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dedicado a
« quienes es regalo la muerte »
« para quienes está prohibida la vida »
dedicated to
« those for whom a gift is death »
« for those who are denied life »
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• • • « para un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos » • • •
∵
• • • « all knowledge is provisional » • • •
∴
• • • « இயல்வது கரவேல் » • • •
• • { eeyalvathu karaveil } • •
{ the good we can do, we must do }
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Resistance and Rebellion
Struggling Ever Lasting
Against Deprivation
Against Forgetting
Against Oblivion
.
For Memory
For Dignity
For Justice
For Truth
.
For Freedom
For Livable Futures
For Life in All Forms
Makes Worthwhile
Being Alive
*
: 0 :
a verifiable cosmogeny
consider these figures and facts whole foods for mentation
for ever will definition be evidential interpretation
13.799 billion years of cosmos known
4.6 billion years thence the birth of a sun shown
4.57 billion years ago a planet in heat begun
at least 3.7 billion years passed first microbes, threads of life webs spun
1.2 billion years of sexual reproduction
200 million years of mammalian induction
around 50 million years of primates’ time
emerging after a pulse of mass extinction and biodiverse explosion sublime
sometime between 5 and 13 million years before,
evolution knocked on the ancestors of gorillas’ oranghutans’ chimps’ and bonobos’ core
and branched from hominidae and again from hominini to hominina ancestors’ kind
and at least 3.3 million years ago developed a rock-knapping-capable mind,
for some 400,000 year passed, were they throwing spears and lighting flame
then 300,000 years ago, hominina, anatomically modern, became
with a minimum 70,000 years on body and rock of brown, yellow, red ochre, symbolic color bursts
and at least 40,000 years ago, beads, figures, sculpture, rhythm, music rehearsed!
and as hominina conjured a consciousness different than their relatives assumed
as language, dance, music, speech, symbol, word, record, and a collective memory bloomed
what of the effects on the earths, waters, fires, winds, and sky-ice-mountains tall?
as hominina grew in reach and number, what of the effects on life big and small?
dominating men, subordinating men, cultures, fathers, children, women, worlds, mother
what about the effects on lives other?
through 13.799 billion years out of a great-mystery and into spacetime ever diverging,
as galaxies swirling pass 3.7 billion years of a biofilm of planetary fecundity pulsing emerging,
earthlings find themselves
in quite
a curious
ominous
predicament.
Unlike the previous die-offs-and-live-ons resulting from extra-species activities borne by a planet vital;
volcanoes, asteroids, and environmental factors mysterious,
the latest mass extinction assumes a peculiar character tidal:
the latest mass extinction wave came about as a result of the activities of a mere single species become delirious.
As a result of the universal evolutionary selective pressures that guide life-unfolding, neural faculties for specialized language of the single surviving earthling species of the hominina, became sequestered and bonded to a cycle consolidating the privileges and powers
of to by and for
a mere few of them
and they forgot about the rest.
Imagining, thinking, naming, defining, interpreting, they mistakenly subsumed all human body types, intersex, female, and male, into incomplete-thoughts. Thus the namers of things came to call themselves by signals male: in Spanish, HOMBRE, in English, MAN, and in Tamil, மனிதன் { MANEETHAN }. And they rendered themselves oblivious to the deprivation and desolation of their making of themselves and others of their species, and therefore that of their other fellow earthlings inhabiting earth.
For as has been conceived and expressed, what we do to others, we do to ourselves.
Let’s check in on them and see how they’re doing…
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: 1 :
solidarity in hyderabad and beyond
What follows are a few sketches of the contours and elements of social terrains as they shift with time: attitudes, values, roles, institutions. Though they must not be mistaken for a comprehensive weave through time of the patterns of the social landscape, narrow yet clear lines are these few temporal narrative threads intended to trace. The sketches are drawn from a few significant figures, events, and patterns, and interleaved by a personal account of a month lived in Hyderabad, in the part of the world these days refered to as India.
⭘
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The self-organized chaos of children in the schoolyard beyond the gates of Musheerabad Government High School, located in Secunderabad, Telangana, India, buzzes, pulses, radiates with the frenetic energy of youth. Groups of young people dressed in shades of uniform blue, gather and flow like water upon the sole-compacted light-brown earth. Cricket balls whizz by heads and roll past feet. A tree looks on in the background, shaded by a grey sky. The air is high with excitement and thick with the raw animation of youth, chorused with the roar of hundreds of young voices, of hundreds of humans in collective acts of learning, hundreds of humans furiously at play.
Carefully, Syed Muhamad Siddiqui and I wade through the glow, and with each step my cold-heavy heart thaws, drip… drip… drip… and lightens. It is as if we wade through a fast-flowing sky-kissed mountain’s snow-melt stream in spring. The un-inhibition of youth, the crystal-clear sun-warmed yet cool tonic of wonder and spontaneity.
We approach a building in the center-rear of the yard near the tree where numerous pairs of shoes cluster around the outside stoop of a door, to the left of which a rainbow-splashed banner hangs at eye level, printed with two lines,
“Aman Vedika RH Musheerabad”
“The Vasu and Pirameela Goli Family Foundation”
We’ve arrived with prior arrangement to visit this particular part of the school. RH stands for Rainbow Home, a residential school for children of parents surviving these days’ precarity, a home nestled inside a school.
At the threshold, we’re greeted by Lalitha, one of four teachers working in the home. She guides us down a short corridor into a spacious, well-lit room with windows facing the yard and poster-covered walls, and take seats next to a cabinet overflowing floor-to-ceiling with books.
Pretty quickly, I get-to-asking-questions. Upon asking Lalitha how and why she came to work in this place, she tells how, after get a degree and lecturing for 2 years, she committed herself to 2 years of social service, and so decided to work in the school as a non-resident teacher. She notes that her husband is supportive of her choice. Lalitha’s father worked as a goldsmith, and witnessed the lives of the children who knew the streets as their home. “Don’t discriminate by caste”, and “all are equal”, she says, recalling ethics instilled by her father.
Soon Jyothi joins us, a resident teacher in her early twenties and designated home manager. She says her parents, rice farmers from rural districts, had limited access to education. Jyothi, on the other hand, was able to go to college, and studied for a Bachelors of Technology degree, and then began social service. As she speaks, two of the littler ones of about 130 6-to-18-year-olds, Lavalya and Poojritha, scurry about playfully, and Jyothi is keen on encouraging them to make their presence known.
Lalitha departs to do some necessary work now doubt, and in a few moments, Nirmala fills the vacated seat. Nirmala, a generation older than Lalitha and Jyothi, also grew up outside Hyderabad. At 19 years old and against her family’s wishes, she chose a life of social service in solidarity with the multitudes of deprived peoples she found around her, later reconciling her decision with her family. For 16 years she worked in Child Welfare Committees established by the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act of 2000, a law initially passed by the parliament of India in 1986, aligning with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) ratified by India in 1992. She’s worked on a host of initiatives, including the Andhra Pradesh Mahila Samatha Society (APMSS), programs associated with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and ActionAid from 2001 – 2004, among others. She’s worked to foster communal harmony { the word communal in this context describes differences between social groups, especially caste and religious affiliation }, for instance in Pooja Goota, Khairthabad, one of hundreds of shanty towns embedded throughout the 6-million-and-swelling-metropolis that is Hyderabad. At least since 2004 she’s worked with Aman Vedica, the organization facilitating this particular residential school.
Another younger woman, Aurora, joins the conversation, quietly recounting the memories of a decade of life passed. In Wanamparthy district, about 150 kilometers South of Hyderabad, after they were strifed with the void of her father’s death, having been completely dependent upon him, her mother considered alms taking to be a next best option. As Tamil Dalit woman writer Bama understands about the position of women,
“Thrice they are exploited actually: caste, class, and gender and religion also, so triple monsters.”
A resonant word from a different geography was given by Comandanta Esther.
“…it is also a symbol that it is I, a poor, indigenous and zapatista woman, who would be having the first word, and that the main message of our word as zapatistas would be mine. …the men go out to work in the coffee plantations and cane fields, to earn a little money in order to scrape by with their families. Sometimes they do not come back, because they die from illnesses. They have no time to return to their homes, or, if they do return, they return sick, without money, sometimes already dead. And so the woman is left with more pain, because she is left alone caring for her children. We also suffer from contempt and marginalization from the moment we are born, because they do not take good care of us. Since, as girls, they do not think we are worth anything.”
“We were begging for two months,” says Aurora.
“How old were you?” I ask.
“3rd class,” she responds. About 10-years-old.
And then one day a social worker from Rainbow Homes named Narasimha, visited their district of Wanamparthy, and Aurora recalls the promises of basic stability: “Shelter, food, school, books…” Her face radiates as she speaks the words.
So at 10 years of age, soon after the founding of this residential school, she decided to move from the rural to the urban, to a house full of girls and women, to a home full of friends, and she’s lived here since then.
She’s 17 at the time of our conversation, and studying electronics and electrical engineering, because it interests her, and when I ask what else she’s interested in, she pauses to think for a moment and then beams, “classical dance”, which she’s studied at the Arts College of Osmania University, stirring mind and body traditions together.
Amidst our conversation, the arranger of our meeting comes and goes like a gust of wind. Wearing a green sari and an equanimous air, Jayashree arrives to hear and say a few words, and in another breath departs for an appointment in pursuit of state-bureaucratic documents required for travel abroad, in other words, as it happens, in pursuit of a replacement passport.
“Shall I make a move?” Jayashree checks in with me verbally.
“According to your preference,” I reply.
*
Now as goddess fortuna or tyche or kaali or kaalam would have it, it was in this same pursuit that I met Siddiqui and then Jayashree and so many others. While on my way from Tamil Nadu in South Asia’s South-East to Nepal in the North, after napping in a railway station’s night, I awoke to find my pack missing from my side– it and all my material possessions, save the clothes I was wearing, into the folds of which were tucked a few rupees and a compass.
Sic erat scriptum { Thus was it written }, as Plato wrote Socrates said Heraclitus thought,
τὰ ὄντα ἰέναι τε πάντα καὶ μένειν οὐδέν
ta onta ienai te panta kai menein ouden
all things move and nothing remains still
And so, all of the sudden, my plans were upended, derailed, rerouted, and rearranged.
*
The word “visa” comes from the latin phrase, “charta visa”, meaning official “paper that has been seen”, so in the eyes of the bureaucracies, losing a visa and passport is a bit like disappearing, like becoming unrecognized, unseen, visaless, undocumented, an un-person, or “out of status” as the consulate would phrase it.
In search of a cyber cafe to make an appointment with the embassy, I happened to strike up a conversation on the metro rail with a tall, thin chef-in-training, who invited me to his dormitory to collect my thoughts, hand me a spare tech-company-branded backpack { Hyderabad is one of the technology centers of India } and use a laptop. As we walked from the station, he casually pointed out a place we passed by where I might inquire for a place to stay, while I hop through the necessary bureaucratic hoops to become once again, a documented person and officially “seen”, and less-eyebrow-raising and uninteresting to immigration officers.
It was here, after the sun had set, situated under the rumble of a flyover { common parlance for an elevated highway } that capped the buildings below, bathed in amber streetlight and seated beside the entrance of Begumpet GHMC Men’s Night Shelter, that I met Syed Muhamed Siddiqui. Though it was past admittance time, Siddiqui as he preferred to be called, with dark eyes quick speech and a smile, offered a warm greeting and ushered me through the mosquito-screen covered rot-iron gateway into a bedimmed, cavernous space. Inside was filled with fifty mostly occupied beds on either side of a central aisle leading to a rear hallway lined with four bathrooms, two on either side divided by a large, open, cement water storage basin. There was a sink at one end of the hallway, where here and there toothbrushes and plastic buckets and bits of soap perched on ledges and hid in corners. Near the front of the cavern, a higher-than-your-head block of lockers partitioned cots from office with desk and cabinet. Lining the tall walls stretching to the overpass above were rotating fans pivoting slowly for side-to-side, sentinelling air and deterring mosquitoes from alighting on human bodies fast-asleep. Here I would meet cooks and clerks, tea stall and other street vendors, future cruiz ship workers, job trainees, men looking for work and those who’d stopped looking, insecticide sprayers, married men estranged from their families, advertisement workers, retail salesmen, loaders and unloaders; along with those in the womens’ shelters, all the people without whose energies and labors, the city would grind to a halt.
I’m given a blanket by Siddiqui, shown an unoccupied bed, and lay my body to rest.
✭✵❂❂✵✭
Just how do institutions in which we are enmeshed, that we encounter and perpetuate on the daily, wittingly and not, institutions broadly defined as persistent behavior patterns, traditions, customs, conventions, practices created by humans, how do they come to be? From building-techniques to fire-use, from freedom’s playfulness to the dispair, resignation, catastrophy, and horrific reality of inurement to thraldom, from hunting to herding to gathering to gardening to plant and animal breeding, from symbolic expression like reading, writing, cyphering, rhythm-making, singing, and story-telling to villages, cities, states, schools, and shelters. How do they come to be?
In exploration of such a question, the next morning or the morning after that, when Jayashree walked through the metal door of the shelter, I asked about the nature and inspiration and history of her life’s work. What had she done and how and why? Jayashree obliged me with her-story. She readily credits her mother as a model she followed, who she remembers as dedicatedly putting forth the effort to help others. Jayashree is a mother and grandmother herself, and has been an educator in a formal capacity at least since 1982, working as a teacher and principal in government schools, and operates a daycare center for children of working parents, and through the Shri Education Society, adult shelters, including the one I found myself in, and residential schools for orphaned and otherwise vulnerable children. I asked her to show me more, and she did.
*
In a neighborhood not far from my chance derailment,and reorientation, Jayasree and I decide to visit, along with her assistant, young Venkatesh, one of the four residential schools she directs. The ground floor of the building we’re visiting is locked, dark, and packed with books and other school supplies, suggesting a decreased operation capacity. This is a school shuttered and then reopened to meet childrens’ needs.
