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 “(Vegda’s poetry) resonates with sensations relating to the survival and resilience needed to navigate environmental and social realities, even individual and collective memories.

If you think this should be a paean to a poetic genius, penned by a perceptive literary scholar, you are spot-on. It is an excerpt from the Foreword written by Kathryn Hummel to a book of poems titled Vultures by Gautam Vegda, a bi-lingual Dalit poet, translator, researcher and a formidable anti-caste intellectual. Currently, Vegda is conducting doctoral research at Central University of Gujarat on Dalit environmentalism, an area that hasn’t received much scholarly attention despite its germinative importance in the age of Anthropocene. His M. Phil dissertation focused on examining an alternative, egalitarian worldview that goes into the formation of Dalit masculinities as distinct from upper-caste masculinities. Vegda is also an accomplished translator with a rare talent for translating not only literary but also scholarly texts between Gujarati and English. Most importantly, he is an anti-caste intellectual who practices Buddhism and follows the Ambedkarite philosophy of anti-caste struggle. Vegda is a dear friend too, one who can sit with you for hours together and unpack a dismal world an upper-caste individual wouldn’t have the foggiest idea of, a world of extreme deprivation and hopelessness.

Born in a back-of-the-beyond village called Vadgam in Surendranagar, Gujarat, Vegda experienced the pangs of poverty and the canker of caste at close quarters from an early age. His entire family would set out on dahadi (daily wage labor) early morning, a bundle of rotla, onion and green chilies on head, and return in the evening after drudging on the farms of landlords, too tired to think of anything else but a long sleep. In off seasons when dahadi work became scarce, the family would go to construction sites to do whatever was asked, from carrying headloads to mortar plastering. One can’t even begin to imagine how impossibly difficult it would have been for Vegda to break out of such a miserable grind and think of education, scholarly research and even poetry. In one of our conversations, Vegda reminisced having heard the muffled, worried conversation between his parents on the night he had gone to ask them for 4000 rupees to enroll himself in a master’s program at university. Mortified and morose, he had returned the next day without the money so as not to cause his parents any further distress.

Recently, Vegda was subjected to public humiliation on Facebook by the head of Calcutta-based Hawakal Publisher. His ‘crime’ was that he shared the cover of his poetry collection titled The Black Drongo: Illustrated Dalit Poetry on Environment on Facebook with a warm filter, a crime which, publisher Kiriti Sengupta imagined, could tarnish the publication’s reputation. At the gunpoint of scrapping the contract, Vegda was made to apologize through a ‘public’ post “to you all and to Hawakal for posting the tampered cover design.” When called out by people for the total absence of logic in his stance and grossness of his demeanor, Sengupta raised the pitch of his misplaced indignation and justified his “lashing out in public” on the young poet for the “crime of using an altered image in the name of original designer” i.e. Bitan Chakraborty, his co-director at Hawakal. Within a week, expressions of solidarity for Vegda, as well as denunciation of Sengupta’s arrogance (including boycott hashtags) streamed in from within and outside the country, driving the latter to tender an ‘apology’ to Vegda. Far be it for me to do a detailed analysis of that apology, which irksomely invokes themes of compromise and family livelihood, and that of Vegda, the emotional exactions of which are beyond anybody’s imagination, though it could throw up deeply unsettling insights about the workings of caste in Indian society. However, sample this: Vegda’s apology brought him humiliation, Sengupta’s bouquets for being courageous, humble and responsible. In a society where a nine-year Meghwal schoolboy must die for touching the upper caste waterpot and where one is not immune to subtle forms of discrimination despite occupying the highest public office, caste offers a wide spectrum for poets like Vegda to calibrate and slot their painful humiliations in.

