Joothan A Dalits Life: An Untouchable's Life [Paperback]

Anyone interested in Indian culture or history or social justice issues should read this book. It is a rare glimpse into that other history of India, the one that everybody knows is there and nobody wants to talk about.

Omprakash Valmiki grew up in Northern India in the decades just after Indian Independence, and in this book he sets forth a collection of scenes from his life. He begins as the son of a desperately poor family from the lowest caste in Indian society, a community of illiterate Untouchables, who fights to gain an education and becomes, today, a respected playwright. His tells of the torments he suffered along the way (and occasionally still suffers), as well as of his political awakening and the development of his consciousness and morale. He describes, by example, how India's thousands-year-old system of institutionalized slavery has actually worked on the ground and upon the lives of real people, how it manifests its power over their hearts, minds, and stomachs. He gives us an anatomy of oppression.

But while the darkness that pulled Valmiki down is relentlessly bleak, his life-story is stunning. That a person could pull himself up from such poverty, such abject powerlessness, to advance himself in the world and become recognized as a writer and an empowered voice, working on behalf of Dalits, is nothing less than amazing. His is one of those inspired lives, the kind we want to hear about to remind ourselves how much adversity the human mind and spirit are able to overcome, to remember that we can thrive despite all.

While Valmiki's prose doesn't entirely conform to the modern Western literary sensibility, the content of his account is breathtakingly honest and brave. We are reminded in the foreword that the highest purpose of Dalit writing is not beauty of craft, but authenticity of experience. And as we put together the realities of his life, we come to understand why.

Most significantly, though, Valmiki's story is a voice from the half of India that has been voiceless for countless generations. In the latter decades of the 20th century, Valmiki and a few others like him have breached an opening for our understanding and knowledge about a people so marginalized that they disappeared from the world's awareness, their cultures, lifestyles, folk knowledge, and aspirations represented nowhere in mainstream or scholarly sources. For thousands of years, the oppressed of India had only been spoken about and spoken for by outsiders lacking any real knowledge of their lives--indeed, usually by those with a vested interest in preserving the status quo, with its imbalance of power against the Dalits.

Even today, most Dalit writing is unavailable to the English-speaking world because Dalits usually write in Hindi or another indigenous Indian language. "Joothan" was translated from Hindi by Arun Prabha Mukherjee, a professor of English at York University in Canada. In making this work available to a wider audience, and in illuminating the book with her thoughtful and insightful foreword, which provides historical, cultural, and literary context, she has done the world a great service.