Dalit literature is a post-independence phenomenon.
India being the largest democracy of the
world still holds the indifferences in terms of caste which is a credo of major Indians. Indeed, the term “Dalit”
refers to the oppressed which is a self-chosen political name of castes. It is very difficult to
distinguish the Dalits from the others in India. The complex Indian constitution approves the
scheduled caste as Dalits. But this segregation
doesn’t fully penetrate into the pith and core of Dalit identity.
However, “Dalits” or the “Untouchables‟
share a large segment of India’s population i.e., nearly 20%. “Dalit” the
term having been used by Jyotiba Phule
for the first time in 19th century has widened its use in subsequent years. The origin of Dalits as a
clan can be traced back to the Rigveda. Varna’s
known as castes are of ancient origin. Manusmrits is considered to be a
legal text among the religious texts of
Hinduism defines it with clarity and precision. Brahmins, Vaisyas, Kshatriyas and shudras are the
primary varnas that existed but later divided into many. However, Brahmins are considered as
savarnas and Sudras are asavarnas. The
discrimination between these two has been an age-old phenomenon. Indeed, “Dalit Literature” in India emerged
as a voice of protest by the oppressed
group against the atrocities and injustice caused by the dangerous caste
system. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar as one of the
torch-bearers of this Dalit movement not only popularized it but was also
instrumental in awakening the revolutionary spirit among destitute / subalterns
to rebel against the upper class
society. However, Dalit literature emerged out of racial discrimination and
exploitation caused by the higher caste people. Dalit writers were influenced
the philosophy of Goutam Buddha, Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and
so on. Dalit literature appeared in 1958 in Maharashtra as a protest against
the tyranny of so called upper class people. The writers of Dalits have seen
and experienced it all: the brutality of the higher class people, censorship,
exploitation, ruthlessness, discrimination. They have been a part of it all
with just pens in their hands. Not just pens but the sentinel of their
conscience, voice for the speechless
Meena Kandasamy (1984-) is also one of the women poets who has been
instrumental in giving new trends in
poetry. Her poems bring into focus caste annihilation, feminism and linguistic
identity. One of her first poetry collections, Touch was published in August
2006, with a foreword by Kamala Das. It was translated into five different
languages upon publication. Her second poetry Miss Militancy was published the
following year. Other works such as Mascara and My Lover Speaks of Rape won her
the first prize in all India Poetry. Her books Touch and Ms. Militancy were
reviewed by the New Indian Express. Touch was criticized for its English
language errors, though its challenging themes were described as
"interesting". Ms. Militancy was described as an improvement in her
use of the English language but "disastrous, if not worse" in terms
of themes and content. A review in The Hindu put the negative criticism into
context, describing Meena's work as difficult for anyone whose politics were
"mainstream". Her poetry is "about the female self and body in
ways not 'allowed' by this discourse". Poems of Meena Kandasamy are
definitely standing very strong against the subjugation of women. They motivate the women to come out of
their shell and carve a place for themselves in the society. Understanding the
information of an expression is one-step and understanding the meaning is
another. The meaning turns out as knowledge when one brings the meaning into
habit or practice. In “Dead Woman Walking” by Meena Kandasamy explored the
meaning of ‘Dead Woman’ as follows:
I am a dead woman walking asylum corridors,
with faltering step, with felted, flying hair,
with hollowed cheeks that offset bulging eyes,
with welts on my wrists, with creasing skin (1-4)
In nutshell, these three Indian poets Sujata Bhatt,
Meena Kandasamy and Smita Agarwal have great contribution in the progress of
Indian English poetry and these poets have been rich in their unique ways of
presenting human feelings and emotions. Their poems along with romantic
elements also consist emotions of nationalism, mysticism and other divergent
trends. The women poets also use autobiographical medium and their experience
in there poetry. There are use of multiple themes in a single poem. Although
there are recurrent themes ofdespair in their poetry, the note of optimism
cannot be ignored. They harp on their vision and make all attempts to integrate
tradition with modern outlook and endeavor the poet play a leading role for her
original imagination and thought. The feelings of diaspora and nostalgia are
also the major trends of their poetry. Use of language and diction in a
peculiar manner with neologism and having
technical and modern slangs is new and different major trend of these
women poets. Love, beauty images of love
are also the subthemes of their poems and they mostly do not imitate others’
works and stamp a mark of their own style. They depict their original thoughts,
experience and techniques and that becomes the trend of the time making them
the trend setters in the realm of post-independent women poets of India.
