 160 million untouchables would rather be known by a term of their own choosing, ''Dalit'' - the word is derived from the Sanskrit for destroyed or crushed - much as African Americans rejected ''Negro'' during the civil rights movement in the US.

As Valmiki spoke, the largely upper caste audience almost visibly winced with embarrassment. Dalit children, he continued, were seated apart in school, forced to sweep the classroom and given water in different glasses. Upper caste Hindus refused to be treated by a Dalit doctor or rent their homes to Dalits for fear of ''pollution''.

The session's title, Why Hindus Feel No Shame, had been chosen by Valmiki's colleague, Dalit writer and academic Kancha Ilaiah. "Whites in America fought alongside the blacks in the civil rights movement in the '70s. White South Africans fought to end partheid,'' said Ilaiah. ''But which upper caste Hindus have fought to end ntouchability?"

In the Hindu system, the four castes are, in descending order, the Brahmins (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (rulers and warriors), Vaishyas (merchants and traders), and Shudras (servants). The ''untouchables'' are outside the caste system and as outcasts, their very touch pollutes a high caste Hindu who regards them as ''unclean''.

The reason Hindus had never struggled to end untouchability, said Ilaiah, author of the acclaimed Why I Am Not a Hindu, was because they felt no guilt, this absence arising from their conviction that the caste system was morally just. Thus, said Ilaiah, although untouchability was a much deeper form of human degradation than racial discrimination, upper caste Hindus could countenance it without discomfort, the segregation being, in their world view, divinely ordained.

Racism, he continued, had for many years dictated that black Americans could not sit next to whites on buses or in restaurants. In South Africa, it had meant that blacks could not vote. ''But if a white person touched a black person, he did not have to go and bathe because the black was 'unclean','' he said. ''The black person was still regarded as a human being created by God.

''But Hindus have to bathe if they touch a Dalit because God himself, according to them, created him as an untouchable.''

That Dalit literature was a special theme at a mainstream book festival such as the now globally known Jaipur Literature Festival, attended by Indian and international authors, was thanks to festival co-founder and publisher Namita Gokhale.

''I wanted to bring this genre to the attention of a wider audience. Their voices, their stories need to be heard. They have a message for India about the deep injustices in our society that have been glossed over for millennia," she said.

Although the Indian constitution bans any caste-based discrimination, the reality is quite different. True, owing to affirmative action in politics and government jobs, Dalits are more visible than before in these two spheres of Indian life. But few Dalits can be found in the world of books, music, film, theatre, art and the media. India has no famous Dalit actor, model, singer, journalist or television personality. No Dalit version of the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire - portraying the lives of Dalits sympathetically - has ever been made.

And even today, Dalits, who form 17 per cent of India's 1.2 billion people, continue to be subjected to routine brutality.

Against such a backdrop, even the act of writing a book becomes a powerful gesture, asserting the right to intellectual creativity for a community that has never before moved beyond simple survival. ''By writing, Dalits are claiming their right to beauty instead of being confined to struggling for bare necessities,'' said Dalit novelist Ajay Navaria, who teaches at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi.

Political scientist Christopher Jaffrelot sees Dalit writing as a specific literary genre. ''It gives us a new history of India, a history from below, a history that is not found in the textbooks," he said. It was inevitable, he said, that Dalit works should be full of rage and rebellion, for it was the first time in their history that Dalits were narrating their experiences. ''Just as with feminism and the American civil rights movement, the first wave of writing tends to be autobiographical.''

This is not to say that upper caste Indian authors have never portrayed Dalits in their novels. On occasion, they have, but these characters are invariably drawn as passive victims. ''When Dalits write about themselves, it is a totally different kind of writing. It is a cry of anguish. It is very moving and powerful,'' said Jaffrelot.

S. Anand, head of Navayana, which exclusively publishes Dalit works, believes it is impossible for Dalits to sever their relationship with pain, which is why their works make uncomfortable reading. ''When your entire early experience has been shaped by caste cruelties, it can never be a light-hearted, easy read,'' he said.

The days when untouchables had to wear a bell around their necks to alert any approaching high caste person so that the latter could quickly cross to the other side of the path to avoid being ''polluted'' may be over, but other forms of dehumanisation flourish, particularly in the countryside, where 75 per cent of Indians live.

Valmiki, writing in his book Joothan, describes being forced by the headmaster to sweep the classroom in the village school he attended while the upper caste pupils studied, and writes of how his parents, whose caste required them to remove human excrement from upper caste toilets, squatted outside the homes of upper caste villagers, waiting patiently for leftover food to be thrown out.

