Meena Kandasamy

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies
ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)
Venomous Touch: Meena Kandasamy and the Poetics of Dalit Resistance

Abin Chakraborty
Abstract: Meena Kandasamy, hailed as the first Indian woman writer, writing Dalit poetry in
English1, belongs to a long tradition of militant Dalit literature that not only focuses on the
multifaceted atrocities faced by Dalits, along with their material and ideological paradigms, but
also articulates the need for active resistance. In the process, her poetry, both in Touch and in the
aptly titled Ms. Militancy, offers a re-evaluation our supposed national culture and the icons of
our supposed national history. Sparing neither Gandhi nor gods, her polemical, aggressive
poetics scathingly dissects the complex matrix of subjugation which punctuates Dalit existence
in India. In doing so, her poems sweepingly cover aeons of time as they deal not only with the
myth of Ekalavya, which has remained a source of abiding inspiration for Dalit poets, but also
with elements of modern history such as the atrocities of Karamchedu, in 1985. What emerges in
the process is an alternate history of India, marked by entrenched caste, class and gender
hierarchies which have shaped thousands of years of casteist subjugation against which
Kandasamy vehemently reacts. Functioning, according to her own analogy, as a guerrilla without
guns, her poetry not only offers a stringent critique of casteist ideologies but also excavates those
abysmal crevices of our imagined community whose depths are inhabited by countless
subalternized communities. If an author is to be imagined as an antagonist to the state2 who
can give, in the words of Calvino a voice to whatever is without a voice3, my paper would
explore how Meena Kandasamys poems may be seen as products of a counter-hegemonic
1
The struggle to annihilate caste will be victorious: Meena Kandasamy in Conversation with Ujjwal Jana,
Postcolonial Text, Vol 4, No 4 (2008) 3.
2
Salman Rushdie, Jaguar Smile. New York: Viking, 1987. 50.
3
Italo Calvino, Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature, Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays
and Documents, ed. Dennis Walder. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. 114.
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Venomous Touch: Meena Kandasamy and the Poetics of Dalit Resistance, Abin Chakraborty.
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discourse that seeks to scream into the national imaginary those subalternized Dalit voices which
lie beyond fringes of political tokenism.
Keywords: Dalit, postcolonial literature, subaltern, women, resistance
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Venomous Touch: Meena Kandasamy and the Poetics of Dalit Resistance