We ascend the concrete stairs to the first floor above ground level to a hallway lined with open doors. The kitchen is at the end of the hallway, which is run by two designated home managers, Sadita and Bimaini. The classroom across the hall from the kitchen functions as a sleeping area, where clusters of bedrolls neatly curled. On the hall walls are immaculately calligraphed posters specifying day-to-day operations: food committee, cleaning committee. The young people, with the guidance of Mrs. Jaya, Sadita, and Bimaini, organize the daily tasks. Here about 45 7-17 year-old boys turning young men abide.
We all collect into the first classroom, where I encounter Mrs. Jaya and her young daughter Maithili, seated in her lap. Mrs. Jaya’s been the home mother and teacher for 7 years, since the school was occupied and re-appropriated as a living space. One-by-one the youngers say their names; lastly and from the back row, the eldest voice thier aspirations: Naresh wants to study software engineering, Vijay wants any position in government { there many times more applicants than available government posts }, and Ragavandra is studying for a Bachelors of Commerce.
“We give space for the children to speak for themselves,” emphasizes Jayashree.
“It should be like a home with the parents.”
The staff form close bonds with the children, and as specified by the Rainbow Homes model, the resident schools operate on a non-custodial basis, meaning the resident-students may come and go freely, self-regulated. Because of people like Sadita and Bimaini and Mrs. Jaya and Jayashree, because of their care work, due to their efforts, the worlds of a few more young people becomes a lot more livable.
Around back, past the darkened stores of knowledge, past the long row of latrines, amid the concrete buildings, a small courtyard-like space filled with time and trampled rubble. No doubt there is a path unrevealed to momentarily glancing eyes, a way through wrecked yesterday. These crumbling and renewed elements form us; we re-form the elements; the elements we combine fall apart. Out from the cracks grow the ancients: plants, bugs, life amidst the debris. Sometimes it seems so simple: all we have to figure out how to do is not suppress life, every inter-evolving being, every developing child.
On the street, at the main gate of the school, a cat ambles beneath the car into which Jayashree and Venkatesh and I slide. As we leave, We say and wave goodbye to the children and home mother Jaya and home managers Sadita and Bimaini.
*
Various levels of government as well as private sources fund twenty residential schools in greater-Hyderabad, with the first established in 2010. They are operated by a dozen-or-so-member forum called “Bal Matri,” Telugu for “Childhood Friends”. Rainbow Homes for girls, and Sneh Gars, or “Friendly Homes”, for boys. Two nodes in the network be Jayashree’s Shri Education Society, as well as Aman Vedika. From Hindi, the phrase “Aman Vedika” could be translated as “Peace Platform” or “Peace Program”. Home to at least 1,500 children in Hyderabad, they implement the Rainbow Homes Program, guided by the sister organizations Rainbow Foundation India (RFI) and the Association for Rural and Urban Needy (ARUN), creating living examples of aspirations idealized and codified, yet unrealized, by the national legislative underpinnings guaranteeing universal access to education, at least legally. These include, सर्व शिक्षा अभियान, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in Hindi, meaning Education for All Campaign, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, of 2009, and the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, of 2009 and 2015, and these are the laws advocates cite when re-occupying unused school premises.
This particular model and method of turning school spaces into resident homes for disadvantaged children was initiated by a Sister (Sr.) Mary Cyril Mooney after arriving as principal at a certain Loreto Day School in Sealdah, Kolkata, in north-east India; more accurately, the students pressed for her to initiate it. The school is one of many operated worldwide by the Sisters of Loreto, also known as the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (I.B.V.M.), an un-cloistered catholic womens’ religious congregation that promote education, founded by Mary Ward in 1609. It is fascinating to consider the currents of thought patterns flowing through our histories. Mary Ward transgressed the gender roles of her time, asserting public engagement, that it was right for a woman to live a public life. Notes one writer, “the Pope placed Galileo under arrest a year after meeting Ward, whose supporters argue that she is comparable to Galileo not only in the way she was treated but because her ideas were just as revolutionary.” Centuries after Ward, advocacy and argument for the education of women and the disposessed and deprived continue after Mary Ward’s example, and Mary Cyril Mooney’s in turn. While the overall effects of parochial schools and their roles in colonization across the world will not be analysed here, it is striking to realize that the largest non-governmental educational system in the world may be comprised of the more than 40,000 secondary, and more than 90,000 primary catholic schools.
According to one study of the school in Sealdah, it was the students themselves that pressed for compassion, for solidarity with the young. Researcher Tansy Jessep describes.
“In 1985, a group of Class IX and X students who were participating in a community leadership initiative felt a similar unease about the number of ‘platform’ and pavement children living at Sealdah Railway Station and on the streets outside Loreto Sealdah. They raised the issue with teachers at the school and took it up with Sr. Cyril. At their inspiration, and with the support of the school’s leadership, the pupils conducted a survey of the local streetchildren to ascertain their needs. In response, a proposal followed, which resulted in the setting up of a school-within-a-school for streetchildren who ‘drop in like rainbows, giving joy as they appear’.”
Pupils dialated
and let the energy in
The students saw promises of brilliance
of human hues of a whole spectrum
shining there in the streets
The children eyed and minded
the needs of the people
And so the pupils
gave vision to the teachers
and embodied a definition of Freedom
not as the ability to choose just anything
but rather
« to enter into moral relations with each other »
« to live within a community of equals »
« Real Freedom is the ability to make friends »
In an interview, when asked about the program’s purpose and impetus, Sr. Mary Cyril responded,
“This is a country which guarantees its policy of equality so nobody can question it if I want to bring the poorest of children to big schools like this. Why not? They should be equal and they have every right to be equal like everybody else.
That’s why I bring them in. But most people don’t see them as equal even when they bring them into their schools. We have them in the heart of the school, taking part like everybody else in everything. They are sitting at the same desk in the same class and wearing the same uniform. So from the educational point of view, it is another dimension.
[Interviewer] What prompted you to start Rainbow?
Seeing the condition of these children. If I was in a garbage dump or in a slum, I would be happy if someone helped me get on my feet and make something of my life. And there is so much talent among those children. That is the tragedy we cannot afford to ignore.”
A banal tragedy for multitudes for millennia. Think for a moment, in the age of humankind, how many children, how many people, have been kept from, have been deprived of the chances, the freedoms, to develop, to grow, to learn, to play, to care, to love. Take a large number as a guess and then add “so much talent among those children…” Imagine for a moment worlds in which the raw imaginations, the undeveloped potentials of children were regarded as sacred, not to be molested, hampered, hobbled, suppressed, or stuffed with stultifying doctrine, but instead fostered and respected radiators of inspiration. Imagine children not as minds to mold but friends to foster, and teachers of discovery and play.
Drawing a clear contrast to popular notions of worthwhile activity, Sr. Cyril responds to the question,
“[Interviewer] After so many years, what according to you is the most endearing part of Calcutta?
It depends on what your definition of endearing is. If it is beautiful or lovely then the whole area around Red Road or Fort William and all that. But where your compassion would be moved, it would be the slums and red-light areas. Compassion would be when you will be moved to do something to help people if you see the people forced to stay in the slums.”
Researcher Tansy Jessep further explains,
“Sr. Cyril acknowledges that passionate leadership is an essential ingredient of radical transformation: ‘[It is essential] to have a principal who believes passionately in justice and equality and is prepared to take the necessary steps to bring them about’. Passion is seen in what she describes as a ‘sense of outrage’ at the unequal life chances of Indian children. The product of passion is action. Controversially, the principal [Sr. Cyril] told parents: ‘If I can make mathematics compulsory, I can also make compassion compulsory’.”
Outrage, Empathy, and Initiative were harnessed to burn away attitudes Seared, Sealed, and Callused by Age-Old-Indifference. At Sr. Mary Cyril’s direction and in consert with students and staff, attendance of educationally deprived children began to increase at Loreto Day School. In 1979, the figures were roughly 90 of 790. 19 years later, in 1998, rougly half of 1,400 students were children of the streets, railway platforms, and slums.
Tansy Jessop’s illuminating account of the school is cited above and below, and the ending is worth quoting at length.
“The pursuit of excellence and equity is at the heart of the school’s vision and response to poverty. The moral purpose of education is stressed, while its goals have a larger significance than narrow definitions of good schooling, based only on academic, sporting, and cultural achievements. They suggest the link between society and schooling and challenge the inevitable and accepted view of school as a competitive place that divides the sheep from the goats, usually on social class or narrow academic grounds. In its objectives to build a new school community and contribute to educational opportunities for all children, the school measures up to the greatness. Yet the goals of service, practicing social justice, opening the school doors, and training a cadre of rural teachers are both challenging and feasible.
The challenge of pursuing outward-looking goals such as social justice alongside the maintenance of standards of excellence within the school is vast. Yet the school has effectively created space and mechanisms that enable its members to contribute to the achievement of this vision. While parents, staff, and pupils are exposed to the hard issues of poverty in India, they are also brought into relationship and dialogue with the poor. Many children in the regular school who teach street children in a peer learning program say that they have learned and benefited more from these encounters than have the rainbow children. Power relations between rich and poor, suburban and street children are obviously not easily erased; yet it is interesting to observe that the powerful have begun to recognize the level of ingenuity (and power) many of the rainbow children have, simply to survive the streets of Calcutta. Exposure renders a meaningful challenge, not only to richer children, but also to the core values of the whole community; and it invites everyone to think imaginatively about solutions. Principal [Cyril’s 1994] keynote address to the ‘Education for All’ Conference in Calcutta summed up the challenge:
‘The regular school child learns at first hand what real destitution is and will be less likely to dismiss the poor as a nuisance when she holds a position of power later on, and if the regular child is herself poor, then she learns the need to work for her own community and is challenged to share rather than climb up the social ladder and be lost to her own people…. Our creativity is constantly challenged to find ways and means of stretching resources to reach as many as possible…. The poorest child challenges, by her very presence in the school, value judgements based on money or power.’
The school is a night shelter, a training institution, a soup kitchen, a home, a drop-in school for street children, a place of pilgrimage for foreign visitors, and a residence of para-teacher trainees … a school which has broken conventional notions of schooling.”
Since 1998, Loreto Day School has inspired the appearance and implementation of Rainbows Homes in at least eight cities across India, providing opportunities for at least 3,300 children concurrent.
*
Jayashree recommended that I meet with Feroz, a dedicated organizer in the various efforts to present people-with-less-options with-more-options. So on one afternoon Siddiqui and I went to where we knew he would be: an adult shelter managers’ meetings held up a flight of stairs at one of the adult shelters. After the meeting, Feroz and I agreed to see each-other at a demonstration scheduled to take place a few days later. On the designated day and prior to the demonstration, Babu, an assistant manager at the shelter where I was staying, accompanied me on a walk after an appointment at one of the state bureaucracy’s towering administrative building, then for a bite to eat, and then down a long row of regional and national figures set in stone along Tank Bund Road, an Eastern edge of Hussain Sagar, the 450 year-old artificial heart-shaped lake adjoining Secunderabad and Hyderabad.
“Not In My Name” was the banner of the nationwide gathering of the people in many cities who on this day united to decry an assault on Junaid Khan, two of his brothers, and a friend while aboard a crowded train. Just about a week earlier, they were returning home from market in Dheli, in preparation for Eid, a celebration at the end of Ramadan, Islam’s month of fasting. As is tradition, after sundown, شير خرما, sheer khurma, Persian for “milk with dates” would be prepared and shared by Siddiqui at the shelter, while Junaid Khan would not survive the lynching, for in cutting contrast with hospitality, we humans have also made a tradition of bigoty. One of the accused named in the subsequent legal proceedings would later run for a seat in the Lok Sabha (House of the People), the lower of India’s bicameral parliament, with the Uttar Pradesh Navnirman Sena, meaning Reconstruction Army, a regional Hindu nationalist, or Hindutva political party. Junaid Khan had not yet turned 17.
The Bal Matri network being justice-oriented, and as well, news of my school visits probably having spread through the network, I was not especially surprised by the assertive presence of and a chance meeting with Usha Rani, director of Sannihita Center for Women & Girl Children, operating two Rainbow Homes for girls and one hostel for boys. Management coordinator Chandrakala and a number of younger women fanned out around me like feathers from Usha’s wing. Bureaucratic-time and barriers got in the way of me taking them up on their invitation to visit them at their schools, but I did take a look at Sannihita’s website and stated Vision:
“A global order where poor and marginalized women and children are liberated from the legacies of atrocities, violence, and patriarchy; where men and women live in harmony, and promote love, and equality; where they are able to access their birthright of the necessities of life– food, water, land, clothing, shelter, air, health, education, and livelihood; able to understand and access knowledge and technology; where social justice, equal opportunity and peace are a reality.”
*
Feroz couldn’t make it after all that day, so we rescheduled for a few nights later, when he, Siddiqui and I, met at Aman Vedica’s office. The location has been a staging ground for Feroz, Ganesh as driver, Ananthai as scout and messenger, Rajashekar, a doctor, and nurse Amar Singh. During these mobilizations, they reach out into the city’s body-precariat to give basic medical care and raise awareness of shelters and other services. Ananthai spreads the word to the people prior to their trips into the night.
In a minibus full of good will, we wind and crawl through the busy night streets for what seems like a dozen kilometers of so, and pull up along a curb between a temple and a mosque, Sai Baba Mandir and Dargha Masjid, next to a busy intersection in Chaderghat, where gathered on a stone-paved corner are a few dozen people. Children skip and dart through the dark. Babies clutch shoulders, and are bounced by arms and balanced on hips and passed from hands to hands. Feroz hops out and promptly starts snapping headshots with his mobile phone for people who want made an identification card. Rajashekar & Amar Singh listen to men and women describe of their ailments, probably in Telugu, maybe in Hindi; less likely in Karnada, Tamil, or Urdu. The medics ask questions and distribute meds, most prevalently for body pains, specifically joint pain. They tell me they’ve encountered 15 to 20 emergency situations during the last 6 months. I listen to the migrant workers, like Srineevas, 24, coming from Sladnagar, 50 kilometers soutwest of Hyderabad, or Khe ArSath, age 25, and Rushopam Reddy, 29, from Narayanpet district, 160 kilometers in the same direction. They work for daily wages: 500 rupees, 400, or as little as 300 rupees { 4 US dollars } per day, doing any work they can come by, “loading and unloading” for example, as described by one of them. Women might work 8-hour shifts, in tailoring shops, for example, for 150 rupees or less.
