Dalpat Chauhan’s alternative Dalit history of Gujarat

ABOUT A DECADE AGO, as Gujarat seized the national imagination in India, with Narendra Modi touting it as a model to emulate while he went from ruling the state to ruling the entire country, I was reading and translating Dalpat Chauhan. His poem ‘Rise’, from his collection Kya Chhe Suraj (Where is the Sun?), which appeared in 2000, reads,.Rise you did.we know it..Rise we will.be sure about it..But not the way you did..You lit up like the moon..We’ll shine like the sun..The popular image of a rising Gujarat, “lit up like the moon” – a moon reminiscent of the “lamp which lights up only palaces” in the Pakistani poet Habib Jalib’s famous ‘Dastoor’ – represented a narrow, exclusivist, dominant-caste Gujarati worldview. The cherished asmita, or pride, of the Gujarati elite, as well as an overblown, ethnonationalist idea of welfare and development – Modi’s much-loved “vikas” – had long excluded the state’s Muslims, Dalits and other oppressed minorities. As a counter to this, and making it pale into insignificance, Chauhan offered up an egalitarian Dalit worldview, represented by the sun. .The sun is a profoundly symbolic leitmotif in much of Chauhan’s rich oeuvre. It spans more than five decades, and includes two poetry collections, five novels, four short-story collections, two collections of plays, an essay collection, a history of Gujarati Dalit literature, a lexicon of a Dalit dialect from northern Gujarat and a number of edited books on Dalit literature and literary criticism. This whole corpus is deeply committed to foregrounding Dalit history, Dalit experiences and Dalit resistance struggles, all in a razor-sharp idiom that blends mainstream and marginalised languages, traditional and modern literary techniques and tropes, and a portrait of the skewed present with the dream of a just, egalitarian future. .The sun serves as an organising principle for Chauhan’s impressive trilogy, published between 2004 and 2021: Bhalbhankhru (The Dawn), Rashava Suraj (The Suspended Sun) and Bapor (High Noon). This is due, perhaps, to the sun’s seminal importance to Dalit life in a caste order that has denied Dalit bodies access even to sunlight, among many other natural and public resources. .Chauhan touches upon this deprivation in his short story ‘Home’, which depicts the ordeal a Dalit couple is put through for toying with the idea of building a pucca house. The diktat from the lackey of the village head goes,.The house should span not more than thirty feet to the east and twenty to the north. No windows in the front, understood? No niche in any walls for cupboards or a showcase. The pair of shutters in the doorframe should be plain. No carvings or designs therein, got it?.In this context, Chauhan’s extremely poetic and poignant description of his birth, featured in his forthcoming autobiographical novel Vakho (The Pain Man), assumes telltale significance. Speculating about the circumstances of his birth in a hut with tightly packed mud walls and a makeshift door forged of twigs, reed and bamboo stalks, Vakho, the title character, says, .At that moment, the sun would have sneaked in from chinks and holes in the russet roof tiles, sat for a moment in my half-clenched fists like tiny sequins and lured me into a game of Catch Me If You Can. I would have opened and closed my tender fists to grab it. Since then, we have been pals. Ask these clay walls if you don’t believe me..In a sense, Chauhan’s entire oeuvre is an engagement with the much-touted myth and model of Gujarat, a project to reclaim a Dalit history, culture and worldview that forms a different asmita directly opposed to the one Gujaratis brandish before the world today. His aim is to recuperate a Gujarat hidden from view, much as a slum of Saraniya tribes was hidden behind a tall wall in February 2020 as Modi prepared to receive the US president, Donald Trump, in the state’s largest city, Ahmedabad. Reading Chauhan’s works is like reading an alternative history, the history of the other Gujarat..THAT GUJARAT, with the longest coastline of any Indian state and a signature mercantile ethos, would evolve into a multilingual, multicultural and multireligious place is a no-brainer. That is why, in 1960, when Gujarat was formally created, the major Gujarati poet Sundaram wrote a long hymn, ‘Gurjari Bhu’ – The Gurjari Land – in which he called the state “a janapada that developed at the confluence of the world.” Nowhere in the poem does the term asmita, much-touted today, figure. This was the poet’s way of paying tribute to the rich interculturality of Gujarat, formed through centuries of interaction, exchange and