India (20 page)

The prostitutes’ meeting that Namdeo was organizing in Golpitha was to be on Tuesday. On Sunday there was an item in a newspaper that I was to be the ‘chief guest’ at the meeting. Other newspapers picked up the item the next day; and though people I knew in Bombay began to telephone me, some with worry, some with amusement, I didn’t think the newspaper story was of any consequence. I thought that misconceptions or exaggerations of that nature would blow away.

From the impression of busyness Namdeo had given, and from the serious-looking black-and-white Dalit Panther poster, I
expected the meeting to be quite an event. But when Charu and I went we found hardly anything. There were Dalit Panther banners across some lanes; there were many policemen and police vehicles about; but there seemed to be no extraordinary stir.

We had gone early, to get something of the atmosphere of the brothel area. We went walking in the narrow lanes: the lights, the signboards, the booths, the people sitting out, some on string beds, in the shadows at the side of the lanes; the piles of wet rubbish, the smell of drains; prostitutes and their ‘mistresses’ and moneylenders and prostitutes’ clients all part of the same display, the mixture of sex and innocence and degradation as undermining as in the poems of Namdeo’s that the area had inspired.

The evening life of the area was going on. The prospect of Namdeo’s Dalit Panther meeting – to protest against what was seen – was hardly causing a tremor. The meeting was to take place at the end of one of the lanes, dark and without motor traffic, but full of activity, with a walking space only in the middle, between the booths and stalls and the string beds. In bright light at the end of the lane, on a platform spread with white sheets, seated musicians were playing country melodies.

No one seemed to be attending. But as Charu and I got nearer, men with cameras, and men and women whom Charu recognized as newspaper reporters, came out from the shadows. And Charu and I understood that, for that evening, so far as the newspapers were concerned, we were the story.

I thought we should go away. Charu and I turned and walked back to the other end of the lane. The newspaper people followed us. When we were at the end of the lane, and near a brighter main road, Charu said it would be wrong to leave just like that. We would anatagonize the newspaper people, who had given up their evening for this event; and they might go away and write hostile stories. He thought it would be better for him to go and talk to the newspaper people – he knew them: some were his friends – and explain matters to them.

He led me to a cigarette stall, and asked me to stand there and wait for him. He went back down the lane, and was soon lost in the darkness and the crowd. But the photographers didn’t go away. They stayed a few feet from me, keeping their eyes on me (in case I tried to run off), while the musicians, their white platform bright and distant at the end of the dark lane, played their rocking country
rhythms. All at once a photographer took a picture; and at that flash all the photographers began to click and flash away, creating the effect of dud fireworks around me.

At last Charu came back. He had news. Namdeo had arrived, and – unusually – Mallika had come with him. It was essential now for me to go back and be with them for a little, Charu said. If I didn’t do that, they might feel that I was letting them down. Already, Charu said, even if I wasn’t aware of it, and couldn’t understand the reason for it, a certain amount of caste hostility was building up in the people of the lane, who had witnessed our coming and going. It would take just one little spark for there to be trouble. There was another reason, Charu said, why I should go and be with Namdeo and Mallika. Mallika, after all the time she had given me, had gone to the further trouble of writing me a long letter in Marathi; she had given him the letter to pass to me.

A length of matting covered by some kind of cloth, a version of a red carpet, had been laid down the middle of the wet, dirty lane. Down that we walked, back towards the musicians, who were playing on. We turned into a little room: Mallika was there, welcoming, smiling, in a fresh sari, and Namdeo. I was glad to see them, glad that Charu had made me come back. Women of the area garlanded me. It was what the photographers wanted; and it was those happy pictures – rather than the furtive ones in the dark lane – that made the newspapers the next day.

In the taxi back, Charu translated Mallika’s letter: many sheets of foolscap in a beautiful, stylish script. She was concerned that I might not have understood the two sides of her way of feeling: her love of freedom, her love for Namdeo. But she had, in fact, said it all when we had met.

