-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [PMARC] Dalit, Feminist and Gay ?
Date: 21 Jun 2010 04:19:45 +0200
From: koolkamayani <[email protected]>
Reply-To: Dalits Media Watch <[email protected]>
To: Dalits Media Watch <[email protected]>
Dear All
In an AMU redux south of the Vindhyas, Indian Institute of Technology
(Hyderabad) management sacked gay rights activist and faculty member
Ashley Tellis, apparently discomfited by his sexual orientation. The
academic, with around 20 years of experience, was shown the door last
fortnight less than a year after joining IIT-H. This Article he wrote 2
years back in indian express
Dalit, feminist and gay?
Ashley Tellis <http://expressbuzz.com/searchresult/ashley-tellis>
First Published : 13 Dec 2008 11:38:00 AM IST
Last Updated : 13 Dec 2008 12:42:13 PM IST
My father was a Dalit from Amravati in Maharashtra, a bonded slave on
the streets of Bombay who was adopted by my maternal grandparents, Roman
Catholic once-upon-a-time Brahmins. My mother was a schizophrenic who
not supposed to marry at all and was technically his sister but went on
to marry him. I am a gay activist. All my life, these three markers — my
‘untouchable’ father, my ‘mad’ mother and my ‘sick’ gayness have haunted
me, hindered me, marked me.
My father’s caste, his skin colour (he was pitch black; my mother snow
white, and I am pitch black and have been racially abused by upper-caste
ndians from all religious backgrounds all my life), his dubious origins
followed me through the implicitly caste-ridden, racist, prejudiced
world of Goan Catholics in which I grew up in Bombay; my mother’s mental
illness has been used to pity me, pathologise me, explain me, contain
me; I am gay and have been harassed as a gay man, by Brahmin and Dalit
alike, all my life.Over the years, through a painful processes of
recognition, questioning and processing, I brought my gayness, my
Dalitness and what became my feminism to speak to one another and my
politics is built from a conversation between these three axes of my
formation. This has made all three constituencies — gay politics, dalit
politics, feminism — deeply uncomfortable with me.Gay politics in India
has not even begun to grapple with caste; Dalit politics remains as
homophobic as any other politics; feminism in India is lesbophobic and
homophobic and implicitly upper caste. I have sought and continue to
seek to build bridges between these three kinds of politics, to show the
connections between the forms of oppression they are against and to put
pretentious NGO terms like ‘intersectionality’ and ‘lateral linkages’ in
action.As a Delhi University teacher, for example, I surprised Dalit
student organisers and Dalit students in general both by my ‘colourful’
presence at all their struggles against the feudal and casteism-ridden
university, students and institutions, as I was a publicly known
homosexual and dressed unconventionally.The surprise was not pleasant
for them; they did not want me around. Dalits share the general
homophobia of the Indian populace — lower and upper caste — with not
much difficulty. How are Dalits not able to see the obvious connections
in the oppression of gays at the hands of heteropatriarchy and their own
suffering of at the hands of Brahminical patriarchy? How is my host at a
dinner party being upbraided by his roommate for offering me food in the
house and polluting the dishes because I, as a homosexual, had eaten
from them different from and similar to alower-caste person polluting an
upper-casteperson by his shadow?How do I change this unwillingness to
see and learn from each other? How do I fit in? How do I find a place in
Dalit politics which is as close to me as my gay politics or my feminist
politics and how to make each of these politics learn from each other?
What does a same-sex, feminist Dalit critique look like? How do we put
into practice a politics based on all the complex histories of the
marginalised that form us?Even as I speak from a position of
“experience-based authenticity” (as the son of a Dalit, the son of a
‘mad’ woman, a gay man), that great weapon with which to stop all
introspection and debate, I want to build a politics from a recognition
of the multiple marginalised histories that form me without the
arrogance of the authenticity claim.Each of these marginalised
identities teaches me the importance of self-reflexivity, change, the
need to listen to other kinds of oppression and learn from them, work
with them.I think all of us should reflect on the multi plicity of
oppressions and work together rather than become gatekeepers of Dalit or
gay or this or that form of politics.
--
Kamayani Bali Mahabal
The world does not need a war against ‘terrorism’, it needs a culture of
peace based on human rights for all.
-- Irene Khan
www.otherindia.org <http://www.otherindia.org>
www.binayaksen.net <http://www.binayaksen.net>
www.phm-india.org <http://www.phm-india.org>
I carry a torch in one hand
And a bucket of water in the other:
With these things I am going to set fire to Heaven
And put out the flames of Hell
So that voyagers to God can rip the veils
And see the real goal.......
Rabia (Rabi'a Al-'Adawiyya)
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