miscegenation between local tribes and the many people who reached its welcoming shores: the Mauryans, Shaks, Huns, Kushans, Gurjars, Arabs, Parsis, Mughals, Portuguese, Sidis, English and so on. .And yet, when it comes to the idea of asmita today, most Gujaratis trace their pride to the glory of the medieval, pre-Turkic Gujarat, ruled between the 10th and 13th centuries by the Chaulukya-Vaghela dynasties. The seizure of the Gujarati popular imagination by this religio-political narrative, of a great Hindu empire ending at the turn of the 14th century with the attack of Alauddin Khalji, the sultan of Delhi, owes less to any historical accounts that directly or indirectly endorse it and more to the works of the independence activist and towering writer K M Munshi, where it is fiercely and ferociously propounded. .Munshi’s Patan trilogy, and the historical volumes of The Glory That Was Gurjara Desa, are “built on legends, myths, and stirring stories”, the journalist Salil Tripathi notes in his recent The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community. These works have “cast a dark shadow on Gujarati minds”, which have become expert at taking athletic leaps of faith between modern and medieval Gujarat, spanning everything in between with an amnesiac stride. Historical scholarship – most prominently, that of the historian Samira Sheikh – has shown how the Muzaffarid sultans played a critical role in integrating the region that is now Gujarat through the “religious marketplace”, and how its political, economic and religious landscape was forged by diverse historical processes set into motion at the onset of the 13th century..Salil Tripathi’s portrait of Gujarati pride and contradictions.The whys and wherefores of this modern Gujarati amnesia might be multifarious. Muni Jinvijay, the renowned scholar of archaeology, Indology and Jainism, spoke during the 1936 session of the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad – the Gujarati Literary Council – presided over by M K Gandhi, about the business-minded Gujaratis’ aversion to historical and scientific research and knowledge, which they regard as non-lucrative pursuits. Even this, however, can hardly explain the near-total silence of the community over the hideous forms of communal and caste violence that punctuate its more recent history. The answer to this lies elsewhere. .Chauhan delivers a devastating critique of the prevailing notion of asmita in his 2008 essay ‘Gujarat’s Asmita as I see it’. He credits Munshi with giving wider currency to the term in Gujarat and points to its negative connotations, touching on ideas of self-regard, self-obsession, false pride, arrogance and so on. Then, in a deft move, he breaks the term apart into “a” and “smita” – that is, a woman without a smile – and suggests that Dalits in Gujarat can lay claim only to this depressing denotation of it. .Gujarat’s Asmita? She might be knocking about some tip picking rags and stuff. Or sweating blood in some dingy, hovel-like factory. Or roaming about the streets, crying, “Please give your left-overs, my kind masters.” Or climbing trees in forests for picking leaves, fruits or firewood. Which Asmita? That half-naked woman or the one with a broom in hand. How many Asmitas do you want me to talk about?.Chauhan writes that the term puts him in mind of the same place as Munshi – Patan, the region’s capital in the 12th century – but not to the same history. While Munshi’s cultural history centres on the glorification of the king Siddharaj Jaisinh, who ruled Gujarat from 1092 to 1142 CE, Chauhan’s subaltern history drives him to the Dalit hero Meghmaya, who stood up and claimed his people’s rights from the oppressive king..Common lore has it that the king was enchanted by Jasma Odan, a beauty from a community of tank diggers who probably worked on building the ambitious Sahastralinga Tank in Patan. When his advances were thwarted by the upright, conscientious woman, the king slayed her husband, which led Jasma to curse the king, making it so that the tank would remain dry despite all his efforts to fill it. The king’s soothsayers told him the only way to break the jinx was a human sacrifice. A brave young Dalit man, Meghmaya, came forward to sacrifice his life and thus secure dignity and humanity for his community..This theme has been developed across multiple narratives in Gujarati creative media. For instance, the film director Ketan Mehta’s award-winning Bhavni Bhavai, from 1980, casts the folk tale as part of a complex matrix that includes a royal power struggle, romance, caste oppression and sex scandals. In literary works, contestations over such cultural figures