Kandasamy herself demands from a woman that when she has to stand up to any
injustices she has to do so. The poet is portrayed as an example for subjugated
women to look up to as she has given voice to the voiceless through her lines.
Just like Mahasweta devi does to her characters, giving voice to the unnoticed.
Ms. Kandasamy takes up the main characters of epics and brings them as common
people and highlights the quality which makes them to stand out of the crowd.
Kandasamy herself has got a powerful voice which is capable of breaking
boundaries and shattering walls. She does her best to uplift her community. Her
poems are a reflection of her strong rootedness to Indian English and Dalit
Literatures. Likewise, in “Six-Hours of Chastity”, the poet renders an
alternative reading of the myth of Nalayani, Rishi Maudgalya’s devoted wife who
is considered the epitome of chastity. According to the myth leprosy ridden
Maudgalya’s commands his wife to take him to his chosen prostitute. So the ever
obedient wife bundles up the decrepit body of her husband in a big basket and
exhibiting unflinching devotion, carries him on her head to the house of the prostitute,
midst the disdainful snigger of the bystanders. Kandasamy imagines the events
that unfold as Nalayani waits for her husband outside the house of the prostitute.
She plays along when ‘[s]someone who saunters in mistakes the devout / [w]ife
to be mistress of guilt, a woman of night.’ She spends the night indulging in
sexual fervor with strangers; with ‘[s]ix men, one for every hour of night’ (
Militancy 49). The implication being, she doesn’t wait for her husband to grant
‘the boon’. Exhibiting agency, she manipulates the situation to overcome the
circumstances and enjoys sexual gratification, thereby averting the fate of
being born as ‘Draupadi’. Ranjit Haskote
interprets the poems in Ms. Militancy as a ‘series of self- dramatization . . .
[of] subversive mythic exemplars . . . [and] heterodox woman saint-poets from
the Bhakti teaching lineage.’ I extrapolate this impersonation as the
performance of the ‘gender acts’ with the subversive potential of ‘drag’; where
by the poet persona assumes subjectivities, miming as well as displacing the
conventions and cultural norms. In the introduction to Miss. Militancy, rather
cheekily titled “Should you take offence,” Kandasamy proclaims the motivation
to her enterprise.
Female desire
is almost always a matter of scrutiny, and Meena uses it to inaugurate her
book. In the very first poem called ‘A Cunning Stunt’, she speaks of the brunt
of family and community honor a women’s sexuality has to bear, and that her
choices should benefit everyone in the society but herself:
“cunt now becomes seat,
abode, home, lair, nest, stable,
and he opens my legs wider
and shoves more and shoves
harder and I am torn apart
to contain the meanings of
family, race, stock, and caste
and form of existence
and station fixed by birth”
The poem ends with the emergence of the woman’s
‘cunningness’ as she starts pretending in an attempt to not displease the man.
“I am frightened. I turn frigid. I turn faker.”
There is a violent seduction in her words, aiming to
make the reader uncomfortable, and rattling them towards an ugly reality. She
uses themes in contexts often conflicting with the original, which might sound
blasphemous to some. She particularly takes on Hindu and Tamil epics, where
women are attributed a virtuous and uncorrupted status, which confines their
desires and abilities, putting them at the disposition of men to ‘save’ and
‘take care’ of them. Like in ‘Backstreet Girls’, she challenges the chastity
forced upon them:
“Tongues untied, we swallow suns.
Sure as sluts, we strip random men.
Sleepless. There’s stardust on our lids.
Naked. There’s self-love on our minds.
And yes, my dears, we are all friends.”
The stanza concludes with the sense of solidarity
between women who refuse to fit into the archetype and stand together to fight
opposition.
Venturing further into her world of irreverence, she
uncovers the cravings of self-righteous men who often mask themselves in
piousness in order to maintain their holy position. The human-ness that they
hide to portray themselves as higher beings is knocked down in her poem ‘Six
Hours Of Chastity:
In the darkest hour before dawn, the priest enters
there,
Enters her, to make love to her leftovers, fidgeting
in his
Guilt and cowardice, like the clinging of holy
cymbals.”