Abin Chakraborty
To surmount the situation of oppression, people must first critically recognize its causes, so that through
transforming action they can create a new situation, one which makes possible the pursuit of a fuller humanity. But
the struggle to be more fully human has already begun in the authentic struggle to transform the situation. Although
the situation of oppression is a dehumanized and dehumanizing totality affecting both the oppressors and those
whom they oppress, it is the latter who must, from their stifled humanity, wage for both the struggle for a fuller
humanity; the oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead this struggle.
(4)
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Italo Calvino once remarked, literature is necessary to politics above all when it gives a
voice to whatever is without a voice, when it gives a name to whatever is without a name, to
what as yet has no name, especially to what the language of politics excludes or attempts to
exclude . . . Literature is like an ear that can hear things beyond the colour spectrum perceived by
politics (114). It would be absurd to claim that Indian politics entirely excludes the issue of
Dalit subjugation which has been going on for centuries, especially in the post-Mandal
Commission political scenario of India where a Dalit woman like Mayavati can even become the
chief minister of Indias biggest state. However, one individuals rise to power on the basis of
electoral Dalit mobilisation in her favour in one state, along with several other political
circumstances, does not render the issue of caste resolved in the political domain as everyday life
in various corners of India remains haunted by spectres of caste-violence in various different
forms. In fact, the laws of political arithmetic are such that while on the one hand political parties
would say exactly the right things in Dalit-dominated constituencies, the same parties would also
use antithetical arguments for campaign and choice of candidates in other areas, in order to
capitalise on casteist sentiments for the sake of electoral victories. What remains unquestioned in
the process is the very structure and discourse of caste which remains an indelible marker of
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identity that becomes manifest in the form of nomenclature, language, residential area and even
physical appearance. It is this pervasive presence of caste that ensures the persistent perpetuation
of casteist violence because of which thousands of Indians, despite constitutional safeguards,
suffer from a subalternized existence that threatens their very survival and corrodes in the
process the foundations of the imagined political community (Anderson 15) of the nation,
which still remain largely Brahmanical. This is where literature, as conceived by Calvino still has
an important function and Meena Kanadasamys poetry offers significant beacons of light in this
regard as it rigorously militates against the very discourse of caste and that myth of Brahmanical
glory which continues to prevail in various areas of Indias national life.
It is not as if the nature and extent of this crisis is not acknowledged by the government
of India and its various administrative sections. For example in a report on prevention of
violence against members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in 2004, we are explicitly
told that
while communal violence is a relatively recent phenomenon rooted in the events
leading to partition, caste violence has a much longer history and a firmer
anchorage. It also has the distinctiveness of being embedded in the social
structure of the dominant community itself which lays down the norms of conduct
between its more privileged groups and the subdued and subordinated segment. It
is this age old caste relationship in Hindu Society which is getting disturbed by
pressure of forces both from above and below. The frequency and intensity of
violence is an offshoot of desperate attempts by the upper caste groups to protect
their entrenched status against the process of disengagement and upward mobility
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among lower castes resulting from affirmative action of State Policy. The
violence takes brutal forms and turns into acts of atrocities against a whole group
of people, such as massacre, rape, burning of houses and through more subtle
methods like social boycott, which are intended to block their access to basic
necessities and services. (Saxena 1)
What is even more alarming is the fact that despite the enactment of several laws and the
constitution of different governmental agencies and organisations to safeguard the interests of the
Dalits, casteist violence is on the rise across India. According to available reports, while in the
year 2000 there were 486 registered cases of murder of persons belonging to scheduled castes
and 1034 cases of rape, according to the 2008 reports the numbers have shot up to 626 and 1457
respectively. What we must also note here is the growing public apathy towards legal remedies
and judicially administered justice which leads to a vast number of atrocities that remain
unregistered, coupled with deliberate manipulation of actual reports by police officials for their
vested interests. As the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) report itself mentions,
with regard to cases lodged under the Civil Rights Protection Act (1955),
of the total number of 2,086 cases, 1,216 (58.29%) are still pending with police
and only 618 have been charge-sheeted (29.63%). The position in respect of
pendency in Courts is even worse. 7,366 cases out of 9,949 cases, were pending
with Courts. Only 271 (02.72%) cases have ended in conviction while as large as
2,312 (23.24%) have ended in acquittal. (Saxena 25)
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The same inadequacy is also true with regard to various other laws which also remain
handicapped by similar problems of implementation born out of bureaucratic and political
prejudice and unconcern. The NHRC report therefore lamentfully concludes:
The dynamics of implementation of protective arrangements strikingly illustrate
how different interests and forces are heavily loaded against SCs which
circumscribe the efforts at administering social justice to them and their
conspicuous lack of strength and ability to neutralize this formidable resistance at
the current level of their social status. Thus the elaborate legislational architecture
of protection in their favour does not present a viable and smoothly exercisable
option to significantly alter the disabilities imposed on them by the caste based
social order. (Saxena 136)
Such disabilities not only refer to the kind of atrocity that they experience at the hand of
upper caste members but also the marginalization that they face in terms of education, economic
status or the possession of assets, as can be seen from various reports. According to the report of
the International Dalit Solidarity Network, entitled Cast an Eye on the Dalits of India,
If you are a Dalit in India . . .
You can expect to have 4 years less to live than others.
You can expect more than half of your children to suffer from under-nutrition.
One third of the women in your community will be anaemic.
For every 100 Dalit children born in your community, 12 would already be dead
before they reached their fifth birthday.
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Only 1 out of every 5 children in your community would not drop out of school,
and only about half would even become literate despite that fact that around 2/3 of
Indians are literate. You would have less than 1 in 600 chance of gaining a
postgraduate diploma (if you are a women, make that 1 in 1,200).
You have an unemployment rate of 5% compared to 3.5% for others, you are half
as likely to have fixed capital assets and four times as likely to become a bonded
labourer, joining the estimated 24.4 million other Dalit bonded labourers.
One in every three in your community will be poor while the touchable
communities will have a 4 in 5 chance of escaping poverty. (IDSN 7)
All these material factors together constitute the matrix of subalternization within which
Dalits in India have to function. What also aggravates this situation is that their material
subordination leads to a simultaneous cultural subjugation on account of the hegemonic
dominance of Brahmanical Hindu culture and its multifarious manifestations which compounds
the Dalits material distress with intense identity crises and existential angst. As Kancha Illaih
reports, while a large number of Dalit children fail to enter schools or drop out after a few years,
even those who continue are always under the domination of teachers and syllabi, conditioned by
Brahmanical thoughts, leading to an abject suppression and tragic silencing of Dalit culture:
The textbooks taught us stories that we had never heard in our families. The story
of Rama, poems from the Puranas, the names of two epics called Ramayana and
Mahabharata occurred repeatedly . . . The language of textbooks was not the one
our communities spoke . . . To date I have not come across a Telegu textbook
which is written in this production-based communicative language. I have not
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encountered a lesson on Pochamma, Potaraju, Kattamisamma, Katamaraju or