often dwindle into quests to prove the historical veracity of competing narratives, with complete disregard for the rich semiotic implications of their stories..Here, the Sahastralinga Tank, so called because of the supposed presence of a thousand Shiva lingas on its banks, may represent not just insatiable masculine desire – in this case for a working-class woman’s body – but also the extractive colonial desire to inflict penetrative violence on non-human ecologies. The barrenness of the cursed tank can be read as symbolising the tyrannical king’s impotence, or his inability to make his lands fertile in the face of resistance from the people he subjugates. The sacrifice of Meghmaya might symbolise the dream of development – vikas – violently realised at the cost of the blood and the lives of the poor and ostracised..Seen this way, the narrative becomes a searing critique of an elite, dominant-caste worldview, which has historically thrived on caste apartheid, heteropatriarchy and an extractive, exploitative political economy. Chauhan develops these thematic strands in his works with extraordinary force and finesse..IN HIS PLAY Patan ne Gondare (On the Borders of Patan), Chauhan develops the legend of the Dalit hero Veer Meghmaya as a foil to dominant icons of Gujarati pride – figures such as Siddhraj Jaysinh and Munjal Mehta, both central characters in Munshi’s Patan trilogy..The hegemonic history in Gujarat, both fictional and popular, depicts Siddhraj Jaysinh as a noble, progressive and democratic king, whose reign witnessed a flowering of the arts, literature, education and civil institutions. In Chauhan’s play, however, the protagonist, Meghmaya, calls the king out for what he is: an oppressive, arrogant ruler at the head of an apartheid state that systematically undertakes and perpetuates the dehumanisation and degradation of Dalits. Meghmaya rallies his community to organise against this feudal, dominant-caste regime, and to stake a claim to Dalit personhood and dignity as a matter of right. Munjal Mehta, a scheming brahmin statesman, conspires to eliminate Meghmaya in order to crush what he suspects is an incipient insurgency. He sets off a rumour that a terrible famine is about to ravage the state, and that the only way to avert it is to appease the Sahastralinga Tank by sacrificing a man whose character is unsullied by any human vice. He then allows the idea to circulate that Meghmaya is the only man fit for the purpose..The Dalit hero sees through the deadly ruse but nonetheless chooses to walk into it, but not before trading his martyrdom for his community’s freedom, welfare and future. He demands five promises from the king in return: the right to set up Dalit quarters near villages, instead of far away as they typically are; the right for Dalits to plant before their homes a peepul tree, considered holy in Hindu tradition and otherwise denied to them; similarly, the right to plant the tulsi plant too; the right for his people to have genealogists and family trees; and the dropping of humiliating identity markers imposed on Dalits, such as headgear made of cheap cloth, a three-sleeved shirt, a spittoon worn around the neck and a broom tied to the back to sweep away “polluting” footsteps..In his play Anaryavart, Chauhan draws from and riffs on the Mahabharata. Like the epic, the play is set in the geography of Aryavarta, the land of the Aryans, adherents of Vedic ritual and belief; and beyond it Anaryavarta, home to supposedly debased, non-Aryan groups. Chauhan stages an encounter between Vyasa, whom he presents as a rebel and a champion of the Anarya communities, and his half-brother Bhishma – son of the king of Kuru, Shantanu..Vyasa approaches Bhishma – who, though bound by a vow to not be king, is the powerful regent – to demand a sovereign and independent state for his people, the oppressed castes and tribes that had historically lived peaceful and non-covetous lives in harmony with nature. Bhishma throws Vyasa in prison and forces him to perform niyoga – sanctioned intercourse outside marriage – with the childless widows of the king Vichitravirya, who was born of Vyasa’s own mother, Satyavati..Affronted, Vyasa tears into the murky politics behind Bhishma’s famous vow of celibacy and calls it a malicious design to satisfy his lust for greatness and power. That vow, taken to cede the throne to the descendants of the union of Shatanu and Satyavati, a fisherwoman the king fell in love with, was ostensibly to please his father. But it came with a boon: the gods, impressed, allowed Bhishma to choose the time of his own death..The play ends with Satyavati escaping Aryavart with her despondent son to join the struggle for a free Anaryavart. After a despairing soliloquy, Vyasa cries, “Forests were burnt down, mountains were razed to ground, and the waters of rivers were diverted. Oh mother! This land of Anaryas has been bloodied by relentless attacks of the Aryans.”