Audio interview and poetry reading in OpenSpace

When I was in Montreal for the Blue Met Literary Festival, Veena Gokhale got talking to me about my writing and activism. This was one hell of an interview: we were recording it in my hotel room at 10 in the night, and then it went on till 11.30. I had not eaten anything, and was tired after two back-to-back readings in the evening. And yet, for all the fatigue, it was a great experience.

Listen to the three-part podcast on OpenSpaceIndia.

Special bits: I read Random Access Man (about the love triangle: Ram, Sita, Ravan), and Massacre of the Innocents (about the Gujarat genocide 2002).

Ms Militancy: Praise, Preface, and so on

PRAISE BY K. SATCHIDANANDAN

“Meena Kandasamy’s full-blooded and highly experimental poems challenge the dominant mode in contemporaray Indian poetry in English: status-quoist, de-politicised, neatly sterilized.These caustic poems with their black humour, sharp sarcasm, tart repartees, semantic puns and semiotic plays irritate, shock and  sting   the readers until they are provoked into rethinking the ‘time-honoured’ traditions and entrenched hierarchies at work in contemporary society.The poet stands myths and legends on their head to expose their regressive core. She  uses words, images and metaphors as tools of subversion, asserting, in the process, her caste, gender and regional identities while also transcending them through the shared spaces of her socio-aesthetic practice.She de-romanticises the world and de-mythifies religious and literary traditions by reappropriating the hegemonic language  in a heretical gesture of Promethean love for the dispossessed.The poet interrogates the tenets of a solipsistic modernism to create a counter-poetic community speech brimming with emancipatory energy.”

MY PREFACE

If you take offence . . .

You are the repressed Ram from whom I run away repeatedly. You are Indra busy causing bloodshed. You are Brahma fucking up my fates. You are Manu robbing me of my right to live and learn and choose. You are Sage Gautama turning your wife to stone. You are Adi Sankara driving me to death. You are all the men for whom I would never moan, never mourn. You are the conscience of this Hindu society.

Your myths put me in my place. Therefore, I take perverse pleasure in such deliberate paraphrase as these poems show.

I am no atheist—I allow everyone an existence. It is just that I struggle with any story that has stayed the same way for far too long. So, my Mahabharata moves to Las Vegas; my Ramayana is retold in three different ways. I am unconventional, but when I choose to, I can carry tradition. That is why I am Mira, Andal and Akka Mahadevi all at once, spreading myself out like a feast, inviting the gods to enter my womb. I am also Karaikkal Ammaiyar, suspected of infidelity for being ravishingly beautiful. Like each of these women, I have to write poetry to be heard, I have to turn insane to stay alive.

Telling my story another way lets me forgive you. Twisting your story to its scariest extent, allows me the liberty of trying to trust you. I work to not only get back at you, I actually fight to get back to myself. I do not write into patriarchy. My Maariamma bays for blood. My Kali kills. My Draupadi strips. My Sita climbs on to a stranger’s lap. All my women militate. They brave bombs, they belittle kings. They take on the sun, they take after me.

I choose my words, coarse as the conned Kannagi’s colourful curses, chaste as her breast that burnt down a capital city. This tongue allows me to resist rape, to rescue my dreams. My language is not man-made, it is beyond the white-hot seminal of your texts. My language is dark and dangerous and desperate in its eagerness to slaughter your myths. My lines are feverish with the heat of the bodies you banish in your Manusmriti and Kamasutra. Tamil woman that I am, I do not spare the ageist, classist, sexist Tholkappiyam either. The criticism that I embark on, like your codification and my cunt, is beyond all culture.

Call me names if it comforts you. I no longer care. The scarlet letter is my monogram. I sew it on everything I wear, I tattoo it into permanence. I strive to be a slut in a world where all sex is sinful. I strive to be a shrew in a society that believes in suffering in silence. I strive to be a sphinx: part-woman, part-lioness, armed with all the lethal riddles.

