THOSE of us who desire to build an equal, just and compassionate society are a community at large – inspite of the differences that we debate amongst ourselves. We listen to each other, we read each other, and sometimes imagine that our concerns define the range of issues that ought to be considered pertinent. Given the explosion of social media, our political sociability is vigorous as never before – thanks to the speed with which we can communicate in real time via Facebook and Twitter, we are in the midst of edgy arguments and points of view almost all the time and not only in English but in our respective vernaculars.

Rapidly changing and contingent circles of intense engagement around particular issues demand our attention, and while tiring, also prove exhilarating. Additionally, as our attention clusters around particular concerns, we experience the conspiratorial closeness of a subculture, and doubtless enjoy what is not entirely fathomable to outsiders. Terse, even gnomic in content, these subcultures make for a distinctive style of virtual political communication – for these are not possible in the material public sphere, unless we physically limit our spaces, which is what many dissident and underground political groups did in the past and continue to do in the present. But now we do this in a relatively ‘open’ sense, which is exciting and also sends out its own message to those we perceive as and those who are indeed opposed to what we stand for.

This energy, however exhausting and limited by its contingent nature – though there are tireless souls who attempt to hold things together and call for greater reflection – is offset by its spread. The social media’s democratic potential is vast. The number of Dalit sites, forums and internet groups are evidence enough of this phenomenon, as also are groups devoted to a range of specific issues which are seldom accommodated within what we consider democratic politics. As we know, this has become all the more the case in an age where prime-time television is both gross as well as partisan in ways that are often nothing short of offensive.

My reflections thus far have been of a general nature, but I wish now to move on from here to consider what these developments mean for political and social education in the Tamil context, of which I have some knowledge. I am not so much concerned with the issue of speaking truth to power, as Said famously put it, but with what, those engaged in finding out the truth of justice claims and of unjust entitlements, may yet not wish to countenance, as we remain obsessed with the business of political relevance and correctness.

 

A good place to begin these reflections is the critical discourse that emerged around the Perumal Murugan issue. As soon as Murugan went off Facebook, and declared that he was not going to write a Facebook page in his defence, and for calling attention to the manner in which he had been silenced, was set up. As happens in these instances, internet petitions circulated widely, and local as well as state-wide protests were coordinated through individual Facebook pages, as well as through WhatsApp and the ‘good old’ method of sending messages to people’s mobiles. Posters, morchas, sit-ins followed, but the solidarity that emerged was of a bounded group.

What was noteworthy about it was that it included his literary detractors, amongst whom were well known Dalit writers. Some of them were unhappy at the attention that Murugan’s case attracted, even though another writer – a Dalit – Durai Guna, had also faced social ostracism and violence on account of a short story that he had written even though his plight did not excite as much interest.

 

Guna’s tormentors argued that he had based his characters on real life persons who were easily identifiable in the local context and that did not appear right to them – rather they felt hurt and dishonoured. Interestingly, not only did dominant caste men say this, but also a Dalit person who, it was later argued, was put up to it by the dominant castes. In the event, the protests for the right to free speech came to include Durai Guna’s infringed liberties as well. Other Dalit writers were willing to defend Murugan’s right to express his views, but they also asked questions; indeed they have been raising these questions for a while now, about the portrayal of Dalits in his writings.

Predictably, debates and discussion on social media seldom went beyond the right to freedom of expression. When finally the verdict was delivered in the court case to do with silencing Murugan, in and through what has been widely praised as a masterly judgement, some anger was visible.¹ While valuing the judgement, disgruntled voices on Facebook posed questions about Murugan’s ‘cowardice’, his ‘lack’ of literary talent and so on – which they felt they could finally speak of, now that justice had been done by him.

The malcontented nature of these responses had partially to do with the forum in which they were expressed, but they also revealed a deeper frustration with the way issues of literature, democracy and freedom get angled and reflected in the wider, English-speaking, public sphere. A ‘cop-out’ author is obviously a problem, in a way a heroic, jail-going author is not. Yet, the ‘literary suicide’ that Murugan dramatically announced was not just a cop-out, and needed to be understood in all its nuances, as well as its limitations. The hurried anger that damned Murugan was obviously symptomatic of what was not being spoken about which, in fact, brings us back to some of the issues raised by his Dalit critics.

