A Dalit family finds happiness

Outcaste
Narendra Jadhav

Viking (Penguin)

Pages: xii+283

Price: Rs 395

A bad book need not be reviewed. Auden went to the extent of saying in an essay: "Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character...One cannot review a bad book without showing off."

In the same essay, he says the function of a critic is to convince the reader why an author must be read.

Reading Narendra Jadhav's Outcaste: A Memoir was no source of discomfort. There is more to be said about the book if one reads it as a social document rather than a literary work.

Call it another racket or what you will, the emergence Dalit consciousness is one of the best things that have happened in the life of this benighted nation.

It is something whose excess one never finds, though its corruption one does. With corruption comes crisis. Venality does not become venial.

But the point is to delink from venality. Jadhav's book is a by-product of all things healthy in Dalit thinking, the things that internalise the values that are universal and shall always be so.

Most of this book has been told in the first person by the author's parents Damu and Sonu. Perforce Damu (Damodar Runjaji Jadhav) returns to his village from Mumbai, a different man from what a Mahar is meant to be.

He finds his duties as village Yeskar (messenger) galling, defies the village fauzdar, and earns his 'comeuppance'. And when he finds his caste brethren highly conservative and acquiescent, he decides to leave his village for good.

This is where the book really begins. Damu and Sona speak alternately. And they tell their stories back and forth. The oppression of the caste system in the village is as real as could be.

But in it there were checks. When the fauzdar's henchmen rained blows on Damu, the village Patil intervened to restrain them. If oppression were relentless, it would be difficult to hold village society together.

One notices many similarities between Dalit society and the Brahminical social order. The ways of worship, propitiating the gods for prosperity and protection against nature, marriage negotiations during which girls had to prove that they were not physically handicapped, that the husband's word was ex cathedra judgment, are some symptoms of this.

At each stage Sonu caves in before Damu-even on the question of changing religion! All the Hindu deities were removed from home because the family had become Buddhist.

But the anti-climax happens when the firebrand Damu himself installs a picture of Saraswati at home to ensure good education for their six children.

This is not the only instance. Once when in a jobless situation Damu had decided to end his life, he had a hallucination that a religious person clad in saffron lovingly forbade him to do so.

Hindu mumbo-jumbo exercises sway even on people it has segregated and shunned. Hence, that Dalits can also turn corrupt when given the mechanism to be so is something not altogether amazing. Here are a people without history. They can only borrow from others.

But Damodar Runjaji Jadhav's insignia was honesty. It was the basis for all actions, and any compromise on this was intolerable.

His life's philosophy, fellow feeling, and what he wanted his children to become, were centred round it. In this he found support from his dolly-bird wife whose honesty was not obsequiousness.

Father Jadhav's tenacity of purpose, mostly inspired by Ambedkar, succeeds. The Class IV employee's eldest son joins the IAS! And the youngest, the author, is now a senior officer with the RBI, with a doctorate in economics from a US university.

But Damu does not lose his earthy touch. He cautions his son that if his PhD does not benefit the 'man on the street', it is of no use. And he amply reveals his wit when he defiantly tells a collector, "I am the baap of a collector."

Some silly mistakes remain. On page 216, the author says his father was in his early fifties when he was born. But the author was born in 1953, and his father was 12 in 1919.

Calculations do not match. On page 87, Marutya is said to be blind. And during the conversion ceremony in Nagpur, 1956, Marutya recognises Damu and hails him (page 187).

Coming back to Auden, let me emphasise I have done no injury to my character, for, this is not a bad book. But not reading it wouldn't leave one poorer.