I will never be free of memories. Memories are my reality.
That is the destiny of Dalits.
– Bhimrao Ambedkar
— “Two Imaginary Soliloquies: Ambedkar and Gandhi’, DR Nagaraj, ‘Flaming Feet and Other Essays’, 2010
To hear one of the greatest intellectuals of modern India let out a cry of profound anguish – on the eve of the Golden Jubilee of Indian Independence – over the lot of his people to forever be the prisoners of memories is rather disconcerting but also intriguing. The memory he is talking about is neither the historical memory nor the spiritual memory, for he had delegitimised the projects of excavating these memories as shrewdly colonial and sinisterly assimilationist, respectively.
If he knew the quest for glorious Dalit past and proud genealogies to be constructs – the revivalist cultural politics to him was dangerously status quoist – he would have none of these structures of memory. The claustrophobic prison-house of memory he is condemned to relates to the frozen time his community is forced to inhabit; the unchanging time marked by the poisonous, viral caste ethos that has infected the very institutions and forms of life he had built and enlivened to fight it.
Like Babasaheb, Bhalabha, the visualiser in Vultures, in whose memory the narrative unfolds, is a hostage to his memory. Based on the incident of the blood-curdling murder of a Dalit boy by Rajput landlords of Kodaram village in Banaskantha district in 1964 and published around the Golden Jubilee of Independence, the novel portrays an orthodox, feudal society, structured around caste-based relations and social segregation.
Bhalabha’s memory categorically disputes the revivalist and even anthropological strands of Dalit cultural memory. It’s quintessentially the bitter-sweet memory of his community’s existential predicament, of the knowledge that in the midst of apparent, superficial change, nothing has changed. He realises that the vice-like grip of caste, entrenched in its deep-seated material greed and its dictates for social distancing, has not only struck deeper roots but also spread its rhizome network far and wide, infecting communities, structures, institutions and world views.
Actually, it is an alternative memory, the vulture’s memory, which has been shunted to the margins by the custodians of cultural memory for it is too stark and too discomforting to confront. The vulture’s hermeneutic of lived realities unsettles and subverts the culture’s truth – claims about identity, progress and civilisation. That’s why it is always rejected as aberration and discarded as exaggeration.
To my mind, the novel presents a subversive counterpoint to another mainstream Gujarati novel that claims to capture the zeitgeist of twentieth-century Gujarat, the invincibility of its spirit and proud agrarian identity. The novel by Pannalal Patel titled Manavi ni Bhavai (Endurance: A Droll Saga), published on the eve of Indian Independence, fetched the author the prestigious Jnanpith Award in 1985. Its film adaptation in 1993 won the National Film Award.
The defining theme of the novel, from which the English translation probably derives its title, is the crushing agrarian angst articulated by the protagonist Kalu when he queues up for charity grains during Chhappaniyo Dukal (Indian Famine of 1899-1900). He says, “It’s not the hunger really, but the act of begging to douse it which demeans.”
In his short story Badalo (The Payback), Dalpat Chauhan develops this theme in caste framework and brilliantly shows how during Chhappaniyo, the pauperised, famished upper-caste villagers shed their caste inhibitions and showed up at the door of untouchables under the cover of night to beg for sun-dried meat of carcasses. In this way, Chauhan cleverly subverts the collective memory, points out gaps in the popular narrative and makes the silences therein speak.
Hunger becomes a recurrent theme in the present novel too and takes shockingly different forms: the hunger for life drives the untouchables to bear with dehumanising humiliations, the scourge of bonded labour and sexual exploitation makes them lead a life of vultures; the hunger of female sexuality becomes a threat to patriarchal order and caste purity results in the brutalised assassination of the protagonist.
Most importantly, the insatiable hunger of the caste-society for perennial power and unimagined pelf leaves a whole civilisation frozen and humanity crippled. Such a seamy, shameful side of society, preserved so luridly in a vulture’s memory, becomes an anathema to the physical, socio-economic, cultural and literary spaces so meticulously sanitised by the culture. A shade of this sordid, polluting memory, even when it perforates the cultural cocoon, makes a muted appearance, transcoded as something else.
That’s why the first flowering of Dalit literature in Gujarati in the late 1970s met with a deep suspicion from the Dalit literary establishment. An elaborate debate that went off then in issue after issue of the Gujarati magazine Chandani about the need and usefulness of a separate, exclusive category called Dalit Literature, with its own aesthetics and humanistics, brought out the worst fears of Brahminical thinking that pervaded the mainstream scholarship and literati.
Even today, the untameable, dissident Dalit creativity is consigned to the scrublands of literary regimes, for the vultures to strip literary carcasses and cadavers of memory, unbeknown to squeamish upper-caste sensibilities. Ironically enough, in the era of neoliberal development, the scrubs too have come under the scanner of land sharks and the plans to dislodge the Dalits from the badlands of caste society are already chalked out. The journey of caste-based oppression from Kodaram to Una is a continuous, uniform saga of caste patriarchy’s regressive, almost medieval, lust for land and women.
While Jatayu and Sampati have been so central to our national, cultural memory, we cannot forget even for a moment the critical importance of vultures for the restoration of the ecosystem and humanity’s survival. In about the last two decades, India witnessed a mass dying off of around forty million vultures on account of the administration of diclofenac, a pain reliever, to cattle.
This led to the formation of Saving Asia’s Vultures from Extinction (SAVE), which works in mission mode for the restoration of the vulture population through setting up of conservation breeding centres and so on. Concomitantly, there is a need, I think, to launch a similar programme aimed at curating the vulture’s memory as a way of curing our cultural amnesia.
What Elif Shafak says about Turkish and Armenian societies and their cultures of amnesia and memory respectively is so pertinent: “One day in my ideal world, I would like to see Armenians forgetting more and the Turks remembering more, but for that to happen, the Turks need to start remembering first.” That’s the only way to liberate Babasaheb on the eve of the Diamond Jubilee of Indian independence.
Excerpted with permission from Vultures, Dalpat Chauhan, translated from the Gujarati by Hemang Ashwinkumar.