The Age of Kali (19 page)

Rajeev Goswami was the first. He was a Brahmin boy, aged twenty, from a middle-class Punjabi family. His father was a clerk with the postal department, and in time Rajeev was expected to take up a respectable government job as well. The announcement that half the jobs in the government were to be reserved for the lower castes ended Rajeev’s hopes of automatic placement. Previously, such posts had been fairly easy to come by: the
Dalits
knew their place. If they applied for government jobs, they would expect only the most menial positions: washing trucks, carting files around an office. The better clerical jobs were acknowledged to be the preserve of the Brahmins. That many of the best jobs should be reserved for the lower castes was unthinkable. It insulted every Brahmin’s pride.

First, Rajeev went on hunger strike. But there are always hunger strikers in India, protesting about anything – the lack of retirement homes for cows, a rise in the price of rickshaws – and the strike received little attention in the press. So, together with some friends, Rajeev planned a stunt – a mock self-immolation. He would douse his legs with kerosene and set them alight. His friends would be on hand to put out the fire. There would be minor burns, perhaps, but at least it would be reported.

In the event, something went wrong. When the kerosene failed to light, Rajeev doused his whole body, and set it alight. His friends weren’t there: they had somehow become lost at the back of the crowd, and there was no one to put out the flames. But there were photographers, and while Rajeev burned, the shutters clicked. The next morning, while Rajeev fought for his life in hospital, his picture was on every front page.

The protest against the job reservations had needed some catalyst. Rajeev provided it. In quick succession, riots broke out in every
Indian city as high-caste students – the main losers if the reservations were implemented – fought police, disrupted traffic and derailed trains. In some cities the police opened fire. There was a wave of self-immolations – deliberate this time.

The immolators were all high-caste teenagers – like Monica Chadha, a nineteen-year-old belonging to the
kshatriya
(warrior) caste from south Delhi. One Sunday morning she got bored with the video she was watching with her mother and five sisters, went out on to the terrace and set herself ablaze.

Susaria Mohan, aged twenty, was a Brahmin computer programmer from Hyderabad, the son of a temple priest. He walked to the city’s main shopping centre with a bottle of petrol, and there he burned himself to death. His suicide note said he had done it to disprove V.P. Singh’s claim that the riots had not spread to the south.

Rajasthan was one of the main centres of the agitation. Here, centuries of rule by Rajput Maharajahs had left a legacy of caste distinctions as monolithic as any in India. In every village, the Rajputs – the ancient warrior caste – were still the landowners and the lower castes still their serfs. Social mobility was virtually unknown. Thus, when the new government measures were announced, the shock was greater there than elsewhere. Peaceful tourist towns like Jaipur exploded with rage. In Jodhpur, Rajput students battled with police almost as violently as their warrior ancestors had fought the Great Moghuls. The attack on Dr Tyagi’s field centre was just one among many similar incidents.

When I went to Rajasthan a month after the riots started, the violence had begun to subside, but emotions were still running high. In the centre of Jodhpur, in a tented pavilion erected on the town’s principal roundabout, I found an angry group of high-caste students. They waved black flags and clustered round a makeshift shrine – a picture of the burning Rajeev Goswami and a statue of the monkey god Hanuman (‘to give us strength to fight the government’).

‘In old times, these Untouchables were oppressed, but today
nothing,’ said Shyam Vyas, the students’ leader. He shook his head with horror: ‘If they get government jobs, everything will break down.’

‘They will be wanting to marry Rajput girls,’ said his assistant, Arvind Chaudary.

‘And anyway,’ pointed out a third student, ‘if there is no person to sweep the roads, where will the dust be going?’

Many of the students nursed genuine personal grievances. Arvind Chaudary said that he got 80 per cent in his examinations, but because of the reservations he had been refused a place at Jodhpur College. In his class there was a tanner’s boy – an Untouchable – who had scored only 30 per cent, but because there were few Untouchables applying for the college, and because its caste quota had to be filled by law, the boy had been given a place.

As I was leaving, the students broke in to a great chorus of denunciation against the man who, as they put it, was trying ‘to make these
bungi
[oiks] sit on our head’.

