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.