Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India by Pramod K. Nayar

Author:Pramod K. Nayar [Nayar, Pramod K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Literary Criticism, Popular Culture, Political Science, Sociology, General, Human Rights
ISBN: 9781317809081
Google: u_sjAwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 21555736
Publisher: Routledge India
Published: 2012-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

Joseph then speculates that for boys and girls in love, for either to side to discover the other’s Dalit identity, is a preliminary to their parting.

What the Dalit often discovers — and Kancha Ilaiah has written eloquently about this aspect in his Why I Am Not a Hindu (2003) — is that the Dalit self cannot find its ‘proper’ formation, and hence social integration, within the existing educational/pedagogic structures. Ilaiah records that when reading textbooks with stories of Rama and Krishna:

For Brahmin-Baniya students these were their childhood stories, very familiar … The boys bore the names of these Gods; the girls the names of the Goddesses. I distinctly remember how alien all these names appeared to me … The name of Kalidasa was as alien to us as the name of Shakespeare … In a word, our alienation from the Telugu textbook was more or less the same as it was from the English textbook in terms of language and content … What difference did it make to us whether we had an English textbook that talked about Milton’s Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained, or Shakespeare’s Othello or Macbeth … or a Telugu textbook which talked about Kalidasa’s Meghasandesham, Bommera Potanna’s Bhagavatam, or Nannaya and Tikkanna’s Mahabharatham…? We did not share the contents of either; we do not find our lives reflected in their narratives (Ilaiah 2003 [1996]: 13–5).

Gaikwad records the discrepancy between his textbook’s rhetoric and his own lived experience:

When I opened the text-book for Marathi on the first page, I used to see: ‘India is my country, All Indians are my brothers and sisters. I am proud of its rich and varied heritage’. I used to wonder if all this were true, we were being beaten with false allegations of theft, when in fact we had committed no theft; why they beat my mother, pulled at her sari and asked her to hand it over alleging it to be stolen property. Even now I wonder why if Bharat is our country we are discriminated against, why our race is branded and treated as a thieves’ community. If all Indians are brothers and sisters, why are not my brothers given jobs? Why do we not get land, decent houses? If we are all brothers, why are my brothers forced to resort to thieving in order to feed our people at home (1998: 62)?

Naresh Jain tells us in his poem, ‘History’ (2010), that ‘my memories are filled/not with rakshasas but with frightful devatas’ (ibid.: 95), thus reversing the good/evil dichotomy projected by traditional Hindu stories. Manipuri poet Naorem Bidyasagar (2009) speaks of ‘life/lying smeared with blood/in newspapers everyday’ and wonders if he can be indifferent to the violence around him:

How can I study my books,

Turning pages one after another

Inside a room with doors closed (ibid.: 63)?

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