Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd talks about his personal, intellectual struggles

His is a quiet presence. He doesn’t command attention, say, when he walks into a room. But when Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd speaks, as he did at the Jaipur Literary Festival recently about his memoirs, his voice belies his slender build and low-key persona. It is strong and authoritative. More, it reveals a depth of thought, tinged with personal anguish, that brings to mind a Frantz Fanon or Aime Césaire, the theoreticians of colonialism who wrote about its catastrophic effects on the colonised.

We meet in a lounge, away from the milling crowds on the Diggi Palace lawns where we talk not about the cruelty of colonialism but the infinitely greater cruelty (inflicted as it was by fellow Indians) of caste. One of my first questions was going to be on why the horrors of untouchability have not produced some great seminal texts by Brahmins or Banias. Where are the searing indictments, savage dissections or outpourings of anguish over the evil that was done for so many centuries?

For, white Americans and Europeans dissected slavery. It was gentiles who unleashed a cornucopia of films, books and documentaries on the Final Solution. Two generations of Germans who weren’t even alive at the time of Nazism tortured themselves with guilt over the genocide of the Jews by their fellow Germans. White South Africans — activists, philosophers, academics, writers, musicians — fought to end apartheid.

Kancha Kattama

But Shepherd brings up the absence of soul-searching or support by the upper castes before I can pose the question. Look at everyone at this festival, he says, waving his arm in the direction of the stage behind us. The likes of Shashi Tharoor and Pavan Varma write books praising Hinduism but never on the immorality of caste.

“What is the point of saying ‘we sympathise with you’? Where are your texts, where are the critiques? Over one billion people and not a single text by an educated upper-caste person exposing untouchability? How can that be acceptable? You would think we would have had at least a dozen such texts by now. That is what pains me, that they don’t feel the suffering of others. Even the Communists subsumed caste under class,” he says.

Personal bitterness is something he has managed to avoid, perhaps thanks to reason and intellectual lucidity, but this indifference offends him deeply and it’s not simply because it betrays a strangely untroubled conscience. It goes deeper than that. Shepherd feels this indifference is partly responsible for India’s slowness in dismantling untouchability. Had there been a greater engagement, both intellectual and personal, as happened over segregation and apartheid, the unacceptability of untouchability would have filtered down into the public consciousness and into popular culture too, helping to make pace of social change faster.

“That’s how it happened elsewhere. That’s why America can have an Obama and can now be contemplating two Hindu women (Tulsi Gabbard and Kamala Harris) as contenders for the post of president,” he says. 

Shepherd wrote his memoirs, From a Shepherd Boy to an Intellectual (Sage, 2018), for one simple reason: member of the backward castes or Dalit has written an autobiography in English. In other Indian languages but not in English. In them, he recounts a childhood in Papaiahpet village in Telangana that was reasonably happy in terms of home life but scarred by caste bigotry.

His brave mother, Kancha Kattama, insisted that Kancha go to school against an indifferent husband, a hostile mother-in-law who thought reading “boiled the brain”, and a scornful school teacher who used to spit out his name “Ilaiah” and express incredulity at having to teach a boy of the sheep-grazing caste. “You bloody Ilaiah, you should be with the cattle,” he used to say. In 2016, he adopted the English surname as a way of telling Brahmins and their humiliating designations for honest manual work to go to hell.

A young Shepherd (left) with his brother

Shepherd suffered agonies over his name as a little boy. He writes of how it sounded unspeakably backward and primitive to him. Friends urged him to change it. He had low self-esteem. He also had bouts of misery at being thin and having a face marked by smallpox. He never married. A relationship at college spluttered to an end after prolonged dilly-dallying by the woman.

“After that, I met other women and they liked my mind but not my body,” he says simply. “I never came across a woman who wanted to support me in my intellectual work and who could overlook whatever might have been lacking in me physically. I am not comparing myself for a moment to Stephen Hawking, but he found not one wife but two who wanted to support him in his work. That can happen in the West but not here,” he says.

At some point he reconciled himself to the fact that romance and marriage were not to be. Instead he focused on his intellectual work, becoming a successful academic, a Dalit rights activist, author of Why I Am Not a Hindu (2005) and other books, and a commentator on political affairs. For much of his academic career, he taught at Osmania University, Hyderabad. Recently, he retired as director of the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, also in Hyderabad.

At 66, Shepherd is currently chairman of a Telangana organisation that lobbies for English to be taught, along with the regional language, at all government and private schools from Class I onwards, a cause that is dear to his heart because he is passionate in his belief in the power of English to transform Dalit lives.

English is crucial for Dalit self-respect, for their social standing, for the freedom to connect with the rest of the world without relying on non-Dalits to speak for them, and to give themselves, for the first time, a pan-Indian language, just as the upper castes for centuries had Sanskrit. English for all will, he says, democratise education.

“There is a block in Dalit minds about English, that it is not for them and they can’t aspire to it. They are scared of it. But once they have it, they can change India in terms of discourse and history. English is crucial for their social transformation,” he says.

In tracing his personal and intellectual development, Shepherd singles out two key events. One was at the end of the eleventh-day ceremony following his mother’s death when he was in Class IX. The Brahmin priest had been called and suitably fawned on, fed and paid in cash and with a cow. At the end of the rituals, he demanded that Shepherd prostrate himself at his feet. The young Kancha’s mind exploded with indignation.

More than the caste arrogance and entitlement, it was the sheer irrationality of it that angered him. “We had paid him for his services. He did his job and we did ours. How does prostration come into it?” His family implored him, warning him that the fate of his mother’s soul — the person he loved above all others — was at stake, but he stood his ground.

Another turning point was the agitation against the Mandal Commission’s recommendations for caste-based reservations (1990). “It drew a line in the sand. It showed us where we stood, who was really with us and who was against us. Mandal marked a departure in the post-Independence era, in the process of social change. Intellectually, I am a by-product of it,” he says.

By this time, the crowd outside is like a tidal wave. In the lounge, people are queuing up to speak to him but Shepherd continues talking, of how he has been dogged by caste discrimination all his life, from over his name to his physical appearance. In his academic career too, upper-caste contumely has been a factor in his appointments.

Rohith Vemula’s suicide in 2016 troubled him. For the young Dalit men and women who may (and, it must be added, should) read his memoirs, he hopes they will take away two messages. First, they are first-generation learners. Indignities will stalk them. “But you have to fight it out. And the best way to fight it out is to learn English in any way you can, by reading and writing yourself, consistently. Don’t let discrimination overwhelm you.”

Secondly, at this juncture in their lives, love and desire are bound to preoccupy their thoughts. Here, Shepherd urges them to be clear-minded and not let what he calls a “lust for life” impede the far more important “lust for knowledge”. They have to remember that their studies are not only for their personal benefit but for the progress of the community. Earlier generations were illiterate, for centuries, with no record of their human existence. The date engraved on his mother’s memorial stone was, he writes, the “first ever recorded date of death in our family history”.

“As the first generation of Dalits to have the opportunity to acquire knowledge, you must use it well. Become something in life. You have a responsibility, beyond your own desires and preoccupations, to use this opportunity for the wider good,” he says.