.In his essay ‘Dalitism vs Brahminism: The Epistemological Conflict in History’, the anti-caste political theorist Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd posits a foundational dichotomy between the caste-suffused Brahiminical worldview and the philosophy of the Dalits as well as the Bahujans – the marginalised majority of caste society, including non-elite castes and tribes. This can just as well be read as a clash between the worlds of Aryavarta and Anaryavarta. Shepherd writes,.The Dalit-Bahujan call their hands “matti chetulu” [hands with dirt] whereas the Brahminical forces call their hands “pooja chetulu” [hands meant only for worship]. The construction of consciousness of “matti chetulu” and “pooja chetulu” keeps them miles apart in their worldviews. The epistemology of those two schools or those two societies, though they live side by side, not only keeps them away from each other but keeps them opposed to each other..Chauhan builds multiple subversions into the play to point out the glaring absence in recorded history and popular culture of instances of Dalit autonomy, and also works in examples of the differences between Dalit and Brahminical culture. By accentuating the hypergamous birth and Anarya ancestry of Vyasa, he undermines the Mahabharata’s main storyline, which depicts him as the progenitor, creator and chronicler of Aryavart. Chauhan even makes one of the characters in the play say that the union that resulted in Vyasa’s birth, between Satyavati and the revered Hindu sage Parashara, was non-consensual – much to the outrage of the eminent Gandhian writer Manubhai Pancholi, who accused Chauhan of taking his concern for Dalits too far..Similarly, in his critically acclaimed play Antim Dhyeya (The Final Goal), Chauhan extends the story of the tribal archer Ekalavya from where it ends in the Mahabharata. Dronacharya, teacher to the epic’s main hero, the Pandava prince Arjuna, refuses Ekalavya’s wish to be trained by him in archery. Undeterred, Ekalavya trains relentlessly with a clay statue of Dronacharya as his guru. When Arujuna, discovering that Ekalavya’s skill surpasses his own, expresses his dismay, Dronacharya demands that Ekalavya cut off his thumb as gurudakshina, a fee to his teacher. Eklavya complies, destroying his own shooting ability – and illustrating, in anti-caste readings, the violence and iniquities of a Brahminical order that denies learning to the oppressed and sabotages any who rise on their own..Where the Mahabharata broadly leaves things at that, Chauhan keeps the story going. He portrays Ekalavya as a pacifist and an ally of Jarasangha – in the Mahabharata, an enemy of the Pandavas and of Krishna, Arjuna’s closest companion. Ekalavya tries to strike a peace pact between the expansionist, aggressive Aryans and the forest dwellers of Hidimbavana, Khandavavana, Kalavana and Talavana. But a war-mongering Krishna slays him on the sly while he is passing through a forest unarmed and unsuspecting. Later, Jara, Eklavya’s son, assassinates Krishna for the latter’s collusion in the genocides enacted in the Khandava forest and elsewhere, but not before subjecting Krishna’s grand ideas of development and welfare – famously articulated in the Bhagavad Gita and still revered today – to unforgiving scrutiny..Chauhan devotes the first scene of the play to verbal sparring between Time and Man – an example of how central the theme of time is to Chauhan’s creativity, as evidenced also in many of his other works. Affronted by Man, who tries to overtake it, Time mocks his ambition to rewrite the history of humanity and accuses him of overreaching his puny brief. Man accuses Time of buying into and bandying about a history deformed and desecrated by hate-mongers, dividers and génocidaires. Then, brandishing his pen, he says, “I want to tie the whole of humanity together with the thread of love. I wish to banish the language of hatred. I want to restore the lost beauty of this world.”