[Marxism] In Honor of Bush's Visit to Democratic India

[Brian Shannon <Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I learned about Gail Omvedt, while surfing the 1960s alumni of the  
U.C. Berkeley Sociology Department. She attended Carleton College  
during the same period as some in our own world. Then I googled for  
Omvedt herself. There are thousands of references (obviously  
overwhelmingly duplicates). Omvedt has written several books,  
apparently hundreds of articles about her adopted land, and is an  
active participant in its political life.*

Brian Shannon
______________________

http://www.himalmag.com/2003/april/report.htm

Not much has changed in India since that time in 1918 even for an  
educated, urban dalit.

A dalit continues to face the prospect of getting booted out of  
public spaces; but more shameful still, even today, a dalit is under  
pressure to pass for a non-dalit. As much became evident to those of  
us not otherwise bothered by this at a seminar in Pune on ‘Caste and  
Discourses of the Mind’. Overseen by Sushrut Jadhav, a psychiatrist  
and medical anthropologist of dalit-chambar origin, currently at  
University College, London, and Pune-based Bhargavi P Davar, a Tamil- 
brahmin researcher on women’s issues in mental health and director of  
the Bapu Trust, the two-day seminar (14-15 December 2002) put caste  
on the couch.

Dalits, brahmins, non-brahmins, Americans, Europeans and a Japanese  
grappled with the issues at hand. The seminar was, ironically, part- 
funded by a trust that takes its name from Sir Dorabji Tata, a Parsi.
. . .
The deliberations, as tend to happen in discussions of caste these  
days, focused on dalit identity, as if to speak of caste means to  
speak of untouchability and untouchables. The few born-brahmins at  
the seminar problematised the brahmin’s role in the order of things,  
but compared to the dalit participants, they clearly had done little  
homework. The seminar’s aim was not to apportion guilt to  
communities, but the lopsided focus on dalits gave the impression  
that the emphasis was on understanding the psychological consequences  
of casteism for victims rather than for perpetrators. That non- 
dalits, particularly brah-mins, have dominated the discourse on caste  
and dalit issues in academic and non-academic fora perhaps explains  
this bias.

The white American-born sociologist and activist Gail Omvedt, in her  
insightful paper on how Hindutva and brahminical ideologies penetrate  
the social sciences, said: “In the US, when you study social  
stratification you examine the whole system. There is nothing such as  
‘black sociology’; you equally study the ruling class. But in India  
we find a sociology of the weaker sections and not the stronger ones.  
There is a strong unwillingness on the part of the social sciences  
establishment to study their own imbrication in dominance”. The  
result, said Omvedt, is that the few dalits, members of other  
backward communities and adivasis who have done doctoral research  
have been encouraged to study their own communities and not the  
oppressor castes. “Such has been the lack of commitment”, she said,  
“that there has been no effort to generate sociological data on inter- 
caste marriages”.
. . .
Gail Omvedt pointed out that American blacks have a sense of pride in  
their identity, which they have built. They can never pass for being  
what they are not, whereas in India dalits can pass for non-dalits,  
and are under pressure to do so. This takes a very heavy toll on them.

From Gail Omvedt’s paper one could conclude that the dalit inability  
to hit back when subjected to obvious discrimination owes to the  
larger brahminisation of history, language and memory. She pointed  
out that even progressive left-leaning historians such as Romila  
Thapar have their ‘Hindu’ biases, evident in their uncritical  
participation in the brahminical incursions into their profession.  
Consequently, the hierarchies and inequities of brahminical Hinduism  
are to be found in the output of the historian. Thus, the pre-vedic  
non-brahminical Indus valley civili-sation is categorised as  
prehistory merely because its script has not yet been deciphered.

Omvedt compared the dalit in India – “unaggressive, soft and gentle”  
– to the blacks in the US. A black colleague had once told her, “The  
day I stop saying motherfucker I will know I have been co-opted”.  
Demonstrating how and why language becomes a tool for contestation,  
control and psychological humiliation, Omvedt spotlighted  
orthographies as received through history. “In Thapar’s work there is  
a bias for north India, bias in spellings and a lot more. The  
matrilineal Satavahanas (who used names like Gautamiputta) are  
ignored by scholars like her. In Satavahana literature the word for  
baaman is used, but this figures as brahman in Thapar. Historians  
rely heavily on puranic texts, but puranic texts never mention Asoka.  
Asoka was discovered by British scholars. All Buddhist literature was  
found outside India. Pali and Prakrit inscriptions are found in India  
before Sanskrit inscriptions. The first Sanskrit inscription came in  
the Gupta period, 600 years after Pali inscriptions. And despite all  
this evidence, we continue to read of ancient India as Hindu India  
and not as Buddhist India”.

. . .

In their next seminar, Sushrut Jadhav and Bhargavi Davar hope to  
bring together a new set of participants with the aim of  
understanding the brahmin and non-dalit non-brahmin minds that  
perpetrate humiliations. Dalit autobiographical accounts of pain and  
sorrow, which have become grist for the academic and publishing  
mills, are now available for easy consumption for non-dalits. It is  
time we insisted that the perpetrators of casteism reflect upon  
themselves.
_____________________

* See http://www.breakthrough.tv/press_coverage_detail.asp?coverageID=12
OR http://makeashorterlink.com/?H2A842DBC

http://www.lib.virginia.edu/area-studies/SouthAsia/Leaders/omvedt.html

http://www.narmada.org/debates/gail/gail.open.letter.html



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