Mamta Kalia

‘joothan’ if someone else besides the
original eater were to eat it. The word
carries the connotations of ritual purity
and pollution as ‘jootha’ means polluted.
I feel that English equivalents such as
‘leftovers’ or ‘leavings’ cannot substitute
for joothan. While ‘leftovers’ has no
negative connotations and can simply
mean food remaining in the pot that
can be eaten at the next meal, ‘leavings’,
although widely used by Ambedkar and
Gandhi, is no longer in the active
vocabulary of Indian English. ‘Scraps’
or ‘slops’ are somewhat approximate to
joothan, but they are associated more
with pigs than with humans.
The title encapsulates the pain,
humiliation and poverty of Valmiki’s
community, which not only had to rely
on joothan but also relished it. Valmiki
gives a detailed description of collecting,
preserving and eating joothan. His
memories of being assigned to guard
the drying joothan from crows and
chickens, and of his relishing the dried
and reprocessed joothan burn him with
renewed pain and humiliation in the
present.
The term actually carries a lot of
historic baggage. Both Ambedkar and
Gandhi advised untouchables to stop
accepting joothan. Ambedkar, an
indefatigable documenter of atrocities
against Dalits, shows how the high caste
villagers could not tolerate the fact that
Dalits did not want to accept their joothan
anymore and threatened them with
violence if they refused it. Valmiki has
26 :: April-June 2010
thus recuperated a word from the painful
past of Dalit history which resonates
with multiple ironies. Gandhi’s
paternalistic preaching, which assumed
that accepting joothan was simply a bad
habit the untouchables could discard,
when juxtaposed against Ambedkar’s
passionate exhortation to fellow
untouchables to not accept joothan even
when its refusal provoked violence, press
against Valmiki’s text, proliferating in
multiple meanings.
It is not surprising, therefore, that
one of the most powerful moments of
the text is Valmiki’s mother’s overturning
of the basketful of joothan after she is
humiliated by Sukhdev Singh Tyagi. Her
act of defiance sows the seeds of rebellion
in the child Valmiki. The text is dedicated
to her and Valmiki’s father, both
portrayed as heroic figures, who desired
something better for their child and
fought for his safety and growth with
tremendous courage. Valmiki’s father’s
ambitions for his son are evident in the
nickname, Munshiji, that he gives Valmiki.
The child Valmiki rises on their shoulders
to become the first high school graduate
from his basti. He pays his debt by giving
voice to the indignities suffered by them
and other Dalits.
Valmiki’s inscription of these moments
of profound violation of his and his
people’s human rights is extremely
powerful and deeply disturbing. ]oothan
is constructed in the form of wave upon
wave of memories that erupt in Valmiki’s
mind when triggered through a stimulus