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Bhimayana Experiences Of Untouchability Subhash Vyam Durgabai Vyam 9788189059170 Books

Download As PDF : Bhimayana Experiences Of Untouchability Subhash Vyam Durgabai Vyam 9788189059170 Books

Bhimayana Experiences Of Untouchability Subhash Vyam Durgabai Vyam 9788189059170 Books

This book is essential to understand one fundamental thing about India, to understand the place of Untouchables, of Dalits in Indian society.

Dalits are rejected by Hinduism, hence by the Hindus in India, as not human because they were not created from one part of the body of the god Brahma, the Hindu God of Creation. They have no rights whatsoever. They can be killed at will after having been raped or beaten at will and freely, meaning the culprits will be the Dalits themselves for provoking the violence that beat them, raped them or killed them. The Muslims refuse to meddle, hence refuse to deal with Dalits not to become the targets of Hindu repercussions, retributions, if not vengeance, violence anyway that could go as far as burning a house to the ground to purify it of the presence of a Dalit. Parsis, who are Zoroastrians, hence do not believe in castes, are just the same as Muslims nevertheless and they do the same thing as Muslims: they cast the Dalits out even though they do not accept castes in their religion.

Only two religions seem to go against that yielding to Hindu pressure, if not terrorism, the Buddhists and the Christians. Remember the Buddhists were originally form India and were banned a long time ago, some having already taken refuge in Sri Lanka and the others moving to the mountains, to Tibet and surrounding areas. Remember the Christians were the representatives of the successive colonial powers, Catholic Portugal, Protestant Netherlands, Protestant and Anglican England, Catholic French (only marginally this last nationality). Buddhism negates castes and is open as an order and a faith to everyone including Dalits. Catholicism and Protestantism (though the English version of it in the 17th century, which does not concern India, was strongly anti-natives and anti-blacks with genocidal attitudes to natives and slavery for the blacks, in the USA at least and this policy disappeared vastly, on the British side not on the American side, in the course of the 18th century) pretend to be a religion for everyone and hence open to everyone because everyone is equal in the eyes of God.

The first measures to support Dalits were taken by the British who imposed common education for all including Dalits. The Hindus are still today resenting this decision and trying to void it or at least empty it of all possible feasibility by restricting access to water and food within the school territory and time. The book does not mention the efforts done by some Christian churches, particularly the Anglican Church and the Catholic Church to provide education to all and first of all to Dalits within their own schools were no segregation was accepted. This lack of a mention is a shame because that enabled some Dalits to get into higher education in England or the USA, and it explains why English is the real identity language of many Dalit intellectuals: to escape Hindi languages that are the languages of the Hindus and to use the language of the wider world that was the language of their education and mental liberation.

In the 1920s Ambedkar (1891-1956), who was a Dalit, managed to get a world class education in the USA and GB. He was a jurist, a politician, a philosopher, an anthropologist, a historian, an economist and a revivalist for Buddhism in India. He inspired the Modern Buddhist movement. As independent India's first law minister, he was the principal architect of the Constitution of India, though all his suggestions to improve the lot of Dalits were rejected with strong opposition from Gandhi himself. When he came back to India in the 1920s he tried to fight for the liberation of Dalits and he was heard by the British who took the decision to educate Dalits equally and in the same schools as other castes, hence mixed will all Indians. He finally became a Buddhist and published an important and inspiring book at the end of his life (in fact posthumously) on the subject of his Buddhism. Note the only available edition of this book is a paperback critical edition that is not available everywhere in the world, far from it.

This graphic book shows how - through episodes of Ambedkar's life - Dalits are rejected in everyday life. They cannot access water freely. If they try they are at once rejected and victimized in any possible way, or the water is spoiled. They cannot be accommodated in any hotel or guest house and as soon as they are found out they are rejected with violence if necessary or rather if deemed pleasurable by the ejectors. An ejector always finds some pleasure in mistreating, violating, raping the ejected person, or destroying his or her belongings, including stealing his or her money. They cannot travel normally because they are segregated against, they cannot access some services on the trains like water or toilets, or they are exploited for the use of simple carts or whatever means of transportation since the carriage or cart will have to be purified afterwards, and the driver cannot really sit in it while the Dalits are in the back seat. Don't expect children to be treated differently. In fact in some minds if they did not exist they would not be victimized, and the Hindus who behave like that do not consider that since many Dalit women are raped on a regular basis by Hindus who apparently are not soiled in such a very intimate physical contact, the Dalit children might very well be half non-Dalit by origin. I guess the one-drop-of-Dalit-blood theory applies here, as it used to apply in the USA for the Blacks.