Come, unriddle me. But be warned: I never falter in a fight. And, far worse, I seduce shamelessly.

~~~~~

WHERE TO BUY THE BOOK ONLINE

Scholars Without Borders
It is INR 150, plus shipping.

I will upload a list of bookstores in Indian cities soon, I promise.
; )

Poetry Africa: Press

Me, on the closing night of 14th Poetry Africa, reading a poem on the Tamil Genocide

Actually, I made it to the front page of a daily newspaper for the first time ever. In a beautiful photoshoot, poets Ronelda Kamfer and Busiswa Gqulu (South Africa) and I were each grabbing Jamaican Rasta warrior-poet Mutabaruka and it really made for a pretty, pretty picture on Mercury. But since that is something might mother might disapprove (three/women/poets/fighting over a rasta?) I have decided to only share the serious stuff here.

Book South Africa about my performance on the opening night,

Meena Kandasamy’s provocative piece about the colonised status of the English in India prompted rapturous applause, and her books sold like hot-cakes at the books stand afterwards.

And what they had to say about my 20-minute reading the following night (October 5, 2010)

Indian poet Meena Kandasamy swept onto stage like a small whirlwind, swirling the audience into admiring applause for her vital, quick words. I will never see tea-drinking in the same light having heard her describe the making and drinking of tea as a seductive ritual! At 26, a consummate wordsmith, Kandasamy went from reading love poetry to “more angry poems”. In answer to Seboni’s poem about his grandmothers, she read a poem about hers, who suffered terrible abuse at the hands of the British, as well as their own husbands, and whose grand-daughters now, “mostly write”. Unsurprisingly Kandasamy’s soon-to-be-published collection is called Ms Militancy. We got a taste of that fiery political energy when she chose to read a poem challenging the caste system in India, which insisted on “giving names to our inward anger”.

And, finally, and most important of all, here’s what Niren Tolsi (one of the smartest and most provocative journalists I have met in a long, long time) had to say about my work in the highly intellectual Mail&Guardian,

Feminist and Dalit activist Meena Kandasamy recited with verve, sex-tinged verses. She spoke in a demure sexual manner and in language that seemingly brought into view stereotypes of submissive womanhood, but always ended with a twist that felt like a brutal kick to patriarchy’s testicles. She explored the caste system in India, love and gender violence.

What else? This was THE best poetry festival I have ever been to. I wrote a daily journal during the period I was there, so perhaps, someday I will share it all here.

 

Girls and Ragging (And what people choose to ignore)

I am writing this post because a variety of current media reports in Tamil Nadu suggest that ragging is something that only senior male students subject the first-year/fresher students to. Senior female students (especially in hostels) harassing the first year hostel girl students is a reality that is never taken up seriously or discussed. I am a hardcore feminist, but that does not mean that I am going to proclaim that all women are incapable of being mean.

I have no personal experience of staying in a hostel, or being a first-year student in a professional engineering or medical college. But I have heard friends share their experience. And two-three weeks back, a cousin of mine who’s joined her first year MBBS at the Mohan Kumaramangalam Government Medical College Salem narrated  her experiences of pain and humiliation. Third-year medical college girl students staying in the hostel would come to the rooms of first year students at nine in the night, and begin ragging which would go on up to midnight. Sessions involved simple name calling,being ordered to catch a mosquito, walk like ducks, wear weird clothes to college (black pants, yellow top, red duppatta), to the utterly revolting exercises of asking girls to name their sexual organs, or to hug a pillar and make love to it as if it were their lover.

On my cousin’s behalf, we made complaints even with the anti-ragging cell, we sent follow-up emails. Few boys were suspended for similar ragging in the same university, but no action was taken against the girls. There was no inquiry. And filing actual complaints with the police is difficult, because students fear to expose themselves, and also because they don’t know the names of the senior girls as yet. My cousin was strong enough to have us there for her, she was strong enough to resist some of the bullying. I am just scared for girls who would succumb. Entering a professional course involves so much of hard-work and talent, and there can be no greater tragedy than getting tortured and traumatized in a place where one spends the best years of their life. There is so much of promise on paper, but such little implementation.

Second part of my interview in Thejas

Here is the second part of my interview (to M. Noushad) in the Malayalam fortnightly magazine THEJAS. A friend wrote in to say that the magazine has been published for the past 14 years, and that a majority of its readers are Dalits and Muslims. (-:

(I still haven’t read the first part, unable to find any Malayalam friends. Will read it soon. All that I can appreciate now is the layout and photographs based on which I have tagged this article)

Post-war, post-genocide poetry: Revisiting the Tamil Eelam tragedy

After the teaching semester came to an end this May, as usual I had this list of huge things I planned to do. Now university resumes in mid-July and I have to welcome a new batch of students and I look back at the vacation, and I feel, well, I did the stuff that had to be done. (Even if it was not part of the plan)

So, what did I do this summer? Well, I managed to translate this moving collection of poems written by Cheran Rudhramoorthy, V.I.S.Jayapalan, Latha and Ravikumar about the genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka’s NorthEast last year. The poems emit bitterness and tragedy, even as they speak a language of hope and resistance and faith and pride. Some of them are extremely intense, most of them bleed.

Cheran and Jayapalan are well-known poets from Tamil Eelam and have been anthologized (along with my hero-of-sorts Puthuvai Rathinadurai) in Wilting Laughter: Three Tamil Poets. While I have translated Cheran, Jayapalan and Ravikumar (with generous inputs and help from Sascha Ebeling) for this as-yet-untitled forthcoming book, Latha’s poems have been translated by my dear friend Ravi Shanker.

Darker than the poems, and much more haunting in its directness is the extensive 4000-word introduction by writer Ravikumar (the editor-publisher of this collection) of this who captures the myriad facets of the genocide and its aftermath. He makes use of a wide range of sources: letters by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Arbitrary Executions, report of the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), news-stories, eye-witness accounts in exposing the anti-Tamil, xenophobic and ruthless nature of the Sri Lankan state. He also writes painstakingly of how India betrayed the Tamil people and how it failed to protect them. Because I had to pause to cry, I found his prose deadly and damning.

Lest we forget the horrors of the genocide, this book was brought out in Tamil (Engaludaya kaalathildhan oozhi nigazhndhadhu – எங்களுடைய காலத்தில்தான் ஊழி நிகழ்ந்தது, published by Ravikumar’s publishing house Manarkeni) in May 2010 to mark the first anniversary of Eelam War IV that left nearly half a million Tamils dead.

Watch this space for more details on the English translation, its publication and so on. If you are highly curious, please drop me a line.

In today’s New Indian Express: my interview with Suniti Namjoshi

This is the unchopped longer version. Read the official interview on the paper’s website.

Famed for her subversive writing and outspokenness, poet and fabulist SUNITI NAMJOSHI took to writing prolifically for children a few years ago. During her recent visit to Chennai to launch the latest series of The Aditi Adventures, she spoke to MEENA KANDASAMY about fables and fairy tales, and the intricacies of writing for a young audience.

Q: Your book Feminist Fables is a classic because it retold and revised so many myths. What made you deal with myths?

A: The power of a myth is that it mutates—in the hand of a different poet, it is retold in a different form. Take the myth of Narcissus: for one poet it could be about the romanticism of falling in love with beauty, for another it could be Echo and her fate and her voicelessness. Since myths never mean one thing, all poets understand them and mutate them. Feminist Fables sought to question social assumptions and subvert the male-dominated literary tradition.

Q: Why do you choose to work with fables, given the fact that it is mostly a moralistic medium?

A: Yes, the fables are a didactic form. But more often than they preach something, they actually question something. Secondly, it can be a satirical form—satire doesn’t necessarily reinforce existing values—it can question social issues of a morality which can be damaging. Jonathan Swift was a satirist, but his savage and nasty satire was directed against the establishment. I think my choice of fables has to also do with the Indian tradition of story-telling.

Q:What made you take up writing for children, when the rest of your work is so politically charged? Isn’t writing for children a holy land where there are clear-cut definitions of right and wrong?

A: There are a lot of assumptions about what children’s books should be like. But, it is something that changes from age to age and society to society. There are people who believe that children should be protected. But take a look at the nursery rhymes—say, Ding dong bell, Pussy’s in the well—it is all about drowning a cat, it is so bloodthirsty. Or take a look at fairy-tales Little Red Riding Hood, there is so much of violence. Even the Grimm’s fairy-tales are no exception in that regard.

Q: How unique is the experience of writing for children? Are there any specific limits you set for yourself?