A priest visiting a whorehouse is unthinkable but
real, and Meena affirms this. The apparent holiness in humans is a sham. No one
is spared of their weaknesses, not even the Brahma who is considered one of the
sacred trinity of Hinduism as she speaks to that ‘villain’ in ‘Prayers To The
Red Slayer’.
She calls Brahma out on his self-proclamation of the
creator and a father-figure, despite the existing narrative of him raping his
own daughter. “If you’ve ever called to pose for the camera, or give
interviews, drop that pen and stop writing our story as if it were your own.”
She snatches away his entitlement over people’s lives, of deciding their
future.
Moreover, she portrays the women of these myths as
self-determined and making decisions on their own terms. For example, Sita from
Ramayana is shown refusing to succumb to her husband’s flickering attitude
towards her in ‘Princess-In-Exile’:
“Years later, her husband won her back
but by then, she was adept at walkouts,
she had perfected the vanishing act.”
Sita was abandoned when her husband questioned her
chastity, but came back to claim her after some time. But she rejects his call,
and decides to never go back with the person who doubted her at the first
place.
Another example of Sita putting herself first is
illustrated in ‘Random Access Man’. Here, tired of waiting for her husband to
come to her, she chooses a random man to satisfy her. The poem concludes by
giving the reader an insight into her perception of masculinity.
“By the time she left
this stranger’s lap
she had learnt
all about love.
First to last.”
Along with desires, this poetic collection also
advocates Dalit feminism and the atrocities of caste system. Meena lays bare
the obstructions and impediments lower-caste women often have to bear as they
stand at the intersection of two marginalized identities. In Once My Silence
Held You Spellbound, she writes:
“You wouldn’t discuss me because my suffering
was not theoretical enough.”
Here, one can locate the powerlessness of Dalit women
as they are unacknowledged not only because of their gender and caste, but also
because of their inability to voice themselves in the upper-caste dominated
academia Perhaps one of the most compelling poems which vigorously exposes the
structured subjugation of our society is One-Eyed:
her left eye, lid open but light slapped away,
the price for her a taste of that touchable water.”
The brutal
discrimination and suppression faced by a little girl means different things
to different outfits. While the inanimate well of water only sees a thirsty
child, as we move forward towards human establishments, her act starts taking
shape of an infringement. This is used for self-interest, as the school
attempts to uphold its reputation, and the press sensationalizes it to make
money. But for the girl, this episode is only a reminder of a prejudiced world.
One important
aspect in the poetry of Kandasamy is the discussion and resentment directed at the sexual exploitation of women.
Women in general are already viewed as the “other” and the Dalit women exist as
“others within others”. The exploitation that these women are subjected to
deprive them of the very basic right to survive with dignity. They are a
constant subject for torture and maltreatment both within as well as outside
the domestic sphere. They are always seen as silent sufferers lacking the power
to resist, to assert and to live by choice. Meena, however, emerges as an open
rebel refusing to surrender to the dictates and constructed norms. She speaks
as a lover: When you called me to light up your life I could never refuse… Love
I can’t be a candle for I know it’s an ancient lie. The candle is for the
solemn…for those who yearn a slow and Tenderness/Not for us… (Kandasamy,2006)“Moon-gazers”
depicts the unquestionable superiority of non-Dalits over the Dalits the poet
brings in a class room situation in which the teacher talks about a bird that
watches the moon through out the right when a girl questions that the bird does
on new moon days. She is seen as impudent and is mocked at. She sinks into the
teachers limitless eyes without ever reaching the surface. This is the common
fate shared by all the Dalits. They are force to oblige without any questions
and made to lead a passive life devoid of any sign of existence.
“Ms. Militancy” the title
poem of the volume is based on Kannaki, the heroine of the Tamil Classic silapathikaram.The very
first stanza of the poem has a pathetic tone:
She thought she was dying- ants crawled
under her flaking skin, migraines visited her
at mealtimes, her tender –as-tomato breasts
bruised to touch, her heart forgot its steady beat.
