[INDOLOGY] Response to several messages on Caste and Gender at the WSC

[Ananya Vajpeyi]

Dear Colleagues,

This message will be long, and for that I do apologise in advance, but I am
responding to a couple of hundred postings against the Caste and Gender
panel and against the speakers made on the BVP group site, as well as
several messages sent to me privately expressing concern and solidarity
from members of the Indology List. Please bear with me.

(1) On members of the audience, especially women, who repeatedly
interrupted us and asked to be allowed to tell the story of their Sanskrit,
it struck me that day as I sat on stage and I share that now with all of
you, that this would never happen if the panelists had been men. Kaushal
and I were the invited speakers and featured panelists. It was our names,
bios and pictures on the poster. Many in the audience had come to hear us
and were there because they knew about our work both as scholars and as
women who have a public voice and a substantial record of intervening in
the Indian public debate on issues of caste.

It struck me then and it continues to strike me as bizarre 6 weeks later,
that unidentified people in the audience should seek to get us invited
speakers to NOT say what we have to say, and instead give over the stage to
them, so that they can have their say, never mind that it wasn't them but
us whom Dr. Sathaye and the WSC had invited and advertised as the guests
that night! I would like to see such presumption -- the idea that the
designated speakers could be stopped and replaced by unknown others -- if
the speakers had been men.

For the record, a full half hour was given over to audience Q and A. An
audio recording of the proceedings confirms this.

(2) Many of the postings on the BVP site repeatedly question Dr. Panwar's
scholarly credentials, and explicitly or implicitly harp on her
pronunciation of Sanskrit, effectively communicating the ancient
brahminical pet-peeve regarding uccarana. It's interesting that the
exclusion of the sudra from Vedic learning -- an old topic in the
literature on sudra-dharma which appears very clearly in the
apasudra-adhikarana ("chapter on the exception of the sudra") of both the
Brahmasutra and the Mimamsasutra and their respective bhasya texts and
subsequent commentarial traditions (a subject on which I have written my
doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago) -- also begins with the
prohibition on utterance and all that follows from utterance -- reading,
speaking, learning, teaching, and partaking of Vedic knowledge, and
whatever the fruits of it, seen and unseen.

What we saw that day in Vancouver when Kaushal was challenged and insulted
for uttering Sanskrit was nothing but a modern-day reiteration of these
primary injunctions that seek to prevent members of certain social groups
from having any kind of access to Sanskrit knowledge. It isn't me who is
living in the past, as one of the BVP posts alleges. Rather, it's the
voices of social conservatism and religious orthodoxy, who still seek to
silence a woman speaker, scholar and teacher, and more so if she happens
not to be a brahmin -- they are the ones living in that ancient past.

And they should ask themselves why Kaushal's accent -- her pronunciation of
Sanskrit as a native speaker of Haryanvi Hindi -- bothered them so much,
grated on their ears to such an extent that they still cannot stop
themselves from expressing disdain and skepticism about her worth as a
scholar and her locus standi as a speaker on that stage.

(3) It needs also to be mentioned that Kaushal has published extensively in
sudradharma in Hindi. Her books sat in a small pile on the table on stage
in front of her that night. Many of those who attacked her were South
Indian (we learnt this later when they came up and accosted me after the
event and introduced themselves). Perhaps they need to familiarise
themselves with her publication record -- alas in a language they may not
be familiar with -- before insulting her and insinuating that her presence
there was somehow illegitimate or at least questionable.

These are the practicalities of living in a multi-lingual country, and we
all have to do our bit to understand one another outside of our linguistic
silos.

(4) On the matter of how normal, natural, polite, grammar-consistent,
Gandhian or otherwise appropriate it is to call someone who is an SC a
"harijan", in this day and age, after the entire history of the Ambedkarite
struggle and the Dalit Movement, I am afraid it is beyond my patience to
begin to educate the offenders, at least on the platform of this list,
though I have done this elsewhere on numerous occasions and continue to do
it extensively in the rest of my work as a scholar and public speaker.

Even that night I had to make a brief excursus on the late D.R. Nagaraj's
explication of the difference between "harijan" and "dalit", his classic
essay on "self-purification" and "self-respect", and his key critical
intervention on how to understand Gandhi and Ambedkar on untouchability
dialogically and not adversarially. But my short lesson of that moment did
not do much to mitigate the personally humiliating, politically incorrect
and ideologically insensitive charge of repeatedly addressing Dr. Panwar
either as a "harijan" herself or as someone who has to take on board this
term when she is explicitly trying to critique and annihilate caste, and
shift the discourse to an egalitarian terminology of citizenship and
self-respect. Even when she strongly objected, she was badgered into
retreating and subjected to further etymologies and parsing of the word,
including by the president of the IASS.