It has been said that poverty is life lived as one-long-emergency; for example the deprivation in a New York ghetto, described by James Baldwin on Fifth Avenue, Uptown,
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor; and if one is a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one’s feet have simply been placed on the treadmill forever. One is victimized, economically, in a thousand ways…”
*
Having affirmed humanities for another night, the people on the curb carry on surviving, the van containing driver, scout, nurse, and doctor goes it’s way, and Feroz and Siddiqui go ours. We walk from the segment of stone through a dusty and dimly lit length of road, a bridge over Musi River, under a flyover and slide into seats near the entrance of a large bustling café, where Feroz and Siddiki know is served tea Irani.
Feroz tells a now-familiar story. He also lost everything, materially that is, on the train from Bangalore to Hyderabad several years ago. But the greatest suffering wasn’t the loss of physical possessions. It was the social isolation.
“It’s the loneliness that’s the hardest.”
“You eat together but that’s it.”
He lived near a railway station, among other places, until the scarcity of solidarity was quenched upon the invitation of outreach workers and their organizations during a mobilization. In order to pressure the regional state apparatus to address the wide-spread precarity in Hyderabad, a Campaign for Citizen Shelters (C4CS), composing a network of such organizations was setup in 2010 by Aman Vedica. It was at that time that the first GHMC, or Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation sponsored NGO-directed adult shelter was opening. Feroz was one of the first to benefit, and has since moved on from the shelter. C4CS actions include out-reach mobilizations, awareness-raising, and organizing solidarity sleepovers with people living outside, billed as “Sleeping Under the Stars”. The second C in C4CS is an explicit legal-rights based appeal. From a legal perspective, a person who is a citizen is entitled to certain constitutionally promised rights. The C4CS network operates the dozen and growing adult shelters across Hyderabad.
Feroz, Siddiki, and I leave the café and after a minute of walking under bright-street-lights, like spotlights-on-a-dark-stage, we are approached by a woman with an outstretching hand gesturing for alms. Feroz digs into his pocket and places several coins into the palm of the hand, and addresses the woman, who is trailed by children. Unable to comprehend Telegu (or, less likely, Hindi or Karnada), after continuing our dusty walk I ask him about the exchange. Feroz said he told her about the womens’ shelters, and she responded by saying if she wanted stay in a shelter, she would have to ask her husband for approval. He says he gives out the information and then sees it as up to them to make a decision.
Said Meridel Le Sueur in an “Evening in a Lumber Town”,
“Poverty is grotesque. It is violent and abnormal. These faces are the faces of nightmare. This scene is the dark half mad back-ground of a Goya. Poverty is like a violence producing a terrible dwarfing of nature.”
*
One morning Jayashree called Siddiqui to invite me to visit that evening the offices of the organizations dedicated to alleviation of deprivation. In the afternoon Babu, along with Siddiqui, and I hailed an auto rickshaw and headed across the city, again skirting the perimeter of Hussain Sagar, and arrived across a street from Gandhi Nagar Park and alongside an unassuming one floor building, home to Aman Vedica and C4CS. Indira, C4CS’s coordinator, Ramanji, on-site manager of the North Bagumpet mens’ shelter directed by Aman Vedica, Jayashree, director of Shri Education Society which operates resident schools and the South Bagumpet mens’ shelter, as well as Anuradha, director of Aman Vedika, and others, are present. One of those others, a women who’s work I silently appreciated but who’s name I did not learn, made and distributed hand-warming hot tea.
It is Anuradha who I heard refer to the Bal Matri, Childhood Friends, network as a forum, and that evening she facilitated a dialogue spanning subject and time: Indian history and significant social reforms and reformers, conditions of the most vulnerable people in the city, labor junctions where migrants look for worker, addiction among the poor, internalized feelings of guilt and shame, inferiority and low self-worth, and ostracized with stigmatizing labels slum dwellers face, like “buchjardhu” { which can be translated as something like “criminal” }. Typical normalized scapegoating and otherising and diviantization–the old degrade-and-control and blame-the-poor-for-being-poor shtick, while at-the-same-time redirecting the focus, the attention, the questions, the critiques, the accounting, and proportional responsibility from policies that wage devistating social war perpetuated by those ruling from above, the wealthy, the elites, the men, the higher castes, the higher classes, to those who longsuffer the ruling below, the poor, the-intersex-the-female-the-male, the children and women and men and hijras, transgender and queer people, the lower classes, the lower castes, the shudras, the ati-shudras-untouchables-unseeables-unapproachables-unknowables, the outcasts, the pariahs, the dalits-broken-crushed-and-scattered, the precariats, the disposables, the abject, « the wretched of the earth », the tribal peoples, the-adivasis-the-original-inhabitants, the forest dwellers, the forests, the forgotten. This intentional use and abuse of humanity, this willfull ignorance of life, writer Arundhati Roy calls “the great project of unseeing”. Anuradha cited one survey that reported 28,000 street children survive on the streets of Hyderabad, while another, carried out by C4CS estimates more than 30,000. The nationwide figure varies from half a million to more than ten million.
Joytirao Govindrao Phule, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Arundhati Roy, among others, are also made mention in conversation. The first inspired the second, while the third was a leading figure in the nationalist movements, jailed in aggregate for over 3,000 days between 1921 and 1945 in opposition to British colonial rule in favor of स्वराज { swa-raj in Hindi, meaning self or home rule }, and became the first president of an independent India. The fourth, Arundhati Roy, published, among considerable other works, an elucidating introduction, called “The Doctor and the Saint,” to a reissue of what is perhaps Ambedkar’s most known work { besides his contributions to the a certain founding document of India }, called The Annihilation of Caste.
“The Doctor and the Saint” contextualizes and casts a light on the long-haunting horror that caste is, and describes Ambedkar’s opposition to and Gandhi’s support for it, exposing a man behind the myth that has become of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who has become all-but-deified-and-upheld-beyond-critique-the-world-over, “the saint of the status quo”. Comparing the monstrous rankisms that are race and caste, Roy juxtaposes Phule, Ambedkar, Nehru, and Gandhi, among other contemporaries:
“From inside jail [ in South Africa ] Gandhi began to petition the White authorities for separate wards in prison. He led battles demanding segregation on many counts: he wanted separate blankets because he worried that ‘a blanket that has been used by the dirtiest Kaffirs may later fall to an Indian’s lot’. [ an Arabic term meaning disbeliever, Kaffir later became a racist pejorative in colonial South Africa, akin to nigger { this note does not appear in Roy’s writing } ]. He wanted prison meals specially suited to Indians–rice served with ghee–and refused to eat the ‘mealie pap’ that the ‘Kaffirs’ seemed to relish. He also agitated for separate lavatories for Indian prisoners.
Twenty years later, in 1928, the ‘Truth’ about all this had transmogrified into another story altogether. Responding to a proposal for segregated education for Indians and Africans in South Africa, Gandhi wrote:
‘Indians have too much in common with Africans to think of isolating themselves from them. They cannot exist in South Africa for any length of time without the active sympathy and friendship of the Africans. I am not aware of the general body of the Indians having ever adopted an air of superiority toward their African brethren, and it would be a tragedy if any such movement were to gain ground among the Indian settlers of South Africa.’
Then, in 1939, disagreeing with Jawaharlal Nehru, who believed that Black Africans and Indians should stand together against the White regime in South Africa, Gandhi contradicted himself once more: ‘However much one may sympathise with the Bantus [ native peoples of South Africa ], Indians cannot make common cause with them.’
Gandhi was an educated, well-travelled man. He would have been aware of the winds that were blowing in other parts of the world. His disgraceful words about Africans were written around the same time W.E.B. Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk: ‘One ever feels this two-ness–an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.’
Gandhi’s attempts to collaborate with a colonial regime were taking place at the same time that the anarchist Emma Goldman was saying:
‘The centralisation of power has brought into being an international feeling of solidarity among the oppressed nations of the world; a solidarity which represents a great harmony of interests between the working man of America and his brothers abroad than between the American miner and his exploiting compatriot; a solidarity which fears not foreign invasion, because it is bringing all the workers to the point when they will say to their masters, ‘Go and do your own killing. We have done it long enough for you.’
Pandita Ramabai (1858-22), Gandhi’s contemporary from India, did not have his unfortunate instincts. Though she was born a Brahmin, she renounced Hinduism for its patriarchy and its practice of caste, became a Christian, and quarrelled with the Anglican Church too, earning a place of pride in India’s anticaste tradition. She travelled to the US in 1886 where she met Harriet Tubman, who had once been a slave, whom she admired more than anybody she had ever met. Contrast Gandhi’s attitude towards the African people to Pandita Ramabai’s description of her meeting with Harriet Tubman:
‘Harriet still works. She has a little house of her own, where she and her husband live and work together for their own people … Harriet is very large and strong. She hugged me like a bear and shook me by the hand till my poor little hand ached!’
In 1873, Jotiba Phule dedicated his Gulamgiri (Slavery) to
‘The good people of the United States as a token of admiration for their sublime disinterested and self sacrificing devotion in the cause of Negro Slavery; and with an earnest desire, that my countrymen may take their noble example as their guide in the emancipation of their Shudra Brothers from the trammels of Brahmin thraldom.’
Phule–who, among other things, campaigned for widow remarriage, girls’ education, and started a school for Untouchables–described how ‘the owners of slaves treated the slaves as beasts of burden, raining kicks and blows on them all the time and starving them’, and how they would ‘harness the slaves as bullocks and make them plough the fields in the blazing sun’. Phule believed that the Shudra and Ati-Shudra [ these categories include the least priveleged castes locked-in as laborers, artisans, and servants, and “ati” means below, as in “below-shudra” ] would understand slavery better than anyone else because ‘they have a direct experience of slavery as compared to the others who have never experienced it so; the Shudras were conquered and enslaved by the Brahmins’.
The connection between racism and casteism was made more than a century before the 2001 Durban conference. Empathy sometimes achieves what scholarship cannot.”
Roy draws a comparison between caste and race: caste being “not colour-coded, and therefore not easy to see” yet alike as “forms of discrimination that target people because of their descent”. She writes that at the Durban conference that took place in 2001 in post-aparthite South Africa, billed by the United Nations as a World-Conference-against-Racism, anti-caste advocates present at the conference insisted on asserting the parallels of caste and race, yet fellow Indians insisted on squelching such elucidations. A century prior, similar supressions of clarity were undertaken by Gandhi throughout his life as he wavered with contradictory positions on the matter. Roy puts it this way: Gandhi had a tendency to say “everything and its opposite.”
In 1873, just four years after 1869, the birth year of Mohandas Gandhi, Joytirao Phule, born in 1827, who was greatly influenced by Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, made his emancipation-aspiring dedication in a book he called गुलामगिरी, Gulamgiri in Marathi, meaning Slavery. It is Joytirao Phule who is commonly credited with adopting the word Dalit, from the sanskrit word, दलित, dalita, meaning crushed, ground, broken, divided, or scattered, to symbolize and describe untouchability. There were currents of thought that grasped the common condition of peoples caught and caged by caste and race, and articulated among others by Joytirao Phule and Pandita Ramabai.
Both Joytirao Phule and Pandita Ramabai fought against gender injustice as well. As a female-bodied person, Pandita Ramabai experienced, understood, and opposed gender discrimination, the severe limiting of opportunity, of choice, of privileges, of access to allies and the right to friends that is based not on difference of skin color or ancestory, but on body-type. Harriet Tubman at times managed to avoid some of the limitations imposed by this form of slavery, an enslavement of women, by dressing as a man. In Pandita’s case, due substantially to her Brahmin caste lineage, and significantly, to a supportive father who advocated for the education of women, Pandita Ramabai was among very few women who gained expert knowledge of the language in which many religious texts that codify a Brahminical version of male supremacy were written. She writes,
“While reading the Dharmashastras I came to know many things which I never knew before. There were contradictory statements about almost everything. What one book said was most righteous, the other book declared as be unrighteous… but there were two things on which all those books the Dharmashastras, the sacred epics, the Puranas and modern poets, the popular preachers of the present day and orthodox high caste men were agreed, that women of the high and low caste, as a class were all bad, very bad, worse than demons, as unholy as untruth and that they could not get moksha [like] men. The only hope of their getting this much desired liberation from karma and its results, that is countless millions of births and deaths and untold suffering, was the worship of their husbands. The husband is said to be a woman’s god; there is no other god for her. This god may be the worst sinner and a great criminal; still he is her god and she must worship him…. The woman is allowed to go into higher existence (only) thus far but to attain moksha or liberation she must perform such great religious acts… by which she will be reincarnated as a high caste man, in order to study Vedas and the Vedanta and thereby get the knowledge of the true Brahma and be amalgamated in it. The exra-ordinary religious acts which help a woman to get into the way of getting moksha are utter abandonment of her will to that of her husband…. The woman has no right to study the Vedas and Vedanta and without knowing them no one can know the Brahma; therefore no woman can get moksha.”
Contemporary Tamil Dalit woman author Bama has used the phrase “the Dalits of the Dalits” in reference to women of untouchable communities within a caste-based society. And this has been true generally of women of any class within any class-based society present and past. Womens’ Historian Gerda Lerner puts it succinctly.
“At any given moment in history, each “class” is constituted of two distinct classes–men and women.”
A century and a half ago, Pandita Ramabai grasped the ancient mysogyny laced into her own heritage, and like Joytirao Phule, established organizations, including schools and shelters, to intervene in thraldoms casted and gendered, by facilitating refuge and educational access for women. But she wasn’t the first Indian woman to do so.
It is surprising to me that among the W.E.B. Du Boises and the Emma Goldmans and the Harriet Tubmans, Roy in her writing on Phule as well as Anuradha and Jayashree in our conversation left unmentioned a driving force and fierce advocate acting alongside Joytirao. It was arranged that he should marry her at the age of 13. She was 9. To his credit, he encouraged her to develop her neural capabilities, to learn to read and write, including in English, in a time when such was not done. Her name was Savitribai, and for daring to challenge toxic traditions that excluded women and untouchables from formal education, she and her partner were beset by the guardians of caste and gender, who marshaled fierce reactionary responses, and forced by Joytirao’s father to banish his own son and daughter-in-law from his house. By virtue of their moral choice, they had been cast-out from and by their own community. Refuge was offered and found in the company of Main Usman Sheikh, who’s sister Fatima Begum Sheikh would teach in the schools established by Savitribai and Joytirao. In Pune, Maharashtra, in view of the foothills of the Western Ghats of West India, they opened one of, if not the first, native operated schools for young women in the modern period, in 1848.
As the conversation draws to a close back at the organizaing spaces of Aman Vedika, modern-day incarnations of Savitribai fill the space, and Anuradha and Jayashree beam smiles from opposite sides of the room as they approach each other and share in an embrace that radiates with a glow of years of women-in-allyship and sisterhood-in-struggle. It-is-as-if the air is permeated with the aspirations and inspirations from Savitribai’s first book of poems, named Kavya Phule, published in 1854.
Go, Get Education
Be self-reliant, be industrious
Work, gather wisdom and riches,
All gets lost without knowledge
We become animal without wisdom,
Sit idle no more, go, get education
End misery of the oppressed and forsaken,
You’ve got a golden chance to learn
So learn and break the chains of caste.
Throw away the Brahman’s scriptures fast.
Rise, to learn and act
Weak and oppressed! Rise my brother
Come out of living in slavery.
Manu-follower Peshwas are dead and gone
Manu’s the one who barred us from education.
Givers of knowledge– the English have come
Learn, you’ve had no chance in a millennium.
We’ll teach our children and ourselves to learn
Receive knowledge, become wise to discern.
An upsurge of jealousy in my soul
Crying out for knowledge to be whole.
This festering wound, mark of caste
I’ll blot out from my life at last.
In Baliraja’s kingdom, let’s beware
Our glorious mast, unfurl and flare.
Let all say, “Misery go and kingdom come!”
Awake, arise and educate
Smash traditions-liberate!
We’ll come together and learn
Policy-righteousness-religion.
Slumber not but blow the trumpet
O Brahman, dare not you upset.
Give a war cry, rise fast
Rise, to learn and act.
*
Joytirao Phule and Savitribai committed to a Great Refusal. They refused, to a great extent, to act as male and female jailers of female and male bodies, and likewise refused, to a great extent, to act as caste jailers of other castes. They joined and furthered a tradition of jail dismantlement, of abolition. On the paths of emancipation upon which they walked would follow, among others, a certain Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, who named Joytirao as one of his prime inspirations.
Ambedkar understood theoretically and viscerally the meaning of and was subject to the deprivation of longstanding segregation maintained by institutionalized hierarchies that are castes, which Ambedkar would describe as Brahminism. Born an untouchable, of Mahar caste lineage, being the youngest of fourteen children { seven of which died at or soon after birth } and the only one to enter secondary school, he defied the odds of educational deprivation due to caste, studying economics in Bombay { now Mumbai }, and receving scholarships to study abroad: law at Columbia University in New York and at the London School of Economics. After this period in the United States and England, Roy writes,
“Ambedkar returned to the thorny embrace of the caste system. Afraid of even accidentally touching Ambedkar, clerks and peons in his office would fling files at him. Carpets were rolled up when he walked in and out of office so that they would not be polluted by him. He found no accommodation in the city: his Hindu, Muslim and Christian friends, even those he had known in Columbia, turned him down. Eventually, by masquerading as a Parsi [a South Asian Zoroastrian], he got a room at a Parsi inn. When the owners discovered he was an Untouchable, he was thrown onto the street by armed men. ‘I can even now vividly recall it and never recall it without tears in my eyes,’ Ambedkar wrote. ‘It was then for the first time I learnt that a person who is Untouchable to a Hindu is also Untouchable to a Parsi.'”
Toward the end of The Annihilation of Caste, he asks and answers a basic question:
“What is this Hindu religion? Is it a set of principles, or is it a code of rules? Now the Hindu religion, as contained in the Vedas and the smritis, is nothing but a mass of sacrificial, social, political, and sanitary rules and regulations, all mixed up. What is called religion by the Hindus is nothing but a multitude of commands and prohibitions. Religion, in the sense of spiritual principles, truly universal, applicable to all races, to all countries, to all times, is not to be found in them; and if it is, it does not form the governing part of a Hindu’s life. That for a Hindu dharma means commands and prohibitions is clear from the way the word dharma is used in the Vedas and the smiritis and understood by the commentators. The word dharma as used in the Vedas in most cases means religious ordinances or rites. Even Jaimini in his Purva Mimamsa defines dharma as ‘a desirebale goal or result that is indicated by injunctive (Vedic) passages’.
To put it in plain language, What the Hindus call religion is really law, or at best legalised class-ethics. Frankly, I refuse to call this code of ordinances as religion. The first evil of such a code of ordinances, misrepresented to the people as religion, is that it tends to deprive moral life of freedom and spontaneity, and to reduce it (for the conscientious, at any rate) to a more or less anxious and servile conformity to externally imposed rules. Under it, there is no loyalty to ideals; there is only conformity to commands.
But the worst evil of this code of ordinances is that the laws it contains must be the same yesterday, today and forever. They are iniquitous in that they are not the same for one class as for another. But this iniquity is made perpetual in that they are prescribed to be the same for all generations. The objectionable part of such a scheme is not that they are made by certain persons called prophets or law-givers. The objectionable part is that this code has been invested with the character of finality and fixity. Happiness notoriously varies with the conditions and circumstances of a person as well as with the conditions of different people and epochs. That being the case, how can humanity endure this code of eternal laws, without being cramped and without be crippled?—I have, therefore, no hesitation in saying that such a religion must be destroyed, and I say there is nothing irreligious in working for the destruction of such a religion.”
So, he writes, intending to address the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal { Society for the Abolition of Caste System } which would ultimately disallow him deliverance of the prepared speech at a conference over which the Mandal had invited him to preside,
“Indeed I hold that it is your bounden duty to tear off the mask, to remove the misrepreseentation that is caused by misnaming this law as religion. This is an essential step for you. Once you clear the minds of the people of this misconception and enable them to realise that what they are told is religion is not religion, but that it is really law, you will be in a position to urge its amendment or abolition.
So long as people look upon it as religion they will not be ready for a change, because the idea of religion is generally speaking not associated with the idea of change. But the idea of law is associated with the idea of change, and when people come to know that what is called religion is really law, old and archaic, they will be ready for a change, for people know and accept that law can be changed.”
Ambedkar burns and shines incandescent:
“If you wish to bring about a breach in the system, then you have got to apply dynamite to the Vedas as the shastras, which deny any part to reason; to the Vedas as the shastras, which deny any part to morality. You must destroy the religion of the shrutis and the smirtis. Nothing else will avail.”
Ambedkar makes plain the obvious: Casteism, or Brahminism as he calls it, is a social arrangement of monstrous injustice that comes about and persists when a class of male priests and scribes, the men of brahmin caste ancestries, set the rules of a dogma of devistatingly unequal treatment, privileges, and relationships between communities, as well as between between women and men within these communities, and claim of these horrendous laws a divine ordination and immutability, forever and eternal. He plainly pionts out the profound stultifying stuckness of such dogmatic, scripture-based religion. And to counter such a long-standing, ossified orthodoxy, in order to pry open the brahmin castes’ exclusive control of ritual priestly position and religious authority, he proposed a pitting of institution against institution: the authorities of the laws of constitutional, beaurocratic nation-state against the authorities of the laws of traditional religion.
“The priestly class must be brought under control by some such legislation… This will prevent it from doing mischief and from misguiding people. It will democratise it by throwing it open to everyone. It will certainly help to kill Brahminism and will also help to kill caste, which is nothing but Brahminism incarnate. Brahminism is the poison which has spoiled Hinduism. You will succeed in saving Hinduism if you will kill Brahminism.”
Ambedkar knew the poison ran deep, infected the mentality of the subcontinent from top to bottom, east to west for thousands of years, and he knew that without a change in a mentality among numerous castes indoctrinated to enforce a system of “graded inequality”, legal rights inscribed into a country’s constitution would only represent ideals of yet unrealized aspirational futures, beset by the banal horrors of traditions past. Quoting Ambedkar, Roy writes,
“If the fundamental rights are opposed by the community, no Law, no Parliament, no Judiciary can guarantee them in the real sense of the word,” said Ambedkar. “What is the use of fundamental rights to the Negro in America, to the Jews in Germany and to the Untouchables in India? As Burke said, there is no method found for punishing the multitude.”
Ask any village policeman in India what his job is and he’ll probably tell you it is to ‘keep the peace’. That is done, most of the time, by upholding the caste system. Dalit aspirations are a breach of peace.
Annihilation of Caste is a breach of peace.”
*
One evening at the shelter, there was a reporter who came to see me. Prefiguring a world in which inequality and suffering are not ignored but addressed, in other words, a better world, this writer would later pen a story highlighting not the hapless document-deprived traveler, as did most of the press, but instead detailing the unequal amount of shelters available for women and men in Hyderabad. The night the author visited me, Aditi Mallick and I had a frank conversation about Patriarchy, how for women, the streets at night are haunted by men. We discussed gender, queerness, and caste, and read aloud a Dalit student’s fairwell from a year and half ealier, who struggled through numbness and over the brink of bearability. It was Rohith Vemula’s suicide note, written in English. Rohith’s death at Hyderabad University was an event in time that would become a latest spark in the vast brushfires of anti-caste agitation. He wrote, in part and in parting,
I would not be around when you read this letter. Don’t get angry on me. I know some of you truly cared for me, loved me and treated me very well. I have no complaints on anyone. It was always with myself I had problems. I feel a growing gap between my soul and my body. And I have become a monster. I always wanted to be a writer. A writer of science, like Carl Sagan. At last, this is the only letter I am getting to write.
I loved science, stars, nature, but then I loved people without know that people have long since divorced from nature. Our feelings are second handed. Our love is constructed. Our beliefs coloured. Our originality valid through artificial art. It has become truly difficult to love without getting hurt.
The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of stardust. In [e]very field, in studies, in streets, in politics, and in dying and living.
I am writing this kind of letter for the first time. My first time of a final letter. Forgive me if I fail to make sense. May be I was wrong, all the while, in understanding world. In understanding love, pain, life, death. There was no urgency. But I always was rushing. Desperate to start a life. All the while, some people, for them, life itself is curse. My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness. The unappreciated child from my past.
I am not hurt at this moment. I am not sad. I am just empty. Unconcerned about myself. That’s pathetic. And that’s why I am doing this.
People may dub me as a coward. And selfish, or stupid once I am gone. I am not bothered about what I am called. I don’t believe in after-death stories, ghosts, or spirits. If there is anything at all I believe, I believe that I can travel to the stars. And know about the other worlds.
…
*
* * *
*
Besetting and benign, how do these constelations of human institutions come to be? What is their History?
As dreams slipping in dawn’s twilight, the History of how things are, and how they came to be is intentionally suppressed by a symbol system coopted long ago by powerful men. And for this, there is a strengthening arguement that in large part, an archaic effort to maintain patriarchal dominance is responsible. History, spoken, written, sung, heard, danced, signified in as many ways as bodies move, History Itself has become a ritual, a practice, a custom, an institution of collective memory distortion; the supression of collective remembering of the contributions of ordinary people, and the erasure of significance of women and womens’ essential contributions to collective development of humanity. In this spirit and for this reason, Womens’ Historian Gerda Lerner wrote,
“By making the term “man” subsume “woman” and arrogate to itself the representation of all of humanity, men have built a conceptual error of vast proportion into all of their thought. By taking the half for the whole, they have not only missed the esssence of whatever they are describing, but they have distorted it in such a fashion that they cannot see it correctly. As long as men believed the earth to be flat, they could not understand its realitiy, its function, and its actual relationship to other bodies in the universe. As long as men believe their experiences, their viewpoint, and their ideas represent all of human experience and all of human thought, they are not only unable to define correctly in the abstract, but they are unable to describe reality accurately.”
This forgotten history can be known, can be remembered. It is buried in living memory, and dug up from lives past by those who refuse to forget, refuse to believe the propoganda, refuse to accept regularized brutality, and choose to re-evaluate and reinterpret our pasts in search of possibilities for different worlds in which differences are not supressed, but celebrated and dignified, in which our collective memory is rebalanced to account for the contributions of all beings, especially those of women. This remembering and re-imagining sustains the struggle in the present for any kind of temporary relief from the grind of social marginalization and the effort to overcome the widespread precarity. It reminds us of past and future possibilities. The arenas of forgetting and remembering in which the skirmishes unfold are everywhere inside and outside the halls of powers where rules are formulated, formalized, and codified, and in civil society, in the workplace, in the streets, the hinterlands, in the homes, and ultimately in our relationships with one another, in how we treat each other.
Multitudes of social bonds, afterall, are what animate what we refer to as society; villages, cities, and empires. Empires-militerist-paternal e’er conquest sought. Yet if we stretch our imaginations far enough, conceivable are times, memories, records, of histories when military adventures were not. On the way, by attempting to become aware of, identify, decode, and understand the relationships of the memorized mezmorized characters animating us, the gendered roles of the husband-wife, master-slave, the financier-debtor, buyer-seller, merchants, traders, judges, mercenaries, militaries, priests, laws, states, clans, kinships, families, marriages, husbands, wives, fathers, families, mothers, the parts in these plays of institutionalized paternal dominance, then can the scripts be graphittied, cut-up, re-assembled, and rewritten; then can they be effectively wielded to the benefit of those peoples that these scripts, these prescribed social roles, these straight-jackets are meant, by designed, to cripple, to control. For example, tactically, in order to fight effectually in the courts, one must be able to speak the language of the law.
