Khairlanji by Anand Teltumbde
Lankesh Prakashana
Let me begin by saying clearly: Anand Teltumbde’s “Khairlanji” is an insightful interpretation on the ‘presence’ of caste that comes along at a time when the Dalit/caste studies seem to have reached an analytical impasse, over-determined as they are with explorations of identity. The book under review is a Kannada translation of the same along with an addition of a detailed interview of the author. On September 29 four Dalits in Khairlanji village of Maharashtra’s Bhandara district were bludgeoned to death and their mutilated bodies were dumped in a nearby canal. The provocation for the bestial killings was that Bhaiyalal Bhotmange’s wife, daughter, and two sons were educated and asserted their right to a life of dignity. This was clearly unacceptable to the OBC-dominated village. The book also traces the role of the secular State machinery (police, judiciary) and the media which colluded to cover up the bestial act. The horrifying incident in Khairlanji is not an isolated case of caste atrocity, as the author reminds us that on an average two Dalits are lynched every day. Taking this as a point of departure, Teltumbde attempts to inquire into the contemporaneity of caste in modern India by asking two related questions: How do we understand caste today? Why is it no longer enough to brand caste as pre-modern or pre-capitalist and/or account for its ritual dominance? The process is indeed an attempt to resist the reified ways in which caste continues to figure in much of socio-anthropological literature and writings in political sociology.
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Caste studies today animate a contradictory state of existence marked by an essentialisation of caste or its marginalisation. Perceiving the importance of caste and recognising caste mediated realities as important to Indian society, and how they supersede all else, many scholars conclude that this society can be described solely in terms of caste identity. On the other, there are also those who say that caste is today becoming salient and even primary player in determining the modern political system. The epistemic-privilege on the ‘experience’ of subaltern castes in making sense of caste oppression was a significant aspect of caste studies. However, studies in Kannada on the experiences of the subaltern castes seem limited by issues of assertion and collective mobilisation against years of dominance and hegemony by the ‘upper castes’. In seeking to delineate a departure, Teltumbde pursues the question of the “contemporaneity of caste: about what is happening to the hierarchical principle? How relevant is varna in understanding caste today? Is caste today indeed an ‘invention’ of colonialism? While taking the ‘lower castes’ as its subject matter, Teltumbde holds out a formulation where in the last four decades there is no direct involvement of the Brahmin community in the caste atrocities, even as the Brahminical cultural values themselves find greater acceptance among the ‘Other Backward Castes’.
The book also tries to show how the brutality of caste power could be curbed at different levels of its manifestation – be it at the level of ideology with a counter-ideology, ensuring exemplary punishment that may act as a deterrent, but more importantly by eliminating the basic source of differential power in a rural scenario through land reforms and redistribution.
This is a bold work, panoramic in scope, forthright in conception and argument. However, limiting caste studies to the ‘lower castes’ their movements and assertions, only to villages, and to the field of politics and governmentality, and consequently its erasure from the urban, ‘Brahmin’ contexts that manifest in subtler forms needs greater reflection than what the text has been able to address.
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Finally, ‘Kharilanji’ makes one wonder if converting to Buddhism would contribute to the “annihilation of caste”?!