Years later, Valmiki feels sick whenever the memory of those days returns. ''It was not so much that we had to eat the leftovers but the fact that we were so hopelessly poor we relished them. That is what rankles still.''

Elsewhere in Joothan, he describes how, not being recognised as a Dalit, he is mistakenly treated with kindness by a family. They invite him home for tea. Valmiki's heart melts with gratitude on being treated like a human being. Not all people are wicked, he thinks to himself. Minutes later, his host asks him his name and, realising his mistake, throws Valmiki out, hurling obscenities at him.

Valmiki defends the genre against critics who have derided Dalit writing as lacking in literary merit, dismissed it as propagandist or claimed that the stark portrayals of injustice have been exaggerated.

''What they don't understand is that the Dalit literary movement is not just a literary movement. It is also a cultural and social movement because Dalit books portray the aspirations and wishes of tormented Dalits,'' he said.

Even at the Jaipur Literary Festival, some people furtively exchanged quizzical looks as P. Sivakami, until recently a senior civil servant in Tamil Nadu, spoke about her experiences. Sivakami said caste kept intruding into her life, no matter how hard she fought to escape it. As the guest of honour at a school, she had recently stood alongside an upper caste colleague as they watched a procession of Dalit students.

''The first thing my colleague said was that they were 'too pretty', they couldn't possibly be Dalit girls,'' said Sivakami. Her latest Tamil novel, translated into English as The Grip of Change, marks a departure from Dalit literary tradition, tackling the male domination of the Dalit social movement rather than recounting her childhood experiences.

S. Anand is never surprised at the charge that Dalit authors exaggerate their suffering or the degree of caste consciousness in India. As a Brahmin who had a Dalit girlfriend at university, he had been sceptical too the first time his girlfriend remarked that he was getting higher marks than her for literature because he was a Brahmin and the department was full of Brahmin lecturers.

''I was shocked at her assertion. I didn't believe caste played any part in it. But … once, because she was feeling lazy, I wrote a paper for her and submitted it in her name. It was good because I worked hard at it. It got only reasonable marks.

''Later, I wrote a very shoddy and mediocre paper and submitted it in my name. It got top marks. I realised they were not marking me but marking me as a Brahmin,'' he said.

Even among his liberal friends, Anand is constantly struck by how little they realise the unconscious exclusion they practise when it comes to Dalits. ''They don't realise it is manifested in every choice we make - who we eat with, what we eat, who we marry. If I point out, say, that they have never had a Dalit over for dinner, they say it's not deliberate but that is exactly my point. That we practise exclusion without being aware of it.''

AUTHORS such as Sivamani represent a new breed of Dalit writers who are moving away from autobiographies and exploring issues of identity, patriarchy or sexuality. For example, Anand is publishing an anthology soon of Dalits writing on love.

And Navaria, a rising star in Dalit literature, has written about a gigolo's travels in India and recounted his relationships with non-Dalit women in which a niggling worry is that he might be attracted to them only because they are not Dalits.

Dalit literature is also slowly emerging as a discipline of academic study. The department of English at Pune University features Dalit and African-American literature in a course entitled ''Literature of Protest''. Jamia Millia Islamia University has received support for an endowed chair in Dalit studies from the Ford Foundation.

While he welcomes such developments, Ilaiah is convinced that it will take someone from outside India, perhaps a Hollywood director or a European author, to make a film or write a book that will make Hindus ashamed of what they have done to Dalits.

''We need someone who can portray the evil of caste in a way that captures people's imagination globally, because we have tried and failed to rouse the conscience of the upper castes,'' he said. ''If creative Western minds can portray the evils of the Holocaust or apartheid, why not untouchability?''

Amrit Dhillon is a Delhi-based journalist

Bangalorean Mirrior

Where have the flowers gone?

http://www.bangaloremirror.com/article/36/2010022420100224211714869b1a2f196/Where-have-the-flowers-gone.html

Monideepa Sahu

Posted On Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 09:17:14 PM

Let's celebrate every day as Valentine's Day and spread a little love and human feeling whenever and wherever we can

Valentine's Day came and went with youngsters proclaiming their freedom to love. After a fleeting day of splendid public displays, we are back to our old ways.

Even before the roses wilted, we've tossed love into the darkest corners of our hearts. 'Normal' human behaviour in its ugliest avatars has resurfaced with a vengeance. Are we now about to face a nasty wave of brutishness for the rest of the year? Why do we truly need to set aside a special day to create a spectacle and semblance of love? Is it because we are spiteful, malicious and violent brutes at heart?