A: I have fallen into writing for children by accident. The first book I wrote was for my niece Aditi. Most of the children’s books at that time were certainly not Indian. Those stories did not make sense for our landscape, our tradition and our experience. My book was set in the countryside, and I put my own childhood into it. The book was not about a Jane or Jim or Lucy, it was about Aditi, it had her name on it.

The difference in my writing arises because I am much gentler when I write for children. My audience comprises of children under ten: not young adults or teenagers. I think writing can arm children with intellectual weapons—I want children to think for themselves and consider and reconsider what is being said. That’s why all the books are filled with speculations and questions which they can ask themselves.

Another difference between writing for children and writing for adults lies in the fact that grown-ups are expected to know several things—such as literary references or allusions—beforehand, but with children that’s not fair to have such an expectation. After all, children have less literary and life experience.

Q: In the Aditi series, the stories for children are set everywhere: in Prague and Hong Kong, in outer space, in cyberspace. How do you view the relationship between travel and writing?

A: Writing springs from experience. I have been to all the places, except of course the moons of Jupiter which figures in one of the stories. When you have been somewhere, there is something about that place which strikes your imagination. What helps with the writing is the right combination of intelligence and imagination.

Q; What’s your take on the standard “and they lived happily ever after” endings? Don’t you think it doesn’t prepare children for real life?

A: Children respond in several ways, and their only influence is not fairy tales where the good prosper and the wicked die. It is hard to say how much these fairy tales actually affect them.  Recently, I was addressing students of a popular school in Chennai, and I was telling them how I had to remove from one of my books an instance of an elephant stealing sugarcane because the publishers objected to it. But one boy in the audience told me, “But it happens in real life. So it can be there in the book.” That’s a major point he was making. In my opinion, children are really rooted in real life.

Interview in Muse India — In Conversation with Rana Dasgupta

Rana Dasgupta is a British-Indian novelist and essayist. He grew up in Cambridge, England and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Presently, he lives in Delhi, India.

His first novel, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), an examination of the forces and experiences of globalization, was billed as a modern-day Canterbury Tales with stories narrated overnight by thirteen passengers held up at an airport. Tokyo Cancelled was short-listed for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Dasgupta’s second novel, Solo, was released earlier in 2009. It is an epic tale of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries told from the perspective of a one hundred-year old Bulgarian man.

Here Meena Kandasamy, a noted poet, engages Dasgupta in conversation on his novels, in Chennai during launch of Solo.

Meena - All over Solo, we have people trying to preserve the remnants of their culture. How important do you think is the preservation of culture? What about the dangers of such a project—a monolithic Hindutva that seeks to impose itself, or fundamentalist Islam that refuses to respect native traditions?

Rana – In a way, the book deals not so much with the idea of culture, as just the idea of preserving it. There is a difference between the attempts of an individual, to sort of, find out what links their lives, and the attempts of a state or political party to impose a cultural homogeneity on people. The character in my book is in fact suffering at the hands of people in this category. He’s being forced into losing his culture in the name of a big political project. I think the idea of culture is a very difficult one. For instance, it is assumed that we all know what our culture is. Most of us have constructed our culture—it’s fairly complex, it is not necessarily shared with people who live in the same place as us. So, I don’t see culture as a sort of organic and obvious thing. For my character, it is just an aspect of the self. It is how people tell their stories themselves. I was looking at how politics and times completely rips that language apart and deprives individuals of the ability to link various bits of their lives together.

Meena - Tokyo Cancelled was ultramodern, consisting of stories swapped in an international airport. Why do you have to take us to the 19th century in Solo? Is it to tell us that it was a better world?

Rana – Tokyo Cancelled had no historical depth of any sort and was very much in the contemporary moment. We didn’t know the stories of the parents or grandparents of any of the characters. They were just simple situations which didn’t have a past to them. After that I felt that I had to write about history. And I feel that the times we are living in, make sense only through history. I wanted to write a book in which the present is linked to a long past through the life of one character. I think there is some romance in the book about the time in which Ulrich is born. This romance for the 19th century is quite strong in me, for certain kind of incredible creativity in the European bourgeois culture of that time. So, one thing I wanted to do was to write a history against the Anglo-American version of 20th century. The 20th century is shown as the American century, with great progress and meaning and fulfillment, and I wanted to tell the story of people for whom the 20th century was quite meaningless, haphazard and full of pointless political projects that caused them quite a lot of pain. I think we are also used to the idea that the 21st century is a place of great doom and pessimism, but I wanted to find some kind of hope in the present moment. So, the second part of my book, also quite crazy and violent shows characters who are full of immense creativity. My main character ends his contemplation of the future with some kind of hope.

Meena - This is a successful book about a man who has met much failure. Was this a conscious decision?

Rana – I wrote about failure partly because I am surrounded by success stories all the time. I was bored by it. People are kind of obsessed with success in this country. It is never the reality for lots of people. The main pages in a newspaper are only about endless success, but tucked away in the small columns are news of people committing suicide. Writing about failure was also because I wanted to set myself a writing challenge—if you strip away success and events and achievement from a life, when you basically have to narrate one hundred years of duration, it makes you engage with the role of life itself, of what it means to just exist. I found that an interesting project for writing a novel.

Meena - Why did Ulrich have to be so unlucky even in love?

Rana – I think Ulrich survives a hundred years because he never really becomes entangled with anything. As the experience in the middle period of his life shows, your attachments are going to kill you, your attachments to political movements, your attachments to people. Ulrich basically survives because he is incompetent at making attachments. He doesn’t quite believe in himself to make the things work. After he turns blind, this character finds a new lease of life.

Meena – Daydreams are the only redeeming feature of this doomed man’s life. What do you think of old age? And isn’t daydreaming no country for old men?

Rana – To me, Ulrich is some kind of novelist. So, on one level, this novel is an examination of the relationship between what a novelist imagines and writes, and what their life is, and how elements of life become mutated into fiction. The daydreams here are fictions that are too coherent and directed to be daydreams. I think that old age is undervalued. I think it is difficult to grow old with all your faculties intact. Both my books have been interested with what wisdom means in the contemporary world, and wisdom is something that is associated with old age.

Meena – There are echoes of India in the Bulgaria that you have described. Your novel could have been about India instead. Or is it because you would have been criticized if you had penned a honest novel about India?

Rana – There is particular kind of psychological sensitivity in India to ridiculously claim that there is no poverty or violence in the country. Poverty and violence are absolutely legitimate subjects to write about. I still haven’t found a way of writing about this country. It’s a very, very complex place and it’s been written about very much. I would like to write about this country, and if I do, it will probably be non-fiction because I find that the reality of this country is itself complete. One doesn’t have to make it up. The reality is so stark and intense that just reporting on it, as it is, is kind of enough. Also, the last two countries I have lived in have been India and the US. And in a way, I am bored of big countries and their arrogance and their assumption that they are so unique. Both America and India have this very intensely and both are very self-absorbed. So, I wanted to write about a small country that I didn’t know much about.

Meena - There’s so much of reference to gypsies—they seem to be the only truly happy people in the Ulrich’s world.

Rana – Gypsies are interesting because they are the ones who cannot really be categorized. Even the Communists tried to lock the gypsies down and make them factory workers. They always remained somehow outside the social system and when the system crumbles one suddenly realizes that they are running all kinds of businesses and also producing the kind of music that became the anti-state sentiment. So, I suppose that they are fascinating in one respect, they are figures that are not pinned down and one cannot really define who they are: are they criminals, are they heroes. Both my books have figures who cross borders, who are never categorized, who refuse to allow an identity to be given to them from outside. There’s also a long history of romanticizing gypsies which is quite unfair. They have also had a terrible time in Europe—they are mentioned in connection with the Holocaust, they were also gassed along with the Jews.

(Reproduced from Muse India)

Book Review: Sam’s Story by Elmo Jayawardene

(First published in The New Indian Express, 02 August 2009.)

Sam is poor, Sinhalese, and a servant in the Master’s River House. His only best friend is the owners’ dog Brutus. Sam is someone who can never figure out what a problem is, someone who doesn’t know why people cry. He has never learnt anything, not even how to write his name. He is a village idiot who doesn’t know what breasts are, but then, surprisingly, he knows about the Tamil militants.

Employing the first person narrative throughout the text, Sam’s Story succeeds in its attempt to imitate the raw, sparse prose style of Hemingway — the stark simplicity blends with the irreverence and dumbness of the protagonist, and the sudden shifts of action make for an aesthetic reading experience. But the story-telling embeds a clear-cut political agenda and is nowhere as remarkable as the superficially successful prose-style.

Sam’s Story, first published in 2001, painstakingly avoids even a single oblique reference to Tamil suffering on the island. Perhaps, it is left for us to infer that just as the stupid Sam is incapable of looking at reality, even to the minimum extent of noticing that Tamils are being discriminated against, people too refuse to accept that linguistic and racial chauvinism have wrought a climate of hatred on the island.

Most of the novel is a successful study in hate: the narrator prefixes everything about the Tamil language, people or culture with the word “stupid” and goes little beyond depicting Tamil people as those “who threw bombs and killed our soldiers and tried to divide our country”.

After more than 100 pages of a monotonous rant, we are privy to the picture on the other side, of how the Sri Lankan military is also a convoluted place to be. Perhaps, this is one way of striking a balance and attempting neutrality, although the damage is already done; no amount of salvaging can help the text.

The depiction of the brutalities of army life begin when Sam talks of his brother Jaya who’s killed-in-action, and his brother Madiya who deserts the armed forces. From this point forward, the book changes vastly in tone and treatment. Madiya, in his brief stopover at his home (after his desertion, and before going into hiding) explains the poverty draft and the meaninglessness of the war.

Against this backdrop, Jayawardene explores how poor people, bereft of all opportunities, send their children to war; and how they make do without food and medicine whereas a rich man’s dog gets immediate access to the best doctors and a stream of visitors inquiring about its health. He writes of this divided world where the political ‘punishment’ for a Sinhalase man campaigning for the Other Party involves being transferred to teach at a faraway Tamil school.

Sam’s lives his life in a climate of mutual hatred, and he instinctively distrusts the Tamil servants at River House. While Sam tolerates the housekeeper Janet, he resents the cook Leandro, who, with his talk of Eelam, divides the world into easy binaries — the people who are willing to kill (The Army) and the people who were willing to die (The Tigers).

Sam’s suspicion of Tamils extends to everybody: he thinks Velu, a servant in a nearby bungalow is a spy; and he doesn’t appreciate that Master’s son has found himself a Tamil girlfriend. The fatal climax, replete with a truck-bomb driving into a national bank, throws them all apart, and widens the rift to such an extent that any coming together seems fraught with impossibility.

Silence may be costly, hence this post

I would have remained silent about the caste clash among the law college students, but for this extremely abusive and derogatory comment from a casteist person who prefers to go by the pseudonym Pasumpon Muthuramalinga Thevar (PMT).

This is the said comment from PMT:

“You inhuman ambedkar people beat up our thevar people. How barbariands you are not at all human. you should register under wildlife act. down with the inhuman ambedkarisms”

I have not written about the caste clash among the students any where on this blog, so I fail to understand why I got this comment. However, I have taken the pains to write this post, because I want the world (and at least the readers of my blog) as to what exactly happened in the Dr. Ambedkar Government Law College premises. This post is based on what my friends told me. If this comment had not appeared on my blog, I would reacted like any other mediaperson. I wouldn’t have taken caste names, I wouldn’t want to complicate an already confounded situation. (Now the names of the warring factions are out in the open, so I needn’t apologize). I would have remained silent and started worrying about solutions, rather than take the pains/risks of exposing the real story. But I think that people might be really getting the wrong news, or not getting the long background to this, hence this post.

