Guest Post: Playing With Love by Jaya Sharma

Photo Credit HERE

"A scene flashes through my head. The Delhi High Court. A (Section) 377 hearing in the summer of 2009. As we sat at the back, on the left hand side of the court room were the lawyers of the Home Ministry. I marvelled at their words. They spoke of holes – which hole was designed for what, and how wrong it was for this hole to be used for this and not that. And I listened to our words – dignity, rights, love… How unable we were to speak of holes. And, beyond a point, what does 377 have to do with love? It was bad enough that our lawyers told us to use ‘LGBT’ instead of ‘Queer’ because the judges would not understand Queer. And then to have to evoke the trope of love. Uff.

Not that love does not have radical potential. Ironically, it can have radical potential when love translates into marriage (or at least reproduction). Ambedkar was probably right when he said, “The real remedy for breaking Caste is inter-marriage. Nothing else will serve as the solvent of Caste.” But we know that love is also the glue that holds heteronormativity together. Love, in the context of modernity, helps hold together that same caste, same religion, manly man and womanly woman couple which produces heirs to inherit private property. And let those of us radical types who are against marriage, including same-sex marriage, not forget, that it is not just about marriage. Love is also the glue that holds together coupledom.

Love humbles, sometimes even humiliates, those of us who sincerely believe and loudly proclaim the criticality of friends in our lives and decry the hierarchy between ‘love’ and ‘friendship’. Oh, hang on. Here in lie many points to ponder." Click HERE to read more.

Uma Chakravarti, a larger than life picture

Dr Uma Chakravarti at home

These days she sees the world through the lens of the camera, bringing to life, the larger picture behind a person. She evokes in the minds of the viewer, the memory of women, lost to history. 

When she was born, her grandfather, an astrologer by choice, had predicted that she would lecture a lot. 

“..now this is interesting,” she laughs, ‘because all my life, I have done nothing but used words. I do a lot of lecturing, speaking when I have to at meetings and doing workshops.”

Professor Uma Chakravarti, is perhaps one of Delhi’s, indeed India and the world’s best known writer on feminists issues that cover a wide range of subjects. She has worked and written on issues of caste, labour and gender and is active in the democratic rights and women’s movements. 

Born, in Delhi, on August 20, 1941, Dr Uma Chakravarti, hails originally from Palghat, Kerala where her grandfather’s ancestors had been invited to come there by the maharaja of Kollengode. The maharaja had created many agraharams for Brahmins who had come from Tanjore district to Palghat district. They were given 108 villages in return for acknowledging his status as a maharaja, which the namboodiri Brahmins of Kerala had declined to do. 

“My grandfather was a reformist of sorts and wrote leaflets against the practice of kanyadaan (the giving away of daughters in marriage). He questioned the practice. He also questioned the virulence of the caste system not only in words but in action when he invited the entire village to his elder daughter’s wedding but fed the Dalits before he fed the Brahmins, causing the latter to walkout”. 

Uma Chakravarti’s father studied in Palghat and Madras and moved north in 1924, to join the bureaucracy at the bottom level but worked his way up, retiring as Under Secretary. During his years of Service, he was in Delhi and Shimla, the summer capital of the British. Professor Chakravarti, the third of seven children, studied in Delhi and Bangalore. Exposed from an early age to many people from different spheres of life, Uma Chakravarti’s mind grew into a liberal, secular one shaped by the tragedies of the partition and the assassination of Gandhiji by a Hindu fundamentalist, both of which she remembers fairly vividly. An early learning of sorts and observation helped Professor Chakravarti, shape her own way of life. 

Although her father was in the bureaucracy, theirs was hardly an elite upper class home, but could be identified as an upper caste, middle-middle class home with no money for the extras of life. “There was never any money”. Having seen his own mother and sister as widows and dependent on the family, her father was keen to give all his children a very good education and insisted that his daughters were not only well educated but had careers of their own. 

