Dennis Baron

Global English may be about to go celestial. A political activist in India wants the country’s poorest caste to improve its status by worshipping the English language, and to start off he’s building a temple to Goddess English in the obscure village of Bankagaon, near Lakhimpur Khiri in Uttar Pradesh.

English started on the long path to deification back in the colonial age, and in many former British colonies English has become both an indispensable tool for survival in the modern world and a bitter reminder of the Raj. In 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay recommended to fellow members of the India Council that the British create a system of English-language schools in the colony to train an elite class of civil servants, “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,” who would help the British rule the subcontinent.

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Abu Dhabi :The spotlight was once again on India at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, courtesy a British filmmaker. Kim Longinotto in ‘Pink Saris’ depicted the evils of child marriage and the caste conflict in the interiors of northern India – and a woman’s fight to bring about change.

M. Swathy Margaret

(First published in the March-April 2005 issue of Insight Young Voices magazine)

I am a Dalit-middle-class, University educated, Telugu speaking Dalit-Christian-Woman. All these identities have a role in the way I perceive myself and the worlds I inhabit. I, as a Dalit woman, primarily write for Dalit women to uphold our interests. This statement of mine is necessary because if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others – for their use and to our detriment. This voice is not representative of all Dalit women. However, I know that my voice is important because it is the voice of a socially denigrated category, suppressed and silenced.

 My own self-perception and understanding as a Dalit woman, as a point of intersection/an overlap between the categories “Dalit” and “woman”, took shape in the University of Hyderabad when I joined there for my M.A. in English. I fell in love with the sprawling campus instantly. Some familiar-looking young men came to my aid in filling the endless forms and challans, saying they are from the Ambedkar Students’ Union. Hearing Ambedkar’s name I knew I belonged there. However, it did not take much time before I realized they refused to see an equal intellectual comrade in me. Like the majority of men, they acknowledge a dalit woman’s presence as only fit for handing over bouquets to the guest speakers they invite for their meetings. At the most, she can give the vote of thanks. They do not consider her in important decisions or in writing papers. Later I learned that excluding women from their committees was a deliberate policy they followed as they believed women’s presence would cause “problems” and come in the way of serious politics. Women inevitably mean “problems”, their sexuality being an uncontrolled wild beast waiting to pounce upon the unassuming dalit men in the movement. It is assumed that they divert the attention from the larger concerns of the movement.

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Ila Patnaik

Economists have tended to focus on expenditure patterns, consumption and income to assess poverty and inequality in rural India. Within these categories, the debate among economists normally focuses on the average consumer or the one living below the poverty line. This approach fits well with methods for studying changing inequality in most countries. However, it ignores the most important aspect of rural India—the inequality created by the caste system.

CATHNEWS

A dalit woman has thanked a Catholic nun for helping her to overcome the prejudice and corruption that could have cost her livelihood.Upper caste parents voiced opposition to Teju Bai’s job as a school cook in Madhya Pradesh, asserting that her former “untouchable” caste status would render the food impure and inedible.“But I did not back down, because I was aware that prejudice due to someone’s ‘untouchable’ status is no longer legal,” said the 40-year-old mother of four.

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INDIA BLOOMS

New Delhi:  Names of several women folk poets were systematically wiped off, said Vishnu Khare, well-known poet, translator and critic.He was speaking at the 11th Friday Seminar Lecture series organized by the School of Gender and Development Studies, IGNOU. The topic of the lecture was “The Daughters of Punna and Mutta: Contemporary Women Poets in Hindi”.“The MA Hindi course being taught in our Universities is a Hindu Course. It has not been secularized. We need to hijack Mir, Ghalib , Umrao Jaan Ada into the Hindi curriculum and secularize it,“ said Khare.

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