FOR PUBLICATION
AHRC-ART-004-2008
May 2, 2008

An Article Series on Human Rights and Culture by the Asian Human Rights Commission

Human Rights and Culture - Issue 4

This is the 4th issue of Human Rights and Culture. This issue contains a poem by M.I. Kuruvilla, Meditations and Merchandise, an article on the situation of Dalits entitled, Voices of the oppressed by K G Sankarapillai, a poem by Basil Fernando, The sea was calm behind your house, dedicated to M. I. Kuruvilla and another in the series of children’s poems, Is My Son Also Sleeping under the Mara Tree? by W. P. Ruwani Wanniarrhchi, a 10th Grade student.

You may view the previous issues at:  http://www.ahrchk.net/pub/mainfile.php/hrculture/.

Your contributions and comments for future issues can be sent to ahrc@ahrc.asia.

A Poem by M.I. Kuruwilla

MEDITATIONS AND MERCHANDISE

Carry a message to your own people, my friend,
Which will be well understood by your people,
Not ours- the creed of the material, phenomental
World as an illusion, you call it, Maya, don’t you?
Concealing but also symbolically revealing
A deeper order of reality. Do I sound philosophical?
You must excuse me. I cannot help it.

This view of things with a deeper reality
At a deeper level is intriguing. I am myself affected
To the extent of thinking of blood and terror
As fantasies, symbols. Isn’t it intellectually
Consoling  to think that violence, blood and terror
Are not real but only symbols of a deeper
Reality. Although I live in a firm word, I move
On two planes of reality- the mundane level,
And a deeper level of mystical yearnings and insights.

Yet the mystique of blood and terror is terrifying
Thing, not consoling at all. Passion and the craving
For power at a deeper level are murderous things.
Call it spirituality of blood and terror, if you
Like. But it is no joke to allow your face
To be blasted. No taking you first by the scruff
Of your neck even.

But I speak of none of those things here, the fear
And dread in the pursuit of Passion and Power.
Let them be. I would rather tell you of other mystical
Properties of violence and bloodletting. Although
We perpetuate violence to see an end to what we hate,
Violence is endless. Like Time. Though Time
Must have limit, time is endless, eternal.

Besides, our relationship with our enemies is
Of both love and hate, in which note a deeper
Dimension. Hatred is in the desire to exterminate
Our caemies. Our love for our enemies is in the care
We take for the continuance of violence……..

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Symbol and blood, blood and symbol. Why only
Symbols, you are asking. What about emblems?
You are right. They are there, when we often
Look at things horizontally, on the surface,
Not seeing the wood for the trees, if there is
Any wood to see. Look at the emblems of our culture
Which we are apt to overrate, but worth
Something, the surrogate and substitute fantasies,
The flotsam and jetsam of this our modern life.
Ponderous definitions!  Let us have some model samples.

Yes the toothbrush, the sanitary towel- the tampon,
That covering for the female back under certain
Conditions. Don’t your Dakshina ladies in their
Shopping expeditions go in search of it – two
To three thousand miles? We may call them universal
Symbols, being so ubiquitous….  Nonsense!
We will stick to them as nothing but emblems.
But what is covered, is it at least universal…
Appetites are universal, passions urges aren’t
They? Possessing uniqueness, individually too?

What universality, uniqueness in a word
Of throw- away tampons and throw-away condoms!
Emblems will always be emblems, But in the rotund
World, baubles too have their place,
Looked at representationally.

All these- dilettantish nonsense! Commodity
Rules the world, someone truly said. The spilling
Of blood is profitable. Next of kin to blood
Is arms - for an orgiastic embrace, the buying and selling
Of which is profitable.

How we forget the realities of life!
Farewell, fantasy symbols and emblems. Yesterday’s
Shopkeepers are now the most expert gunmakers.
The descendants of those who stormed the Bastille
For the Brotherhood of Man are the manufacturers
Of deadly missiles. Three hurrahs for Gallic Socialism,
And four for their Socialist President. Thou shalt
No kill, said the great Jehovah to prophet
Moses. Thou shalt kill, kill and kill again
In Jordan and Gaza. That is the new dictum
Which replaces all of Hammurabi and Moses.
Christ and Gautama. Arms have to be sold,
Blood has to be spilt.

Look! Can great powers survive without arms
And arms-trade? And if they can’t survive,
If they collapse, what is the future of mankind?

And your terrorist gangs- call them guerrillas
Or freedom-fighters- where do they get their arms
From? From the sources controlled by us. We know
The extent of their sources and resources.
We have prescribed the rules and the game
As to who wins, who loses. But the game
Must go on. It is such fun-and so profitable.

M.I. Kuruvilla – An introduction to his work and ideas by Basil Fernando (Published in Channels Vol. 12 No. 1 – The English Writers Cooperative of Sri Lanka, October 2004).

