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Caste in a Casteless Language? English as a Language of Dalit Expression

Rita Kothari

This paper focuses on a new archive of dalit writing in English translation. The archive has a forced homogeneity imposed by the term dalit, which embraces an urban middle-class dalit and a member of a scavenger caste; the homogeneity is consolidated by the fact that the translated texts are in an international language. The questions asked concern the relationship between caste and the English language, two phenomena that represent considerably antithetical signs. Dalit writers accept English as a target language, despite the fact that local realities and registers of caste are difficult to couch in a language that has no memory of caste. The discussion shows how English promises to dalit writers (as both individuals and representatives of communities) agency, articulation, recognition and justice. The paper draws attention to the multiplicity of contexts that make writing by dalits part of a literary public sphere in India, and contribute to our thinking about caste issues in the context of human rights.

My mother is an untouchable, while my father is a high caste from one of the privileged classes of India. Mother lives in a hut, father in a mansion. Father is a landlord; mother, landless. I am an akkarmashi (half-caste). I am condemned, branded illegitimate. Limbale 2003: Acknowledgements How is it that people consider us too gross even to sit next to when travelling? They look at us with the same look they would cast on someone suffering from a repulsive disease. Bama 2000: 24 I have asked many scholars to tell me why Savarnas (upper-caste Hindus) hate dalits and Shudras so much? The Hindus who worship trees and plants, beasts and birds, why are they so intolerant of dalits? Valmiki 2003: 134

Homogenising/Heterogenising the Archive

The author thanks a viewers comments and also acknowledges the feedback and help received from Abhijit Kothari and Harmony Siganporia. Rita Kothari (rita.abhijit@gmail.com) teaches at the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, Institute of Information Technology, Gandhinagar.

he three excerpts above are by three authors Sharankumar Limbale, Bama and Omprakash Valmiki who belong to different parts of the country. Limbale lives in Maharashtra and writes in Marathi. Bama is a teacher in Tamil Nadu and writes in Tamil. Omprakash Valmiki lives in northern India, and writes in Hindi. Born an illegitimate child to an untouchable mother, Limbale rose to become the regional director of a university. From an untouchable community in Tamil Nadu, Bama moved to a Christian convent which, she hoped, would give her and many others like her a life of dignity and equality. On nding Christianity in India equally casteridden, she quit the convent and now teaches in a school. Valmiki asserts his distance and exclusion from Hinduism by adopting his scavenger and untouchable caste as his last name, Valmiki. He is an ordinance ofcer in the town of Dehradun. Thus, all three represent not only different languages or regions, but also different religious identities. They call attention to many specicities, of caste, class and region. For instance, Limbales Marathi would not be the same as that of a Chitpavan Marathi-speaking person from Pune. Also, his mixed lineage as the son of an upper-caste father and lowercaste mother provides to his experiences a dimension of sexual and gender politics. His narrative becomes as much his own as his mothers. Would the ramications of being half-dalit be the same as (being) fully dalit? Does a dalit become fully elite that is a question raised in Valmikis autobiography Joothan. Bamas critique of Christian missions is as much about Hinduism as the localisation of Christianity in India, and its misplaced claims of egalitarianism. Thus, it is possible to read each of these autobiographies as individual narratives of struggle and articulation of that struggle, or documents of communities, regions and nations, challenging the idea of India and its unnished modernity.
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As an exercise, we could replace the three authors with another set of authors, say for instance, Balbir Madhopuri (2010), who provides a much-needed perspective on untouchability in Punjab and erodes populist myths about equality in that region, and with B Kesharshivam (2008), the author of Gujarats rst dalit autobiography. The heterogeneity of caste experiences, negotiations between caste and modernity, and caste as both a pan-Indian and locally experienced phenomenon emerging out of life narratives, would provide the point of entry that sees dalit sociology not through the eyes of the academe but in terms of its own emic categories (Visvanathan 2001: 3123). Thus, a new archive of dalit writing in English translation forms the basis of this paper. The archive has a forced homogeneity imposed by the term dalit, which embraces an urban middle-class dalit as well as a member of a scavenger caste, who may have to wait a generation more before s/he can become part of the middle class. The homogeneity is also consolidated by the fact that the translated texts are in an international language. I have discussed elsewhere (Kothari 2008) the politics of representation in an archive of this nature the preoccupation with the autobiographical; the burden of representation that some members of a dalit community carry with them, mostly ones who have had the opportunity of self-expression through social mobility, and so on. Questions could also be raised about the following: the transparency of autobiographies; the location of upper-caste mediators and translators who re-present such authentic voices; the middle-class readers who would be much more willing to read autobiographies as narratives of suffering than to engage with the polemics of essays and articles; and also the discursive nature of truth, that is constructed as much through life stories as the blurbs of books, publishers efforts, the marketing economics of English publishing houses, etc. The scope of this paper does not allow me to discuss them here, although they do get dealt with in partial ways elsewhere (Anand 2003a, 2003b; Kothari 2008; Merill 2010).
Issues and Arguments

