Pariah beats: Dalits in India are using traditional music to subvert the caste system - Sounds of dissent: India

New Internationalist, August, 2003 by Julian Silverman

'No-one will say this openly. Gandhi has done the greatest harm ... he did not intend any good for the country!' Professor Subramanian, retired scholar of South Indian classical music, a man of the highest Brahmin caste, turns in his chair back to the singers' recital. He sniffs loudly and again turns to complain bitterly. The 'untouchables of India" are getting above themselves, he insists. They should know their place at the bottom of the Hindu hierarchy. Gandhi campaigned all his life for greater tolerance for the country's most dispossessed peoples--the Dalits--whom he called harijans or 'children of god'. Subramanian was getting hot under his Nehru-style collar just thinking about the upstarts. 'They say the harijans are being crushed, but in fact it is the Brahmins being crushed!'

The Dalits (1) are fighting back. Born into marginal existences they increasingly assert their human rights. They are by far the largest group amongst the fifth of India's population who live in extreme poverty and destitution. Condemned to labouring in the fields of high-caste families in return for a subsistence diet, millions are undernourished and exploited by landowners, officials and moneylenders.

The unique music of the Dalits has long been viewed by high-caste elites as a degenerate culture born of an essentially 'impure people'. Their presence and cultural practices are viewed as polluting by people of high status.

Professor Subramanian dismisses all music not made by people of high caste. During the recital in Chennai (formerly Madras), cultural capital of the refined classical music of the Brahmins known as Carnatic, he says:

'There is folk music and classical music. Carnatic music is scientifically organized, folk music is not so ... people who are not properly trained just sing out of emotion, enthusiasm. Folk music can be sung by any child. Quacks! Carnatic is not like this, you need a talent.'

Despite the prejudice of people of high caste, those at the gutter level of the Hindu hierarchy are reclaiming their music. It is becoming a source of powerful resistance, the basis of new and revolutionary identities. As Dalit women come together to share and find solutions to their problems at meetings of self-help groups in villages throughout India, they learn that they are not to blame for their individual problems. They become 'conscientized'--in the term coined by Paolo Freire, the Brazilian revolutionary educator--to the fact that their problems are rooted in an oppressive social structure. With this realization comes a new sense of self and community as they band together to fight for fair wages, access to clean water, electricity and land rights.

Ambu, an activist with the NGO Village Action Group, describes how Dalit women use song in their daily struggles. 'The women are used to singing about agriculture work ... on suffering, temples, gods, but sing here about problems and solutions. We sing songs about the problems of women, dowry, chastity, about who will change these problems. We sing songs at women's meetings. The power of the songs is that they help women to pick up meanings fast.'

A thousand humiliations

Mr Arokiasamy is a Dalit. He is an intense man, whose heart burns how untouchability is imposed upon communities such as the Pariyar through a thousand humiliations. At another nearby grassroots organization, the People's Multipurpose Development Society, he the many village teashops in which Dalits are still forbidden to drink out of the same glasses used by people of high caste. In certain villages they are prevented from 'contaminating' entire streets by being forbidden to walk in shoes or ride bicycles.

Arokiasamy may have been born at the wrong end of the Hindu caste ladder, but like Professor Subramanian he too is critical of Gandhi's position on caste. An intensely religious man, Gandhi believed that the caste system of the Hindu scriptures is divinely ordained and should remain in place. However, he felt that untouchability was a recent perversion of Hinduism and must be done away with.

Arokiasamy--like his hero, the great Dalit leader Dr Ambedkhar--feels that there will be no end to caste discrimination unless the entire caste system is overturned. Although Arokiasamy works with Hindus, Muslims and Christians from Dalit and other communities, the Pariyars--a caste of funeral drummers--are amongst the most downtrodden. When the British colonialists observed how severely Pariyars were exploited and excluded from the Hindu mainstream, they applied their community name to all in the world who were rejected and despised. They became known as 'pariahs'.

The Pariyars' low status is continually emphasized through association with one of the most impure and contaminating phenomena of all in Hinduism--death. Required in the past to clear away dead cattle from the fields of their strictly vegetarian landowners, they were forced through starvation to eat furtively the putrefying carcasses of sacred cows. This intimacy with death perhaps was the factor that compelled Pariyars to develop yet another stigmatizing cultural practice.