Born in Kerala, India, on 19 January1918, M.I. Kuruvilla migrated to neighboring Sri Lanka and initially worked as a teacher at St. Joseph’s College, Colombo. He was among the founding staff at the Aquinas University College in 1954, and was Head of the English Department till his retirement in the late 1980s. He prepared undergraduate students for exams conducted by the University of Ceylon. Peradeniya, and Universities in England. He also taught English to University entrance students. He is known to many as a great teacher of literature, who also contributed literary criticisms to newspapers and radio, for which he won the award for non-fiction prose (literary criticism) in 1985. He introduced many new writers whose names are now well known.

Before passing away on 17 November 1993, Kuruvilla devoted the latter part of his life to writing. He published Studies in World Literature (Sterling Publishers, New Delhi), and many translations. The latter include From Comorin to Kashmir: An anthology of Malayalam short stories, (Navrang Publishers, New Delhi, 1989), The Wooden Dolls and Other Stories from the Malabar Coast (Karoor Nilakanta Pillai, Future Asia Link, Hong Kong, 1999)’, and The antecedents and the identity of the Modem Indian Short Story. His self-published Raving Brat and Other Poems (in two parts), secured the Sri Lanka Arts Council Awards for Poetry in 1988.

In this short note I will try to introduce some of the key ideas that Kuruvilla sought to spread regarding creative writing in South Asia. My sources are his own published writings and what I remember of the conversations I had with him, most at his residence on Muhandiram road, Dehiwela, where he lived with his wife and three children,

Perhaps the strongest idea he held was that “the most enduring and universal art is that which has the deepest national and local roots”1 He repeated this phrase often and several of his students have told me he repeated it in almost every lesson. He tried to demonstrate that the greatness of several Malayalam writers, some of whose work he translated into English was well rooted in their national and local ethos.

He wrote:

Writers like Thakazhi, Karoor and Bibhutibushan Banerji (1899—1950) possess a tremendous importance through their rootedness in their own native, local background, their preference for the parochial, the local and the national as opposed to the so-called civilized, urban and cosmopolitan. Perhaps he laid such a strong emphasis on this due to his fear, which he expressed quite often, of the tendency of local writers to attempt to imitate great Western authors. On the same theme he wrote: “Who knows that the Literary Hall of Fame which Gerald Moore approvingly speaks of as filled with the immitigably Russian Dostoevsky and the immitigably American Melville may be filled with the unmistakably Malayalee Karoor and the incorrigibly Brazilian Machoda de Assis?”

Kuruvilla saw the need to tell the stories of common folk in Kerala, Sri Lanka and further afield in South Asia: engaged in a frightful struggle; a struggle for survival against the intolerable pressure of poverty. He constantly narrated the kind of vigorous, local life that exists among the impoverished peasantry, outcast labourers, petty traders, minor government employees and .swabasha, or vernacular schoolteachers. Writing about one of his favorite writers, Karoor Nilakanthan Pillai, Kuruvilla observed that.

“The truth about poverty is stranger than fiction. While the auction forsale of toddy and arrack goes on briskly among arrack rentiers, with the amounts steeply rising to several thousand rupees, a schoolteacher frantically rushes about in the crowd searching for a vendor of aerated drinks who owes him a quarter chakram, less than one cent, one hundredth part of a rupee. Exaggeration? No... Karoor’s social criticism is penetrating and sharp. There is a definite Marxist trend in modern Malayalam literature. But Karoor, without being a Marxist, has done more than any other Malayalam writer to unfold the frightful conditions of poverty in which large sections of the people live.”

By way of illustration, Kuruvilla narrates a story. In “Pathaeker” (Ten Acres), from the collection Smarakam (A Memorial; 1952) a low-caste family occupies a small parcel often acres of land, but are ejected by the owner with the help of hired thugs:

“I hope there was no trouble, no violence.”
“What violence, Sir? Why should there be violence? We shaped him up as he came to his hut.”
“He didn’t do anything.”
“He came howling all right. But soon he found himself tied to a tree.

As for his screaming, a piece of rag stuffed into his mouth...”

“Well, good that the matter was settled without much difficulty.”
“But one thing went wrong.”
“No... no... not that ... the tree he was tied to was full of red ants.”
“That? Oh, that doesn’t matter”.

He also believed that there is a unity in the divergent literature. “What confers a kinship to the works, however far apart geographically or culturally they may be, what provides the universality is their inwardness, what is eternal, absolute, and unchanging (in the Baudelairean sense) embodied in the works”

Though Kuruvilla spent most of his working life preparing undergraduates for university degrees, he did not become “an academic” in the popular sense of that word. In my view, Kuruvilla belongs more to what Danish educationist N.F.S. Grundtvig called the Folk School Tradition. His writings also show deep interest in people and society, and in particular, deep attachment to the ordinary folk. Obviously, Kuruvjlla acquired this tradition during his early upbringing in Kerala. In the latter part of his life he was very keen to promote close cooperation between South Asian writers, and to promote South Asian writing elsewhere.