Beerappa, the goddesses and gods whose names were familiar to us from
childhood. (Illaih 176)
These are precisely the considerations which prompt us to ponder over what Pramod
Nayar calls the processes of postcolonial subalternization (69) which refer to those constitutive
forces of the Indian nation which establish the narrative of the nation by banishing various
different groups, based on class, caste, gender, sexuality and other considerations, to the margins.
It remains questionable, however, if it is at all possible for the margins to write back to the center
and overhaul the hegemonic narrative by reconstituting the centre or to even create those spaces
from where alternate structures of imagining and experiencing the nation may emerge. The
problem of course lies with the preponderant hegemonic authority of the centre itself which
either nullifies the sporadic assertions from the margins or co-opts them within its own fold.
Therefore, as Kancha Illaih states the condemned must learn to condemn the others and that
unless the culture and consciousness of the oppressed is put forward visibly in public debate,
unless this culture is prepared to clash with the culture and consciousness of the enemy in public,
a society of equals will remain an illusion (Illaih, 169, 168). The polemical thrust of his
arguments is justified in advance by his declaration that the dalitbahujan experiencea long
experience of 3000 years at thattells us that no abuser stops abusing unless there is retaliation.
An atmosphere of calm, an atmosphere of respect for another is never possible unless the abuser
is abused as a matter of shock (Illaih 168-69). Much of extant Dalit poetry recognizes this truth
and operates on this basis. So Raj Kumar ND writes in his A Wish:
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He who desires peace

Under oppression
Is a fraud.
It is human tendency to disturb

And attain clarity in the fight
For liberation. (23-28)
Similarly, Rama Prabhu claims his Remainder:
Dont search for anything intoxicating
In my words
The ash of half-burnt bones

And the spirit of dead ancestors
Will be mixed in them.
The blood oozing from the fingers

Will be known from the stench
Of my lines. (1-8)
The poetics of Meena Kandasamy operates along similar lines and her poetry, especially
in Touch (2006), is filled with relentless militant assaults on those structures, customs and
conventions which have persistently been used to justify and then gloss over Dalit subjugation of
various kinds.
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The title itself is replete with multifarious significances that not only touch upon
aesthetic considerations and sensual human bonds of affection or desire but also refers to the
rigid hierarchies of caste which had rendered thousands of Indians untouchable by birth and thus
relegated them to a sub-human level as their mere touch was considered to be polluting to
members of the upper castes. Yet, the entire Brahminical scriptural philosophy is also fraught, on
the other hand, with innumerable indictments of physical, corporeal existence which is bound to
be decayed and the concomitant privileging of mans spiritual being, away from all tactile
considerations. It is this hypocritical contradiction within the entire discourse of Brahmanical
Hindu philosophy which Kandasamy scrupulously highlights as she states:
You will have known almost
every knowledgeable thing about
the charms and the temptations
that touch could hold.
But, you will never have known