.Chauhan suggests that Aryanism has historically excluded Anaryans from language and so discursively legitimised their subordination. This exclusion and dehumanisation must, in turn, be undone discursively, through a reclamation of language and the construction of narratives that reconstitute Dalit memory, experience and ideology. .How prophetic these plays, written in late 1980s, seem today – especially given the prevailing neoliberal lust to acquire land and goods, to obliterate the cultures and lifeworlds of the marginalised, and to produce a monolithic cultural and moral geography. The things we are now accustomed to witnessing in India, especially under Modi’s rule – the public floggings, gory lynchings and forced evictions of Dalits and Muslims, their ghettoisation in the wake of communal riots and the bulldozing of their shanty towns and homes – are precisely the forms of aggression that Chauhan flags as being enmeshed in the creation and expansion of Aryavart..Readers like you make stories like this possible. Become a paying Himal Patron to support our work! .IF HIS PLAYS furnish a necessary corrective to the hegemonic myths, folk tales and oral histories that still underpin the Brahminical sociopolitical order, Chauhan’s prose works too provide powerful exposition of Dalits’ exclusion from both the material and cultural realms of the modern imagined community..His first novel, Malak, published in 1991, describes the precarious and almost subhuman condition of Dalits in northern Gujarat, marked by daily humiliation, deprivation, violations and sexual aggression by the dominant castes. An account of bonded labour and sexual exploitation frames Dalit reality on the eve of India’s independence, achieved in 1947, and the saga of suffering culminates in the exodus of the entire weaver community from their village..The novel depicts an amorous relationship between a dominant-caste woman, Santok – whose husband is impotent – and an oppressed-caste man, Bhago, to bring out the duplicity of the village, which turns a blind eye to the affair until Santok gives birth to a boy to extend her family’s line and then uses it as an excuse to take its casteist fury out on the entire Dalit settlement. After facing a deadly assault, the entire community sets out on a mass exodus – a poignant realisation of what the Dalit leader and icon B R Ambedkar famously told Gandhi at their first meeting, in 1931: “Gandhiji, I have no homeland.”.It goes without saying that although Malak is still extremely relevant in today’s India – Dalit exoduses have taken place in Gujarat from villages like Chitrodipura, Chavand and Aniyali even after 1991 – it does not and will not find a place in the postcolonial literary canon or on university syllabi, a discursive exclusion of an extremely subtle nature but no less violent on that account..The motif of love cutting across the caste hierarchy, and its lethal consequences, receives an elaborate treatment in Chauhan’s second novel, Gidh (Vultures), from 2000. Based on the murder of a Dalit boy by Rajput landlords in Gujarat’s Kodaram village in 1964, the novel portrays an orthodox, feudal society, structured around caste-based relations and social segregation. Unfolding in the memory of the protagonist, Bhalo, the narrative stages the circumstances under which his friend Iso was scapegoated for a sexual escapade he was never a part of and brutally murdered by dominant-caste vultures..Chauhan’s genius lies in making the vulture a polyphonic symbol of both the dominant-caste oppressors and the oppressed Dalits, who feed literally on animal carcasses (fulfilling the duty to dispose of dead animals forced upon them by the caste order) and figuratively on the same rotten social system that perpetuates their subjugation. He describes in graphic detail the processes of skinning animals and tanning hides, and uses this to critique the internal hierarchy amongst the Dalits of Gujarat, divided mainly between the Garos (Dalit Brahmins), Vankars (weavers), Rohits (tanners), Valmikis (scavengers) and Senmas (drub-beaters). Here he is at his searing best..Just as vultures, kites and crows clawed each other for first dibs on the cull brought to the scrub, so the weavers, tanners, drum-beaters and scavengers fought not only over material resources but also over things that were intangible and abstract. Issues were imported from the upper castes of the village with impeccable accuracy and with all the attached obduracies; issues of high and low status, degrees of caste privileges, whom to marry, with whom to dine and so on. They became the flashpoints of silent resentments as well as bloodied battles..The recovery of an alternative memory is a running trope in Chauhan’s writing. At multiple places, it is pitted directly against the dominant culture’s memory as a counterpoint, a counter-ballast, to asmita. His story ‘The Payback’ deconstructs the proud agrarian identity of Gujaratis – as, for instance, depicted by Pannala Patel in his novel Manavi ni Bhavai (Endurance: A Droll Saga). The novel’s defining theme is the agrarian