MY SON’S INHERITANCE: A Secret History of Lynching and Blood Justice in India by Aparna Vaidik

Author:Aparna Vaidik [Vaidik, Aparna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Published: 2020-01-31T18:30:00+00:00

The people who dress themselves up and parade around in their purity have only one intention, and that is to think that they are more pure than other people, and they feel happy at this; but do their cruel hearts ever feel any pity at the suffering that we endure that the very touch of our hands pollutes them?

The ‘long and ferocious’ essay was the fruit of Phule and Savitribai’s labour.

In 1873, two years before Dayanand Saraswati established the Arya Samaj, Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj, the truth-seeking society, in Pune. The samaj started by arranging marriages without priests and dowry. The main work of the samaj was to create awareness in the low-caste communities about the oppression that they faced, enable them to get an education, and encourage them to be more articulate in the public sphere in order to enhance their visibility. The Satyashodhak Samaj created a groundswell of change fed by Phule’s anti-feudal stance and peasant agrarian distress. The samaj was to later inspire several similar movements in different parts of India. These were the Ad Dharm movement in Punjab (constituted of young educated Chamars who broke away from the Arya Samaj), the Adi Hindu movement of Swami Achutanand in Uttar Pradesh in the 1920s, Adi Andhra, Adi Dravid, and Adi Karnataka in southern India. An important variable in their mobilization was the economic distress in the wake of World War I and the introduction of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms in 1919. These movements challenged and reversed the view that the Aryans were the original inhabitants of the subcontinent and the makers of Indian civilization. They vigorously took up the issue of lower castes’ access to communal water tanks and to the temples and also encouraged their people to stop performing the traditional caste duties.

Phule thus laid the foundations of an alternate discourse in the Indian subcontinent that led to the rise of leaders such as Iyothee Thass, Maraimalai Adigal, Periyar, and Ambedkar in the 1930s and 1940s, who took the cause of the ‘depressed classes’ or Dalits up to a wider regional and national level. In the post-Independence era a strong Dalit literary movement developed. Writing which had been the preserve of the upper caste and elites now was being made use of by individuals from the suppressed and subordinate groups. They wrote in the languages and dialects they knew. Writers such as Daya Pawar, Namdeo Dhasal, Baburao Bagul, Keshav Meshram, Narayan Surve, Raja Dhale, Gangadhar Pantawane, Vaman Nimbalkar, and Omprakash Valmiki waged a valiant battle against caste oppression by writing about their lives and the discrimination they had faced. Protest and testimony were central aspects of their writings. The injustice done to the mythical Bali had played its part in catalysing a long-lasting rebellion against the tyranny of religion and caste privilege. The seeds of Phule, the gardener, were flowering.

Despite the blooms, why did the Indian garden remain a wasteland when it came to Phule’s ideology taking root? This was a question that kept nettling me.

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