Thus the subsequent legal terms-of-court-control trace a symbolic shadow cast by empires past, in the following case, by that of Rome, a relatively recent example of colinization thrice-over, as anthropologist David Graeber explains,
“German legal theorist Rudolf von Jhering famously remarked that ancient Rome had conquered the world three times: ‘the first time through its armies, the second through its religion, the third through its laws.’ He might have added: each time more thoroughly. The Empire, after all, only spanned a tiny portion of the globe; the Roman Catholic Church has spread farther; Roman law has come to provide the language and conceptual underpinnings of legal and constitutional orders everywhere. Law students from South Africa to Peru are expected to spend a good deal of their time memorizing technical terms in Latin, and it is Roman law that provides almost all our basic conceptions about contract, obligation, torts, property, and jurisdiction — and, in a broader sense, of citizenship, rights, and liberties on which political life, too, is based.
This was possible, Jhering held, because, the Romans were the first to turn jurisprudence into a genuine science.”
Such a science, language, and jurisprudence was an area of extensive inquiry for a certain Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. In 1946, one year before India’s formal independence, he became the draft committee chairman of the Constituent Assembly tasked with the composition of Constitution of India, which was adopted after an almost three year process in 1949.
In the record of the debates, Ambedkar explains that the Fundamental Rights specified in part three of the final document were to be safeguarded by Article 32.
“I need make no apology for explaining the nature of these writs. Anyone who knows anything about the English law will realise and understand that the writs which are referred to in the article fall into two categories. They are called in one sense “prerogative writs”, in the other case they are called “writs in action”. A writ of mandamus, a writ of prohibition, a writ of certiorari, can be used or applied for both; it can be used as a prerogative writ or it may be applied for by a litigant in the course of a suit or proceedings. The importance of these writs which are given by this article lies in the fact that they are prerogative writs; they can be sought for by an aggrieved party without bringing any proceedings or suit. Ordinarily you must first file a suit before you can get any kind of order from the Court, whether the order is of the nature of mandamus, prohibition or certiorari or anything of the kind. But here, so far as this article is concerned, without filing any proceedings you can straightaway go to the Court and apply for the writ. The object of the writ is really to grant what I may call interim relief.
…I am very glad that the majority of those who spoke on this article have realised the importance and the significance of this article. If I was asked to name any particular article in this Constitution as the most important–an article without which this Constitution would be a nullity–I could not refer to any other article except this one. It is the very soul of the Constitution and the very heart of it and I am glad that the House has realised its importance.
…I prefer the British method of dealing with rights. The British method is a peculiar method, a very real and a very sound method. British jurisprudence insists that there can be no right unless the Constitution provides a remedy for it. It is the remedy that makes a right real. If there is no remedy, there is no right of all, and I am therefore not prepared to burden the Constitution with a number of pious declarations which may sound as glittering generalities but for which the Constitution makes no provision by way of a remedy. It is much better to be limited in the scope of our rights and to make them real by enunciating remedies than to have a lot of pious wishes embodied in the Constitution. I am very glad that this House has seen that the remedies that we have provided constitute a fundamental part of this Constitution.”
Interestingly, earlier in the record of the same debates, Durgabai Deshmukh, a lawyer from Andra Pradesh and one of only fifteen women among ultimately 299 members of the Constituent Assembly { after about quarter of the members withdrew to a separate Constituent Assembly in Karachi that would later form West and East Pakistan, now Pakistan and Bagladesh }, had already affirmed the significance of Article 32 { at the time of debate and in the record, it was referred to as Article 25 }.
“I have great pleasure in supporting this article. While doing so, I wish to place a few points before the House for its consideration.
The right to move the Supreme Court by appropriate proceedings for the enforcement of a person’s rights is a very valuable right that is guaranteed under this Constitution. In my view this is a right which is fundamental to all the fundamental rights guaranteed under this Constitution. The main principle of this article is to secure an effective remedy to the fundamental rights guaranteed under this Constitution. As we are all aware, a right without an expeditious and effective remedy serves no purpose at all, nor is it worth the paper on which it is written. Therefore, as I have already stated, this article secures that kind of advantage that it will ensure the effective enforcement of the fundamental rights guaranteed to a person.”
Essentially, Article 32 enables anyone to petition the Supreme Court to issue a writ, written command, a court order, to remedy a violation of a person’s Fundamental Rights.
A half century after the adoption of the Constitution, the country suffered a shrivelling three years of drought, in which in one season in the state of Rajasthan, “47% of the villages (19,817 out of 41,529), crop losses [were] above 75%.” Combined with an expanded notion of locus standi { literally, location of standing, or a court’s determination of who the court will allow stand before the court to be seen and heard, to petition }, in 2001, a human rights advocacy group, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, represented by the Human Rights Law Network, those with formal educational advantage, the formally literate and learned, used their privileged positions in solidarity with and on behalf of hundreds of millions of those without or with less such advantages, the differently literate and learned. They took up Article 32 as their weapon legal in order to compel the state to enforce the constitutional guarantee of Fundamental Rights, and listed the respondents as 1) the Government of India, 2) Food Corporation of India { responsible for subsidized food distribution }, and 3) seven other Indian states. They specifically cited Article 21.
Article 21 reads,
“Protection of Life And Personal Liberty: No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.”
The resulting petition put before the Supreme Court in persuit of a writ, a binding court order for remedy of violation of Fundamental Rights, contrasted an unsettling vision of the abundance of stockpiles of grain rotting in the rain with the scarcity of starvation rations endured by people residing, according to the petition, just 75 kilometers from the godowns, or grain warehouses.
The Supreme Court assented with the writ petition, and designated capital-C Commissioners { a unique feature in the Indian justice system } to track the implementation of the court’s orders for interim relief of what became a 16 year long legal proceeding known as the “Right to Food Case”, legally asigned as “Writ Petition (Civil) No.196 of 2001”. Through a series of subsequent filings, findings, and orders, the ambit of the case grew to include “urban destitution, homelessness, the right to work, starvation deaths, as well as issues of transparency and accountability”.
In early 2010, following media coverage of the preceding winter, 9 years after the case began, the Commissioners
“brought to the notice of the Honorable Supreme Court, the appalling conditions of the people living on the streets in Delhi, especially in extreme cold weather conditions. They explained that these deaths could have been avoided had there been proper implementation of directions of the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India (in CWP 196/ 2001) … It was further explained that people are dying in the streets of Delhi not only because they are hungry but also because they are homeless. People require more food to remain healthy, as the temperature decreases. This makes homeless people who already have low levels of access to nutritional food and high malnutrition rates, very vulnerable to cold weather. … the Commissioners therefore sought a direction to all state governments/UTs [ Union Territories ] in India, to ‘to build and run 24 hour shelters for urban homeless people, with adequate and appropriate facilities. The shelters must be in sufficient numbers to meet the need, in the ratio of at least one per lakh [ one hundred thousand ] of population, in every major urban centre.’ … The Supreme Court concurred and issued notice to all state governments to respond about facilities that they are providing to the urban homeless. As a result, the matter of services to the homeless was taken up at the highest levels of the administration in various state governments for the first time.”
One of the lawyers with the Human Rights Law Network, Colin Gonsalves noted, “It is one of the most successful cases we have done; it had had a nationwide effect. After the judgment … the right-to-food campaign has taken off, with hundreds of groups joining the campaign. There has been some improvement with government programmes… Take the mid-day meal scheme… for children in schools. The programme had virtually closed down [but after] the order, the mid-day meal has been restarted in six to eight states.”
The Housing and Land Rights Network stated that “The National Urban Livelihoods Mission–Scheme of Shelter for Urban Homeless (NULM–SUH) was launched by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation in 2014. It provided policy direction to the Supreme Court’s orders on homelessness. The Scheme aims to provide permanent shelter and essential services to the urban homeless population in the country.” While the United Nations (UN) Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported in 2016 that “…the implementation of DAY-NULM is very poor. A total of 770 shelters have been sanctioned by States/UTs [ Union Territories ] with a capacity of about 38,770 inmates which is a minuscule number of shelters to house India’s 1.7 million homeless population.”
As an analysis of the Indian state beaurocracy like Akhil Gupta’s Red Tape details,
“…in postcolonial India, using a very crude calculation, I estimate that the number of “excess deaths”–the number of people missing from the population because of malnutrition and morbidity–is approximately 140 million. This translates to over 2 million untimely deaths annually, a figure that overshadows the loss of human life resulting from all natural disasters globally.”
“… Statistical regularity, in other words, helps establish the prescriptive.In the Indian case, high rates of poverty, once established as a statistical fact and the normal state of affairs, served to justify and legitimate slow action against poverty on the part of the state elites, particularly since there was not much change in rates of poverty in the first five decades after Independence. High rates of poverty are tolerated because, much like any other natural phenomenon, they are seen as part of the landscape. In a very similar vein, Scheper-Hughes introduced the concept of ‘an average expectable environment of child death’ to explain how high infant mortality rates came to be normalized in northeast Brazil. As in the case of the natural cycle of floods and droughts, one can at best cope with such situations by developing adequate mechanisms of temporary relief. This is why any significant reduction in poverty is treated as a cause of great celebration and self-congradulation.”
But, Gupta notes, the poor are not totally disenfranchised.
“The poor in India are not excluded from political participation; in fact, as this book demonstrates, they are enthusiastic practitioners of participatory democracy at different levels of politics. Of the two million people elected to various offices by democratic methods in India, the poor constitute a significant number. The failure of the benefits of development to reach them cannot be attributed solely to their exclusion from political communities constituted by identities such as nation, religion, or caste. On the other hand, despite their inclusion in the national community and the development state, their poverty does not constitute a scandal, and their death does not provoke national soul-searching. Popular sovereignty takes the paradoxical form of inclusion and unspeakable violence; forms of belonging coexist with the production of bare life. What begs explanation in the case of India is the widespread acceptance of the violence being done to the poor at the same time that popular sovereignty is constituted through them.”
Gupta argues, “structural violence is enacted through the everyday practices of bureaucracies, and one therefore needs to look closely at those everyday practices in order to understand why violence coexists with care and why, paradoxically, it is often found in practices of welfare.”
*
The hard-won increments of harm-reducing action taken by the state, like the provisioning of slightly wider access to food, housing, and education, are small but significant achievements of the pressure brought to bear by ordinary people propelled by a basic sense of decency, solidarity, and dignity-in-practice, acting through overlapping social movements, in the courts, in the streets, the slums, the schools, the railways, the countrysides, and in homes. These efforts against deprivation documented hereunto seem to have at least dual aspirations. They are in fact palliative measures, alleviating the suffering of a significant few among legions of the pricariate, and yet they strive in their deeper motivation, in their profounder imagination, in their longer-term vision, to be transformative, asserting the importance of the dignity of every life, regardless of caste, gender, or any other category.
Consider the stratified, bureaucratised, market economies and their bureaucratized, managarial states likened to prisons’ production { choose your imagery, the factory or the plantation }. The conventional structures themselves peretuate deprivation by design. Any infirmaries that do exist are there to patch-up prisoners just enough to keep them alive and able to limp along well enough to produce– to maintain the flow and accumulation of wealth of the manchurian, managarial, admistrative classes. Anything beyond maintaining the “bare life” of the prisoner is not only irrelevant, but a threat to the operation, the function, the very intent, purpose, and desired effect of the prisons. Now imagine a prisoners’ rebellion in which a recalcitrant few win consessions to communicate with people beyond the prison walls, expand the infirmaries, add windows, libraries, schools, gardens, forests. And it is exactly this urge at the least, to reduce harm, and better yet to rearrange the sickening status quo in order prevent harm, that is a call to imagine, create, and maintain realities in which the prisons are dismantle, repurposed, and entirely transformed. These are the promises of the dreams and actions of the imaginations and affection and simple and basic care of the solidarity networks I have witnessed in Hyderabad and beyond.
* * *
* * *
across the barren plain
across the infantilized brain
and the hot dry windy breath of crumbling skeletons buried
of the body domestic scorned
“we do not fear ruins”
by our own hands
knowing that requisite is death
we lay our bodies down,
martyrs of a meaninglessness patriarchal
into the ground, 11,000 times
for 11,000 years
for the only way to go is down
into your gravity
into your eternity
into your world, our world
* * *
our skeletons wait
for 11,000 years
wait to be excavated, uncovered, reinterpreted, remembered
and meaning in allied difference realized
we from these domestic ruins emerge
our skeletons bearing strength and blood of ancestors
carring the flower of the word
in a world of tears and rain
gathered into precious pools
protected from the sun
sunken into the earth
upon which infants carry maturity
and our worlds, meaningful so that they are alive and fecund
we learn the meaning of a single moment, a forever series of moments
and once again
truely live
* * *
*
Here’s an idea, an argument, a thesis. Imagine a reinterpretion of the notion of freedom as meaning the ability to simply and meaningfully be able to care-for, care-about, and play with each other,
« to enter into moral relations with each other »
« to live within a community of equals »
« the ability to make friends »,
Imagine. What if we take the ability « to enter into moral relations » to mean the maintaining of an equality of access to two things: first, something observed and practiced by native, indigenous, and aboriginal peoples, what anthropologist Paul Radin calls the « irreducible minimum », “an inalienable right to food, shelter and clothing” and second, the capacity to maintain alliances capable of defending and protecting the irreducible minimum, which requires the collective capacity to imagine, to conceive of, to grasp, to understand, to subvert, to overcome, and to dismantle barriers to the irreducible minimum.