And once again everyone except Buddhists and Christians yields to the terroristic attitude of Hindus.

All this explains why they try to reach out for the world in English. Their Indian language is the language of the Hindus, and in the form of Urdu which is very similar to Hindi, it is the language of the Muslims. For Dalits it is the language of rejection (I mean all the languages of this Indo-Aryan family, plus Tamil since the Tamils are also Hindus and reject the Dalits in their community). That's the great difference with a Buddhist society like in Sri Lanka in which there are no Dalits, or should I say there should not be any Dalits, though the Hindu Tamil community recognizes this caste.

English is thus the only alternative that comes from the British decision on education before independence. This alternative is also a way to reach out for the world. Dalits are conscious only the world can help them out of their "apartheid" rejection, the "apartheid" rejection they are the victims of.

At the time of independence Ambedkar tried to get equality, which would have been liberation for Dalits, in the constitution. Hindus refused everything, particularly a separate vote and representation. This was in a way assuming and using the concept of total separation that Hindus had imposed for millennia. But Gandhi himself opposed the concept and Dalits were just rejected into non existence since they could not be accepted in any voting precinct that they would soil by their very presence, except of course to clean up the floor and the toilets. Till very recently, up to the latest census in the process of being completed, they had never been counted and this first attempt is occurring more than sixty years after independence. So far estimations vary from 100 to 200 million Dalits. It took two generations to start giving enough value to Dalits to just number them. Where is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (and what about Civil Rights?).

This particular book is a graphic book and the way it is presented is important. There is no direct timeline or story line that can be followed from box to box and from page to page and from chapter to chapter. On each page the drawing is exploded in a sort of labyrinth or maze. We have to enter it and go from one spot to another to reconstruct an exploded vision and rebuild a unity beyond that exploded vision. It seems though to follow at times a downward vertical orientation and a left to right orientation. But not always and some pages are the simple juxtaposition of different autonomous elements that come together because of a common theme, but not a common string. We thus could read many pages from different entering points. And modern elements are constantly added here and there to prove nothing has changed since Ambedkar's times.

This requires an effort but renders very well the type of life Dalits can have in India, only taking or receiving tit bits of life or food or water or whatever that are cast out on the shoulder of the road, not to mention the ditch of it where dogs and other animals can lie, run, or just relieve themselves. It is difficult to build a real life with a perspective and real goals when at every step you have to mind the gap between castes and the rejection Dalits are the victims of. The only procedure to get something out of the book and out of Dalit life is to consider the totality of this "samsara" and let some kind of synthesis emerge from it. You cannot deduct this or that conclusion from clearly organized facts. You can only subsume or subduct some unifying idea from the total and impressionistic reality you have been presented with.

In other words this is a very emotional and effective book that forces us to start understanding the problem and the dilemma. When a segregation-oriented religion rules in and over a society there can never be any progress and progress has to come from those who can say no to that religion, and only them. But then this is dangerous and the danger of the situation can only come from an explosion of violence from the supporters of that religion, especially if the pressure comes from outside: they will take the segregated-against people as hostages to try to alleviate this outside pressure, like in South Africa in the 70s and 80s: "Stop pestering us otherwise we will kill as many of your beloved black people as we can!"

Dalits in that case, and among them first of all women and children, are the easy victims of sectarian religious violence coming from any mob imaginable, at least officially, though this mob violence is generally encouraged by the official tolerance of the law of the mob, of the democracy of the street as the historian Danielle Tartakowsky would say, be it only blind, the mob, the street and the tolerance. If you turn a blind eye on something you obviously won't see it. As soon as federal police forces intervened in the racist south in the USA people started opening their eyes and witnesses appeared and criminal Ku Klux Klanners were finally identified.