It was appalling the way the word was hurled at her again and again, and I
must say, I am ashamed of fellow-Indians who speak like this in a public
setting, seeking to demean another Indian and undermine her inalienable
dignity. Whatever their rationale, they will never convince me that they
had a right to address her or anyone in this fashion. Shame on them, and
solidarity with Dr. Panwar, this is my position, and I won't be bullied out
of it.

Incidentally, in the week or so that we were all in Vancouver attending the
WSC, Dr. Panwar was invited to give several lectures in the wider
Vancouver, Surrey and British Columbia region; she appeared repeatedly on
local Indian-language TV channels in interviews and discussions; she was
honoured with lunches and dinners by Ambedkarite and Indian-Canadian
community groups; and some of her admirers and followers came also to meet
me after they saw what happened at the caste and gender panel. In a hall
full of brahmins and Hindu apologists she was humiliated and belittled; the
fact is, she has a much wider public reach and media image than any of us
who attended the Sanskrit conference. (A visit to the Internet will confirm
this).

It's only the ignorance and arrogance of those who attacked her, their
frog-in-the-well mentality, their baseless notions of their own
superiority, that prevent them from recognising that Dr. Panwar is someone
widely known in a much, much larger context of relevance than they can ever
hope to achieve. I would advise them to visit her YouTube channel, her
Facebook page and her Twitter handle, and to open their eyes long
accustomed to the darkness of caste mentality and see who's who and what's
what. They might be in for a shock.

(5) Finally, many accused Dr. Sathaye of not curating a "balanced" panel,
of not having anyone "from the other side" speak on stage that night. This
again is absurd. Dr. Panwar and I come from different ends of the
socio-economic spectrum; her father was a Dalit and mine was a Brahmin; her
mother is illiterate and mine was a college professor; she teaches at a
public university and I pursue research at an institute for advanced study;
she is located in a Sanskrit department and I work with social scientists;
we could hardly be more different from one another or more representative
of the huge disparities in Indian society and culture.

But there we were, she and I, two speakers on one panel on one stage, both
with PhDs, both students of Sanskrit, both academics with a public voice.
What's so "biased" or "one-sided" about us as a set of two who are polar
opposites in terms of caste background and social capital? This allegation
of bias is completely irrational.

However, that said, the differences between Dr. Panwar and me in terms of
our respective subject positions in caste society are to my mind less
interesting, telling or important than the astonishing commonalities
between us: that we are both highly educated; that we are both graduates of
the same university (JNU); that we both chose to pursue Sanskrit despite
every kind of obstacle that we faced as women and / or for other reasons
springing from our socio-political identities; that we both worked on
sudradharma as our topic when we were graduate students; that we both
engage in civic pedagogy outside the academy as best we are able; that we
are both committed to an Ambedkarite vision of social justice; that we were
both there at the WSC and on that panel, coming from far ends of a vast
field of social experience and yet converging in our purpose on one common
ground.

This fact, of Kaushal Panwar and Ananya Vajpeyi (and it could be any other
two persons of her and of my description, I am not taking this as a
personal matter at all) sitting there and addressing a common audience on
July 10, is a testament to the vision of the Indian Constitution, to the
teachings of Babasaheb Ambedkar, to the promise of Indian democracy, and to
the ethical urgency and political necessity of the ongoing struggle for
equality in an unequal world. If people want to quarrel with this, they are
free to do so, but I for one will never be on their side.

I would like to leave it there, and assume that others on the Indology list
will take this forward, and relieve me of the burden of argumentation now
that I have, to the best of my admittedly limited capability, played my
role as a whistle-blower. I would be grateful if those who have written to
me privately would also come out and take their stand and share their
stories, so that we know where we are collectively as a community of
scholars and specialists in our field.

Thank you and all best,

Ananya Vajpeyi.

Ananya Vajpeyi
Fellow and Associate Professor
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road, Civil Lines
New Delhi 110054
e: vajpeyi at csds.in
http://www.csds.in/faculty_ananya_vajpeyi.htm


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