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Voices of the oppressed by K G Sankarapillai

‘Dalit’ means broken, oppressed, untouchable, downtrodden, and exploited. They come from the poor communities which under the Indian caste system used to be known as ‘untouchables’. They constitute nearly 16% of the Indian population.

The caste system, with a history of more than 3000 years in India, is a shameful system of social segregation, which works on the principle of purity and impurity. Purity is rich and white or whitish, impurity is poor and dark. Hidden powers of wealth can be easily traced in every feudal Brahmanical concept of the ideal. Material milieu of purity and beauty and prominence and command and comforts is also wealth. Economic division is reflected in the social classifications. But it should not be registered that caste is racial or economic. Dr. Ambedkar says that the caste system came into being long after the different races of India had commingled in blood and culture. To hold that distinctions of caste are really distinctions of race and to treat different castes as though they were so many different races is a gross perversion of the historical facts. Ambedkar asks: What affinity is there between the Untouchable of Bengal and the Untouchable of Madras? The Brahman of Punjab is racially the same stock as the Chamar of the Punjab and the Brahman of Madras is the same race as the Pariah of Madras. The caste system does not demarcate racial division. (Annihilation of caste – in writings and speeches vol.1 .p.49 Dr .B.R. Ambedkar)

Historically the caste system is a socio-cultural menace of Hinduism. But it is followed by Muslims, Sikhs and Christians in the country. The traditional Hindu society is divided into four main hierarchical caste groups: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras. Beyond this fourfold caste structure, there is a category of ‘ati-shudras’ or Dalits (as they are now called), which is forced to occupy the lowest position in this abhorrent social order. A devilish and disgraceful residue of the very long history feudalism in India.

The practice of untouchability was formally outlawed by the Constitution of India (by the mastermind Dr. B.R. Ambedkar) in 1950. But in practice, the Dalits are still subjected to extreme forms of social and economic exclusion and discrimination; physical and mental torture. Their attempts to assert their rights are often met with strong resistance from the higher castes, resulting in inhuman torture, rapes, massacres, and other atrocities.

Dalit reality in India today is not a mark of national pride –

• As per official statistics, an estimated one million Dalits are manual scavengers who clean public latrines and dispose of dead animals
• 80% of Dalits live in rural areas and 86% of Dalits  are landless.
• 60% of Dalits are dependent on casual labour.
• Only 37% of Dalits are literate.
• 3 Dalit women are raped every day.
• At least one crime is committed against a Dalit every day.

As per 2001 census Present Dalit population is 16% of total population of India i.e. around 160 million. Independent India has witnessed considerable amount of violence and hate crimes motivated by caste, even though the law of the country doesn’t permit it. 

The word ‘Dalit’ in Marathi literally means ‘broken’. First used by Jyotiba Phule, the term was later popularized by Dalit leader Dr. B.R. Ambedkar to reflect the situation of the millions of Dalits within south Asia, who are systematically and institutionally deprived of their civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights in every aspect of life. But the Dalits are now redefining the word and with it their identity - Dalits are those who practice equality, believe in equality and fight for equality!
 (Source of facts Dalit Foundation)

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The Dalit movement is an anti-caste movement fighting for the construction of a modern secular and democratic Indian identity.

The term ‘Dalit literature’ can be traced to the first Dalit literary Conference in 1958 in Maharashtra State in India.

There are numerous theories about the origin of Dalit Literature. Buddha (6th c. B.C.), Chokhamela (14th AD), Mahatma Phule (1828-90), and Prof.S.M.Mate (1886-1957), are hailed as its originators by various activists/ideological groups. These great men were deeply concerned about the plight of the untouchables. They fought against all the unjust divisions in society.  A huge mass of literature is created in the light of their teachings and visions.

But it was Dr. Ambedkar, a great modern visionary , renaissance leader ,the architect of the constitution of India and an ardent critic of the caste system, who demolished the myth of divine origin of caste hierarchy. He inspired and initiated the creative minds of India to enforce the socio-cultural upsurge for the total emancipation of the Dalits.

Dalitism is the ideological habitat where various socio-cultural sensibilities and politico-economic groups co-exist.  Opposition to the Hindu intellectual traditions in general and the oppressive caste hierarchy in particular is the central concern of the movement.  

