Palash Speaks

Untouchable citizens
Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashbiswaskl@gmail.com">palashbiswaskl@gmail.com
Untouchable citizens: Dalit movements and democratization in Tamil Nadu – By Hugo Gorringe
C.J. Fuller**London School of Economics and Political Science*London School of Economics and Political Science
Gorringe, Hugo. Untouchable citizens: Dalit movements and democratization in Tamil Nadu. 397 pp., bibliogr. London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005. £39.99 (cloth)
Dalit, meaning ‘oppressed’ or ‘downtrodden’, is the name adopted by politically conscious ex-Untouchables in India. Dalit movements have become increasingly active in Tamil Nadu, south India, during the last two decades, and one of the largest is the Dalit Panther Iyakkam (DPI), which Hugo Gorringe discusses in this book. Mainly carried out in the city of Madurai in 1998-9, Gorringe's research investigated both the Dalits’ socio-economic position in contemporary Tamil Nadu and the causes and consequences of their political activism. This research was an impressive achievement, given the political sensitivities, problems of multi-sited fieldwork, and generally difficult conditions that Gorringe faced.
An introduction and chapters 1 and 2 introduce the DPI and outline (rather haphazardly) the historical background. Chapters 3-5, which draw heavily on Gorringe's fieldwork in Madurai and some nearby villages, present valuable ethnographic data and discuss the Dalit's position in the caste system, their economic situation, and the spatial contexts of their activism. Chapters 6-9 explore the Dalit political movements, focusing on attitudes to women, the role of leadership, the DPI's mutation into a political party, and the Dalits’ role in the 1999 parliamentary elections. A conclusion revisits Gorringe's main arguments, which include the following. First, caste discrimination remains widespread in Tamil Nadu, Dalits are frequently denied their basic rights, and their movements are mainly organized to assert their pride, honour, and dignity, although the experience of poverty is also important in political mobilization. Second, Dalit movements have opened up the Tamil political sphere and put pressure on the dominant Dravidian parties (DMK and AIADMK), which mainly represent the non-Brahman castes that are the Dalits’ primary oppressors, especially in the countryside. Third, and at a more general level, Dalit political activism is reconfiguring the political system by contributing to ‘deepening Indian democracy’. This book should help to revise the large (and sometimes repetitive) literature on non-Brahman politics in the state and contribute to the current debate on the ‘democratization of democracy’ in India.
Moreover, Gorringe addresses several issues in the literature on untouchability which have particularly preoccupied anthropologists of Tamil Nadu (Michael Moffatt, Robert Deliège, David Mosse), especially the critical problem of whether Untouchables did or do internalize their ascribed inferiority. Gorringe particularly emphasizes Dalit awareness of the potential costs of resistance to oppression, which may give a misleading impression of acceptance, and explains why resistance is more likely among urban than rural Dalits. This divergence is just one example of many significant variations in Dalit experience – for example, between older and younger people, or between different Dalit castes – which Gorringe describes, even though a general decline in how far Dalits in Tamil Nadu accept their subordination and inferiority is also apparent.
Despite its many merits, this book unfortunately retains remnants of its origin as a Ph.D. thesis, especially innumerable citations from ‘theorists’ that are often mere name-checking. Chapter 5, for example, entitled ‘Identity, space and power’, cites the usual fashionable suspects, but fails to tackle the central problem of the meaning of the cheri and its social and cultural constitution. Cheris are the ‘colonies’ inhabited by Untouchables throughout rural Tamil Nadu, which are always spatially separated from the main village sites where the other castes live. At the end of this chapter, Gorringe reports the claim that ‘cheris do not change’, ‘a common rhetorical flourish designed to highlight the continuing subordination and poverty of most Dalits’ (p. 218). But what exactly this claim means has not been explained. Gorringe provides some ethnographic data from the Dalit housing estate in Madurai and the village which he studies, but there is also a sizeable ethnographic literature on Tamil villages and colonies that is hardly mentioned. This literature is far more salient for his subject-matter than the ‘theory’ cited and, if he had worked through it systematically, Gorringe surely would have been able to tell us something original and important about urban and rural cheris today, and hence about the significance of the rhetorical claim.
There are, therefore, some missed opportunities in this book, but it is nevertheless an original and valuable study that tells us a lot about growing Dalit activism, undoubtedly one of the most significant developments in India today.
SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK
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Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University:
Postal address: SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
Visiting address: Universitetsvägen 10 B, Frescati
Fax: +46 (0)8 15 88 94
Web page: http://www.socant.su.se
SARI –
Stockholm Anthropological Research on India
Coordinators: Eva-Maria Hardtmann, phone: +46 (0)8 16 37 90
& Christer Norström, phone: +46 (0)8 16 33 74
SARI consists of a group of researchers within the Dept. of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. It makes one of the major South Asian studies environments at Swedish universities.
The research has since a long time focused on cultural values and changing identities in contemporary India. Several researchers in SARI carried out their fieldwork in India, approaching their areas of research from a relatively new angle. These projects have been informed by a perspective on contemporary India as a part of the global scene and by a focus on processes of cultural communication. Both the geographic locations and the people studied in these projects are approached within a framework of translocal and transnational interconnections.
The projects undertaken constitute a potential link between traditional small-scale ethnographical studies and macro-oriented studies of overarching political and economic transformations. Several projects emphasize the process of identity formation in contemporary India as well as the construction (reconstruction) of images of Indian society and their distribution in different contexts (in social movements and NGOs, among journalists, tourist guides etc).
During the coming years SARI will work on themes and for 2007/2008 our theme is chosen to be “Dalits in the Neoliberal Global Order”. SARI is part of the national cross-disciplinary network SASNET (Swedish South Asian Studies Network) and seminars, workshops etc. for the autumn 2007 / spring 2008 will be announced in the SASNET calendar.
(Both Eva-Maria Hardtmann and Christer Norström have previously been members of the SASNET board)
South Asia related researchers in the department:
• Dr. Eva-Maria Hardtmann defended her doctoral dissertation on ”Our Fury is Burning – Local Practice and Global Connections in the Dalit Movement”, on Friday 7 November 2003. The thesis focuses on the cultural discourses as well as the organizational aspects within the contemporary Dalit movement in India. Faculty opponent was Martin Fuchs, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.
Abstract: This study focuses on the cultural discourses as well as the organizational aspects within the contemporary Dalit movement, so as to examine processes related to identity formation. Most Dalit activists, protesting against caste discrimination, are to be found in India, but the movement networks reach beyond the Indian state borders. The international and global involvement of the activists, as, for example, in the UN or more recently in the global justice movement, has increased during the last decade.
Activists among ‘scheduled castes’ (so-called untouchables) have, for the reason that they were excluded from the Indian public sphere, created and re-created their own counterpublic at least since the 1920s. They have their own arenas, publishing houses, magazines and networks to express their own cultural discourses. Since the beginning of the 1990s the Dalit discourses have reached the general public to a larger extent than before. The heterogeneity within the movement, with a multitude of groups and varied movement perspectives, will be displayed and mutually re-lated. It will also be shown how the Dalit activists have come to share a tacit knowl-edge regarding their common main conflict with ‘Hindus’ and ‘Hindu values’.
More information on her personal web page.
In November 2004 Eva-Maria Hardtmann received a three-years grant (June 2005–May 2008) from Sida/SAREC for a project on ”The Dalit Movement: Global Connections and the Return to Local Networks”. See the full list of recipients of Sida/SAREC grants 2004. The study is a continuation of an earlier project about identity formation in the Dalit movement.
Abstract for project: The transnational Dalit movement (a protest movement against the caste-system) has the last years become part of the global justice movement. Dalit activists now formulate their demands in terms of economic equality, democracy and human rights. The project takes the international and global contexts in which the Dalit activists interact and communicate as a point of departure. A central aim of the study is to understand the processes in which the experiences from these contexts are transmitted to local/regional NGOs in India and Nepal, where the activists are also active. Parts of the fieldwork have been carried out at international conferences in Hague and Genève during 2006 and at World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya in 2007.
• Dr. Christer Norström defended his doctoral dissertation on “They Call for Us. Strategies for securing autonomy among the Paliyans, hunter-gatherers of the Palni Hills, South India”, on Friday 19 September 2003. Faculty opponent was Professor Alan Barnard, School of Social and Political Studies (Social Anthropology), University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
The dissertation deals with the Palni Hills of South India, where the Paliyans for decades have combined hunting and gathering with work within a plantation economy, it seems that the economic relations between them and their landholding Tamil neighbours is based on negotiation rather than subordination. These findings challenge earlier views, grounded on an ecological framework, which states the incompatibility between contemporary hunting and gathering societies and an expanding modern market economy. With a focus on the Paliyans’ arguments and strategies Norström demonstrated how their social system and basic values allow them to incorporate outside forces into their own “mode of subsistence”. The study also incorporates the role of the local government and NGOs. Fieldwork was conducted during several periods during 1991-2001, totally 25 months. Read the abstract (as a pdf-file).
Christer Norström is now teaching full-time at the department, and besides he is working on a book dealing with the modern history of the Palni Hills, the area he has studied for many years. It was supposed to be published during 2005.