( kannika)
This poem is
a call to women to be revolutionary and courageous like the heroine herself. Though
Kannaki is deeply effected by her husbands betrayal. She readily accepts him when
he returns from his dancer mistress’s lap. She supports him by giving him one
of her anklets to start a fresh life. The Kannaki in the first part of this
poem is very devoted and loyal when judged by the standards of Tamil culture
which advocates patriarchal dominance. But the rage she displays at the death
of her husbands shows that she is not a passive, submissive Kannaki but a bold,
assertive, revolutionist she gains the justice which her husband, a patriarch
at figure failed to get. Justice alone can suffice her anger and she burns down
the entire city by – “a bomb of her breast .....”
Such is faith in her self and in woman by coming to
the free front and voicing her protest at a very young age. She has set herself
as a model for down subjugated women. Kandasamy gives an example of various
atrocities committed against the Dalit women in her short poem “One eyed”. The
poet, the glass and the water she the thirst of a person but he the teacher the
doctor the school and the press the violation of rules and are indifferent to
the needs of people. Human beings fail to understand their follow beings what
the inanimate things where able to comprehend. Dhanam‟s world was „Torn in
half”. When she lasted the forbidden water at the cost of her left eye.
“Princes of Exile” is about Sita. Kandasamy‟s Sita is no longer of chaste
women. She doesn’t want women to follow the rules laid by the patriarchal
society. Her Sita has perfected the art of vanishing from the day she was
kidnapped. Her constant walkout is her way of taking revenge on her husband who
was not careful enough to protect her or even to rescue her within a short time
span. Kandasamy fearlessly with her trashing words attack the superstitious and
the age old orthodox beliefs forced upon the lower caste women by the
patriarchal society.
Commending on her poems Meena Kandasamy ones says
that: I work to not only get back at you. I actually fight to get back to
myself. I do not write into patriarchy.
My Maariamma bays for blood. My Kali kills. My Draupadi strips. My Sita climbs
onto a strangers lap. All women militate. They brave bombs, they belittle kings
Meena Kandasamy is one among those few Indian poets who have managed to convert
their deepest anguish into brilliant poetry. The poet herself has a militant
spirit. She takes up myths and characters from Tamil Classics and demystifies
them by providing them with an identity entirely different from their original
one. As a woman, she has forced her way to the forefront to represent her
community through her powerful language and rebellious writing. Her voice is
like the voice of her African-American counterparts. Her soul is endlessly
search for an voice. Most of her themes and her choices of diction are taboos
in the cultural context of India. This can be justified because crude realities
cannot be explained in sophisticated forms and language. As Ranjit Haskote puts
it in his review of “Ms. Militancy” in The Biblio, “There is considerable
current of surprise and elusiveness that does battle with the strain of
predictability in Kandasamy‟s poetry; even when she rehearses a well
established choreography of feminist self-assertion, she does so with a sharp
eye for detail, a grasp of worldly insight, and an appetite for phrasal
shape-shifting.
There can be an inquiry as to what validates, or
rather, how validated is Kandasamy”s perception of the reality of Dalit women;
also, the reality of her own Dalit feminine self. Antonio Gramsci had argued
that ‘the perspective of the dominated is necessarily contradictory and
fractured; a doubled or negative consciousness that must both acknowledge the
force and power of elite domination in real and symbolic terms (in this case-
patriarchy, classism and castism), while struggling to maintain the critical
distance necessary for defining oneself againstsuch homogenizing attempts.’
When we consider Meena Kandasamy as a female Tamil Dalit poet writing the kind
of provocative performance poetry that she does, we notice that she rules out
the assumption of any risk.
Conclusion:-
Given that their gender as well as their caste and
class identity causes the Dalit women to
talk differently – it is their experiences which show that what Dalit women
need most are localized and specific
forms of resistance. That is, to resist formation of a sisterhood that is based
on gender, and not forged in concrete, historical and political practice and
analysis. For that matter, male violence must also be theorized and interpreted
within such specific societies for a better understanding of the role(s) of
oppressor(s), oppressed and the layers of oppression involved between them; as
well as for better organization that leads towards a required change.
Kandasamy”s poetry does not plainly demand a social inclusion of Dalit women.
It seeks for an analysis of gender relations as they are inflected by multiple
and overlapping patriarchies of caste communities that produce varying
registers of vulnerability.