 

For this, of course, greater calm and some quiet are required, and it is not likely to unfold in social media spaces. But given that these latter set the trend and tone to many debates in the Tamil context, even printed expressions are bound to be defined by their terms of reference. And, if not, they are likely to remain within mainly literary magazines which some read, but many do not, though they do not mind participating in discussions that emerge from these magazines on, where else, Facebook!

In any case, the furore created by Murugan’s work could have alerted us to some of the more complex and frustrating concerns that come up when dissent emerges from within the caste order. But given the busy nature of responses and the breathless way in which we band together to combat fascist thought as well as actual violence, these concerns are not deemed pertinent or at least do not incite as much curiosity or criticism. Murugan angered fellow Gounders because he wrote as a critical insider and problematized the nature of social and caste relationships, on the one hand and sexual encounters in caste society, on the other. The anger was on account of his work being widely available, being translated into English (though they were enraged only by one novel, Mathorupagan (One Part Woman).

Murugan was careful not to entirely belittle his hate-filled critics; in fact he was willing to rework some passages – and this is what gave some of us reason to pause. Why did he do this? Perhaps it was strategic, perhaps necessary even, at a time when his life and those of his dear ones were under threat – but there may possibly be another reason. He has consistently been critical of his own caste folk and of the layered practices of exclusion and humiliation that make up the everyday life of caste in western Tamil Nadu. But he has never shied away from engaging with the life worlds that he criticizes.

 

In this context it is worth remembering that he has edited a rather unusual and thoughtful volume of essays titled, Caste and I in which several young men and women and some older men speak of what it means to be from a particular caste, their coming to a critical sense of this iniquitous order and the limited or expansive ways in which they have been able act on that critical sense. The writers include Dalits, and those from the most backward as well as backward castes, and some from the so-called upper castes. I lay out the contents of this remarkable volume to merely underscore my point about Murugan being troubled by caste, and also to draw attention to his consistent critical engagement with it.

On the other hand, his fictional world derives its energy from a lived sense of his own caste life, and is as affective as it is critical – such affective energy can express itself in either self-recriminatory terms, or in cool, ironic ways, or a mixture of both. Murugan is incapable of literary hatred, powerful and searing in its own right, nor is he consistently ironic. He stays close to the observed and observable, without being ‘realist’ in the obvious sense and, precisely because he does this, his accounts of Gounder lives appear credible. His ‘affect’ thus is not something that leads him to angry or denunciatory estrangement, rather it allows him to write the way he does, and clearly it is linked to his relationship to the world that he both knows and has left behind to an extent, but which still exercises his imagination.

This is also perhaps what made it possible for him to imagine that he could negotiate a narrative passage for himself out of a situation that cared nothing for his writing, or his talent, or indeed for anything, except for what appealed to violent casteist imagination and sense of injured pride. He relied on his sense of affect, on the fact that while he was critical of the life-world of caste as it existed in his part of the world, he also knew it, and had been shaped by it. However, his detractors cared little for his offer, and insisted on a unilateral withdrawal of the text – and this led to a court battle that finally granted Murugan the judicial relief of freedom to write on his own terms.

 

To return to the question of affect: Murugan’s portrayal of Dalit lives, while rich in detail, and obviously driven by affection and knowledge, is as defined by affect; in fact his approach and style of writing are not dissimilar to what he employs when he writes about the Gounders. The sheer physicality of these lives, their being ground into humiliating labour and violence, even when only children, is brought home in what to me is one of his finest novels, Koolla Madari (Seasons of the Palm) and, in a very different sense, in some of the short stories in that rather surreal collection titled, Pee Kathaigal (Tales of Shit).

But in a literary context where Dalit literature has raised questions about representation, and the implications of showing Dalits as history’s abject victims, his characters, while credible, appear limited by a certain creative unease, as if his imagination cannot extend beyond the fictional present, which is precisely what much of Dalit literature seeks to transcend. Dalit critiques of Murugan, especially by writers such as the very talented poet Mathivannan, who is from the same Kongu region and the Arundathiyar caste that Murugan writes of, are sharp and angry precisely because of this – that his Dalit characters do not bear the stamp of Dalit self-consciousness that has emerged with such power and distinction in Dalit texts, and more fundamentally, evident in constant and ongoing Dalit struggles in innumerable local contexts in the region.

