[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.

regards
Jenny Rowena, Carmel Christy

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