that touchthe taboo
to your transcendence,
when crystallized in caste
was a paraphernalia of
undeserving hate. (36)
The male Brahman addressee is thus made aware of the fact that despite all his persistent
attempt to transcend touch, it remains the undeniable everyday reality for thousands of people
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who are humiliated, discriminated against and violently subjugated precisely by those
Brahmanically encoded hierarchies of caste that make touch indeed a matter of life and death.
Kandasamy therefore mordantly scoffs at the vaunted Hindu philosophy of non-dualism, revered
by people around the world, by emphasizing that foundational binary or duality, between the
touchable and the untouchable, between the upper castes and the outcastes which the ancient
texts codified and naturalized:
One
More
Fina
Question
Can
My
Untouchable Atman
And
Your
Brahmin
Atman
Ever
Be
One
? (37)
The sarcasm directed at such scriptural texts is an integral element of a counter-discourse
that seeks to displace altogether the supposed glory of ancient Hindu religion and the associated
cultural framework because it is these discursive frameworks that also provide the basis of the
various massacres and atrocities that keep occurring in the name of caste, as exemplified by
either the familiar legend of Ekalavya or the Karamchedu massacre that Kandasamy herself
writes about in Liquid Tragedy: Karamchedu 1985:
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Buffalo Baths. Urine. Bullshit

Drinking Water for the Dalits
The very same Pond.
Practice for eons.
A bold Dalit lady
dares to question injustice.
Hits forth with her pot. Her indignation
is avenged. Fury let loose. Violence. Rapes. (52)
As Kathi Padma Rao, a former leader of Dalit Mahasabha, explains:
Two Kamma (upper caste) youth, Potina Seenu and Rayineedu Prasad, took their
buffaloes to the drinking water tank in Madigapalle. They fed the buffaloes with
washings of rice in buckets. While they were washing the dirty buckets in the tank,
Katti Chandraiah, a Dalit boy, objected to it. His courage angered Seenu and
Prasad. They were about to beat up Chandraiah when Munnangi Suvaartha, a
Madiga woman, came to the tank to collect water. She tried to protect the boy
from the attack of Kamma youths. Seenu and Prasad threw hunters at her. She
lifted her vessel and warded off the hunters. Suvaarthas lifting of vessel in selfdefence became a pretext for Kammas, who were itching for a fresh quarrel with
Madigas after the election clash . . . They raided every Dalits house, drove
Madigas into fields. The blood thirsty Kammas beat Madigas, stabbed them and
axed them. They raped Dalit women . . . The murder and mayhem had no parallel
in the Indian subcontinent. (para 4)
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These axed Madigas as well as the assaulted or raped men and women of Karamchedu
operate as those silenced subalterns of post-independence Indian history whose anguish seeps
into the poetics of Meena Kandasamy and provokes that militant rhetoric which prompts her to
remark: Aggression is the best kind of trouble-shooting (38). It is this aggression which
prompts her revision of the Ekalavya episode of Mahabharata and the Ekalavya she envisions
does not meekly accept Dronacharyas diktat and vanish into passive oblivion. The consolation
that remains, within Kandasamys poetic world, is that of active armed resistance by Ekalavyas
modern counterparts, against the violence that they have endured for generationsviolence such
as that witnessed in Karamchedu:
You can do a lot of things
With your left hand.
Besides, fascist Dronacharyas warrant
Left-handed treatment.
Also,
You dont need your right thumb,
To pull a trigger or hurl a bomb. (44)
Interestingly, as newspaper reports explain, the Peoples War Group killed the key
accused Daggubati Chenchu Ramaiah and the Naxalites claimed that the murder of Ramaiah
was a fitting reply to the upper castes of the village (Times News Network para 6). Just as
colonial history is littered with innumerable instances of violent subaltern self-assertion, however
ephemeral, local or misdirected, postcolonial India too remains scarred by various such cycles of
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violence and counter-violence and Kandasamys poetics represents an impassioned involvement

with this process of subalternization and its various consequences.
However, Kandasamy of course realizes that resistance does not only flow from the
barrel of a gun. It is important to acknowledge that structures of oppression can only be altered
through both material and discursive resistance. This is precisely why Kandasamys exploration
of the Dalits history of subjugation and suffering is always complemented by a stringent critique
of various elements of dominant Hindu culture and the self-congratulatory narratives of
nationalism, voiced through sarcastic barbs that spare neither Gandhi nor gods. Therefore, not
only are the gods verbally abused as indifferent bastards (46), the poet even mocks their actual
inability to intervene in any way by referring to roadside walls, adorned with images of divinities,
which however are also covered with layers of urine:
And yet, the Gods are covered with
layers of smelly urinethey dont retaliate.
Tolerance is a very holy concept.
Or like someone said,

