Some people ask "do these things really happen”? Or a modified version of that. "Do these things really happen these days?"
No. I am not angry with people who ask such questions out of ignorance. They simply do not know. For the benefit of such innocent souls, a quick refresher on caste101.
Last week, near Madurai, a 14-year-old Dalit schoolboy was attacked with a razor by his classmate. The attacker, also a child from the same class, verbally abused the victim by calling out his caste name.
Two months back, near Vellore, Dalits were denied the right of passage to carry a dead body for cremation. Eventually, they tied the corpse to a rope and lowered it down a bridge to take an alternative route.
October last year, near Salem, a 13-year-old Dalit minor girl was beheaded in front of her mother, for resisting the sexual advances of her attacker. The murderer carried her head all the way to his home. His loving wife asked him to throw away the head somewhere and made a false plea to the police that her husband was mentally ill.
For those who believe this happens only in villages, please spare some time and read about Rohith Vemula, a PhD candidate and Payal Tadvi, a Doctor who was pursuing her Masters Degree.
Those who argue "Oh! Then what about poor people in forward castes?" "Oh! What about those second-generation Dalits who are enjoying the benefits of reservation?" "Oh! I did not get admission in IIT despite scoring 95% because a Dalit student snatched my opportunity", simply do not understand poverty, discrimination and caste-based violence.
This is not about getting admissions in IITs or clearing competitive exams. This is not about opportunities to succeed. Affirmative action gives the oppressed, the right to live like everybody else with dignity, self-respect and basic sustenance. Kids are picking up trash, working in factories, burning corpses in cremation grounds, working as agricultural bonded labourers and doing all kinds of unimaginable jobs because of the caste that they are born into. They are fighting their chance to go to school in the first place, complete schooling, and compete with the rest of the privileged world.
The
Rangarajan Committee under the erstwhile Planning Commission said in 2015 that the threshold of poverty in rural India was Rs.972 p.m and Rs.1407 p.m in urban India. It went on to say that 29.5% of the population, i.e. about 3 out of 10 people live under these thresholds of poverty. Compare that with the threshold of Rs 66,666 p.m for 10% reservations (that’s a long topic for another day) set for the general category (i.e. the upper castes). Let that sink in. The last caste-based census was done by the British in 1931. No Government will ever tell you the real state of poverty and the caste-based ratios of the poor. The truth will be harsh.
If your parents could not get you a birthday gift or a new dress for Diwali, or could not afford to send you to a fancy school, it does not make you poor. Those who had the luxury of being fed a proper meal everyday, have a toilet at home so that one doesn't have to defecate near railway tracks or roadsides and not get killed by upper caste men for doing such unhygienic act, going to a school that has a roof and four walls, have a clean dress to wear to school, and the love and care of parents who wake them up and make a warm glass of milk on exam days, ask why should those children who are deprived of even these bare necessities and nurturing be given a quota in admissions.
If you still believe that caste and class are not two sides of the same coin, and start with your "whatabouts", you can stop reading here and proceed with whatever you are doing in your good life.
Class divide stems from caste discrimination.
Caste determines class.
Rohit Vemula, in his last letter, said: "My birth is my fatal accident".
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Asuran takes a sensitive plot element, caste discrimination, but toys and abuses the soul of the plot to the core, all the while enjoying it while the crowd goes gaga about it.
I read about the Keezhvenmani massacre of 1968 as a teenager during a summer vacation spent in my father's library. The details of the violence can make your bones chill. Upper caste landowners burnt alive 44 Dalit workers including women, children and infants for demanding a wage rise. The not so honourable judges of Madras High Court who acquitted the 23 accused after 5 years, noted in the order: "Most of them were rich men, owning vast extent of lands and Gopala Krishna Naidu possessed a car. However much they might have been eager to wreak vengeance on the kisans, it was difficult to believe that they would walk bodily to the scene and set fire to the houses, unaided by any of their servants. They were more likely to play safe, unlike desperate hungry labourers."
After the police, judiciary and the elected representatives failed the people, 12 years since the massacre, a group of Maoists seeking vengeance, murdered the prime accused, in the same place where the massacre happened. A vicious circle of violence.
This is the state of our society. Powerful people gain power from their caste. The rich become rich because of their caste. The poor remain poor because of their caste. The oppressed are crushed under the wheels of the State because they are considered dispensable, also because of their caste. Even the Indian communists did not (maybe still do not?) agree with this view for quite some time and insisted that class and caste are not interlinked. It's another thing that the top line of the political communists is headed exclusively by upper caste leaders.
My beef with Asuran is that it romanticizes the Keezhvenmani massacre into a dark flashback, serving as a backdrop to an all-glorious hero, and reduces the boiling point in Tamil Nadu's communist history, into a melodrama.
Asuran suffers from the same flaws as the other movies (Kabali, Pariyerum Perumal, Kaala) that talk about the oppressed standing up for their rights. They shamelessly advocate violence as a means for liberation and upliftment. The movie piggybacks on the guilty porn instincts of an average movie watcher who enjoys blood and gore on a big screen. This is such an absolutely irresponsible and arrogant act from it's creators. Celebrating and worshipping misguided heroes who go punching and kicking and killing all the way for over two hours, overshadows the obligatory punchline at the end of such movies asking the oppressed children to go to school. This is equivalent to making a dope movie celebrating marijuana, with vivid shots of colourful people smoking weed, but with a statutory advisory to the contrary scrolling below the screen in fine print. Above all, making some fancy money pretending to be Dalit saviours and glorifying violence is an act of fraud.
Other than the aforesaid problems, the movie fails in several departments. Especially, Danush's act as the protagonist. Understandably, Dhanush is Vetrimaran's best buddy and his preferred choice for all lead roles. This mutual ass licking relationship had crossed the bearable threshold long back in Vada Chennai. Not to blame Danush, he tries. But the problem is not in the actor's talent but with the wrong choice of casting. It is a mockery to cast a guy of his looks in the role of a 50-year-old father of two adult children and worse, fighting like a gladiator through a herd of muscle men. Danush walks in slow-motion from all possible directions and butchers a bunch of bad guys single-handedly. I can't believe fanboys shout and scream and celebrate such eyesores. Vetri sucks in casting right actors for the right roles. When he picked stiff faced Andrea for the strongest and central character of Vada Chennai, I had given up already. She did nothing other than dropping her chin and raising her eyes up like the ghost from The Ring movies (Japanese of course), in all sorts of moods. Romance, betrayal, vengeance, power… drop chin, raise eyes, plastic face. Now after the disastrous casting in Asuran, I wish Vetri a speedy recovery. This is not the guy who made Polladhavan and Aadukalam.
We need to talk about caste discrimination. Especially in modern times. Education does not, unfortunately, reform the oppressors to turn a new leaf. On the contrary, they find new ways to discriminate.
From denying footwear and toilets, it evolves in to having an exclusive handwash for vegetarian students at elite universities and forming upper-caste cartels in corporate offices and deny opportunities to others. We know their ugly faces. We need to fight them. Not by violence.
Asuran, Kabalai and Kaala cannot liberate the oppressed. They do not offer any solution to the problem but only add fuel to the fire.
The responsibility to end caste discrimination and violence is in our hands. Not some superhero.
Talk, write, argue. Stand up and raise our voice. Question. Help those you can.
We should keep doing this till the gates of the ivory towers break open, and children of all men can enter those high palaces with their heads held high.
