Ten Thousand Things
Multicultural Webfinds

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

People of Color Discriminating against People of Color in Asia & their Challengers: Dalit Intellectual Chandra Bhan Prasad and Dalit Activist Ruth Manorama

In all, Dalits' Durban experiment witnessed a great leap forward as a large number of women participated in the campaign. As the great radical poet Gorakh Pandey said, "women are the pre-requisite for a movement's success."
– Chandra Bhan Prasad

"I have tremendous confidence in the capacity of the poor to transform not only their own lives but also to build a just, humane, and democratic society."
– Ruth Manorama

In Asia, discrimination results from a mix of traditional and neo-colonial attitudes and structures, with caste-based forms being the most historically entrenched. Transnational activists and intellectuals are collaborating to more powerfully deconstruct and challenge the conceptual underpinnings of caste discrimination.

One example is the joining of forces between the Burakumin and Dalit human rights movements.

Japanese historical prejudice towards Burakumin is related with those of caste attitudes towards Dalits, members of the "untouchable" caste in South Asia. Both forms of discrimination derive from archaic religious attitudes rendering these groups as ritually "impure.”

Along with the migration of other Indian cultural legacies throughout Asia, caste concepts spread from India throughout the Asian subcontinent and the Japanese archipelago centuries ago, as well as to diasporan communities more recently. The website of the International Dalit Solidarity Network, a transnational movement that brings together people who are discriminated on the basis of archaic notions of hereditary caste throughout the world, dilineates:

India’s caste system finds corollaries in other parts of the sub-continent, including Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Discrimination against Buraku, sometimes known as eta (variously defined as ‘pollution abundant’ or ‘unclean’) persists in Japan.

Caste has migrated with the South Asian diaspora to firmly take root in East and South Africa, Mauritius, Fiji, Suriname, the Middle East, Malaysia, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, North America, and other regions.

Although the Indian government ostensibly formalized constitutional protections for Dalits in 1950, discrimination continues in widespread attitudes and practices towards the 160 million Dalits in India, part of the 250 million Dalits in South Asia (two percent of the world's population), who remain in a hidden apartheid system. Dalits are denied access to land, forced to work in humiliating conditions, and are regularly abused, at the hands of the police and of higher-caste groups protected by the government. Women suffer from frequent sexual abuse, without recourse to legal remedies.

"Dalit Perspectives: a symposium on the changing contours of Dalit politics", a February 2006 edition of the outstanding Seminar Magazine published in New Delhi, offers an array of original and challenging perspectives on the situation of Dalits.

Historian Ramnarayan S. Rawat, one of a number of North American-based scholars on Dalit issues considers the source of "The Problem" as the absence of Dalit perspectives in mainstream Indian public discourse and narratives:

As a caste Hindu, I have been struck by the absence of Dalit points of view within mainstream Indian historiography, and by the necessity of bringing these points of view into active dialogue with caste Hindu narratives of Indian history, society, nationalism and colonialism...

Intellectual Chandra Bhan Prasad is the first Dalit to have a regular column in a leading English-language Indian newspaper. His "The brown man's counter-apartheid," sharply challenges the ironies of traditional forms of racism in India and Asia, perpetrated by people of color against other people of color:

Is the brown man intrinsically a racist? Well, it is difficult to state it affirmatively, and equally difficult to negate it. India has been a hierarchal society since its remotest antiquity. The brown man’s intellectual personality is organically inseparable from the history he has lived through. The brown man’s cultural trait thus seeks a civilizational context, where a system of hierarchy must pre-define his existence...

In September 2001 when I was in Durban, a Black journalist narrated an interesting story. When apartheid was officially done away with, Indian immigrants to South Africa, in particular the Patels, would avoid restaurants where Black waiters served. After further investigation it was found that the Blacks hated Indians more than their White ‘masters’, because, the Indians in this case, routinely engaged with the Blacks as their subordinates. Similar stories can be found in the US as well, where the Brown man treats the Black population as potential subjects. Hierarchy, therefore, thrives on other continents as well where Indians have found their cultural world…

Barnard College South Asian history professor Anupama Rao contextualizes the Dalit situation within an interrelated global history of structural oppression and movements towards liberation. Rao brilliantly argues that the Dalit movement towards equal opportunity is the real test of Indian democracy. (In my view, this is analogous to the African American Civil Rights Movement finally bringing the start of authentic democracy to the United States in the 1960's. How can a nation consider itself "democratic" when millions are disenfranchised and structurally oppressed?)

I argue that Dalit is not a name so much as it is a field of contestation and significance. The emergence of the Dalit as a political subject is historically contingent, and problematizes dominant narratives of secular nationalism.

