Ridding India of its putrid racism and casteism must start by teaching this important fact in school
Poyi, poyi, paandi parayante kudumbathil ketti.
"She's gone and married a Tamil darkie from an untouchable family." That casteist and colourist vignette was served up as admonishment to a family member for marrying a Tamilian. Never mind that the pronouncement contained several calumnies: the only truth there was that the groom was Tamil. Never mind that caste is supposed to be a nonstarter for Christians.
I wasn't around when this incident happened, but the story was always gleefully repeated. This, then, is the power of racism and casteism, its lesser known India cousin (to the West): its ability to put someone down for something they're not responsible for and should never have to apologize for.
Microaggressions
Growing up, North Indians would be routinely shocked on meeting me: "...but you don't look South Indian," they'd say. It was meant to be a compliment. As an impressionable child, I certainly received it as one. We have a word for this phenomenon today: microaggressions. It took many years of work, catalyzed by courageous feedback from friends, to get comfortable in my own skin, and with that of others.
The subcontinent's obsession with fair complexion and skin lightening potions has long been well understood. With the amount of casual racism that gets tossed around in this country, that shouldn't surprise anyone. If you're going to be constantly zinged for being dark, you're going to find a way to not be dark, or be less dark, anyway.
A former lover first introduced to the term bhangi (a caste of manual scavengers, considered by some to be one of the lowest untouchable castes). His family, originally from Sindh in Pakistan, had settled in Madhya Pradesh after the partition. He used the term to describe how I looked after we spent a whole day out in the sun trekking. I was horrified. I quickly showered to remedy the situation and regain my position in society.
What Does All This Have to Do With Gandhi?
In the aftermath of George Floyd's death and the subsequent worldwide resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, there was an unexpected byproduct: calls to remove Gandhi's statues on account of him being racist. This has left some people perplexed: surely, this is a cunning ploy by white supremacists to massively distract from the actual issue.
So, let's investigate the man himself and these claims about him. While Gandhi is justifiably lauded for pioneering nonviolent resistance to British colonialism, what's not as well known is his trenchant racism and casteism.
In 1903, when Gandhi was in South Africa, he wrote that white people there should be "the predominating race." He also said black people "are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals." His only quarrel with white people was that they wouldn't treat brown-skinned South Asians like him as equals. The blacks can be damned because they deserve it.
It has since been argued that Gandhi was racist only in his early years in South Africa, and that by the time he left, he was on good terms with the black Africans there. This is conjecture at best. We have no writings from Gandhi proving this change of heart, while there's plenty of well-documented evidence of his virulently racist stance towards black Africans.
Caste-ing a Wide Net
On the matter of caste, on the other hand, there's much less contention: Gandhi was enthusiastically casteist. Although eradication of untouchability was one of his leading missions, he long remained an advocate of the varnavyavastha, the fourfold caste order. In 1921, for instance, he wrote in the journal Navajivan, “...if Hindu Society has been able to stand, it is because it is founded on the caste system.”
His seemingly inconsistent stand on caste has often confused people: after all he fought vigorously against untouchability. But the devil is in the details: he was an untouchability abolitionist, not a caste abolitionist. People like the Indian-American Dalit writer Sujatha Gidla have speculated that Gandhi's vocal stand against untouchability was motivated by realpolitik:
He really wanted to preserve the caste system, and why he paid lip service to the upliftment of untouchables is because Hindus needed a majority against Muslims for political representation in the British government.
The Ideal Bhangi
As an astute online commenter observed, "at a time when science was revolutionizing everything and making life more comfortable, apparently Gandhi couldn't think of ways in which technological advancements would make sanitation and the cleaning of latrines an easier and tidier job.
Far from this, we have in The Ideal Bhangi, a confirmation of the status quo, a definition of the scavenger interspersed with repugnant and unsavory details on how to clean a latrine. By linking divinity and motherhood to manual scavenging, Gandhi had wanted to elevate the job but still perpetuate it. The answer lay in modern methods of sanitation and not in asking the bhangis to consider their job sacred."
What's the Point of This Essay?
Gandhi was a complex man and a product of his times. He was ahead of the curve in some respects but on the wrong side of history on others. We do him, and Indian society, a great disservice, but reducing him to a caricature of infallibility. In a country where colour, caste, and race are engaged in a complex marriage of convenience, we need to take our public figures down a few notches and make them real.
We could take a leaf out of modern Germany's playbook for this. Germany's high school curriculum "challenges its young to come to terms with the burden of a collective past far more cruel and destructive than teen-agers anywhere else in the world are obliged to contemplate. And it is part of the attempt by a postwar generation to explain why the past must not repeat itself to those who will one day run Europe's economic and political powerhouse."
We would do very well in India to apply some of these lessons to our own context. We could start by teaching a nuanced history of our nation's founders: that while Gandhi is the father of the nation, he was also racist and casteist. Ridding India of its putrid racism and casteism must start by teaching this important fact in school.