Five dalits are lynched by a Hindu mob. Their alleged crime: skinning a cow. The reporters and analysts whoexpress shock and outrage do not go beyond stating that the dalits were doing what they have beentraditionally doing: selling the dead cow’s hide to make a living. There are few who want to explore thehistorical relationship between the cow, the brahmin and the origins of untouchability.
The caste Hindu common sense is that eating beef is a taboo for the Hindus. The common sense also takesuntouchability for granted, as something sanatan (permanent, eternal). For the Hindus, the cow issacred. And what is daubed with sacredness is beyond the pale of argument. Then what about those who eat beef,the dalits? Are they Hindus? When did they start eating beef? Why did the brahmins for whom every day wasprobably a beef-steak day in the vedic period give up beef and meat altogether?
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In 1948 Bhim Rao Ambedkar sought some serious answers to these and other questions, answers which have beenneglected by the mainstream academia and intelligentsia. Here, we present the answers that Ambedkar sought ina context where at one end (Tamil Nadu) dalits today are being forced to eat shit and drink urine, and atanother (Haryana) dalits are being forced to pay with their lives for doing what they have been condemned todo - eat the meat of the dead cow and use its skin for making leather products.
(In Thinniam, a village in the Tiruchi district of Tamil Nadu, on May 21 two dalits were forced to eatdried human shit when they insisted on the right to a house for which they had paid money to the caste Hinduvillage panchayat president. The news was under-reported. Within a few months a dalit in Nilakottai, Dindiguldistrict, was forced to drink urine in public. At the other extreme the hindutva lobby is delighted to getcow-urine therapy patented in the US.)
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Even Ambedkar would not have visualised such a scenario. He records several crimes against dalits but notones where they were forced to eat shit or lynched for skinning a dead cow. His investigations into theorigins of untouchability bear a lot of significance on how we understand what happened in Jhajjar or inThinniam. In the preface to his work The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables? -- fromwhere we have excerpted much of what is featured here - he dwells at length on why brahmins and caste Hindushave neglected this area of research:
"Notwithstanding the attitude of the Brahmin scholars, I must pursue the task I have undertaken. For theorigin of these classes is a subject which still awaits investigation … That the Hindus should not haveundertaken such an investigation is perfectly understandable. The old orthodox Hindu does not think that thereis anything wrong in the observance of untouchability. To him it is a normal and natural thing. As such itneither calls for expiation nor explanation. The new modern Hindu realises the wrong. But he is ashamed todiscuss it in public for fear of letting the foreigner know that Hindu Civilisation can be guilty of such avicious and infamous system or social code as evidenced by Untouchability…
"This book may, therefore, be taken as a pioneer attempt in the exploration of a field so completelyneglected by everybody. The book, if I may say so, deals not only with every aspect of the main question setout for inquiry, namely, the origin of Untouchability, but it also deals with almost all questions connectedwith it. Some of the questions are such that very few people are even aware of them; and those who are awareof them are puzzled by them and do not know how to answer them. To mention only a few, the book deals withsuch questions as:
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"Why do the Untouchables live outside the village? Why did beef-eating give rise to Untouchability?Did the Hindus never eat beef? Why did non-Brahmins give up beef-eating? What made the Brahmins becomevegetarians, etc. To each one of these, the book suggests an answer. It may be that the answers given in thebook to these questions are not all-embracing. Nonetheless it will be found that the book points to a new wayof looking at old things."
That Ambedkar’s work did not get the attention and the follow-up it deserved is something he seems tohave anticipated. He wrote in the same preface:
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"If any non-Brahmin were to make such an attempt the Brahmin scholars would engage in a conspiracy ofsilence, take no notice of him, condemn him outright on some flimsy grounds or dub his work useless. As awriter engaged in the exposition of the Brahmanic literature I have been a victim of such mean tricks."
And today, as we seek to correct this historical neglect - which partly makes us responsible for whathappened in Jhajjar and Thinniam - we can only hope that reading Ambedkar will offer us a way to understandand fight not only the fundamentalism of the obvious kind around us (in the form of VHP/ RSS/ BJP), but alsothe fundamentalism in us.
