Bereft of Being the Humiliation of Untouchability – V. Geetha

About Humiliation

·         Humiliation is an experience that interrogates and recasts one’s relation to oneself

·         Where one’s pride and self-esteem have  suffered as a condition that is degrading and wounding

·         Cornel looks at humiliation as an  ontological wounding

·         Humiliation when it degrade , hurt , and render passive  another person is clearly an expression of power

·         Kate Millet describes it seems to me that this dark and cold ,  cruel pain it demands and relishes are central to the practices of untouchability

On untouchability

·         It is a condition of existence as well as a violent expression of power

·         To Ambedkar this system embodied the principle of graded inequality

·         E V Ramasamy Periyar ,it was a norm that informed the caste system , at every level of its hierarchical existence

·         For both of them untouchability was the most important and expressive instance of an unjust inhuman order

·         V Geetha observes that in an order which holds that human being are not  indeed, cannot  be coeval with each other

·         Their existence connotes an enhanced negativity

·         They are the taboo against the coeval existence

·         They are physically set apart and their bodies are called to bear witness a system that require their continuous humiliation  

·         The unjust nature of caste order is understood in terms of [production , reproduction, discipline , punishment , sexual control and regulation

·         But none can help to comprehend the actual practice of untouchability

·         Taboos like sharing water, burial ground, ban of adornment, punishment like forcible eating of excreta of human, fire brand, rape mutilation. whatever the structural figure , essentially it is an experience of wounding of willful hurt through which they become strange to themselves

·         It is not a dramatic horror  rather it is every day practice

·         It is legitimized by a tortuous semantics of tactility

·         To understand the experience of untouchability we need to understand it both as a layered and as an evil that is stunning in its banality

The course of labour

·         Untouchability is a form of extreme alienation where the labourer is invariably a labourer

·         Dissociated not only from the products of her own creation but from her own laboring body

·         Norms of tactility mandate lowborn should labourer at difficult  and hazardous tasks

·         Untouchable body thus become – laboring body without symbolic value

·         The logic of lowness and labour exists in contrast with counter logic of highness and intellect

·         Dalit does not know how to escape from labour status  because of the lack of divine knowledge that set apart to Brahmin only

·         Caste imagination needs the untouchables , his continuous humiliation being the condition of our social order 

·         Ambedkar understood the venality of this relationship

·         He quotes apostle Paul and pilgrim fathers  to show all are equal

·         He says that Hindu society is not based on brotherhood , Brahmin cannot be a brother of shudra

·         Hindu society remains as separate

·         As far as untouchable are concerned their separation is assured not merely by rules of works but by norms of pleasure as well

The impossibility of love    

·         Through a complex sexual discourse , caste are separated

·         From Manusmriti to Kamasutra on one  hand , from matrimonial adds to legal argument on the other, intimately discussed the matters like  who shall marry who , who hall touch who

·         Caste society has to normalize the sexual rapacity of upper caste men and protect the chastity of upper caste women as well as the punish the erring desire of untouchable men and contain the irrepressible sexual otherness of untouchable women

·         Our sexual fictions  are sustained  by legends , folktale , scriptural story

·         Stories that shows the relation of sexual fiction  and caste Parashurama’s mother Renuka , and the tale of Brahmin girl

·         Both stories show that how one can consider  lowness and highness by sexual relation and chastity

·         For the sexual transgression , in caste society  the most severe punishment is getting the status of untouchability

Untouchable angst

·         It is significant that untouchables are associated with in different ways with waste trash , refuse

·         As a manual scavengers they are the custodian of what the body rejects , of what is expelled to maintain the physical world in a state of health

·         The stigma of pollution which attaches to untouchables that they are doing for the goodness of  a commonweal  that has no use for untouchables , thereby untouchable men become an object that is expected from that commonweal

·         The circle of fictional purity around untouchables is the informing angst of them that define being. a certain sort of being  as waste , as that which cannot be pertinent to itself

The impossibility of history 

·         In the modern period , groups like untouchables ontology became transformed in to history  and instead of being located in the passivity of birth started to quest for personhood and community

·         Untouchables could make their own quest which show their lives and identities to be governed by circumstance , not by the fact of low birth

·         DD Kosambi noted caste order in the present day could only survive through a negation of history and progress through an exaggerated conservatism

The body of knowledge  

·         How to reproduce this imagination of this social order

·         The Brahminical imagination reproduced by anti – caste movement

·         The wrongness of caste order is impossible to dispel as an idea because it is tantamount to dispelling God

·          Dalit carrying an umbrella , wearing trouser , invite the wrath of upper  caste Hindus

·         Every acts those are out of step with what has been ordained for the untouchables becomes a crime in the eyes of the sacred

·         The sacred and pollution were sophistry works of upper caste people , especially from Brahmin

·         When the untouchables questions the sacrality  of the caste order – he commits himself to history or interferes with the logic of transcendence with untouchable claim of moment

·         Untouchables have struggled to sustain their self-respect , dignity and sense of purpose in the face of a generalized anomie

·         The politics of self-respect somehow helped to uplift the condition of untouchables