In January 2003 Norström received SEK 108 000 as a SASNET planning grant for a programme on ”Livelihood strategies among forest-related tribal groups of South India.” The programme also involves the department’s Charles Camâra (see below), as well as Gunnel Cederlöf and Beppe Karlsson from the Dept. of Cultural Anthropology, Uppsala University.
The programme aims at establishing a multidisciplinary research network between Nordic and South Asian scholars. The planning grant was used to arrange a conference on the issue at the Centre for Indian Studies, Mysore, India, 17–19 October 2003. The conference was organized in collaboration with the Centre for Research on Environment, Development, Innovations, Technology & Trade, CREDITTe, Bangalore.
Go to the conference page, where the papers presented are available for download.
• Dr. Per Ståhlberg defended his doctoral dissertation on ”Lucknow Daily: How a Hindi Newspaper Constructs Society” on Friday 20 December 2002. Faculty opponent was Dr Thomas Blom Hansen, University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
The dissertation deals with the regional Hindi-language press and its journalists in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The aim of the study was to ascertain the conditions under which media produces its image of reality in a developing country. Of particular interest is how journalists use collective categories when reporting about religious or social groups in society. Theoretically, the project links up with mass media research on news production, anthropological discussion of the distribution of knowledge in complex societies, as well as specific research on institutions in the modern Indian nation state.
In 2006 Per Ståhlberg teaches part-time at the School of Culture and Communication at Södertörn University College in Huddinge. Another part-time he spends teaching in ”Omvärldskunskap” at the Swedish National Police Academy in Stockholm. He is in the department, and continues to do research on Media, professional culture and production of imagined comunities: A study of Indian journalists. More information on his personal web page.
In October 2006 Per Ståhlberg was given SEK 1.7 million as a grant from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (Stiftelsen Riksbankens jubileumsfond), for a research project about ”India as a Global Superpower; An Anthropological Study of Future Visions”.
Project abstract: India is nowadays viewed as a coming economic superpower. Economic liberalization and a good supply of low wage English-speaking labour have made the country competitive in the global market place. The high quality of technical education and successes for companies in the ICT business contribute to the image of a new “knowledge nation”. However, the Indian superpower is, despite certain impressive developments, very much a vision of the future. The image of success could be regarded as a social construction, created in the interaction between a numbers of actors with partly different motives. For example, the Indian Government and industry that are promoting a strong “Brand India”, international finance institutes aiming to interpret changes in world economy, and the mass media (Indian as well as international) creating comprehensible representation of a country. The aim of this project is, firstly, to examine the production of a new image of India and analyse its themes and variations, within the country as well as in an international context. Secondly, Per Ståhlberg will study what is happening on the ground, in a place that has a key position in the vision about a glorious Indian future: How are grand expectations interpreted among some categories of “brokers” that in a concrete manner deal with this vision? The first part of the study is based on media material and text documents. The second part is based on fieldwork in the South Indian city of Hyderabad.
• Dr. Paolo Favero defended his doctoral dissertation on ”India dreams: Cultural identity among young middle-class men in New Delhi", on Friday 25 February 2005. The project has been part of a major research project on ”Modernities in transition: A Study of Youth Cultures in Iran, Brazil and India”, financed by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (Stiftelsen Riksbankens jubileumsfond), and led by Professor Gudrun Dahl. Faculty opponent at the dissertation was Marcus Banks, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK.
In addition to the doctoral dissertation a documentary film called ”Fly over Delhi” was produced by Paolo Favero and Angelo Fontana. The film was shown during the conference on ”Structures of Vulnerability: Mobilisation and Resistance” that the department organised 12–14 January 2005.
Project abstract: The project focuses on the dynamics of social mobility and cultural change among young middle-class men in contemporary urban India. With the opening of Indian economy to the global market in 1991 new life-worlds as well as new possibilities for social mobility have entered the country and influenced especially young people. A new era of increased interactions with the outer world started. This study focuses on the generation that epitomizes this new era and is based on fieldwork among young English-speaking, educated, Delhi-based men involved in occupations such as tourism, Internet, multinationals, journalism and sports.
These young men construct their role in society by promoting themselves as brokers in the ongoing exchanges between India and the outer world. Together they constitute a heterogeneous whole with different class- and regional background. Yet, they can all be seen as members of the ‘middle-class’ occupying a relatively privileged position in society. They consider the opening of India to the global market as the key-event that has made it possible for them to live an “interesting life” and to avoid becoming “average Indians”.
“India dreams” is an exploration into the life-world of these young men and moves between issues of cultural identity in their everyday life, their views and uses of Delhi, their ideas of India, its history and its relation to the West, their notions of young women and masculinity. The study focuses in particular on how these young men construct and experience their identities facing the messages and images that they are exposed to through their involvement with travelling flows of images and conceptualizations. It suggests that the ‘import’ of trans-national imagination into everyday life gives birth to sub-cultural formations, new “communities of imagination” that cross conventional Indian community boundaries. Their members share a similar imagination of themselves, of Delhi, their country and the world.
“India dreams” will primarily approach cultural identities through abstract categories with shifting reference (Favero refers to them as ‘phantasms’) such as ‘India’, ‘West’, ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. The young men in this study understand themselves and what surrounds them by invoking such terms, mirroring the debates on change that have gone on in India since colonization. Yet, they imaginatively re-work the content of these discourses and give the quoted terms new meanings. In their usage ‘being Indian’ is turned into a ‘global’, ‘modern’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ stance while ‘being Westernized’ can become a marker of ‘backwardness’ and lack of sophistication. Their experiences mark out the contemporary popularity of notions of Indianness in metropolitan India.
In November 2005 Dr. Favero received SEK 648 000 as a three-years grant (2006-08) for a post-doc project titled ”‘FILMI STYLE’ AND THE AESTHETICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE, a visual study of visual culture in Indian diaspora in Rome” from the Swedish Research Council. More information about the project (only in Swedish).
• Björn Alm defended his doctoral dissertation at the department on ” The un/selfish leader. Changing notions in a Tamil Nadu village” on Friday 5 May 2006. The study is based on fieldwork carried out in Ekkaraiyur between 1988 and 1990. Faculty opponent was Dr. Jens Lerche, School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, UK. Read the abstract (with a link to the full-text dissertation). Björn Alm is now working at the Division for Social Anthropology, Department of Religion and Culture (IRK), Linköping University.
• Marie Larsson defended her doctoral dissertation about mobilisation among women against men’s alcohol consumption in Andhra Pradesh on Friday 9 June 2006. The thesis is titled ”When Women Unite!. The Making of the Anti-Liquor Movement in Andhra Pradesh, India”. The Faculty opponent was Prof. Shalini Randeria, Ethnologisches Seminar, Universität Zurich, Switzerland.
Abstract: In the early nineties an anti-arrack campaign started among poor village women in Andhra Pradesh in Southern India, primarily among Scheduled Castes (formerly Untouchables) and Muslims. The movement subsequently spread throughout the state. Its origin is usually taken to be the event when, in 1991, women from Dubagunta, Nellore District, drove the liquor contractors out of their village. The so-called anti-arrack movement finally led to that alcohol was prohibited in Andhra Pradesh on the 16 of January 1995. The main participants were disprivileged women from Muslim groups or so-called “Scheduled Castes “, supported by voluntary organisations and later on by politicians from the opposition parties.
The local state administration, the literacy campaign and the newspaper Eenadu have also been described as important for the expansion of the movement. The present study is an attempt to use this case in order to understand how people can be mobilised from concerns with problems in their own everyday life to join a translocal, maybe transnational movement, with a certain political agenda. What effect does participation have on women´s private situation? What does the social mechanism for mobilisation look like? How does the translation from the private to the general occur?
At the other end, where do movement leaders get their ideas from? What makes a special question in the international supply of issues relevant for regional intellectuals? Why are they interested to mobilise the poor? Which audience do they have? What methods do they use? What is the relation between the participants of the movement and political leaders and the state administration? These are topics that I will address in my study. I will also relate the women’s temperance movement in India to wider issues of feminist mobilisation as well as to class and caste emancipation. Attitudes towards alcohol will obviously be a part of the analysis.
• PhD Candidate Charles Camâra is working on a project on ”The Siddis – Emancipatory Struggles among the Contemporary Afro-Indians”. The Siddis are a heterogenous collection present-day descendants of African slaves, merchants and soldiers who arrived in India centuries ago. This study is about their situation at the end of the 20th century, often characterized by a social stigma and by material poverty. It deals with Siddi grassroots activism directed at changing and improving their situation, but also with how their ethno-genesis as a self-conscious ethnic category has been both locally engendered and further shaped by global influences. The study concentrates on those Afro-Indians who live in the former Portuguese colonies and their hinterlands, but the issue has wider ramifications as pan- Indian connections are sought by the activists.