Both at school (Delhi Public School) and later in College (Mt Carmel College), Professor Chakravarti, was not particulary studious but worked hard when the exams came around when even her father would be pressed into service in making notes from the reference books! At home with many siblings, she learned to find her own space and to be independent and self-sufficient. The girls in the family went about freely, just like the boys on bicycles to school and later to college as well. Growing up in cosmopolitan schools, none of her siblings including herself ever saw themselves as marked by a strong regional identity.  Rather, they learned to live with a cross-section of people. Uma’s best friend at school was a Sikh girl Satinder Khurana who hailed from west Punjab at the time of partition. This early preparation, helped to understand, or reason out, some of Dr Uma Chakravarti’s work, in later life, especially her enormous contribution to the oral history of people who suffered the after math of the 1984 Sikh Riots, in Delhi. 

Professor Chakravarti, studied Law formally, but it is her love of history, which drove her to do two sets of exams simultaneously—she went to the College of Law in Bangalore as a regular student also enrolled as a private student in History at Banaras Hindu University for a Master’s degree. The exams were a nightmare shunted between two cities to appear for her exams one after another. 

Although Uma Chakravarti did not become a lawyer, she has engaged with law, reading judgments closely for her writings. It is history which she went on to teach throughout a long career at Miranda House, Delhi University. It was here that she ‘engaged’ with history, teaching it in class and along with a group of really creative teachers in other colleges in shaping the syllabi bringing a new kind of history with a focus on the margins. These were heady years in Delhi University which also was the place from where an engagement with feminist issues began as the women’s movement in the city had its reverberations in the university too. Students and teachers raised feminist slogans in the campus and began serious research in women’s studies inspired by issues that were thrown up from the ground. Uma Chakravarti herself began writing on gender when activists insisted in the early eighties that she use her understanding of history to examine the relationship of culture and tradition to women’s oppression. Her first piece from a feminist perspective was an essay on Sita in myth and literature. A second essay examined the place of women in Buddhism. This was followed by a sustained engagement with gender. The nineties were spent in researching on nineteenth century Maharashtra, especially on the life and times of Pandita Ramabai published as Rewriting History - The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai (1998). She co edited  From Myths to Markets: Essays on Gender (2000),which was  quickly followed by another co-edited volume Shadow Lives: Writings on Widowhood (2001). In 2004 Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens (2004), was published. All this was of course preceded by The Delhi Riots: Three Days in the Life of a Nation (co-authored) and her own Ph.D thesis Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism (1987)

You would imagine that such an active scholar would in fact be rather somber by nature. The surprise is, she is just the opposite. What drives people to her is her vivacious nature, her laughing face and the pure energy she exudes which is that of a very positive person, very active, both mentally and physically. She mixes the sophisticated intellectuals of our times who values her roots, albeit she may not exhibit it blatantly. Her home is an example of the openness of her mind; indeed as you enter, you encounter treasures from the past, in the paintings and the handicraft that greet you, but you don’t see any door that shuts the visitor away from the rest of the house. One room looks into another and even opens up the kitchen, as if the outer and the inner are one, open.  

Dr Uma Chakravarti can truly be called ‘midnight’s children’, when as a child of only 6 years, she witnessed the partition of India and Pakistan and the aftermath thereof. She has seen the days when, this major happening changed their lives completely. From bread man, to dhobi, to house help, maids, gardeners who came to work in their homes, to neighbours, all became divided into whom you could trust and whom you were told not to. The normal roads that took her to her school, or people to their work destinations changed overnight, to traumatic places, forever guarded and hounded by the Police force, the army and suspecting neighbours. 

“Even as a child, it was impossible to keep away from the trauma of the times; it was in the very air around you.” What as a child, she was an onlooker to, as an adult she became part of the tragedy that finally culminated in her historic co-authored book, The Delhi Riots: Three Days in the Life of a Nation. 

What attracted her to her husband Anand Chakravarti, who is a Sociologist? He was actually her brother’s friend, whose name too is Anand, and had been a visitor to their home in Bangalore.  Later Anand was in Benaras at the Gandhian Institute, at the time Uma went there for her exams so they took a boat ride down the Ganga which was a nice way of getting to know each other and their view of the world. 