 

When questioned about this in a literary workshop many years ago, Murugan said that his fiction has been largely set in the 1950s-1980s and that the period of Dalit struggles that followed belongs to a different chronology and one that he needs to properly ‘digest’ and ‘take in’ before he can write about it. Subsequently he did write at least one novel that dealt with inter-caste love and marriage, Pookuzhi (Pyre, published in English translation by Penguin Books, 2016), which is clearly set in the present (the present also frames his other novel, Kanganam, though his Dalit characters essay minor roles in it). But it is not at all clear that he has taken in the history of the post-1980s in all its density – for while the subject is ‘topical’ his treatment remains the same, with that same fanatic attention to detail and context, and that same fascination with exact description of place and time. As before, his fictional horizon remains trapped by what it sets out to describe, and does not appear to heed the turn of history except in what is yet disallowed, in the teeth of resistance.

I have dealt at length on some of the issues that Murugan’s writings pose for us as we seek to understand both the nature of the anger that silenced him, and the critique that calls for greater introspection and dialogue, both of which Murugan is not incapable of, but which he reserves for non-fiction rather than his creative writing. This, of course, raises a further set of questions about the relationship between the lived worlds of caste and the imagination that emerges from within these life-worlds. How may one imagine Dalit lives as both defined by context and conjuncture, and yet as historically dynamic? Is it merely a question of political correctness? Or does the imagination need to school itself differently? How may an author like Murugan write such that he does not mimic ‘Dalitness’ and yet achieves a historical acuity? What may be the value of non-Dalit writing that attempts such a narrative?

 

On account of the important issues that it raised, the Murugan episode ought to have been discussed further and more, but that did not happen – not because we are imperfectly political, but because we are all much too motivated by political enthusiasm and correctness such that we do not heed the pace of arguments and questions that emerge from longer histories of living, suffering, and transcending. This is the chronos of social democracy, to use Babasaheb Ambedkar’s words, which heeds a different rhythm than that of political democracy, and how may we learn to keep pace with it?

I now turn to more recent developments in the Tamil context to further amplify my argument and to ask more questions about learning and reflecting. For, in the case of Perumal Murugan’s work, the questions that failed to emerge froze our learning, but in the instances I address below, the repercussions are of a different order.

Since the horrible violence inflicted on Dalit homes and neighbourhoods in Dharmapuri in 2012 on account of an inter-caste love relationship and marriage, which was cruelly sundered apart, there has been a growing number of suicides and murders in the state precisely because of this reason. Several young Dalit male lives have been lost, the most recent being that of a promising young engineer, Sankar, who was brutally hacked to death in broad daylight. There have been others, including the beheading of Gokulraj, another young Dalit person. Meanwhile, sexual crimes against Dalit women continue to unfold, committed with frightening and predictable impunity by dominant caste men, which in many cases have resulted in violent deaths.

 

Angry voices have kept up a steady and consistent critique of these incidents, mostly in social media, and to a lesser extent in print. Many of those invested in keeping alive the memory of these deaths are Dalits, both men and women and some feminists. I point to this history because it has left an indelible imprint on how many of us respond to social violence and suffering (there have been at least four more similar episodes as we go to print).

Two shocking incidents of violence took place in Tamil Nadu over the last couple of months and more: one, the hacking to death, again in full public view, of Swati, a Brahmin-born software engineer; the second involved a schoolgirl, 17-year old Naveena who was allegedly set on fire by a ‘stalker’. As a news report had it: ‘The accused, Senthil Kumar (32), had waited for Naveena’s parents to leave the house. Soon after, he entered the house and first tried to set Naveena on fire. When he was unable to do that, he set himself on fire and grabbed hold of her, setting her alight too. Senthil died on the spot, while Naveena was immediately taken to the government hospital’.² Naveena too succumbed to her wounds.