• PhD candidate Per Drougge planned to work on a research project focusing on the social and cultural impact of electronic mass media in Bhutan and local ways of managing this potential threat to the cultural integrity of the ‘last Buddhist country in the Himalayas’. But he has now decided to work on a project on Zen Buddhism instead.
His research interests include the ‘westernization’ of Buddhism, comparative monasticism, and the interfaces of Buddhist practice and (western) psychotherapy.
Research conference on ”Structures of Vulnerability: Mobilisation and Resistance”
In collaboration with the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency Sida, the Dept. of Social Anthropology organised a conference focusing on ”Structures of Vulnerability: Mobilisation and Resistance”, 12–14 January 2005.
It was the largest gathering so far in Sweden of Third world oriented researchers, within fields such as Biodiversity, Children and youth, Climate, Corruption, Environment, Ethnicity, Food and water, Gender, Hazards, Health, Infrastructure, Law, Religion, Urbanity, War and violence, and Welfare. More than 300 researchers and graduate/post graduate students took part in the higly succesful conference, and a vast number of South Asia related research papers were presented in the workshops.
Key note speakers were Professor Ben Wisner, lecturing on ”Root causes of vulnerability: What do we know after 30 years and what is to be done about them”, Professor Hunter Wade and Professor Johanne Sundby. A panel debate was also held on ”Victims and Actors – who get the blame? Concepts of structure and agency in the development research”, with Ass. Prof. Hans Abrahamsson and Prof. Björn Hettne from PADRIGU, Göteborg University, Prof. Thomas Hylland Erikssen, Oslo University, and Prof. Gudrun Dahl, Dept. of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University (photo above).
It was the third conference in a series of conferences financed by Sida, on the challenges faced by the research community in developing countries. The first conference was arranged with Göteborg University in January 2000, and the second, named ”Poor and Rich” was held at Lund University in January 2003 (more information on the Lund conference).
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Theorising The Dalit Movement: A Viewpoint
Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashbiswaskl@gmail.com">palashbiswaskl@gmail.com
I am forwarding this article for Debate.
Palash
Theorising The Dalit Movement: A Viewpoint
Anand Teltumbde
INTRODUCTION
The Dalit movement, in the familiar sense of organised resistance of the ex-untouchables to caste oppression, may not be traced beyond colonial times. However, in a wider sense of the struggle of lower castes against the hegemony of Brahminical ideology, it has to coexist with the history of caste itself. The broad framework of caste remaining the same, the Dalit movement could also be seen in a historical continuum with its previous phases. In another sense, it could be taken as the articulation phase of the numerous faceless struggles against the iniquitous socio-economic formation ordained by the caste system, that has occupied vast spaces of Indian history. By any reckoning it seems to have done well in identifying its friends and foes, putting in place its strategies and tactics and more importantly, carving out a space for itself in every sphere. It kept pace with the changes taking place in socio-political sphere during the colonial times and thus displayed significant learning during this phase. However, it could not do so thereafter when it had to consolidate its gains particularly in the context of substantial changes that befell during the post-independence times.
During this period, it appears to have been eclipsed by the shadow of its own past. In an attempt to grasp certain generalities of the Dalit movement, this paper will try to present a hypothesis that all the predominant attributes that the contemporary Dalit movement tends to reflect, are basically acquired from the circumstances that brought it into existence. In corollary, the hypothesis is extended to state that the Dalit movement did not assimilate any significant learning through changes in these circumstances and so allowed itself to degenerate and to be used by the very set of people whom it intended to fight. While wading through the web of Indian reality around the Dalit movement it is expected to throw up issues the clarity on which is considered prerequisite to chalk out a road map for its liberation.
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
The mythologized history of India does not provide many clues to the direct rebellions of the oppressed masses against their oppression. But it is inconceivable that they did not take place at all over a long period of two millennia that nibbled at their existence every moment with a 'divine' contrivance called caste. The extraordinary success of this contrivance of social stratification is as much attributable to its own design that effectively obviated coalescence of the oppressed castes and facilitated establishment and maintenance of the ideological hegemony as to its purported divine origination. None could ordinarily raise a question as it meant incurring divine wrath and consequent ruination of the prospects of getting a better birth in their next life. Thus the caste system held society in a metaphysical engagement and at the same time in physical alienation with itself. Materially, it provided for the security of every one through caste professions and psychologically an aspirational space for every caste including the non-caste untouchables to feel superior to some other. Since, this superstructure was pivoted on the religio-ideological foundation, the manifestation of resistance to the caste system always used the metaphysical toolkit that contrived its arguments into the religious form. Right from the early revolts like Buddhism and Jainism down to the Bhakti movement in the medieval age, one finds articulation of opposition to the caste system materialising in a religio-ideological idiom. This trend in fact extends well down to modern times that marks a new awakening of the oppressed castes and the birth of the contemporary Dalit movement. All anti-caste movements thus, from the beginning to the present, invariably appear engaged in religious or metaphysical confrontation with Brahminism, either in terms of its denouncement or of adoption of some other religion.
The religious discourse is thus a common feature of all the anti-caste movements. For example, the Satnami movement of the Chamars in the Chhattisgarh plains in Eastern Madhya Pradesh that eventually became an independent religious sect (Russel 1916); the Dravid Kazhagam movement of Periyar EVR Ramaswamy Naicker which created a stir by publicly burning the effigy of Rama and celebrating the virtuousness of Ravana; the Nadar Mahajana Sabha in Tamilnadu (Hardgrave 1969); the Ezhava movement of Narayana Guru which culminated in establishment of a new religious sect called Sree Narayan Dharma Pratipalana Yogam in Kerala (Thomas 1965; Aiyappan 1944; Samuel 1973), and the most pervasive Dalit movement (Zelliot 1969) led by Babasaheb Ambedkar curiously reaching its climax of mass conversion to Buddhism; they all signify an overriding hatred for the religious code of Manu and a proposition of an alternate faith for themselves. It essentially embodied dejection with the Brahminism, which was perceived to be the root cause for their sufferings. The most articulate expression of this dejection is found in Ambedkar's own analyses that holds overthrowing of 'Hindu' religious ideological hegemony as a necessary condition for the liberation of Dalits (Omvedt, 1994).
Notwithstanding the views of some people who contend that the caste system was not a rigid system that had disallowed inter-caste movement of people, the fact remains that it does not have any evidence of having brought in a change in the forces of production or in the relations of production till the advent of British rule. With its quasi-autonomous villages it remained in a fossilised form for centuries. This feature of the Indian society precisely impelled Marx to disdainfully comment that India did not have history and to commend the British colonial rule for waking it up from its slumber to Western modernity. The first cultural shock this Indian society received was through the Moslem invaders. For the first time the Indians got to relate with some other religion and to realise that not only could there be alternative religious systems but also the gods postulating them. Egalitarian Islam initially treated all Indians equally but soon the imperative of their political strategies made them realise the utility of the intrinsic divisions existing in the Indian society and they not only decided to compromise their egalitarian zeal but also allowed adulteration of their cultural broth with the poison of caste.
Bhagawan Das (1983) quotes Ibn Batuta, a Moslem scholar who accompanied Mahmud Ghaznavi stating that the Moslem invaders at first treated all Indians alike but later took advantage of the cleavages existing in Indian society. The compulsions of politics overtook religious spirits, which meant the Brahminic social order, based on castes remained largely unhindered and even influenced the emergent Moslem society with the Hindu converts. Even then this process spelt a sea of opportunity to the untouchables living outside the cities and villages. It was the Moslem invaders who first opened the gates of their cities to these 'Untouchables'. Many 'Untouchables' and low caste people embraced Islam and joined the invaders, partly to avoid persecution and partly in search of better status and fortunes. Those who embraced Islam and joined the armies of Moslem invaders imitated the customs and manners of their new masters. They gradually merged and integrated into Moslem society. Besides those who formally embraced Islam, whether voluntarily or under compulsion, there were millions of those who belonged to the artisan castes like weavers, masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers, basket makers, potters, dyers etc., who slowly came to be Moslems.
There were even some high caste Hindus including Brahmins who converted to Islam for various reasons. These converts coming from diverse castes brought in their respective cultural modes of living into the emergent Moslem society and along with it the caste divisions. Thus, although conversions to Islam could not rid the untouchables from their caste status fully, going by the intensity of oppression, they certainly must have experienced a great relief. First of all, the conversion enabled them to come out of their caste professions, which had been the mainstay of their low social status. Secondly, in renouncing their religion they must have had a sense of revenge against the ignominy heaped upon them and a vague sense of belonging to the ruling community. Thirdly, the opportunity to wield the sword in itself meant many things to them: it meant notional raise in their caste status catapulting them from a non-caste untouchable to that of Kshatriya - a penultimate rung in the caste hierarchy; it meant realisation of their manhood for the first time; it meant restoration of their confidence and most importantly, it meant economic betterment.