“Probably it was the idealism. He was fixated on the idea that society needed to undergo change, structurally, economically, and politically; there was a lot that needed to be done. Although, he came from an affluent background, he was disturbed by poverty and deprivation, which you could see all around.” Straight after her marriage she joined him in Rajasthan where he was doing fieldwork for his Ph.D on social and political changes in the village. 

Anand and she spent one year in the village, studying political change on the ground. Very quickly though they became aware that there is no structural change that was happening at all; the state colluded with the dominant so there was little that changed for those who were at the bottom end of society. Both Uma and Anand have been part of many fact finding teams that have investigated communal riots, agrarian violence, and state repression. During one such investigation Uma describes what she saw:

“As we entered the village, we encountered the body of a young man, whom we assumed had been killed by the police force, but no! We were shocked to know, that he had died because, the family did not have the rupees two hundred that was required for the treatment of this man.”

The callousness of the state towards the poor has horrified them .

Together they have two children, a daughter, Upali who is a teacher and she along with her husband and son, live just above Uma’s own house. Siddhartha, Uma’s son, is older and lives in the US. 

Professor Uma Chakravarti’s contribution to feminist literature in India, is best found in her own works. Relentlessly, over the years she has been uprooting from the buried past the oppressive norms that work against the freedom of women. 

Where does Dr Uma Chakravarti find her relentless strength to write and put forth lives of women, who broke the cast? Perhaps the best summation of the above, is crystallized in her dedication, Rewriting History - The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai. 

“For my grandmothers Alamelu and Lakshmi, who experienced the routine humiliation of ‘adult’ widowhood, dependence, and a reluctant maintenance from their sons; my aunt Parvathi, who was married at twelve, mother at fifteen, deserted by her husband in her twenties, widowed at thirty-four, mortified eleven years later by the painful death from consumption by her eldest daughter, condemned to replace her as an unpaid domestic drudge for twenty-four remaining years of her life, my father, P.S Doraiswami, who even at the age of ninety, suffered the guilt that some sensitive men have felt at not being able to do enough to prevent the anguish caused to the widows in their families, my mother, Saraswathy, her sister Vijaylakshmi, and their father, P.V. Aghoram, who resisted and broke with the oppressive practices of Brahminical patriarchy so that I and my sisters and our daughters could have a better today…”

This dedication sums up the source of the fire in the belly, in a nutshell. That is also why, the unrest within to go out there, and listen, read, record, wherever, human torture and anguish is crying out loud.

“It was around 2.30 pm, when we heard on the BBC that Mrs Gandhi had been assassinated. The state was still waiting to make it public, as they waited for Rajiv Gandhi to return to India.” The rest is history, but what was not, till she along with her student from Miranda House, made it one, is the oral histories of Sikhs who underwent torture and killings in the hands of the state, in what finally came out as a 658 pages recorded transcription in the book, co-authored with Nandita Haskar, The Delhi Riots: Three Days in the Life of a Nation. 

Excerpts from the book:

“In the night the Pandit came back. He opened the door and told us to run away. But where could we go? There was danger everywhere. I went to my house – everything was looted and burnt. Opposite my house there was a jhuggi with a charpai. I went and hid under the charpai and remained there. In the morning again the mobs came. They were searching for the last Sikh still alive….They dragged me out and were going to attack me…” – Phanda Singh, pg 77.

“I think that T.V had an indirect role to play in creating a particular atmosphere in every drawing room in the city because of the single monotonous focus on the mourners filing past Mrs Gandhi’s body…Do you remember the slogan, “khoon ka badla khoon se” was first heard on T.V? And although we could see efforts being made to quell the slogan-shouters, we were allowed to hear the slogan. I think that was provocative and deliberate you might call it the official signal to go ahead.” – Rashmi Bhatnagar, pg 656

Today, she has changed her language of expression to the visual arts and has already produced two films, one on the life of a child bride who went on to participating in the national movement even though her husband was a salt inspector for the colonial government as depicted in a book, titled “Fragments of a life” by Mythili Sivaraman and the second, a documentary on the life of the author of the book herself, who is slowly losing her memory and struggles to remember her own past. Titled Fragments of a Past, the film is both touching and revealing as it covers the period from 1960s to the 1990s when Mythily worked relentlessly for labouring men and women, documenting their oppressions through her writings most of which she does not remember now.  

