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Amma and Other
Stories
In an earthy, realistic narrative, reminiscent of Prem Chand, Valmiki poignantly records the degradation, humiliation and brutalities that the Dalits have to suffer on a daily basis due to caste discrimination still prevalent in independent and democratic India. The anguish and anger as also the illiteracy, poverty and helplessness of Dalits are central to several stories. The protagonists of these stories are ordinary individuals, on the lowest rung of social hierarchy, whose main ‘heroic’ accomplishment is their survival in the face of insurmountable odds. In a harrowing tale, The Killing of a Cow, when Mukhiya’s cow dies accidentally after eating some explosive material, Mukhiya finds an opportunity to teach a lesson to his Dalit servant Sukka, who had started showing signs of resistance. He had refused to send his newly married beautiful wife to the haveli of the Mukhiya. Since killing of the cow is "prohibited in the shastras", the panchayat meets the next day to punish the guilty. When no one confessed the sin, Mukhiyaji screamed, "The rascals are born low and will remain so. They should be flayed alive and stuffed with straw ... . Blesar, Jokhu, Ragghu, Chimra and Sukku here. Only one of these five is responsible ... ." The panchayat holds Sukka guilty and he is asked to clutch a plough heated in fire and if his is innocent no harm will come to him "just as no harm had come to Mother Sita in agnipriksha." The story ends with the punishment meted out to Sukka. How deeply embedded is the caste factor in social psyche is depicted in the story Where can Satish Go?. Satish runs away from home to pursue his studies and to save himself from being pushed into holding the broom all his life. When Mrs Pant, in whose house he is a tenant, discovers his ‘bhangi identity’, all her concern and sympathy for the young boy vanishes. As she passes by Satish’s drying clothes, she feels "as though an electric current had passed through her, as though something filthy had touched her body" and with a long bamboo pole she throws the trousers and the shirt down and "shoved them towards a corner of the courtyard like rubbish". Fear, Storm and The Web of Intrigue are other stories which also reveal how sadly for a Dalit despite all his accomplishments his caste remains his primary identity. Along with the trauma of being a Dalit, stories like Salaam and Amma, which enjoy the status of modern classics in Hindi, register the resistance and resilience of the protagonists and their heroic survival. The humanistic vision of Omparaksh Valmiki also includes other victims of injustice and oppression. Eclipse, Biram’s Wife and The Beast focus on the plight of the upper caste women who suffer terribly at the hands of their own men. As in other literatures from the margins of society, in these stories, too, the line between fact and fiction, between activism and aesthetics is a thin one. The stories extend the social consciousness of the oppressed to the readers and thus include them in the ongoing struggle for social transformation, for equality, dignity and freedom for degraded marginalities. The introduction to the volume by Naresh K. Jain focusing on main issues of ideology and aesthetics is particularly useful for those approaching Dalit literature for the first time. Indeed valuable as Dalit literature, the stories go beyond the limiting label as literature of deep human significance, capturing several shades of brutalities and tenderness, of helplessness and determination, of socially inflicted pains and filial concerns, of violence and self-preservation and so on. The English translation by Naresh Jain very well captures the tone and nuances and the feel and flavour of the original narratives and makes them accessible to a much wider readership. It also juxtaposes the stories with the Dalit representations in English by non-Dalits such as Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Even more importantly the translation places these stories along side the writings in English of socially marginalised, nay ‘despised’, people across the world: the Blacks, the Aborigines, the Natives or First Nations, offering striking parallels and giving new meanings to the ‘particular’ and ‘universal’ in the postcolonial literatures.
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IN
the Preface to his autobiography Joothan, Omprakash
Valmiki, eminent Hindi poet, theatre artist and political activist,
states, "Dalit life is excruciatingly painful, charred by
experiences. Experiences that did not manage to find room in literary
creations." The 15 short stories in this collection, poignantly and
graphically present Dalit life "charred by experiences" and
document "the acute pain of the world around me" as Valmiki
puts it, who himself was born in a Dalit family in village Barla
in western Uttar Pradesh.