by dalits part of a literary public sphere in India, and contribute to our thinking about caste issues in the context of human rights. The subsequent section continues with English as a language of empowerment, and also builds upon its castelessness as a marked strength, not an inadequacy. It is based on an interesting case study of a Gujarati dalit writer, Neerav Patel, who raises some very important questions in this respect. Drawing on his views, by no means representative of all dalits in India, I add specic and regional perspectives on not only English, but the hegemony of standard language over what are perceived as dalit dialects. The favourable view in Patels case stems as much from the empowering nature of English, as the stigmatising nature of his own Gujarati. If standard Gujarati, Patel argues, is as distant and alien to dalits as English, he would rather embrace English, and use it to replace his mother tongue, thus making English what he calls his foster-tongue. By being foreign, English does not normalise and legitimise caste, and by being an ex-colonial language with global reach, it becomes empowering. The closing section asks what it means to give up or embrace a language, and how the self gets redened and translated into new meanings by the aforesaid shedding or embracing of a language. I suggest that embracing English involves, and also coincides with, multiple levels of translation as far as dalits are concerned.
Material and Symbolic Capital

The questions I seek to ask here are about the relationship between caste and the English language, the two phenomena that represent considerably antithetical signs. Caste, an institution that denes tradition and inheritance, combines, through translation, with the modern and secular discourse of the English language. Dalit writers, as we see in the section that follows, appear to accept English as a target language, despite the fact that trenchantly local realities and registers of caste are difcult to couch in a language that has no memory of caste. The discussion shows how English promises to dalit writers (at least in theory), as both individuals and (however problematically) as representatives of communities, agency, articulation, recognition, and justice. It would seem that the inherent inadequacies of English as a target language of translation for dalit literature are compensated by it being a language of global dissemination. The two sections that follow draw attention to the multiplicity of contexts that make writing
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The introductory discussion above mentioned the archive of dalit literature in English translation. In the discussion that follows, I delineate the conditions that aid the emergence of the archive. The public sphere formed through dalit articulation has many agents and participants. As a signicant development for the archive under discussion, life stories, witness accounts, YouTube videos, and a range of cultural texts of groups subjected to vulnerability and violence, have come to play an important role in the discourses on human rights. Pramod Nayar persuasively argues that cultural texts may not have much evidentiary value in a court of law, but they carry enormous purchase on the civil society which becomes politicised as a result of these emotional appeals to its moral imagination (Nayar 2012: 5). Nayars study refers to the insertion of new identities (victims), contexts (casteism, racism), economies (suffering) into popular and public discourses of the nation India to produce a rights imaginary and a rights literacy (ibid: Preface). Written in the myriad languages of India, and very often non-standardised registers, dalit life stories become a part of the gamut of cultural texts, a task accomplished for the most part through English translation. Dalit literature in India has emerged in tandem with caste protests in various states. In Gujarat, the state I come from, it gathered steam after the upper castes went on a rampage to protest against afrmative action for the dalits. In Maharashtra, on the other hand, where it has its seeds and strongest constituency, literature by dalits triggered off the political struggle against caste. A literature that redenes the aesthetic by
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making its readers confront the unpleasant, dalit writers very often take risks. Engaged in writing about their lives, the writers very often do so to the chagrin of those around them, and this includes not only the upper castes (whose hypocrisy they reveal), but also the humiliation of the entire community they belong to. They reveal, to the discomfort of their fellow community members, the internalisation of caste hegemony. This is also true of other dispossessed groups in India, such as the tribals and the de-notied tribes. In an autobiography about a criminal tribe, the author Laxman Mane, who evoked censure from his community councils for exposing and humiliating the community, writes
From our panchayats point of view, the very writing of this book is a crime and I am aware of the provision of the punishment for such wrong doing. I am prepared to face the consequences. Is it because my Father has already conducted the weddings of both my sisters that I have dared to write as I have? (Mane 1997: 5).

of Dalit movement. We use our words as weapons. It is our struggle through pen and pain against inhumanity. We want liberty, fraternity, and freedom. We want to eradicate this cruel Hindu caste system. This message reached out [to the] the world at large through English translation. Not only my life, but our movement strengthened. People know we are living here (email interview with the author, 3 April 2006).

English Translations

Voices of Writers from the Grass Roots

Since some dalit writers are involved in grass-roots movements, their voices tend to take on the burden of representation. The candid nature of the autobiographies that have come into English clearly show that the writing of such autobiographies must have been an act of courage. For instance, the author Kishore Shantabai Kale created a storm in the literary circles of Maharashtra by describing candidly his experiences as the son of a tamasha dancer (Kale 2000). For the rst time, the sexual exploitation in the life of a dancer was exposed to a wider public, rst through Marathi, and eventually through English. Kale brought to readers, who considered tamasha merely an innocent form of vernacular dance in Maharashtra, a sexual and caste politics, which they were hardly aware of. After the publication of the autobiography, Kale also set up counselling centres for tamasha dancers, to raise awareness about AIDS and sexual exploitation. The autobiography proudly uses the mothers name as the middle name, and makes a political statement about the community to which his mother belonged. The above very often positions dalit literature as authentic and untold stories, and this is particularly true of autobiographies. The writers of autobiographies take on a burden of representation, and appear arguably as translators of their community. It is not possible, given the scope of this paper, to examine the implicit claims of authenticity; rather, one can draw attention to the symbolic premium this places upon dalit literature. The body of Indian literature has come to be hugely enriched by narratives of an other India, emerging out of protests, struggles and grass-roots activism. English translation plays a role in its visibility and dissemination, at least potentially. The act of translation into English has had an important impact on the dalit authors themselves. For instance, Limbales autobiography in English was shortlisted for a translation prize, and also made available in Tamil and Malayalam. In an (electronic) interview, when I asked Limbale if the English translation of his Akkarmashi had helped him, this is what he had to say:
Because of English translation I get [a] world platform to present myself and my community. It proves that the academic discussion is started today on Dalit problem. Dalit literature is a socio-political document

As far as dalit writers are concerned, there is prestige and wider dissemination attached to English translation. We do not know how far this translates into sales for every single book, unless dalit texts are prescribed (as is the case with some) as textbooks in courses taught at universities. At a more fundamental level of identity, the act of writing and being heard/ read in the English public sphere allows for a renewed representation. There is another, and to my mind a more signicant, advantage. By being translated into English and thereby nding an audience outside the local language community, a dalit author creates a path that is independent of local politics. For instance, the conservative literary establishment of Gujarat which, up to the end of the 1990s, continued to dismiss dalit literature, has had to reckon with its importance (at least as lip service) once it became a nationwide phenomenon. At the same time, its residual reservations against writing, that exposes its own upper-caste duplicity, would not allow it to support dalit writing wholeheartedly. In such a situation, notes Chandu Maheria, we are able to bypass local politics and create a more neutral place for ourselves (personal interview with the author, 8 February 2006). Another writer from Gujarat, Sahil Parmar, mentions that the two issues of corruption and caste need to be internationalised and that is possible only through English translation (personal interview with the author, 6 February 2006). While Maheria and Parmar rely on others to tell their stories in English, Meena Kandaswamy, equipped with the technologies of English and cyber-media, tells them herself. Her blog mentions the following:
Big media houses which own the major publications only rarely give opportunity to dalit writers, and there is an absence of dalit/anticaste writers who write in English. The elitist writers want to write the feel-good stuff, India shining myths, and thats the work that gets into print. So I wanted to tap the power and enormous outreach of the internet (http://sotosay.wordpress.com/ by Kamalakar, accessed 18 May 2012).

Meena Kandaswamys interventions in the silence she would have been subjected to conrms Thirumal and Tartakovs thesis that cyber-savvy dalits now have the internet for campaigning against cases of atrocities, making the boundaries between civil society and political society porous. In cyberspace, they observe, dalits can explore what it means to be a dalit, and what it means not to be a dalit (Thirumal and Tartakov 2011: 29). Edging out of the margins into which their voices were relegated, dalits are now using many new technologies. Another case in point is the visual and graphic narrative, Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability, published in 2011 by Navayana Press (a press devoted exclusively to dalit writing in India). A sophisticated and moving set of images, drawing upon both tribal and cyber technologies, Bhimayana is a sign of our times.
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It may thus be useful to acknowledge the above as both the symbolic and material capital which accrue to make a body called dalit literature in English translation possible. Inuenced by Pierre Bourdieu, translation studies show how the eld, habitus and capital are formed through agents and participants in translation and publishing, dissemination and distribution, readers and reviewers (Munday 2008: 157). The inclusion of dalit studies, and courses on identity politics, race and ethnicity in universities in India and abroad, have also provided the impetus for publishers to invest time and money in undertaking such publications. Editors, translators and publishers are responding to both the market and to personal or institutional commitments which make translations by dalit writers possible. Of interest to us is also the relative comfort translators and editors feel in carrying out Indian experiments on English. Publishers aunt the dalitness of texts; a stance governed by both commitment and conducive market conditions. For instance, through Limbales autobiography, The Outcaste: Akkarmashi, the translator Satish Bhoomkar makes the Englishspeaking reader reckon with a category and identity called half-caste. Similarly, Lakshmi Holmstrom, the translator of Bamas autobiography, retains the title Karukku which, she explains, is a leaf that has sharp edges on both sides (Holmstrom 2000). English readers unfamiliar with an object called karukku come to realise on reading the autobiography that the leaf is a metaphor for Bamas existence, a woman in a situation of unease with the traditional hierarchy of Hinduism, as well as with the understated hierarchy in Christianity. In the translation of Gujarats best-known dalit novel Angaliyat, the retention of the title in the English translation is equally signicant. Angaliyat refers to a child who is led by his angli (nger) to the house of his new father, where he continues to be the stepchild. Once again, the English translation brings to the reader an awareness of being angaliyat, not just for one child, but an entire community (Macwan 2003). Similarly, Changiya Rukh, an autobiography by Balbir Madhopuri, retains its title and refers to a tree that has been deliberately stunted from the top; however, the same tree may also have the resilience to bring forth fresh branches and leaves. The titles successfully evoke for the English reader (also) the simultaneity of subjugation and resilience. It is unlikely that words such as the ones described above would easily form a part of living and dynamic vocabulary in English, like other forms of interactions bet ween Indian languages and English, which create creolised mixtures. However, there is a philosophical faith in the idea of translation as well as English, contributing to what have been discussed as contexts of material and symbolic capital. Continuing in the same vein, the section below on B R Ambedkar provides the exemplary role.
Ambedkar, English (and) Translation