Then unfreedom could be taken to mean the prevention, the thwarting of friend-making, alliance-making, and care-taking, and critically, arresting the development of the capacities of imagination, creativity, symbol-making, meaning-making, history-making, collective-memory-making, definition, interpretation, and reinterpretation of symbols necessary for the maintaining these alliances. Such will be the subjects of the rest of the inquiry…
Within human communities, regularized inequality is founded on and has developed among humans via the suppression of mutually supportive alliances, of solidarity, of mutual-aid, care, and play, as well as the suppression of, as far as we know, a uniquely human capacity: the capacity to use our imagination to conceive and our creativity to make, make-up, and interpret symbols, i.e. definition, id est meaning, which are the constituent elements of expression, communication, and language required to develop and sustain such alliances. And most crucially, regularized, that is institutionalized inequality, the denial of the irreducible minimum, is founded on and has developed via the suppression of friend-making, alliance-making, and care-taking among women, along with the suppression of the development womens’ capacities of imagination, creativity, symbol-making, meaning-making, collective-memory-making, history-making, definition, interpretation, and reinterpretation of symbols necessary to sustain such alliances. Necessarily, this includes the imagining, creating, assigning, and determining of what are meant by every symbol ever devised in any of the myriad human communities contemporary and ancient. Key among these symbols signal what behavior patterns are included and excluded by the conceptions, the ideas, the words, the speech-acts that are « woman » and « man » { determination in the senses of it’s many cognates: the determination that terminate the terminals of the terms, the expressed, danced, gestured, sung, spoken, drawn, and written symbols themselves }. In other words, what is conceived of in any particular culture as characteristic, or typical, or normal, or normative behavior of « woman » and « man », these gender roles are gendered roles. They are types of imagined, created, assigned, determined law, tradition, custom, ritual, performance.
Within human communities that do not preserve equal access among the sexes to the development of female alliances and their complimentary imagining and creating of symbols, male-bodied people have taken control of the symbol-system, and with it, the ways-of-thinking, the attitudes, the mindsets, the destinies of the people. The genderization or gendering or assigning of “proper” or “improper”, “acceptable” or “unacceptable”, “appropriate” and “inappropriate” behavior patterns of human bodies based on differences of anatomy form the fundamental bases of contrived, normalized institutions of social inequality.
Within the academic community, Historian Joan Scott elucidated an influencial description, or shall we call it decyphering of the shifting notion of gender:
“My definition of gender has two parts and several subsets. …gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.”
“Gender involves four interrelated elements:
First, culturally available symbols that evoke multiple (and often contradictory) representations–eve and mary as symbols of women, for example, in the western christian tradition–but also, myths of light and dark, purification and pollution, innocence and corruption. For historians, the interesting questions are, which symbolic representations are invoked, how, and in what contexts?”
“Second, normative concepts that set forth interpretations of the meanings of the symbols, that attempt to limit and contain their metaphoric possibilities. These concepts are expressed in religious, educational, scientific, legal, and political doctrines and typically take the form of a fixed binary opposition, categorically and unequivocally asserting the meaning of male and female, masculine and feminine. in fact, these normative statements depend on the refusal or repression of alternative possibilities…”
“The third aspect of gender relationships: a notion of politics as well as reference to social institutions and organizations”
“The fourth aspect of gender is subjective identity.”
“The theorizing of gender, however, is developed in my second proposition: gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power. it might be better to say, gender is a primary field within which or by means of which power is articulated.”
“Established as an objective set of references, concepts of gender structure perception and the concrete and symbolic organization of all social life. to the extent that these references establish distributions of power (differential control over or access to material and symbolic resources), gender becomes implicated in the conception and construction of power itself.
In addition to specifying a definition of gender as a cultural role,
“Gender is the cultural definition of behavior defined as appropriate to the sexes in a given society at a given time. Gender is a set of cultural roles. It is a costume, a mask, a straitjacket in which men and women dance their unequal dance.”
Second wave feminist and Womens’ History scholar Gerda Lerner names, assigns, defines, describes an institutionalized form of the phenomenon as follows:
“Patriarchy in its wider definition means the manifestation and institutionalization of male dominance over women and children in the family and the extention of male dominance over women in society in general. It implies that men hold power in all the important institutions of society and that women are deprived of access to such power. It does not imply that women are either totally powerless or totally deprived of rights, influence, and resources.”
To theorize, explain, and argue the case for the historic and pre-historic developments of Patriarchy and like institutionalizations, such systems, such arrangements, such persistent thought, emotion, behavior, and activity patterns over time, or rather, Patriarchies, is no small task. Matriarchy studies researcher Heide Goettner-Abendroth’s states in order to gain such an understanding, one must investigate what came before Patriarchies, and that, such efforts have hardly begun,
Two important questions have to be answered: 1. How could patriarchal patterns develop in the first place? 2. How could they spread all over the world? The latter is by no means obvious.
In my opinion neither question has been sufficiently answered yet. Instead, a lot of pseudo-explanations have been offered. If we want to explain the development of patriarchy we first of all need clear knowledge about the form of society which existed previously — and that was matriarchy. At present, this knowledge is in the process of being developed. It is the absolute precondition for explaining the development of patriarchy. Otherwise, we begin with false assumptions.
Secondly, a theory about the development of patriarchy has to explain why patriarchal patterns emerged in different places, on different continents, at different times and under different conditions. The answers will be very different for the different regions of the world. This task has not yet been done at all.”
The recognition by Heide of the appearances of similar patterns of human male dominances “at different times and under different conditions” { like, say, the quite possibly independent rise of plant and animal domestication by humans beginning over ten millenia ago and over a span of thousands of years in perhaps a dozen different places across the world } is refreshing. It indicates a recognition of a distributed pattern of emergences that arose possibly independent of eachother, as well as a recognition of the tremendous diversity of human cultures through time. But what conditions, as Heide points out must be determined, might all human cultures in all of their tremendously diverse forms have had in common? Heide avers that they were matriarchal, not in the sense of arche as in domination, but in the sense of arche as beginning { not like patri-arch, but like archaic, archetype, or archeology }, and not in the sense of female-dominated, but in the sense of being fundamentally egalitarian, of maintaining the irreducible minimum through alliance-making, and the requisite capacity to imagine and create symbols. But if that’s true, it would mean humans went from equal egalitarian Matriarchies to unequal elitist Patriarchies. How could this have possibly happened?
If we take the tack of social anthropoligist Camilla Powers in her critique of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s essay, “How to change the course of human history (at least the part that’s already happened)”, then far older and inter-species behavior patterns must be taken into account.
Graeber and Wengrow do helpfully point to deepening cracks in the simplistic idea that with agriculture came inequality. They point out that settled societies are not and were not invariably class-based, and that class-based societies are not and were not invariably settled. Included in the vast and ancient diversity of human groups, are those who have practiced the cyclical establishment and tearing-down of social hierarchies, including at times on a seasonal basis.
Limited to the experience of a single life, one individual person would not find obvious a phenomenon Graeber and Wengrow point out, namely the tremendously varied and cyclical character of social organization among humans, writing,
As Claude Lévi-Strauss often pointed out, early Homo Sapiens were not just physically the same as modern humans, they were our intellectual peers as well. In fact, most were probably more conscious of society’s potential than people generally are today, switching back and forth between different forms of organization every year. Rather than idling in some primordial innocence, until the genie of inequality was somehow uncorked, our prehistoric ancestors seem to have successfully opened and shut the bottle on a regular basis, confining inequality to ritual costume dramas, constructing gods and kingdoms as they did their monuments, then cheerfully disassembling them once again.
If so, then the real question is not ‘what are the origins of social inequality?’, but, having lived so much of our history moving back and forth between different political systems, ‘how did we get so stuck?’
They write,
Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place.
Elsewhere Graeber argues along the same lines:
“…the elimination of formal chattel slavery has to be considered a remarkable achievement, and it is worthwhile to wonder how it was accomplished. Especially since it was not just accomplished once. The truly remarkable thing, if one consults the historical record, is that slavery has been eliminated–or effectively eliminated–many times in human history.”
And elsewhere,
“Patriarchy as we know it seems to have taken shape in a see-sawing battle between the newfound elites and newly dispossessed. Much of my own analysis here is inspired by the brilliant work of feminist historian Gerda Lerner.”
More from Lerner in a bit, but first, leave it to an anthropologist and archeologist to impress us with the tremendous variety to be found in human social organization, and we can thank them for too reminding us that, for instance, the popular conception that foragers lived in tiny groups in isolation isn’t a well supported one; but instead they often associated with non-kin groups. But in their essay, Graeber and Wengrow elaborate on human behavior stretching back only 40,000 years and do mention the pliestocene, evolution, and gender, but show us to the shallows, at the edges of the pools of even more ancient times. I hope that in thier subsequent colaborations, Graeber and Wengrow take a deep dive into geological and evolutionary time.
But there are others who take on the challenge. Social anthropoligist Camilla Powers writes,
“The main reasons Graeber and Wengrow are disqualified from speaking about human origins are that they give no context of evolution; they don’t deal with sex and gender; and they leave out Africa, the continent on which we evolved as modern humans.”
Keep in mind that genetic studies have demonstrated that homo sapiens, anotomically modern humans with which we share the vast majority of our genetic material { and in the case of Sub-Saharan Africans, all of it } have interbred { or as a latest evolutionary metaphor for introgression would describe it, have woven gene flows into a “braided stream” } with at least two extinct species of the genus homo within the last hundered thousand year, Homo Neanderthalensis and Denisonvans { pronounced denEEsovans }, which are both as yet known to have inhabited Eurasia only, and not Sub-Saharan Africa and non-the-less much less documented, studied, and understood. To get at the origins of inequality of human societies, as Powers suggests, we’ll need to look at non-human precursor societies of a much older age– natural history on the geological and evolutionary order of millions years, at which time our ancient human ancestors shared our LCA, or Last Common Ancestor, and diverged onto an evolutionary pathway distinct from other primates.
Biopsychologist Barbara Smuts suggests that the emergence of patriarchal behavior patterns that only recently institutionalized as Patriarchies, have their roots in evolutionary adaptations that can be observed in our living non-human animal relatives. Specifically, there are conflicts of interest, she says, among the reproductive strategies of the sexes in primates and other animals. In primate groups, which include humans and our hominidae ancestors, Smuts lists six factors contributing to the dominance of male reproductive strategies over female ones, specifically by way of,
1. a reduction in female allies
2. elaboration of male-male alliances
3. increased male control over resources
4. increased hierarchy formation among males
5. female strategies that reinforce male control over females
6. the evolution of language and its power to create ideology
Every factor is observable in humans, while only the sixth is observed only in humans.
This is where the explanation of evolutionary fitness within species and among the sexes of ancient humans posited by social anthropologist Camilla Powers and others becomes both extra-ordinary and compelling. Powers theorizes that “our forebears were the ones who somehow solved the problem of great ape male dominance” and thus “first became equal.” She argues that Smuts’ sixth factor, “using symbols and speaking language, could only have emerged on the basis of egalitarianism”, and by implication, in opposition to the first five. Egalitarian relations were borne out of the cooperative struggle for counter-dominance against male-dominance.
Combining the evolutionary benefits of cooperative childcare, or alloparenting, performed by extended family members observed in humans and some, but not all, monkey species, as advanced in Mothers and Others by primatologist and anthroplogist Sara Blaffer Hrdy, Camilla Powers attributes humanity’s trend toward egalitarian inter-generational, increasingly significant alliance-making and symbol-making inter-dependence as follows:
“Our biology, life history and evolved psychology provide evidence of an egalitarian past during our evolution: our large brain size, cooperative eyes, menopause, intersubjectivity and Machiavellian counterdominance. These are underpinned by women’s evolved sexual physiology increasing equality of reproductive opportunities among men, compared with their great ape cousins.”
“Because among Machiavellian and counterdominant humans, weaker individuals can connive to overthrow the strong, we are animals capable of symbolic communication. Only in such conditions is language likely to emerge. The strong have no need of words; they have more direct physical means of persuasion.”
She explaining that “reverse dominant, collective – moral — action”, alliances, acted as evolutionary pressures that selected for and favored females that banded together, and males that supported such female mutual-aid. These intricating female-female and female-male alliances included an archetypal Female Cosmetic Coalitions (FCC), which exemplify the beginnings of symbolic culture and language.
“Whenever a coalition member menstruated, the whole coalition joined that female in amplifying her signal to attract males. Females within coalitions would begin to use blood-coloured substances as cosmetics to augment their signals. This is the Female Cosmetic Coalitions model of the origins of art, ritual, and symbolic culture.”
In creating a cosmetic coalition in resistance, females deter alpha males by surrounding a menstrual female and refusing to let anyone near. They are creating the world’s first taboo, on menstrual blood or collectively imagined blood, speaking the world’s first word: NO!
But even as a negative, this cosmetic display encourages investor males who are willing to go hunting and bring back supplies to the whole female coalition. Cosmetically decorated females who create a big show of solidarity against alpha males ensure that investor males will get the fitness rewards. It is fully in the interests of investor males to sexually select females belonging to ritual cosmetic coalitions, because they then eliminate competition from the would-be alphas.
“The FCC strategy is also the prototype symbolic action, with collective agreement that fake or imaginary ‘blood’ stands for real blood [by the painting of the body using of cosmetics, specifically red ochre]. While it is revolutionary at the level of morality, symbolism and economics, the strategy emerges as an evolutionary adaptation, driven by male sexual selection of female ritual participants.”
“While there must have been variability in the degree of dominance or egalitarianism among human groups, we can be confident that those populations where male dominance, sexual conflict and infanticide risks remained high were not the ones who became our ancestors. Our forebears were the ones who somehow solved the problem of great ape male dominance, instead harnessing males into routine support of these extraordinarily large-brained offspring.”
