Mamta Kalia

sun and the needle pricks of the sheaves
of grain. Valmiki shows that he performed
most of these tasks under duress, and
was often paid nothing. The most painful
of such episodes is the one where Valmiki
is yanked away from his books by Fauza
and dragged to his field to sow sugarcane
just a day before his maths exam.
Such a portrayal of village life is
very unlike the lyric mode of Hindi nature
poetry where the sickle-wielding, singing
farm worker is just an accessory of the
picturesque landscape. Valmiki
juxtaposes his harsh portrayal of the
village life and its exploitative economy
to a famous poem by a canonical Hindi
poet: ‘The poetry by Maithili Sharan Gupt
that we had been taught in school, ‘Ah,
how wonderful is this village life...” Each
word of the poem had proved to be
artificial and a lie. Such juxtapositions
expose the caste and class bias of
curriculum makers whose evaluation
criteria judged such poetry to be the
benchmark of excellence. And they reveal
Valmiki’s antagonistic relationship to the
canon of Hindi literature.
Valmiki does not trust that his upper
caste readers will understand his point
of view, or believe the veracity of his
experience. He pre-empts such responses
by addressing them in his Preface: ‘Some
people will find all this unbelievable and
exaggerated... Those who say, “such
things don’t happen here”, I want to
say to them, the sting of this pain is
known only to the person who had to
suffer it.’ Every time Valmiki describes
a violent encounter with the oppressor,
he inserts the challenging and dissenting
voices that constantly deny his testimony.
His voice acquires a bitterly ironic tone
when he addresses these deniers. In fact,
one of the distinctive aspects of ]oothan,
which marks it as a Dalit text, is its
interrogative discourse. The text is full
of questions that demand an answer:
‘Why didn’t an epic poet ever write a
word on our lives?’ ‘Why is it a crime
to ask for the price of one’s labour?’
‘Why are the Hindus so cruel, so heartless
against Dalits?’ Such interrogatory
rhetoric, which brings out the
contradictions in the dominant society’s
ideology and behavior, reminds one of
Ambedkar’s fiery writing and speeches
which are peppered with witty, pungent
and harsh questions like the following:
I asked them [our Hindu friends],
‘you take the milk from the cows
and buffaloes and when they are
dead you expect us to remove the
dead bodies. Why? If you carry
the dead bodies of your mothers
to cremate, why do you not carry
the dead bodies of your ‘mothercows’
yourself?’ (Ambedkar
1969:143)
]oothan is full of similar conundrums.
They jolt the reader out of the contrived
normativity of the high caste value
system that denies the truth claims of
the Dalit speaking subject, a subject who
has come to voice after centuries of
enforced namelessness and voicelessness.
By bearing witness to these routinized
April-June 2010 :: 29