Caste and Gender in the Urban Space of Keralam
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Caste and Gender in the Urban Space of Keralam A Case study based on Experience of Chithra Lekha In small towns and urban spaces in India we can often find cinema theatres, old book shops, night-skies, dirt, varieties of sounds, sights, visions and what not!!! But we cannot forget that these spaces are also inhabited by a large number of human beings who create and consume all of these urban and semi-urban phenomena. As researchers coming from the discipline of humanities, such human interactions that structure the culture of the urban space is what interests us most. This helps us get in touch with our own troubled lives in various semi-urban situations, both as children and as adults, which has pushed us like this, to think about the way this world is arranged. Thus we decided to study one of the most important patterns in the urban design, the way in which identities such as caste, gender and religion make and unmake human lives. It was easy for us to choose the Chithralekha case for this, as it is often called, which in 2006, was on the lips of every Malayalee intellectual who wanted to talk about the issue of caste in the contemporary space of Kerala. We begin this report by giving a detailed account of this case: Chithra Lekha was born into a Pulaya family, which is an ex-untouchable caste in Keralam. Chithra Lekha's husband Shreeshanth is a Thiyya (an OBC caste). Both his family and the dominant left party (CPI (M)) structure were against Shreeshanth marrying Chithra Lekha as she is a Dalit. Yet the couple went ahead and got legally married. In their attempt to make a better living, they resorted to what many Dalitbahujans of moffusil towns easily choose: an autorickshaw. The autorickshaw KL 13L 8527 was bought in Chitra Lekha's name under the PMRY loan scheme. The Edaatu auto rickshaw stand in which Chithra Lekha wanted to drive her auto was under CITU, the trade union that belongs to the Communist Party of India, Marxist (CPI (M)). To start functioning from this stand Chithra Lekha had to obtain a membership card from the CITU. However, this card was delayed for more than 2 months as the party was already angry with Chithra Lekha having married above her caste. Chithra also told us that they adopted such delaying techniques with many new comers from "other" communities. When at last she was given membership she started driving her auto rickshaw from March 2005. According to Chithra Lekha, they welcomed her with these words: “O! The subalterns have progressed. A Pulaya woman has come with an auto” In spite of such harassment Chithra Lekha turned out to be a competent driver and became very popular with her customers, especially women. When she started her career there had been a coin operated phone at the auto stand where the customers would call for drivers. Soon, Chithra Lekha started getting the most number of calls from this phone. This she feels disturbed her fellow male drivers. After a few months she bought a mobile phone and now people started calling for her even more than before. This made the drivers feel even more threatened. All these problems took a violent turn during the Navami or Saraswathy Pooja days when Chithra Lekha placed her auto in the common Pandal for pooja. When she came to take back the auto on the next day, that is on October 11, 2005, she found that the hood of her auto was torn. Ajith, one of the CITU members who had threatened her earlier was standing there and she asked him why did he tore the hood. He retaliated saying that if you don't keep your limits you will also be torn like this. She complained about the incident to Rameshan, fellow auto driver and the Secretary of the local branch of CITU, but to no avail. Since there was no response from Rameshan or CITU, she lodged a complaint with the police after two days. When she came back to the stand on October 14th Rameshan gave her a two hour punishment of abstention, for having taken the case out of the stand to the police station. Chithra Lekha declined to obey it, at which point an angry Rameshan tried to run over Chithra Lekha with his auto. She moved to the other side of the road and escaped the attack. However she sustained minor injuries and had to be hospitalized. Yet another compliant was lodged against Rameshan and he was arrested. Immediately CITU members unleashed a poster campaign in support of Rameshan. They stuck posters and wrote on the walls of the panchayath that Chithra Lekha and her mother were loose women who were bringing up the issue of caste only to hide their immoral natures. Soon, violence took its worst form when her auto was burned to ashes on the small hours of December 30th 2005. With the help of Ayyappan Master, a Dalit activist and member of the police committee to prevent atrocities against SC/STs, Chithra Lekha lodged a complaint against six CITU members including Ajith and Rameshan. The case was registered under IPC 143, 147, 148, 341, 352, 324, 294 (B), 506 (1), SC/ST S3 (1) XI R/W and 149. Two of the accused were arrested later and soon came out on bail. All the others have either gone abroad or are in hiding. The case is still going on and a final verdict has not been given. One month after the burning of the auto rickshaw, a local action committee was formed to rehabilitate Chithra Lekha. Zulfath, a woman activist of the feminist organization, Sthree Vedhi was the convenor of the committee. Other important members of the committee included Mr Subrahmanian, K M Venugopal, Ayyappan Master, Dr Surendranath, Mr Gopinath, etc. The committee was divided on how to rehabilitate Chithra Lekha. While one section was for buying an auto rickshaw for her, the other group wanted to limit things to arranging an auto on rent for her. However, at last, the committee presented her with a rented auto at a public meeting under the condition that she should pay Rs.100/ daily to the owner. But she could not pay the committee the rent and she also developed problems with Zulfath who was supervising the whole process and within 10 days she returned the auto back to the committee, which by then had been dissolved. She also lost all connection with the members and was soon out of public eye. A few months later when some party members attacked her brother thinking it was Sreeshanth her husband, the news was not reported in any paper. Moreover, now there was no citizen's initiative which could support her. When we went to meet Zulfath and Subramanian, they were clueless about Chitralekha's real whereabouts and they told us that they did not have any contact with her after the auto was returned. Initial objectives When we gave the proposal for studying this incidence of violence, we wanted to do two things. One, we wanted to document the entire incident through interviews, photographs, paper cuttings and audio-visual material and if possible video recordings. We also wanted to analyse the whole incident from a theoretical perspective and see how caste operates in the contemporary space of Kerala. Along with passing on our documentation to SARAI, we also wanted to widely circulate our theoretical analysis in the mainstream press in Keralam. Here is a detail account of how we envisaged our project in the beginning before the field work was conducted. Documentation We started with the notion that any ethnographic documentation of an event is not value free and is marked by the initial questions and urges that frame the project. We did not want to claim to put forward the "true" story or the "real" incident as it happened. Instead our documentation would be influenced and structured by the following questions and interests: First of all we wanted to capture the differences in the way the same incident is put forward by all those narrating it– the police, the involved parties, the NGOs involved, the mainstream press, the mainstream intellectuals and the various Dalit and feminist intellectuals who have involved in the issue. Here we knew that we were starting off with the notion that most people involved in this issue such as the police, the auto rickshaw drivers involved and the people of the town would see this as just a case of law and order, caused by the aberrant ways of a rebellious woman. We hoped to find critical and political analysis of the events only from Dalitbahujan intellectuals and given our experience of Kerala culture, we were highly sceptical about mainstream intellectuals. We were also quite prejudiced against the mainstream press and media in Keralam. In spite of/or because of this knowledge we hoped that we would be able to capture moments that are totally unexpected and unprepared for. Our second major concern in the documentation of the event was about what would be our relationship to the central person in the story, Chithra Lekha, and her family members. We knew that what has happened must have been highly traumatic for Chithra Lekha, and we already had heard stories about certain individuals and institutions making away with funds meant to help her. We wanted to bring out these aspects in our documentation. However, we did not want to comment on anything more at that point and we wanted to allow Chithra Lekha to decide the terms of her relationship with us as researchers - whether she would want to talk to us or not and in what terms and under what condition.