The Dalit Literary movement started in Maharashtra, the home state of Dr. Ambedkar.   A collective endeavour of the Neo-Buddhist elites to create a new culture of social equality. It is based on wider socio-cultural, political ideas to transcend the narrow space of the old concepts of culture and social hierarchy to new and open space.  Uttam Bhoite and Anuradha Bhoite have described it as a protest movement organised against the traditional Hindu social theories of life and liberation. A sense of collective identity and solidarity are seminal for a protest movement.  Dalit literature was evolving in a dialogic structure towards this direction as a communication system for various segments of the movement, the Dalit writers and Dalit intellectuals. Dalit writing is addressing the oppressed, the untouchables, the victims, and the oppressors.  “It is not our wish that what we write should be read only by the untouchables. Our writers strongly desire that it should be read by the touchable as well”. (Raosaheb Kasbe in his essay ‘some issues on Dalit literature’).

Dalit Poetry became popular mainly through poetry readings and alternative media like the little magazines and posters and hoardings and creative collectives.

Birds of the same feather from other states of India were inspired by its liberative spirit, straight and strong style, and poignant poetic images. Great poets like Narayan Survey, Namdeo Dhasal, Daya Pawar,  Arun Kamble , Josef Macqwan , Saran Kumar Limbale , Arun Dangle , and many other poets wrote stunningly new Indian poetry in the sixties and seventies. They portrayed the life and struggles of the lowest strata, the low caste. The prominence of the Dalit poetry in modern Indian poetry is undoubtedly great. It could consolidate numerous socio cultural and ecological movements in post colonial India. Still it is great and powerful even though some of its leaders were hijacked to the power games by the ruling class political parties in India.

K.G. Sankarapillai, is a contemporary Indian poet writing in Malayalam. He has won the National Award for Poetry in India on two occasions. More about this author may be found at http://india.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=8636

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A POEM By Basil Fernando

The sea was calm behind your house

(A poem dedicated to M. I. Kuruvilla)

In a day in July 1983
When our nation had gone mad
I visited you
The sea was calm behind your house.

You greeted me as before
But something had gone wrong
We both knew
Measured silence we kept

You were the master
I was the child
We had played that game before
But that day it stopped.

Our cheerful beliefs shattered
We saw the unknown unfolding
Fates smiling truant and gods mocking
The sea was calm behind your house.

Basil Fernando is a Sri Lankan poet and has published several collections of poems. An anthology of his poems entitled, Sundramaithry, has been translated into Malayalam by Dr. Dhanya Menon, and published in 2008. This is the first anthology of Sri Lankan poetry translated into any India language. His writings may be seen at www.basilfernando.net under literature. This poem was first published in Channels Vol. 12 No. 1 – The English Writers Cooperative of Sri Lanka, October 2004.

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A Children’s Poem by W. P. Ruwani Wanniarrhchi (Grade 10)

Is My Son Also Sleeping under the Mara Tree?

My little son,
I can wait
Till I am tired, seated at the doorstep of the house
Inside the lonely mind,
Kiri kokku (white storks) are crying
Come back home again,
My little son
It is to erase the tears of the leaking roof
Of the wattle and daub home from which my son flew
To the field of letters
Who there, aney (Oh, my goodness), told my son
To break mahamera (heaven’s) walls?

In the midst of fires,
The irony I do not feel in the world
Of the milk pot that moved in the river
Is my son also sleeping
Under the mara tree?

Warm tears fill both my eyes
Now, son, who am I to feed
The warm rice cooked on the three cooking stones?
Come, even in a dream,
And wave your hand
I still have more tears in my eyes
To shed

‘Is My Son Sleeping under the Mara Tree?’ is one of the poems from a collection of 83 Sinhalese poems by children of grade 3 – 12 from the anthology Kadulu Mathakayen Obbata (Beyond the memory of tears) published by a organisation called Kalapeya Api (We of the free trade zone) based in Negombo, Sri Lanka. This poem has been published in several publications in different countries. Translation by Basil Fernando

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The Asian Human Rights Commission is regularly issuing this article series on Human Rights and Culture in which various cultural expressions, poems, stories, pictures and other forms of cultural expression that are based on the theme of justice, will be published. A pivotal issue in modern literature is justice, particularly the enormous unleashing of injustice under fascist, communist and other authoritarian regime including those that pursue an unbridled market economy have generated responses from created writers. This search for justice is at the very essence of being human. Human beings are part of nature and part of each other. Perhaps the lines of John Donne are most relevant: “…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde;”

Contemporary mass culture promotes violence and destruction. There are those who are opposed to mass culture and want to reclaim the best traditions of human culture within which justice remains a core issue. This column will provide space for those who wish to share their creative initiatives.

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About AHRC: The Asian Human Rights Commission is a regional non-governmental organisation monitoring and lobbying human rights issues in Asia. The Hong Kong-based group was founded in 1984.