Searching for caste bugs in the radical Naxal movement

“Your life is your caste, your caste is your life.”
-Sujatha Gidla

Sujatha Gidla’s book, Ants Among Elephants, is a fascinating account not only of her own and her mother’s tryst with caste but also of the radical movements—Telangana Armed Struggle (1946-51) and Naxalite movement under CPI (Peoples War Group) –mediated by her uncle, KG Satyamurthy (SM), who played a significant role in both. It additionally highlights the oppressive prowess of caste that survives momentous political-economic changes during the last century including religious conversions during and after independence by its worst victims, the Dalits. Gidla’s family is educated from her grandparents’ generation, which makes it unrepresentative of the majority of the Dalits, who are illiterate and laborers. However, the process with which they achieved that stature is representative of the most Dalits. Having achieved that relatively exceptional status, if it continues to face humiliation and oppression, the plight of the ordinary Dalits can be well imagined. This book is in many ways an eye opener to those who think that caste system is a thing of past or is just a residue that would wither away. Caste remains a lived reality of the contemporary India for the Dalits, in a rather more complex way than ever before.

Gidla’s narrative effectively captures this complexity of castes in contemporary India. However, she is at times too simplistic as for instance in tracing the roots of untouchability of her clan. She writes that her ancestors were a nomadic tribe subsisting on forest produce until colonial times. They were driven out onto the plains when the British began clearing the forests for teak plantations and then ­the agents of the local landlord denuded them of their lands to be landless labourers. Thereafter, she simply leapfrogs to say that when her ancestors entered the Hindu society, they were assigned lowest caste, and thus they became the untouchables. Similar bungling on caste, surfaces when she mentions Bhoomaiah and Kishta Goud as lambadas, a nomadic tribe. Actually, Kishta Goud was toddy tapper by caste and Bhoomaiah was a Jangama, a veerashaiva lingayat, a priestly caste for BCs.

The story of Gidla’s clan becoming Christians and getting education through missionary schools accords well with general history. While becoming Christian benefitted the Dalits culturally, it did not help them socially and economically. Socially, they remained what they were before conversion, Mala or Madiga. Economically also, they remained as they were. Gidla’s entire narrative is rather focused on the persisting untouchability and poverty of her community. Her grandfather, Prasanna Rao along with two of his brothers, was educated in the mission school, to be the teachers. Both her parents were college teachers. Her uncle, was not only educated but also a leader in radical politics and still as the book depicts could not escape bitter experience of their caste at every step. Despite being educated, she and her family were daily subjected to reminders of their caste status. Poverty is integral with Dalit lives. The depiction of poverty and penury Gidla’s characters suffer pervades the entire book. The dispassionate narrative of how SM starves and wastes his time during his college days, because his family could not afford to feed him or the manner in which her mother Manjula endures the biting cold of Benaras just because she could not afford to buy proper woollen, will haunt the reader.

The allegorical title of the book is indicative of the inferiority that caste induces among the Dalits that they are ants in the society of elephants. In her native state, she develops a notion that they are looked down upon by the society because they are a minority.

But, in IIT-Madras, where she takes up a job as a Research Assistant, she finds highbrow Christian girls from Kerala who tell her that they were Brahmins, Nambudiris and how they were superior even to other Brahmin castes. They do not suffer either poverty or low caste. Their castes overrode their religious identity.

The discrimination, humiliation, oppression the Dalits are subjected to because of their caste is a legion in Gidla’s book. Her precocious mother, Manjula, struggled in BHU with the poor grades she received from one Brahmin professor, who realised that “she was poor and untouchable” and reacted with disgust. She was also rejected from — or harassed at — teaching posts for similar reasons. Gidla’s uncle Satyamurthy felt himself “an ant among elephants” in college, and was cruelly dumped by a well-to-do young woman named Flora, who had once flirted with him, only to eventually announce: “We are brahmins. You are have-nots, we are haves. You are a Communist. My father is for Congress. How in the world can there be anything between us?” He realised that life was not like the movies so popular after Independence, in which “the rebellious daughters of rich, evil men” fall “in love with a champion of the poor.”

While her experiential account reads so much authentic, the contemporary castes manifest in far more complex ways than Gidla appears to infer. Contemporary castes are not the classical castes of pre-colonial times where their status was ritually determined. Under capitalist modernity, they have been classised. Therefore, the Dalit experience ranging from humiliation to a gory atrocity can always be seen as the outcome of the inseparable interaction of both class and class.

Notwithstanding these nuances, Gidla’s book is replete with episodes that silently uncover the reality around us. But she would be especially thanked by millions of people for having presented Satyamurthy alias Satyam or simply SM in flesh and blood. The revolution devoured thousands of brilliant people over the last five decades but barring a prominent few people hardly know of any. Their sterling sacrifices remain shrouded by secrecy from the people. Nothing much was known about SM, not about his poverty-stricken university life, various struggles he waged even then, his travails, his parasitic habits, his idiosyncrasies, and so on. Of course, not much was known about Kondapally Seetharamaiah either.

SM comes out alive as a remarkable revolutionary in Gidla’s narrative. But in process of painting him a hero, she again uses her broad brush strokes to highlight caste as the only cause for his downfall. As the person who denies existence of caste even in the revolutionary movement may be called caste-blind, the one who only smells caste everywhere may have to be called caste-obsesed. Both should be condemned. While none can deny SM’s sacrifices and contributions to the naxalite movement, his conduct after he came out of his underground life having been expelled from the party, might not have convinced even his ardent admirer, including me. He had a long conversation with me, followed by letters he wrote from Vishakhapatnam, which I found quite incoherent, both ideologically as well as strategically. They were also confirmed by his actions. He strayed across all kinds of political streams just to get disillusione. When he came out, he declared that he would form a new revolutionary party CPI (ML) (Bolshevik) but instead joined CPI (ML) Unity Centre. Bigger surprise came when he joined Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and even contested the election for legislative assembly from Mydukuru constituency in Krishna district and lost it badly. Later, he left BSP and joined CPI (ML) Praja Pratighatana and was elected as a secretary. Leave aside BSP, to those who know what these various ML parties stood for, even his joining them would certainly be surprising. The tendency to idolise people comes in the way of their objective assessment: While SM must be respected as a great revolutionary until mid-1980s, he needs to be critiqued for his later actions. And this must apply to all the great people.

Barring these pitfalls concerning with the history of the revolutionary movement, Gidla accomplished a marvellous job in eloquently weaving together her family narratives with the contemporary Indian society and politics, specifically focusing on the practices and consequences of caste inequality. The sheer choice of episodes to make a larger picture of the life of a Dalit ‘middle class’ family (despite horrendous poverty all her characters endure, it would be still called middle class among Dalits) and amazing degree of detachment with which she narrates them is simply brilliant for a person with science and technology background. Perhaps her own tryst with radical politics has come to her help. Inspired by her uncle and by the general inspiring atmosphere around her (Warangal was a hub of the Radical Students Union (RSU), Revolutionary Youth League (RYL) and PWG activists, where she grew up), she plunged into naxalite politics. She was arrested, tortured and incarcerated in jail for three months while at REC Warangal. In all these myriad details she has brilliantly kept her focus intact, which is to depict how caste operates in India. Even the religious conversion or physical migration of Dalits to Western world did not save them from the experiences of humiliation, discrimination and oppression. As Gidla eloquently says, she could never escape her caste, even in America. She says when she meets a fellow Indian, it’s often one of the first questions they ask. Caste is the virus that travels everywhere Indians go.

It is an important book that must be read by all interested in knowing the contemporary reality of India.

(The writer is a political analyst, and civil rights activist with CPDR, Maharashtra)