It is useful to invoke B R Ambedkar at this point, a gure that not only imposes a pan-Indian unity upon dalits, but also has specic contributions to make to three important aspects under discussion telling stories, the English language, and translation. Considering how Ambedkar was himself formed
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in considerable measure by liberal thought and the systemic understanding of caste, which he acquired over the course of his education in the west, English played a constitutive role in his life. Without undermining the experiential discrimination he underwent, it may be possible to say that not only did Ambedkar create something through English, but that he was himself also a creation of English. Ambedkar set in motion a political language of rights, as well as practices of self-expression and narratives. The practice of circulating stories that could generate political responses to caste is most evident today in the various visual, print and cyber media (some examples of which have been provided in the previous section). This goes back partly to the way the relatively literate dalit communities such as Mahars and Mangs would read out Ambedkars journalistic writings to hutment dwellers men, women, children who listened with rapt attention (Punalekar 2001: 8). Through this, Ambedkar also carved a tradition of self-expression which laid emphasis upon the content of suffering and dissemination, rather than on the language chosen for the purpose of this self-expression. This, to my mind, is the solid foundation of dalit life stories, told by the dalits, although translated, edited and published (and even read?) very often by others (read upper castes). When, in the centenary year of 1994, the writings of B R Ambedkar were translated into different Indian languages, dalit literature received a strong impetus. Importantly for us, Ambedkar was not merely disseminated through translation; he used English translation to form his understanding of the caste system enunciated in ancient scriptures. In his wellknown essay Who Were the Shudras?, Ambedkar addresses those critics who had accused him of ignorance in Sanskrit and declared his unsuitability to interpret scriptures (Ambedkar 2002). Ambedkar admits the role of English as the medium through which he accessed Sanskrit texts, and declares that [t]he want of knowledge of Sanskrit need not therefore be a bar to my handling such a theme such as the present (ibid 387). In addition to using English as a means of accessing Sanskrit texts and exposing their ideological support for social inequalities, Ambedkar uses English to express his ideas of social and political democracy. It was in English that he wrote short narratives about his life to show, in a simple and accessible manner, the everydayness of the caste system. Thus, through theory and practice, Ambedkar supported the articulation of the dalit struggle and its expression or translation into English. Meanwhile, the generation that began to write dalit autobiographies (largely), poetry and ction grew up on the ideals of Ambedkar, who had organised them into a political constituency and made the nascent nation state of India incorporate electoral representation in its new Constitution. Ambedkar also initiated a move to include dalits within the educational system, and created a tradition of afrmative action that continues to this day, amid many in/valid objections from the upper castes and privileged classes. Out of the constituencies carved out of Ambedkars efforts, some, exposed to the glory of the alphabet, have their autobiographies/life stories in print, mediated through an English translation.
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Caste in an Alien Language? Before we begin to examine the relationship between caste and a casteless language like English, it is important to provide some of the main and unresolved positions on the English language in India. English belonged to the white master in the past, and is now wielded powerfully by Indias urban elite. The history of the relationship between the English language and India reveals several stages of ambivalence, stemming from its being a colonial instrument (and therefore anti-nationalist) and an alien language, and therefore inadequate in enunciating the regional ethos (Kothari 2003). However, others argue that English might now have lost the taint of colonial legacy. But even those who subscribe to such a view and vociferously insist upon the languages postcolonial and benign contribution to India would nd it hard not to acknowledge Englishs excluding functions. It is the economic and cultural capital only of Indias well-heeled middle class, but is also one that is aspired to by almost all, regardless of caste, class and gender. One of the strands in the scholarship in English studies looks at its vernacularisation in India, that encounter between Indian languages and English as a testimony of some shifts in linguistic economy. The views in this regard tend to be, yet again, polarised. Does the vernacularisation of English represent equal terms between an Indian language and English? Or, as some ask, does English continue to maintain an upper hand (see, for instance, Harish Trivedis Foreword in Kothari and Snell 2011)? On the other hand, some argue that English has lost its upper hand and become democratic, accessible. In the process of becoming more available, shifts in syntax, vocabulary and accent erode the edices of power and exclusion present in the English language (ibid). As dalit texts are increasingly translated into English, they bring to English (at least in theory) a working-class register, the shock of an idiom and sentiment (Devy 2003: xix). The new speech sets its own boundaries, delineates its own aesthetics, and when carried into English, bends the English language. What are these relationships between caste and English established through translation, and what sustains them? Caste is an age-old institution in India surviving, enduring, persisting, even consolidating, and thereby resisting the project of modernity. Its reinsertion into Indias census was both inevitable and a poignant marker of its inescapability and the futility of chasing a modular western modernity. Its articulation in a language whose existence in India goes back a mere 150 years would seem anomalous. However, the life of English in India is characterised by such anomalies: it carries simultaneous possibilities of exclusion and democracy, biases of class as well as neutrality of region, religion and caste. Hence, any discussion on English runs into the danger of perceived polarisation, overfamiliar-but-continuing-to-be heated debates on its western hegemony versus part-of-the-Indian soil indigenisation. It is an undeniable fact that by being a language of the socially and economically privileged, English is distant from dalits. A study based upon language acquisition among students in Gujarat illustrates how dalit and tribal students remain outside the core of primary learning by being distant 64

from English economically as well as culturally. The author observes that the dalit and OBC students seem to struggle more than others. These are the students most in need of English, yet English seems farthest from them (Ramanathan 1999: 228). Elsewhere, in a rebuttal to a report that accused the University of Hyderabad of being elitist and metropolitan, the writers clarify how dalit students enrol in the University without the barrier of English restricting their entry (Palshikar and Patnaik 2002: 1490). The veracity of claims and positions is not my concern, but I wish to point out how, in the anxiety to refute the charges of elitism and exclusion affecting vulnerable groups such as the dalits, rhetoric is mobilised to undermine English so as to make for inclusive spaces. Furthermore, the use of dialects, imagery and linguistic registers in dalit literature are tethered to regional and local life-worlds that demand from its upper-caste and urban readers a translation of not only linguistic, but also anthropological material. Lakshmi Holmstrom mentions in her introduction to Bamas autobiography that
Bama is doing something completely new in using the demotic and the colloquial regularly as her medium for narration and even argument, not simply for reported speech. She uses a dalit style of language which overturns the decorum and aesthetics of received upper-class, upper-caste Tamil (Holmstrom 2000: xi).

Given this reality, it would seem almost paradoxical that English should be a suitable language to carry across dalit realities. In the context of this discussion, a refreshingly different perspective was offered to me by Neerav Patel, one of the most well-known dalit poets from Gujarat. Patel stridently expressed the desire to have English as his language of expression, without its mediation through translation. The idea, he says, is not to distrust translators of English, but to insist that a dalit must learn English himself/herself (personal interview with the author, 8 April 2012). A discussion based on his article Gujarati Maari Matrubhasha, English Maari Foster Mother in the next section throws light on the ideological apparatus invested in the English language, which all dalits may/ not share. The discussion also brings home the social meaning of languages and the role they play in identity politics in India. English in particular has unique possibilities of redenition.
Goodbye, Mother Tongue

Gujarati Lekhak Mandal, a literary circle in Gujarat, has been engaging itself with a series of debates about the lack of phonetic consistency in the Gujarati language. Finding the rules of Gujarati spellings cumbersome and awkward, a group of writers are campaigning for an alignment of the written language with spoken Gujarati, which to them must be privileged as a more dynamic and living part of language. One of the arguments this group posits concerns the less educated, rural and underprivileged groups whose Gujarati must not be, according to them, deemed inaccurate (read, inferior to) by the speakers and writers of standard Gujarati. In 2012, the Gujarati Lekhak Mandal invited responses to the question, Who (all) can claim Gujarati? for its journal. Implicit in this question is
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not only the written/spoken dichotomy, but questions of power, legitimacy and representation. Are the lives of the dispossessed, linguistic and religious minorities reected in Gujarati literature? The question was meant to irritate Gujarati writers into thinking about the politics of language, and its inclusion as well as exclusion through standardisation.
Idea of a Mother Tongue?

later, almost in college, that ghari is the name of a sweet eaten by the upper-castes. Imagine if dalit children even today were taught the sound of p by pasta and not patang (Kite), would it not be confusing?

While the responses are still under publication, this section draws on Neerav Patels unpublished response to this question. An acclaimed poet and critic, Patel attacks the homogeneous idea of a mother tongue in India. Although this may seem a separate issue from English, it is very important to see how the idea of an Indian language that alienates the dalits and colludes with the upper castes in normalising caste discrimination shapes the dalit response to English. The specicity of the case below provides a much-needed elaboration of this operation to bring home the fact that Indian languages do not constitute for all Indians a proud inheritance, which globalisation and similar invasive forces may allegedly besiege. This is essentially an upper-caste view and luxury; those who wish to redene themselves must do so by abandoning this inheritance and embracing English. This argument is not the same, Prasad (2012: 21), suggests as the one espoused by management gurus and avowed adherents of capitalism, who see possibilities of progress only in English. The discussion shows how this abandonment is animated by the misery of unwanted memories of language, and a desire to erase that memory. Patel provides a biography of the language, and shows the uneasy interactions between standard and non-standard Gujarati.
At the outskirts of Ahmedabad, my village Bhuvaldi is one of the 26 villages inhabited by the untouchable community of Rohits, to which I belong. In addition to following their caste occupation [of removing dead animals and skinning them], my parents also cultivated the land, and that is how they looked after our family. Their ancestors had followed the same occupation. This made the sphere of their social life and livelihood limited to a radius of about 25 kilometres. The mothertongue they had inherited, the language they acquired through a highly limited social sphere, and one shaped by the communities that their hereditary occupation brought them in touch with Muslim leather traders from Mirzapur, the Marwadi cobblers of Madhupur, the Vora Muslim goldsmiths of Manek Chowk, the thakurs, hot-headed neighbours and landowners, the barbers and others combined to make my mother-tongue. How this mother-tongue was vastly different from the Gujarati of the upper-caste is something I wish to explain through an example .

Although the distance may appear to be one of class, it is difcult in Patels memory and experience to delineate it from caste. Patels example underscores two things: rst, standard Indian languages are carved out of the reality and convenience of hegemonic sections so that they neither reect nor make provisions for the disempowered sections. Second, the disempowered groups effort involved in learning such standard registers is as arduous as their attempt to learn English. With this, Patel erodes an oft-assumed myth that cultural and linguistic translations between Indian languages are easier than those from an Indian language into English. While this may be theoretically true, Patel aims to show the many languages that exist in even what is ofcially the same language. This also establishes the context for the English language, whose cultural difference for the dalit is no more marginalising than an Indian language. The realisation takes away for the dalit a fundamental argument about the lack of authenticity with respect to English. Meanwhile, Patel refers to his own mother tongue, the one formed through locality, occupation, memory and inheritance, also as Gujarati; but only as a qualier to mother tongue. In order to mark this differentiation in the Roman script, let us use the term gujarati for Patels mother tongue and Gujarati to refer to standard Gujarati. The former (with its peculiar words and accent), a mark of Patels dalit identity, brought to him abusive terms, and both the non-standard and standard language carry for him the memory of pejorative words. In order to erase that memory and also to become a proper Gujarati, he had to put behind mother tongue gujarati. He says, In any case, my parents from whom I had inherited are no more, nor do I have a living relation with the dalit environment of the village Bhuvaldi, my motherland. Saddened by this loss, Patel sees this as a matter of little choice, and believes that dalits must embrace the international language of rights available in English. A foreign language, a foster-mother, according to Patel, has extended to the dalits more justice and empowerment than his gujarati.
My innocent gujarati has taught me ne things of which one is endurance. But it did not tell us the reasons how caste and class were the basis of oppression perpetrated upon the deprived and dalits. It did not tell us that in order to eradicate that injustice you needed a new awakening, knowledge and struggle. How would that poor thing teach us this? Living as it does in the shadow of oppressors, how would that mother-tongue of mine know that they had cast a web of oppression and hidden it deftly in their language? By forming words such as superstition, destiny, God, bhajan, rebirth and other-world, they had made it helpless, blind and fatalistic. I am grateful to the other tongue which became my foster language; it is this English that provided scientic thought and showed a way out of oppression and torture.

Patel echoes Kancha Iliah in illustrating how the language of artisans, pastoralists, dalits, and other labour groups is formed through production and the materiality of everyday life (Iliah 2009: 3, 5). What constituted Patels vocabulary through occupation, oral traditions, trade and labour was not enough for him to relate with standard Gujarati. Hence, when Patel was being taught the sound gh of an expensive sweet, ghari, made of dry fruits and ghee, he found himself outside the imagination of that object.
When I was in the rst grade studying in a school in my village, a lady teacher tried teaching me the sound and letter of gh. But I found it very confusing. She would give an example of ghari. I learnt much
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Patel once again reminds us of Iliah, who says, While the brahminical lessons had been conspiratorially silent about our castes and cultures, the English texts appeared to be doing the opposite (2009: 55). However, Patels contribution lies in exposing an essentialist and sentimental defence of language as
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not only a luxury, but also a collusion of forces that wish to keep dalits away (even now) from the benets of a global economy. According to him, the ones whipping up anxieties about the loss of language and insignicant concerns of script are writers, journalists, teachers and politicians, whose status and livelihood depend on Gujarati. As for those who genuinely care about a more inclusive G/gujarati world, Patel addresses them thus:
They worry that should g/Gujarati disappear what would happen to such wretched communities [dalits, Muslims and other marginal sections]? They fear that people would have a sudden aphasia, and how would they then express their struggles, emotions, thoughts and feelings? To this section I wish to extend reassurance and say that do not worry about us Gujarati dalit, tribals and underprivileged sections. We have now fathomed the history of the language; we also know its politics .