angst articulated by its protagonist, Kalu, while queuing up for charity grain during the famine that swept western and central India in 1899 and 1900: “It’s not the hunger really, but the act of begging to douse it which demeans.” Chauhan reworks this trope within the framework of caste and enacts a scene in which dominant-caste villagers, unable to bear the hunger and crushing poverty caused by the famine, line up at night at the doors of the “untouchables” and beg for a few pieces of sun-dried meat from the animal carcasses they had skinned and disposed of as a part of their caste vocation..The story ‘Fear’ captures the heroic resistance of Dalit youth in 1975 against sexual exploitation of Dalit women in Golana. The story creates a rupture in the perception of caste morality, deeply enmeshed in the metaphysics of pollution and purity, by documenting the traditional rights of kshatriya men over the bodies of Dalit women in the villages of Gujarat, by which the husband of a Dalit woman had to deferentially walk out of his house when a kshatriya man entered it. By highlighting this incongruity in the idea of (un)touchability, Chauhan puts forward a necessary counter to the grounds on which the rapists of Bhanwari Devi were acquitted in 1995. In that case, the verdict, delivered by a district court judge, said that a dominant-caste man could not have raped a Dalit woman, and that the man could not have participated in a gang rape while Bhanwari Devi’s husband, bound to protect her by the vow of marriage, passively watched on..Chauhan uncovers such strategic gaps in the collective memory and dominant culture, and makes the silences in the popular narrative speak loudly across the four collections of short fiction he has published so far: Dar (Fear and Other stories), Munzaro (Buffaloed), Bhelan (The Invasion) and Visiting Card. The commitment with which he does this is rare, and perhaps unmatched in scale, among Dalit writers working in any Indian language..IF MUNSHI’S PATAN TRILOGY should be read for a peek into Gujarat’s past, no matter how selective and imprecise, it is as important to engage with Chauhan’s Dawn trilogy for a precious and point-blank perspective on the present, to comprehend the state’s edited-out history of injustice and atrocities as well as the struggles for dignity waged by Gujarati Dalits. .Semi-autobiographical in nature, the trilogy captures the trials and tribulations of Dalits as they migrate, in search of light and life, from their villages to the relative urban utopia of Ahmedabad. Bhalbhankhru (The Dawn) documents the joy and jitters of Dalits in Baroda State (now part of Gujarat) after their children were given access to free and compulsory primary education by a legislative act in 1906. The act laid down a regime of rewards and punishments for parents who either complied with or contravened it. Chauhan has never tired of upholding education as a great enabler of Dalit emancipation, and hurdles to it are to him more damaging than material deprivations of various kinds. In the story ‘The Visiting Card’, for example, he provides a disturbing account of the intergenerational trauma of Dalit students whose dreams of emancipation were overshadowed by the anti-reservation riots that rocked Gujarat through the 1980s and the pervasive, deep-seated caste prejudice in its institutions of learning. Like her father, who had to drop out from an engineering college to save his life during the riots, Meena Kapadia fails to achieve her dream of becoming a doctor due to the machinations of a hostile chemistry teacher..Bhalbhankhru dramatises the dilemma of Vhalo, its Dalit protagonist, as he decides to enrol his daughter Mani in the village school following Baroda’s decree of free and compulsory primary education for all children. More than the fear of falling foul of the law, however, it is his innate desire to educate his daughter that drives him. Vhalo has already tasted the outrage of the village’s feudal overlords when he earlier tried to enroll his son in school. This time, emboldened by the state order, he makes up his mind to confront them. Soon enough, he is hit hard by the reality of the caste universe: the village overlords launch a series of attacks on the Dalit settlement, and Vhalo’s neighbours and community put the blame for this squarely on his shoulders. Disheartened, he strikes a please-all compromise with the dominant-caste overlords and his community, whereby Mani gets enrolled in the school, but only on paper. With his dream of educating his daughter falling apart, he finally decides to marry Mani off..From this point, the novel takes a thematic turn towards a detailed