'The Age of OBCs in Indian Literatures'? Rethinking Indian Literatures and the Question of Caste Identity

The study of relationship between caste and literature in India has primarily been dominated by the Dalit Studies, which justifiably  interrogates the ' Sawarna-Upper Caste' hegemony in literary and cultural studies from the Ambedkarite position. Statistically speaking the Dalits, ( the former ' untouchables') who are usually categorized as ' Scheduled Castes' ( SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) by the constitution of India, form roughly 30% of Indian population as per 2011 census. Approximately 40 % of population in India comprises of a multitude of castes and communities classified as ' Other Backward Classes' or 'OBC'.  The Wikipedia graph about the OBC is informative.

Friends of South Asia or FOSA has put together a website Friendsofsouthasia.org which provides  useful information about this social category. It notes, " The OBCs comprise, by and large, the lower rungs of the Sudras who, in the past, suffered from varying degrees of ritual prohibitions applied to the a-dvijas (literally, those not twice-born) and remain till today socially and occupationally disadvantaged". It also notes, " "OBCs, by profession, being small cultivators, agricultural laborers, artisans and also being engaged in weaving, fishing, construction work, etc. and these occupations being common to SCs and OBCs, the status of OBCs cannot be treated as very much different from that of SCs ....OBCs constitute a majority of poor and backward population which produced a variety of goods and services, but on terms and conditions unfair to them."

However, in the study of sociology of Indian literature, the category of ' OBC' has not received the importance it deserves. One of the most significant statements comes from a renowned Marathi writer Vilas Sarang (1942-). In his provocative essay, " Marathi Sahityatil OBC Yug' ( in the magazine ' Khel' vol. 7, 2007) he attempts to theorize the relationship between this societal category and the poetics practiced by these writers in terms of the questions of identity. The essay is later anthologized as ' Marathi Vangmaiyatil Madhyamvarniya Yug' in his collection of essays Vangmaiyeen Sauskruti ani Samajik Vastav (2011).  

Sarang points out that this mass of ' Other Backward Classes'  is a heterogeneous and scattered one. It lacks any ' face of it's own'.  Historically, the modernist poets of the nineteen forties and the fifties in Marathi like BS Mardhekar or Vinda Karandikar were from the upper-castes. After the sixties, the Dalits and OBCs started making in-roads into Marathi literary world. While the Dalits were aggressive and assertive, the OBC writers were very often on the ' middle grounds'. Sarang points out that Bhalchandra Nemade, a major OBC writer of this period, failed to provide leadership as he remained closer to the identarian politics of ' grameen' writing and 'sub-culture' ( pot-sauskruti) politics.  As the time proceeds, the ' grameen (rural) literature' will give way to the category of ' OBC' literature, Sarang notes. In short, great shift in literary values is under way. 

Sarang remarks that in terms of literary practice, it did not have a poetics of its own. It often used the brahminical upper caste aesthetics, or used the Modernist idiom, or used the Dalit poetics or often followed the poetics of' grameen' or ' rural' literature. After 1980, Sarang argues, however the situation changed and the OBC writers started asserting themselves in poetry. Their preferred mode was 'realism' which gave rise to ' realistic  and unadorned poetry in Marathi.' They could not identify with the poetic idiom of the poetry of earlier generation be it conventional-romantic one or be it modernist one. It seems the OBCs' search for their own identity, their own face and their own voice will be critical for Indian cultural scenario.

Sarang's conceptualization, irrespective of its accuracy, is fascinating and has far-reaching implications for literary studies in India. It is interesting how he changed the title of his essay from ' OBC' Yug (2007) to ' Madhyam Varniya' ( of Middle Varna) in his collection in 2011, probably to avoid controversy. However, some questions need to probed further. For instance, why did the OBCs stay away from Dalit politics and poetics? What was the impact of the Mandal Commission implementation and the rise of OBCs as a force in Indian politics on the way Indian literature was read and written? What is the impact of  the swing of the OBCs towards the erstwhile upper caste party BJP ( see the statistics from the Hindu given below) on cultural politics of India, especially, the identarian ones? Specifically, with the OBC as a Prime Minister who has a thumping support from the upper-castes as well, what will be the trajectory of OBC identity politics in India? 