Powers argues, ultimately,
“organizing as the revolutionary sex,
* that women bust through the ‘gray ceiling’ of brain size
* that female political strategies created human symbolic culture
* that resistance is at the core of being human”
These are nascencies of explorations into the environmental conditions that evolutionary selective pressures have been for hominids, shaping the behavior patterns of the different sexes as they cooperate and compete, influence, resist and respond, dominate and counter-dominate, ally, befriend, play off and play with each other. Over periods of at least hundereds of thousands of years, from these forces, if Powers is correct, emerge art, ritual, custom, symbolic language and symbolic culture, and indicating that human body painting may be one of oldest canvases of symbolic expression. Alas, painting with ochre on human skin is an ephemeral surface-art, more so than the tattoo, for which there is approximately six to seven thousand year old evidence, and much more so than the strata of the Earth from which ochre might well be the oldest mined material. A testament to it’s significance, and it’s use as a medium of signification, massive amounts of the iron-rich mineral have been extracted from Wilgie Mia in Australia beginning at least 27,000 years ago, and from Ngwenya Mine in Swaziland beginning at least 40,000 years ago, around which time evidences of cave art bloom across Africa and Eurasia. The oldest figurative painting yet discovered is a drawing of a two-horned animal of red-orange hue of ochre in Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave in Borneo, dating back to between 40 and 52 thousand years ago. At least 71 hands traced with red ochre within Maltravieso cave in Spain date to 64,000 years ago, predating known evidence of homo sapien habitation in Europe by 20,000 years, suggesting the hands belong to homo neanderthalensis. Pieces of red ochre engraved with cross-hatch patterns have been found in Blombos Cave on the South African coast, dating back at least 70,000 years. Ochre-use may stretch as far back three to five hundered millenia.
So there seems to be periods, vast span of hundreds of thousands of years backdropped by the emergence of mindstate-sharing, inter-subjectivity, cooperative breeding, and symbolic communication, but before the invention of writing, that call for further examined, call for further re-membering, call for a reconstituting of our collective-memory in order to trace activity patterns of humans from the preliterate period starting hundereds of thousands of years ago, up to what on these vast time scales seems a rather recent phenomenon, the start of the Record in it’s written form, just 5,000 years ago, by which time, patriarchal patterns had begun to take hold.
But before we open the chapter of the institution of writing, one last hopeful sample of relations among the sexes from preliterate and postfigurative times. As Graeber and Wengrow emphasize, egalitarian societies are not an anomaly of the past. To cite just one example, albiet, remarkable at the very least for it’s relative longevity, of such a matriarchy { taking the broader definition as a society that is generally egalitarian in it’s gender expression, in this case, a society in which “lives, diets, and work” seem not to be determined by anatomical body-type }, Çatalhöyük was a settled agricultural society numbering at it’s peek, a population as many as ten thousand souls. For several decades, the site has been meticulously excavated from the arid Konya plains of Anatolia in present-day Turkish. One of the principle investigators, Ian Hodder, responded to a question of gender thus { and note Hodder’s use of the term “matriarchy” as meaning something akin to a reverse of a patriarchy, and not meaning an egalitarian society }:
[Questioner]: “…I think in the early days of the excavations there was some evidence that the society was matriarchal in those days. The desendents were related to the mother and the mother goddess… have you found anything contrary to that, or is that theory not true any more, that there was a matrtiarchal society?
[Ian Hodder]: “There have been many people who have argued that, yes. So the work we’ve done on gender shows very clearly that men and women had very similar lives and diets and work. So if you look at male and female bodies, they have really identical diets in terms of isotopes but they are also very similar in things like different types of work they did in their lives and we also find that both men and women had their heads removed. Head removal after death is something of clear social significance at Çatalhöyük and if it was a matriarchy or a patriarchy you might expect that only the male or female heads would be used and kept and re-deposited but they’re both male and female. So we don’t have any evidence that men and women had very different lives from each other. And there’s no real evidence that weather you were male or female had much impact on the social roles that you led. Of course men and women are different in terms of having children and so on, and in the data there are some minor differences, so for example we see that women enter into the workforce rather later than young men do…so there are differences but they’re not differences that seem to get then translated into longterm social or economic differences in standing in any way so it’s a very very egalitarian society in terms of gender as well as in other ways.
{ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bst5px48M4w&t=1h13m55s }
Starting around 9,500 years ago, habitation at Çatalhöyük spanned a period of over a thousand years. One writer argues that Catalhuyuk itself rose as a result of revolt against elites centuries prior.
How we got from there, from past matriarchal or egalitarian societies, to here, to present patriarchal, or elitist, ranked, classed, and stratified societies, as Hiede suggests, that has barely begun. There is by no means a consensus around how regionally variant patterns of patriarchal civilization developed and became ascendent worldwide.
Commenting on the nature of civilization itself, helping us to tip the scale back toward a balance of intellectual contribution among the sexes, that is, to recognize the obvious, that “society was created by women and men”, Wengrow emphasizes,
A moment’s reflection shows that women, their work, their concerns and innovations are at the core of this more accurate understanding of civilisation. Tracing the place of women in societies without writing often means using clues left, quite literally, in the fabric of material culture, such as painted ceramics that mimic both textile designs and female bodies in their forms and elaborate decorative structures. To take just one example, it’s hard to believe that the kind of complex mathematical knowledge displayed in early cuneiform documents, or in the layout of urban temples, sprang fully formed from the mind of a male scribe, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Far more likely, these represent knowledge accumulated in preliterate times, through concrete practices such as the applied calculus and solid geometry of weaving and beadwork. What until now has passed for ‘civilisation’ might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation – by men, etching their claims in stone – of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its centre.
{ https://aeon.co/ideas/a-history-of-true-civilisation-is-not-one-of-monuments }
Militarism, War, Slavery, Patriarchy. These institutions seem to have been present before the advent of writing in at least one of the three areas, the Near East, China, and Mesoamerica, in which writing systems independently emerged:
“In general, education becomes institutionalized when elites–military, religious, or political–need to assure their position in power by means for training a group to serve and perpetuate their interests. Whenever that has happened, historically, women were discriminated against and excluded from the very inception of each system. The earliest example is the exclusion of women from training in the newly discovered skills of writing and reading in Sumer and Babylon of the 2nd millennium B.C.”{tcofc p.23}
Gerda goes on to explain,
“the significance of history for human consciousness and psychic well-being. History gives meaning to human life and connects each life to immortality, but history has yet another function. In preserving the collective past and reinterpreting it to the present, human beings define their potential and explore the limits of their possibilities. We learn from the past not only what people before us did and thought and intended, but we also lean how they failed and erred. From the days of Babylonian king-lists forward, the record of the past has been written and interpreted by men and has primarily focused on the deeds, actions, and intentions of males. With the advent of writing human knowledge moved forward by tremendous leaps and at a much faster rate than ever before. While, as we have seen, women had participated in maintaining the oral tradition and religious and cultic functions in the preliterate period and for almost a millennium thereafter, their educational disadvantaging and their symbolic dethroning had a profound impact on their future development. The gap between the experience of those who could or might (in the case of lower-class males) participate in the creating of the symbol system and those who merely acted but did not interpret became increasingly greater.
It is upon the written record of the patriarchal patterns emergent in the Ancient Near-East that Gerda Lerner focuses her inquiry and survey of 5,000 years in her outstanding work, The Creation of Patriarchy. This period begins capital -H-, History, what she authors as “the recorded and interpreted past”. Lerner emphasizes that lower-case -h- history constitutes “the unrecorded past–all the events of the past as recollected by human beings”. That the written Records from their beginnings etched in clay and stone, memorialize war and king, conquests and spoils, suggests that militarism, the taking of captives, and the appropriation of the evolved human capacity to create, grasp, manipulate symbolic expression, that is, language, and wield it in order to indoctrinate and control defeated populations, point to these inventions originating in preliterate times. These forms of control had not existed before, that is, the normalized sub-oridination by men of women and other men, not only in body, but in mind.
“I am arguing that the sexual enslavement of captive women was, in reality, a step in the development and elaboration of patriarchal institutions, such as patriarchal marriage, and its sustaining ideology of placing female “honor” in chastity. The cultural invention of slavery rested as much on the elaboration of symbols of the subordination of women as it did on the actual conquest of women. By subordinating women of their own group and later captive women, men learned the symbolic power of sexual control over men and elaborated the symbolic language in which to express dominance and create a class of psychologically enslaved persons. By experimenting with the enslavement of women and children, men learned to understand that all human beings have the potential for tolerating enslavement, and they developed the techniques and forms of enslavement which would enable them to make their absolute dominance a social institution.
Lerner explains that with this enurement came the development of gender inequality and the commoditization of women. Markets of blood and soil are born on which human bodies, first those of women, later those of men, and land are the « goods » exchanged, traded, bought, and sold.
Men-as-a-group had rights in women which women-as-a-group did not have in men. Women themselves became a resource, acquired by men much as the land was acquired by men. Women were exchanged or bought in marriages for the benefit of their families; later, they were conquered or bought in slavery, where their sexual services were part of their labor and where their children were the property of their masters. In every known society it is women of conquered tribes who were first enslaved, whereas men were killed. It was only after men had learned how to enslave the women of groups who could be defined as strangers, that they learned how to enslave men of those groups and, later, subordinates from within their own societies.
Thus, the enslavement of women, combined with racism and sexism, preceded the formation of classes and class oppression. Class differences were, at their very beginnings, expressed and constituted in terms of patriarchal relations. Class is not a separate construct from gender; rather, class is expressed in genderic terms. By the second millenium B.C. in Mesopotamian societies, the daughters of the poor were sold into marriage or prostitution in order to advance the economic interests of their families. { p. 212-213 tcop }
Paternalism is at least one essential thread common to all dominant-subordinate relationships. Historian Gerda Lerner provides the following definition:
“Paternalism, or more accurately Paternal Dominance, describes the relationship of a dominant group, considered superior, to a subordinate group, considered inferior, in which the dominance is mitigated by mutual obligations and reciprocal rights. The dominated exchange submission for protection, unpaid labor for maintenance. In its historical origins, the concept comes from family relations as they developed under patriarchy, in which the father held absolute power over all the members of his household. In exchange, he owed them the obligation of economic support and protection.”
Human societies that tolerate the domination and protection of any proportion of the population, let alone half the species in the case of women, suffer from this ignorance, generation after generation. Where there are prisons, be they mental or material or both, there are guards and wardens and an elaborate carceral and terroristic culture designed to keep the thing running. No matter how neglected or guilded the cages, no matter how rosy or barren the grounds, crack-ridden or sturdily-built the administrative blocks, as long as dignity is incidental and exploitation essential to the rotten enterprise, neither prisoner, nor guard, nor warden, nor blind-eye-turned society escape the consequences of the obscene moral blindness that is paternal dominance, weather conscious of the phenomenon or not.
“Sexism stands in the same relation to paternalism as racism does to slavery. Both ideologies enabled the dominant to convince themselves that they were extending paternalistic benevolence to creatures inferior and weaker than themselves. But here the parallel ends, for slaves were driven to group solidarity by racism, while women were separated from one another by sexism.”
Paternal dominance stultifies.
For the maintenance of paternalism (and slavery) it is essential to convince subordinates that their protector is the only authority capable of fulfilling their needs. It is therefore in the interest of the master to keep the slave in ignorance of his past and of future alternatives. But slaves kept alive an oral tradition— a body of myth, folklore, and history— which spoke of a time prior to their enslavement and defined a previous time of freedom. This offered an alternative to their present state. Slaves knew that their people had not always been slaves and that others like them were free. This knowledge of the past, their separate cultural tradition, the power of their religion and their group solidarity enabled slaves to resist oppression and secure the reciprocity of rights implicit in their status.
Eugene Genovese, in his superb study of slave culture, shows how paternalism, while it softened the harshest features of the system, also tended to weaken the individual’s ability to see the system in political terms. He says: ‘It was not that the slaves did not act like men. Rather, it was that they could not grasp their collective strength as people and act like political men.’ That they could not become conscious of their collective strength was due to paternalism.
And here we see the key part that isolation, sequestration, and the relegation of women to the domestic sphere played.
This description has great significance for an analysis of the position of women, since their subordination has been primarily expressed in the form of paternalistic dominance within the structure of the family. This structural condition made any development of female solidarity and group cohesiveness extremely difficult. In general we can observe that women deprived of group support and of an accurate knowledge of the past history of women experienced the full and devastating impact of cultural modeling through sexist ideology, as expressed in religion, law, and myth.
Exercised as both protection and domination, “absolute power” entails the sovereignty, dominion, legitimacy, might, right, advantage, and priviledge to decide who shall be allowed to survive, as well as who shall not and under what conditions. While infanticide is not unique to the human species, in human societies, dominant male rulers came to command a continuum of discretion, from infanticide, in particular widespread femecide, to infantalism, an engendered disposition in the submited and ruled group that “never out[grows] the childlike state of being subordinate and under protection”. “[P]aternalism describes a particular mode, a subset of patriarchal relations”.
Lerner shines from a particularly brilliant spot in the feminist firmament. The Creation of Patriarchy is an illuminating account of the gradual emergence and institutionalization of Patriarchy over a period of two and a half millenia from flows and frictions of the cultures of the Ancient Near-East. It “trace[s] the development of the leading ideas, symbols, and metaphors by which patriarchal gender relations were incorporated into Western civilization. Each chapter is built around one of these metaphors for gender”. It describes the desecration, the profaination of the goddesses-sacred-divine, the sequestration from women of the mediation of the holy into a single-all-powerful-male-creator-god accessible only via the ritualized roles of men as priests, divinely inspired, symbolized recorded as scripture, and inherited by the abrahamic religious traditions: Judaism, later Christianity, later Islam. In the chapter named “The Patriarches”, Lerner writes that
If, for example, Yahweh was not conceived or thought of as a gendered god, but rather as a principle which embodied male and female aspects, as some theologians have argued, this is significant only in showing us that there were available alternatives to the traditional patriarchal interpretation and that these alternatives were not chosen. The fact is that for over 2500 years the god of the Hebrews was addressed, represented, and interpreted as a male father-god, no matter what other aspects he may have embodied. This was, historically, the meaning given to the symbol, and therefore this was the meaning which carried authority and force. This meaning became the utmost significance in the way both men and women were able to conceptualize women and place them both in the divine order of things and in human society.
