Suraj Yengde
D.Phil candidate
Oxford University, UK
I have been trailing through various places in Europe, North America, South America, India, and Nepal. Reading is not dedicated affair; books invite pauses, reflection, and theory. Still, yet, I carried a couple of books with me. Among the selected ones, Yogesh Maitreya’s Water in a Broken Pot: A Memoir was one of them. It is one of the rarest statements of a Dalit Youth’s journey, written with passion and candour. The present book under review both educates and places a certain responsibility upon its readers.
Related articles
The Substance of Caste
Maitreya does not tell a tale of arrival; he presents the path of his work. It is not celebrating the tales of miseries. Rather, he constantly reminds the reader with every alternate page about the sustenance of anxiety, pain, hurt, self-doubt, violence, and rage. He is not toying with the line of the industry that is always salivating over Dalit personal space that they anyway never bothered to socialise with or invest in. Through the writing of personal narratives, the publishing industry satisfies its craving to experience a Dalit through distance. It is a win-win situation. Untouchability is also practised, and Dalit life is also enjoyed at the same time by its rules of hegemony and standards. There is something dirty about it. It is nauseating and ugly voyerism. This constant gaze of widened Kaali eyes judges and needles through the scars of a familiar historic weapon called caste.
Caste is like a substance. Those who consume it find a purpose in life. They hold on to it for the rest of their lives and endow it to the next generation. The ones suffering at the receiving end want to get rid of it completely, and that means the creation of a new soceity too.
Maitreya comes from Nagpur, the second capital of Maharashtra and the third largest city in the state. Nagpur’s social history has seen the rise of the British confederacy along-side the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh that is headquartered there. Nagpur is also the site of the epochal work of BR Ambedkar’s mass conversion to Buddhistm. The Dalits in the Vidarbha region, particularly near Nagpur, were already landowning Mahars who could raise their status and contribute to the movement. Some of the pre-Ambedkar-era Dalit leaders hailed from the Nagpur region. Many of these well-to-do Mahars even unsuccessfully fielded Ambedkar in the 1954 by-election in Bhandara to ensure that he got into Parliament.
Nagpur, in that sense, is advantaged with history, culture, political movement, and counter-social organisations that have bolstered the people living in these areas with the required confidence and shown a path. It has become a cradle of a new Dalit kind. Many top positions in any field, from politics and bureaucracy to the private sector, have people from this region. The air of Nagpur breathes confidence for those living in these areas. It is natural for a child who is growing up in this environment to be assertive, bold, and aware of their history. Thus, like Mumbai, Nagpur is also a city where Dalits got the required assertiveness through access to modernity, trade, and the Naga Ambedkarite culture. A slum dweller in a first-tier city is many times ahead of the ones coming from semi-urban and rural areas.
This worked in favour of Maitreya, even though he was living a life of poverty. His brush with Buddhism and the access to Western people and, therein, the world of literature is emblematic of his spatial advantages. However, not all become Yogesh Maitreya. There are ample people like him who are still trying to overcome the difficulties of life, but many have given up. In the graph of Dalit success stories, however, Nagpur has an honourable mention. Many more have turned to ambedkarite literature and found their echoes reasonating inliterary circles.
One Story, Many Relations
In his journey, Maitreya is searching for meanings. There are many regrateful tones, and often, it comes with a hidden victimisation that masks the protagonist’s next adventure. He is a victim; he is aware of it, but also, he is conscious and lettered, so Maitreya keeps moving in many directions. He has written an explanatory note to all those who did not understand him. It was his caste, clubbed with the fringes of class that he was born into that made him the way he is now. He reacted in a certain way against the old-age scars created in his mind. Thus, he is merely out there without any warning, protection, or support. He is hitting the wall and picking himself up with the help of substances that he finds.
When he is confronted with emotions, he keeps the mask of strong face. “I was taught by cowards that Men don’t cry.” This condition gives rise to “suppressed emotion” which “transmutes into violent energy in men” (pp 61-62). Many a time, this does not remain with the emotions of invidividuals but makes them victims of atrocities. People eject violence instead of satisfaction which is cause of national tragedy. They want to become a shadow of someone, or something.
Maitreya is an advocate of poetry who has experienced the desires of people around him. The desperateness to own and be owned makes us equal he argues (p 153). After all, powerlessness is felt when we gain power in someone else through the libidinal malevolence of cravings and restlessness. Who would, then, ask for caste in the scorching yells of orgasmic height?
Throughout his life, Maitreya is haunted by the slap of loneliness. As he writes, “I was defined by loneliness” (pp 43). This spectral fear has animated much of his life because of his innate nature as an introvert. Thus, he visits many people, mostly women, to feel truly calm in their embrace. He longs for that hug, kiss, and ejaculation validated through an embrace. But when you “journey into the territory of conscience,” you nature fast as you no longer see your pain in isolation (pp 136, 112). Life takes people in directions they did not sign up for.
Juices and Flows
With the many encounters with his partners and the great difficulties they have had in relationships, one wonders if Maitreya was brave enough to undergo the furnace of potential accusations. Many prominent writers from marginalised communities the world over have had crude attention from the opposite sexes. They have come back with their narratives to destroy or manipulate the story of the ex-lover. Perhaps, Maitreya is cautious and is confessing to his deeds already before someone comes with a dagger.
We get juicy ethnographic insights as we travel with Maitreya. His pictorial representation of the brothel had pictures of both hung on the wall – Bollywood stars as well as Hindu gods and goddesses. Maitreya has the ability to reflect on memory and make it into a fieldwork of imagination to do something bigger.
Ambedkar and Dalit literature gave meaning to his life and practce. Suddenly, he started to notice those beautiful experiences hidden beneath the aggression of caste violence. Maitreya started to read the “vocabulary” of his pain. A rebel was in the making. He saw the immensity of love in Ambedkar, wherein he could transform hate into love and also transform himself into love (p 184). This love language is a preamble of an Ambedkarite Dalit existence.
Dalit life is not one of hate but of two loves: workable love and hopeful lvoe. The earlier is a pragmatic jovial love while the latter is an imagination that runs wild to keep the pace of one’s feet grounded and mind floating into many spheres. Often, Dalit rage – the beauty of anti-caste violence – is misinterpreted as hate. Hate, as Matireya captures evocativesly, is “too expensive a burden to carry in our heart” when ours is full of compassion and discipline (p 163). Maitreya discounts this with a rather generous medication by alluding to the hallmark of loneliness. He makes caste definitions into a sharpened arsenal of the victim which is arrested by the fake victors assuming the role of the oppressor. After all, they are lonely too and lack a society to grow as humans.
Loneliness is escaped through company; if the company is of a person, even better. If not, company can be someone or something that can be made one’s own, premised on one’s fragility. Loneliness is seeking a world beyond companionship. It is the drawing force of compassion. The lament of being and belonging to feeling worthy to live a few more years.
The Burden of Permanence
The one thing that keeps reappearing in the testimony of Maitreya’s life is the coded seeding of a forced and involuntary exile. It is the diagonal of innocence from where the powerful is stripped into a bare body that is sensitive to the bloodbath and mockery around oneself. The cloting as apparel is suggestive of the attempts made to cover it with more fuel so the fire into its flames and burn the country – its psyche and body.
The troubled archives of experiences are registered on the bodies, and the mind is holding those mountainous memories in its depth. A slight trigger to the warehouse of burdened shame makes outwardly reaction as being shy or in self-doubt. Such a condition brings in the fortitude of rejection. No one can be made to feel otherwise. A Dalit life for others is that of rejection. You cannot convince us by occasional offerings of worldly comfort.
Respect is deposited in the deepest trenches of Dalit anatomy. This forces the cause of freedom into a longing wherein the living trauma invites a mistaken belief of self-harm. Giving up on society is the failure of the country that did not love its own precious children. The dispensary of faith an dogma resides in the chamber of relief of those pushed into a permanent residence of alienation. Dalits have created their own worlds in the confines of segregation. It is these worlds that have developed new words and new life for all to benefit. The Dalit world is privately open for all. Dalit writings are a window into that world.