It is a book like this one that can help some minds to open and in Buddhist philosophy the mind is the master of your life, thinking and action. But there are hundreds of millions of minds to open in India, and elsewhere in the world. Since the mind is responsible for your action, if your action is bad action then it comes from a bad mind that has to be restructured, reformatted, reformed in general, if it is possible. Some minds have reached such a point in perversion that they cannot be reprieved or salvaged (like a derelict car) any more. And I say perversion because the human mind is by physiological and genetic nature, by phylogenic and psychogenetic nature good. Only a trauma of some kind can pervert a mind. Unluckily there are many traumas in life and education is too often such a trauma that will pervert millions of minds for life and for generations.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU


Tags : Bhimayana: Experiences Of Untouchability [Subhash Vyam, Durgabai Vyam] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. What does it mean to be an untouchable in India? Why do some Indians despise the touch of others? Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891 1956),Subhash Vyam, Durgabai Vyam,Bhimayana: Experiences Of Untouchability,Navayana Publishers,8189059173,Nonfiction Social Science

Bhimayana Experiences Of Untouchability Subhash Vyam Durgabai Vyam 9788189059170 Books Reviews

The book "Bhimayana Experiences of Untouchability" illustrated by Durgabai Vyam & Subhash Vyam and written by S Natarajan & S Anand, tells incidents in the life of B.R. Ambedkar. Book contains excellent Gond style illustrations in comical form to portray untouchability as practiced in the twentieth century India during the colonial and even post-colonial periods. Untouchability is a social evil, which is a kind of apartheid of Indian origin. This book also shows that untouchability was widespread across social life. Access to basic needs such as water, shelter and travel was restricted to certain communities. Ambedkar fought for equitable rights to facilitate marginalized communities' access to water, shelter and travel.
'Bhimayana Experiences of Untouchability' is one of the most remarkable books I have experienced in a long time. I say 'experience' because it completely captivated my senses. I know India well. I have spent the past 41 years conducting field research there and publishing my own books on the subject. I am a total bibliophile and have literally thousands of books about South Asia as well as a full library of other titles. But this book is unique and transformative.
Navayana Press has a fine reputation in India for publishing books about gritty subjects with a particular focus on social injustice. (No, they are not my publisher and I am not trying to curry favor with them.) Many of their other titles are deep, scholarly inquiries into the problems that plague India's social systems, particularly its lowest classes.
`Bhimayana' is an entirely fresh and unparalleled approach to the serious, ongoing issues of the pervasive prejudice towards and horrific mistreatment of India's Dalits (those previously called `Untouchables'). The medium in which this information is conveyed is unlike any other. In some ways it is similar to a graphic novel, but that label could easily be misinterpreted.
The artists who created it are tribal peoples from villages deep in central India. Durgabai and Subhash Vyam are highly accomplished Gond painters who work entirely within their own individual artistic idiom. The publishers exposed them to graphic novels, but then gave them complete artistic creative freedom to design a book to their own aesthetic. They worked closely with authors Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand to convey the biography of untouchability's most important spokesperson, Bhimarao Ramji Ambedkar. The story itself compelling interweaves profound anecdotes from Ambedkar's entire life with potent reports of contemporary abuses reported throughout India. The highly imaginative drawings combine successfully with frequently shocking messages to create a masterpiece that enchants the reader and succeeds in conveying valuable information that is often lost elsewhere in rhetoric and hyperbole. The results are outstanding. This book is a must for any socially conscious Indian or Indophile.
This book is essential to understand one fundamental thing about India, to understand the place of Untouchables, of Dalits in Indian society.