the Caste Gods deserve
the treatment they get. (72)
The same rhetoric is also used in her second book of poems, Ms. Militancy where she
either scoffs at Brahmma as villain who willed our deaths / . . . four-faced, dour-faced father
figure/ who fucked up our lives (43) or uses the myth of Indra splintering the fetus of Diti, the
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mother of gods, into forty-nine pieces, in order to lash out at the Brahmanical violence, ingrained
in vaunted scriptural texts of ancient India, by identifying Indra as being a worse psychopath
than Herod or Hitler. The nature of her condemnation is further illustrated on other occasions
when she hurls her vitriolic invectives at some of the other gods and goddesses of the Hindu
pantheon, who, however, have no presence in Dalit beliefs and whose processions never enter
the Dalit localities:
We understand
why upper caste Gods
and their good-girl much-married, father-fucked,
virgin, vegetarian oh-so-pure Goddesses
borne in their golden chariots
dont come to our streets. (53)
Her ire is particularly directed at the figure of Saraswati about whose origins there
remains a lot of ambivalence in the puranas. While on the one hand she is supposed to be the
daughter of Brahmma, on the other hand she is also presented as one of the wives of Brahmma.
As a Dalit, what makes such contradictions all the more sickening is the fact that Dalit women
have been vilified for generations as women of loose morals and have been subjected to the
sexual gratification of upper caste men occupying several positions of social or political
authority. Furthermore, while such scriptural protestations of purity have become a part of
dominant, mainstream culture, there has also continued a relentless process of sexual violence
against Dalit women, as evident from the increasing number of rapes recorded in the data of the
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National Crime Research Bureau. It is in acknowledgement of this particular crisis that she
scoffingly states:
Dalit Girl Raped
is much too commonplace.
Humiliation gnaws
the sixteen year old.
Gory scars on a wrecked body,
serve as constant reminders
of disgrace, helplessness. (58)
What makes such blatant injustices all the more brutal is the fact that the offenders are
often able to go scot-free as various arms of the administration collude to ensure their safety on
account of their upper-caste status. As Kandasamy explains: . . . the criminals have / already
mainstreamed / Their Caste is a classic shield (58).
The history of the recently concluded Vachathi case may be cited as one example of the
obstacles Dalits generally face in securing justice as the caste-identity of the perpetrators enabled
them to manipulate the judicial and administrative system in various ways. One of the rapevictims of that atrocity later recalled: I was just 13 then when dragged me by the hair, abused
me in foul language and raped me on the bund of a lake . . . When I pleaded that I was a small
girl studying eighth standard, the men in khaki responded saying Being a girl is enough
(Palaniappan para 2-3).
This is precisely the kind of double-subordination that Dalit women generally face and
this is further amplified through the phenomenon of witch-hunting which operates on the basis of
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a nexus between casteism and patriarchy and ends up humiliating, assaulting or even killing
Dalit women identified as witches by upper-caste members of the society, especially those who
are defiant and rebellious. As Kandasamy herself explains in Dangerous Dalit Women and
Witch-Hunters:
It is no surprise that almost all the witches have been Dalit or Adivasi women.
Nowhere else in Indian history can we see such an explicit tie-up between
patriarchal oppression and casteist subjugation. Witch-hunting is a powerful tool
in the hands of caste-Hindu men who want to persecute assertive Dalit and
Adivasi women who might directly challenge caste hegemony, or indirectly
subvert local power equations . . . A Dalit woman, Badam Bai was beaten to death
by four men at Bhunein village in Sultanpur in Kota district. Lajwanti Harijan of
Kamolar village in the same district met with a similar fate. When a Dalit woman
in Tarra village in Raipur district claimed rights to her dead husbands land, she
was killed after being branded a witch by her brother-in-law. Memki Bai Bhajaat
of Varlipahada village and Sakri Bai Meena of Sailana village of Udaipur district
were branded witches because of property disputes . . . An Adivasi woman
panchayat president in Udaipur district in Rajasthan was declared a witch by
caste-Hindu villagers who wanted to settle political scores. (para 5)
This is precisely why Kandasamy herself assumes the role of the witch in order to launch
a scathing attack both against the individuals who perpetrate these crimes and the system that
allows them to do so with impunity:
I fancy myself being a witch.
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Broomstick borne and black as pitch.