As the Friends of South Asia website tells us, the OBC is a dynamic category. What we need today is more contemporary sociological framework in the study of Indian literature to explain this dynamics and I don't think we are anywhere near to deal with this. 

Inventing the Third Nation: A Brief History of Marathi Poetry of Past Hundred Years

Yesterday, I read my paper titled' Re-imagining the Nation in the Post Global Period:The Case of Post-Nineties Marathi Poetry' at the National Workshop on Literary Historiography organized by the UGC-DRS-I SAP Program and the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, The MS University of Baroda. 

I began my talk by commenting on how academia and intellectuals of this country are obsessed with the desire for mourning for 'dying languages' and cultures and are blind to new languages and cultures being BORN everywhere around them. My talk was about these 'birth' of new languages and cultures. The English which I was using in the seminar hall, I said, was a newly born language and not the older one by the same name which was born on the British isles one thousand years ago. The birth of new languages, like the language of Manya Joshi or Sanjeev Khandekar, is the focus of my talk, I said.

Using Benedict Anderson's theorization of nation as an imagined political community, I looked at how the nationhood was constructed in the Marathi poetry of the twentieth and the twenty first century.

I talked about how the invention of modern nation was possible in India in the nineteenth century due to colonial modernity , especially the rise of print-capitalism and colonial education system. This nation, as we know, was an orientalist construct which was elitist, upper caste,Brahminical, and masculine. It was based on the view of culture which was High Textual. This paradigm was radically questioned from within by Jyotiba Phule (1827-1890) and Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) in their distinctive ways. The impact of the print capitalism and the western education on Marathi language gave birth to new kind of Marathi which did not exist earlier. The birth of a new nation was actually a birth of a new language.

Marathi poetry of this period, as characterized by the poetry of Keshavsuta (1866-1905)and Balakavi (1890-1918)is reformist, idealist, and influenced by the Anglo American romanticism. The exception to this paradigm was the poetry of Bahinabai Chaoudhary (1807-1882), an illiterate genius whose brilliant works were unavailable to the 'community' as they were orally composed, and hence outside of the print-capitalism of literary culture of the time. 

The second discontinuity in imagining nation was after independence. This 'post-colonial nation' was a critique of the colonial nation. The attempts were made to democratize and open up the colonial nation. This was a 'demotic' re-imagining of the colonial nation which attempted to democratize both modernity and literary culture. The efforts to democratize modernity and literary culture resulted in the rise of 'little magazine movements'. These vision of culture and modernity which these magazines embodied was democratic, pluralist and anti-establishment. 

The avant-garde poetry of B.S. Mardhekar (1909-1956)is situated at the cusp of these two imaginings of nations and heralds a paradigm shift in Marathi poetry. His poems express despair resulting from World War II, growing industrialization, urbanization and erosion of traditional values. They mark a departure from the earlier practice of poetry and opens up possibilities for expression which did not exist earlier. Mardhekar’s attempt to integrate the non-conformist aspects of Bhakti poetics and native traditions with international modernist aesthetics is a significant characteristic of the post-colonial cultural tendencies. From 1955 to 1975, poetry which expressed this dissenting vision of life, culture and nationhood pervaded the little magazines. (Right: Pic of Maradhekar)

The ‘little magazines’ like ‘Shabda’, ‘Vacha’, and ‘Asmitadarsha’ had a distinct anti-Establishment outlook. Complex, experimental and challenging poetry of Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004), Dilip Chitre (1938-2009), Vasant Dahake (1942- ) and Namdeo Dhasal (1949- ) emerged from the movement. Their works bear a distinct influence of the international modernist and postmodernist poetry. The Dalit poetry or ‘the poetry of the oppressed’, influenced by the radically reformist philosophy of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (1891-1956) and Jyotiba Phule (1827-1890), exploded on the scene in the same period. The poets like Dhasal straddled both avant-garde and the Dalit poetics. Feminism also started making its presence felt in this period. Malika Amar Sheikh (1957- ) writes vigorous poetry which combines feminism with other dissenting political ideologies. In the eighties, the tribal poets like Bhujang Meshram (1958-2007) started writing poetry which combined their quest for tribal identity with protest against the exploitative social system and the poets like Arun Kale (1952-2008) continued the tradition of Dalit poetry.

This alternative way of imagining a nation was also an alternative way of using language and so the language of post-colonial Marathi poetry was more inclusive, demotic and radical. This birth of new languages and new languages of literature is correlated to the birth of the new idea of nation.

The third shift in the way we imagine ourselves, I argued, takes place in the nineties, largely due to economic reforms, globalization and revolution in media. While the colonial nation was constructed by introduction of print-capitalism, national imagination today is shaped by satellite television ( news, soaps and reality shows), the Internet, cell phone revolution and the overwhelming power of market. The context of post-cold war geopolitics is a significant context to this construction of nation.

This new construction of nation can be theoretically analyzed in multiple ways. For instance, one can fruitfully combine Anderson’s theorization of nation as an imagined community with Howard Rheingold’s theorization of ‘virtual communities’ ( 1991/2000).A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. One of the most pervasive types of virtual community includes social networking services, which consist of various online communities. Following Toffler, one can also think of this new imagining of nation as the ‘Third Wave’ nation.

Following Raymond Williams (1977), I think we can in the year 2011 also think of the first construction of the nation as ‘archaic’, the post-colonial nation as ‘residual’ and the third post-nineties ‘nation’ as `emergent’. The critique of this 'global nation' ( an oxymoron)is only possible on globalized platforms. This contradiction- that globalization can be critiqued only on globalized platform-is the crucial aspect of globalization.

Marathi poetry of this period reflects this emergent nation in multiple ways. Poetic idiom was transformed in the nineties due to the social and cultural crises caused by these processes of globalization, technological revolution, and economic reforms. New little magazines like ‘Shabadvedh’ (1989-2009), ‘Abhidhanantar’ (1992-2009) played an important role by providing a platform for new voices to emerge.

Saleel Wagh’s satirical poetry mocking at the globalized urban culture and corporate world, Manya Joshi’s effort to convert the chaos of contemporary metropolitan culture into cacophonic music, Hemant Divate’s asphyxiation of living in a sham urban upper middle class, Sanjeev Khandekar’s prosaic caricature of disfigured human self in the world transformed by scientific-technological forces and the forces of global capitalism can be considered as a few representative poets of this period. The Dalit poetry of Arun Kale and Mahendra Bhavre rethink the Dalit politics and poetics in the context of the globalized world. The works of these poets also appear mostly in the new little magazines of this period. 

These poets I argued are inventing the language of Marathi poetry because the new Marathis are being born outside the academic world which is simply engaged in mourning the death of Marathi.

The discussions that followed my presentations were equally interesting. Deeptha asked me if the events like Babri Mosque demolition can be understood within this new idea of nation. I replied that the communalism of the late eighties and the nineties was not the same as the communalism of partition era. Even the  Naxal movement of the nineties and first decade of the twenty first century are not same. The altered context is what I was emphasizing. The altered context, I could not respond due to the lack of time, was the rise of 'new capitalism' of the nineties. There were questions about 'heterogeneous times', about multiple time frames inside globalization. I responded by drawing the attention to Raymond Williams' terms I mentioned in the talk. He talks about how the archaic, the residual and the emergent exist simultaneously in a single moment.

WORKS I CITED IN MY TALK:

Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. (1991). Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Revised and extended. ed.). London: Verso. pp. 224.

Rheingold, H. (2000). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. London: MIT Press.

Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. Bantam Books, 1981

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, pp 121-6 

Of Anonymity Crisis and Hendiadys

We, as the part of the Dept of English, under the DRS SAP-I programme had organized lectures and a workshop on 18 and 19 Sept 2009 to conclude a series of colloquia dealing with the theme of Identity which we had organized over the past six month. We had Prof Aniket Jaaware from University of Pune and Prof Nivedita Menon from JNU New Delhi. Students were quite enthusiastic about the whole thing and I too learned a couple of things from this very productive workshop.

I was fascinated with Prof Jaaware's guest lecture ` Language and Duplicity in Hamlet' which though was not part of the theme of the workshop was extremely insightful and lucid. Prof Jaaware shifted the focus away from the traditional approaches to Hamlet which have largely focused on his ` delay' in murdering his uncle to the use of language in the play. Prof pointed out that this was one of the most verbose plays and there was just too much language and people simply talked too much.

One of the preoccupations in the play as Aniket rightly pointed out was the verbal duplicity and linguistic manipulation of discourse. He drew attention to how Hamlet manipulates words of Polonius and Claudius by twisting them in different ways. Aniket noted that the idea of duplicity would also include `dualness' and talked about how there was often an extra character - for instance `Rosencrantz and Guildenstern' and `Voltemand and Cornelius ' . Aniket also talked about an essay by a noted Shakespearean scholar GT White which focuses on a figure of speech called `Hendiadys' in Hamlet. The figure expresses a single idea using two nouns instead of a noun and its modifier e.g. `He drinks from the cup and gold'. Aniket also noted that the whole idea of delay is only in the mind of Hamlet himself and the critics. No other character is concerned with this problem in the play, not even the Ghost. Hence, the center of duplicity is the figure of Hamlet himself.

Aniket's other lecture was very interesting too. It addressed the question of Identity and the notion of difference. He focussed specifically on the problematic relationship between identity and anonymity with reference to the urban armed resistance. Though armed resistance is about assertion of identity, in the urban context, it uses anonymity in a strategic ways. He said that the fictive identity ( fake identity cards, ration cards, fake driving licenses etc) are to treated very seriously and to be considered almost ` authentic' as the armed guerrillas in the cities cannot afford to be caught for ` improper parking'. Hence the politics of armed resistance in the cities uses a very different kind of identity politics where the `real' identity is often concealed and the fake one is treated as if its authentic.

Prof Menon spoke about the politics and predicament of feminism in contemporary India. Her presentations were extremely lucid and thought provoking. I had not acquainted myself with some of the key ideas of the third wave feminism. My reading of feminism was restricted to the French theorists. After Dr Deeptha's presentation in one of the earlier colloquia and after Prof Nivedita's discussion, I am definitely interested in this area.

Yours truly discussed Aniket Jaawre's essay ` Eating the Dalit and Eating with the Dalit' ( see K Satchidanandan ed. Modernism and After, Sahitya Akademi). I shared my apprehensions about confusion in the essay arising out of unclear distinctions between ` Varna', ` Jati' and `Untouchability'. I also pointed out the confusion arising out of lack on emphasis on the distinctions between ` modernism' and `modernity' in the essay as leading to a certain misunderstanding of the historiography of the post-independence Marathi poetry.

The workshop was inaugurated by the respected Dean of Arts faculty. During his inaugural speech he called Rajan Barett my colleague by the name `Dr. Sachin Ketkar', not once but thrice.
It was befitting of the workshop organized around the theme of identity. While making my presentation on Aniket's essay , I introduced myself as Dr. Rajan Barrett. The respected Dean of the Arts faculty, with his harmless lapse of memory had ushered in an ` anonymity crisis' of sorts in me. Taking away Rajan's identity had resulted in the loss of my identity too. I suggested to Rajan that we have now start resembling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the department. He said that we should rather be called the grave-diggers. I wonder whose skull are we going to find under the ruins now. Is it Yorrick's skull?