ABSTRACT
Many Dalits militantly asserted their traditions, language and culture; at the same time, ambiguity and cultural anxieties found deep roots in the minds of some Dalit elites who were becoming ‘modern’. As a result, the latter constantly combated their past and present identities to deploy ‘technologies of the self ’ to transform and refine themselves, and to fit more easily into the rhythm of urban Brahmani cultural hegemony. For example, many second-and third-generation Dalit women developed ‘cultured’ shuddha Marathi: the Brahmani ‘ho’ instead of the lower-class ‘ha’ for ‘yes’; the nasal instead of the flat-toned aani-paani (Paik 2009, 192). As such, many Dalits spoke two different Marathi dialects – informal and formal. The Marathi spoken inside the home, the ‘mother’s breast milk’, was distinctly different from that used outside – the ‘tinned formula’ (Illich 1981, 32). Most women with whom I interacted represented both. This chapter examines what may be broadly categorised as the experience of emerging modern middle-class Dalits. They are sometimes depicted as a new type of caste (‘Dalit-Brahman’) in India: one that may be entered through achievements in education and employment (Wagh 1986, 1994; Beteille 1970; Dushkin 1999). In this way, some Dalit-Brahmans believed that they could – at least to some extent – escape their caste by becoming middle class. Following Dalit radicals’ rhetoric, modern Dalits did not believe in inherited privilege but sought to make their destiny through their own merit, and to improve and advance themselves and their families, communities and nation. This chapter focuses on the intentional generative practices, the varied and complicated processes through which many Dalit women and men continuously and consistently sought to escape from the circuitous predicaments of the slum, poverty, low-level education and social exclusion in order to appropriate modernity. Another aim of this chapter is to reveal the processes of accessing such modernity by investigating how the teachers and lower-middle-class, elite parents practised the dictum of the classic Marathi proverb ‘chaddi lage chham chham, vidya yeyi gham gham’, which means ‘the harder the stick beats, the faster the flow of knowledge’. Here, I extend the meaning of the proverb to untangle the processes through which Dalit parents and teachers sought to discipline Dalit girls and women into ‘doing well’ in order to radically remake themselves and fashion their present and futures.