Dalits are rejected by Hinduism, hence by the Hindus in India, as not human because they were not created from one part of the body of the god Brahma, the Hindu God of Creation. They have no rights whatsoever. They can be killed at will after having been raped or beaten at will and freely, meaning the culprits will be the Dalits themselves for provoking the violence that beat them, raped them or killed them. The Muslims refuse to meddle, hence refuse to deal with Dalits not to become the targets of Hindu repercussions, retributions, if not vengeance, violence anyway that could go as far as burning a house to the ground to purify it of the presence of a Dalit. Parsis, who are Zoroastrians, hence do not believe in castes, are just the same as Muslims nevertheless and they do the same thing as Muslims they cast the Dalits out even though they do not accept castes in their religion.

Only two religions seem to go against that yielding to Hindu pressure, if not terrorism, the Buddhists and the Christians. Remember the Buddhists were originally form India and were banned a long time ago, some having already taken refuge in Sri Lanka and the others moving to the mountains, to Tibet and surrounding areas. Remember the Christians were the representatives of the successive colonial powers, Catholic Portugal, Protestant Netherlands, Protestant and Anglican England, Catholic French (only marginally this last nationality). Buddhism negates castes and is open as an order and a faith to everyone including Dalits. Catholicism and Protestantism (though the English version of it in the 17th century, which does not concern India, was strongly anti-natives and anti-blacks with genocidal attitudes to natives and slavery for the blacks, in the USA at least and this policy disappeared vastly, on the British side not on the American side, in the course of the 18th century) pretend to be a religion for everyone and hence open to everyone because everyone is equal in the eyes of God.

The first measures to support Dalits were taken by the British who imposed common education for all including Dalits. The Hindus are still today resenting this decision and trying to void it or at least empty it of all possible feasibility by restricting access to water and food within the school territory and time. The book does not mention the efforts done by some Christian churches, particularly the Anglican Church and the Catholic Church to provide education to all and first of all to Dalits within their own schools were no segregation was accepted. This lack of a mention is a shame because that enabled some Dalits to get into higher education in England or the USA, and it explains why English is the real identity language of many Dalit intellectuals to escape Hindi languages that are the languages of the Hindus and to use the language of the wider world that was the language of their education and mental liberation.

In the 1920s Ambedkar (1891-1956), who was a Dalit, managed to get a world class education in the USA and GB. He was a jurist, a politician, a philosopher, an anthropologist, a historian, an economist and a revivalist for Buddhism in India. He inspired the Modern Buddhist movement. As independent India's first law minister, he was the principal architect of the Constitution of India, though all his suggestions to improve the lot of Dalits were rejected with strong opposition from Gandhi himself. When he came back to India in the 1920s he tried to fight for the liberation of Dalits and he was heard by the British who took the decision to educate Dalits equally and in the same schools as other castes, hence mixed will all Indians. He finally became a Buddhist and published an important and inspiring book at the end of his life (in fact posthumously) on the subject of his Buddhism. Note the only available edition of this book is a paperback critical edition that is not available everywhere in the world, far from it.

This graphic book shows how - through episodes of Ambedkar's life - Dalits are rejected in everyday life. They cannot access water freely. If they try they are at once rejected and victimized in any possible way, or the water is spoiled. They cannot be accommodated in any hotel or guest house and as soon as they are found out they are rejected with violence if necessary or rather if deemed pleasurable by the ejectors. An ejector always finds some pleasure in mistreating, violating, raping the ejected person, or destroying his or her belongings, including stealing his or her money. They cannot travel normally because they are segregated against, they cannot access some services on the trains like water or toilets, or they are exploited for the use of simple carts or whatever means of transportation since the carriage or cart will have to be purified afterwards, and the driver cannot really sit in it while the Dalits are in the back seat. Don't expect children to be treated differently. In fact in some minds if they did not exist they would not be victimized, and the Hindus who behave like that do not consider that since many Dalit women are raped on a regular basis by Hindus who apparently are not soiled in such a very intimate physical contact, the Dalit children might very well be half non-Dalit by origin. I guess the one-drop-of-Dalit-blood theory applies here, as it used to apply in the USA for the Blacks.

And once again everyone except Buddhists and Christians yields to the terroristic attitude of Hindus.