documentation of Dalit socio-cultural life, complete with its unique traditions, customs, rites and social mores, all of which reflect a unique, alternative worldview distinct from its Brahminical counterpart. The elaborate account of this complex of rituals is aimed at recuperating what the critic and commentator D R Nagraj calls the autonomous cultural domain that for centuries secured the symbolic and religious life of Dalits against the Brahminical onslaught. .Towards that end, as Vhalo invites his guru to his home, Chauhan depicts an intricate religious performance called pata-puja, whose observance was recommended by none other than Meghmaya. The ritual is a part of several lokadharma traditions in Gujarat, a set of highly eclectic popular religious traditions, preserved orally, with a complex of secret rituals and tantric sacraments. What is most fascinating about the cults in this tradition – like Mahapanth, Ismaili-Nizaripanth and Ravibhanpanth – is their egalitarian character and multi-religious, multicultural fabric. Through the novel, Chauhan suggests that a sense of meaningful Dalit selfhood can be built by anchoring the Dalit past, present and future in this alternative cultural domain..Rashava Suraj (The Suspended Sun), the second novel in the trilogy, begins under the looming threat of an assault on Mani’s departing wedding procession. The reason for this is Vhalo’s parting gift to her of a copper waterpot, breaching a traditional prohibition on the use of metal vessels by Dalits. Pasha Natha, a headstrong Dalit man and Vhalo’s friend, guards the procession and ensures that no harm comes its way. Chauhan then proceeds to depict episodes of discrimination, humiliation and violence against Dalit tanners and scavengers when they refuse to bow down to flagrant injustice and oppression. The village takes revenge by pouring cow dung into the Dalits’ well, pelting their settlements with stones at night and subjecting them to social boycott..Several events in the book carry telltale resonances with present-day India. Chauhan includes a half comic, half tragic incident in which the scavengers refuse to drag away a cat carcass; in 2016, Dalits in Gujarat and beyond refused to handle animal carcasses in protest after seven of their fellows were flogged in the town of Una. The seven were attacked by cow-protection vigilantes who accused them of having killed the animal that they were skinning. Other events with real-world echoes include the dominant castes snatching away a Dalit site of worship and building a Shiva temple in its place, and a foiled attempt to rape Mani..Fed up with the atrocities and a life of degradation, Pasha Natha decides to move to Siddhapur, a town where the rulers of Baroda have set up a textile mill and a settlement of weavers to work in it. At Siddhapur, he doesn’t have to make calls of “poh poh” while on public roads to alert the dominant castes of his unwelcome coming, the cowherd he meets doesn’t mind shaking his hand, and the local priest greets him with “Ram Ram” instead of cursing or ruthlessly battering him for crossing his way. Here Chauhan’s sun fully rises, and remains suspended between dawn and high noon..Bapor (High Noon) celebrates the intensifying light of modernity. Pasha Natha’s exclamation as he cleans a lantern is pregnant with symbolism: “Damn it! It’s the city which has blessed us with this lantern. Had we been in the village, we would still have been lighting the earthen lamp fuelled by the fat of dead cattle. Only that blasted Mukhi has the right to a lantern in the village. How strange!” But discrimination and violence persist even in the textile mill, although in newer and more complex forms as caste intersects with class..A particular episode of injustice and humiliation meted out to Pasha Natha and a fellow worker drives the former to look for opportunities in the textile mills in Ahmedabad, a city that promises a high noon of modernity and political awareness. Chauhan devotes a large part of the novel to Dalit life in the web of chawls spread around Ahmedabad’s mills. The city grants Dalits a certain degree of anonymity and privacy, and thus a cover for caste identity. But that is not quite enough. .Pasha Natha’s political consciousness is awakened by the movements waged by Gandhi and Ambedkar – the former trying to abolish untouchability and win for Dalits the right to use public spaces, the latter battling for their self-worth and the fashioning of a proud Dalit identity. The lingering discrimination in the spaces of modernity and progressive politics makes him uneasy. Chauhan describes an unspoken ban on Dalits travelling by train, the caste politics