[Reader-list] First posting: Caste, Class and Gender in the Urban Space of Keralam

[jenny chithra]

Hi everybody!

This is Carmel Christy and Jenny Rowena and here is our first posting which
is a reworked and detailed version of our initial proposal.
**
*The Title*:  *Where some autorickshaws run, others burn: Caste, Class and
Gender in the Urban Space of Keralam  *

Our project stems from a deep dissatisfaction with the ways in which the
politics of gender, caste and community has been articulated in the present
academic situation. Usually conclusions are arrived at based on the
un-problematized subjectivities (often upper caste and/or male) of the
researchers. Always the question of gender leaves out the question of caste
or community and vice versa. This research is an attempt to look at ways in
which we can talk about the contemporary in terms of complex "overlapping
cultural contexts" such as caste, class, gender, religion and sexual
orientation. (Patricia Hill Collins, *Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge,
Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment.* Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990.)


Similarly, we also are restlessness with regard to the whole project of
progressive politics in Keralam today, which is focused only on the
deconstruction of the secular, modern and often leftist notion of a
progressive and enlightened Keralam. Agreeing fully with the need for this
political project we still feel that it is not enough to talk about gender,
caste and community as categories that were excluded by the modern
imagination and its by product, the Kerala model of development. (T T
Sreekumar and S Sanjeev, Katha Ithuvare: Kerala Vikasana Samvadangal (The
story thus far: Debates on Kerala's Development) Kottayam, DC books, 2003.)
We feel that we need to move forward theoretically so as to think about how
the modern cultural forces and Left politics in Keralam have not only
excluded certain categories, but has also worked to formulate the way they
are experienced, recognized and lived out in the contemporary situation.
For this we have chosen to look at a highly complex case of violence against
a Dalit woman, Chithra Lekha, which happened in an urban space in Keralam.
Here the attempt is not to narrate, for a waiting public, a sensational
story of caste and gender atrocity. Neither do we seek to think about our
own gendered selves through the Dalit figure of Chithra Lekha. (Both of us
are OBC women, Carmel Christy is a Latin Catholic Christian woman from a
lower middle class background and Jenny Rowena is a Thiyya woman who has
lived in lower and middle class urban spaces)
The attempt instead is a theoretical and academic one which would be based
on our own documentation of the entire event. In fact, by documenting and
re-examining this case our attempt is to move away from the usual
ethnographic accounts with which such subjects are treated. Instead we want
to foreground this case of violence - which involves issues of caste, gender
and class, all staged in an urbanized and yet highly Dalitbahujan space - as
a central point in a move towards rethinking contemporary inquiries about
cultural hegemonies in Keralam.

*The Incident*

Chithra Lekha was born into a Pulaya family, which is a Dalit caste in
Keralam. Chithra Lekha's husband Shreeshanth is a Thiyya (an OBC caste).
Both his family and the dominant left party (CPM) structure were against
Shreeshanth marrying Chithra Lekha as she is a Dalit. Yet the couple went
ahead and got legally married. In their attempt to make a better living,
they resorted to what many Dalitbahujans of moffusil towns easily choose: an
autorickshaw.  The autorickshaw was bought in Chithra Lekha's name in
October 2004 and she decided to drive it herself.

Chithra Lekha also decided to operate from within the ambit of the Payyannur
college stand itself. Payyannur, one should understand is a busy town in a
district which has witnessed some of the most glorious moments in the
communist and Naxal struggles against human oppression. However, Chithra
Lekha's caste and gender identity made it impossible for her to fit into the
scheme of this liberated moffusil town. The CITU (the leftist trade union,
already angered by her caste violation of marrying above her caste) acted
against her by delaying her membership card in the auto stand. In January
2005, she was given the card and she started riding the auto. However, her
fellow drivers (mainly from the Maniyani OBC caste) started creating
problems just within one week of her public career on the city roads. They
broke the glass of the autorickshaw and beat her up. When Chithra Lekha
complained to the police, they gave a counter complaint against her saying
that she drinks, uses drugs and parks the vehicle near college in vacant
places implying that she is a sex-worker. A few days later, the final blow
was dealt when Chithra Lekha's autorickshaw was burned to ashes in the
middle of the night. She was also threatened that she would also be
similarly burned. It is highly significant to note that this is the second
such incident of a Dalit woman's auto rickshaw being burned in that town,
only further enquiry will reveal more cases of caste-gender oppression.

Our project is divided into two parts. One involves the documentation of the
incident and its repurcussions and the other is the theorization that we
would attempt based on the texts before us

*Documentation*
We start with the notion that any ethnographic documentation of an event is
not value free and is marked by the initial questions and urges that frame
the project. We would not then claim to put forward the "true" story or the
"real" incident as it happened. Instead our documentation would be
influenced and structured by the following questions and interests:

First of all we would like to capture the differences in the way the same
incident is put forward by all those narrating it– the police, the involved
parties, the NGOs involved, the mainstream press, the mainstream
intellectuals and the various Dalit and feminist intellectuals who have
involved in the issue.
Here we know that we are starting off with the notion that most people
involved in this issue such as the police, the auto rickshaw drivers
involved and the people of the town would see this as just a case of law and
order, caused by the aberrant ways of a rebellious woman.
We hope to find critical and political analysis of the events only from
Dalitbahujan intellectuals and from our given experience of Kerala culture,
we are highly skeptical about mainstream intellectuals. We are also quite
prejudiced against the mainstream press and media in Keralam. In spite of/or
because of this knowledge we hope that we would be able to capture moments
that are totally unexpected and unprepared for.

Our second major concern in the documentation of the event is about what
would be our relationship to the central person in the story, Chithra Lekha,
and her family members. We know that what has happened must have been highly
traumatic for Chithra Lekha, and we already have heard stories about certain
individuals and institutions making away with funds meant to help her. We
would surely like to bring out these aspects in our documentation.
However, we do not want to comment on anything more at this point and we
would allow Chithra Lekha to decide the terms of her relationship with us as
researchers - whether she would want to talk to us or not and in what terms
and under what condition. If it becomes possible for us to share with her
our research concerns and listen to her perspective, we hope to be as
non-interfering as possible in our listening. We would also do our part in
maintaining or reviving the projects already at place that seeks to address
her past and present situation.
We are also aware of the differences that exist between us and Chithra Lekha
and we hope to sharply foreground this in all our documenation.
Most importantly, in our documentation of her voice we would also like to
bring out Chithra Lekha, not only as a victim but also as someone who
politically resisted the hegemonic structures around her.


*Theorization*

Critically analyzing our documentation, we would try to think about how
discourses of gender, sexuality and community are being formulated in
contemporary Keralam. We will then look at how these discourses work towards
coding the progressive urban space of Keralam as upper caste and/or male. We
will try to show how a Dalit woman like Chithra Lekha have to encounter
another kind of day-to-day reality vis-à-vis middle-class, upper-caste
women, as she negotiates both her community and gender identity in the
modern space. We will use this understanding to re-examine the issues of
gender as articulated by mainstream feminists both in Keralam and outside.


In this context, it must be mentioned that, using already available Dalit
feminist works (such as, J. Indira, *"Study of Sexual Violence: A Case of
Rape against Dalit Women*." M.Phil. dissertation, University of Hyderabad,
1997) and supplanting it with our own findings, we want to re-think the
current feminist conceptualization of sexual harassment and the working
place. Usually, as J Indira points out in her work, women's workplace is
imagined around a middle class, comfortable office space. But when we think
of lakhs of "other" women who are doing "other" and not so "feminine" jobs
as in the case of Chithra Lekha, there is a need to rethink the women's
workplace and the problems they encounter there. We start with the already
available theorization that such women, who are thrust into the public
sphere for work, are considered as 'bad, deviant' women in the dominant
imagination.  We would also look at how the coding of the work place as
middle class in feminist theorization helps to further de-legitimize the
problems of most Dalitbahujan and minority working women in Keralam.

The next important question would be to look at the dominant Marxist party
as an important institution in maintaining the hegemonic structure of caste,
class, community and gender in Keralam. We would begin by searching for the
roots of such a process in the history of modern Keralam, the rise and
spread of the Left movement and the imagination and production of the Kerala
model of development. We would then move on to map this on to the case in
question.
Here the attempt would not stop with showing the Marxist party in Kerala as
male (as in J Devika, and Praveena Kodoth ("Sexual Violence and Predicament
of Feminist Politics in Kerala", *Economic and Political Weekly *Vol.36,
No.33, 2001). We would also want to think about the caste and religion of
the Male Marxist party in Kerala. Does it have one particular caste all over
Keralam or does it take on the religious and caste colors of local dominant
groups to sustain itself? We would try to see how such a process is carried
out locally.
We will surely examine the self-presentation of the Left as progressive,
modern and caste and gender neutral and show how this contradicts with the
situation at hand. Here the question would be to see how the dominant
Marxist institution engages with these contradictions. This engagement or
negotiation, we will argue, is constantly reworking and re-articulating (not
excluding or ignoring as suggested in many studies) cultural categories such
as that of caste and gender, with immense consequences for Keralam.

Another major area of interest would be the intricacies of the OBC-Dalit
relationship which is crucial in this whole incident and which often goes
unnoticed in any discussion on caste in Kerala. All over India, caste/gender
violence is increasing between OBCs and Dalits. Being a progressive
enlightened state, Keralam claims to be outside this with less number of
atrocities. The Chithra Lekha case proves this wrong. From the outside this
only looks like a case where there is a struggle between a woman and a trade
union. However, we would try to show how the trade union is peopled by a
distinct OBC community and how their objections to Chithra Lekha is based on
notions of untouchability and gender made in the name of maintaining caste
hegemony.

Lastly we would look at the role of subaltern masculinities (as many OBC men
are involved in this incident) and the pressures that trigger violence in
them, which then spills on to the city space. Here we would *not *want to
pin point to the subaltern male – in this case, the OBC male - as the only
violent creature existing in Keralam. Instead we would try to read his
maleness with regard to the institution of Marxism and also in contrast to
the invisible violence of men of hegemonic communities. Doing this, we will
try to look at the historical caste/gender pressures that work both from
within the community and the outside towards throwing the OBC man into the
ambit of violence and caste and gender oppression.

Along with passing on our documentation to SARAI, we would also like to
widely circulate this material in the mainstream press in Keralam. In doing
this, we want to reformulate the way in which Chithra Lekha's case has
received attention. So far it has only captured attention as a human
interest story, with vague and unfocused reflections on the problem of
caste. Gender is not even talked about in most narratives about Chithra
Lekha, the whole issue being presented as a case of blatant caste violence.
Therefore we would like to imbibe this story with our own peculiar
theorization of it which we hope will re-start the debate all over again,
inviting Keralam to engage with this crucial issue in a much more complex,
nuanced and political manner.




Looking forward to your responses



Warm Regards,

Carmel Christy and Jenny Rowena



-- 
(All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20070329/e491297d/attachment.html