All this explains why they try to reach out for the world in English. Their Indian language is the language of the Hindus, and in the form of Urdu which is very similar to Hindi, it is the language of the Muslims. For Dalits it is the language of rejection (I mean all the languages of this Indo-Aryan family, plus Tamil since the Tamils are also Hindus and reject the Dalits in their community). That's the great difference with a Buddhist society like in Sri Lanka in which there are no Dalits, or should I say there should not be any Dalits, though the Hindu Tamil community recognizes this caste.

English is thus the only alternative that comes from the British decision on education before independence. This alternative is also a way to reach out for the world. Dalits are conscious only the world can help them out of their "apartheid" rejection, the "apartheid" rejection they are the victims of.

At the time of independence Ambedkar tried to get equality, which would have been liberation for Dalits, in the constitution. Hindus refused everything, particularly a separate vote and representation. This was in a way assuming and using the concept of total separation that Hindus had imposed for millennia. But Gandhi himself opposed the concept and Dalits were just rejected into non existence since they could not be accepted in any voting precinct that they would soil by their very presence, except of course to clean up the floor and the toilets. Till very recently, up to the latest census in the process of being completed, they had never been counted and this first attempt is occurring more than sixty years after independence. So far estimations vary from 100 to 200 million Dalits. It took two generations to start giving enough value to Dalits to just number them. Where is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (and what about Civil Rights?).

This particular book is a graphic book and the way it is presented is important. There is no direct timeline or story line that can be followed from box to box and from page to page and from chapter to chapter. On each page the drawing is exploded in a sort of labyrinth or maze. We have to enter it and go from one spot to another to reconstruct an exploded vision and rebuild a unity beyond that exploded vision. It seems though to follow at times a downward vertical orientation and a left to right orientation. But not always and some pages are the simple juxtaposition of different autonomous elements that come together because of a common theme, but not a common string. We thus could read many pages from different entering points. And modern elements are constantly added here and there to prove nothing has changed since Ambedkar's times.

This requires an effort but renders very well the type of life Dalits can have in India, only taking or receiving tit bits of life or food or water or whatever that are cast out on the shoulder of the road, not to mention the ditch of it where dogs and other animals can lie, run, or just relieve themselves. It is difficult to build a real life with a perspective and real goals when at every step you have to mind the gap between castes and the rejection Dalits are the victims of. The only procedure to get something out of the book and out of Dalit life is to consider the totality of this "samsara" and let some kind of synthesis emerge from it. You cannot deduct this or that conclusion from clearly organized facts. You can only subsume or subduct some unifying idea from the total and impressionistic reality you have been presented with.

In other words this is a very emotional and effective book that forces us to start understanding the problem and the dilemma. When a segregation-oriented religion rules in and over a society there can never be any progress and progress has to come from those who can say no to that religion, and only them. But then this is dangerous and the danger of the situation can only come from an explosion of violence from the supporters of that religion, especially if the pressure comes from outside they will take the segregated-against people as hostages to try to alleviate this outside pressure, like in South Africa in the 70s and 80s "Stop pestering us otherwise we will kill as many of your beloved black people as we can!"

Dalits in that case, and among them first of all women and children, are the easy victims of sectarian religious violence coming from any mob imaginable, at least officially, though this mob violence is generally encouraged by the official tolerance of the law of the mob, of the democracy of the street as the historian Danielle Tartakowsky would say, be it only blind, the mob, the street and the tolerance. If you turn a blind eye on something you obviously won't see it. As soon as federal police forces intervened in the racist south in the USA people started opening their eyes and witnesses appeared and criminal Ku Klux Klanners were finally identified.

It is a book like this one that can help some minds to open and in Buddhist philosophy the mind is the master of your life, thinking and action. But there are hundreds of millions of minds to open in India, and elsewhere in the world. Since the mind is responsible for your action, if your action is bad action then it comes from a bad mind that has to be restructured, reformatted, reformed in general, if it is possible. Some minds have reached such a point in perversion that they cannot be reprieved or salvaged (like a derelict car) any more. And I say perversion because the human mind is by physiological and genetic nature, by phylogenic and psychogenetic nature good. Only a trauma of some kind can pervert a mind. Unluckily there are many traumas in life and education is too often such a trauma that will pervert millions of minds for life and for generations.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU