[Reader-list] Third posting: caste and gender in the urban space of Kerala

[jenny chithra]

Dear friends,

The last time we wrote, we were thinking about leaving for Kerala on our
field trip. We spent the whole of May and some days in June on the field
trip. However we are very sorry we could not write a report immediately.
This trip brought up so many issues, some of them new, that we needed this
time to think through the things we saw, heard and experienced. We will
write about them briefly here.



1. Before going on our field trip, we were hoping that Chithra Lekha would
have been rehabilitated at least partially and that the public outcry about
the whole incident would have left her with some support from various
organizations.  However, we met a Chithra Lekha who was driven out of her
village, living precariously in a small rented house far away from her home
town. She had no connection with any one from the Action Committee that was
formed to support her. Only a retired school teacher and Dalit activist in
the group was in touch with her and it was he who took us to her. When we
met her, Chitra Lekha did not own an auto rickshaw and was not even remotely
hopeful that she would drive one again. She and her husband, both of them
trained and licensed auto rickshaw drivers, were now doing hard manual labor
and leading a very difficult life, in their own words.

Here it is important that we contrast this with the tremendous uproar that
this issue had created in Keralam. Even in far off villages, other auto
rickshaw drivers knew about the case and had their opinions about it.
Chithra Lekha appeared on three different cable channels, Asianet, Amrita TV
and Network. We also learned that during the last elections, there was even
a party which had used Chithra Lekha's issue as its trump card, against the
Left coalition. Many press conferences were held about the case and almost
all magazines had published at least one article about her. Chithra Lekha,
we were told, was even sent to New Delhi, as part of a Human Rights Campaign
by an NGO group and had addressed a gathering there. The interesting and
thought provoking fact is that, in spite of all this noise, Chithra Lekha
could not gain entry into the mainstream as she had bravely wanted to.

In great contrast, two of the people who had harassed her (one of them has a
police case against him) are now living in the Gulf countries. Another man
who is the main accused in the burning of her auto rickshaw is out on bail
and is still driving his auto rickshaw in the same place in which Chithra
Lekha cannot even live now, let alone drive an auto rickshaw.



The present situation of Chithra Lekha, who seems to lie outside the scope
of all progressive and resistant voices in Kerala today, has put many new
questions into our research work.



We realized that we cannot go forward without thinking about why even after
such a prolonged agitation in her support, she is in a far worse condition
than she had ever been. We put this question to all the people that we met
and interviewed, including the Dalit activists who were involved in the
issue. We plan to write a special part on this in our final project. We have
decided to look at:



>>the media representations of Chithra Lekha.

>>the action committee which was formulated to fight her case

>>the few feminist voices that were part of the agitation.



In all this we want to look for those reasons that limited the possibilities
of such *progressive *voices. Such an enquiry is really important given the
present situation of Chithra Lekha.



At this point, our preliminary analysis is that the new centers and
discourses of power that emerged from the media, the activists and
feminists, often reproduced the very same structures of caste and gender
that Chithra Lekha was trying to fight. None of these progressive voices
were ready to give leadership to Chithra Lekha and as she herself argues,
many of her concerns and needs were not taken into account when decisions
were made. She was portrayed again and again as the classic victim whom the
media, the activists and the feminists had now to save. No one saw the way
in which she had stood up to live against the entire historical edifice of
her region, caste and gender. Media representations and progressive activism
could not function in such a way as to support the active agency she had
shown in resisting the backward caste community in her village and
workplace. Instead, her cause was taken up and fought out by "others" who
had their own particular agendas to look after.

More importantly, the "progressive" postures adopted by these voices made it
unnecessary that they be self-reflexive about their own endeavors and
statements. Therefore, they ended up blindly using available "progressive"
discourses, which, at least in Kerala, is often structured in terms of
caste/gender violence. In the light of all this, in our final work, we want
to argue that only a commitment to complex self-reflexiveness and an attempt
to recognize "difference" at all levels, can aid any contemporary political
act.

We would also interrogate our own work in this manner, at least to point out
the probable positions of power that we might be reproducing as we engage in
this project. This is given the huge differences that we felt strongly
between our own presently middle class, Backward caste location and the
working class, Dalit location of Chithra Lekha.



2. After meeting and talking to Chithra Lekha, we cannot come to terms with
the fact that we are involved with a case where our study would not be of
immediate help to the central person we are studying. Though the academic
world around us seems to have resolved such questions, we feel the need to
revisit these resolutions and re-think this question very seriously all over
again. At this point we have decided to be active participants in some of
the initiatives that are now trying to rekindle the whole issue. We would
describe this whole process in our final work.



3. Another important issue that came up during our field trip is the fact
that many other women were also facing/had faced similar problems. We came
across four other cases of harassment – two of them involved Dalit women,
one, a Thiyya woman and another, a Muslim women.



However it must be mentioned here that we also met and interviewed one
Brahmin woman, one Thiyya woman, and a Thattan (OBC) woman and also a Muslim
woman, who all told us that they had no problem whatsoever as women drivers.
They also told us that the Marxist trade union was a source of huge support
for them We also came to know about a Dalit woman whose auto rickshaw was
burned 7 years ago, but who refused to speak about this now and is driving a
new auto. She was also said to have a good relationship with the CITU,
through relatives who are office bearers of the Marxist party.



Here we want to look at two important issues:



a. There seems to be a marked difference in the situation of Dalit women and
other Bahujan and minority women in this field which is dominated by men
from the latter communities. We would like to elaborate on this, focusing on
the identities of Bahujan women (in working class spaces) which allow them
more access to the public space than the Dalit woman. We would tie up this
analysis with our own theorization of backward caste masculinities later
(when studying the men involved in the case) and look at the way in which
the construction of the backward caste woman helps sustain backward caste
identities.



b. Among OBC and minority women, we found women who claimed to be
comfortable in their working places even as others from their own community
were being harassed. We would also like to think more about the difference
between these women. At this point we feel that the harassed women were not
*only *harassed as they belonged to a particular community or gender, but
also because they were exhibiting skills and capabilities that allowed them
to question and resist the limitations of these identities. Exploring this
aspect we want to think more about the nature of both "living within" and
"exceeding" given boundaries (which we see clearly in all the harassed
women).

This we feel might help us think more about the elements of resistance that
constitute the "excess" in the case of Chithra Lekha.



4. We visited Chithra Lekha's hometown and her house where she does not live
anymore. Most media representations talk about her as coming from a very
poor background, and they also speak about her house which has no
electricity and no municipal pipe connection. However on our visit we
noticed something entirely different. We realized that no one mentions the
fact that Chithra Lekha's little unfinished house stands at the very end of
a kilometer long road which is filled with huge houses belonging to people
from Hindu Backward caste communities who are sustained by *Gulf money*.

Here, Chithra Lekha's grandmother is called "mad woman", her mother is said
to be a "prostitute" and Chithra Lekha herself is said to be "over smart and
loose". More importantly, they are also socially ostracized from the
mainstream constituted by the backward caste community through practices of
untouchability.



It was clear to us that Chithra Lekha and family were functioning as the
Dalit "other" of this region, dominated by socially mobile backward caste
communities. Therefore, when Chithra Lekha chose to marry a Backward caste
man and drive an autorickshaw in an auto-stand dominated by such men, she
was actually resisting the very structures that kept her underneath and was
attempting to move into the mainstream of the contemporary.

Thus the whole incident was not *only *one of crass victimization but it
also speaks of a Dalit woman's resistance against the entire socio-cultural
situation that modern Kerala has placed her in. The victimization that
happened followed this kind of a resistance from her side.



Here it must also be mentioned that it is important for any study, to
understand the social difference between the three or four Dalit families in
that area and the Backward caste communities who live beside them. In our
further work we want to probe more into this difference starting with the
Dalit theorization about such issues and looking for more clues to
understanding the position of Backward caste communities in this dyad and
the way Left organizations sustain and use them.



5. We have much to say about the different view points put forward to us by
various intellectuals that we interviewed and spoke to, namely K K Kochu,
Sunny Kappikaad, K K Baburaj, Rekha Raj, Arun A, Kallen Pokkudan and
Sreejith Paithal. Again and again we heard from them about the ways in which
the Left had squashed caste movements in Malabar and had totally monopolized
the region with its ideology. This, most of these scholars maintain, has led
to the present situation, where they argue, the Left is leading a
criminalized social network, with backward caste communities as its leaders
and foot soldiers, in a highly casteist and masculine manner.

We also realize that there is an immense amount of theorization of the
history of caste movements in Malabar and the Left movement from the Dalit
perspective which has not yet gained currency in the mainstream. We feel
that we need to rethink the contemporary of Malabar from this perspective
all over again to better understand what happened in this particular case.

This would help us sketch out a good picture about the very *local *way in
which the Left, as a large, global ideological institution, engages and
structures the everyday lives of people from Backward caste and Dalit
communities. We feel that such an exploration would lead us into some
insights about some of our initial concerns about caste and gender operating
in contemporary Kerala.



6. Initially we had wanted to "re-think the current feminist
conceptualization of sexual harassment and the working place" with this
project. After the field trip we have gained more insight into this aspect
of our work. Though she does not use the mainstream vocabulary pertaining to
such issues, from our conversations with her, we feel that Chithra Lekha
clearly sees herself as a victim of workplace harassment. She continuously
talks about how she was harassed due to her superior capabilities in
handling the job. We heard similar stories from other harassed women also.
However, at present there is very little theorization that has happened with
regard to the workplace sexual harassment of working-class Dalit Bahujan and
Minority woman.



One position put forward by Dalit feminists, talk about such working places
as being constituted through the sexual exploitation of women. And as seen
in the case of Chithra Lekha (and all the other women), most often inability
or refusal to comply with the highly sexist/casteist exploitative context is
what causes the harassment, pushing her out of the work sphere. We feel the
Savarna, middle-class position provides an entirely different working place
identity to women. In the coming days, we would like to make a detailed
comparative study of Chithra Lekha's case (as perceived by us) and other
issues of sexual harassment (namely the P E Usha and Nalini Netto debate)
that has come up from middle class working places.



We have written this out elaborately as we feel that each of these issues
are important and we cannot go forward without thinking through all of them.
Will keep you posted about the journey forward.

Jenny Rowena, Carmel Christy
-- 

(All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave)
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