Dalit-Bahujan history is marked by absence and exclusion from the mainstream historiographic writings. National archives and central university libraries in India have failed to record Dalit-Bahujan experiences or their cultural nuances. This lack of formal documentation has meant that much of the Dalit-Bahujan culture and history survives only through oral narratives, passed down from one generation to another through story-telling, ethnographies, myths, and folklore. Engaging with these oral repositories takes us beyond the existing notions about India's marginalised communities and the Brahminical and Eurocentric biases inherent in them.
The archival exclusion has only widened the gap in acknowledgment of Dalit-Bahujan knowledge production in India. This is unlike the West, where researchers of folk culture and oral histories have shown keen interest in preserving Dalit-Bahujan history. For instance, the Smithsonian archives have preserved oral recordings of the Dhola epic by singers such as Ram Swaroop Dhimar and Matlol Singh. This acknowledgement infuses dignity into their labour, something that Indian archives and history-telling have largely missed. But mainstream historiography institutions in India have kept not just Dalit-Bahujan stories out, but also any acknowledgment of the caste system.
There have been some efforts, though. The Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, has a Dalit Resource Centre, which has conducted basti-level conferences and workshops and is documenting oral history of Dalit-Bahujans. Similarly, institutes like Nagaloka in Nagpur, Maharashtra, have been important sources of Buddhist repositories in India.
But the responsibility of recording Dalit-Bahujan history has mainly rested on the shoulders of people's memory and imagination, and cultural symbols have played an important role here -- not just in keeping alive the history that dominant castes have all but buried but also in questioning their authoritarian views and practices that have relegated Dalit-Bahujans to the margins.
Exclusion of Dalit-Bahujan stories and oral history
Historical writings in India have been mainly about glorifying the worldview of the dominant castes. The act of writing itself is shaped by existing power dynamics -- who gets to write whose history. The hegemonic caste-ruled social order has controlled how mainstream narratives are told and oral traditions of Dalit-Bahujans ignored.
A prominent example is the history of King Ashoka. The Dalit-Bahujan community considers him as a non-Aryan (Dasyu), who was a Mulnivasi and a Shudra. Ashoka's acceptance of Buddhism is seen as his revolt against the existing social order as stated in the Vedas. It is alternative histories such as these that mainstream historiography has blatantly disregarded, creating huge gaps in our understanding of not just Dalit-Bahujan history but larger Indian history and culture.
The caste system's control over the cultural realm of performing art, which dictates the myth, narration, and languages used in performances, has subsumed Dalit-Bahujan culture into the dominant narratives. This (mis)appropriation has created a Brahminical homogenisation of Dalit-Bahujan art and culture. Therefore, India's caste-based society has not only forgotten the history of those on the margins but also created historiography of misplaced identities.
The oral narrative of Dalit-Bahujan history offers an alternative to the established understanding of Indian history. This is significant because it enriches our engagement with the everyday cultural frameworks of Dalit-Bahujan society such as their celebration of festivals, idolisation of icons, rituals, etc.
However, the contestation to this appropriation and homogenisation is happening in a new, popular cultural space. Jamaican-British sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall defines cultural space as a "site of negotiation" where a "struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle". This struggle negotiates its position to re-construct identities that have been subsumed into mainstream culture. The creation of this popular cultural space in India is, therefore, a necessary alternative that questions the authenticity of the existing dominant caste-cultural practices.
Some of the new pop-cultural spaces can be seen on popular Twitter and Instagram handles such as @TribalArmy, @EqualityLabs @AmbedkariteIND, @bhim_warriors_official, @Dalitdesk etc.
Source: The Print India
