This is Prof. Anupama Rao writing about, 2024 MacArthur 'genius' awardee, Prof. Shailaja Paik's book 'Dalit Women's Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination'
I suppose Paik means that girls are discriminated against in India and Dalit girls are even more discriminated against. Yet, the truth is, it is those who attend shitty State Schools, because they can't afford even the shittiest private Schools, who are worst off regardless of caste, creed, or gender. Two caveats. Dalit Christians females can do better than upper caste Hindu girls in some parts of India because the Church has good schools. Muslim Dalit girls tend to do worst in rural areas. However, it is Hindu and Christian Dalits in Pakistan whose suffering is most extreme.
Paik describes her method as follows: “Rather than ‘going where women are,’ or ‘recovering’ women through oral histories,... the book illustrates how Dalit women were formed within the limits of historically specific practices,
This is nonsense. Dalit women were formed the same way that European women were formed. You may say that this 'within the limits of historically specific practices' but you would then have to explain why female penguins were formed in the same way as European or Dalit women.
what [Michel] Foucault calls ‘modes of subjectivation’:
This is clearly false. Dalit women had the same status and life-chances whether they were subjects of the Queen Emperor or a Muslim Nawab or a Hindu Maharaja. They were quite literally beneath the reach of 'governmentality' or 'subjectivation'. It is no good saying the Hindu law-books- e.g. Manusmriti- was doing the heavy lifting. But once high caste Hindus fled Pakistan, how do you explain the continuance of untouchability and the complete absence of civic or civil or even basic human rights for Dalit girls- even those who have been raised as Christian? Indeed, the latter may be in greater peril because they can be used of blasphemy against the Holy Quran and sentenced to death.
Incidentally, France had its own 'Cagot' untouchable community whom neither Church nor State could help. Only economic growth and mass emigration put an end to their abject status. One may also mention the European Gypsies and the theory that the 'Romani' and 'Domnis' from an untouchable caste in India. It seems Hitler treated them worse than any high caste Hindu ruler.
the very processes that secure a subject’s subordination
This is done either by beating or the payment of wages
are also the means by which she becomes a self-conscious identity and agent.
No. Women aren't donkeys. They don't like being beaten or enslaved. They don't achieve 'self-consciousness' only after some kind rapist kicks the shit out of them and starts exploiting them in a brothel or a factory floor.
Women are different from men because, for our species, much higher 'maternal investment' in progeny means evolution has given women better screening and signalling mechanisms or strategies. Interestingly, women may gain by taking 'Dalit' status (i.e. losing ownership of land) whereas their males may lose by it. Don't forget, a vulva or nipple is always pure. On the other hand, a claim to land can get you killed double quick in an overpopulated agricultural nation.
Voice and experience have become the unfortunate focus of much critical engagement with Dalit literature,
But 'critical engagement' means shitheads quoting ignorant nutters like Foucault or Deleuze.
which views such writing as inherently ethnographic, a window into the life and times of otherwise inaccessible subaltern subjects.
This is precisely what the Ford Foundation and MacArthur shitheads are funding her for. She is actually 'emic'. Her parents were poor and Dalit.
Paik instead challenges the categories of experience and embodiment, which constitute the privileged ground of feminist and Dalit history, to argue that the question of Dalit women must be posed, at the outset, as a problem of representation.
But only stupid, impotent, shitheads are doing that type of 'representation'. Meanwhile a Mayawati has come and, it appears, gone.
Here liberal feminism’s inability to confront the exclusions of caste
In other words, the obstinate refusal of rich, White, chicks to get beaten and raped by Black pimps so as to show solidarity with the trillions of Nethan-Yahoos currently being sodomized by Joe Biden at the behest of Neo-fucking-Liberalism.
meets with Dalit history’s focus on the community’s emancipation at the cost of ignoring the specific needs of its women.
Ambedkar Sahib should not have married a Brahmin Doctor to help him manage his diabetes. He should have married a Dalit nurse who might have done an even better job.
Paik tempers her admiration for B. R. Ambedkar’s enlightened and far-reaching response to the woman question with her own focus on “Dalit women’s ideas and practices, as they not only actuated but extended and critiqued Ambedkar’s feminist praxis by challenging the politics of local leaders and men inside the household, howsoever limited” .