Could Sengupta have thought of imposing such humiliation, had it been Amitav Ghosh instead of Gautam Vegda, is a rhetorical question I wish to ask. To me, the episode represents the upper-caste hubris that takes it as its birthright to routinely show lower castes their place through public humiliation, name-calling and physical violence. The pre-apologetic avatar of Sengupta clarified in one place that “he should refrain from making a casteist comment under any circumstances.” I am ready to believe it and yet his rash flaunting of insolent institutional might and resorting to the language of “lashing out in public” (reminiscent of Una flogging) and the (imagined) “crime” reflects a deep-seated caste bias of which perhaps he himself is not aware. Be that as it may, the episode has brought to the fore a deeper malaise that society and the Indian publishing market suffer from i.e. the commodification of caste. Caste has always been a commodity in India and now even abroad; it has always sold like hot cakes. One look at the matrimonial adverts in dailies is sufficient to realize how sought-after the commodity of caste is in the marriage market, for example. Or in the job market, for that matter, where it is pursued most aggressively. In a context where the whole of the private sector is free from implementing any reservation policy, it’s not without significance that institutions invest much energy and resources in ensuring that caste sells in the right denominations and right proportions, something clearly borne out by government statistics and multiple instances of corporatized casteism.

All this goes to prove the unrelenting grip of caste on the Indian mind. But what is more alarming is that the devious workings of caste ferret out newer ways to coopt even the anti-caste discourse within the convoluted logic of caste, turn it into a commodity and blunt its subversive edge. The most glaring example of such appropriation and commodification is found in the Indian publishing industry. In his book of critical essays titled Of Oppressor’s Body and Mind (2020), Yogesh Maitreya exposes caste prejudice in India through a brilliant analysis of how language, literature and cinema become sites for reproducing dominant hegemonic ideologies. In one of the powerful essays, “Dalit writers – Savarna[1] translators,” Maitreya sheds an unforgiving light on the shady dynamics of the cultural economy of the English translations of eleven Marathi Dalit texts and notes that in these cultural-commercial endeavours, everything except the source text is Savarna; all the translators are either Brahmin or Savarna, the organizations publishing the translations too are owned and managed by the Savarna and even the outwork of translation – introduction, annotation, blurb, epilogue etc. – has been entrusted to Savarna writers without any qualms. At its most basic level, this skewed translation and publication scenario not only robs the Dalit figure of the right to equal representation and rightful participation in the cultural field but also serves to assert the Savarna figure’s “persistent hegemony over the discourse in the English language.” Maitreya attributes the post-2000 boom in the translation of Dalit literature to its unprecedented demand in foreign universities, something which primarily impelled the Indian academia and publishers to take it seriously.

Further, the advent of social media made it possible for “people from the Dalit community to express their views, opinions, perceptions and ideas,” which enhanced the circulation of Dalit discourse and its readership. As a result, Maitreya contends, a Dalit text became a saleable commodity with an expanding market share in the cultural economy dominated by the Savarna cultural mediators. A critical examination of the bibliographies of publishers, he argues, will throw up glaring contradictions in the titles, the choice of authors, their ideologies and so on. A handful of Dalit titles in those catalogues would look like aberrations, more like an eyesore, amidst an overwhelming array of titles on logic-less mythology, Brahminical narratives, science, art and popular fiction, mostly by Savarna writers – precisely, the stuff responsible for “the formation of prejudiced literary imagination – opinions, ideas and imagination about the community and society – among its readership.” Hegemonic publication houses can capture substantial imaginative space on the strength of their mammoth trade machinery, but their mercenary agenda and capitalistic mode of production reduce them to being instruments – a willing cog in the ideological machine – for sustaining and consolidating the caste order, something which a Dalit writer sets out to deconstruct in the act of writing. Evidently, the interest of such publishers in Dalit literature is driven by market demand and upcoming trends, rather than a cultural need for social transformation. Seeing the potentially decisive role the publication of Dalit textuality can play in the distribution of anti-caste understanding across a caste society, Maitreya then set up Panther’s Paw, an alternative, Dalit-only publishing house whose ideology is manifested in their catalogues, employment policies and moral commitment to the percolation of anti-caste ethos.