Dr Uma Chakravarti’s work as a film-maker, is of utmost importance, as she captures on screen, scenes of lives and happenings that cannot be ever lost to time, or moth eaten, as might be in the case of books. Working with an all women team, representing a wide section of women from all walks of life including the visual arts, her films, will outlive the shorter life of creative material, and stand as testimony of truth. 

Dr Chakravarti lives in Delhi with her husband and is surrounded by friends and family who have been with her, throughout her years. 

Her grandfather may have predicted that she would have a lot to do with ‘vac’- word and speech, but he would have never imagined his granddaughter to have used so many different forms of communication, the blessed spoken word, the written word and now the visual art. 

What a larger than life picture Uma Chakravarti is! 

References and Bibliography:  www.womenswritings .org, The Delhi Riots: Three Days in the Life of a Nation , Rewriting History - The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai. 

The author wishes to thank Dr Uma Chakravarti for giving her an opportunity to write about her and helping develop this article. Thanks is also due to Dr Kanchana Natarajan for lending books by Dr Chakravarti.

First published in Dignity Dialogue, November Issue, 2013

http://www.dignityfoundation.com/knowledge/sample-articles-in-dignity-dialogue/261.html

Neo-Buddhism: Balm over the angst of non-recognition

On 15th August,2010, The Times of India quoted Meena Kandaswamy, Professor in English, in Anna University, Chennai, saying through her blog (see http://meenu.wordpress.com/) “ I would like to describe myself as a woman writer obsessed with the revolutionary Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s message of caste annihilation…….Dalits are denied the right to land, Muslims the right to homes. We live in a society riddled with minority phobia.”

Indeed, where Meena Kandaswamy is placed, Tamil Nadu, there is another phobia – the fear of being upper (read brahman) caste. People belonging to that community may be bending backwards to prove they are not brahmans, as in Tamil Nadu there is 70% reservations for SC/STs.

In the meantime, Sharmila Rege , Director, Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies Centre, University of Pune, has been equally involved in path breaking work in unearthing the buried histories of Dalits in India. Years of being ostracised by the Brahman community, the Dalits had been living in the outskirts of the village eating left over food by Brahmans and other communities, announcing the dead, burning death bodies, eating animals and doing menial work only, as education was totally denied to them. Their existence was non-recognition only.

Until, Dr B R Ambedkar came along.

Rising from their midst, Dr B R Ambedkar went on to do a Ph.D and become a Lawyer and finally the architect of the Indian constitution. He is best remembered today also as the founder of Neo-Buddhism which he used very ably as a weapon against social injustice bestowed upon the untouchables by the brahmans. He is also the father of the Dalit uprising in India.

It would be interesting to note that way back, while India was still under the subjugation of the British, Rabindranath Tagore, had written the famous lines in his poem Apamaanita:

Hey mor durbhaga desh
Jader korecho apomaan
Apomaney hotey hobe shobar shaman

Translated to English it means: Oh my unfortunate country, you will have to face the same undignified treatment in the hands of those your treat without dignity; only then will equality be restored among all.

One might argue that like all big talkers of present day, political parties mainly, the poet too had made no effort personally to make any difference. However, one cannot overlook his contribution to the making of Shantiniketan whose first students were in fact, the very poor, uneducated children of the neighbourhood.

Be that as it may, the real movement of the uprising of the down trodden happened when, Dr B R Ambedkar, having reached a conclusion after much study of all religions, that the way out of a decadent system, rooted in religion of the Hindus, must be wholly and absolutely thrown out of their lives. Only then he believed that the first step to liberation from brahminical subjugation and the regressive caste system would happen. The caste system which existed in India, much before Manu wrote his book Manusmriti, became strengthened by the text which is infamous for both being a text replete with oppressive dictum against women as well as the fact that it documented the divide of Indian society based on the four caste categories –brahman, vaishya, kshatriya and shudras, the last being the lowest caste. Not only that it gave brahmans superiority over all others and thus gave them unquestionable right to work diligently to dehumanise the sudras, under which the ST/ST sections of modern day India fell. The Manusmriti as well as the lawmaker Manu have been under the axe of feminists and psychologists for a long time. For one, the lawmaker seemed to be material fit for the loony bin, and for the text which proved to be a hate document taken too seriously by the brahmans. As a document that proved material for Psychoanalysis’ time-pass and the brahman’s excuse to continue to torture the sudras, it did well when Dr B R Ambedkar burned the text in public as a sign of protest.