Patel perceives a collusion between the upper castes and ofcial, standardised Gujarati, which also in turn inuences world views in his own gujarati, and normalises caste discrimination. In his elaboration of this link, Patel is convincing, even if he does leave some questions unasked: If Gujarati were to make a trenchant critique of caste, would that not lead to a reformulation of the role it has played (or not) over the centuries? Did Gujarati not briey adopt a language of reform apropos its encounter with colonial modernity in the 19th century? However brief this period of reform might have been, Patel makes no mention of it, or of the fact that language is also animated by hegemonic desires. And when the animating forces change, do languages not get coloured? On the other hand, he could well argue, and quite rightly, that it was only through an encounter with the English language that Gujarati acquired (on occasions few and far between) voices of dissent against caste and other forms of injustice. This too was made possible through and as translation, to which we return again. Meanwhile, if English, as it would appear from Patels views (as stated above, and subsequently), is inherently democratic, how did it become an instrument in the project of racial and imperialistic agendas elsewhere? However, the argument he makes about English below is most hard-hitting and incontrovertible. Addressing the same group again (the one that experiences anxiety about the loss of Gujarati), he says:
You wish to make your children study in English-medium schools and prepare them for the gifts and power of a globalised world, while you lure the children of dalits and tribals through mother-tongue, so that they continue being menial labourers? Is that not a plot, bhai?

He sums up in unequivocal terms:

I would like every dalit child to study in an English medium school and love his foster-mother English more than his mother-tongue. In fact I would like English to be their mother-tongue. Dear mother-tongue, I bid you goodbye .

in India (2008: 4). Sanskritisation is a much larger and persistent phenomenon than the Sanskrit language. It is manifested in the perpetuation of Sanskrit through referentiality. In other words, a heavy inuence of Sanskrit in diction, manner and form denes the acceptable norm of literary Gujarati. It positions the ordinary and vernacular as being less literary (ibid: 4). The Gujarati spoken and written by the educated and literary also tends to be Sanskritised, setting its difference from and superiority over the more vernacular, rough-hewn forms of language used by the less literary and educated, including the dalits. This phenomenon is not unique to Gujarati; this is but one example from the cluster of Indo-Aryan languages that display these tendencies. Of course, such distinctions can appear facile in the face of the criss-crossings that characterise languages. It is also possible to detect the Persian lexicon in what is considered standard Gujarati, an outcome of Gujarats trade with the Perso-Arabic world. However, it is not common to see this as an expanding vocabulary. The third linguistic impact of Englishisation would appear to be closer to Patels ideological stand on language. However, Patel is not suggesting an alignment with the English register, vocabulary or syntax, but is propounding English as the new tongue for dalit communities, a replacement of the diverse dalit languages spoken across India by English alone. An iconic expression of the dalit view on English is the celebration (by the dalit columnist Chandrabhan Prasad) of Lord Macaulay, who drafted the Minute on Indian Education (1835), and of Mother Goddess English (for a range of viewpoints on this, see Mukherjee 2009; see also Prasad 2012: 3-23). As far as dalits are concerned, the Indian languages bring with them Sanskritic traditions, perpetuation of inequality rationalised in linguistic structures, and restrictions on mobility. The neutrality implicit in such a stance may also extend to a language such as Tamil, whose politics in the 20th century entail deSanskritisation. It may also include a language such as Urdu, whose inuence from Persian, rather than Sanskrit, may make dalit a more appropriate choice for the dalits. Hence English is not the only language that may provide to the dalits the amnesia of ritual purity associated with Sanskrit. However, thinkers such as Neerav Patel and Chandrabhan Prasad gravitate to not only the absence of Sanskrit, but the presence of liberal thought, notions of equality and a vocabulary in English, which separates destiny from system. Neerav Patels mother tongue gujarati evokes unease and pain. It tethers him back to the community and village he has distanced himself from by being an urban dalit. English not only