One can make one’s own decision as to whether a Dalit text/writer could be a commodity to Hawakal or not by checking its catalogue. However, what needs to be probed is the relationship of humiliation with commodification. The response of Sengupta to the allegation of unwarranted humiliation of a Dalit poet by Makhdoom Ammar Aziz is quite revealing,

“A design is a work of art. Any change (using a filter etc.) made by anyone (Dalit or non-Dalit) without the consent of the designer harms the trust and integrity of the concern that intends to use it for a product. A product, I must repeat.” (Italics mine)

Sengupta here conflates a work of art with a saleable product, a commodity which ironically Vegda didn’t monetize by adding a simple filter but he rightfully would by selling it. His “Dalit or not-Dalit” jibe, which found a disturbing echo in Bitan Chakraborty’s tweet “Rights don’t belong to a group of people, all humans enjoy basic rights to maintain intellectual assets”, gives an insight into their idea of equality, the question of caste and casteless social imaginary. The damning smear campaign unleashed against Vegda through a vocabulary of trust, integrity, crime and so on notwithstanding, what this episode has served to highlight is the failure of imagination; an imagination that couldn’t gauge what goes into the making of a Dalit writer/text and the unique esthetics, epistemology and experience that animate it. It is this failure, I contend, that enables a writer’s humiliation and a text’s commodification. In his book Towards the Aesthetics of Dalit Literature (2004) Sharankumar Limbale posits a binary opposition between the literature of anumana (imagination/non-material) and anubhava (experience/material) to say that the esthetics of Dalit literature is constituted by a deft capturing of the quintessential Dalit experience – the materiality of untouchability and consequent naming of the Dalit as the unclean, impure Other – “through a minute chronicling of the smallest detail of daily life in a language that is crude, impure and uncivil.” (12) While upper caste writers, driven by the aesthetic conceptual triad of satyam (truth), shivam (goodness), and Sundaram (beauty), operate on the pleasure principle and seek to express “world-consciousness or other-worldliness”, Dalit writers, unable to sever their relationship with pain, attempt to awaken “Dalit consciousness” in readers. Dalit writers forge novel idioms and alternative discursivity to assert their exclusive ethical universe and cosmology; its roots can be traced to the unique epistemological foundation of Dalit consciousness, which is historically formed through an intimate, day-to-day interaction with prakriti (nature). In his essay in the book Dalit Identity and Politics Kancha Ilaiah reminds us, “The Dalit-Bahujan call their hands ‘matti chetulu’ (hands meant to work in mud) whereas the Brahminical forces call their hands ‘pooja chetulu’ (hands meant only for worship). The construction of consciousness of ‘matti chetulu’ and ‘pooja chetulu’ keeps them miles apart in their worldviews.” (2001: 113, parentheses added)

Two days before his humiliation, in an elated ‘forthcoming’ post about his book, Vegda had said, “Through the images of plants, birds, animals and other environmental beings, the poems raise voice against the environmental othering and caste oppressions. The question of Dalit self as a collective and the inequal distribution of natural resources are central to this collection.” Unfortunately, despite the profound ontological brilliance of these poems that imagine a collective future for terrestrials, all it took to trash this imagination was an innocuous filter. The question here is certainly not of the professional ethics of a publisher; it is a moral one. Vegda has gone through so much in the last one week, for humiliation lingers long after the first occurrence, it dehumanizes, violates the most tender core of being and shatters the soul; the huge groundswell of support and solidarity can hardly be a salve to his fractured self. Why must a Vegda undergo such pointless struggles throughout his life, which could be put to good use for nobler purposes and desirable struggles, is a fundamental question that a visibly disturbed young poet asked me? It’s a question addressed to writers, publishers, academics and cultural mediators in whose backyard this unfortunate episode has taken place. Folks, the question of caste is categorical; it seeks categorical answers.

[1] Varna, literally skin-color, designates four-fold system of social division into hierarchical categories of brahmin, kshatriya, vaishya and shudra, in that order. While varna identity is based on birth, there are strict, oppressive restrictions prescribed by caste as to social intercourse amongst these categories. However, anyone born into the varna, hence called Savarna, can automatically claim superiority over Dalits who are kept outside the varna and hence called Avarna. The term Savarna allows us to take into account the wider nature of caste oppression. Notably, the signification of complexion, which obtains in the category of race, doesn’t really hold in varna system despite its denotation of skin-color.