Barely after the sun had set upon the great love fest, some ladies of our city went all out to prove their equality with men in the ugly behaviour department. Drunken young women assaulted a policeman on duty, while another lady displayed a remarkably violent outburst of road rage. Some argued that the enforcers of law and order insult women when they get the chance, provoking angry retaliation. It's wrong to get drunk and run amok in the first place, countered others. Are these displays of ferocity exceptional behaviour, or does this reveal the true nature of 'people like us'?

Pick up the newspaper or switch on the TV, and vehement bursts of cruelty and anger leap out everywhere. While umpteen laws have been enacted to protect their rights, atrocities against dalits and adivasis continue unabated. Deep in India's heartland, people are publicly hacked to death because their witchcraft is believed to be responsible for deaths and disease within the community. Children are sacrificed to gain riches and please the gods of black magic while honour killings continue. Insurgents and terrorists wreak havoc in many pockets of our country.

Closer to our sanitized urban doorsteps, hate and resentment seethes everywhere waiting for every chance to explode. Children from deprived backgrounds are robbed of their childhood and exploited as child labour. Violence against women is often glossed over as 'eve-teasing,' a term encompassing the worst indignities. Females, from babes in arms to withered crones, are sexually violated. Some dismiss such attacks as the result of provocative and culturally inappropriate dressing. Such attitudes only draw attention away from wrong and aggressive behaviour, blaming the victims while diverting responsibility form where it belongs. Nobody deserves to be discriminated against and ill treated because of caste, creed, and gender or dress sense.

Recent studies by five different organizations show that the rich became glaringly richer in China during the recent financial crisis. This has fuelled deep resentment among ordinary Chinese people against those whom they perceive to have prospered by official nepotism, corruption and other dubious means. What is true of China also applies to our own society.

People seem constantly on edge, all too ready to resort to indiscriminate aggression. It is happening in our teeming cities, where even 'educated' residents of congested apartments tend to base 'neighbourly' relationships on back-scratching and back-biting. Many are forced into aloofness to avoid being dragged into nasty situations and divisive politics. In huge offices, employees rarely interact with colleagues in other departments or even in the neighbouring cubicle. Undercurrents of hatred and viciousness lurk in the internet, where wrongdoers can easily evade the consequences of their actions. Overcrowding is one among the many complex factors diluting our sense of humanity and decency. Lower passions seem to be rising as people react strongly to the slightest real or perceived affront.

"It's so sad, don't you think," a friend tells me. "These are times when we really need to reach out to others, but no one seems interested. And if we persist, we only have our hands bitten." The saving grace is that in this brutal and malevolent world, gentler and nobler human qualities are not yet extinct. We can still find that rare friend who shares such thoughts.

Love is too vast to be confined to a single day. It has innumerable contours and patterns; love for family, friends, country, pets and for the beauty of nature. And love has its dark side in countless manifestations which attack our souls at every step: avarice, envy, the damning urge to control and ride roughshod over others at any cost. True, we can't change the world or bury our heads in the sand to avoid its ugliness. It makes little practical sense to turn the other cheek at an aggressor. But we can change the way we react to provocations by seeking out the positive in our daily lives. Let's celebrate every day as Valentine's Day and spread a little love and human feeling whenever and wherever we can.

(Monideepa Sahu is a former banker and internationally published writer of fiction and non fiction. She's concocted a fantasy/adventure novel, but the intricacies of creative financial jugglery elude her)

The Wall Street Journal

Words That Touch

India's Dalit writers come into their own

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126703360108751027.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

By JOHN KRICH

Jaipur, India

Untouchable, maybe. But no longer unread.

Omprakash Valmiki, born into India's lowest social group, the Dalits -- known widely as "untouchables" -- says he was the first member of his family to "ever see the inside of a school building."

For 40 years he has worked for the Ministry of Defense in Dehradun -- but by night the bureaucrat was doggedly composing poems and fiction. And when Mr. Valmiki came to the 2010 Jaipur Literary Festival to participate in a series of panels meant to recognize the importance of so-called Dalit literature, he drew larger crowds than many of the internationally known authors there. He was mobbed for autographs, and his works -- which include the Hindi-language autobiographical novel "Joothan: A Dalit's Life," published in English translation in the U.S. by Columbia University Press -- were among the first to sell out at the festival bookshop. (The English translation also appears with the subtitle "An Untouchable's Life.")

"What we're doing is creating a new history of India that's not in the textbooks," the soft-spoken, bespectacled 60-year-old says of the growing movement of Dalit writers. "To support their superiority, the majority invokes so many ancient myths. So we must create myths of our own."