Social media has been agog with anger, excitement and bitterness over both episodes, but in different ways. With respect to the first instance, without attempting to diminish the horror of what happened to Swati, many questions were raised about how the police zeroed in on the alleged perpetrator, a young Dalit student. The accused’s social origins have since complicated this murder story. Given the alacrity with which the criminal justice system marks Dalits as ‘criminal’, and the almost copybook story of a dark-skinned young man being ‘rejected’ by a fair-skinned girl, and his turning to ‘revenge’, which emerged from police investigations, many on social media wondered if there was not something familiarly insidious about the framing of this young man. Lawyers for the accused have since raised these questions in public and in court and claimed that the police investigation has not only been haphazard, but may also have been ‘motivated’.

 

Predictably, Swati’s caste background proved a source of great unease to many who actively discuss social concerns in social media. Her purportedly caste-defined views on marriage, gleaned we were told from her Facebook page, the obsessive manner in which mainstream media covered the event, quite different from how it routinely trivializes or ignores crimes against women from subaltern communities, and the drama that characterized police investigations (the police wanted a restaging of the crime by the accused at the spot of murder), were all conflated together in social media discussions – such that it was virtually impossible for anyone who was critical of caste to think beyond it, indeed to even merely consider for a moment what it means for a young woman to have met with such a fate. Except for one lone article on the fear that stalking can instill in women, and the cinematic framing of stalking as a form of fervent passion, not much time was spent in discussing how women, even if politically incorrect in every which way, have a right to say no to unwanted sexual attention.³

 

Swati’s family muddied whatever clarity appeared possible: they spoke of how god-fearing she was, how virtuous she was and so on, making many of us wonder what exactly they wished us to overlook or not look – with some even making so bold as to say that this might have been a case of disguised ‘honour’ killing, with the alleged perpetrator being a mere ‘tool’, carrying out a command that came from elsewhere and which wished to put an end to a relationship that was not considered proper. With Swati seen or available to our gaze only as an obedient and loving daughter and sister on the one hand, and a complicit upper caste woman on the other, not unlike the many hundreds who routinely take their entitled status and privileges for granted, the details of her life that brought her to such a horrific end ceased to interest us. Not that we were made privy to them, but we also did not wish to know further – the prospect of an innocent Dalit man being framed as the murderer continues to haunt us, to an extent that we have stopped thinking of the hatred that found vent in such a ghastly act of violence.

In general, we were not interested in asking questions that could have taken us out of the emotional paralysis induced by the routinely casteist manner in which love and sexuality are mediated in our contexts. We did not, for instance, ask questions about our social incapacity to love, cherish and build lives, beyond the boundaries of our own castes; or of how, as public critics and commentators, we may work against the immense power vested in this incapacity, and not limit ourselves to a politics of recrimination and blame. Neither did we ask questions about misogyny, as something that is both shaped by, but also straddles all caste spaces in greater, lesser and modest measure.

 

Interestingly, feminist voices within Tamil social media continue to be muted, or even non-existent, with some honourable exceptions. Within anti-caste politics, there is space to discuss gender concerns; militant as these discussions are from the point of view of caste injustice, they are not always as nuanced in the connections they establish between caste and gender. This was made all the more evident in Naveena’s case. For one, the girl’s death earned condemnation from Ramdoss of the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), chiefly because she happened to be born into the vanniyar caste. He has, however, been resolutely silent on all Dalit deaths (though he was vocal in the Swati case) and his speaking up on this occasion placed the dead schoolgirl outside the pale of our empathy.

Further, her purported killer was also Dalit, and here too the investigation appeared strange – for, as has been asked, how did a man, maimed, with one arm and leg lost in a train accident, actually manage to drag himself to a house where he had been shown the door in the past, and do what he is claimed to have done? In all this, what was forgotten is that the dead girl had been pursued by a man older than her by a decade and a half, and this could not have been a pleasant experience when she had to deal with it at an even younger age.

