Introduction
Chandu Maheria, a prominent Dalit intellectual, activist, journalist and columnist from Gujarat, is a litterateur unnoticed and unrecognised by the Gujarati literary establishment. That the essays in his memoir, Homes Without Windows, have remained uncollected and unpublished in book form in Gujarati to date speaks volumes about that apathy.
Born in 1959 in a family of nine, Maheria lived in the seedy chawls of Rajpur, a working-class suburb and industrial hub in east Ahmedabad, until he turned 40. The memoir provides a graphic and breathtaking account of his childhood and teens, caught up in endless struggles for roti, kapada, makan – food, clothing and home – alongside those for education, enlightenment and political awareness. That perilous journey threw open the windows of Maheria’s mind and uncovered for him the ugly reality of power structures in a caste society. It enabled a politics that is neither abstract nor a slave to any ideology but looks out for truth in the interstices of discourses and ideologies. A politics of biradari – fraternity and solidarity.
The dominant note of the memoir, thus, is the challenge to the divisive discourses of caste, patriarchy, communalism, authoritarianism and neoliberalism that inflict unspeakable suffering on the toiling masses of India. However, surprisingly enough, one doesn’t hear, as might be expected, any grouse, resentment, fulmination. The whole memoir is made light by delicate irony, fresh humour, quick wit and flitting melancholy. This is a glorious achievement in an age of anger, when ressentiment has come to undergird all manner of thought and action in both the public and private spheres.
The excerpt below is a fascinating and thought-provoking essay that upholds Maheria’s ethic of biradari and looks for truth in the in-between of narrowly contrived social identities and mutually exclusive polemics. Mohandas K Gandhi and his anti-Untouchability politics are problematic presences in the Dalit imagination and in the Dalit struggle for the annihilation of caste, more so for his role in Poona Pact than anything else. Maheria affords a quick, snap-by-snap peek into that imagination, its foundations and its blind spots, and lays out the contribution of Gandhi, Gandhian activists and institutions in the lives of Dalits in post-independence India. While Gandhi is not spared, he is not smeared for the sake of it. For its realistic assessment of the undeniable role “that fellow, Gandhido,” played in shaping the past, present and future of the Dalit community, the essay is a precious gem, next in value perhaps only to the Kannada intellectual D R Nagaraj’s analysis of the old man’s legacy.
– Hemang Ashwinkumar
I LIKE TO wear khadi. It suits my short body and slim build. But Ma doesn’t like it a bit, the fact that I wear it. The fabric is anathema to her. Thus, every time I don a khadi kurta and a pair of khadi pyjamas, she takes a dig, not sure whether at me or my attire, saying, “You look like a ditto Gandhiyo in this pair.” Ma and Ba had not seen Gandhi anytime in their lives, though he was their contemporary. The world of Ma, an unlettered woman, began and ended with her household and its immediate concerns. In the long years of her marriage, the mantra of her relatively isolated and homebound life was: Be good, do good and feel good. But Ba had heard and learnt a lot about the Gandhi–Ambedkar debate, and even read a bit about their strained relationship. The simmering discontent with Gandhi among the first generation of Dalits who grew up in that era found its way, from time to time, into everything, from a casual talk to a fiery argument that Ma and Ba had in front of us kids. Ma’s pet grouse was, “None but that fellow, Gandhiyo, is responsible for erecting these caste enclosures.” Clearly, at the root of her quibble against my partiality for khadi lay the misgivings and mix-ups concerning Gandhi that Ba and the zeitgeist of the era had sown in her mind.