From Midnight to Glorious Morning? by Mihir Bose

Author:Mihir Bose [Bose, Mihir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Asia
ISBN: 9781910376706
Google: j9ssDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Published: 2017-07-03T22:16:17+00:00

It may happen, but at the same time you have to take people along. You have to give them hope. If by now India had ensured equality of opportunity for its people, yes [reservations could be abolished]. But just because time has passed, that cannot be the reason. In fact, it has given hope to so many people. I know other Indian communities who are higher castes are claiming to be Shudras. But for me that doesn’t mean that something good needs to be taken away just because somebody wants to claim reservation.

The surprise comes, however, when the interview is over, I have switched off my tape recorder and we are about to part. Would I, Chauhan asks, not mention the fact that he is a Shudra? Since he didn’t mention this while I was interviewing him on the record I did not feel obliged to accept his request, and made that clear. But that he made it showed, despite all the optimistic noises he had made, that India still has far to go. Ashish Chauhan’s life should be a wonderful story of how India has tried to remove a terrible discrimination that disfigured its society for so long. Upper caste Hindus may no longer treat the lower castes and Dalits in the way their ancestors did, when even the shadow of a Dalit crossing their path would have seen the Dalit punished, but caste prejudices still exist. And that those from these long-suppressed castes, whose own lives are an everyday demonstration of how in modern India historic injustices can be remedied, still do not want to advertise their achievement, but actually want to hide it, shows how much of a shadow the old system still casts over the country. For all his success, Chauhan would rather not acknowledge his origins.

Of course, I had grown up with the big C of Indian life (which Indian has not?), reminded every day by my mother that certain people were so different we could not even share a cup of tea with them. The tea she served for the sweeper woman, who cleaned the toilets and was from the lowest of castes, was provided in a special cup from which only she was allowed to drink.

The Aryans may have invented caste, but it is not confined to the Hindus: there is a caste system even among Indian Christians and Indian Muslims. I grew up very aware of how caste distinctions affected social life. This became very evident when Mr Barat, the only man my father ever fawned upon, came to visit us with his family. As the former textile commissioner of Bombay, Mr Barat had had the power to decide the allocation of textiles to my father’s raincoat business, and even when he retired, his importance did not diminish. He became managing director of Bombay Dyeing, one of India’s biggest textile firms and an important client for my father. Barat still had to be humoured, and when he and his family came calling, everything in our house stopped.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.