In frame : Prof. Gail Omvedt
An IIT-Kharagpur’s lady professor openly abusing and threatening SC/ST/PWD students on
record with casteist slurs during a Zoom meeting very recently, has gone viral along with
Jhatkaa.org campaigning for her termination.
And Aruna Gogulamanda’s poem “A Dalit Woman in the Land of Goddesses” reveals the
hypocrisy of Indian culture that boasts about celebrating women as goddesses:
Her eyes two dry hollows bear silent witness
To hundreds of deaths of her mothers, daughters, sisters
Their dreams, respect and their bodies.
Her calloused hands, her unkempt hair
Her cracked heels, her wrinkled hair
Tell the tales of living through fears and years
Of centuries and millennia of violations and deaths.
She was told
That she was dirt,
She was filth and
In this sacred land of thousands of goddesses
She is called a Dalit.
This incident and this poem should lead you to realising that we in Bharat really do not have
much to be proud of. Together, they should lead you to reading Sujata Gidla’s fiction-prose,
“Ants among Elephants”, which sensitizes us to the undeniable fact of the horror of the all-
pervasive caste in India—how the filthiest work is still the lot of the lower castes, and
relentless caste oppression and violence go on and on even as caste has become an instrument of immense political leverage over time along with affirmation-action-quotas for Dalits and indigenous tribes.
Gidla has portrayed life as an ‘untouchable’ (Dalit) in modern India. She has given an
account of her own family from the life of her grandparents to her own. In doing so, she has
given us an absorbing account of how ordinary Indians lived their lives in the first three
quarters of the 20 th century from the imperial age to the first decades of independence. She starts saying: “My stories, my family’s stories, were not stories in India. They were just
life…When I left and made new friends in a new country, only then did things that happened
to my family, the things we had done, become stories. Stories worth telling, stories worth
writing down…I was born in South India, in a town called Kazipet in the state of Andhra
Pradesh…I was born into a lower-middle-class family. My parents were college lecturers…I
was born an untouchable.” And then she proceeds to tell the story of caste as fate despite
educating oneself along with accounts of upheavals and human ideals via Leftist political
ideologies and “movements”.
Now come to the recent Black Lives Matter movement, through the poem, B for Breathe:
It takes one's breath away: a man dying during a pandemic that
takes away one's breath, no ventilator but one brave spectator,
recording
his last breath, his need please
somebody
taking the knee on the neck from men who from birth breathed in
tainted air, imbibed a foul history, burning crosses
still smouldering
I can't breathe
like the hot breath of anger consuming the cities
that inhaled this before
this white heat this
burning sensation in the throats of
the numerous ones held down and
mama
mama
I can't
Come on, George Floyd, breathe in the timeless rhythm of Mother
Earth waiting for you, for all her lost children, for justice
I'm through
I'm through
This powerful poem was written for George Floyd (murdered by a Minneapolis police
officer on May 25, 2020) as the source of the recent Black Lives Matter movement. It is the
meditation of Olive Senior on George Floyd’s killing.
This, in turn, should lead you to reading the Pulitzer Prize winning prose of Isabel
Wilkerson. Her book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” is about how America today
and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of
human rankings—“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened
theatre, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.” In saying so, Isabel has likened skin-colour-discrimination in the US and the Nazi racial discrimination to the Indian caste system. Isabel has grounded her argument in the rich, concrete stories of individuals and asserted that the Dalits in India, the African-Americans and the Jews in Nazi Germany have all grappled basically with a system of oppression. In her view, racism is only the visible manifestation of something deeper, a hidden system of social domination. There is a caste structure in the US that uses neutral human differences, skin colour among them, as the basis for ranking human value—“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred; it is not necessarily personal…It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things”.
The Isabel argument is rather abstract in that she contends that the caste model moves white behaviour away from subjective feelings (what motivates these people to do what they do) and into the objective realm of power dynamics (what they do, and to whom). She is referring to the dynamic of how a dominant caste stops a low-ranking caste from gaining on it. She has thus mixed up Martin Luther King Jr. and B.R. Ambedkar.
To me, it is rather intriguing and outlandish that Sujata Gidla who is now working as a bus-
conductor in the New York subway seems to be happy about escaping to the new country in
the US from India—that she is ‘touchable’ in the US—even as Isabel Wilkerson is ruthless
about colourism in the US as equivalent to casteism in India.
A Gidla-Wilkerson dialogue is, therefore, required as a sequel to their respective
contributions.
The common fact that remains between them all the same, for example, is that just like black
economists have long been ignored by the economics profession and media in the US, in
India too the intellectual voices of ‘bahujan’ communities are ignored and hounded out for
bringing to light how the subaltern underclasses bear the greatest burden during crises in the face of the impact of structural inequities.
What are the takeaways from this detour, any way?
At the personal level, we must seek a self-consciousness that is independent of all kinds of
hierarchies so that we relate to the others as we expect the others to relate to us. This idea of morality is non-negotiable and should guide human behaviour, including economic
behaviour. This idea of “respect for persons” is the ‘categorical imperative’, thanks to
Immanuel Kant, the philosopher. In this regard, a compulsory course on human behaviour is
a must for every student to do in order to develop awareness in this regard. The doors to this
are opened at: https://imotions.com/blog/difference-feelings-emotions/
At the societal level, it is absolutely essential that the voices contributing to discussion for
socio-economic policy making are representative of race, caste and gender differences.
Ignoring, undermining or silencing the oppressed communities will not lastingly change the
political and economic realities for the better, for each nation of diverse—black, brown, and
other—communities concerned. How to design and effectively implement a mix of punitive
and non-punitive anti-discrimination policies has been a challenging topic since long. It
should be a critical component of Inclusive Economics and social inclusion. The doors to this
inquiry in the Indian context have been well opened by Jean Dreze in his Jholawala
Economics, even as the power elites of this country have been busy closing these doors of
social development. Furthermore, the economic benefits of cultural diversity and the social
and economic policy mix that upholds multiculturalism is a two-way topical concern. How
divisive mindsets conditioned by culture and context can be changed in favour of inclusive
development progress by behavioural economic research is another valuable inquiry a la the
2015 World Development Report.
I dedicate this note to the memory of Professor Gail Omvedt whose work as an organic
intellectual among the Indian ‘bahujans’ was exemplary.
By Annavajhula J.C. Bose, PhD
Department of Economics, SRCC
Comments