A window on caste prejudice
A. S. PANNEERSELVAN
PLAIN SPEAKING — A Sudra's Story: A. N. Sattanathan; Edited by Uttara Natarajan, Permanent Black, D-28, Oxford Apartments, II I.P. Extension, Delhi-110092. Rs. 395.
This book is part autobiography and part a university lecture series. A. N. Sattanathan became a household name in Tamil Nadu when the DMK Government appointed him as the Chairman of the first Backward Classes Commission in 1969, nearly 14 years after his retirement from the government services. During his long career as a bureaucrat, he had neither served in social sectors nor in the judiciary. He was in Customs and Central Excise. The key factor that influenced the state government to secure his services was the extraordinary trajectory of his personal life. From a humble Sudra caste to the distinguished portals of the Imperial Civil Services is a heroic journey, and the State rightly understood that he would be able to bring in enormous insights in defining the affirmative action to address the contentious question of social equality and social justice. In the present context, where the IXth Schedule of the Indian Constitution is under closer scrutiny, the anti-reservationists will love to quote verse and rhyme from the second part of the book. The curious inversion that happens between the first part and the second part of the book, and the dialectic tension it creates reflects the myriad contradictions of both modern India and the individual called Sattanathan.
Inversions
The inversions can be understood by using two metaphors: mirrors as windows and windows as mirrors. The autobiography which starts with Sattanathan's birth in 1905 in a small village in a numerically as well as socially marginal caste Vanniyar in southern Tamil Nadu (Vanniyars are numerically stronger in northern Tamil Nadu) ends abruptly in 1928. This is the most interesting and illuminating part of the book. Even as Sattanathan holds the mirror closer to his face, the window to the larger world opens up and brings to the fore the inequalities and prejudices of a caste-based society, starkly. From Jyotirao Phule's days the plight of Dalits and their stories of humiliation have been documented in English. However, not much has been written about the discrimination and marginalisation of Sudras and their struggle for a just society.
Humiliation
At the core of Sattanathan's recollection of his life, lies the notion of humiliation and the redoubtable human spirit to fight the causes that heaps humiliation on a section of people because of their birth into a particular caste. What makes the memoirs poignant is its spartan prose, which is free of rancour and has no traces of dirge. The austere narrative brings out the multiple layers of caste hegemony; the entry barriers to public arena through education, employment and social mobility without mincing words. Its conscious attempt to read the self as a part of a social fabric renders it personal/political and political/personal. Or, in the classical Tamil genres, his `aham' (interior/mindscape) and his `puram' (exterior/political space) constantly exchange places to bring out the living conditions of the majority of the people during the larger part of the last millennium. The first person singular in the narrative helps any individual, immaterial of his/her caste, not only to empathise with the author but also to distinguish what the elites perceive as humiliation and what the subalterns experience as humiliation. In the vocabulary of the powerful, humiliation is about slight, offence, rudeness, temerity, whereas the subalterns draw our attention to total callousness, neglect, unjust and inhuman treatment. And for precisely this reason, this memoir is a mirror that becomes a window.
Affirmative action
The second section of the book is the three-part lecture that Sattanathan delivered at the University of Madras in 1981. Titled "The Dravidian Movement in Tamil Nadu and its legacy", it was sponsored by the Periyar E. V. Ramaswamy Endowment. Here the tone of the lecture is neither academic nor political but bureaucratic and at times constitutionalist.
The fluid flow of the memoirs gives way to a studied tone, which yearns for acknowledgement of `the other'. Ideally, the discourse on the Dravidian movement should have opened up many possibilities of talking of the notion of power, sharing of power and renegotiation of power, and the distinct difference between the two important categories: caste and class. Though the two categories seems to coalesce due to the levels of poverty and the vertical hierarchal arrangement of the Indian society, the paths for creating an egalitarian class-less society is vastly different from the one that is available for creating an equally important egalitarian system of caste-less society.
Sattanathan prescribes income-limit in his report for reservation and reiterates the need to remove the "upper crust" in his lectures (his term for what is being referred to as `creamy layer' in the current judiciary versus legislature attrition over reservation). While no reasonable person can reject the idea of preferential affirmative action being directed to the deserving, it is not possible to use an economic criterion for a solely social condition. It needs an innovative political device. The recent beneficiaries of the affirmative actions and legislations should not see it as taking away their hard-won political rights.
The role of judiciary is crucial in taking this issue forward. One of the best ways forward came from Tamil Nadu in 1989-90, when the State introduced the scheme of giving five additional marks to the first generation graduate applications. Here the criteria used to determine the social and educational backwardness was education itself and not an external economic criterion. However, the judiciary rejected this piece of progressive step by the political leadership. Thus, the lecture section becomes a mirror of the prevailing bureaucratic-judicial imagination rather than a window for socio-political possibilities.
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