behind employing Dalits only in the spinning department, an agitation in a local school against admitting the children of scavengers, a prohibition on Dalits entering hotels – and treats all of these with the critical sociological analysis they deserve. He deftly portrays the immense impact on the popular psyche of Gandhi’s anti-untouchability campaign and the manifold ways in which it spelt liberation for Dalits, but without losing sight of the flaws in Gandhi’s approach to the annihilation of caste. The novel ends anticipating India’s independence and, with it, a high noon of freedom, equality and justice..Of course, Chauhan’s own life is proof that this high noon has still not come. He was born in Mandali village, in the northern Gujarat district of Mehsana, in 1940. As he puts it in Vakho, he arrived as “a slave of the slave subjects of a slave king of a slave country enslaved by the British.” The “slave king” was the maharaja of Baroda State, beholden to the British Raj and finally deposed when the erstwhile princely state was merged into independent India in 1949. Chauhan describes how the world would have seen him: “a dhedh, an untouchable, an antyaja.” “Dhedh”, a slur for Dalits from the weaver community, is used here strictly in a descriptive sense; the term is prohibited under law, and rightly so. “Antyaja” – “last-born” or “lowest-born” – is a Sanskrit term for those relegated to the very bottom of the caste hierarchy..As a child, Chauhan witnessed his community’s forced migration to the city for refusing to discharge its traditional duty of collecting logs and dung cakes from the mouths of all streets in their village and setting them up to light a bonfire for the festival of Holi. After he narrated this episode to me, the octogenarian author fell silent, his gaze lost in the distance, as if to survey a life spent in fighting caste apartheid, a lifetime at the intersection of social and literary activism. As a part of radical organisations like the Gujarat Dalit Panthers and Dalit Sangharsh Sangh, which practised a politics of agitation and active resistance, Chauhan lived on the edge through 1970s and 1980s, under looming threat of violence and arrest. The radical magazines he edited between 1979 and 1986 – like Kalo Suraj (The Black Sun), Akrosh (Outrage) and Sarvanam (Pronoun) – cleared a space for the founding of the Dalit literary movement in Gujarati. Now, he told me, he is planning to write a new novel, Sanj (Eventide), which would turn his trilogy into a tetralogy..Of late, his genius has been recognised, belatedly, by literary cultures and circles outside Gujarat. With the translation of his novels and short fiction into English and Hindi (I have translated several of his works into English myself), and rave reviews in newspapers and literary magazines of repute, Chauhan has come to be seen as a powerful voice representing Gujarati literature. But not so in Gujarat itself. Not yet. .The segregation he has fought throughout his life still haunts Chauhan in the form of persistent neglect in his homeland and an elusive award from the Sahitya Akademi in Delhi, India’s national academy of letters. I am not surprised. What better can be expected from a Gujarati literary establishment whose representative institution, the Gujarat Sahitya Parishad, has published just one book of Dalit literature in the 120 years of its existence, and which has nominated just one Dalit writer, Mohan Parmar, for a Sahitya Akademi award in last 70 years. .In ‘Gujarat’s Asmita as I see it’, published some years ago, Chauhan asks,.Gujarat carries night soil overhead, that’s our Asmita. Should I pen paeans of pride to that reality? … Or do you want me to write about the Asmita saga of the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad not having published a single Dalit text in a hundred and five years since its inception? Or shall I talk of my sense of self deriving from the fact that none but Dalits had to write Dalit literature?.If there is a problem accessing Chauhan’s alternative discourse – the slang and myths and little-known sayings, all the things that evoke Dalits’ exclusive ethical universe and cosmology – the literary establishment can very well refer to Talani Boli, his dictionary of terms used in the Dalit dialect of northern Gujarat. If figuring out the history and politics of Dalit literature is a hurdle, it can follow along with Chauhan’s Gujarati Dalit Sahityani Kedie, an insightful account of Gujarati Dalit writing. But the Gujarati literati is still enamoured with the moon and its big lies. How many moons, I wonder, will it take to wake up to the bright, brilliant sun of the other Gujarat?