Thin, stark-naked and with fire for eyes.
Killing men whom I despise . . .
Haunting oppressors to shave their heads.

Cutting all their holy threads.
Experiencing joy as they bleed.

Dance, rejoice my black black deed. (49)
These wrathful remarks are poetic cannonades against casteism which ends up claiming
the lives of hundreds of Dalit women who are not even supposed to love members of other castes:
. . . Our passionate love,
Once transcended caste.
Let it now
Transcend mortality . . .
Fear not beloved,
In Love
Life is not compulsory. (51)
Such statements allude to the continuing orthodox reaction against inter-caste marriages
which even lead to death of the lovers, as evident from the recent spate of khap killings across
a large area of northern India where casteist prejudices still remain entrenched. These silenced
individuals represent what Ranajit Guha calls the small voice of history (1) which is exactly
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what Kandasamy tries to recuperate as she excavates the violent ruptures of both our historical
past and our everyday present:
poured poison and pesticide through the ears-nose-mouth/
or hanged them in public/ because a man and a woman
dared to love
and you wanted/ to teach/ other boys and other girls/ the
lessons of/ how to/ whom to/ when to/ where to/ continue
their caste lines (60)
What complicates and worsens the matter even further for Dalit women is the fact that
patriarchy also constitutes the internal structures of Dalit communities themselves and even there
women are forced to endure various forms of humiliation and violation at the hands of men
belonging to their own castes. This is exactly the dilemma that Kandasamy confronts in
Narration where the violated woman may give the impression of being raped by the landlord
or disrobed by the lecherous glances of the priestthey have been the familiar victimizers of
Dalit womenonly to conceal the greater agony of being violated by a man from her own caste:
How can I say / Anything, anything / Against my own man? / How? (60).
Kandasamys attempt to explore the perplexed silences refers to the integrity of her
commitment which refuses to seek refuge in comfortable silences and starkly confronts the
difficult intersections where class, caste and gender meet to render easy categorizations unviable.
This is precisely why her pages are dotted with anguished cries and interrogations such as India,
what is the caste of sperm? / India, what is the cost of life? (62). Based on the pervasive context
of Dalit subjugation and the poetic documentation and analysis of such crises in Kandasamys
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poetry, such interrogations pierce through the heart of the narrative of the nation and highlight
either a foundational crisis in imagining the nation or a miserable failure to realize that
imagined community of horizontal comradeship (Anderson 16) which was supposed to be
born out of Indias tryst with destiny. It is precisely because of this crisis that the nation-space
emerges in Kandasamys text as a site of countless ruptures and takes us to the postulations of
Homi Bhabha who asserted that
we are confronted with the nation split within itself, articulating the heterogeneity
of its population. The barred Nation It/Self, alienated from its eternal selfgeneration, becomes a liminal signifying space that is internally marked by the
discourse of minorities, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples,
antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural difference. (148)
Quite naturally, her frustration and anger are especially directed towards the Father of
the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, who as his history with Ambedkar shows, was tangled in an
ambivalent relationship on the question of caste. While it is undeniable that he indeed attempted
to end untouchability and persistently tried to infuse awareness against caste-discrimination and
violence among the people, it is also true that he never really tried to abolish caste altogether and
as Ambedkar himself illustrated with several quoted remarks by Gandhi, he repeatedly eulogized
the significance of caste and varnashram-dharma as an integral feature of Indian society. For
example, in an article in Navajivan in 1921-22, Gandhi declared
to destroy caste system and adopt Western European social system means that
Hindus must give up the principle of hereditary occupation which is the soul of
the caste system. Hereditary principle is an eternal principle. To change it is to
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create disorder. These being my views I am opposed to all those who are out to
destroy the Caste System. (Ambedkar, para 4)
In other words, despite exercising immense national authority over the populace he did
not utilize that authority for the abolition of caste and thus pave the path for an independent India
which could emancipate itself from the stigma of casteism. This is only one of those many
critical hopes which have been subjected to either blatant distortion or infinite deferral by the
post-independence Indian state. And despite using Gandhis name, image and ideas to legitimize
itself, the nation-state continues to unleash violence of one kind or another against the new
subalterns, including casteist violence, implemented on the basis of upper-caste nexus across
social institutions, administrative machinery and the political establishment. It is in
acknowledgment of this hypocrisy and farce that Kandasamy explosively exclaims Bapu, bapu,
you big fraud, we hate you, and adds:
That trash is long overdue.
You need a thorough review.
Your tax-free salt stimulated our wounds
We gonna sue you, the Congress shoe . . .
You knew, you bloody well knew,