As a politics of minority, Dalit politics revealed the Indian nation to be the political manifestation of Hindu majoritarianism. More significantly still, I would argue, is the necessity to think about Dalit critiques of caste inequality as forming a crucial chapter in a broader, global history of subaltern imaginations of political emancipation...

Through this brief discussion of different aspects of a genealogy of the Dalit political subject, I wish to make a more provocative argument, and this is to suggest that the Dalit is India’s first modern, democratic subject. Stifled by the regulations of caste, degraded and humiliated, she had to think modernity through democracy, instead of crafting a nativist modernity that countered the colonial masters while falling short of democratizing the illiberal economies of caste. And yet, Dalit emancipation remains an unfinished project.

Increasingly Dalit voices are gaining the attention of the world's mainstream, if not entering it completely yet:

Indian filmmaker Leena Manimekalai produced "Parai," a documentary that takes a hard look at the harsh intersection of caste-based and gender discrimination experienced by Dalit women:

...reveals the status of Dalit population in India with the South Indian village Siruthondamadevi as a classic example. "An injury to one is an injury to all," quoted by Martin Luther King is the baseline of the film.

Siruthondamadevi, a non-descript village situated in Cuddalore district, Tamilnadu, India, continues to live with the "official" lie that atrocities against minorities are a thing of past. Here 600 odd Dalits are under assault everyday by 6000 strong backward caste (Oppressor caste) people.

Untouchability, sexual harassment, rape, assault, exploitation of labor against the scheduled caste population are shockingly prevalent in this village.

Almost ninety percent of the women in colony live with sexual violence against them with their men helplessly acknowledging the oppressions. The documentary leaves the question on the constitutional concept of "Justice to All". After 56 years of self rule and independence, a major section of the Indian society still lives oppressed in the name of caste.

Indira Patel OBE, Chair, WNC Task Force on the World Conference against Racism, and Meena Poudel, Programme Representative, Oxfam Nepal detail violence against Dalit women in this report at the Oxfam website.

Dalits may not cross the line dividing their part of the village from that occupied by higher castes. They may not use the same wells, drink from same cups, or claim land that is legally theirs. The burden often falls on women because, for example, they have to fetch water, on foot, from distant and unclaimed sources, which might take hours.

Women are also frequent victims of sexual abuse. Since the early 1990s, violence, abuse, and rape against Dalit women has escalated dramatically in response to the growing Dalit human rights and self-determination movements. The sexual slavery of Dalit girls and women continues to receive religious sanction, and the trafficking in persons for the exploitation of their sexuality has become a severe problem for women in general and Dalit women in particular.

However, change is happening, as demonstrated by grassroots and transnational Dalit leader Ruth Manorama, who sees parallels between the experiences of African Americans and Dalits, as mentioned in this February 2006 profile:

Ruth Manorama, 42, is widely known for her contribution in mainstreaming Dalit issues, especially the precarious situation of Dalit women in India. Ruth, herself from the Dalit community, calls the women "Dalits among the Dalits." Ruth has also contributed enormously to breaking the upper-class, upper-caste image of the women's movement in India. In 2005, she was one of 1000 nominees for the '1000 women for the Nobel Peace prize' campaign...

Subsequently, Ruth started Women's Voice and registered the Bangalore Gruhakarmikara Sangha (domestic workers' union) as a trade union. In 1986, Ruth was asked to participate in a cross-cultural study comparing Afro-American Blacks in the US and Dalits in India. Her specific interest was to study the lives of Black women and compare it to the situation of Dalit women. She realised that although several core issues were different, there were many similarities in the situations of marginalised communities across the world.

At an early stage itself, Ruth realised that large, mass-based organisations were necessary to take up issues related to societal structures affecting large populations over a wide area. Thus was born the National Federation of Dalit Women. Ruth was also closely associated with the mobilisation of Dalits towards the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, an effort that put the issue on the international map. In 1993, she organised the public hearing on Violence Against Dalit Women in Bangalore, and the National Federation of Dalit Women was born out of that effort. Ruth was also a core group member of the Asian Women's Human Rights Council.

Her work on coordinating the South India chapter of the preparations for the Fourth UN World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 had a big role to play in this. After returning to India from the UN Conference, the Advisory Group decided that ten regional members of the task force would come together as the National Alliance of Women (NAWO), with Ruth as president, to take the mobilisation of women forward.

For some more information on transnational activism in support of those oppressed by caste systems, the website of the International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism in Asia (the organization that invited U.N. Rapporteur Doudou Diene to Japan), provides reports at"Global Action for Dalits." Human Rights Watch also has a 2005 update on India.

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