‘V.P. Singh,’ they shouted. ‘He is dog!’

‘Not dog, pig!’

‘Bad than Hitler!’

‘Enemy of India!’

The students’ argument was that today the lower castes had the same opportunities as anyone else, and if many of them were poor, then so were many Brahmins.

Like all the most powerful lies, what they said was rooted in a shadow of half-truth. For even in conservative Rajasthan there were some Untouchables who were doing well. Forty miles outside Jodhpur lies the village of Gadvada. Here there lives a large community of leatherworkers, one of the lowest sub-castes of Untouchables,
doubly outcaste for working with dead animals and for skinning India’s nominally sacred cows. For years they had pursued the thankless and badly paid trade of stitching together leather shoes, but recently they had had a stroke of luck. They were good at their work, and their skills came to the notice of an idealistic Delhi exporter who had employed twenty stitchers to make high-quality leather goods for export to the West. He paid them fifty rupees (£1) a day, well over double the official Indian minimum wage, and riches compared to the five rupees a day that the Rajputs paid day labourers in their fields. As the stitchers worked in pairs, usually of brothers, it was now possible for one family to receive three thousand rupees (£60) a month.

In rural Rajasthan this is big money, and in Gadvada the prosperity was beginning to show. The village had recently been connected to the electrical grid. Many houses boasted ceiling fans, and there were six television sets in the village. The leatherworkers’ shop was surrounded by a rank of brand new bicycles. Inside was a new stereo system with a pair of huge loudspeakers surmounted by a bizarre battery of flashing strip-lights.

Socially, the tanners were still untouchable. But untouchability is a relative thing, and for the leatherworkers of Gadvada it meant apartness rather than oppression. They had a separate well from other castes, relaxed in separate
chai
shops, worshipped a different set of Hindu deities, and lived physically at a distance from the main village. But they were now rich, and they no longer had to defer to the high castes in the way that they had once done – for example by removing their shoes and getting down from their bullock carts when a Rajput or a Brahmin passed by. Indeed, several of the leatherworkers had now leased farmland to the middle castes. They were upwardly mobile Untouchables – yuppy
Harijans
.

But Gadvada is an exceptional case. In most Rajasthan villages the traditional order of the caste system is completely intact, and caste prejudice has a free rein. The village of Gagadi, where Dr Tyagi had his field centre, is typical. Gagadi is home to about a hundred families from ten different castes: Rajputs and Brahmins
are at the top of the social pyramid, Jats and Bishnoi in the middle. Below them are three low castes – the musicians, potmakers and shepherds – and finally three Untouchable castes – the tanners, blacksmiths and sweepers.

The strength of caste feeling can be horrifying. Bhera Ram is a charming old man of the Bishnoi caste. He has ebullient moustaches, has never touched alcohol and is strictly vegetarian. He has eighteen grandchildren, readily offers tea to visitors, and smiles amiably as he chats about the harvest. Yet when I mentioned the plan to reserve government jobs for the lower castes, Bhera Ram narrowed his eyes.

‘In the old days, under the Maharajah, everyone knew their place,’ he spluttered, turban quivering with rage. ‘Now these
bungi
[oiks] want to break down social barriers. How can a sweeper be my equal?’

‘You think they should be your servants?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Just as I respect a Maharajah, so the
bungi
must respect me.’

‘And do they no longer respect you?’

‘The ones who are educated create problems. When I want them to work on my fields they do not come. They say they have other work.’

‘Would you let a
Harijan
come in to your house?’

‘If a
bungi
ever tried to come near my house I would beat him with my shoe, then I would kill him,’ said Bhera Ram without hesitation.

In the end, only time and education can hope to remove the stigma of the caste system. Just before I left Gagadi, I had a chance to talk to one of Bhera Ram’s grandchildren, Oma Ram. Bhera Ram was especially proud of him, as he was the first of the family to go to school. He was a good-looking boy, nearing his thirteenth birthday. Were there any Untouchables in his class at school, I asked.

‘There is one sweeper boy.’

