Abstract
Dalit texts produce different forms of truth and knowledge (Pandian, 2008). Dalit life narratives cannot be reduced to mere ‘narratives of pain and sorrow’ rather they are to be read as testimonies of caste-based exploitation, everyday resistance and organised anti-caste struggles, bringing new insights within academia (Rege, 1999). As has been established, the movement of Dalit literature gained ground in Maharashtra in the 1960s, and most of the writers had a connection with the Ambedkarite movement. Dalit autobiographies in Marathi came to be written during the heyday of the movement of Dalit literature itself. Daya Pawar wrote his autobiography—Baluta (a reward for the Mahar community in Maharashtra in return for the various services offered to the ‘high castes’)—which was published in 1978 (Bhongle, 2002). It is, however, important to note that although Ambedkar seldom took time to write about himself, after his death, among his papers, was found a handwritten memoir that he likely penned mid-career in 1935–1936, titled ‘Waiting for Visa’ (Queen, 2021). There are about more than 50 Dalit autobiographies written in Marathi between 1975 and 1990. They can be divided into three broad categories—one, autobiographies by male Dalit writers; two, autobiographies by women Dalit writers and three, autobiographies of the tribal experience (Bhongle, 2002). Dalit Sahitya or Dalit literature purports to be a different kind of writing that is not to be judged by standards of stylistic originality, beauty or entertainment, but by its authenticity and truthfulness to the physical, social, psychological and spiritual realities of its narrators and their communities. It is to be judged by its commitment to a radical vision of social transformation that these authors share with one another across caste, class, gender, linguistic and geographic boundaries (Queen, 2021). Babytai Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke (Marathi Jina Amucha, 1986) displayed her power as a writer and as a survivor, whose book ‘came out of the furnace of the suffering we underwent. Each word in it is a shoot of the truth that has sprouted in my heart’ (Queen, 2021). The reader may find the ordinariness (Pandian, 2008) of the lives written about intriguing or they can construct the narrative as testimonios, which forge a right to speak both for and beyond the individual (Rege, 1999).
It is important to situate this book, a life story, as much it is about Govardhan Wankhade as it is about school and higher education structures in post-independent India, more precisely between 1960 and 2010. This book chronicles the life of a ‘Dalit sociologist’ as the title says, and through him narrates the journey of his everyday humiliation, access to opportunities, right to affirmative action policies and friendships. From a student in a village school in Maharashtra to a retired professor at the Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai—this journey is marked by efforts that people from the Dalit community regularly make to create a space for themselves within the already established public institutions. In this book, the public-funded government school, college and university are the spaces through which Wankhede’s life can be mapped. The book is structured chronologically except for one section. What is very important is that the author gives the reason as to why he writes this life story and provides a sociological context to the life that the reader would enter into. As one reads through Wankhede’s life, the reader realises that B. R. Ambedkar is an important character in this journey that is being written. Ambedkar’s politics, philosophy, aspects of his life and his hopes about India with a futuristic constitution are constantly intertwined as we read the different phases of Wankhede’s life.
In Chapter 3, (Why Do I Write?), Wankhede makes an important methodological claim that the ‘life story approach in sociology is an ethnographic one and traces the events and processes in one’s life that shape one’s development’ (p. 21). This claim can be connected to a perspective that M. N. Srinivas (1996) provided, arguing for Indian anthropologists to consider the self as a field for conducting ethnography. Wankhede asserts the need for more people to voice their own stories of deprivation and struggles since they are not merely individual stories but those of society, indicating thereby that sociology as a discipline needs to find spaces to study and engage with these stories. In Chapter 4, (Where Do I Come From?), Wankhede describes in detail his experience of caste in his village, Karla, in Maharashtra’s Amravati district. Spatial and occupational segregation dominated the village, and Wankhede, sixth among his ten siblings and born in early 1950 (although he doubts the process of record keeping), remembers these discriminations well. Maharwada was the space where the Mahars in the village lived, on the eastern outskirts of the village. Wankhede remembers how epidemics were a frequent feature in his village—with cholera, smallpox, typhoid, scabies being common. The use of school premises to treat patients by the government health departments and involving daais may be comparable to the way ASHA workers today are at the forefront of encountering the current pandemic. By talking about the complexity of his father’s occupation as a balutedari and the response from the broader Mahar community, it is possible to understand the dynamism in caste-based occupations.
Through a detailed description of dead animals being dragged, skinned, roasted and consumed by people of ‘their’ community, he poses a political and philosophical question—‘how to justify this flouting of anything that is humanity, this under destruction of human dignity’ (p. 35). He also recollects the gammat—a heritage art form of singers and performers among the Mahars, appreciated and attended by the upper castes as well.
Wankhede talks about his parents, siblings and aunt when he reminisces about his childhood. He was close to his aunt (aatya), his father’s abuse towards his mother, who would be involved in all the domestic work and how he would wash her saris, which led to snide comments from relatives.
When he starts talking about school and education, he subtitles the section as ‘Branching out: the first step to success’. It is necessary to take cognisance of this since clearly it is his struggles and triumphs with education that Wankhede underscores as he contests his daily humiliation. The account is not just about heroic triumphs; it is also about the pains, sorrows and indifferences experienced as part of this journey. His is a slow move to success. He remembers being beaten up badly in Class IV for being late to school, trying to make his hair look like Dev Anand. He studied as well as worked with his mother to earn wages on the agricultural farms on weekends. Travelling long distances to examination centres without proper food, lack of proper clean clothes to wear every day in school, walking barefoot to the school from the fifth standard, getting harsh punishments from an SC teacher—all indicate that none of this was easy, yet there was motivation from parents to get educated and get into government jobs. He joined the National Cadet Corps, talked about his specific difficulty with the English language and worked as a daily wager during vacations. He was considered a serious and studious student. He passed his 10th standard, missing first-class marks by a whisker.
Chapter 5, ‘Where Did My Voyage Take Me?’ in one sense can be read as the travels and travails of higher education—from Aurangabad to New Delhi. Wankhede studied at Milind College; a college that was established by Ambedkar in 1950. The journey from Akola to Aurangabad was an overnight bus ride, but it symbolised much more. He had received a Government of India scholarship for this education as well as admission into a hostel that had facilities including meals, beds, local travel passes and instruments needed for professional courses. Wankhede remembers the Principal, Mr. M. B. Chitnis, with a lot of respect. An associate of Ambedkar, Chitnis converted to Buddhism in the mass conversion of 1956 and was an expert in Marathi literature. He notes that most political leaders, social activists, poets, writers and teachers from the SC community were products of Milind College and contributed to the broader social cause of the community. However, most of these were Mahars and not Mangs or Chambhars. He writes how the college played an important role in contemporary social causes. Over the years, the reputation of the college went down amid the emergence of different caste-based trusts. The People’s Education Society (which founded Milind College) started engineering and law colleges in addition to the liberal arts college where Wankhede studied in. He completed his Bachelors in second class and joined MA Sociology in 1972 at the Marathwada University. He describes how he financially supported himself through scholarships, driving an autorickshaw, working as an enumerator and doing examination supervision duty. He finished his MA with 55.5% marks—the first postgraduate in his family and even in surrounding villages. Wankhede tells us that he was discriminated against because of his social identity, despite the fact that he was surrounded by ideological discussions around Ambedkar, caste and reservation policy. Wankhede continued to struggle with English-medium instructions as well as encountering modern, progressive women professors in an attire unimaginable to him. Subsequently, he completed his Bachelor of Education with a high second class and got a job as a Sociology teacher in a senior secondary school at Jalna, in the Marathwada region.
After Jalna, Wankhede comes to Delhi and takes admission in JNU’s Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies. He reflects that ‘this was the first time in my life that I got to see such a free environment that crossed all barriers of gender, caste, language and region, rich and poor. It was confusing and disconnecting, making me shy and withdrawn sometimes’ (p. 89). In JNU, he met the first SC faculty—Dr. Nandu Ram. Wankhede talks about the importance of open, democratic spaces like JNU and also mentions how Ambedkar and SC–ST issues would be ignored by all student organisations there. He observed how most SC–ST students at JNU were first-generation learners and recalls that many dropped out of their courses for jobs. He wishes that the institution had paid more personal attention to such students and instituted remedial courses that could have saved their aspirations (p. 97). Between 1977 and 1980, he received various opportunities to participate in seminars and conferences, made contacts with scholars and received sponsorship for future research projects. During his MPhil, he witnessed the Emergency, and during his PhD, the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi. In relation to the latter, he mentions ‘throughout the four-five riot days, the supply of milk, vegetables and groceries were not available in the hostels (p. 120)’. It is in this chapter that he mentions about his marriage, birth of two kids, his passion for dance, Brahmanism within dance practices, his aspiration for IAS, his respect for the Krishnan couple who worked to bring government schemes to the marginalised students and his making and breaking of friendship with an IIT student, who was Brahmin; but none of these in any detail. He writes, ‘I had tentatively decided not to marry in life and devote time for social causes; and if at all I married it would be to a woman from a Matunga community. But both promises proved to be self-broken due to my casual approach to marriage’ (p. 112). The focus of the life story never leaves educational progression and the making and unmaking of social identities through access to education. ‘What Do Testing Times Prove To Us?’ is the title of Chapter 6, which begins with his job interview at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. The chapter is about Wankhede’s tenure at TISS while still pursuing his PhD at JNU. He reflects on his permanent job at TISS,
[s]adly, no one knew how prestigious it was except my elder brother….They were only concerned with the regular income part of it….This was certainly upward mobility in terms of education and occupation as well as entry into a new world of academics, intellect and an elite class with Western sophistication (p. 129).
While on one hand he felt sad about his kinship not really understanding the value, on the other hand, he thought of Baba Saheb (Ambedkar) as ‘my second father who gave me a new birth, dignity and respect’ (p. 130). Wankhede was the first SC faculty appointed through affirmative action at TISS, and he recollects how, both in this institute and at JNU, colleagues would try to guess his caste through the surname (which was not an immediate give-away) or through the topic of the doctoral work that he was pursuing. He completed his PhD in 1993 and embarked on his first international travel through a DAAD fellowship to Germany in 1990. While on the flight to Frankfurt, he says,
suddenly I found my eyes full of tears….This was unbelievable, unimaginable, yet the truth was that I was in a plane that would take me to Germany, away from my motherland, my culture and society that had always treated me like a second-class citizen, and hurt my dignity and respect in various ways (p. 139).
Wankhede mentions the experiences of being singled out to interact with Daya Pawar (one of the first Dalit autobiography writers from Maharashtra, as mentioned earlier) on an event at TISS while not being made part of many other university events. His English communication skills remained a matter of discussion irrespective of the fact that he had become part of the highest decision-making body of TISS. Wankhede became the Dean of the Social Protection Office, which after 2004 covered students from the SC, ST, OBC, PWD and minority categories—a little more than half the total students (p. 173). In addition, he was the Dean of the School of Education and Chairman of the Centre for Higher Education at the time of his retirement. Surviving in academia is as much an experiential struggle as entering it. ‘My Life’ is therefore as much about the individual as the social. The social is the paradoxical product and producer of human life—bearing a continuous and contagious relationship between autobiography and history, self and the other, individual and collective, I and we, everyday lifeworld and social history, the conceptual and the experiential (Sen, 2014, p. 294).
In the final chapter, (What Next?), Wankhede reflects on the politics of reservation policy, the divisions between the educated, upwardly mobile SCs and the uneducated, struggling ones, the lack of leadership in social and political movements, the complexity of Dalit education in a privatised, neo-liberal education as well as the resistance to reservation in private sector employment, leaving the reader with a sense of despair and hope. He remembers his journey both as self-isolating as well as one that gave him academic fulfilment. The reading of this journey would have been more transformatory if he would have used a more empathetic gender lens in his recollection. His sense of shock at seeing women teachers in sleeveless dresses, women students smoking cigarettes, German women hugging a male stranger or a male village student not being apologetic about his ‘prostitute’ mother coexist with his absolute silence about his wife Radha’s contribution to his professional life. It leaves the reader wanting and waiting to engage with the complex gender-caste matrix through which education and academic life operate in India. Concluding with the need to relearn the Sociology of India, Wankhede ends with saluting the great saviour Dr. Ambedkar (p. 191), who many sociologists have assessed as one of the first political philosophers to write about the tyrannies of Brahminical patriarchy in India (Rege, 2014).
As we read through this testimonio, besides reading it in the genre of autobiographies, the contribution of this book is equally in the broader sociology of education discourse. Through Wankhede, the readers are exposed to the difficult worlds of access to (quality) education, the importance of primary and high schools near to one’s residence in order to avoid hostel expenses and the opportunities that come by making it to ‘bigger’ cities for education and employment. But the text also enlightens the reader not just about the trials of access but also about surviving in public institutions without adequate social and cultural capital. The grit and determination of the author are evident throughout, where personal sorrows and moments of demotivation are offset through the determined resilience of reaching a goal. According to government reports, the gross enrolment ratio (GER) in higher education in India is 27.1, which is calculated for the 18–23 age group. GER for male population is 26.9 and for female, it is 27.3. For Scheduled Castes, it is 23.4 and for Scheduled Tribes, it is 18.0. Scheduled Castes students constitute 14.7% and Scheduled Tribes students 5.6% of the total enrolment (AISHE, 2020). It is also necessary to read the autobiography in context of these low numbers of SC students accessing higher education institutions despite years of affirmative action policies. The need for reading life narratives sitting together with educational surveys may only enumerate the life behind numbers. More importantly, if we have to argue that Dalit testimonios are about a collective story, Wankhede’s life narrative could also be representative of many others, who otherwise remain hidden behind numbers. Sociology as a discipline needs to include life narratives in a more consistent manner as argued by Stanley (1993). This book, therefore, would be a significant read for scholars of sociology, educational studies, development studies, political science, Dalit studies and gender studies.
