A struggle with inequality

For 24 hours Saroj, who now owns a Rs 250 crore ($42 million) empire that stretches from sugar to real estate to industrial pipes to movies, seemed to have slipped into a coma even as doctors at the local hospital near her native Roperkheda village in Vidarbha, the drought-ridden heart of the western state of Maharashtra, struggled to wash the poison out of her stomach.

Then, just as suddenly and beating tremendous odds, she began to awaken. She was only 15, but by that time she had been married, abused and tortured and had left her husband’s home to return to her parents. She had spent nearly two years waking up every morning at 4:00 a.m. and working nearly nonstop apart from short breaks for meals and a bath (sometimes not even that) till midnight.

She did not mind the cooking or the cleaning. Nor the hours of washing clothes. But her husband’s family kept chickens. Those cages would be full of chicken shit. "I had never seen such filth. The smell was horrible. I would vomit several times while trying to clean them," remembers Saroj.

Her police constable father had sent her to school until Class 10; he had hoped she would, even after marriage, be able to go to college. "He never wanted me to get married so early," says Saroj, now 53, who speaks fast, and starts answering before questions are completed. It is as if, decades after it all happened, the torture is embedded and alive, even, every now and again, kicking. She speaks casually, with only the slightly unnatural speed perhaps giving away the old pain, and every now and again there is a small pause as she stops to force herself to remember.

During those months, she was given food only once or twice a day; often the smell of the chicken pens so nauseated her that she could not eat for days. One day, about two years after her marriage, Saroj’s father came to see her. "He was shocked. He had never seen me so shattered. He told my in-laws, ‘I married off my daughter, I did not sell her into slavery,"’ says Saroj. That day she returned to her father’s house. A new ordeal began. "I was a Dalit girl who had already broken her marriage. It was the biggest curse,” says Saroj. Dalit literally means "oppressed" in Hindi.

In the Hindu system of caste, the origins of which are disputed but whose poisonous effects have continued for centuries, for many Indians, Dalits are literally untouchables. They make up around 16 per cent of the Indian population but have traditionally remained the lowest rung of society (the highest were the Brahmins). The Brahmins and other upper castes would not accept either food or water from the hand of a Dalit. They would not visit the homes of Dalits and would not invite a Dalit to their home. My grandmother had a phrase for the impossible situation that Dalits faced in the old days—Bamnar aage huthleo dosh, pore hathleo dosh.

It means there is a problem if you walk before the Brahmin and there is a problem if you walk behind the Brahmin. It was meant to suggest the absolute farcical hopelessness of a situation. The Dalit could not walk in front of the Brahmin because an untouchable did not care to be in front of the priestly caste—nor could the Dalit walk behind the Brahmin because he risked stepping on the shadow of the Brahmin, which was utterly unthinkable. Even today in parts of India, the punishment meted out to an “errant" Dalit woman is to be paraded naked through the village — and often gang-raped by upper-caste men. In 2012, 33,655 crimes were committed against "scheduled castes," a government term for lower castes; the brunt of the violence is always directed toward Dalits. All of this is in spite of the fact that the legal ban against caste discrimination was first introduced by the British in 1850 under the Caste Disabilities Removal Act (or Act XXI); special protection was then given to lower castes under the Government of India Act of 1935, and 17 separate laws were passed by various Indian states to end caste discrimination between 1943 and 1950.

The first national legislation against caste discrimination in independent India (after 1947) was created with the Untouchability (Offenses) Act of 1955, which was strengthened in 1976 and made the Protection of Civil Rights Act. In 1990, a special law called the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act came into being. But the violence continues—and rates of violence doubled from around 14,000 in 1981 to 33,000 in 2001 and have remained stubbornly at those levels since then.

As India has modernized and urbanized, the most horrific of these crimes tend to take place in villages rather than in the big city where anonymity and modernity increasingly blur caste identity markers. Nearly all the women killed as "witches" each year in India (760 women have been killed since 2008 after being termed "witches" and 119 murdered in 2012 alone) were Dalits, and the majority of these hunts happened in the most rural states of India—Jharkhand and Odisha. It is as if modern India is bringing alive with a vengeance what Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar saw all those years ago. Ambedkar, a Dalit scholar who was one of the finest intellectuals India has ever known, wrote the Indian constitution.

A seminal figure in India’s struggle for freedom from British rule, Ambedkar embraced the modern early. A graduate in law, economics and political science of Columbia University and the London School of Economics, he was a prodigious student. In his three years at Columbia, he took 11 courses in history, five in philosophy, three in politics, four in anthropology, one each in basic German and French and 29 in economics. Ambedkar advocated the total destruction of the caste system and promoted inter-caste marriage. Barely weeks before his death in 1956, faced with unrelenting orthodox Hindu resistance and after years of research, he embraced Buddhism and urged Dalits to do the same. This kind of renouncing was not new in Ambedkar’s politics and polemic.

In November 1948, barely a year after independence, at a time when most Indians lived in villages and earned their living from farming, when Mahatma Gandhi made villages the cornerstone of his political philosophy and the prime unit of his idyllic Indian society, Ambedkar famously argued, “What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism."

This is what Saroj faced when she returned to her father’s village. Whispers started, asking why a Dalit girl had to leave her husband’s home. Fingers were pointed at her father—had he failed to reveal some illicit fact about his daughter that was later unearthed by the in—laws? "I could not take the insult of my father. I was convinced that the only way was to remove myself.

I had to kill myself." Three bottles of pesticide later, she was alive but with the additional burden of a girl who had tried to kill herself. The gossip in the village asked if she was mad, if that’s why she had been “sent back from her husband’s home.” She then decided to do what Ambedkar wanted of Dalits—to leave the village and seek their fortune in the city.

“But my parents and relatives did not want a young girl to come to the city. A girl who had left her husband, a girl who had no male guardian—it was unbelievable," remembers Saroj.

"But I had crossed the final line—I was ready to die, so nothing could scare me anymore. I told them if they did not let me go, I would jump under a train and kill myself. And this time, there would be no time for doctors or hospitals to save me."

So it was that Saroj came to Bombay, the financial capital of India, to live with the family of a distant relative. Bombay, she says, seemed like America to her.

It was dazzling and different from anything she had ever imagined. "I had never seen such tall buildings. In fact I didn’t believe that buildings could be that tall," she says. “When I first saw the buildings of Mumbai [Bombay], I felt very scared but I also felt free.

I had broken away from the shackles of the village. And even though I had failed to become a nurse or join the police like my father—or even join the military as I had hoped after my suicide since I did not fear death anymore—I felt that this was a place where I could make something of my life."

Her first job was at a small stitching center with a salary of Rs 200 a month. The first day she went there, Saroj froze. "I had never seen men and women working side by side in my life.

And I never thought I someone would offer me a Rs 100 note in my life. Here someone was offering me Rs 200! It was unbelievable," she says.

She rented a room for herself in one of Bombay’s slums—for Rs 40 a month. After a couple of years working at that center, Saroj started a not-for-profit to help women from impoverished backgrounds access government funds in order to start small-scale enterprises.

Soon she spotted a loan she could take (of Rs 50,000) and started a furniture shop. As business grew, Saroj became more entrenched in local politics. As she says, "Many people began to see me as someone who could get things done."

(Excerpts from ‘Recasting India’ byHindol Sengupta; published by PalgraveMacmilan; `499)