We went to see Namdeo the next day at the house. That was the arrangement we had made some days before. But Charu was nervous, and even worried. We hadn’t stayed for Namdeo’s meeting; he might have felt that we had walked out on him. He might have felt that we had damaged him politically, and there was no knowing what he might do. He was an unpredictable man.

When we got to the house Mallika told us that Namdeo was there. He was inside, eating. He came out and greeted us and right away went back in. We saw all the day’s newspapers in the front room: they had been unfolded and looked at. I hadn’t read the stories that had accompanied the photographs. Charu had; and out
of a wish to make peace for both of us (and rebuking me for not having accepted Namdeo’s offer of lunch when it had been made some days before), he settled down, at Mallika’s invitation, and with Mallika serving him, to eat an enormous meal in the front room. He ate all she gave him, and then he asked for more.

But Charu had been too nervous. Mallika was happy with the way the evening had gone. She even wanted me to know that the musicians at the meeting had been part of her father’s folk-song troupe. Namdeo was very happy. He was eating at the back, but that didn’t mean anything. When the eating was over, Charu’s in the front room, and Namdeo’s in the back room, we all met in perfect amity in the back room, with the olive-green metal wardrobe with the tall mirror, and the bronze-coloured lamp-stand; and Namdeo made it clear that he was ready, as he had promised, to give me the whole afternoon.

Still, bearing in mind what Charu had said, I didn’t think I should talk right away about the prostitutes’ meeting. I thought I would begin with his poetry. I told him about the early poem Charu had translated for me, ‘The Way to the Shrine’. I asked about the sexual violence of that poem and other, later poems of his I had got to know.

He replied at great length. Charu, perhaps out of a continuing nervousness, and perhaps also out of his interest in literary matters, allowed Namdeo to talk for a long time before he translated or summed up; and Namdeo talked slowly, reflectively.

In the middle of Namdeo’s Marathi I caught the English words
not sexual
. He said ‘The Way to the Shrine’ was not one of his best poems. He gave this interpretation of the poem. The poet was like an orphan in the land of his birth. The shrine that the poet was going towards was a real place, a famous sea-side mosque in Bombay; but Bombay was a cosmopolitan city, and the shrine of the poet’s pilgrimage could be any of the city’s sacred places. The ‘darkness in the sari’ and ‘the ghost in the footpath’ was the social system into which the poet had been born. The darkness in the sari was not a sexual image – even the lowest woman would have her own code. The darkness in the sari meant ignorance: the poet had spent much of his life washing away this darkness, this ignorance.

But he had written better poems. He wished I had got to know
some of those. He had written a poem about water. It was quite a well-known poem.

That idea about water was important to him. He referred to it more than once. It came from his memories of the strict untouchability that prevailed in the village near Poona where he had grown up. The upper castes used the river upstream; the scheduled castes used the river downstream; and the upper castes used the river first.

He had a memory of something that had happened when he was in the second standard. The village children didn’t have caste prejudices; they would play together. One day he went bathing in a pond with some upper-caste boys. The guard spotted him and threw stones at him. He had defiled the pond. He was chased and stoned. He ran bleeding back to his own settlement and hid there. His mother was abused, and afterwards his mother beat him for defiling the pond and causing trouble.

He thought he was born in 1940, but he couldn’t be sure. Even at school – this would have been in 1951 or 1952 – the scheduled-caste boys would have to sit outside the school-room. They weren’t allowed to touch any source of water; water had to be poured into their cupped hands. A teacher couldn’t touch a scheduled-caste child. When a teacher wanted to punish a child from one of those castes, he threw things at the child.

His family was of the Mahar caste. They lived in a joint family: the wives and children of three brothers, about 25 people in all, lived in one house. Namdeo’s father didn’t live in the house; he had migrated to Bombay, leaving his family behind. The family had land. They lived by farming, and also by the traditional duties of their caste.

As Namdeo was talking of the traditional duties of the Mahars in his native village, we were joined in the small inner room by a man I had seen in the house before, one of those silent, unintroduced, unexplained people who appeared to have the freedom of the house. This small, dark man, with a thick moustache and an orange-coloured tunic, stood beside Namdeo’s chair, and listened with especial attention now, shaking his head in solemn affirmation as Namdeo spoke of the duties of Mahars.

Mahars had to summon people to the revenue department. That was an official duty, for the government, and in the old days it could mean travelling long distances in all kinds of weather. Other duties were more traditional. When someone in the village died, it was the Mahars who were entrusted with the task of informing all the relatives of the dead person. Mahars also disposed of dead bodies. In return, the Mahars were given an allowance of grain three times a year by the upper-caste villagers.

The friend of the house solemnly swung his head from side to side, staring down at a point half-way to the floor, so that it was as if, while Namdeo spoke, the friend of the house was nostalgically remembering the old ways.

He repeated now, ‘Three times a year.’

Mahars had another privilege. This was like a daily ritual, and Namdeo spoke long about it, and the friend of the house listened and looked down at the floor and shook his head.

Mahars, Namdeo said, had the right to call on the upper-caste houses every day and ask for bread. If there were 10 Mahar households in a village they would divide the upper-caste households among themselves, and each Mahar household would be allotted certain caste households to call on. The Mahar who had that task would leave his house early in the morning with a woven basket or a metal basket on his head. When he got to the upper-caste house he would make his obeisance and ask for bread. He would ask for bread twice. If the bread wasn’t given then, it was the right of the Mahar absolutely to demand it. The Mahars did this every morning. And the upper-caste people would give bread, letting the bread fall into the basket, without themselves touching the basket.

‘Without touching,’ the friend said.

This was the way the caste system worked when it was still strong, before 1955. After that it began to break down. Instead of grain and certain rights, Mahars could be offered money for what they did; but sometimes they weren’t offered anything. So while their duties in the village remained the same, such rights as they had had began to diminish. Ambedkar was powerful at that time; and Mahars and other scheduled-caste people began then to make political demands.

Among the scheduled castes in that area, Mahars were the only ones with the right to own land. That was why Namdeo’s family
had land and made a certain amount of money from farming. That right of the Mahars, to own land, had come about for an interesting reason.

Once upon a time, there was a raja of Bidar. He wanted to send his daughter to a certain place. The Mahars were the people who traditionally carried the palanquins, and the raja ordered the local Mahars to carry his daughter to where she had to go. The Mahars understood the seriousness of what they had been asked to do; as a precaution, to avoid accident or misunderstanding, they castrated themselves before setting out. The raja’s enemies started to spread a story that the raja’s daughter had been carnally used by the Mahars. The raja summoned the Mahars and questioned them. They displayed themselves to him, and said they had castrated themselves before taking the princess. The raja was so pleased he gave the Mahars land. That was how the Mahars became the only scheduled caste in the area to own land.

Namdeo had seemed to take much pleasure in the romantic tale; just as, earlier, encouraged by his friend, he had seemed, with something like nostalgia, to call up the caste practices of his village. I asked Charu to ask him about this nostalgia: I thought I might have missed something.

Namdeo spoke for a long time, and his friend in the orange-coloured tunic was as encouraging as always.

Finally Charu reported: ‘He’s fully aware of the pain he’s undergone. But there is also a poet and writer in him, and as a poet and writer he wishes to search out his own roots. Pain has always been part of his psychology. There was no question in the old days of complaining. You were a Mahar and you did your duties, and that was that.’

It wasn’t all pain for him in the village. The village teacher had the prejudices of his caste, and he neglected Namdeo. But this neglect gave Namdeo some freedom as a child. He enjoyed taking the cattle out to graze; he went swimming in the river.

In 1958, when he was seventeen or eighteen, and in the fourth standard, he left his village and came to Bombay. He remembered that
Mother India
, with the actress Nargis, was showing in the cinemas. He stayed in a slum area with one of his uncles, who had two rooms in a chawl. The chawl was called ‘Dhor Chawl’, after the Dhor caste, a caste who disposed of dead cattle and ran the tanneries. Only people of that caste were living in the chawl. So
Namdeo didn’t leave caste behind in his village; caste followed him to Bombay.