Dalit Consciousness: Fear and Revolt in the Stories of Rajat Rani Meenu

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Dalit feminism is an emerging movement from the larger movement for Dalit assertion. For the longest time, Dalit women were viewed as absent from the Dalit movement and literature. In the early history of the Dalit movement in the 1930s, autonomous Dalit women’s organizations protested against practices such as child marriage, forced widowhood and dowry. But increasingly women’s participation in the Dalit movement was overshadowed by the dominant power structures of society at the time.

Sociologist and feminist scholar Sharmila Rege in her essay “Dalit women speak differently“Mentioned in a section on the”Masculinization of Dalithood and the Savarnization of Femininity”During the Dalit Panthers movement in Maharashtra in the 1970s highlights the systemic marginalization of Dalit women’s voices.

Nevertheless, Dalit women’s writing has opened up perspectives and interpretations of Dalit experiences from the intersection of caste and gender and shows how Dalit women are doubly oppressed by Brahmanism and patriarchy. The writing of Dalit women has not only strengthened the larger Dalit movement but has also redefined our understanding of feminism in general by including the voices as well as the political viewpoint of the marginalized groups of women.

Rajat Rani Meenu, a Dalit propagation writer

Rajat Rani Meenu is a prolific Dalit writer, critic and professor. She was born in a village called Jaurabhud in Shahjahanpur district of Uttar Pradesh. Her works primarily revolve around the intersectionality of caste and gender, giving a newfound voice to Dalit feminism.

Source: Amazon

In particular, two of her short stories, namely “Darr” and “Sunita”, depict the two contrasting consequences of caste oppression, with the former presenting a story of looming fear and confrontation of caste hierarchy, with the latter a story of Dalit consciousness and freedom -Consciousness and freedom. “Darr” was published in July 2024 of Hans Magazine, a magazine pioneered by Rajendra Yadav, who is a big name in Hindi Sahitya and Dalit Print Culture. The other story called “Sunita”, which is Rajat Rani’s first published story, is from her short story collection titled “Hum Kaun Hain”.

‘Darr’ and internalization of caste politics/casteism

The narrative chronicles the everyday events in the home of a wealthy married couple. The conflict arises when one day the wife asks the husband to hire a domestic worker because they cannot do the household chores themselves. The husband, Kuldeep, is disturbed upon hearing the word “Baai” (meaning domestic worker) by flashbacks of his mother, who works as a maid for the upper caste, and refuses her son’s endless requests to drive her out of poverty. The story is based on this rejection, which stems from a deep-seated and internalized fear to bridge caste and class divides. It aptly presents the psychological phenomenon of a self-fulfilling prophecy in the mother’s character.

Rajat Rani/ Source: x (Twitter)

The mother is repelled by her son’s career prospects. They find it difficult to believe that their son has actually made progress in his social mobility. Her parents’ generation and that of her in-laws had never seen the forbidden light of the alphabet. However, inspired by Ambedkar’s ideals, she made it her mission to break down caste barriers by educating her son, even if it meant sacrificing her own well-being.

Kuldeep’s mother is so entrenched with this threat of caste atrocities that her poverty-stricken condition makes her develop an enmity and repulsion towards the people of the area, especially the upper castes. This is clearly seen from the instance in the story when Kuldeep visits her mother after a very long time and hears from her mother about her fear and his concern for his safety as the news spread across the area which he has a huge , high, secured. Pay for work in the city. The mother’s psyche was so frightened that she vehemently rejected a journalist’s offer to have both her and her son’s photo in the newspaper.

Kuldeep’s mother also feared losing her job as a cleaner/sweeper in upper caste houses due to the news spread and the underlying truth that they are “untouchable functions”.

In order to protect her son from her own poverty, the mother repeatedly denies her helpless condition and remains indifferent to her son’s requests.

Rakatating casteism in the workplace/environment

The boss of the office where Kuldeep works and wanted him to leave the job as soon as possible.

A peculiar example of casteism in the case of Kuldeep’s mother shows asking for some wood and a utensil of hers to make tea for her son. In her mockery, Ramratiya Chachi puts up with the long-standing practice of the upper caste Awarding leftover foodor ‘Joothan’ to the lowered castes, which had long been viewed by them not as a discriminatory practice but as a noble deed.

Double oppression and poverty/deprivation

The mother works as a domestic servant for working women and also manages the household tasks of the one-room shack since she lost her husband to death.

