New | Essay | Notes from the Ghetto | Rahul Sonpimple

The author with his mother in front of their home

Notes from the Ghetto

 

 

 

We are not born with differential markers yet the worlds we are forced to see are segregated. The sky on the top and the earth beneath us limits no one in the wide collective of people we call humanity.

 

But God does.

 

Condemned by the past, the Untouchables of the ‘Satya Yug’ have been freed into cages of the New World. The City I was born into begins with the smell of brick-kiln smoke, with workers living in shanties in maze-like settlements and I believe with thoughts, feelings and sentiments that resemble the chaos of their habitations.

 

The very ‘beginning’, that I emphasised upon in the last paragraph, amounts to the limit of our experience in the city, in essence, marking our ‘beginning’ as its veritable ‘end’.

 

 

 

And this is how I learnt the word ‘Periphery’. To the rest of the world, civilized, urbane, modern India looks profoundly different from the backward India of the villages, but then why does it looks similar to us?

 

More than the decorated archives in the government library, the experiences of my elders in the ‘Basti’ provide the best answers.

 

This old ‘Periphery’ must have moved with us. And the message of the creator of the Universe and his messengers too, ‘sacred’ as it is, must have followed. They are now guarding our ghettos. I see the birth of our young ones and the death of my elders – the children of this so-called God are deserted in these condemned ghettos.

 

The murder of my friend, upward-mobility of my neighbor, the love of a mother and hatred of my enemies, are all guarded by this God, like an absentee father who has washed his hands off his progenies, siting distantly in an affluent colony.

 

Children in the Basti are not like their parents, they look different, speak differently. The only resemblance with their parents is that both have ‘surplus’ bodies which are to be exploited for the growth of the city’s economy.

 

 Now with my University degree, I look like an Outsider, Yet the God in the city-centre keeps a watch on me, like a guard sitting in the prison’s watchtower. I shall follow his lessons on morality which help in maintaining the normalcy, another word that hides the blatant injustice perpetrated on the weak and powerless. That’s the way to normalize my new existence in the old ‘normal’.

 

I may become perfect now; I have an opportunity to depart from the deviancy. For that, I shall have to make choices. It’s not about the dilemma for university scholars like me; I think it’s about the confrontation. Confrontation between one who is sitting in the centre of city and one who is standing at the entry of the Basti. The standing Ambedkar who is Babasaheb for us; let all the educated ones come to Bhim Nagar, see the modern Prophet in the barren wasteland of everyday struggles and sufferings. He is worshiped, celebrated; songs, and pohada have been made on him; he is part of the wedding rituals and he is remembered even in death ceremonies. He is the barrister revered as ‘Bhimaai’ –the mother by us.

 

I am not surprised though, that he is condemned by them. And this ‘they vs. us’ was not invented on my land, yet the socialization in the Periphery becomes fused with these binaries. The righteous people protected by wall compounds and police station facing the Basti with the angry sipahi - the soldiers of the State with suspicious gazes came up with this dialectic long back.

 

“I had come here with two copper plates and one brass water pot. It was my wedding gift and was good enough for us to start a new life,” says Kantabai –a widow in my neighborhood. Her husband was a wall painter – the beef eater, who dunked it down with Santra desi daru every night, and spoke like a free man. She curses him for not plastering the mud house. ‘Whatever he was, I feel lonely without my man.’ Kantabai, too, desired a family. Two daughters, one married to an auto driver and another divorced who now works as a maid in neighboring colonies.

 

Kantabai had hopes from her youngest son as the elder had to drop out from school. Kamlesh the elder brother works for the same Thekedar (contractor) to whom his father remained loyal till his death.

 

Young one is a local Ambedkarite activist – fondly called as Bhim Sainik by local boys. Along with his university books, he is fond of the movement’s literature and poetry. Eloquently, he speaks about the lower-caste history and uninterruptedly quotes Ambedkar in his conversation. ‘We should fight to be ruling class like Babasaheb and destroy upper caste hegemony’; he keeps repeating his speech in every community program.

 

I wonder what will be he called? Is he a caste anarchist? Is he a believer in what English- speaking liberal intelligentsia calls Identity Politics? Why can’t he simply accept being a State welfare subject? He is adamant about not even identifying as civil society’s victim. He is not from the Proletariat though, he proudly calls himself an Ambedkarite. Dhamma’s name was offered by a monk from Basti’s Buddha Vihara. He isn’t an untouchable, he says, but I wonder if modern India does not want to pigeonhole him?

 

I believe there cannot be a world of the oppressed which is strange to his oppressor. There only exist ‘protected pretentions’ which allow the oppressor to mark every assertive existence of oppressed as strange. Moreover, the oppressed don’t need to ‘come out’ against their oppressor, he knows you; you are a part of him, part of his world. I see people in my slum have been reinventing themselves; the followers of Chokhamela now bow before Ambedkar’s Buddha. The trapped humanity in our ghettos, I hope, one day will explode like Dhasal’s fiery verses. 

(Rahul Sonpimple is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His research focuses on Dalit movements and leadership. He is also an active member of the Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students Association in JNU. He has completed his Master's degree in Dalit and Tribal Social Work at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. He is from North Nagpur known for its Dalit ghettoes).