This is nonsense. The plain fact is that it was the Christian Missionaries who provided the best path forward for ALL Indian or Chinese or Turkish or Arab or African women. I guess, this was because the different European sects were highly competitive with each other. Also, through the Missionaries, you could reach America which was prepared to train women as Doctors. It was also a place where you could meet ex-slave African American heroines like Harriet Tubman or Anna Julia Cooper.
Why didn't 'Negroes' in America get 'constituted' by evil, racist, shite of a pseudo-scientific type? If it didn't happen to them, how could it happen to Indian Dalits whom the 'Paramount Power' considered no whit better or worse than other 'darkies'?
The signal contribution of 'Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India' thus lies in
showing that the 'Ford Foundation' turned to shit. There was a time when it actually helped India by pushing forward the Green Revolution. Now it, and the MacArthur Foundation, reward the septic shite of 'Grievance Studies' because America is part of the problem. Not till all White males chop off their own dicks can DIE be achieved.
tracking this double movement, modes of subjectivation and the refusal and resistance to them, as dialectical processes with contingent and often-unanticipated outcomes.
There is affirmative action but that requires getting a caste certificate and availing of the benefit. There are political parties and reserved seats for Dalit candidates. I suppose one could speak of those who form Dalit parties as 'resisting' the existing set-up. Mayawati could be seen as an educated Dalit woman who enabled a Dalit party to gain power. She herself was the Chief Minister of the most populous state.
Sadly, the problem faced by Dalits is poverty and shitty Government schools and hospitals etc. To tackle this problem, everybody- not just Dalits- has to get richer. Since Dalit parties and Dalit politicians and intellectuals don't want anybody else to become better off, though they themselves may grow rich, their 'refusals' and 'resistance' end up harming the great mass of Dalits.
The book is divided into two sections each containing four chapters. Paik situates the oral narratives that constitute her main archive for the second half of the book in a complex economy of forces—caste reform, colonial modernity, struggles over institutional access, and movement history.
In other words, she just repeats a story well known to Indians. But it is a fairy story.
Thus the first section of the boologies of class mobility and access to knowledge as these confronted the economic power and social resentment of Brahmins in the interwar,
Brahmins helped Dalits. It was the OBCs and Muslims who were their enemies. It now appears that Dalits may lose reservation in January 2030.
when the relationship between caste, colonial state, and Dalits underwent a major shift.
Dalits who converted to Christianity probably did better than others because the Brits, in 1935, barred them from affirmative action. Also, those Dalits who concentrated on making money through private enterprise did well. But there was also a rent-seeking politico-administrative class.
Paik draws on personal recollections, newspaper accounts, and administrative reports to explore how Dalit demands for free and compulsory education were foiled,
by the poverty of the country and the fact that Government schools are badly run.
from the rise of novel practices of spatial segregation, to the psychological implications of the everyday repulsion that upper-caste students reflected back to Dalit and lower-caste students by refusing to share food and drink with them.
Why are people refusing to share food and drink with me? Did you know that Rishi Sunak would not even allow me to use his toilet or to draw water from his well? Indeed, when I expose myself to ladies on the Metro, they refuse to even touch my penis. It is because of discrimination of this sort, that I remain an ignorant bigot.
The 1813 Act tasked the East India Company government with the advancement of education.
No. It permitted them to spend a small amount of money on 'the improvement of literary and scientific knowledge'. However, it lifted restrictions on Christian Missionaries who, it must be said, provided good education. But Indians were willing to spend their own money on English style education. They wanted the Government to subsidize and regulate such English medium schools.
Decades later, in 1882, government-aided schools were opened to the public at large.
They were already open. The problem was money and lack of good teachers. From 1864 onward, the Government was authorized to levy a local cess to pay for state-aided schools but there was resistance to this. In any case, to get to compulsory education either parents had to be coerced or some payment needed to be made to them to get them to send their kids to school. But if the teachers were shit, nothing would be achieved. That is still the case. Voters don't want more money to be spent on schools because government schools are shit.
Simultaneously, missionary societies dedicated themselves to Dalit schooling. However, both initiatives were subject to an implicit “go slow” policy as they faced social resistance from upper castes who withdrew students from “integrated” schools.
Poor people wanted to be paid in order to sacrifice the labor power of their kids. Also, educated kids would not want to work. They would become parasites.
Private initiative fared no better. Paik offers numerous accounts of efforts by Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s Servants of India Society to encourage Dalit education, albeit without allotting adequate funds for that purpose.
Because adequate funds did not exist. India was as poor as shit.
Reformist commitment to mass education by reformers like N. G. Chandavarkar, M. G. Ranade, and R. G. Bhandarkar
all Brahmins
was coupled with apprehension about the social hygiene and mental fitness of Dalit students.
They knew that India was as poor as shit. Education would not raise the productivity of the great mass of the people. Parents didn't kids to become unemployable parasites.
Meanwhile conservative voices, such as B. G. Tilak,
He was a radical. Gokhale was moderate.
emphasized a tracked system of education, appropriate to the manual labor performed by the lower castes, that could curtail rebelliousness.
that could raise productivity rather than create a parasitical class of semi-literate agitators.
Furthermore, resistance to mass schooling found an ingenious ally in quasi-participatory colonial institutions, such as the municipalities, which were controlled by Brahmins,
which is why they weren't utterly shit
and later, by economically well-off non-Brahmin communities,
as opposed to starving pariahs
not to mention local school boards.
rather than local bootlegging syndicates
Paik notes that with the onset of dyarchic government in the 1920s, “the transfer of power to school boards was brutal for Dalits”
No it wasn't. Still, Dalit politicians gained by making such claims. The truth was obvious. India was as poor as shit. Nobody in their right mind wanted to teach useful stuff. No doubt, some missionaries and idealogues wanted to brainwash kids but they reduced productivity and employability.
Still, those with a bit of money could relocate their kids to a place where they could get good enough education at an affordable price.
: commitments to equal access
there was no such commitment. On the other hand, the Viceroy was obliged by law to come and wipe the bum of every starving Indian person.
were foreclosed by
the fact that India was as poor as shit and, anyway, nobody in their right mind wanted to teach in the villages.
the inequities of political and economic power, and the persistence of caste dominance in new forms and spaces.
Saying 'boo' to caste dominance will magically create enormous wealth which can be used to hire teachers from Uranus to work in every village. Also, Viceroy Sahib will come and wipe my bum.
Dalits were far from docile.
They were as poor as shit- unless they set up a business and grew rich.
Paik tracks the growth of Dalit protests at social exclusion in schools after 1920, especially challenges to the separate drinking water system.
At that time people of different religions had 'separate drinking water systems'. Untouchability was a primitive pathogen avoidance strategy.
This chapter records the unfolding of a student strike against that system in Foras Road Municipal School in Bombay in 1929,
Foras Road runs through the oldest red light district in Bombay.
which saw counter-response by upper castes who shut down the stock exchange and a protest against uppity Dalits by the upper-caste headmaster of the Agripada school.
This was also when some Dalits took to burning the Manusmriti.
Such protests were a response to private initiatives, including by Ambedkar’s Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha (Society for the Welfare of the Excluded), which followed upon numerous local initiatives by Dalits across the region, and by V. R. Shinde’s Depressed Classes Mission to establish separate schools, though these were never as numerous as in Bengal, or the Tamil country.
The Dalit activists made the same discovery as the Missionaries and the Government (which, in theory, could have prosecuted parents who didn't send their kids to school). This was quite sad. Kids from poor families who went to half-way decent schools wanted to adopt the superior hygiene and cuisine of the better off kids. But their parents were unable to provide any such thing. Moreover, by then, the competition for 'white collar jobs' was intense. If the kid stayed in school, not only would he hate his parents, he would also not be able to feed himself after completing his education. The fellow would become a pimp or gangster. His life would be miserable, brutish and short.
Poverty is caused by low productivity. Raising productivity is good for everybody. But 'Grievance Studies' and paranoid politics refuses to accept this. If some have little or nothing it must be because of 'dominance' or 'hegemony' or 'subjectivation'. Did you know there are thousands of homeless people in America? Does Joe Biden come and wipe their bums as is mandated in the Constitution? No! He is even refusing to undergo gender re-assignment surgery! This shows the power of Neo-Liberalism which is totes evil.
Ambedkar also argued for free and compulsory schooling,
which, in theory, Bombay Presidency already had
and struggled to mobilize public funds for that purpose.
The Princely State of Travancore had discovered that the only way you can get universal attendance is by paying the poorest families. India could not use coercive means because the people were not 'docile'. If you are as poor as shit, you literally have nothing to lose.
While the chapter focuses on the issue of Dalit schooling under conditions of severe inequity,
poverty. There were some very nice and sweet people in Bombay who discovered the heart-breaking reason why very poor parents weren't sending their kids to school. Sadly, they didn't draw the obvious conclusion. Raise productivity. Fuck paternalism. Just get the rural girls into giant factory dormitories and overtake Japan in industrial output.
it ends by noting efforts by Congress to shift focus away from the issue of free and compulsory education toward the cause of education for girls. Indeed by 1940, “upper-caste men appeared to reason that by replacing government high schools with girls’ schools, they would set women against Dalits, creating a rivalry between the two marginalized groups”.
Nonsense! Congress, under Gandhi, was promoting a wholly useless 'Basic Education' such that kids would pay for their own education by spinning cotton. An English lady- a qualified teacher- who was part of this racket noticed that the yarn the kids produced (like the yarn almost all Gandhians produced) could not be used for weaving. Her ingenious idea was that it be used for scrubbing blackboards and that the State should pay for this. But, by 1937, Bombay was ruled by Congress. In other words, its own members were having to pay taxes so as to finance the implementation of its policies. Clearly, Gandhian education was a money pit. So it was quietly abandoned. People spoke less about education and more about the cruelty shown by Viceroy Sahib who was neglecting to come and wipe their bums.
The third and fourth chapters of this section on Dalit women’s education precede a chapter that asks what education meant for Dalits and lower castes.
It meant your kids come home and shout at you for being dirty and eating inferior food. Why can't you be like the Mummies and Daddies of the rich kids? Also, could you please buy me a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica?
Paik notes that Ambedkar’s focus on integrated schooling was distinctive when compared to Jotirao Phule’s
Phule was of a 'touchable' caste. Inspired by a female American Missionary, he set up a school for Dalit girls. His father threw him out of the house. Some Dalits gave him a bit of money and so he was able to reopen the school and it began to receive a small subsidy. Sadly these schools shut down within a few years. Perhaps European donations dried up after the Mutiny. But, equally likely, he had other interests. After all, he was a fairly successful businessman with a growing political presence.
It must be said, conversion to Christianity was the best way forward for smart people. True, the Missionaries were boring bigots and your own people would call you a 'rice bag', but Western Education really is worth acquiring though, obviously, getting the fuck out of India is even better.
arguments half a century earlier for developing intellectual confidence among Dalits and lower castes through separate schools,
conversion was better. Ambedkar's mistake was to convert to a boring and stupid religion which had spread untouchability all the way to Japan. Indeed, the Japs only started to progress after they burned down Buddhist temples (which held the official birth (and thus caste) records) and beat the monks so as to encourage them to get married and get a fucking job you lazy sack of shit.
and when contrasted with Gandhi’s argument for separate schooling as a stopgap measure
there was no such argument. The maha-crackpot wanted all kids to attend his shitty 'nai talim' schools so they could learn to spin cotton and talk bollocks.
while generating upper-caste consent to integrated schooling.
Which was already available.
Paik connects these projects of transformative education with such thinkers as Antonio Gramsci,
unknown to Indians at that time. The sad fact is, it was his fellow Socialist- Mussolini- who raised school attendance in Italy. But, it must be said, Italy has always had outstanding schools and Universities.
Franz Fanon,
whose country decided to remain part of France. He was irrelevant to India because the Army proved very effective at killing Commie nutters.
Paulo Freire,
whom only a couple of crazy Jesuits had heard of
and John Dewey, whose investment in civic education and the autonomy of critical thought had a deep impact on Ambedkar.
Ambedkar knew that the US was rich. Its workers were highly productive. Dewey had salience there because of the massive improvement and expansion of the State funded High School system between about 1911 and 1938.
Dalit women’s education was forged in this context of viewing education as the right to think.
No. It was forged in the context of nutters who thought that pretending to help Dalit women would cause people to think well of them. They might give the nutter money and praise.
Education isn't about the 'right to think' which everybody already has along with the 'right to dream' and the 'right to fart'. It is about raising productivity. The problem with the Indian education system- but also non-STEM Higher Education in Amrikaka- is that reduces productivity and employability for many.
Across two rich chapters Paik addresses the unique relationship that was forged between Dalit reform, women’s public participation in politics, and the quiet but profound transformations that ensued from becoming educated.
That relationship simply did not exist. True, at a later point, Mayawati decided not to pass the Civil Service exams but to go to work for Kanshi Ram's outfit (which started out as a Trade Union for Dalit Public Sector employees). She had courage and great political skill and thus got to be Chief Minister of U.P.
She argues that concerns with sexual respectability and bourgeois morality compromised the project of female education from the start.
What compromised it, is that it was useless for poor girls- i.e. the vast majority. True, an educated courtesan could earn more and some families wanted educated daughter-in-laws so the grand-kids would have a head-start. But the number of such families was limited by the poverty of a country which could only support a relatively small number of decently paid white-collar jobs.
“There was a major concern with women’s ‘difference’ that resulted in much public debate about curricula, syllabi, textbooks, and even the best location for girls’ education.
There wasn't much debate and, in any case, what was taught was what it was possible to teach. This depended on the quality of the teacher which in turn depended on how much money was available to pay him.
Hence, a major issue in women’s education was the emphasis on a ‘feminised’ curriculum.
Rather than one which trained girls in skills commonly found amongst bulls and rams.
The idea of curricular distinction between men’s and women’s schooling was an idea supported by Hindu reformers, such as B. G. Tilak and V. S. Chiplunkar, while only a handful of men, such as G. G. Agarkar and the sexologist R. D. Karve, supported coeducation and a single curriculum.
None had any impact. Kids were taught what it was possible and affordable to teach. Nothing more.
Meanwhile, ideas of “protection”
i.e. not allowing passers-by to enter the premises and rape all and sundry
pervaded institutions like Pandita Ramabai’s Seva Sadan (1889) and Karve’s Hingne home (1896) for deserted widows and upper-caste women fleeing abusive circumstances.
Even brothels protected prostitutes though, no doubt, access to them was granted in return for money.
The fact that there were only two women from the Depressed Classes against a total of sixty-eight women in Karve’s home testifies to the “double discrimination” Dalit women faced.
No. It testifies to the fact that Dalit women were more productive and thus able to move away from abusive situations. Take the case of the multi-millionaire Dalit entrepreneur, Kalpana Saroj. She was married off as a kid but beaten by the in-laws. So she moved back home and got a job in a factory. There was no question of her having to stay with the husband's family to protect the 'izzat' of the community. Later, she took a small loan under a Government scheme, remarried and became a wealthy industrialist.
Paik’s analysis of the different emphasis of Dalit women’s education, its focus on svaabhimaan (respect) and svaavalamban (self-reliance) is the crux of her argument.
It is a foolish argument. If you aren't productive, you are a parasite and thus lack both items. Education is about productivity. What these two Professors are engaging in is not pedagogy. It is paranoia.
She reminds us that the Starte Committee noted in 1927 that of 1,983,415 girls from the Backward Class, 5,739 girls were receiving primary education, while another 159 girls were in middle school. Only one girl was in high school, and none was receiving university education.
I would like to remind her that lineages with high productivity did not accept 'Backward Class' status even if others shunned them on religious or other grounds. The fact is, the European was 'untouchable' to the High Caste Hindu- as Tagore's novel 'Gora' showed. The Chinese writer Lu Xun wrote the Chinese have two different words for 'barbarian'. One is 'barbarian'. The other is 'Lord'.
Dalit women were all too aware, and demanded educational equality, not merely differential access.
One or two may have done so. The rest were more sensible. It was obvious that India's problem was low productivity. Shitty education was one reason for this. What women- and men- needed was access to higher productivity employment. Obviously, nobody actually wanted such jobs for themselves. But they wanted everybody else to do them.
“Caste identity, rather than gender, was the primary framework of political identity.
Dalits in Muslim dominated areas would realize that creed trumped caste. Hindu India might be bad. Pakistan was Hell fire.
While Dalit women battled to recover their individual and collective self-esteem, and to uplift their community, they also faced social discrimination at the hands of their upper-caste ‘fortunate’ sisters” .
Fortunate people socially discriminate against me. Did you know Beyonce refused to come to my birthday party?
Indeed the unmarked universality of liberal feminism
which had zero political significance in India. Mamta is perfectly happy to protect rapists.
confronted Dalit women’s claims to equality through struggle and solidarity: when they elided caste to claim gender equality, upper-caste feminists found themselves confronting Dalit women’s demands for a practical illustration of equality across the divide of caste, class, and gender.
Nothing of the sort happened. No Feminist had any objection to Mayawati becoming CM or Meira Kumar becoming speaker. At an earlier period, Annie Beasant had promoted feminism in the South. Still, the first female Dalit politician to get elected was Dakshayani Velayudhan from Travancore. I believe she was related to the first Dalit President of the Republic.
Paik introduces us to the spate of organizational activism in which Dalit women were involved, from participation in the All-India Dalit Mahila Congress,
There is no such thing. Perhaps the All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch is meant. It was started in 2006. I believe it is the vehicle of some Professor of Hindi. It has had zero political impact.
to the establishment of an Untouchable Women’s Society in Amravati in 1921,
There was and is no such society in Amravati or anywhere else.
and participation in the important temple-entry satyagrahas of the 1920s and early 1930s. The climax came in 1942, at the Women’s Conference of the All-India Scheduled Caste Federation (AISCF) in Nagpur when Sulochana Dongre and Shantabai Dani spoke before twenty-five thousand women.
Because of Congress's boycott of the war-effort, Ambedkar's star was in the ascendant. Shantabai Dani did have a political career in independent India.
This was soon followed by a Women’s Conference in Kanpur in 1944 attended by Dongre, while Dani was the chairperson of the Women’s Council of the AISCF that organized that Kanpur meeting, and functioned as secretary of the Bombay branch of the Scheduled Caste Federation.
Buddhist Ambedkarite politics was faction ridden and, to be frank, cack-handed. The Jatavs of UP were more sensible.
Paik notes that while Dalit communities privileged sexual respectability and bourgeois morality, they were also adamant about the significance of female political participation and public visibility in the Ambedkarite project to create a “confident, masculine Dalit womanhood”.
Masculine womanhood sums up their oxymoronic politics.
There was surely a deep and enduring contradiction between the focus on emancipation as a collective project by streepurush (women-men, the term coined by Phule in the later nineteenth century to signal gender equality) and efforts to regulate female sexuality
Sulochna Dongre did advocate birth-control- which was sensible. That's probably why she was soon forgotten.
in the cause of gender modernization. Paik accepts this struggle to conceive a viable subject of political feminism but she argues, nonetheless, for a Dalit feminism that grew out of experiences of social exclusion and Ambedkarite revolution that was markedly different in character from liberal feminism.
It was stupid, ineffectual, shit. The Jatavs of UP were smart. But then, as Ambedkar had noticed, there were Jatav millionaires in Kanpur. In politics, people like Jagjivan Ram, Mayawati or Kharge have risen through political nous and the willingness to back schemes from which all will benefit.
Paik’s second section, “Paradox of Education,”
the paradox is if you go to Yurop-Amrika but do PhD in stupid shite, you become more stupid and shittier than those who didn't go to Collidge.
is a tour de force, which considers the ongoing effects of caste and class in shaping Dalit women’s subjectivity.
Her own 'subjectivity' is being very nicely shaped in Amrikaka, thank you very much.
She focuses on women’s experience of gendered precarity
vaginas are precariously poised over the precipice of turning into pricks
and spatial inequality
Amrikaka is spatially unequal to overpopulated India which is as poor as shit.
as mutually entailed, structuring forces.
Stupid structuring forces have forced both these women to write stupid shit.
Through a discussion of the geography of Pune’s and Mumbai’s slums, Paik argues that young Dalit women who are subject to repeated insult and humiliation in the classroom, correlate identity with the inhabitation of stigmatized space, as do upper castes who enact forms of “urban indifference” and outright casteism.
Where is the need for a discussion of geography? If people scream abuse at you and threaten to beat you, you may well feel insulted and humiliated whether you on a mountain or by the sea-shore.
The book’s focus on the social disciplining of the senses—smell, speech, dress, gait—is a profound exercise in social psychology;
It is nonsense. Some people are smelly, speak and dress badly and have a shambling gait. This is because they are alcoholics. This has nothing to do with 'social disciplining'.
Paik shows us that this is coeval with these young women’s fierce desire to better their lives, often via access to government incentives, to escape grinding poverty.
Old men too want to better their lives and would be very happy to get money from the Government to do so.
Escaping to the middle class is a key aspiration,
unless you are middle class and wish to escape to the upper, rich-as-fuck, class
and it marks an important milestone within the life of the community.
One whereby creamy-layer Dalits scream loudly and shit themselves if anybody suggests quotas within quotas.
Yet Paik reminds us, across three powerful chapters, that Dalit women’s aspirational mobility requires a daily confrontation with caste stereotype in public, and fraught engagements in intimate life with husbands, in-laws, and children.
Nonsense! The problem is that of productivity. Kalpana Saroj was a smart entrepreneur and thus highly productive. What she daily confronts is the life of a rich and highly respected ornament to the community. She received Padmashree award from the Government after financing a film on a massacre of Dalits in her State.
“The middle-class Hindu ideal of marriage, the unacceptability of divorce
these woman live in the past
and the agony of perpetual oppression by men thus affected many women” .
Men were equally prone to whine about the incessant nagging their wives subjected them to.
New sites of struggle appear even as earlier paradigms are left behind.
Those 'sites of struggle' tend to appear on Western Campuses. The problem is smart kids won't sign up for shitty 'Grievance Studies' based PhDs. That's why the American DIE crowd has to scrape the bottom of the Indian barrel much to Vivek Ramaswamy's disgust.
Paik’s book is a profound meditation on the enduring effects of caste, class, and gender as these affect individual lives contingently, but through the path dependency of Maharashtrian social history.
No. There are plenty of Dalit women who have taken the path of Kalpana Saroj. They may not have made as much money, but their daughters have higher life-chances and will ensure their own daughters will do so too.
One wishes, at times, for a better sense of the complicated intellectual
nobody involved in this shite had any fucking intellect
and political histories
Dalit women have votes and can use them to secure specific entitlements.
that shaped the terrain Paik describes, but then we would lose sight of the everyday, and the embodied experience of Dalit gender she provides.
Why keep paranoid nonsense in view? If Dalit women really are horribly traumatized, don't give them jobs. They need to be detained in some sort of psychiatric facility. Also, they must not be allowed to reproduce.
I would opt for the latter any day given the sheer paucity of such work,
anybody could invent such shite. I once submitted a short story to a magazine about a Dalit widow who is routinely raped by the tehsildar but whose heart only breaks when her son becomes a Merchant Banker and shits on her tits.
and the sophistication of Paik’s analysis.
which would show why Neo-Liberalism made this an inevitable outcome.
The publication of Paik’s book coincides with a rise in Dalit activism.
Modi's party was anxious to pander to Dalit voters. His government very quickly passed legislation reversing the Bench's dilution of the anti-atrocity act in 2018.
Many will recall the suicide of the doctoral student Rohith Vemula
who wasn't Dalit
in Hyderabad after a lifelong experience with caste discrimination and social exclusion.
the boy could have studied STEM subjects and done well. Instead he went for 'Sociology of Science'- i.e. whining about CV Raman having been a Brahmin- and got involved in student politics- i.e. beating people.
That suicide has mobilized young Dalits to challenge social exclusion and intellectual invisibility.
No it hasn't. Plenty of genuine Dalits commit suicide in IITs etc. Dalits gain by drawing attention to those who became millionaire entrepreneurs after graduating from such places.
Set against this history of the present,
i.e. stupid propaganda
Paik’s book is a powerful and enduring reminder of why the project of mass intellectuality is among anti-casteism’s most lasting legacies.
Mass intellectuality was the first casualty of democratic politics- i.e. it disappeared after the first general election in 1920. Look at what happened to Anand Teltumde- a former IIT professor who is married to Ambedkar's grand daughter. The fact that he was an 'intellectual' is what made him a political pariah. Nobody gave a shit when he was jailed in the Bhima Koregaon case and so he to spend a couple of years in jail. Modi intervened quickly in the Atrocities Act Amendment agitation. But Bhima Koregaon, occurring in the same year, was stupid shit. Apparently fighting for the Brits against Indians is something for Indians to celebrate. The 'intellectuals' associated with that stupidity were senile or second rate. Let them rot in jail for a bit so as to understand that genuine politicians have zero respect for them.