Dr B R Ambedkar led by example. He belonged to the Mahar community which also fell into the untouchable caste. In order to throw away, once and for all, the disease ridden, caste based hindu religion, he, on October 14, 1956 converted to Buddhism, which he accepted as the only religion or practice which had no segregation of persons into different castes. Following him, hordes of Mahars turned to Buddhism, the very next day, after his conversion to Buddhism. It was in fact, Dr B R Ambedkar who conducted the mass conversion, in Nagpur. Ever since, Dalits have converted to Buddhism as their way of life. Please note, Dalits do not necessarily include Muslims and other minorities who in India of 2010 may also want to hold the Dalit ticket.

To go back in history, it is important to understand the social context in which we believe Buddha left his home in search for Truth, of that which is beyond, birth and death and the suffering in between. I have read and heard that it was the sight of four afflictions – death, suffering, disease, old age - that happen to all human beings that caused him to give up his home, his wife and his new born child, his kingdom, his aged father, all because he was overwhelmed with the need to find an answer to the end of suffering. It has been said that at that moment there was so much disturbance in his kingdom that he wanted to escape from there. Whatever, be the interpretations and the beliefs, it must be understood that since Buddha himself has not left any written matter in his hand and all that we know of him or what he preached only by way of word of mouth and texts written after he left his body, we must be cautioned that all what we know and read on Buddha and his teachings are at best only interpretations of what the listeners and the writers think they have heard him say.

Thus, in many ways, while Buddhism is a subject I too studied, I have preferred to follow what I have heard is the way of eliminating human suffering whether it is me or anybody else. And that is not a social movement but a practice which helps in annihilating the last thread of desire that might even bring me back again to this life of suffering, for if there is birth, then, suffering is a given. This is the traditional form of Buddhism, where the cause of suffering happens to be birth itself, and birth, irrespective of where one has taken birth, or in what caste, community has one thing that goes with all – there is suffering, mental and physical. Only nibbana can release one from that suffering.

Dr B R Ambedkar’s Neo-Buddhism, on the other hand, does not accept nibbana, as there is no where to go, except live this life with dignity. Hence, at the root of Neo-Buddhism, as started by Dr B R Ambedkar, there is social change that has to be achieved to gain that state of liberation from suffering. It is quite understandable that that should be the a priori reason for the birth of the new “religion” – Neo-Buddhism.

What are the basic differences between the two? At the very start we can easily state that while, traditional Buddhism is pitched on liberation from birth and death by attaining nibbana, Neo-Buddhism is about bringing about social change. It is about wearing the mantle of equality right from the start and urging, negotiating Press, public and politicians, policies and Lawmakers to see and enact laws to ensure that the down trodden and those who have been sanctioned against for centuries are seen as equal to all, without any disparity. Therefore to this end, the Dalit movement which began in Maharashtra, with the Mahars, has taken on a massive role in Indian Politics and in day to day conversations and doings in India. This now has more meaning as Dalits are not any more only the Mahars, but include all ST/SC classes across India. Dalits have all converted to Buddhism, but while traditional Buddhism is more involved with the vertical movement of the human consciousness, Neo-Buddhism is passionately concerned with the vertical movement of the once depressed classes and castes, up the ladder. This is resulting in the TN-effect across india. The TN-effect can best be described as a hate campaign against brahmans and a “do-unto-them-what-they-did-unto-us” strategy.

Traditional Buddhism is concerned with the “inner revolution” and hence practice a path of non-violence, while Neo-Buddhism, is militant and rigorous about the “outer revolution” that will bring about social change. Hence, the literature too of the Dalit movement in India, at once is engraved on the angst of non-recognition of their human presence for centuries and at the same time, punctuated with pain and anger, while looking forward to a new dawn.

It is psychologically impossible to bear suppression forever. This is not our natural state as human beings. It is also psychologically impossible that the suppressed will one day not take the same weapon of suppression and strike back at its predator in the same way.
This brings us back to what Rabindranath Tagore wrote in the beginning of the last century –

Hey mor durbhaga desh
Jader korecho apomaan
Apomaney hotey hobe shobar shaman

To be shamed and hit back with equal force is what the brahmans inherited by their own doings in the past. It is not what Dalits discovered as a weapon of retaliation.

In Maharashtra, all homes of Neo-Buddhists have the picture of Buddha and Dr Ambedkar placed side by side. In many homes Dr Ambedkar may be more prominently placed than the Buddha himself, but there seems to be a new arising in other parts of the country like UP, where Kashi Ram and Mayawati are taking things to their own meaningful end. One may see statue upon statue of both these “saviours” strewn across UP where the founder of Neo-Buddhist Dr B R Ambedkar is receding backwards, but certainly remain a part of their day-to-day conversation.

When Buddha began to speak to his following on the new way of life, the Buddhist way, the brahmans were equally disturbed as huge numbers of people left their backgrounds and followed the Buddha. This caused them to act against Buddhists and it became so bad that after Buddha left his body, his followers moved out of India to carry his words and preserve them. Thus, Buddhism grew more out of its country of origin, in fact, it flowered most in Japan.

The Dalit movement began in Maharashtra with Mahar uprising and conversion to Neo-Buddhism. It might have more than one prominent face today who seemingly is leading the way. It may be seen as one of the most powerful movements in the country today, which the brahmans all want to get on to the band wagon, for reasons of vote bank politics, or from being ostracised themselves, but it remains to see how many faces Buddhism will take, as it progresses in the hands of those who have adopted it as a potent religion for bringing in a social change in India. The question is, in the face of such pressure, will brahmans convert to Neo-Buddhism as so many are already seen to patronise it?

Yet, through all these ifs and buts, one thing comes through clearly – whatever we see is our perception of it. And our perception is after all only a perception and hence, since we as humans create a religion for our own need and I have at least not heard any God say that he has created that religion (if you have, please let me know), be it Buddhism or any other religion, it is the creator’s right, to bring out as many versions and interpretations of the same religion. However, it is equally important to remember that all are only perceptions of what we see the world as or what the need of society at large is. The real truth is: All things and feelings are transitory, forever changing, never one Truth. They vary as perceptions change. What is now is not, in the next the same. And there is no God, not even The Buddha, who has left his body 2600 years ago and who in his talks warned, I am told, his followers – If you see The Buddha on your way, kill him!

But he was talking of the spiritual path, not a social one, per say. Yet, a practicing Buddhist causes change in society outside, because he has changed inside.

To summarise, I would say that although there is on the surface a distinct difference between the purpose of traditional Buddhist practice and Neo-Buddhism, at one level they come together – they both work towards change, one from within and the other from without. But, that is only on the surface. Ultimately, they meet on a common ground – Change! Be it society or be it at the conscious level.


Note: As I have heard the meaning of - If you see The Buddha on your way, kill him - speaks of one who is striving towards nibbana, which is a path, one might start with a teacher for guidance but then it is a very individual one and must be travelled on one’s own steam. Not even a crutch like Buddha is welcome. Therefore, on the path of self-realization, the teacher including the Buddha himself must be done away with finally.

This article is inspired by a scholarly book – Mahar, Buddhist and Dalit by Johannes Beltz Published by Manohar Publishing & Distributors, 4753/23, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002 and distributed by: Foundation, 4381/4 Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002 Price: Rs 750

News:
The Hindu report on 29th August, 2010, In search of an identity by Ananth Krishnan, Sunday magazine section, page 7, (see link http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=46,9467,0,0,1,0 ) even sections of Chinese are taking to the Buddhist path.