Kuldeep traverses the murky alleys of the painful memories of his mother’s struggle, who had distributed her life in the housework of upper-caste working women, but herself was never considered a working woman in a caste-ridden society.

Kuldeep experiences the wounds of her mother’s past through his memory. She had struggled to make ends meet her entire life. At all times, the basic needs of food and clothing were not met together, with one of the two always lacking. This poverty had also penetrated into the field of education. Kuldeep grew up wearing torn shoes and couldn’t afford all the basic stationery and notebooks apart from textbooks.

Fear of breaking the caste mold

Caste identity is so inseparable from the mother’s self that the meager amount of money she earns from upper-caste women’s workhouses does not allow it to be snatched from her. The mother, because of her abject poverty and because she is a former untouchable, is gripped by the fear that the upper castes might kill her son if they discover him with his mother. The mother herself fulfills the casteist prophecy by alienating her wealthy son from her and refusing to leave her state of poverty just to protect her son from the overwhelming shadow of caste politics.

“Casteist prophecy” refers to the internalized fear of caste atrocities to the extent that this fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The victim (in this case Kuldeep’s mother) intentionally acts according to the whims of the perpetrators (upper caste) and deliberately imposes caste hierarchy and symbology.

“Sunita” and marriage as a channel for casteism and patriarchy

This story begins with seven-year-old Sunita developing the awareness of being a “girl” and learning about the fate that awaits her.

At the beginning of the story, Sunita’s father becomes indignant at her desire for higher studies and tells her to stick to basic literacy itself as she will neither become a collector, an officer, nor a civil servant anyway, nor does she have the ability to become one. According to her father, she will marry, and it is her brothers who will carry the lineage forward. It was then that Sunita had the greatest realization that she is a “girl” and that marriage is her supposed destiny and this shook her and made her even more determined to study further.

Reinforcing caste prejudices

Sunita’s parents only supported her education as an excuse. Her father acted indifferent to her academic achievements. It was both financially and socially burdensome for her to spend on her education. This is because officer.”

Then there is the village head named Sajjan Singh who one day mockingly advised Sunita’s father to stop her studies and marry her as soon as possible.

Led by patriarchal conditioning and Sanskritization, Sunita’s father desperately tries to get her fifteen-year-old daughter married to a rich 50-year-old man. But even Sunita’s mother vehemently refuses to accept this decision. Sunita then admits to her mother about her higher studies and emphasizes the importance of education for Dalits to break out of the cycle of caste oppression. She explains to her mother why the Chamars and the Bhangis are divorced from education because the Brahminical order wants them to continue the generational tradition of cleaning and leather work, thereby perpetuating the vicious cycle of casteism.

Dalit Consciousness and the Importance of Education

Here in the narrative, Sunita is the birth of Dalit consciousness within her, which is further encouraged by her extensive reading of Ambedkar. She is pursuing her BA, bed but when she applies for a teaching position in parastatals in UP, she witnesses blatant caste discrimination where people with lesser abilities were accepted for the position only on the basis of caste. Then Sunita moves to Delhi and finds a job in RK Puram. But her zeal for academic brilliance never took a backseat. She continued with academics and completed her MA and LLB. She was even determined to be an IAS officer.

Rajat Rani/ Source: x (Twitter)

But Sunita’s life journey took a dramatic turn when she delivered a very moving speech on a public platform about the upliftment of the two social groups: women and Dalits. She expressed resentment at Dalits being called “Harijans” and Gandhiji for calling them that. Sunita considered Babasaheb Ambedkar to be of higher value compared to Gandhi who never wanted the upliftment of Dalits and women. She was disgusted by the term Harijan as it had become like a liquid word for the Dalits and was completely unconstitutional and merely served as a token representation and reinforced untouchability.

After this political speech, we see Sunita becoming the MP. And indeed she becomes an MP. Towards the end of the story, we see Sunita as a successful woman who confronts her father, whose egoism and conservatism are crushed, and who ultimately learns that “daughters too can prove to be mentors to their father”.

Ambedkar’s influence on Dalit literature

There is also this looming presence of Dr. Br Ambedkar in the story. His words and ideals are peppered throughout the narrative, emphasizing socialism, equality, and women’s education. In the story, Sunita remembers Ambedkar saying, “Without women’s education, Dalit revolt against Brahmanism would prove fruitless.” Ambedkar’s emphasis on education as a tool to rise above socio-economic backwardness binds both the narratives of “Darr” and “Sunita” and gives it the symbol of a protest against the dying of the light.

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