Here too, a larger politics of caste violence and casteism in the state overdetermined much else – neither the gruesome manner in which the man died, nor the ghastly end that the girl came to, appeared worthy of sober discussion. While a fact-finding team did attempt to sound a note of caution, and also reprimanded Ramdoss for his double-facedness in these matters, and while at least one social media forum (thetimestamil. com) carried this report, as also a response from a Dalit intellectual which raised questions about the police investigation – the death of a schoolgirl remained a side detail in this caste tale and has been mostly ignored.

 

There is another issue at stake here: in much of the social media discussions to do with both cases, understanding has waited upon political positions that for the most part need to be upheld or refuted and while that is valid in a fundamental sense, it turns problematic when it contains and exhausts all analysis. Partly, this is due to the cult-like nature of social media that I referred to at the beginning of this essay, and partly, it has to do with how notions of what is politically urgent and ought to be a priority or is considered more fundamentally just, frame our understanding.

In the event, and rather ironically, in this society of graded inequality, we also inadvertently create our own hierarchy of suffering and wrongdoing that often has little to do with the specific event in question. Even if we were to mark suffering as individual, contingent, or as structural and constitutive, as the case may be, we still have to account for it beyond scripting narratives that answer to our sense of what is worthy of comment, and what may be left aside, or attended to in grudging terms. While we are rightly inspired by the struggles of subaltern caste men and women, who in spite of all odds being against them, continue in good democratic faith to access the courts and abide by the law, the notion of subalternity that we seek to defend sometimes assumes the rigidity of a formula. That is, it ceases to be a politics that is defined in and through actual practice, and remains a politically correct position that we adopt.

 

In summary, it may be said that in both instances discussed above, we did not find a way to talk about women getting killed – in contexts where it appears they were also loved. The precise nature of the ties that link love and violence did not elicit our attention; nor did we ask ourselves how may we relate the logic of caste, and the practice of endogamy to sexual cultures on the one hand, and ways of thinking, feeling and self-expression on the other. Our understanding appeared strangled, muted, and shadowed by an embarrassed silence, or half-speech, at best.

And while we have rightly been angry at the cooption of feminism by the media, by project driven programmes to do with female empowerment, and by the unthinking and unforgivable biases that upper caste women have brought to their understanding of sexuality and violence, we did not seek to adumbrate a different feminist understanding that drew from what feminists had done well – case work, for one, and staying with an individual’s experience of grief and suffering for another.

 

The challenge for pedagogy is: how may we retain our sense of structure, and the long history of cruel caste oppression that comes with it in our context, and yet be attentive to the play of human intent, personality and consciousness? It is in this context that I would like to make my case for quiet pedagogy, which refuses to engage with the swirling energy of the present: whether it has to do with signing an e-petition, or appearing on a talk show, or be present at the next high powered politically progressive panel on this or that issue. While heady and exciting, such engagement is also debilitating – for thought is always pre-existent in the form of an address, a petition, or polemic and argument and is not something that helps us take a line of reasoning through the complexities of things. A pedagogy of dissent, it appears to me, stands to be stifled by its own investment in justice – with the claims made on behalf of justice pursued with an insistent shrillness that leaves very little room to pause, ponder and reflect.

Quiet pedagogy is not always directed at power; nor does it have only to do with defining and explaining rights claims or the entitlements of citizens. It is concerned with social suffering, in the most particular as well as the fundamental sense of the word, and with the recognition of such suffering as worthy of human empathy and discussion, whatever the verdict we bring to our final resolution of justice. Justice as Ambedkar put it, is an address of compassion, of love, as much as it is of righting a wrong, and to be just is also to recognize the ineluctable nature of our fraternal existence, of the social fellowship that binds us. It is in this sense that those who are engaged in justice work need to reflect on what quiet pedagogy may yet offer us.

 

Footnotes:

1. http://www.legallyindia.com/bar-bench-litigation/read-justice-sanjay-kishan-kaul-s-epic-defence-of-freedom-of-expression-author-perumal-murugan; accessed on 28 July 2016.

2. http://www.thenewsminute.com/article/17-year-old-naveenas-dreams-cut-short-brutally-after-stalker-kills-her-47544; accessed on 4 August 2016.

3. http://www.thenewsminute.com/article/glorifying-stalking-and-violence-when-will-kollywood-end-kolaveri-45845, accessed on 4 July 2016.