Caste wont go, they wouldnt let it go.
It haunts us now, the way you do
with a spooky stick, a eerie laugh or two. (54-55)
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However shocking such statements may seem, they are quite natural from an ardent, selfconfessed follower of Ambedkar as Ambedkar himself had consistently castigated both Congress
and Gandhi through such texts as What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables,
where he went on to declare
the social ideal of Gandhism is either caste or varna. Though it may be difficult to
say which, there can be no doubt that the social ideal of Gandhism is not
democracy. For whether one takes for comparison caste or varna both are
fundamentally opposed to democracy. It would have been something if the
defence of caste system which Gandhism offers was strong and honest. But his
defence of the caste system is the most insensible piece of rhetoric one can think
of. Examine Mr. Gandhis arguments in support of caste and it will be found that
every one of them is specious if not puerile. (Ambedkar para 25)
Kandasamys critique is only a poetic version of this long-standing critique of both
Gandhi and the kind of Gandhi-centric nationalist narrative that has acquired dominance in postindependence India where the prevalent Brahmanical discourse still holds sway, as already
illustrated by the various statistics and examples. Kandasamys poetry may be seen as one
discursive step towards an actual rebuilding of prevalent society by dismantling the ideological
paradigm which ensures the reproduction of material reality. Kandasamys poetry also articulates
this hope and resolutely states:
We will learn/ how to fight/ with the substantial
spontaneity/ with which we first learnt/ how to love.
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JPCS Vol. 3, No. 2, 2012.
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So/ now/ upon a future time/

there will be a revolution.
It will begin in our red-hot dreams that surge that/ scorch

that/ scald that sizzle like lava/ but never settle down
never/ pungently solidify. (61)
It is this combination of critique, struggle and utopian hope which characterizes that
growing body of Dalit poetry, whether in English or in translation, of which Kandsamy is a part
and together they effect an insurrection of subjugated knowledges (Foucault 81-82) in the
sphere of Indian poetry which contributes to a re-imagining of the nation by excavating from
erasure the persistent history of Dalit subjugation. Kandasamy thus assumes the role of a
consciously political poet, who is aware of her historical responsibility. And as Adrienne
Rich explains, historical responsibility has, after all, to do with actionwhere we place the
weight of our existence on the line, cast our lot with others, move from an individual
consciousness to a collective one (145).
It is in acknowledgment of this historical responsibility that Kandasamy declares in an
undated interview:
The annihilation of caste is a historic necessity, and at the same time, it is a
historic inevitability as well. So, I am sure that it is a dream that I share with
thousands of others. I think that such a change can come about only through a
social revolution . . . And I think it is in the hands of writers to make people think
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JPCS Vol. 3, No. 2, 2012.
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about it. Writers have the power of the written word, and they can plead with
people to unite for change. (3-4)
Kandasamy has cast her lot decisively with Dalits and she places the whole weight of her
individual and collective existence as a Dalit on her poetry. As the self-confessed Ms. Militancy
she authors a poetic discourse that not only castigates the prevalent modes of subjugation but
also resolutely strives towards futures that are yet to be born.
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Works Cited
Ambedkar. B.R. What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables. 30 August 2012.
<http://www.ambedkar.org/ambcd/41L.What%20Congress%20and%20Gandhi%20CHA
PTER%20XI.htm>
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Print.
Bhabha, Homi. K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.
Calvino, Italo. Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature. Literature in the Modern
World: Critical Essays and Documents. Ed. Dennis Walder. New York: Oxford
UP, 2004. 114-116. Print.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. Trans. Colin Gordon et al. New York: Pantheon,
1980. Print.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30 August 2012,
<http://marxists.anu.edu.au/subject/education/freire/pedagogy/ch01.htm>.
Guha, Ranajit. The Small Voice of History. Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian
History and Society. Eds. Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty. New Delhi: Oxford UP,
1996. 1-12. Print.
Illaih, Kancha. Productive Labour, Consciousness and History: The Dalitbahujan Alternative.
Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Eds. Shahid Amin
and Dipesh Chakrabarty. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1996. 165-200. Print.
International Dalit Solidarity Network. Cast an Eye on the Dalits of India. Copenhagen:
International Dalit Solidarity Network, 2007. 30 August, 2012
59
JPCS Vol. 3, No. 2, 2012.
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<http://idsn.org/uploads/media/CastAnEye.pdf>
Kandasamy, Meena. Touch. Mumbai: Peacock, 2006. Print.
---. Dangerous Dalit Women and Witch-Hunters. April 14th , 2008. 28 Oct. 2011
<http://ultraviolet.in/2008/04/14/dangerous-dalit-women-and-witch-hunters/>
---. Interview for Orupaper.com with Dr. Krishna Kalaichelvan, n.d. 28 Oct. 2011
<http://www.meenakandasamy.com/mk/Press_files/interview%20to%20orupaperpdf>.
---. Ms Militancy. New Delhi: Navayana, 2010.
Nayar, Pramod, K. Postcolonial Literature: An Introduction. Hyderabad: Pearson
Longman, 2008. Print.
ND, Raj Kumar. A Wish. Muse India, Issue 9 (September-October 2006): n.pag. 30 August,
2012 <http://www.museindia.com/viewarticle.asp?myr=2006&issid=9&id=433>.
Palaniappan, V.S. A long agonising wait for justice ends. The Hindu, 30 September 2011. 30
August, 2012 <http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tptamilnadu/article2499078.ece>
Prabhu, Rama. Remainder. Muse India, Issue 9 (September-October 2006): n.pag. 30 August,
2012 <http://www.museindia.com/viewarticle.asp?myr=2006&issid=9&id=434>.
Rao, Kathi Padma. History of Karamchedu and what actually happened? Thursday, 21 July
2011 15:23. 30 August, 2012.
<http://roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3450:his
tory-of-karamchedu-and-what-actually-happened-&catid=118:thought&Itemid=131>
Rich, Adrienne. Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985. New York: W.W.
Norton and Company, 1986. Print.
60
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Saxena, K.B. Report on the Prevention of Atrocities against Scheduled Castes. New
Delhi: National Human Rights Commission, 2004. 30 August, 2012.
<http://nhrc.nic.in/Publications/reportKBSaxena.pdf>
Times News Network. SC convicts 31 in Karamchedu Dalit massacre. Times of India, 20
December, 2008. 30 August, 2012.
<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Hyderabad/SC_convicts_31_in_Karamchedu
_Dalit_massacre/articleshow/3864622.cms>
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JPCS Vol. 3, No. 2, 2012.
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Abin Chakraborty is currently Assistant Professor, Dept of Humanities, Budge Budge Institute
of Technology. He is also pursuing his doctoral thesis from the Dept of English, University of
Calcutta on the representation of subaltern characters in the plays of Utpal Dutt, Girish Karnad
and Mahesh Dattani. His research interests are postcolonial studies, Indian Writing in English,
Subaltern Studies, diasporic literature, and translation studies.
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Meena Kandasamy

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Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)

Venomous Touch: Meena Kandasamy and the Poetics of Dalit Resistance

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Keywords: Dalit, postcolonial literature, subaltern, women, resistance

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Venomous Touch: Meena Kandasamy and the Poetics of Dalit Resistance

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

encountered a lesson on Pochamma, Potaraju, Kattamisamma, Katamaraju or

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

He who desires peace

It is human tendency to disturb

The ash of half-burnt bones

The blood oozing from the fingers

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

But, you will never have known

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Buffalo Baths. Urine. Bullshit

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

violence and counter-violence and Kandasamys poetics represents an impassioned involvement

Tolerance is a very holy concept.

Or like someone said,

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Broomstick borne and black as pitch.

Haunting oppressors to shave their heads.

Experiencing joy as they bleed.

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

You knew, you bloody well knew,

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

So/ now/ upon a future time/

It will begin in our red-hot dreams that surge that/ scorch

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies

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