Mamta Kalia

in the present. These are memories of
trauma that Valmiki had kept suppressed.
He uses the metaphors of erupting lava,
explosions, conflagrations and flooding
to denote their uncontrollable character.
The text follows the logic of the recall
of these memories. Instead of following
a linear pattern, Valmiki moves from
memory to memory, showing how his
present is deeply scarred by his past
despite the great distance he has travelled
to get away from it.
Valmiki presents the traumatic
moments of encounter with his
persecutors as dramatized scenes, as
cinematic moments. The event is narrated
in the present tense, capturing the
intensity of the memory and suggesting
that the subject has not yet healed from
the past traumas so as to put them
behind. We see a full dress re-enactment
of the event, from the perspective of
the child or the adolescent Valmiki. Many
Dalit texts share this strategy of staging
encounters between the Dalit narrator
and persons of upper castes. Often these
encounters are between a Dalit child
at his or her most vulnerable and an
upper caste adult in a position of
authority. The fullness of detail with
which they are inscribed suggests how
strongly these past events are imprinted
in the narrator’s mind.
The Dalit narrator relives these
traumatic experiences again, but this
time to go past them by understanding
them in an ethical framework and passing
judgment on them, something that the
child could not do. By documenting these
experiences of the Dalit child, first by
dramatising them so that we see them
for ourselves, and then by commenting
on them in the ethical language of guilt
and responsibility, from the perspective
of the victim, Valmiki and other Dalit
writers break through the wall of silence
and denial behind which the Dalit suffering
had been hidden. Valmiki’s encounters
with his various school teachers show
how Dalit children are abused verbally,
physically and publicly, without anyone
coming to their rescue. The text, as
testimony to crimes suffered, acquires
the character of a victim impact
statement.
Valmiki places his and his Dalit friends’
encounters with upper caste teachers
in the context of the Brahmin teacher
Dronacharya tricking his low caste
disciple Eklavya into cutting his thumb
and presenting it to him as part of his
gurudakshina or teacher’s tribute. This
is a famous incident in the Mahabharata.
By doing this, Dronacharya ensured that
Eklavya, the better student of archery,
could never compete against Arjun, the
Kshatriya disciple. Indeed, having lost
his thumb, Eklavya could no longer
perform archery. In high caste telling,
the popular story presents a casteless
Eklavya as the exemplar of an obedient
disciple, rather than the Brahmin
Dronacharya as a perfidious and biased
teacher. When Valmiki’s father goes to
the school and calls the headmaster a
Dronacharya, he links the twentieth
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