Standard Gujarati and Patels gujarati

available at

The difference between Patels gujarati and standard Gujarati, which he associates with both the upper caste and the upper class, may be possible to view in terms of what linguists speak of as the three impacts upon languages. The well-known linguist Braj Kachru mentions Sanskritisation, Persianisation and Englishisation as the three linguistic impacts upon languages
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enables him to transcend his region and origins, but also helps diverse dalits from all regions to imagine unity in a language that does not normalise caste. English is also the language of opportunities, and hence empowering in more ways than one. Despite striking an unsentimental note, Patels biography of gujarati, a language he willy-nilly moved away from, and an account of the new meanings he associates with English, is vivid and poignant. In addition to illustrating language and caste politics in India, Patel successfully identies this as the political and philosophical afnity dalits feel towards English. And yet, the sophistication of his response lies in the fact that this is not a brown sahibs Anglicisation: English could well be substituted with French or German here. There are two things that may go against French or German, though: they do not open up the opportunities for economic mobility that English does, and they do not constitute a site of aspiration for the upper castes, and therefore cannot give the dalit a symbolic advantage over the upper-caste person. It is also clear, though, that the plea for English is not framed out of an inherent love for the Anglo-Saxon sounds or linguistic-literary traditions attendant to it, but rather because of its refusal to recognise caste as a priori, a given. Thus, what could have been its disadvantage for carrying local registers and references becomes its advantage in philosophical and political terms. This is what makes no dalit writer question the choice of English as the target language for their works. It is a different matter that dalit writers may differ on translation practices and competence.
Closing Thoughts

Neerav Patels farewell to his mother tongue gujarati for the foster-mother English opens up a gamut of questions, not only about the relationship between caste and the English language, but also larger questions about the linguistic economy in India the relationships between what are considered standard registers of language and forms of vernacularisation,1 the hegemony of the written over spoken languages, the construction of the mother tongue2 and how some languages have come to occupy places of pride, assertion, and (therefore?) territory, while some bring exclusion and unease. For instance, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor mentions in a testimonial, When I refused to speak Hungarian anymore, my parents co-operated (Epstein 1988). The loss of Hungarian, perhaps as much of a mother tongue as gujarati would be to Neerav Patel, is not always a source of joy and coherence to a displaced person. For those wishing to erase sullied pasts, language is an obstruction. It carries unwanted memories. I have discussed elsewhere that the post-Partition Sindhi migrant refuses to speak her language and her parents cooperate with her in shedding not only her language, but also her Sindhi identity. The reference to Sindhities in with the location of Sindh in Pakistan, evoking an unacceptable lineage in India (Kothari 2007: 47). Language is a marker of identity and identication. Accents, vocabulary, syntax, diction are indices of knowing who you are, where you are from, which gender and class you belong to, and in many cases, which race and caste, too. Caste produces, through specic material practices and
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demography, its own vocabulary. It is this combination that is described as dialects employed by the dalits. Dalit dialects have hitherto formed an important part of dalit protest, as weapons undermining the elitist registers of the standard language used and institutionalised by the upper castes. However, the terms of this communication continue to be unequal. Patel recognises how the absence of standard Gujarati marks him out as a dalit. His protest persists without allowing him to be fully free of the memory of caste. By bringing English into this communication, Patel seeks to shift the terms and use a currency that upper castes aspire towards. Patels gesture reects a refusal to Sanskritise or vernacularise, and thus be bound by the old terms of exchange. His gesture of giving up a language is rooted in what would appear as dalit betrayal of Indian languages (see, for instance, Ravikant 2006), in the way that NRIs, for instance, move away from their languages. The question is whether mother tongues generate the same meaning for everybody, and the discussion above shows that they do not. They are, in some cases, painful reminders of origins. Such narratives of language loss seldom form part of language scholarship, focused as it is on language assertion rather than abandonment (Mitchell 2010; Ramaswamy 1993). Moreover, dalits in India speak different languages, and so asserting one language would yield neither a territory nor a representation of all forms of dalit identities. English helps redene identity and imagine a pan-Indian dalit unity, while also allowing a vocabulary of human rights. Many meanings of translation translation into another language (linguistic translation), into other realities (translation in an anthropological sense), from experience to expression, appeared as sub-themes. Translation is one of the many consolidations that show a dalit subject as an active participant in Indian democracy one who has changed the grammar of electoral politics, or one who wants caste discrimination to be acknowledged as a human rights issue, and one who is grappling with both the stigma and the assertion of her/his identity. As far as the English language is concerned, its ideological potential to translate the dalit life from fatalism to an identity of rights outweighs considerations of its distance from Indian reality. The process is as much about manuvaad (casteism) as it is about anuvaad (translation). Not surprisingly, translation has increasingly come to be referred to (Sakai 2009) as the metaphor of the metaphor.
Notes
1 2 For a study of the exclusion of the spoken and non-standard, an outcome of mass printing in Europe, see Tonkin (2006). For a ne-grained discussion of how mother-tongues are also an unstable category, constituted and perpetuated through 20th century scholarship and colonial technologies, see Michele (2009). Also of interest should be Bhallas views on the tyrannical nature of the so-called mother tongue in their repression of the vernacular (2010). Patels dismissal of the romanticism around the mother tongue as luxury and the sentimentalism of those whose languages dominate, validates the constructive nature of the mother tongue as well as the tyranny that Bhalla mentions.

References
Ambedkar, B R (2002): Who Were the Shudras? in V Rodrigues (ed.), The Essential Writings of B R Ambedkar (Oxford: Oxford university Press) 385-95.

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