The results are striking a popular chord -- far beyond a community that is mostly illiterate -- with readers both in India and abroad. Recent hits include "Untouchables: My Family's Triumphant Journey Out of the Caste System in Modern India," by Narendra Jadhav, who rose from poverty to become vice chancellor of the University of Pune; it was published in the West by the University of California Press.

"Not only have their books attracted a mass audience, but they are profoundly impacting the political landscape," says Christophe Jaffrelot, director of France's Center for International Studies and Research and an authority on the Dalits. He points to Mayawati Kumar, a Dalit who has become chief minister of India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, as leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party.

Prof. Jaffrelot says the wide appeal of Dalit works lies in their being "very personal and intimate, dealing with the inner world of an individual in conflict with how society views them," while the work of Brahmin writers can come off as remote and abstract.

"We are drawing on a body of practical experience that we've gained through all the things we have made, the crafts, the carving, the carpentry, the textiles," says Mr. Valmiki. "Very little that you see in India was made by Brahmins -- and everything carries the touch of those they call untouchable."

Direct protest is the message of much Dalit literature. In one poem, Mr. Valmiki cries out, "What would you do? /If you/ Have to swim against the current/ To open the doors of pain/ And do battle with hunger/ If you/ Are denied in your own land/ Made slave labor/Stripped of your rights/ The pages of your glorious history/Torn to shreds/And thrown away/What would you do?"

The most outspoken, and political, of the Dalit writers is Kancha Ilaiah, whose 1996 manifesto "Why I Am Not A Hindu" made him the target of death threats. Given to provocative claims like "while the Greeks were producing Plato and Aristotle, all the Hindus created was the Kama Sutra -- a book that teaches what the animals already know," Mr. Ilaiah argues that a caste system like that of Hinduism is "spiritual fascism" that can't survive in these global times. (Millions of Dalits are estimated to have converted, mostly to Buddhism, but also to Islam and the appeals of Christian missionaries.)

Mr. Ilaiah, 57, credits Dalit creative writers with "building a new image for ourselves" much as pioneering African-American writers did for a people so recently enslaved. "In ending our 3,000-year slavery, the greatest vehicle for our liberation has been the English language."

Access to English-language schools has been a major advance for Dalits, though the group continues to suffer severe discrimination -- including in education -- more than 60 years after caste divisions were outlawed by India's constitution. (That founding document is the work of B.R. Ambedkar, an untouchable with degrees from Columbia who is viewed as the group's heroic role model.)

"How can we take the constitution seriously?" asks Mr. Valmiki. "There are still at least 1.3 million of us condemned to a scavenger class sent out each day to collect human feces -- and their main employer is the Indian government."

"Though we may be one-quarter of the population," says P. Sivakami, a leading feminist voice among Dalits, "we are rarely represented in the mainstream media, in television or movies. In the past, we've only carried names like 'baby,' been portrayed as drunks or sexually lascivious, grateful to get molested by a master."

While she worked for years as a senior civil servant, including a stretch with the Indian tourist office in Tokyo, Ms. Sivakami says she always "wanted to be a creative writer...the most noble job, where words can generate consciousness." In 1988 she produced her first novel, "Grip of Change," which was also the first Dalit novel written in Tamil. (Translated by the author, it was published in English in 2006.)

"It's not easy when nothing prepares you for the situation of your own inferiority," says Ms. Sivakami, one of 13 offspring of an illiterate mother and a father who had only a third-grade education -- but who rose to become a local legislator. Ms. Sivakami left the civil service in 2008 to enter politics and last month established the Party for Social Equity, plumping for everything from tribal to transgender rights. "The caste system," she says, "is a kind of evil spirit that has to be fought off."

In the fight, there are new allies such as young S. Anand, who in 2003 founded Navayana, a publishing house whose books deal with "caste from an anticaste perspective," and include many by Dalit writers.

Mr. Ilaiah believes there will be more writers to come. "We have already had our Martin Luther King," he says, referring to Ambedkar, author of the constitution. "But we've yet to bring forth our Obama."

--
.Arun Khote
On behalf of
Dalits Media Watch Team
(An initiative of "Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre-PMARC")
..................................................................
Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre- PMARC has been initiated with the support from group of senior journalists, social activists, academics and intellectuals from Dalit and civil society to advocate and facilitate Dalits issues in the mainstream media. To create proper & adequate space with the Dalit perspective in the mainstream media national/ International on Dalit issues is primary objective of the PMARC.

Visit web site | Reply to sender | Click here to unsubscribe
The email is intended only for the recipients. The owners of the Dgroups cannot be held responsible for the contents of the email message.


No comments:

Post a Comment