Recasting India (18 page)

She was only 15, but by that time she had been married, abused and tortured. She had spent nearly two years waking up every morning at 4:00 a.m. and working nearly nonstop apart from short breaks for meals and a bath (sometimes not even that) till midnight. She did not mind the cooking or the cleaning. Nor the hours of washing clothes.

But her husband's family kept chickens. Those cages would be full of chicken shit. “I had never seen such filth. The smell was horrible. I would vomit several times while trying to clean them,” remembers Saroj.

Her police constable father had sent her to school until Class 10; he had hoped she would, even after marriage, be able to go to college. “He never wanted me to get married so early,” says Saroj, now 53, who speaks fast, and starts answering before questions are completed. It is as if, decades after it all happened, the torture is embedded and alive, and sometimes even kicking.

She speaks casually, with only the slightly unnatural speed perhaps giving away the old pain, and every now and again there is a small pause as she stops to force herself to remember. During those months, she was given food only once or twice a day; often the smell of the chicken pens so nauseated her that she could not eat for days.

One day, about two years after her marriage, Saroj's father came to see her. “He was shocked. He had never seen me so shattered. He told my in-laws, ‘I married off my daughter, I did not sell her into slavery,' ” says Saroj. That day she returned to her father's house.

A new ordeal began. “I was a Dalit girl who had already broken her marriage. It was the biggest curse,” says Saroj. Dalit literally means “oppressed” in Hindi. In the Hindu system of caste, the origins of which are disputed but whose poisonous effects have continued for centuries, for many Indians, Dalits are literally untouchables. They make up around 16 percent of the Indian population but have traditionally remained the lowest rung of society (the highest were the Brahmins). The Brahmins and other upper castes would not accept either food or water from the hand of a Dalit. They would not visit the homes of Dalits and would not invite a Dalit to their home. My grandmother had a phrase for the impossible situation that Dalits faced in the old days
—Bamnar aage hathleo dosh, pore hathleo dosh.
It means there is a problem if you walk before the Brahmin and there is a problem if you walk behind the Brahmin. It was meant to suggest the absolute farcical hopelessness of a situation. The Dalit could not walk in front of the Brahmin because an untouchable did not dare to be in front of the priestly caste—nor could the Dalit walk behind the Brahmin because he risked stepping on the shadow of the Brahmin, which was utterly unthinkable.

Even today in parts of India, the punishment meted out to an “errant” Dalit woman is to be paraded naked through the village—and often gang-raped by upper-caste men. In 2012, 33,655 crimes were committed against “scheduled castes,” a government term for lower castes; the brunt of the violence is always directed toward Dalits.

All of this is in spite of the fact that the legal ban against caste discrimination was first introduced by the British in 1850 under the Caste Disabilities Removal Act (or Act XXI); special protection was then given to lower castes under the Government of India Act of 1935, and 17 separate laws were passed by various Indian states to end caste discrimination between 1943 and 1950. The first national legislation against caste discrimination in independent India (after 1947) was created with the Untouchability (Offenses) Act of 1955, which was strengthened in 1976 and made the Protection of Civil Rights Act. In 1990, a special law called the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act came into being. But the violence continues—and rates of violence doubled from around 14,000 in 1981 to 33,000 in 2001 and have remained stubbornly at those levels since then.

As India has modernized and urbanized, the most horrific of these crimes tend to take place in villages rather than in the big city where anonymity and modernity increasingly blur caste identity markers. Nearly all the women killed as “witches” each year in India (760 women have been killed since 2008 after being termed “witches” and 119 murdered in 2012 alone) were Dalits, and the majority of these hunts happened in the most rural states of India—Jharkhand and Odisha.

It is as if modern India is bringing alive with a vengeance what Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar saw in the early twentieth century. Ambedkar, a Dalit scholar who was one of the finest intellectuals India has ever known, wrote the Indian constitution. A seminal figure in India's struggle for freedom from British rule, Ambedkar embraced the modern early. A graduate in law, economics and political science of Columbia University and the London School of Economics, he was a prodigious student. In his three years at Columbia, he took eleven courses in history, five in philosophy, three in politics, four in anthropology, one each in basic German and French and twenty-nine in economics. Ambedkar advocated the total destruction of the caste system and promoted inter-caste marriage. Barely weeks before his death in 1956, faced with unrelenting orthodox Hindu resistance and after years of research, he embraced Buddhism and urged Dalits to do the same. This kind of renouncing was not new in Ambedkar's politics and polemic. In November 1948, barely a year after independence, at a time when most Indians lived in villages and earned their living from farming, when Mahatma Gandhi made villages the cornerstone of his political philosophy and the prime unit of his idyllic Indian society, Ambedkar famously argued, “What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism.”
¹

This is what Saroj faced when she returned to her father's village. Whispers started, asking why a Dalit girl had to leave her husband's home. Fingers were pointed at her father—had he failed to reveal some illicit fact about his daughter that was later unearthed by the in-laws?

“I could not take the insult of my father. I was convinced that the only way was to remove myself. I had to kill myself.” Three bottles of pesticide later, she was alive but with the additional burden of a girl who had tried to kill herself. The gossip in the village asked if she was mad, if that's why she had been “sent back from her husband's home.”

She then decided to do what Ambedkar wanted of Dalits—to leave the village and seek their fortune in the city. “But my parents and relatives did not want a young girl to come to the city. A girl who had left her husband, a girl who had no male guardian—it was unbelievable,” remembers Saroj. “But I had crossed the final line—I was ready to die, so nothing could scare me anymore. I told them if they did not let me go, I would jump under a train and kill myself. And this time, there would be no time for doctors or hospitals to save me.”

So it was that Saroj came to Bombay, the financial capital of India, to live with the family of a distant relative. Bombay, she says, seemed like America to her. It was dazzling and different from anything she had ever imagined. “I had never seen such tall buildings. In fact I didn't believe that buildings could be that tall,” she says. “When I first saw the buildings of Mumbai [Bombay], I felt very scared but I also felt free. I had broken away from the shackles of the village. And even though I had failed to become a nurse or join the police like my father—or even join the military as I had hoped after my suicide since I did not fear death anymore—I felt that this was a place where I could make something of my life.”

Her first job was at a small stitching center with a salary of Rs 200 a month. The first day she went there, Saroj froze. “I had never seen men and women working side by side in my life. And I never thought someone would offer me a Rs 100 note in my life. Here someone was offering me Rs 200! It was unbelievable,” she says. She rented a room for herself in one of Bombay's slums—for Rs 40 a month.

After a couple of years working at that center, Saroj started a not-for-profit to help women from impoverished backgrounds access government funds in order to start small-scale enterprises. Soon she spotted a loan she could take (of Rs 50,000) and started a furniture shop. As business grew, Saroj became more entrenched in local politics. As she says, “Many people began to see me as someone who could get things done.”

It was at this time, around 1996, that she was offered a plot of land of about two acres on a road that links the cities of Bombay and Pune. The asking price was Rs 2.5 lakhs and the owner wanted to sell only to Saroj. The land was filled with illegal encroachments of the local land mafia. “The owner told me—‘Kalpana, I have two choices: either sell it to you and get Rs 2.5 lakhs, which is less than market value or give it up to the goons and get nothing,' ” says Saroj.

This was the first deal that kick-started Saroj's career. But it was also the first time she was told that she might be killed—and when she decided to get her revolver license. The mafia put a price of Rs 10 lakh on her head. Saroj went to the home of the police commissioner and told him that she might be murdered. After months of legal battle, the land was cleared. On this she built her first commercial complex. She called it Kohinoor, after the famous Indian diamond.

Around this period, Saroj says she began to read Ambedkar's work very seriously. It made her question her concept of economics, and indeed her own life. Dalit economics in India has been the tale of the quota system, in essence a system of affirmative action where positions are reserved for the community in state-run schools and colleges and in government jobs. There has been endless debate, heartache and violence in India over these quotas. There is evidence that these quotas have been useful in some places to bring access to communities, but in many cases the reservation system has been overrun with rampant corruption and the worst kind of bureaucratic sloth. The quota system and the inclusion of various communities under the quota regime has also become a source of votes with political parties carving out “vote banks” by forcing the inclusion of different communities on the reservation benefit list.

There is also a raging debate over whether Ambedkar was a free-market proponent or a Fabian socialist, but it's undoubtedly clear that Ambedkar was far less anxious about private capital, enterprise and business than the men who came to govern independent India, including its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, an avowed socialist. In fact, Ambedkar opposed the inclusion of the word “socialist” in the constitution he wrote. On November 15, 1948, Ambedkar said in a constitutional debate,

Ambedkar argued that the section in the constitution on the directive principles of state policy already included what he thought were relevant guidelines about economic policy in Part IV and Article 31, namely,

These Ambedkar thought were enough—there was no need to bring in state ownership of capital, resources and industry, which would curb private enterprise. Unlike many of his cabinet colleagues who were uninterested in economic theory, Ambedkar wrote some of the most definitive works on economics in India. This is a man who fervently spoke for industrialization and mechanization, and his ideals of socialism have more to do with justice than with restricting the role of individual enterprise. His economic writings are replete with ideas that are being absorbed and applied skillfully today by entrepreneurs like Saroj.

Ambedkar's three seminal works are
The Problem of the Rupee: Its Origins and Solutions
(1923),
Administration and Finance of the East India Company
(1915) and
The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India: A Study in the Provincial Decentralisation of Imperial Finance
(1925).

Consider these two sections from
The Problem of the Rupee
: