Dalitbahujan nationalism versus Brahmanical nationalism – A Study of Bhanwar Meghwanshi’s I Could Not Be Hindu: The Story of a Dalit in the RSS.
Ms Ashmita Saha
Postgraduate Student, Department of English, University of Calcutta, West Bengal, India
According to the French critic, Philippe Lejeune autobiography is a "Retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality"[1]. However, this definition does not suffice for the particular genre of Dalit autobiography since “The particular relevance of the dalit autobiographies is the creative burst of the individual striving to assert himself, lest he disappears swallowed up by the alleged necessity of systemic orders and the divine truth of cultural dispensations imposed on him by dominant social actors.”[2] According to Sharmila Rege, Dalit life narratives challenge the bourgeois genre of autobiography by establishing “a right to speak both for and beyond the individual and contest explicitly or implicitly the ‘official forgetting’ of histories of caste oppression, struggles and resistance”[3]. For Gopal Guru, the genre signifies not simply a victim providing witness, but rather that of a “powerful moral medium to protest”.[4] This paper aims to focus on Bhanwar Meghwanshi’s I Could Not Be Hindu: The Story of a Dalit in the RSS and examine how it problematizes the concept of nationalism as envisaged by the dominant Hindutva ideology, and exposes it to be inherently casteist. According to Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd “In the guise of a nationalist cultural element, this spiritual fascism”, which rests upon the belief that the Dalit-Bahujans are to be made to live and work for the cause of upper caste education, enjoyment and wealth, but not for themselves, “is being shoved down the throats of Dalit-Bahujans and indeed many have now swallowed it.”[5] This paper also intends to look at how the text serves as a testimonio to the author’s gradual shift from being a member of the Sangh Parivar to becoming an Ambedkarite, and how this corresponds with the assertion of his identity as a Dalit individual who goes on to partake in Dalitbahujan nationalism instead of being a mere “trishul-wielding foot soldier"[6] within the discourse generated by Brahmanical nationalism. This conflict between Dalitism and Brahmanism within the author, a Dalit individual, is of crucial significance since “When a human subject realises that he has been alienated from his Self, dialectical processes do stir up a new consciousness and prompt to remake history.”[7]
[1] Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography, edited by Paul John Ekain and translated by Katherine Leary, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1989, p.4 [2] Poitevin, Guy. Dalit Autobiographical Narratives: Figures of Subaltern Consciousness, Assertion and Identity, Centre for Cooperative Research in Social Sciences, Pune, 2002. [3] Rege, Sharmila. Writing Caste/Writing Gender. Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonios. Zubaan, 2006. [4] Guru, Gopal. “Afterword.” In The Prisons We Broke, by Baby Kamble. Translated by Maya Pandit, 2nd ed. Orient Blackswan, 2008/2018, pp. 158–70. [5] Shepherd, Kancha Ilaiah. “Introduction” Buffalo Nationalism: A Critique of Spiritual Fascism, Samya, 2004, p. xix. [6] Shepherd, Kancha Ilaiah. “Introduction” Buffalo Nationalism: A Critique of Spiritual Fascism, Samya, 2004, p. xx [7] Poitevin, Guy. Dalit Autobiographical Narratives: Figures of Subaltern Consciousness, Assertion and Identity, Centre for Cooperative Research in Social Sciences, Pune, 2002.