Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature

THIS IS Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s call to Dalit writers to use literature as a form of social activism to underscore the humanistic capacities of creative narrative (2004, 50). Recently, across linguistic communities, Dalits in India have put this call to action into practice with striking success. Dalits have developed literary forums in several languages that emphasize the power of narrative to inspire social transformation. Scholarly attention to emerging bodies of Dalit literature in dominant Indian literary languages such as Marathi, Tamil, and especially Hindi has so far focused largely on the sociopolitical significance of Dalit writing, celebrating somewhat uncritically the emergence of the “authentic” voice of subaltern experience.¹ Little emphasis, however, has been given to the strategic aestheticization of that experience in the construction of Dalit literary narratives, or to the varying textures of Dalit literature penned by individual authors. Rather, Dalit literature is most often heralded as a unified body of protest literature or as a literature of resistance, with a focus on the author’s efforts to expose various aspects of the “truth” of Dalit life. However, as the following chapters attest, the revolutionary potential of Dalit literature is as much aesthetic as it is political.

The texts gathered under the thematic umbrella of Dalit literature in Hindi and other Indian languages are not an undifferentiated mass of univocal narratives. Rather, they represent mature and nuanced manipulations of language, narrative structure, content, and imagery that rely heavily on creative ambitions and construct carefully wrought worlds of meaning. Although this emergence of Dalit literary and political voices has rightly begun to be recognized, it is now critical that we analyze in greater depth how Dalit writers make meaning in their texts. Consequently, we also need to consider how these narrative strategies serve the emancipatory goals of the Dalit movement.

In part I of this book I argued that contemporary Dalit literary discourse in India is constituted by both the publication of diverse forms of literature (including autobiography, short and long fiction, poetry, and drama) and critical networks of public debate. These networks are made up of Dalit literary and activist organizations, publishing houses that regularly print Dalit-authored texts, literary journals and magazines, and public meetings at book launches, literary conferences, and award ceremonies.² The counterpublic model is instructive in its positioning of the Dalit literary sphere as one that occupies a parallel and oppositional space to the Indian literary mainstream. The Dalit counterpublic sphere both creates a shared space for the reflexive circulation of discourse that has been marginalized from the mainstream public sphere and also challenges that mainstream to recognize this competing discourse.

Here, in part II, the purpose is to interrogate the various aesthetic strategies of contemporary Dalit short fiction. In this chapter, I examine the literary strategies that shape contemporary Dalit fictional prose in Hindi by examining in depth two Hindi short stories by two prolific and notable Dalit writers, Omprakash Valmiki and Jaiprakash Kardam, in an effort to understand the dominant narrative mode of this contemporary body of prose literature. Through a close reading of Valmiki’s “Pachchīs Chaukā Ḍeṛh Sau” (“25 Fours Are 150,” 2000) and Kardam’s “Lāṭhī” (“The Staff,” 2005), I argue that more analytical attention to diverse Dalit literary strategies can significantly contribute to existing conversations about the growth of Dalit literature across linguistic and geographical regions in India. This will also identify new narrative styles in a sphere of subaltern social protest and literary innovation. Additionally, close attention to the stylistic strategies of Hindi Dalit narratives contributes to an understanding of the diversity of modern and contemporary Hindi literature as a whole.

Much of the focus of existing academic analysis of Dalit literature has been on its social and political content, specifically its themes of oppression and exploitation. The emphasis on the resistive ambitions of Dalit literature is accurate, but it does not by itself adequately explain the literary innovations of a vast body of Dalit literature and overlooks the ways in which many Dalit writers manipulate diverse narrative strategies to delineate their own identities, both public and private, increasingly on their own terms.³ Few scholars have put forward any systematic aesthetic or structural analysis, and what does exist is largely relegated to observations of its “vulgar” language and “angry” narrative tone.⁴ This attitude is a holdover from the rhetoric of the early Marathi writing of the Dalit Panthers. Yet to remain stuck in an analytical framework of difference while reading newer Dalit literary prose in languages like Hindi, far removed from the early virulence of the Panthers’ poetry, is to willfully ignore the ways contemporary Dalit writers engage a particular politics of style in the construction of Dalit chetnā.

Considerations of formal narrative strategies in Dalit literature are few, but they exist in diverse analytical articles and scholarly translations. For example, in the introduction to her translation of Joseph Macwan’s autobiography, The Stepchild (Angaliyat), Rita Kothari suggests that in a move toward greater “authenticity” in their texts, Gujarati Dalit writers have increasingly employed dialects.⁵ Further, Digish Mehta has characterized Dalit literature as a “literature of the oppressed” for the dominance of its “oppressor versus oppressed plot pattern.”⁶

Arun Prabha Mukherjee offers a few of the most specific observations of the narrative strategies of Hindi Dalit authors, but she stops short of a methodical analysis. In an article in The Toronto Review, Mukherjee seconds Mehta’s characterization of the polarization of oppressor and oppressed as the predominant narrative structure in Dalit literature, offering a sociological interpretation of who oppresses and who is oppressed. She writes, “Dalit literature has emerged as an oppositional voice, puncturing holes in the grand narratives of India’s heroic struggle against colonialism and its transformation into the ‘world’s largest democracy.’ Dalit literature divides Indians into two camps: those born as high-caste Hindus who control all avenues to wealth and privilege and those born as lower castes and outcastes, Shudras and Atishudras, who are oppressed by the upper castes.”⁷ And in her analysis of Omprakash Valmiki’s autobiographical style she observes a layering of description, from both a child’s perspective of experiential immediacy and an adult’s theoretical gloss, and further notes that “Valmiki presents the traumatic moments of his encounter with his persecutors as dramatized scenes, as cinematic moments”⁸ (Mukherjee 2003, xl). Finally, she also insists on the primacy of realism in Valmiki’s text, “Valmiki, like many other Dalit writers, demands the status of truth for his writing … [he] dismisses imagination as make-believe, insisting that he writes about the ‘suffered real.’”⁹ Indeed, all of these observations become evident when one reads more than a few Dalit works, and together they form an intriguing glimpse into a customized Dalit aesthetics. But they do not present a complete picture.

A close look at the short stories of both Omprakash Valmiki and Jaiprakash Kardam illustrates significant trends in contemporary Hindi Dalit literary practice. Both authors straddle the creative and critical arenas of the Dalit literary sphere, acting as shapers of the emerging Dalit literary aesthetic in their respective roles as literary critic and journal editor, while also remaining respected and frequently translated and anthologized creative authors. Among the most prolific and esteemed contemporary Dalits writing in Hindi, Valmiki has authored several short story collections. He has also written extensively as a critic and theorist of Dalit literature, publishing an influential book on the aesthetics of Dalit literature (2001). The English translation of Valmiki’s autobiography, Joothan (2003), introduced him to the English-speaking world as a representative voice of Dalit literary expression in Hindi. Jaiprakash Kardam is also critically involved in the development of contemporary Dalit networks of literary discourse, largely through editing his annual anthology (since 1997) of Dalit literature and critical writing from various authors, called Dalit Sāhitya (Dalit Literature). Kardam is also the author of several sociological treatises on caste and race in India, as well as several novels and short story collections, including Talāsh (The Search, 2005), from which “Lāṭhī” is drawn.

An analysis of both Dalit literature and literary criticism emerging from the Hindi Dalit counterpublic sphere reveals a particular narrative perspective resulting from a strategic project of self-theorization; as I suggested in part I, Dalit intellectuals have developed the essentialist concept of Dalit chetnā (‘Dalit consciousness’) in an effort to contain and define the political, social, and aesthetic attributes of Dalit literature, thereby establishing a tangible Dalit public identity. In the developing aesthetics of Dalit literature, Dalit chetnā has evolved from general political awareness and self-respect to a specific theoretical definition of a revolutionary mentality that perpetuates and now expands Ambedkarite ideology.¹⁰ Ambedkar’s writings are voluminous and his political ideology far too extensive and subtle to do any justice to it here. Nevertheless, it is important to highlight those fundamental ideas that have made him such an enduring icon for Dalits and that have become common narrative themes in recent literature. One of the most radical acts Ambedkar ever undertook was his apostasy from Hinduism and conversion to Buddhism in the months before his death in 1956. While overtly Buddhist philosophy makes scant appearance in Dalit literature outside the invocation of the Buddha as an icon of rational enlightenment and a name coterminous with Ambedkar in Dalit poetry, Dalit writers have embraced Ambedkar’s rejection of Hinduism. Specifically, the target in both Ambedkar’s expository writing and the creative texts of more contemporary Dalit writers is Brahminism, defined by the absolute separation and hierarchy of castes and the complete social and political exclusion of the Untouchables. Early in his career, Ambedkar sought the annihilation of caste by advocating for both intermarriage and integrated dining and later sought to destroy the foundation of the caste system—Hinduism—altogether.¹¹ Ambedkar engaged critically with Marxism throughout his career and firmly believed in economic marginalization as a key factor in social and political oppression. He emphasized above all else the importance of reason, dismissing any personal or communal recourse to a reverence for the supernatural. Historian Valerian Rodrigues suggests that Ambedkar believed that a significant hurdle to abolishing the practice of untouchability was a fundamental lack of understanding of its material reality. “He felt that it was difficult for outsiders to understand the phenomena of untouchability and explored modes of presenting the same. Once explained, he thought human sympathy would be forthcoming toward alleviating the plight of the ‘Untouchables’ …”¹²

Dalit authors, no longer content to be represented by others, have turned a critical eye to mainstream literature that claims to speak from a Dalit perspective. No longer wanting to be limited to being looked upon as objects of sympathy, revulsion, or desire, Dalit writers have embraced the call of Ambedkar to not only intimately reveal the ‘pain and sorrow’ of Dalit lives but also, more significantly, to “bring progress.” This progress is wrought, I argue, through a transformation of Dalit literary characters from objects of oppression to agents of social change. Underscoring the mechanics of this transformation is the critical idea of Dalit consciousness and an innovation in literary aesthetics. In Hindi writing, both Dalit consciousness and Ambedkar’s desire for the spread of understanding are most strenuously exercised in narrative form by the dismantling of normative ideas of privilege by recasting the usual Dalit “victims” as heroes. The aim of this chapter is thus to demonstrate that contemporary Dalit writers have privileged the dualistic, formal approach of “melodramatic realism” in their efforts to represent to themselves and to the world the “true” experience of living as an Untouchable, as well as to manifest their commitment to ending caste oppression through awareness and education.

In her study of Marathi Dalit texts, Ramachandran rightly observes, “Dalit literature plays a significant role in … shaping identity. Its social realist narrative strategies describe a severe outer reality that goads the moral imagination of readers, demanding ameliorative action.”¹³ In Hindi Dalit writing, it is the combined forces of social realist and melodramatic conventions in Dalit literature that strive to demand such an engaged, “ameliorative” response from readers. The moral imagination of readers is stimulated by realistic representations of the deplorable material conditions and culture of social injustice that curtails the lives of many Dalits. Readers are also stirred by the starkly drawn moral dramas that these short narratives represent, preventing even the slightest ambiguity of analysis and reader response. In the majority of Dalit short stories, the Dalit character embodies absolute, morally pure psychic integrity and is embattled by a world filled with elaborately drawn upper-caste villains. The ensuing melodramatic struggles, set in a location and situation based on the aesthetic standards of social realism, demand that readers’ sympathies align unquestionably with the side of the Dalit, the side of the “good,” and hence the “good Dalit.”

Both realism and melodrama as verbal and visual narrative forms have long played central roles in South Asian cultural production. Premchand and other members of the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) were vanguards in the development of a realist literary aesthetic, and their continued influence on contemporary Indian literature is profound.¹⁴ Gopal suggests that among the members of the PWA Sa’adat Hasan Manto in particular saw realism as “an influential speech act inasmuch as it will change the fundamental sensibilities by boldly making reference to the actually existing.”¹⁵ This suggests a strategy for shining “the light of day upon the filth and grime that the rest of society refuses to see.”¹⁶ Therefore, like other socially committed writers before them, Dalit writers and critics have emphasized realism as the dominant narrative structure for depicting the “truth” of the social, material, and emotional circumstances of Dalit life.¹⁷

Late nineteenth-century Parsi theater and the subsequent development of twentieth-century popular Indian cinema, on the other hand, favored many of the conventions of melodrama developed on the nineteenth-century French stage and normalized such conventions for a mass audience across India.¹⁸ It is no surprise, therefore, that Dalit writers have assimilated aspects of both realism and melodrama—aesthetic conventions in dominant circulation in Indian literature and film—in the development of their own narrative style. What is worth investigating is how both expressive strategies often manifest, interwoven, in a single text. Further, since Dalit literature is not a body of texts written for aesthetic pleasure, but rather vehemently regards itself as part of a larger movement of sociopolitical resistance, it is worth considering the ways in which these narrative strategies develop Dalit chetnā.

In his seminal volume on realism in literature, Auerbach suggests that the great achievement of realism is the “serious treatment of everyday reality [and] the rise of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of ‘subject matter.’”¹⁹ Dalit writer Ajay Navaria colorfully compares the realist aesthetic of Dalit literature to the necessity of lancing a cyst on the body of Hindu society. While the substance that the cyst releases may be unpleasant, its cathartic release is said to be necessary for the healing of the social body.²⁰ Melodrama also has a stake in the modern construction of an ethical society through its emphasis on the triumph of good over evil, despite being commonly disdained as “popular” and unrefined. Moral polarization is the fundamental organizing principle of melodramatic narratives, a principle expressed in hyperbolic situations and dialogue, moments of astonishment and ethical realization, and the exteriorization of psychic structures in stock characters.²¹ There is comfort in the repetition and guarantee of melodrama, a narrative form that Brooks calls “a moral universe made available,” a democratic art form that presents to itself the fundamental values of a civilization, outside of the realm of myth or religion.²²

The moral universe that Dalit writers present in their literature is based on Ambedkar’s ideal of a casteless society. This is not to say that there is no caste in Dalit narratives. On the contrary, myriad evils of caste oppression provide the narrative threads that are woven together to create a story. As the following examples will demonstrate, the melodramatic practice of pitting absolute signifiers of good and evil against one another is the predominant storytelling mode in Dalit literature. The narrative logic of these stories revolves around the conflict between the moral pole of the bad, inhabited by the upper-caste proponents of caste inequality (“Bad Brahmins”), and the moral pole of the good, inhabited by the victimized, and always innocent, Dalit characters (“Good Dalits”). This moral opposition is continuously reinforced: in plot, dialogue, and description. The following discussion serves to demonstrate the function of realism in these stories and the ways in which it serves to underscore the melodramatic core. Realism appears as a means of recovering Dalit subjectivity and the visibility of Dalit lives in literature, while melodrama provides a powerful pedagogical focus to the narrative.

The story is told from the perspective of Sudeep, a young Dalit who is returning to his village to share his accomplishment with his mother and father after receiving his first paycheck from a new job in the city. As the story begins, Sudeep is riding a bus to his village and meditating on how far he has come from village life. He thinks of his early years at the village school, remembering how his illiterate father had to plead for his son’s entry, groveling at the feet of the school’s upper-caste administrators. The plot soon arrives at its narrative focus, a critical event in Sudeep’s second year of school while learning the multiplication tables. Sudeep recalls practicing the equations aloud when his father, who, we are told, could not count past twenty, sits down to listen, swelling with pride at his son’s growing knowledge. But when Sudeep reaches “25 fours are 100,” his father interrupts him to tell him he is mistaken.

Years before, when Sudeep’s mother had suddenly fallen ill, the upper-caste village head (chaudhrī) had loaned Sudeep’s father 100 rupees to pay for medication. Four months later, the chaudhrī tells Sudeep’s father that he is charging interest of 25 rupees a month on the 100 rupees borrowed. Recognizing that he can cheat the poor, uneducated Dalit, he insists that four months’ worth of 25 rupees interest comes to 150 rupees.²³ Proud of his ability to instruct his son, the father becomes irritated when Sudeep tries to show his father that the sum is printed in his schoolbook as 100:

Here lies the central conflict of the story, the moment that cleaves a wide split between father and son, locating them on opposing sides of modernity and tradition, skepticism and misplaced faith. While Sudeep continues his efforts to convince his father of the authority of his textbook, the father takes recourse to his own idea of authority, one firmly entrenched in the philosophy and understanding of caste hierarchy that invests the chaudhrī with greater knowledge, power, and authority—in effect, value—based on his “high” birth. The next day, when Sudeep incorrectly recites his tables in class, his teacher slaps and ridicules him, calling him a “stupid sweeper.” Sudeep leaves the class in tears, overwhelmed by this conflict with authority:

This matter of ‘“25 fours are 150” plagues Sudeep for years. Not the sum itself, but rather its greater significance, the knowledge that his father had been duped by his upper-caste overlord. The recognition of his father’s weakness throws Sudeep into a crisis of identity. As an adult, however, sitting in the bus on the way home, Sudeep is emboldened by his new job and salary to finally prove to his father that he was wrong, that he was cheated by the chaudhrī, indeed ultimately that he has been a victim of caste-based exploitation throughout his entire lifetime. When he returns to his parents’ home, Sudeep separates the rupees he has earned into piles of 25 each and asks his father to count them. After several attempts, the excruciatingly slow realization of his exploitation manifests itself in the form of physical pain in the father’s chest. The story ends with the father’s relinquishment (with an angry oath) of his lifelong reverence for the upper-caste chaudhrī. This is the decisive moment of his assumption of Dalit consciousness, taught to him by his son, who achieved his own awareness through the arduous routes of education and punishment, urbanization and modernity.

Valmiki constructs his narrative around what Morris calls the “metonymic principle of contiguity,” tracking narrative movements along a logical, continuous, realistic ordering of activity, in a “cinematic” style.²⁶ He builds a narrative parallelism between Sudeep’s physical journey, back to his village on a bus, and his mental journey, back through his memory to the central event of his childhood. Both of these journeys, physical and mental, emphasize the greatest journey of his life, the psychological removal of ignorance and dependence of which this whole story is a metonymic rendering. Throughout, the story continually emphasizes this parallelism in the narrative, making the structural strategies explicit for the reader. For example, Valmiki writes:

Sudeep’s physical journey on a bus back to his village to share the joy of his first paycheck with his parents is in one sense the final leg of a much longer, more emotional life journey. In the first half of the story, descriptions of the physical conditions of the bus ride punctuate, and often prompt, Sudeep’s reverie into his past, maintaining a realistic effect. After a long meditation on his painful childhood memories, Valmiki offers this tangible description of the atmosphere on the bus:

Then, just as the fresh air from the window cuts through the obfuscating clouds of smoke, Sudeep remembers the seminal event of his childhood, the matter of multiplication that penetrated the darkness of caste hierarchy and oppressive ignorance. There is both figurative and empirical value to this description that underscores the revelation to come and offers a material basis to the narrative, a sense of establishing the “here and now” that contributes to the effect of the real.

The employment of several melodramatic devices in Valmiki’s narrative maximizes the symbolic impact of the story, dramatizing the essential ethical struggle at its core. The story itself centers around the fairly mundane issue of a simple multiplication equation. However, constant melodramatic flourishes throughout the course of the narrative raise the significance of “25 fours are 150” from the specific context of the characters of son and father to a powerful symbol of the susceptibility of uneducated, impoverished Dalits to exploitation by manipulative upper castes. As Peter Brooks explains, social melodramas are concerned with the “dual engagement with the representation of man’s social existence, the way he lives in the ordinary, and with the moral drama implicated by and in his existence.”²⁹ Valmiki’s story asserts that the “ordinary” lives of rural Dalit laborers, steeped in traditionalism and ignorance, can only be overcome with difficulty by modern education and through rejection of customary caste hierarchies. The climax of the story is not Sudeep’s father’s realization that his math was wrong, but rather that his lifelong reverence for the chaudhrī, based in an internalized ideology of his own inferiority, was without foundation. The opening paragraphs of Valmiki’s story immediately illustrate the melodramatic tone underlying the story.

The rupees in Sudeep’s hand serve as a hyperbolic sign, a conventional object metaphorically exaggerated to the extreme. These rupees are imbued with the symbolic capacity of emitting heat throughout Sudeep’s body. It therefore becomes immediately clear that they represent something much larger than money, or even the milestone of drawing a first salary. Rather, these rupees are “a spot of light in the deep darkness” and, as highlighted in the second paragraph of the preceding quote, proof that Sudeep has “managed to save himself” from all kinds of obstacles, “thorny bushes,” “apparitions,” and “ghosts of the past.” This is a prime example of the hyperbolic description common to many Dalit fictional and nonfictional narratives.³¹ Its employment in these first two paragraphs immediately establishes Sudeep as an embattled individual, a hopeful and hardworking innocent who has triumphed against the odds and who is humbly proud of his achievements, even if it is only an “average job.”

In the third paragraph, however, the author’s grandiose tone abruptly shifts, and we are again plunged into the quotidian details of a realistic narrative:

The ordinariness of these details is striking and initially appears incongruous with the extravagant descriptions of Sudeep’s lifelong struggle for salvation in the first two paragraphs. Yet the third paragraph, too, serves the overarching melodramatic mode of the narrative. The fact that Sudeep’s desire to share the momentous event of receiving his first salary with his mother and father is so strong that he went to great lengths to secure days off to return to his village is testament to the goodness of his character. The good son’s filial piety draws him back to his village, the purity of his ambition revealed in his desire to give his earnings to his parents. Indeed, throughout this story, as in the overwhelming majority of Dalit narratives, the central Dalit character is morally upright. However embattled and victimized by the exploitative forces of caste and poverty, the Dalit character represents one unambiguous pole in the battle between good and evil, with innocence as the most potent quality of moral virtue.

Film scholar Rosie Thomas suggests that Hindi cinematic melodramas are also constructed around opposing moral poles in conflict with one another, concretely and symbolically embodied by the archetypal figures of the Mother (self-sacrificing, loving, devout) and the Villain (self-serving, duplicitous, brutal).³³ In the context of Dalit literature, this observation could be amended to suggest instead that the melodramatic conflicts between the opposing moral poles of innocence/virtue and treachery/evil are embodied in carefully constructed archetypes of the “Good Dalit” and the “Bad Brahmin,” in which the Dalit is drawn without exception as a blameless figure and the Brahmin or other upper-caste person is characterized as ruthless and exploitative.

Valmiki sticks closely to the normative melodramatic Dalit literary practice of investing his Dalit characters with unqualified goodness while representing upper-caste characters as lacking any redeeming qualities whatsoever. There is no space for moral ambiguity. Frequently, Dalit characters have been depicted as physically weak or in poses of supplication, while their polar opposites, upper-caste “villains,” are drawn in the aesthetic of the grotesque. For example, as Valmiki shows, a bus conductor rebukes a Dalit passenger whose bags are taking up space in the aisle, first having “taken stock of his appearance,” which is described as “meek and slight” (dublī-patlī-sī) and with a “waning voice” (dhīme svar).³⁴ The conductor, however, is just the opposite: “His pot-bellied body was restlessly trying to tear his tight clothes and release itself. He had a face like a wild (janglī) pig and red, pān-stained teeth … Sudeep imagined that a wild pig had in fact pushed himself into the crowd on the bus.”³⁵

The stark contrast between the pitiable passenger and the monstrous conductor reminds Sudeep of his own father and the many times he had seen him reduced to a state of desperate supplication before a callous authority figure. This reflection of his father’s weakness elicits physical revulsion in Sudeep. Valmiki depicts this, too, in hyperbolic imagery: “Whenever Sudeep saw someone grovel, he would remember the image of his own father, and he would shudder violently, as though someone were sawing on his body.”³⁶

In this case, the image Sudeep remembers is his father’s appeal to get him enrolled in school: “Sudeep was never able to forget his father’s pose. He stood bent, his hands folded together in supplication,” while the Master responded to this self-effacement coolly, “flicking ashes off the glowing butt of his bīḍī.’”³⁷ The contrast is drawn again when Sudeep replays in his mind the moment when he recites the sum of twenty-five times four incorrectly at school and his teacher accosts him with insults: “And he would also think about Father’s face so full of faith and Master Shivnarayan Mishra’s angry, red face as he shouted abuses at Sudeep.”³⁸ Through such physical descriptions and the careful attention to the balancing of an opposing malevolent character against each representation of a victimized innocent Dalit, the melodramatic, binary moral universe of the narrative is consciously constructed.

This moral universe conforms to the Ambedkarite model. It is based on the principle of equality, where it is understood that caste divisions are not preordained, nor based on inherent human value, but are instead the product of the malevolent manipulation of men who desire to seize social and political power. Sudeep has returned to his village in this story to prove the existence of that universe to his father. The denouement of the story, the final revelation of the magnitude of his deception by Sudeep’s father, constitutes the “moment of astonishment” in which the presentation of evidence provides for final recognition and a restoration of the primacy of the moral universe, creating “an exciting and spectacular drama of persecuted innocence and virtue triumphant.”³⁹ Of course, one may argue that the realization that twenty-five fours are not in fact 150 hardly provides for “spectacular drama.” I would attribute the choice of this symbol to a reverence for realism. Still, the revelation of manifold meanings condensed within that single symbol does result in a profound shift of perspective for Sudeep’s father, and, as the author might hope, the reader.

Kardam’s very brief short story, “The Staff” (“Lāṭhī”), focuses on water rights and irrigation in a community of villages.⁴⁰ Its narrative scope is narrow, concerned with the events of just one night. Its significance, however, is much more broadly conceived. It is a story about a rural culture of intimidation, in which Dalits are routinely barred from equal access to shared resources. It dramatizes the tensions that can rise within a community over how to address the matter of its exploitation, specifically whether to combat such institutionalized mistreatment with violent resistance or to passively accept its lot. There are several rich descriptions of the geography and caste politics of the specific community that lend the story authenticity. At moments it resembles a newspaper or census report of the local community, but Kardam also makes liberal use of various melodramatic strategies to heighten the narrative’s drama.

Harisingh is a Dalit of the Ahir subcaste in the village of Harsanv in Uttar Pradesh. Harsanv and several nearby villages share a government-regulated irrigation system for their fields. Access to the water is divided into twice-weekly “turns” of a period of several hours for each field, and the water is distributed among a series of canals. On the night he expects his share of the water, Harisingh has gone to his field at 11 P.M. The owner of the neighbouring field, Badni, an upper-caste Jat from a neighboring village, is not ready to finish and cajoles Harisingh into going home. Harisingh protests “beseechingly” (anurodh ke svar meṁ) that it is his turn for the water, but to no avail. When he bends down to place an obstacle in the canal to redirect the water to his field, Badni hits Harisingh hard across the back with his lāṭhī and sends him sprawling on the ground. Badni shouts: “Get outta here if you care about your life … or else I’ll dig your grave right here, you bastard!” and continues to beat the man with his lāṭhī until Harisingh manages to drag himself to his feet and return home.⁴¹

At home, his moans of pain immediately wake his wife, Ataro, who rushes to his aid and massages his back as she loudly curses Badni. Her shouts awaken Harisingh’s father and uncle who also rush to his side. Harisingh’s father, Samman, is anguished by his son’s pain, but advocates caution while Harisingh’s uncle, Phaggan, threatens to retaliate and attack Badni that same night. Phaggan commands Ataro to bring him his lāṭhī as he prepares to attack Badni and “scatter the bastard’s corpse all over the ground.”⁴² But Samman holds Phaggan back, reminding him of an incident a few weeks earlier when members of another Dalit subcaste had quarrelled with a few members of the Jat community, and later a mob of Jats from the surrounding areas had assembled and “forced their way into their houses and tore everyone limb from limb.”⁴³ Samman warns that any attack on Badni would draw a much more devastating retaliation from the rest of the Jat community. Phaggan argues that if they do not stand up for themselves now, they will only continue to be exploited and oppressed, forced to hide “like foxes in their holes” from the upper-caste “lions.” He eventually submits to his elder brother’s authority and returns to bed. But Phaggan is still seething, and the story ends with his personal promise to “see Badni again” while he stares at his own lāṭhi leaning against the wall of his room.

The most striking element of melodrama in this story is the liberal use of epithets, maledictions, and curses to heighten the emotional drama of the narrative. As Brooks explains, “[o]ne of the most immediately striking features of melodrama is the extent to which characters tend to say, directly and explicitly, their moral judgments of the world. From the start, they launch into a vocabulary of psychological and moral abstractions to characterize themselves and others.”⁴⁴ Anger and an overarching feeling of helplessness pervade Kardam’s narrative, unlike the redemptive tone of “25 Fours Are 150.” While the character of Sudeep in that story was able to save himself from the conditions of his low-caste birth through the avenues of education and urban employment, and manages to emancipate his father from debilitating ignorance, there is no such way out envisioned in this story’s episode. Instead, “Lāṭhī” tells the story of a community literally beaten into submission, although they are, unlike Sudeep’s father, perfectly aware of the exploitative nature of their social position. The impotent anger and frustration of the story’s characters is therefore released in the form of verbal outbursts directed at the one individual, Badni, who on this particular night embodies the systematized enforcement of their low social status. Interestingly, the character who takes the most recourse to the hurling of abuses (gālī denā) is Harisingh’s otherwise silent wife, Ataro:

This is virtually the only speech Ataro is allowed in the story. It is a speech that is markedly rustic, firmly placing the narrative in its rural locale.⁴⁶ Otherwise Ataro silently fulfills her wifely role: massaging Harisingh’s back and plying him with warm milk, jaggery, and turmeric while the men of the house discuss whether to take any kind of active recourse. While Ataro is not the only character to utter an oath, she does so more frequently than anyone else in the story, and her curses are the most threatening of all.

In their anthropological study of Dalit women’s cultural lives, Franco, Macwan, and Ramanathan observe that “rituals of rebellion have a socially cathartic function, ensuring that conflicts occur in prescribed ritual contexts, leaving the dominant ideology intact; … while these expressive forms bank down rebellion at one level, they also make active resistance conceivable at another.”⁴⁷ Indeed, Ataro is in no way capable of “destroying” Badni, but the vehement expression of her anger is ritually appropriate, perhaps even required, as she busies herself over the healing of her husband’s damaged body. Her outbursts function as ritualized female expression. The pronouncement of her rage and grief proves cathartic. She calms herself “only after shouting many abuses” and is then able to return to bed.

It is possible, too, that Ataro’s maledictions, although ignored by the other characters in the story, encourage Phaggan’s own violent response to Badni’s attack. Phaggan’s final oath ominously ends the story, promising future retaliation and underscoring the spirit of resistance that is momentarily stifled, but not yet extinguished:

The anger and heated exchange from a little while earlier was over now. Once again there was pin-drop silence in all directions. But nobody could sleep. They tossed and turned on their cots. They could all feel the pain of Harisingh’s lāṭhī wound inside themselves. Phaggan was the most agitated. He could not even lie down, let alone sleep. He just sat like a statue but inside he was still shaking with anger.

‘Badni, I’ll see you again’, he muttered. His face was pulled taut in anger, he was making fists and his gaze hung on the lāṭhī standing against the wall opposite him.⁴⁸

This parting image is powerfully drawn and recalls stage melodrama. We can imagine the lights lowering or the curtain closing on the figure of a red-faced Phaggan glaring with rage and resolve at his lāṭhī leaning on the wall. Indeed it is standard practice in both stage and film melodrama that, in climactic moments and extreme situations, there is often a recourse to mute gesture as a means of expressing meaning more powerfully than with words. I would argue that in “The Staff” this final moment of resolve, emphasized both by verbal utterance (“Badni, I’ll see you again”) and starkly symbolic visual imagery, serves the same revelatory and didactic purpose of the “moment of astonishment” illustrated in the father’s revelation in “25 Fours Are 150.”⁴⁹ Here, at the denouement of “The Staff,” is a call to a Dalit audience to reject victimization, even when the circumstances make the goal of freedom from oppression seem impossible. While the advice of Samman, who advocates acceptance as a means of survival, is for the moment upheld, the most indelible impression of reading “The Staff” is the final image of an angry Phaggan, barely restraining himself from violence.

Although the emotional logic of melodrama pervades this story, there are several moments where the narrative mode of social realism dominates. Adherence to the two aesthetic styles is so absolute, however, that very often the passages foregrounding realist strategies can seem as though they belong to a different text altogether or are explanatory asides from the main story. Kardam includes an inordinate amount of what Roland Barthes has referred to as the “cultural code,” or “multiple explicit and implicit references in a text: familiar cultural knowledge, proverbial wisdom, commonsensical assumptions, school texts, stereotypical thinking.”⁵⁰ Kardam offers explicit details about both the culture of the community (“No village woman ever uttered her husband’s name”) and the geographic makeup of the area (“There was a village named Harsanv a little more than a kilometer along the road that goes from Misalgadh to Gaziabad. There were a few Jat houses along the bank of the spring near Harsanv in the direction of Sadarpur”). The specificity of this kind of detail contributes to the “truth effect” of the narrative, reinforcing its authenticity. The story is not located in an abstract India but is rooted in a specific region of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Kardam uses dialect (such as the localized form of Chamar, “Chamtā”), or he reshapes standard Hindi, principally through vowel lengthening, to represent a rural tongue and to give the sense that the reader is hearing directly reported speech.

One of the most effective narrative strategies Kardam employs in this story is a multilayered metonymic interpretation of the symbol of the lāṭhī. On the most basic level it is a staff, an indispensable tool of the rural farmer. Harisingh brings his own lāṭhī with him when he goes to irrigate his field, and it flies out of his hands when he is attacked by Badni, who puts the lāṭhī to a different, more malevolent use when he wields it as a weapon to enforce his will over Harisingh. Thus the humble lāṭhī comes to take on a violent and oppressive significance. Kardam explains that for Phaggan, his lāṭhī is a means of living with self-respect, since the strength and skill with which he can wield his own lāṭhī as a weapon protects him from the indignity suffered by his brother Samman who always “defused a situation with flattery and obsequiousness.” Kardam writes of Phaggan: “He was of short stature, but his body was strong. He could hit even the most robust young man on the waist with a lāṭhī with his full strength and reduce him to a heap, so much was the power in his body.”⁵¹ Thus it is naturally with his lāṭhī that Phaggan wants to retaliate against Badni. But as Samman tries to dissuade Phaggan, the lāṭhī takes on an even deeper metonymic valence as a signifier of individuals who are willing to wield their lāṭhīs on either side of a caste war. In the context of Samman’s cautionary advice, the lāṭhī becomes symbolic of the disunity of the Dalit community and of their weakness in the face of the opposing force of the Jats, who would fiercely protect their caste privilege. Kardam writes:

Samman tried to explain to him: ‘Brother, there’s village after village of them. With one call they’ll get a hundred lāṭhīs together. How can we beat them? They’ll beat our heads in’.

‘That’s their village, not ours. If they have a hundred lāṭhīs then we have five hundred’, he told Samman.

‘Sure there are five hundred lāṭhīs, but you’ll never get them to come out together against someone from the outside. These lāṭhīs are only for splitting one another’s heads open amongst ourselves. You’ll only get four lāṭhīs together to go against someone else’.⁵²

First the lāṭhī has been transformed from a farmer’s implement to a weapon, a means both of caste oppression and coercion in the case of Badni, and of self-sufficiency and respect in the case of Phaggan. In the preceding passage, it also becomes a representative of the disorder and lack of solidarity within the Dalit community. Rather, as Samman explains, lāṭhīs are used only for “splitting one another’s heads open among ourselves.” The lāṭhī therein becomes a symbol of the Dalit community’s source of weakness, and at the same time a symbol of Jat strength. It also becomes symbolic of the central conflict of this aptly named story. Just as Valmiki invests the meaning of the destructiveness of ignorance in the symbol of an incorrect multiplication equation, Kardam has focused the well-worn oppressor vs. oppressed plot pattern around a single locus, the lāṭhī.

Realism as a narrative mode is traditionally discussed in the context of the novel, largely as a strategy of elaboration of detail and the logical contiguity of events that lends a text the air of the real. In short stories, however, the construction of reality requires “a literary technique that insists on compression, a rhetorical method that reveals meaning by leaving things out, and a language style that creates metaphor by means of metonymy.”⁵³ In both short stories discussed here, many different meanings are compressed into the single signs of “25 Fours Are 150” and the lāṭhī of Kardam’s story. The signs themselves become metonymic symbols, both of the demoralized living conditions of Dalits in casteist society and also of the hope for equality. May explains, “in the realistic short story, metonymic details are transformed into metaphoric meaning by the thematic demands of the story that organize them by repetition and parallelism into meaningful patterns.”⁵⁴ In Valmiki’s story, the symbol of the mathematical equation is repeated and developed throughout: first it symbolizes the ignorance and impotence of Sudeep’s father, then it becomes the transformative event that forces Sudeep to question the authority invested in the upper castes by a hierarchical social structure, and finally it symbolizes the triumph of Sudeep over the social forces against him, as well as the dramatic social progress that can take place within a single generation. In Kardam’s story, the lāṭhī takes on early significance as a tool of the brutal suppression of the weak, and it continues to take on several different meanings depending on whose hands hold the lāṭhī. But the final scene of the story is unambiguous. The lāṭhī leaning on the wall is Phaggan’s hope and his future, his promise to “see Badni again,” by which he asserts his own subjectivity and rejects the role of the victim.