BOOK
REVIEW
TITLE: BLACK COFFEE IN A COCONUT SHELL-Caste as a
lived experience
EDITED
BY: PERUMAL MURUGAN
TRANSLATED
FROM THE TAMIL BY: C.S. LAKSHMI
PUBLISHER: SAGE/YODA PRESS, 2018
PRICE:
RS.595/-
Fissure
Lines Of Tamilian Casteism: A Pan-Indian Mirror For 2018
This is a engagingly written set of unpretentious and short
essays, straight from the heart, on the unbending rules and practices of caste
in rural Tamil Nadu.
The narratives range from birth and one’s sense of station,
to assignations, marriage, and what might have been, the simulations and
euphemisms of tact, particularly between religions, and also death – with its
separate and stratified final rites. These are stories of personal experience
and very touching for their authenticity.
Published by Sage/Yoda Press, the quality of the flawless
editing and presentation in this volume is exceptional.
The essays, serious in content, are written by a pantheon of
highly educated academics, authors, poets, editors, even a doctor, who could
easily have chosen to be pedantic and pompous, but have instead chosen a quiet
tone of dignified poignancy, simplicity, and acute honesty.
If one didn’t read the notes on the contributors, bristling
with PhDs, though many were indeed born in the village, you would have taken
the entire collective of 31 to be ordinary people, writing directly on their
own experience with their caste and religious identities.
The essays, some only two or three pages long, have been impeccably
translated by the distinguished Dr. C.S. Lakshmi, specialized in Women’s
Studies.
The Editor of this slim but valuable collection, Perumal
Murugan, is a professor, author, poet, with what must be a fairly rare PhD in
Tamil.
Caste is a formidable construct in India. The message of this book however is that
though it can, and does, much to preserve traditions and structures - with its rigidities,
it often destroys lives too.
Recent Assembly elections in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat,
the North East, taught us caste, class, creed, tribal loyalties, are all
crucially relevant to the “social engineering” aspects of winning State
elections.
Such groupings compete with religion, ideology, and the
modern, inclusive, siren calls to development, and still hold their own. The
vast metro cities with a population in millions are perhaps the only places
where these issues loosen their hold, provided one does not seek out familiar
ghettoes.
Most recently in Karnataka, we were treated to detailed
analyses of Lingayats and Veershaivas, sub-castes, Mahants, Mutts, Vokkaligas,
Kurubas, the Muslim- Shia, Sunni Imams, Maulanas, Dalits, Maha-Dalits - all bubbling
away in the election cauldron. Along, that is, with money, liquor, fake voters’
lists, intimidation, lies, accusations, promises and hoopla.
Reservations, the modern affirmative action panacea, say
some in this interestingly titled book: Black
Coffee in a Coconut Shell, are responsible for even more divisions than
were originally built into the caste system.
Getting in is one thing, but then cheek by jowl colleagues
proceed to snuff each others’ promotions based on caste groupings.
Skin colour, physical features, crudity, refinement, food
habits and inclinations, are all repeatedly brought up as visible markers of
caste to the discerning observer. The
untouchability of caste practice, though some of the authors attributed it to
departed mothers and grandmothers, is heartbreaking- the separate glasses, the
laxman rekha of inside and outside, bathing to dispel “pollution”.
It is no wonder, given the childhood trauma, that many of
the erudite writers here meekly accept their caste limitations, hinting at
genetic probabilities, without demur.
It is poignant to read this. Comparative study would explain
to these distinguished professors that the tinker, tailor, butcher, baker,
candle-stick maker of “tradesmen entrances”, craftsmen, artisans, would have
never climbed into the Boardrooms of Europe and America if this was inviolable.
Of course the world wars that wiped out their aristocracy helped.
But also, mongrellisation seems to have worked really well
in the “melting pot” that is America, and here we are, hesitating at “inter-caste
marriages”, and being routinely lynched by the Tamilian equivalent of Khap
Panchayats.
There is a feeling, represented in most of these essays,
that caste is immutable in the village. It can, after a fashion, lose itself in
the big city, in the Chennai of this book.
But only if the incumbent does not let himself be tortured
by its internal dictates even there, amongst all the reasonable anonymity and
the cosmopolitanism. A suicide is cited even here though, when the attempt
fails.
Caste is heartfelt. The low, the middling, and high-born,
all feel its lash in different ways. This is interesting, and true enough for the
articulation. Nobody is really on top anymore, certainly not by right! It is
money that is replacing caste, and thank God something is.
Not even the atheist politicians of the South, and their
ardent followers, who tried to cut through the Gordian knot are anything but
just such and such
(generally low) caste, who say they don’t believe in God
anymore. There is a churn, but one must still carry the baggage.
Theoretically, if a person can shed the effects of caste on
his developing psyche, particularly if he grew up in Tamil Nadu’s villages,
then all is well.
But not one of the authors of these essays dares thumb his
nose at the notion. Everyone accepts its pernicious hold in the spirit of age-old
Karma. There is no communist or modernist attempt to belittle the meaning of
caste and its stratifications in this volume. Perhaps it is not lost on this
distinguished assemblage that Karl Marx was himself a Jew.
This realism is indeed remarkable, and at the nub of this
book’s honesty. No one celebrates the apartheid of caste, but no one denies its
existence either.
Everyone ends individually and separately, with a hope that
future generations may make a better job of rendering caste irrelevant than
they have.
It is possible. A multi-cultural Europe has blurred colour,
ethnicity, race, and cultural lines in the minds of most of its people. A
generation or two ago this was unthinkable. Did economics and technology do the
trick? Perhaps the answer is in all of
the above, and in the inexorable processes of evolution too.
For:
The Sunday Pioneer BOOKS
(977
words)
May 14,
2018
Gautam
Mukherjee
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