For the past couple of years, the Thevar Peravai (based in Egmore, Chennai) has been organizing students of their community under the banner of Mukkulathor Maanavar Peravai. Particularly within the law college campus, where politics and caste rule the roost, the effects of such an organization has been enormous. And scary. They have taken an anti-Dalit line and this has led to minor skirmishes in the recent past. In pamphlets and posters within the campus, the Mukkulathoor Maanavar Peravai specially omitted the usage of “Dr.Ambedkar’s” name while referring to the college. By refusing to use the Dalit leader’s name, they were taking an explicit anti-Dalit line. It is easy to argue that there’s really nothing to a name, but if there was nothing, why did the Mukkulathoor Maanavar Peravai not evoke his name? And according to students there, these caste tensions ran high especially after the Thevar Jayanthi celebrations (30 October 2008). Within a ten-day span, there had been four assaults on Dalit students. One student of the Mukkulathor caste: Mr. Bharati Kannan, had arranged for rowdies from outside to enter the campus and assault Dalit students. A few Dalit students had been hurt in this attack, but that wasn’t publicized. The chief intention of this oppressive caste students’ organization was to prevent Dalit students from writing their exams. However, the Dalit students who came to know about this, had gone ahead and informed the police who went on to seize weapons from within the campus. The Dalit students also reported this instance to the principal. Because of this widespread fear about what these frenzied casteists (with support from violent/nefarious outside elements) could do to them, around 50-60 Dalit students (primarily those who were keen activists and were publicly known/ identified as ‘Dalits’) refrained from attending the exams. It was the sanest choice, because they had to choose between taking an exam, and having their life taken away. Only those Dalit students whose caste identity was not obvious to a lot of people came to take the exams. These students had complained to the police though about what they were facing. Those who did not undertake the examinations were standing as a group, because of their belief in unity, and belief in the fact that if they were together, they couldn’t be harmed. They also felt that their unity would ensure that other Dalit students (who were taking the exam) would not become victims. However, one Dalit student Chitiraiselvan, who walked out of the exam hall after finishing his exam was attacked brutally by these caste-Hindu Mukkulathor/Thevar students. He was stabbed in the head and his ear was cut off. (News update: A plastic surgery has been performed on him to restitch the ear back into place.) Even as mindless brutality was going on, Chitiraiselvan was stabbed in the stomach. It seems the oppressor caste hoodlums had planned to kill at least half a dozen Dalit students to prove their superiority, that is why they were murderously attacking students who did not even flaunt their Dalit identity. Having realized the possible consequence of where this could lead to, and to safeguard the rest of their friends from further harm, the gathered group of Dalit students decided to retaliate. Nobody must forget that what comes out of video as brutality has a story behind it–this is not to justify the series of events, but to say that there is the other side to the story. The subsequent, and extremely delayed, police intervention turned the tide against dalit students. And I am not even sure I have the confidence to say that things have come to an end. Friends from other places in Tamil Nadu say that Dalit students are being attacked in law colleges in other cities: Coimbatore, Salem and so on. This is how caste has a nuclear fission effect. I think the State has at least done some good by shutting down all law colleges in the state.

Of course, the video coverage doesn’t point out to the students’ caste identities. What has taken place there is a tragedy, it shows brutality. I would blame the police more than anyone else. The police can say that they can’t enter the law college campus without its principal’s permission, but a single shot into the air would have made all the difference in the world. The spectators are more heartless than the rampaging students themselves. And I don’t know where to place trollers like Pasumpon Thevar, who decides to pick on an unrelated person like me simply because I happen to be an Ambedkarist.

I really think being a Dalit student is the hardest job in the whole world. Those who struggle hard and enter the upper crust institutions, are mentally harassed and driven to suicide. In places like the law college, they pay with their blood. When will academic casteist terrorism come to an end?

UPDATES: These are updates that I found in yesterday’s newspaper and in today’s. I think it will tell you more. It is a pity that provocative posters continue to appear. . . Bharati Kannan flaunts his caste and power connections…  And, the state police have only arrested Dalit students so far. 

I am in a mood to actually meet all Dalit lawyers who passed out of the Dr.Ambedkar Govt. Law College and make them share their experience of both violence and casteism within the college campus. Somethings have to be recorded.