‘Is he your friend?’

‘Yes, but I cannot mix with him out of school because of my family.’

‘Do you think that is a good thing?’

‘No,’ replied Oma Ram. ‘I treat everyone equal.’ He thought for a second, then nodded: ‘Yes, when I have a hut I will keep equality there.’

Postscript

Dr Tyagi rebuilt his field centre and continues to do brave work in and around Jodhpur and Gagadi.

V.P. Singh’s decision to implement the Mandai Commission Report on reservations for the lower castes eventually helped bring down his government. In November 1990 he was replaced as Prime Minister by the Rajput Chandra Shekhar, who had led the opposition to the policy.

Since 1990, however, reservations have begun to be fitfully introduced by many state governments, and in some areas of the south, such as Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, as many as 65 per cent of government jobs are now reserved for the lowest castes. Moreover, in 1997 K.R. Narayanan, a Keralan Untouchable, became India’s first
Dalit
President, and an important symbol of lower-caste emancipation. At the same time the rise of lower-caste politicians, particularly in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, has important long-term implications for the status of the
Dalits
.

Nevertheless, for all these changes, in much of rural India the caste system remains firmly entrenched. Indeed, if anything, it seems likely that the policy of reservations and the
Dalits’
recent assertion of political power have both brought about a new awareness of caste.

DEORALA, JAIPUR
,
1997

On 22 October 1996, thirty-two men trooped out of a courtroom in to the bright desert sunlight of the small Rajasthani town of Neem Ka Thana. After a trial lasting ten years and a controversy which profoundly divided the people of India, the thirty-two men were finally cleared of ritually burning to death an eighteen-year-old widow, and attempting to revive the ancient Hindu practice of
sati
.

In Rajasthan, like many of the more traditional parts of India, different centuries, even different millennia manage to exist side by side. In the larger towns, advertisements for cellular phones and satellite television now score a skyline once dominated by the spires of temples. But head out in to the countryside and you soon have the unnerving sensation of the twentieth century simply slipping away.

Turning off the Jaipur–Delhi highway and driving north in to the arid thorn-scrub, you leave the modern world far behind you. Cars and trucks disappear, to be replaced by camel and bullock carts. Women carry water from wells in bulbous brass pots balanced carefully on their heads. Occasionally at road junctions you pass small domed cenotaphs commemorating the site of some long-forgotten
sati
: a memorial put up to mark the place where a living, breathing widow chose to climb atop her husband’s burning funeral pyre, sacrificing herself to ensure her husband’s successful rebirth. In this way she is believed to join her soul with the goddess Sati Mata and to bring good luck to her family and her village for seven generations. Under the domes of the cenotaphs stand a series of
stone
stelae
, some dating back to the sixth century
AD
. On these are carved small, primitive sculptures of a husband and wife standing side by side, sometimes with the husband’s arm over his wife’s shoulders. The cenotaphs – known as
chattris –
are cool, peaceful spots, and standing beside them listening to the cooing of Rajasthani rock doves, it is easy to forget the violence and brutality of the events they commemorate.

Sati
is still deeply engrained in the culture of many parts of rural India, and nowhere more so than in Rajasthan, which is now the centre of the cult of the goddess Sati Mata. Historically, of course, widow-burning is not unique to India: Greek myths record its presence in Europe, and there is archaeological evidence for its existence among the Scythian tribes of the Central Asian steppe. Moreover, the practice has links to the widespread ancient belief that a man needed his companions in the afterlife as much as in this world. But its presence in India is recorded from at least the first century
BC
–
sati
appears in the
Mahabharata
and in the Indian writings of the Greek historian and traveller Diodorus Siculus – and from the third century
AD
onwards it became increasingly common, with the very greatest reverence being paid to those women who (in the eyes of the Hindu faithful) sacrificed themselves for their family’s well-being. In Rajasthan the cult came to be particularly associated with the warrior Rajput caste, who saw
sati
as an expression of their martial valour: while the men showed their bravery by fighting the Muslim sultans of Delhi, the women showed theirs by opting to die on their husbands’ funeral pyres.