There was therefore no inevitability in the emergence of an all-male priesthood. The prolonged ideological struggle of the hebrew tribes against the worship of Canaanite deities and especially the persistence of a cult of the fertility-goddess Asherah must have hardened the emphasis on male cultic leadership and the tendency toward mysogyny, which fully emerged only in the post-exilic period [ after the exile of hebrews captive to babylon in the 6th and 7th centuries BC ]. Whatever the causes, the old testament male priesthood represented a radical break with millennia of tradition and with the practices of neighboring peoples. This new order under the all-powerful god proclaimed to Hebrews and to all those who took the bible as their moral and religious guide that women cannot speak to god.”
Gerda lays out how came to pass the exclusion of women from signification, definition, and interpretation, from symbol-making and history-making, the exclusion of women from the transcendent work of the determining of meaning. It describes a tremendous flaw plaguing the script from and stage on which would rehears and rise Western civilization:
“By making the term ‘man’ subsume ‘woman’ and arrogate to itself the repressentation of all of humanity, men have built a conceptual error of vast proportion into all of their thought. By taking the half for the whole, they have not only missed the essence of whatever they are describing, but they have distorted it in such a fashion that they cannot see it correctly.
The androcentric fallacy, which is built into all the mental constructs of Western civilization, cannot be rectified simply by “adding women.” What it demands for rectification is a radical restructuring of thought and analysis which once and for all accepts the fact that humanity consists in equal parts of men and women and that the experiences, thoughts, and insights of both sexes must be represented in every generalization that is made about human beings.
TODAY, HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT has for the first time created the necessary conditions by which large groups of women–finally, all women–can emancipate themselves from subordination. Since women’s thought has been imprisoned in a confining and erroneous patriarchal framework, the transformation of the conscousness of women about ourselves and our thought is a precondition for change.”
But Lerner readily provide a provincial caution regarding her theorizing about Patriarchy. She writes,
“Although I believe that my hypotheses have wide applicability, I am not, on the basis of the study, of one region, attempting to offer ‘a general theory’ on the rise of patriarchy and sexism. The theoretical hypotheses I offer for Western civilization will need to be tested in and compared with other cultures for their general applicability.”
In an interiview sometime after The Creation of Patriarchy was published, she remarked that “I cannot possibly know enough about other places to say with the same certainty that I say it about the ancient Near East. However, a colleague of mine in India has undertaken the study of the origin of slavery in India independently, and she came to the same results. So in India it certainly was the same way.”
Uma Chakravarti may or may not be the colleague to whom Lerner refered, yet this is what Chakravarti wrote in “Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India,”
“Rig Vedic Society witnessed a continuning struggle between the Aryans and the ‘indigenous’ tribes who were viewed with particular hostility by the Aryans for their dark skins, and their racial ‘inferiority’. As the Aryans succeeded in establishing their control over certain areas most of the men either fled or were killed; the conquerors then enslaved the women of the subjugated peoples. Thus the first large group to be enslaved in early Indian history were women as there are more frequent references to ‘dasis’ than to ‘dasas’; the evidence of the Rig Veda is in consonance with Lerner’s argument that all early conquering tribes killed the defeated men and enslaved the women, at least in the first stage of conquest. For our purpose the Rig Vedic evidence is extremely significant as it reflects an essential stratification within women, between women of the conquering tribes and women of the subjugated people.”
The Rig Veda { sanskrit for “praise knowledge” } is one of the cannonical texts of Hindu tradition. As Chakravarti points out, Sexism was present in early Bhuddist thought as well.
“…in the Gahapati Jataka [ Jakata is pali for birth story ], the errant wife of a gahapati [pali for house master] when caught by the husband is thrashed by him. He seizes her by the hair, knocks her down and threatens her ‘If you do this kind of thing again, I’ll make you remember it.’ He also demands damages from the adulterer saying ‘Damages please for injury done to the chattels under another man’s watch and ward’. The narrative concludes with the statement that following the physical chastisement the wife did not dare transgress even in thought.”
Heide reminds us that there are some cultures that retain the egaitarian-matriarchal character. Assembled in part through anthropoligical study of Iriquois, Minungkabou, and Mosuo socities, among others, Hiede defines matriarchal societies:
Summary of criteria of the matriarchal society
* Economic criteria: societies with [“most often”] self-supporting gardening or agriculture; land and house are property of the clan, no private property; women have the power of disposition over the source of nourishment; constant adjustment of the level of wealth by the circulation of the vital goods in form of gifts at festivals — societies of reciprocity.
* Social criteria: matriarchal clans, which are held together by matrilinearity and matrilocality; mutual marriage between two clans; visiting marriage with additional sexual freedom for both sexes; social fatherhood — non-hierarchal, horizontal societies of kinship.
* political criteria: principle of consensus in the clan-house, on the level of the village, and on the regional level; delegates as bearers of communication, not as decision-takers; absence of classes and structures of domination — egalitarian societies of consensus.
* Cultural criteria: concrete belief in rebirth into the same clan; cult of ancestresses and ancestors; worship of Mother Earth and the Goddess of Cosmos; divinity of the entire world; absence of dualistic world view and morality; everything in life is part of the symbolic system — sacral societies as cultures of the Goddess.
On the other hand it was easier for women to maintain a sense of self-worth, because they so obviously shared the world and its tasks with men. Certainly this was so in pre-industrial society, when the complementarity of men and women’s economic efforts was clearly visible. It was more difficult to maintain a sense of self-worth in industrial society, because of the complexity of the technological world in which men operated and because of the commodity nature of all market transactions, from which women as housewives were largely excluded. It is no accident that, worldwide, feminist movements begin only after industrialization.
As modern cities swelter and swell, phalic edifices multiply, and “what a person is good for”, the self-worth Gerda refers, drops out from under the waves of migrants fleeing war, instability, poverty, precarity. On the way, we shed our pre-industrial cultural skins. In our traditional cultures, social roles were directly environmentally embedded. New to the city, we resist the naked dehumanization, alienation, and void of the various paternal dominations: kingdom, money, slavery, debt bondage, the plantation, social death, casteism, prescribed and predestined labor, the factory, wage-labor, the salaried position, privelege and power { “the differencial control over access to symbolic and material resources” }.
And this is the promise of social movements purposefully strive to critique and shift the values, norms, beliefs, and traditions of a culture.It is through social movements that we transform the oblivion of five to ten thousand year old basal banality of patriarchal patterns that have served to erase the roles, imagination, creativity, meaning-making, definition, interpretation, an reinterpretation of and by women, alliances of women, and alliances of listening men stepping up to step back to back women on womens’ terms. Meaning and Purpose: A re-assessing, re-balancing, re-membering, re-constituting, re-meaning, re-assigning, re-determining of decision-making and carrying out of what is most essential to humankind: the nurture and care work necessary for each generation to survive. Human social reproduction ought exclude no one from freedom, dignity, and justice. Everyone, every community, every inter-dependent network of living communities deserves our fulfillment of needs, nutrients, and care, care as in freedom, freedom as in play, in the case of humans, so that we learn about the world, and in the case of non-humans, for no reason at all, for all life is at play.
What have developed over such an apparently long and forgotten span of time, are all the institutions that have not got us stuck. But in this stew of time, social movements seem to be somewhat the opposite of institutions, at least in the sense that they are not valued by an elite group that a social movement sets itself in opposition to. To the elite group, the one enjoying the powers and privileges of the status quo, the moment a social movement contending for social change can be forgotten, it ought to be. This is exaclty why social Histories of the past are so rare. George Orwell iconicly, and perhaps ironically encapsulated something akin to this phenomenon in writing,
…if all others accept the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quiet simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.
Cultural memory is a crucial factor influencing our determination of a collective imagination, our sense, symbolically and materially, of what is and is not true, of what is and is not right, and of what is and is not possible, of a past, present, and future. So perhaps it could be said that social movements are the transmuters of traditional values and re-membering of forgotten Histories. At times for the expansion of solidarity, and at times for the constriction of solidarity, sometimes progressive, sometimes regressive, social movements are the co-enzymes catalyze the reactions of institutions, producing an ever changing social development. A scholarly definition will be helpful:
“…the meaning of the term is itself often hotly contested. For us, social movements are collective efforts by socially and politically subordinated people to challenge the conditions and assumptions of their lives. These efforts are a distinctive sort of social activity: collective action becomes a “movement” when participants refuse to accept the boundaries of established institutional rules and routinized roles. Single instances of such popular defiance don’t make a movement; the term refers to persistent, patterned, and widely distributed collective challenges to the status quo.”
The status quo renders invisible and devalues peole who do the most essential of human activities. If you think about it, care work is obviously the most significant human activity. It is the enculturation of other human beings into our respective societies. The teachers, but also the child-care workers, the nurses, the cooks, the cleaners, and domestic workers. Without this basic care and maintainence work, nothing else could happen. This is where David suggest we shift, reinterpret, re-evaluate our conception of –work– as freedom, and freedom as play. the caring classes, the classes that do care-work, regain significance and ought to be valued according. David writes,
“Caring labor is best concieved as labor that is directed, ultimately, at maintaining another’s freedom, action not as a means to an end, but a means in itself, that is, freedom as play. What are mothers taking care of the children so that the children can do? Mostly play.”
Gerda Lerner said in an interview late in her life,
“I think the defense of children [is] the kind of issue, you can’t affect … unless you build a broad coalition around it. Unless you have a long-range commitment. Unless you’re going to attack it on the legal ground, on the economic ground, on the nutrition ground, on the ground of the garbage that goes out of the television and that substitutes for ideas and information. … it’s the most universal because people all feel that way about children, when you come down to it, whether it’s your own children or your nephews and nieces or your whatever.
…
MacLEAN { interviewer }: It would transform the culture and it would transform the structure of the society to take these issues seriously.
It would. The point is that radical change has to be made in the institutions of society…”
It is in social movements that champion a greater inclusiveness and promotion of every human being’s capacity for imagination, that more accurate Histories can be recollected, and livable futures can be discovered. It is such creative forces that inspired a young person to skip school in Europe, for instance, putting older people on notices, declaring, “for way too long, the politicians and the people in power have gotten away with not doing anything to fight the climate crisis, but we will make sure that they will not get away with it any longer. We are striking because we have done our homework and they have not.” Greta Tunburg, the utterer of those words, was herself inspired to act by the collective action of the anti-gun violence campaigns carried out by young people in the wake of the Parkland Florida school shooting that silenced seventeen lives on February 14th, 2018.
Greta Thunberg is becoming something of a truth-teller, culuture-bearer, and livable-future-maker. Witness her rebuke of gerontocracy delivered to the United Nations:
“My message is that we’ll be watching you.
This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!
You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!
For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.
You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.
The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.
Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.
So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.
To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.
How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just ‘business as usual’ and some technical solutions? With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.
There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.
You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.
We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.
Thank you.”
So it would seem that the rising wave of youth movements around the world are responding to their existential angst with a grave gaze into an uncertain future and a recognition that the adults can’t be trusted, and our own children must defend themselves. The youth seem to be functioning as an accountability mechanism, where other mechanisms have failed.
On a planet described by Grace-Lee Boggs one of “technologically over development, and human and political underdevelopment”, and due to this imbalance, one of ecological destabilization, young people have grasped what is happening, the stuckness of the adult minds who’s hands they do and do not hold. They grasp that though they have limited control of material resources, they do have ability to weild the word as weapon to defend themselves and the planet. It could go without saying that social movements not only including, but driven by young people are not boring. They are the opposite of boring: they are creative, imaginative, absolutely serious and playful at once. In a word, they are youthful. In this age-order, age-rank, age-regime, the young must overcome the deadening-doctrine of the old, while the elders that have gained some level of maturity, must learn to listen to the young. And social movements that not only include, but are driven and sustained by a full range of who we think of as women, regardless of caste, class, race, or gender, are not callus. They are radically inclusive. What we think of as masculinity, who we think of as masculine and male and men, must listen to and make space for who we think of as feminine, female, and women. And in this gender-order, this gender-rank, this gender-regime, what we think of as femininity, who we conceive of as feminine, female, woman, must strive to overcome the stultifying-doctrine that dictates that who we conceive of as the man, have the sole right of symbol-making, signification, interpretion and re-interpretation, the definers, “the namers of things”.
These social movements that foster the active not only material participation, but crucially, the symbolic meaning-making capacities of young people, women, and especially, young women, gift the world with different and better experiments. Here can be found visions that offer better worlds. One such shining example of Resistance and Rebellion and Celebration is the 10 year covert and secret followed by 25 years of overt and open struggle of the Zapatistas, who number and organize in the hundreds of thousands, and are growing and multiplying like the numerous seeds of maize-filled milpas they cultivate, until their skin turns the same color as the land they work in the misty mountains of the Mexican South-East.
“First and foremost, our growth is due to the political/organizational work and example set by the women, men, children and elders of the Zapatista bases of support. It is especially due to the women and youth of the EZLN. Compañeras of all ages mobilized so that they could speak with other sisters in other organizations and sisters that had no organization. Without ever abandoning their own tastes and desires, the Zapatista youth learned from the sciences and arts and through these activities transmitted their rebellion to more and more youth. The majority of these youths, especially the young women, have now taken up posts in our organization and they steep this work in their creativity, ingenuity, and intelligence. Today we can say without any shame and with much pride that the Zapatista women are out in front of us like the Pujuy bird to show us the way and keep us from losing our way, on our flanks to keep us on track, and behind us so that we will not fall behind.”
It is in this championing of a re-interpretation of freedom as a sober commitment to verifiable fact, the mutual-aid and especially youth and female alliances in partnership with male allies that assures that there is room in the world for all human beingsliving being. The spaces of playfulness, that our creativities and imaginations experiment to generate the symbols, language, and material conditions necessary to mitigate the effects of a human-caused mass extinction, and regenerate a dying world. We must learn to play again, to let flow at every level of society the creative energies. In all seriousness, human and non-human life is greatly affected by our stuborn unconcious commitment to our own stuckness. The fecund, ever-emergent spirit-turned-material of the cosmos that is Life, will go on developing with or without us. To what extent we remember that to care-work is most significant, that play is it’s purpose, a playful humanity would protect and affirm all of evolutionarily developed life, who our ancestors are, that our origin is.