^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

— The situation in 2018 is a lot worse than it was during the 14 years I took to make Jai Bhim Comrade. In 1997 the rightwing had just come to power in my home State, Maharashtra. Today it rules the whole country. Religious othering, together with a well-disguised upper caste vision that embraces market economics and an authoritarian mindset, is a sure recipe for fascism, albeit one that is not as crude and combustible as the Hitler-Mussolini edition. This is a refined variant and it comes disguised as democracy.

 

But you cannot hide disparity forever. The disempowered and the dispossessed grow by the hour. Propaganda tactics that blame the Muslim, the Christian, the Dalit or the ‘anti-national’ will not fool the disenfranchised forever. That is where my optimism lies.

 

How do we resist this, especially when there is a fault line developing around reason? When I speak of the forces of reason, I’m potentially including all Dalits, Adivasis (the indigenous), the minorities, the landless and marginalised and small farmers, the unemployed youth, the homeless and indeed all those who have fallen off the high table of ‘development’. I am also including people like myself, who come from the privileged castes and classes but reject the politics of hatred and exclusion. We might have other differences, we might not agree on everything – somebody might be capitalist, anarchist, or just be critical of any form of dictatorship – but if you believe in reason, you will still be on this side of the fence.

 

^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

— This is happening even more systematically now under the Modi regime. The Modi government cannot co-opt the majority of Dalits, but it can co-opt some of the Dalit leaders. It engineers splits within the movement by buying off a few top leaders. This isn’t succeeding on a large scale though, because the basic contradictions between Dalit and upper class-caste interests are too great. A BJP type of party can never placate the Indian masses for long.

 

^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

—  The original trigger for the film was the murder of 10 unarmed Dalits by police in a Dalit colony in Mumbai, followed by the protest suicide of Vilas Ghogre. These events led to the colony residents filing court cases against the police, and the police filing counter cases against the people they had shot at. The police always do that after an atrocity: they cover up by charging the victims. Police tried to pretend it was a riot that could only have been controlled by resort to firing – which was of course a complete lie. The court process itself took many years – first getting it admitted into court in 1997 and then sustaining the battle. Finally, in 2009, Manohar Kadam, the police officer who ordered the firing, was sentenced to life imprisonment. He immediately appealed in High Court, got bail and never actually went to jail. I then waited for the next round. I wanted to end the film when he was actually brought to justice, but that never happened. Instead, in 2011, some musicians who feature in the film {Kabir Kala Manch (KKM), a cultural organisation that spread anti-caste messages through song} went underground because the police branded them as dangerous ‘Naxalites’ (Maoists) and started hunting them. It was a dangerous situation that could have led to their elimination. That’s when I decided to hurry up and finish the film so civil society could take notice before the State perpetrated another atrocity. As civil society members we formed a KKM Defence Committee, the musicians then came overground and surrendered to the police. Finally, after spending four years in prison awaiting trial, all were released on bail.

 

^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

— In a sense Vilas was betrayed by everybody, including myself. Born into a poor Dalit household Vilas soon became an accomplished poet-musician steeped in the Ambedkarite tradition of poet-musicians like Vamandada Kardak, who spread Ambedkar’s life story and emancipatory message through song and told everyday stories of Dalit suffering and Dalit resistance.  By the 1980s Vilas was beginning to feel restless because Ambedkar’s revolutionary message was getting compromised with the co-optation of leaders of the Republican Party of India (the party that Ambedkar inspired before he passed away in 1956) into mainstream political parties like the Congress and later, the Shiv Sena and BJP. So Vilas joined a revolutionary Maoist party. Initially this gave him a huge creative impetus. His songs became more militant – they were always militant, but they took on a Left consciousness, and yet remained rooted in the Dalit experience. If you compare his ballads that first describe working class Dalit life before then pointing to a Marxist solution, to traditional Left songs that have the rhetoric of revolution without the lived experience of working class life, you will realise how precious Vilas was.

 

But in the end Vilas was expelled by his Left Party, the Communist Party of India’s Marxist-Leninist faction {the CPI (M-L)}, for petty disciplinarian reasons and Vilas was heartbroken by this. The party he had given the most productive years of his life to expelled him because they didn’t understand caste or his living conditions. Vilas worked as a peon and sang to supplement his very tiny income. But this went against party discipline and he was deemed to have sung at non-party venues. I was never in his party but I include myself in the list of people who betrayed Vilas because I did not stay in close touch with him beyond the film we collaborated on in 1985, and was unaware of the trauma he suffered at the hands of the party and in the aftermath of the Ramabai firing. I now, belatedly, remain in touch with his son Milind.

 

^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

— I cannot speak for the Left, as I do not belong to any political party or any fixed ideology. I speak as someone who gives equal weight to Left, Ambedkarite and Gandhian thinking without accepting the limits of any one body of thought. For me each of these has something unique and valuable to offer. I will not spell all this out for want of time and space. The Left, as you rightly point out, has many divisions. And yet there is a common thread that makes them the enemy of communal forces.

 

^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

—  As someone born into a Gandhian Socialist family that fought British rule (my father’s entire family spent many years in British jails) I was never made conscious about caste except to regard it as a distant evil. I was never asked to undergo the thread ceremony that marks upper caste males. At the same time, to my shame I did not read a word by Ambedkar till late into adulthood. The fault lies with my family, schooling and friends circle that the real plight of Dalits didn’t strike me with great force till I volunteered to work in a village project at the age of 22. From that moment on caste was never far from my consciousness. Waves of Revolution, a film I made on the Bihar Movement in 1974–75, has a scene of people breaking their caste threads (a mark of being upper caste). In Ram Ke Naam/In the Name of God (1995) I keep asking people their caste in order to underline that it was mainly the upper castes who wanted to demolish the Babri Mosque. The film ends with a Dalit woman who says that as her people are being evicted from their birthplace, why should she run after the birthplace of God Ram?

 

By the time I met Vilas I already had an understanding about caste but his music was piercingly sharp and later, after his death, the story of Jai Bhim Comrade took me much deeper into a world I had not experienced personally.

 

^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

—  In those days, the RPI was categorised by the Marxist group as a bourgeois party, so this was seen as a serious compromise. It’s not like Vilas went and sang on a rightwing BJP platform; he still chose an Ambedkarite platform, and that should have been okay, but it wasn’t. There were other issues of discipline and in fact he was made to recant and he apologised to his party, the CPI (M-L), and was taken back, but by this time his passion was gone. When the killings at Ramabai happened it was the last straw.

 

That’s the question I had at the beginning: why would a Marxist revolutionary commit suicide? Vilas had reached a moment of despair. But it’s not enough to say that he did it out of despair alone – he also did it as an act of protest against the killings. He didn’t let his death go to waste. On a small blackboard in his hut he wrote a denunciation of the police and called for Ambedkarite unity, and people finally took notice.

 

^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

— That’s an example of a section of the Left not wanting to come to terms with the fact that there can be other progressive colours than just red. In a way, the whole film is talking about the contradiction and cooperation between caste and class. The intersection between Dalits and the Left is a running theme, which in fact gives the film its title {Jai Bhim translates to ‘Victory to Bhim’, Bhim a reference to Ambedkar. The addition of Comrade to the title of the film without punctuation, marks the connection between the Dalit and the Leftist struggle in the story of Vilas Ghogre}. In the beginning before they had seen the film some Dalits were upset with the title because they thought I was calling Ambedkar a communist. After seeing the film they understood that the title pointed to people like Vilas Ghogre and the intersection between class and caste.

 

Dalits are scattered across the country and constitute 16% of the population of India. They also have many internal sub-divisions. To bring real change they would need to unite not only internally but also with other progressive forces.  As for Marxists who want to unite the oppressed in a class struggle, how can they succeed if the poor are subdivided by caste?

 

^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

— Ambedkar was no celebrity politician. He was a revolutionary who struck a huge blow against the caste system. Not only did he help draft India’s Constitution guaranteeing Liberty Equality and Fraternity, he later walked out of Hinduism in disgust and together with hundreds of thousands of followers adopted Buddhism – a religion that did not harbor caste. There is very good reason for him to be in an iconic position. He singlehandedly took the movement forward. Of course there was a background of history, there were people like Mahatma Phule and older traditions of rationality and resistance. And while Ambedkar’s mass base came from the most dispossessed he also had support from across caste lines from all those who had drunk from the cup of egalité and imbibed the spirit of an Enlightenment that had swept across Europe in the eighteenth century.

 

^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

— Equality and knowledge were both traditionally denied to Dalits. For the better part of the history of caste oppression, Dalits were made to believe that they themselves were unclean and inferior and therefore untouchable. That was the first thing that had to change – their self-image had to change. I think this self-image has changed. Now it is by physical force that they’re kept at the bottom. That is the major contribution of Ambedkar but also of Mahatma Gandhi – I know it’s not popular in some circles to point out that Gandhi was an anti-caste crusader in his own right – but I believe that the day he picked up night-soil {excreta} and insisted that manual scavenging was not a dirty job to be done only by Dalits, he broke the purity-pollution principle that lies at the heart of Brahminism.

 

^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

— Frankly, the critics are content to quote Gandhi at one or the other point in his life without seeing his entire trajectory. Gandhi came from a conservative upper caste family – we are talking of well over 150 years ago when caste rules were far more unbreakable than today. It is a telling fact that when Gandhi’s egalitarian principle first pushed him to do manual scavenging himself rather than get it done by a Dalit, no other upper caste leader or intellectual of his time, Leftwing or otherwise, had done anything like this. It was truly a revolutionary moment in time and Gandhi morally forced all his followers to do the same. He fought for temples and village wells to be thrown open to Dalits. He lived in the homes of the poorest Dalit in the village. Towards the end of his life Gandhi declared that the only marriages he would attend would be inter caste marriages. Inter caste marriages followed over decades is the surest way to break the endogamy that defines the caste system.

 

So I will never agree that Gandhi was committed to the caste system. What people must realise is that Gandhi was a nonviolent warrior. He could never succeed by running miles ahead of his flock. A few steps ahead would suffice. So untouchability was the first target.  I have written elsewhere about how both Gandhi and Ambedkar were liberation theologists. Both realised that Indians were steeped in religion. Ambedkar re-imagined Buddhism as his casteless Mecca. Gandhi did the same with Ram Rajya {a system of beliefs in which an ideal society is governed by the rules of Lord Rama}. They took what they liked from the religion they adopted and uprooted the rest.

 

^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

—  Fake news is happening everywhere – on mainstream print and electronic media as well as social media. Public memory disappears in no time. Everything is fresh breaking news, and you’ve forgotten what happened three days ago. It’s ideal for fascist demagogues.

 

On one side are those who speak incessantly about a glorious Hindu past – with a telling of a past where evils like caste oppression are denied or forgotten and all greatness like scientific discoveries or military conquests are rediscovered, or re-imagined through a Hindutva lens.  Knowledge control disguised as religious ritual and indecipherable mumbo jumbo has always been the historical weapon of the religious elite. It comes in the form of an embedded corporate media, a pliant or terrified judiciary, an intellectual class ready to sell its soul and stormtroopers drawn from hordes of unemployed underprivileged people who have been deliberately dumbed down to the extent that a single WhatsApp fake news message on their prized possession- the ubiquitous cell phone – can jumpstart a lynch mob.

^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

—  Films like Jai Bhim Comrade, made over 14 years, are small attempts to preserve memory. If people watched these on a large scale, it could help. The battle to screen them widely continues. The mechanism for this has to be re-invented and sustained.

^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

— This film was made in 2011, and Kabir Kala Manch was underground at the time. Partly because the film was shown a lot, we created civil society awareness of what was happening – the government couldn’t have just gotten away with calling them Maoist and shooting them. We formed a defense committee for the Kabir Kala Manch and they finally came overground, surrendered to the police and said You can charge us with what you want. After a few months, Sheetal Sathe, the poet-singer of the KKM, was released on bail. And after four years, her husband Sachin Mali and three other KKM members who were also arrested were released on bail. Now they’re all out on bail, but they’re no longer one group. Over the years, they developed differences and Shital and her husband Sachin started their own separate group though they were originally the backbone of KKM. Both groups are active and vibrant.

 

^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

— This approach — to look at the effect of multinational corporations on the Indian economy and its impacts on marginalised groups — was a contribution of Left consciousness entering the Ambedkarite movement. The earlier tradition was more often confined to stories of Ambedkar’s life and teachings. Of course the Right also uses music to spread its message, but since religious culture has been dominant for thousands of years they have immensely more resource material than those who are trying to rediscover the roots of rationality.

 

Religious iconography is in your face all the time, and the Right makes political capital of it. Every religious festival becomes a weapon in their hands. By falsifying history, the Right has also appropriated nationalism. People who never fought for India’s freedom, who never went to jail against the British, those who were in fact were collaborators, now drape themselves in the national flag – the very tricolour that they poured scorn upon until recently. Since they had no heroes of their own, they have started to appropriate all those whom the people still respect, be it Gandhi, Ambedkar or Bhagat Singh. To the extent they succeed it is because people read original texts so little, and rely on hearsay and fake news so much.

 

^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

— The rationalist message is more truthful and also more poetic – but it has no effective outlet. The right-wing message can be crude and completely false, but is repeated endlessly.

 

^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

— If I didn’t feel hopeful it’d be hard to continue! I am actually hopeful. I think in the last 150 years progress has been made, at least in consciousness. You couldn’t imagine 150 years ago that there would be so many Dalit professionals in all walks of life. Of course it’s not what it should be by any stretch of the imagination, and atrocities against Dalits are increasing, but atrocities are also increasing because resistance is increasing. People are fighting back. Caste survived for thousands of years because both the oppressor and the oppressed had internalised it as ‘God-given’. Today the oppressed are no longer docile and self-subjugated, and this is where hope lies.

 

^A

ANAND PATWARDHAN

— The methods of destroying caste may sound idealistic but all they require is genuine political will. One key to is to create a free common school system where children of any given neighborhood study side by side regardless of caste, class or creed. But by far the surest way of destroying caste is intermarriage. When several generations marry and procreate across caste lines, no one would be able to pinpoint what their caste actually is or was. Once endogamy is destroyed, caste is destroyed. Of course all this cannot be implemented through a dictat. We need to change hearts and minds. For that we need every cultural warrior we can find.