Describe the condition of the Chuhras as depicted in Valmikis joothan. 700 words
Answers
Answer:
Author:
Omprakash Valmiki
Reviewer:
Mohd. Asaduddin
Omprakash Valmiki. Joothan: An Untouchable's Life. Translated by Arun Prabha Mukherjee. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 160 pp. $19.50 (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-12973-2.
Reviewed by Mohd. Asaduddin (Jamia Millia University) Published on H-Asia (April, 2010) Commissioned by Sumit Guha
Chronicle of an Outcast(e) from India
In that Country the laws of religion, the laws of the land, and the laws of honour, are all united and consolidated in one, and bind a man eternally to the rules of what is called his caste.--Edmund Burke[1]
“Dalit” is the term used to describe the nearly 180 million Indians who were placed at the bottom of the traditional caste system. In recent years, a vibrant field of Dalit literature has appeared in India, and some works are beginning to be translated into English. Autobiographical writings constitute a significant subgenre of Dalit literature, conveying the firsthand, raw experience of the writers who were, themselves, subjected to the scorn and contempt of the people who had no other qualities or distinctions in life except that they were born into upper-caste families. It is through the autobiographical writings of the first-generation Dalit writers that readers in Marathi, Tamil, and Hindi have become aware of what a Dalit’s life was/is really like in independent India. These works have been translated into other Indian languages and English to spread awareness across the country, and sometimes, build solidarities across languages and regions.
In Joothan, Omprakash Valmiki deals with the issue of humiliation meted out to the Dalits by Indian society, no matter where they lived. This humiliation stems from the fact that Dalit inferiority has gotten embedded in the psyche of the upper caste, the members of which have developed an extraordinary repertoire of idioms, symbols, and gestures of verbal and physical denigration of the Dalits over centuries. It is embedded in the literary and artistic imagination and sensibility of the upper caste. Even the Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are replete with examples of this denigration where the shudras and the chandalas are shown to be treated as less than human. Dalit writers feel that the mainstream literature in Sanskrit and many other Indian languages foster these built-in assumptions of Dalit inferiority and thus they need be critiqued, subverted, and deconstructed. In this context, one is reminded of other autobiographical works by Dalit writers, like Bama’s Karukku (2000) in Tamil and in Hindi Tiraskrit (vol. 1, 2002) by Suraj Paul Chauhan and Meri Safar aur Meri Manzi (2000) by B. R. Jatav. These books shocked the readers of mainstream literature into the realization of the inhuman and morally repugnant ways in which Indian people continued to treat segments of society. Before this body of literature came out, the Dalits were the proverbial invisible men and women of India who were compelled to live on the margins of society, never entering the vision of high-caste Hindus, the arbiters of art, literature, and good taste, in any significant or positive way.