It is a moot point whether these conversions could be called a social movement insofar as technically the latter insists upon an organisation striving for some collective goal of social change. It certainly reflects a spirit of rebellion at least at the individual level to defy the caste code and embrace a different faith. Insofar as caste society had the intrinsic organisations of castes that governed their respective caste behaviours and managed the community life within the caste framework, it is a difficult proposition to say that this rebellion materialised without any organisational backing. An individual in the caste society was too small an entity to transcend the dictate of his caste organisation. In all probability these kinds of people's choices particularly in large numbers, get exercised only with social connivance. As could be seen from the later instances of conversions (Minakshipuram in Tamilnadu and several conversions of Dalits to Buddhism), the religious conversions never took place in any significant scale without there being a social movement to support it. In this sense, one could surmise the existence of some movement of untouchables that spearheaded the conversion to Islam.
The above overview highlights the following:
· Indian society as a whole never accepted hierarchy as a basic value system.
· The anti-caste movements essentially were against the creed of Brahminism that had ordained the iniquitous social structure.
· They were always articulated in terms of constituting an anti-theses to oppressive aspects of the 'Hindu' religion.
· They invariably materialised in the form of denouncements of these aspects and in corollary, adoption of a different faith, which in their perception was better.
· These movements invariably needed certain extraneous enablers especially the political congeniality.
BIRTH OF AN AUTONOMOUS DALIT MOVEMENT
Unlike the Moslem invaders, who had ruled India on the strength of their developed feudalism, far superior to the priest-ridden Indian system, the British conquest of the country was based on their superior technique of production and social form (the bourgeois), that was much more efficient than the technique of feudalism. The British colonisation with its bourgeois liberal ethos coupled with the imperatives of their ruling strategy, created space for working up subaltern identities, mainly in terms of caste and religion. The institutional changes (judiciary, civil administration, commodity markets), cultural changes (modernity, western mode of living, English education, exposure to western treasure of knowledge and scholarship), economic changes (zamindari and ryotwari systems in place of jajmani-balutedari), and emergent social changes that came in during the colonial rule gave impetus to the aspirations of the lower castes. The development opportunities that these changes created came into conflict with traditional social relations, which still shackled them through caste bondage.
There appears to be some kind of capability threshold that takes into account a balance of all resources with a social group, below which social movements are not possible. The colonial rule lent various opportunities to the disadvantaged sections and pushed them up past this threshold. It was thus natural that the first of the social resistance movements was by the Shudra castes. Because, as the labouring caste, they constituted an immediate interface with the parasitic upper castes, and in terms of resources they got over the threshold sooner than, say, the more oppressed untouchables. These movements broadly exposed the fraud perpetrated by Brahmins in the name of religion. They denounced their exploitation and praised British rule as an enemy of the enemy. In this formulation Dalits were vaguely bracketed as the co-oppressed ally. But the anti-Brahmin consciousness of these movements could not hold out in the face of the contradictions these castes had with the untouchable castes. Although, the Dalit movement was significantly influenced by the non-Brahmin movement of backward castes, it soon drifted away from the latter. With the advent of Ambedkar, it soon secured national prominence.
Around this time, there was a strong revolutionary movement all across the globe that drew its inspiration from the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917. It claimed its ideological strength from the theories of historical materialism, dialectical materialism and scientific socialism propounded by Karl Marx. The Russian revolution had ignited hope of emancipation in oppressed humanity. In India too, it soon took roots and came to be reckoned as a political force, especially in the urban centres where it had a particular appeal among the workers of various factories. The leadership of this communist movement however came from the middle class educated youth who for historical reasons had to come from the upper castes, the majority being the Brahmin itself. Their comprehension of the philosophy of communism was acutely constrained on one hand by the lack of systematic political education compounded by the non-availability of much of the original literature, and on the other by their class and caste consciousness. It rested on the dictums like class struggle, dictatorship of proletariat and notions of the base and superstructure without the underlying dialectics that lent it its specific meanings. This movement was essentially pitted against British imperialism that brought them nearer some sections of the nationalists and tended to ignore the caste as a superstructural identity. The emergence of autonomous Dalit movement could not therefore be taken kindly by the communist movement, as it saw the Dalit movement to be dividing the workers, diffusing the focus of the anti-imperialist struggle and being non-scientific. On its part, the Dalit movement not only did not find any answer to their specific caste exploitation but on the contrary total apathy about it in the communist movement. In their strategic formulation, the open anti-State stance of the communists moreover did not found favour with the Dalits.
As Gail Omvedt perceptibly observes, the autonomous Dalit movement had to engage with three forces in colonial society:
1. It developed in opposition to the socially and culturally pervasive and historically deep-rooted hegemony of Brahminical Hinduism.
2. It had to contend with the hegemony of the nationalist movement, which under the leadership of the Congress, strove to take over the agendas of several subaltern movements while restraining their democratic and egalitarian potential.
3. It had to face a difficult relationship with the communist movement which otherwise should have been its natural ally.
OPPOSITION TO BRAHMINICAL HEGEMONY
While dealing with Brahminical hegemony, the autonomous Dalit movement naturally perceived an ally in the backward castes. The anti-Brahmin movement launched by the creative and visionary genius of Mahatma Phule in Maharashtra in many ways inspired the Dalit movement (e.g., early proponents of the Dalit movement like Shivram Janaba Kamble were followers of Phule). In spite of the difference in time period marking out different transitory phases in the history of the country; differences in dispositions, equipment and social backgrounds between Phule and Ambedkar, one finds essential similarities in their characterisation of the social structure and the movements they launched and led. Both Phule and Ambedkar regarded British rule positively for introducing modernity into the moribund Hindu society but simultaneously both showed its limitations; both repudiated the claims of nationalists that India was a nation; both had no faith in the Indian National Congress; both came to characterise and oppose it similarly; both declared their vehement opposition to Brahminism but still did not hate Brahmins; both were rationalist; both had hated the parasitic class of priests, landlords, moneylenders and capitalists and sought to organise their victims; both emphasised the importance of education in the scheme of liberation of Dalits and backward castes; and so on and so forth. The pious formulation of Phule and to a certain degree of Ambedkar hoped to bring together all the Untouchables and the Shudra castes in opposition to Brahminism. Howsoever underestimated or grossly overlooked the contradictions between the Shudra backward castes and the non-caste Dalits may be in the village setting where precisely the caste problem is to be confronted, the Shudra castes came to share the mantle of Brahminism in relation to Dalits. This is basically strengthened by the economic contradictions between these farmer castes and the Dalits who are the farm labourers dependent on them. This legacy of Manu could neither be overcome by the powerful non-Brahmin movement of Mahatma Phule, who had certainly shown how to bring them together during his life time; nor by the Dalit movement despite its significant investment for bringing about a broad unity of all the labouring people during Ambedkar's time. Immediately after the death of Mahatma Phule his Satyashodhak Movement lost its anti-caste zeal. Even the attempts for reviving and revitalising it under the patronage of Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur could not succeed and by 1920 it completely lost its anti-Brahminism character and degenerated (barring a few who spearheaded leftist struggles) into a political addendum of ruling class.
The majority from the Shudra castes, as marginal or small farmers or artisans labouring in the jajmani-balutedari (client-patron) system, is variously exploited and is poor. A minority of them, as big farmers and middle farmers, were well off. Some of them were vested with the traditional powers of village administrators. These people of the farmer castes came to don the role of exploiter in the village setting. During the post-independence period the imperatives of electoral politics provided the motive force for the consolidation of the middle castes. These castes received disproportionate benefits from the policies and programmes implemented during this period. The most significant have been the land reforms that sought to restore the lands to tenants and later the green revolution that channelled significant investments into agriculture and raised its productivity. The former could not reach real tenants who in most cases were Dalits because the government machinery would not know that there operated a layered tenancy in villages as a Dalit tenant could not be dealt with by the high caste landlord directly. So, by default, it recognised the intermediaries as the legal tenants who invariably belonged to these farmer castes. Many of the benami transfers also went to them, as they were the confidants of the former landlords. The green revolution, as numerous studies concluded, clearly benefited the bigger farmers who again belonged to these castes. The empowerment of a section from these Shudra castes impelled them to create a formidable constituency for themselves in nexus with the capitalist class and to wield significant political power. The contradiction between them and the Brahmins that impelled the non-Brahmin movements during the colonial times were overcome in this process, which enabled them to assume the hegemonic role in the rural setting.
All the castes under this generic Shudra caste-group were not well off economically and equal socially. Many of them, the artisan and service castes, were as poor as Dalits and lay at various rungs in the caste hierarchy. However, they could be bracketed together socially in caste terms and economically as farmers as most of them had land. The caste divisions between them were really imperceptible in hierarchical terms. In relations to Dalits however they were placed socially and culturally clearly apart as the caste Hindus. Their superiority perception in relation to the increasingly assertive Dalits was deliberately worked up by the powerful elements in villages, which thwarted any possibility of their making common cause with Dalits. All these Shudra castes came to pose as a single block in opposition to Dalits for mainly two reasons. One, their superiority in the caste hierarchy to Dalits lent them power over them to extract more and more economic surplus and two, the assertiveness of the majority Dalit caste induced by their political consciousness (through the Dalit movement) and their economic betterment (through reservation policy) made them vulnerable and defensive. These dynamics achieved two things for the rural rich. One, it obfuscated their exploitative relations with their own caste fellows and two, it provided them the requisite mass base to claim political power.
While the caste identity consolidated the middle castes into a powerful block, the same identity was used to catalyse disablement of Dalits by dividing them into various caste groups. Historically, all the Dalit castes were not economically equal. Most of them had a specific caste calling and so had a reason to perceive a stake in the system. But, there was a caste engaged to do low skilled miscellaneous village jobs, by virtue of which it came to be relatively more populous and remained, economically, most vulnerable. Paradoxically, they constituted the interface between the village and town, which enabled them to acquire a self-identity as humans particularly during the alien rule. With nothing to lose, they therefore were the first to rebel against the caste system. There is enough evidence that the other Dalit castes also initially made common cause with this anti-caste movement. But, with the advent of parliamentary electoral politics the ruling class could easily engineer their detachment from the Dalit mainstream movement. Later, the contradiction between the middle caste hegemony and the Dalit struggle accentuated this division and put a cap on the prospects of Dalit unity.
This debacle embodied a larger debate relating to class vs. caste and the concomitant question of how to wage class struggle and also how to annihilate castes. Insofar as the working class in India collectively come from the Dalit and Shudra castes, it is important that they come together to become a class. In the same manner, the question of annihilation of castes is intimately linked to the coming together of the Dalits and lower-rung Shudra castes against the upper caste hegemony in every sphere of power. The class notion subsumes economic exploitation, which cannot be isolated from the notion of social hierarchy in the semi-feudal setting of Indian villages, and is thus essentially intertwined with the notion of caste. But the protagonists of class comprehended it in a restrictive manner and hence failed to tackle caste, which was the tangible and lived reality of the Indian proletariat. They were inevitably led to ignore it till they were compelled to acknowledge its existence by continual blows from concrete reality. It is to be said to the credit of Phule and Ambedkar that they unmistakably understood the crux of the problem, when they took up caste as a comprehensive exploitation-category for their movements and put forth a native agenda for democratisation of Indian society.
Unfortunately, this essentially anti-class, anti-caste agenda got juxtaposed against the class agenda of the communists and unleashed a sterile debate, which refuses to die even today. Caste or class, both these categories, to be workable, need to expand their boundaries to represent the current mode of exploitation in the country. This process would essentially bring out a large interface between them. This ought to happen however through the medium of concrete struggle based on caste or class-consciousness and not through any wishful amalgamation of caste and class conceived in the brains of some intellectual.
Insofar as the Shudra castes largely represent the class of have-nots together with the Dalit castes, and simultaneously functions as the nearest representative of Brahminism and also as the exploiting class, the need to apply a class filter to it cannot be overemphasised. The same principle is applicable to Dalits insofar as there is an evidence of class formation among them. It therefore needs to be understood that mere caste identity is not only going to be inadequate but is also going to prove dysfunctional. The usage of the caste idiom may bring in temporary electoral gains to the parliamentary players but it can never bring the real social change desired by the revolutionists. The prerequisite for this to happen is both, a strong Dalit movement which while fighting the remnant Brahminism is capable of orienting itself as a class assimilating the toiling masses from all the other castes, and a strong communist movement which incorporates into its class struggle the agenda of the struggles against social and cultural discrimination. The struggle shall have to be waged along both the axes of exploitation simultaneously, viz., caste and class. The Dalits as the most proletarianised people will have to be the vanguard of both these struggles.
The opposition to Brahminical Hinduism led naturally to its rejection by Dalits but not of the religion itself. On the contrary, it gave rise to the Dalit-obsession of religion that curiously refuses to wane even when the organised religions ceased to ordain social affairs as they did many years before. As we know religion is a product of particular socio-economic phase in history that served the purpose to resolve certain crises on the basis of accumulated knowledge available then. The religious resolution invariably took the form of suppression of man's desire to seek a good life by promising him a better after-life (Neusch, 1982). Marx dismissed religion outright as a vestige of superstition and a tool of social control used to enslave the masses. For Marx, religion existed not to console, but to control; it was "the opium of the people,"-a drug that dulled the will to throw off the chains of oppression. When Dalits rejected Hinduism, it might have been necessary to fill the void. But it was not necessary to fill it with some alternate organised religion. Buddhism, howsoever radical in its pristine form, came to be an organised religion with its package of aberrations. In its pure form, it may not even qualify to be a religion but in its popular form, with its own mythology, rituals, and mumbo jumbo, it was no different from any other. The consequence of this change has been in terms disorienting the Dalit masses from the material world where their real problems are rooted.
ISSUES WITH THE HEGEMONY OF NATIONALIST MOVEMENT
The second factor would seem out-of-date as it relates with a specific moment in the past. However, there are a few vital questions that crop up in its conjunction that are still consequential to the discourse of revolutionary change in India and that should impel us to its discussion.
Nation
The first is about what constitutes a nation. The Dalit movement dismissed the premise of the mainstream nationalist movement that India was a nation. Ambedkar, for instance, repudiated the notion of a nation in a caste society and challenged it saying that each caste was a nation. Phule, who was Ambedkar's preceptor, had said that "unless all the people in the Balisthan (his term for India), including the Shudras, Ati-Shudras, Bhill, Koli etc. become educated and are able to think over and unite, they cannot constitute a nation." At some other place, Ambedkar observed, "I am of the opinion that in believing that we are a nation, we are cherishing a great delusion". He questioned," How can people divided into several thousands of castes be a nation?" and said that "these castes were anti-national." At another occasion he had said that, "unless you change your social order you can achieve little by way of progress. You cannot mobilise the community either for defence or for offence. You cannot build up a nation; you cannot build up a morality. Anything that you will build on the foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole"(Khairmode, 1958). Despite these forewarnings and subsequent nationality movements bloodying the bosom of the country, the ruling classes are yet not awake to India's multi-national character. The vested interests still keep on exhorting the gullible masses to sacrifice for the non-existent nation or dismiss genuine peoples' movements calling them anti-national. Paradoxically, as they do it the nationality problem in India waxes in complexity with the accentuation of inequalities engendered by the capitalist development.
Nation, inasmuch as it is a phenomenon associated with the capitalist development, the pre-capitalist caste has to be antithetical to the concept of nation. Dalit movement by squarely posing this problem has indeed contributed to India's nation building efforts. The Indian National Congress, which spearheaded the national struggle for independence, represented the emerging Indian bourgeoisie's drive for overall political and economic control, whereas the Dalit movement under Ambedkar sought to strengthen the most disadvantaged people in the Indian society and set in the process of internal consolidation of the Indian nation.
With Ambedkar's taking upon a role of a constitution maker and a position in the Nehru cabinet, many of these lofty theoretical standpoints that could provide a framework for the Dalit movement got shifted to background. Although his commitment to his people - the basic propeller for these moves remained undiminished, its expression particularly with reference to the means of its fulfilment suffered from compromise. Notwithstanding his lamentations and exhortations against the post-independence political system, the emergent framework of the Dalit movement could not escape distortion in the powerful vortex of ruling class parliamentary politics. The particularity of the tactics of law-abiding posture of its early phase got universalised into the new constitutionalism that set the parameters of the Dalit movement. Ambedkar's programme for annihilation of caste system thus was completely way laid by the ruling class.
In the context of nation, the question here is what should be the relationship between the Dalit and nationality movements. The nationality struggles invariably land up using certain primordial identities in their anxiety to secure themselves uniqueness but are essentially underscored by the exploitations experienced by a set of people. As Ambedkar argued, Dalit struggle has the characteristics of a nationality struggle. It thus gets linked to the struggles of all the oppressed nationalities the world over. However, the concept of nationality is prone to be abused by a section of ruling classes to settle scores against another and hence warrants a critical examination of the underlying issues and the forces driving it. The alliance of Dalit movement with the genuine struggles of other oppressed nationalities will have a congenial acculturation impact and strengthen the Dalit movement.
Imperialism
The second question is about the struggle against the British imperialism. It is a common feature of anti-caste movements that they did not support the freedom movements and to some extent saw the colonial rule in congenial terms vis-à-vis their objectives of eliminating caste disability and gaining a due share of power. It is a fact that

Muslim Women's Newsletter

Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashchandrabiswas@gmail.com">palashchandrabiswas@gmail.com

Institute of Islamic Studies
(Reg. No. E-8900 (Mumbai)
Muslim Women's Newsletter - Vol. 1 No. 8. November 2007 E-mail:csss@mtnl.net.in
Address: 602 & 603, Silver Star, Behind BEST Bus Depot, Santacruz (E), Mumbai: - 400 055.
Edited by
Miss. Qutub Jehan Kidwai
Miss. Shirin Huda
From the Editor's Desk
Today a large number of Muslim women all over the world are excelling in their respective fields, like academicians, social activists, writers, sports persons, doctors, politicians, and in also the most male dominated occupations, like being a Qazi, running hotels, working in armed forces, running taxis on road, running industries, etc.
A Muslim woman has always been considered to be a woman who is to be confined to the four walls of the house, who is usually in a veil, the one who is ever bound by religious and social boundaries. But what we are presenting in this newsletter is the Muslim woman, who is overcoming all such social and religious inhibitions, and proving her potentials, and creating her identity as an achiever.
It has been perceived that lack of education hinders the women from achievements. But there are examples of women, who are illiterate or less literate, and even then creating a niche for themselves.
Over the times we have also seen reforms taking place in most conservative Islamic countries. A large number of NGOs, women's groups, human rights activists, are constantly trying to bring about reforms in the Muslim society, especially in the areas related to women, like triple talaq, hijab, maintenance, polygamy, karokari i.e. honour-killing, female circumcision, etc.
Considering the Indian Muslim women, the issues of polygamy, triple talaq, maintenance, are the grave issues to be dealt with. These problems exist because the women are ignorant of their rights in Qur'an. The women do not get their due because of the people who interpret the Sharia law. There is need for women to educate themselves about their rights in Qur'an and assert these rights.
Through this newsletter we try to throw a light on the problems and achievements of Muslim women, who are always considered to be helpless victims. We welcome your suggestions and views to improve our newsletter, and appeal to you to forward it to your friends.
- Miss. Shirin Huda
A Step Forward
Portrait of a housewife transformed
Hindustan Times
Mumbai, October 25

Shannoo -- as Ishrat Shahbuddin Shaikh is widely known runs a hugely successful Shalimar restaurant and finds the veil very useful in dealing with her employees and customers -- mostly men.
There is no doubt in Shannoo's mind that this work -- running the restaurant -- is meant for men. She found herself thrust into it when her husband died in a car accident some years ago. Now, she wants to hand over the business to her son, adding, "I will hand over the restaurant business to my son and take full charge of the school started by my husband." Omar Sheikh, the eldest son, is 19.
Omar was 16 when Shannoo, a committed housewife, took over the business. She has been to school, but not beyond. And she came here on marriage from Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh. She was only 18 then.
Clearly, nothing in her resume prepared her for this: a sprawling multi-crore, multi-cuisine restaurant that employs 300 people and serves on an average 1,000 diners every day -- mangur fish bred in own pond is an absolute must.
Her quiet life of a housewife ended on December 7, 2004. "There was a wedding in the family. We decided to take some of her guests from Bahrain to Khandala. There were two-three cars.
"Though quite rare, that day we took separate cars. My husband Shahbuddin Sheikh went with daughters and I with our sons. The accident took place near Panvel. We were completely shattered."
Her husband and one of their four daughters died. Two other daughters were in hospital in critical condition. Shannoo and her sons were, of course, safe. "I remained in a state of shock for four months."
Omar was still in school, younger one barely two years old and there was no one in the family to run the business. "My husband was the only son while I am the youngest among ten of us -- seven brothers and three sisters."
Shannoo's mother-in-law asked her to take over the restaurant, as she did not want a relative or anyone else to run it for them. "Initial days were difficult. Not only was I suffering from the trauma of losing my husband and daughter, but two of my daughters were in hospital while my youngest son was barely two."
"Forget the business," she says, "even running home was difficult." But she believes that because of her husband's religiosity -- when he was alive -- "Allah bailed me out of this crisis."
"I knew nothing -- the management, the accounts. Perhaps, a little knowledge of English helped me also besides a very supportive staff and sincere teachers."
She prayed every day before her daily meeting. That gave her the strength she needed to push dark thoughts and feelings out of her mind and prepared her to face the daily challenges, crises and, in short, the grind.
"My son Omar always accompanied me. But he was too small." And soon she found herself picking up the tricks of the trade.
Shannoo is at work till quite late in the night, supervising her staff and interacting with the customers. But never without the hijab and it is mandatory for people to knock before entering her room -- she doesn't want to be caught without the veil.
As she leans back in her executive chair in a dimly lit plush chamber on the first floor of her 27-year-old restaurant spread over 4000 sq ft area, face carefully covered by a veil (hijab), she talks about her restaurant, life and everything else.
Shalimar has come a long way: the small things first, the flowers are always fresh, the waiting room is air-conditioned and there is the dastarkhan where women or families can comfortably enjoy their meal in total privacy and a fast food centre.
"Dastarkhan was my husband's idea which I implemented. The waiter would enter the room only if called in or else he would leave the trolley outside the door."
She is now planning a chain of Shalimar restaurants in the city, the dream project of her son. "Insha Allah jab bhi sahi jagah milegi, woh bhi pura hoga."
All she wants to do now is to hand over the restaurant to Omar and focus on the school run by her family. "I simply love the Islamic environment of my school. It is an English-medium school with 600 students from nursery to class seven."
"We also impart Islamic education. Students wear Islamic dress and celebrate the Islamic days. We are adding one class every year besides trying for government recognition. Our dream is to take it to the college level," Shannoo added.
That's her dream, and there is no doubt in anyone's mind she will make it comes true. Shannoo is only 35.
Haryana Governor confers Sabir Dutt award on Dr. Syeda Saiyidain
By TwoCircles.net newsdesk

Chandigarh: Haryana Governor, Dr. A.R. Kidwai conferred coveted Sabir Dutt Award for social upliftment of women on Dr. Syeda Saiyidain, at a simple function in Haryana Raj Bhavan on 17th May 2007.
Dr. Syeda Saiyidain is member of the Planning Commission of India. She is the great granddaughter of the Maulana Altaf Hussain Hali Panipati.
She is the founder member of Muslim Women's forum and South Asians for Human Rights. She is Founder trustee for Women's Initiative for Peace in South Asia and Center for Dialogue and Reconciliation.
She has done a lot of research work on Maulana Hali who hailed from Panipat in Haryana. Haryana Urdu Akademi has conferred this award for her consistent and committed work for the social upliftment of women.
Late Sabir Dutt was an accomplished Urdu poet of Haryana.
Phool Chand Mullana, Education Minister and senior Vice-Chairman of the Haryana Urdu Akademi, Kashmiri Lal Zakir, Secretary Haryana Urdu Akademi, Mr. Alok Nigam, Secretary to Haryana Governor were also present on this occasion.

Qatar: First woman Colonel in the Qatar Armed Forces

"I reached this position through my dedication and hard work," said Col. Sumayya Hassan Nasser Al Rashid. (The Peninsula)
Sumayya Hassan Nasser Al Rashid has become the first Qatari woman to be promoted to the rank of a Colonel at the Qatar Armed Forces. She currently heads the Internal Diseases Section at the Medical Services Department of the Armed Forces.
Sumayya said the confidence that the Qatari leadership has given to women in the country has helped her reach this high position.
She said she was happy that the Armed Forces have expressed their confidence in her abilities and treated her as equal to her male counterparts.
"I reached this position through my dedication and hard work," said Sumayya.
Before 20 years she joined the Armed Forces as an Officer and that was the last year of her study at the medicine faculty of the King Saud University in Riyadh. Then she graduated and was promoted to Second Lieutenant in 1998 and to First Lieutenant in 1991.
In 2003 Sumayya was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and finally became Colonel on August 1 this year.
Asked how her family responded to her career, Sumayya said, "I am from a military family and most of the family members are working in the army. I got tremendous support and encouragement from my father as well as brothers."
"The relatives were also not a problem to me at all. I joined the Hamad Medical Corporation for training and then joined the medical services unit. The situation in the country is changing in favour of women. Society's perception about women has changed a lot. I have noticed this personally. When I took part in my first military exercise in 2002, I was the only woman participant. I felt as a stranger in that environment. In the exercise that took place ahead of Asian Games in 2006, I was in a very prominent position and I led the entire medical team."
She added that the medical services unit at Qatar Armed Forces has been witnessing a steady growth and development under the guidance and support of the Chief of Staff of the Qatari Armed Forces H E Major General Hamad bin Ali Al Atiyyah
.
Two set to be Britain's first Muslim women MPs
The Muslim News, UK

Yasmin Qureshi Rushnara Ali
Two Muslim women prospective parliamentary candidates could become Britain's first Muslim women MPs at the next general election.
Yasmin Qureshi, 44, of Pakistani origin, and Rushnara Ali, 32, of Bangladeshi origin, have been selected for the seats in Bolton South East and Bethnal Green and Bow, respectively.
Qureshi, a barrister and currently the human rights adviser to Mayor of London's office, has worked for the Government Legal Services and the Crown Prosecution Service as well as heading the Criminal Legal Section of the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and later directing the Department of Judicial Administration there. In the past, she has been the Chair of the Human Rights and Civil Liberties Working Group of the Association of Muslim Lawyers and has provided guidance on rights under the anti-terrorism and state security legislation.
Qureshi will be succeeding Labour MP Brian Iddon, who won by a 56.9 per cent majority at the last general election. She believes she was chosen for the candidacy because "they thought I had the widest experience in terms of international issues, national issues and different things I had done in my life." Qureshi also believes her commitment to the Labour Party, which she has been a member of since her teens, may have played a part.
Qureshi warns against letting the legacy of Iraq taint all the positive changes Labour has introduced such as their investment in education, health, regeneration, pension credits, the minimum wage, state-funding for faith schools and imams in the prison service.
Commenting on how the Labour candidates were selected, Bolton Council's Executive Member for Regeneration, Cllr Akhtar Zaman Cllr Ibrahim, said: "I don't think members purposely went out to choose local candidates but they have chosen who they feel would be best for the constituency."
Qureshi feels that if elected, it would giver her "a good opportunity to correct a lot of misunderstanding about Islam" and "a platform in which I can help to counteract and correct a lot of misinformation

AIDS created as a bioweapon
Palash Biswas

Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashbiswaskl@gmail.com">palashbiswaskl@gmail.com

Dear Daljit Bhai

I came to similar conclusion after reading the Stracker report (The two Stracker brothers were medical doctors). Yes, there are clear evidences that attempts to develop weapons that could kill without leaving any evidence were made, are being made right now (like HAARP). And biological weapons have been successfully developed, tried, tested, and available for deployment. But in case of AIDS, there are clear evidences that they failed. But they worked on destroying the immune system by other means: 'destroy/kill while profits are ensured.'

Grove's memo and several declassified memos, orders of his successors, clearly show that from 1943 onwards the US Government directed its army to develop all sorts of weapons, including depleted uranium.

Warmest regards and happy Diwali to all,
Arun Shrivastava

Daljit wrote:
The following information shall enlighten you about how AIDS was created in the laboratory, from the person who knows everything from insides out.

Daljit Singh
Amritsar

American Boyd "Ed" Graves, J.D. Human rights leader and international
AIDS activist was born on 10 July 1952 in Charleston West Virginia,
USA to parents James and Theresa Graves
.
"THE WORLD WAR WITH THE AIDS WEAPON CONTINUES TO RAGE. ONLY KNOWLEDGE
AND TRUTH WILL DEFEAT IT."
Boyd E. Graves, J.D. 11/19/00
Dr. Boyd Ed Graves
The Man Who Solved AIDS
International Human Rights activist and HIV/AIDS Advocate, American
Dr. Boyd E. Graves is the first Black African American HIV+ AIDS
patient in the United States to have received the patented cure for
AIDS, a one-time infusion called Tetrasil (U.S. Patent Number 567677)
in November 2001.
This year Dr. Boyd Graves, accepting Africa's invitation, journeyed to
Motherland Africa to share his story of his AIDS cure hope and
personally encourage the initiation of independent clinical trials and
accessibility of the U.S. patented AIDS cures in African countries hit
hardest by HIV/AIDS.
Working alongside Africa's Health Ministries, top HIV/AIDS doctors,
community leaders, Special (HIV) Virus victims, and activists alike -
Dr. Graves' mission to bring the truth about the the man-made U.S.
Origins of HIV and the patented U.S. cure for AIDS has brought hope
and success to Africa.
Since 1999, Dr. Graves has served the People as the Director for AIDS
Concerns for the International Medical Research Foundation, Common
Cause headquartered in Canada. 2007 marks six years since Dr. Graves'
was given the one-time AIDS Cure infusion dose of Tetrasil to
experience the total reversal of AIDS diagnosis and the return to good
health without traditional ARV treatment (Anti-RetroViral) , the AIDS
industry's standard for modern HIV treatment.
Dr. Graves was released from HIV/AIDS care by his U.S. Veteran's
Hospital physicians because other than minor ailments related to the
aging process and some permanent damage caused by nine years of
traditional HIV treatments, Dr. Graves' physicians report him in
exceptionally good health.
Dr. Graves 15 years of research into HIV/AIDS concentrates on two
questions and answers:
"If there is evidence of a secret U.S. Virus development program the
15 years immediately preceding the 'discovery' of HIV/AIDS, should
this program be reviewed?"
AND "If there is evidence of a U.S. Patented Cure for AIDS, should
this cure be tested?"
The theoretical jury pool sample Dr. Graves has queried among American
and now African Peoples, across demographics, countries, borders,
oceans and cultures indicate the answers to Dr. Graves' questions on
HIV/AIDS are both, 'positive'.
Dr. Graves began his research into HIV/AIDS following his own personal
HIV+ diagnosis the 10th day of July, 1992; also his 40th birthday. Dr.
Graves graduated from The Ada Ohio School of Law earning his Doctorate
of Law. The positive HIV test result in 1992 altered the course of his
legal career, and life purpose.
Dr. Graves has filed multiple legal actions with U.S. Federal Courts,
Members of the United States Congress, and U.S. Attorney General
Albert Gonzales; calling also upon the United Nations for the
immediate review of the formerly secret U.S. Special (AIDS) Virus
Program. Dr. Graves serves as lead plaintiff, The People vs. The
United States of America.
Dr. Graves is the first to clarify his professional distinction as a
doctor of law, not medicine. Dr. Graves does not provide individual
medical advice.
Dr. Boyd 'Eddie' Graves, originally from Youngstown Ohio and a
graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD; served as
Communications Officer aboard the U.S.S. Buchanan during President
Richard Nixon's administration. Lawyer Graves continued his private
career as a legal advocate for the class of persons protected by the
American with Disabilities Act.
In 1999, while researching his own HIV+ diagnosis, Dr. Graves'
uncovered the hidden 1971 U.S. Special Virus Flow Chart. The 1971 Flow
Chart is the research logic of the United States' 'Special Virus.' A
1971 U.S. blueprint providing the absolute proof of purpose, intent,
and premeditation as evidence in the logic flow design of the patented
Human Immune Virus (HIV).
Dr. Graves makes the Special Virus Program's 15 years of 'missing'
medical history accessible to medical doctors, scientific researchers,
leaders in public health policy and the interested reading public at
large to further facilitate the independent international review of
the 15 years of Human Rights Violations evidenced inside The U.S.
Special Virus Program (1962-1978).
Dr. Graves continues asking leaders both in the United States' and
abroad to recognize the urgent responsibility and cooperation
necessary for an immediate independent international review of the
formerly secret "U.S. Special Virus Program" and the implementation of
accessible protocols for the clinical trials of the patented AIDS
cure, Tetrasil.
Today, Dr. Graves lives in San Diego continuing legal action against
the U.S. Special Virus. Graves is considered the world's leading
investigating research expert on the U.S. Special (HIV) Virus Program
and discoverer of the program's 30 year old HIV Research Logic Flow
Chart coordinating over 20,000 experiments and 15 years of 'missing'
medical history.
Dr. Graves is dedicated to helping HIV affected people adequate access
to cure resources, human rights, educational materials, and legal
information; including out-reach education and consulting for
communities hardest hit by HIV/AIDS.
Dr. Graves does not provide medical advice and encourages patients of
HIV/AIDS to discuss the patented HIV virus and patented AIDS cure
Tetrasil with their physician and health care providers. Dr. Graves
medical records are maintained by the U.S. Veteran's Hospital.
Dr. Graves receives no public or private foundation money for his
HIV/AIDS research and judicial activism. Dr. Graves does not profit
from the patented AIDS cure and makes no official endorsement of any
pharmaceutical company, government, NGO nor individual.
Dr. Graves contributes any book profits back toward the legal work to
continue his 'David and Goliath' scaled battle for the truth about
HIV/AIDS, its' laboratory origins and AIDS' hidden cures.
Dr. Graves' is the author of two books detailing his 15 years of
medical research discoveries and judicial activism, including: "STATE
ORIGIN: The Evidence of the Laboratory Birth of AIDS," and "WORLD WAR
AIDS: The Third World War." Dr. Graves forces the shadows of
disinformation into truth's light using the accurate factual records
of our legal, medical, and news media records.
Dr. Graves' books and videos are available for purchase via Amazon.com
and boydgraves.com
Dr. Graves' updated internet news archives, audio, video and web blogs include:
boydgraves.blogspot .com
boydgraves.com
boydgraves.info
myspace.com/ boydgraves
See Also: YouTube, GoogleVideo, eg Search = "Boyd Graves"
The Man Who Solved AIDS (Printable PDF)

On 11/8/07, Lindy Greene wrote:
I have said the same thing all along.

I believe it was engineered in a lab and deliberately introduced into "politically disfavored" groups.

----- Original Message -----
From: Arun Shrivastava
To: indiagroup ihro ; hsrat ha
Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2007 10:10 AM
Subject: [IHRO] AIDS created as a bioweapon

Friends

The silence of the lambs is about to be broken. here's one.

One US Government lab did try to create a virus that would destroy the immune system but failed. So the US Govt directed and Bilderberg controlled drug industry created retroviral drugs to induce immune deficiency syndrom. The tests are spurious. So once a person is declared HIV+, the treatment drugs ensure that he/she dies of immune system collapse, while generating profits for the Big Pharmaceutical firms.

Wangari Maatha is right to suspect that AIDS is a biowarfare weapon; she is wrong in saying that it was successfully created in the labs. yes, attempt was made.

But there are far more effective bio-weapons in the arsenal than Manmohan or Bajpayee should like to know.
Best regards
Arun Shrivastava

AIDS Created as Biowarfare, Says Nobel Laureate
http://www.conspira cyplanet. com/channel. cfm?channelid= 34&contentid=1595

The first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Wangari Maatha of Kenya, spoke out on the AIDS virus saying it was man-made and deliberateloy created as a weapon of biowarfare.
"In fact it (the HIV virus) is created by a scientist for biological warfare," she said. "Why has there been so much secrecy about AIDS? When you ask where did the virus come from, it raises a lot of flags. That makes me suspicious," Maathai said.
The Kenya based East Africa Standard reported that in response to questions from Asian and European media, she said, "I want to dedicate the prize the African woman. I want to hold and embrace her. She has suffered so much and I feel this is an honour to her.
"Although I am a biologist, I have not done any research. I may not be able to say who developed the (HIV) virus but it was meant to wipe out the Black race," she continued.
"When she first blamed the HIV/Aids on 'some sadistic scientists, Professor Maathai kicked a storm, leaving some experts outraged and others supporting her," the Standard reported.
posted by
Arun Shrivastava

http://www.lewrockw ell.com/rothbard /rothbard66. html
Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy by Murray N. Rothbard
by Murray N. Rothbard
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DIGG THIS
This first appeared in World Market Perspective (1984) and later as a monograph published by the Center for libertarian Studies (1995). Afterword By Justin Raimondo.
Businessmen or manufacturers can either be genuine free enterprisers or statists; they can either make their way on the free market or seek special government favors and privileges. They choose according to their individual preferences and values. But bankers are inherently inclined toward statism.
Commercial bankers, engaged as they are in unsound fractional reserve credit, are, in the free market, always teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Hence they are always reaching for government aid and bailout.
Investment bankers do much of their business underwriting government bonds, in the United States and abroad. Therefore, they have a vested interest in promoting deficits and in forcing taxpayers to redeem government debt. Both sets of bankers, then, tend to be tied in with government policy, and try to influence and control government actions in domestic and foreign affairs.
In the early years of the 19th century, the organized capital market in the United States was largely confined to government bonds (then called "stocks"), along with canal companies and banks themselves. Whatever investment banking existed was therefore concentrated in government debt. From the Civil War until the 1890s, there were virtually no manufacturing corporations; manufacturing and other businesses were partnerships and had not yet reached the size where they needed to adopt the corporate form. The only exception was railroads, the biggest industry in the U.S. The first investment banks, therefore, were concentrated in railroad securities and government bonds.
The first major investment-banking house in the United States was a creature of government privilege. Jay Cooke, an Ohio-born business promoter living in Philadelphia, and his brother Henry, editor of the leading Republican newspaper in Ohio, were close friends of Ohio U.S. Senator Salmon P. Chase. When the new Lincoln Administration took over in 1861, the Cookes lobbied hard to secure Chase the appointment of Secretary of the Treasury. That lobbying, plus the then enormous sum of $100,000 that Jay Cooke poured into Chase

Black Untouchable Dalits In India and the Global African Society
Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashbiswaskl@gmail.com">palashbiswaskl@gmail.com
THE GLOBAL AFRICAN COMMUNITY
NOTES FROM A BROTHER IN INDIA:
THE BIGOTRY OF HINDUS WITH REGARD TO SKIN COLOUR
By INIYAN ELANGO, M.D.
Edited and Posted by RUNOKO RASHIDI

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I would like to add some observations to our previous exchange on the bigotry of Hindus with regard to skin colour.
Most Hindus (whether upper or lower caste) are "brown" skinned (with shades from dark to very fair) with "caucasoid" features. Dalits all over India and a few lower caste Hindus in South India are those with black skin and indigenous features.
Lower caste Hindus in South India (Tamil Nadu) tend to be black skinned because, unlike the rest of India where the caste system was introduced by the Aryans by enslaving the indigenous Dravidians, the caste system was introduced in Tamil Nadu by making the Dravidians (Tamilians) accept the caste system under the garb of "religious conversion" by making the black Tamil kings convert from Buddhism and Jainism to Hindu caste religion.
Tamil kings in the south successfully resisted Aryan invasion for centuries. While the Tamils (Dravidians) in the rest of India succumbed to the Aryan invasion, the Tamil kings in the south held out against the Aryans for many centuries. The Brahmans, the wily priestly caste people of the Aryan Hindus, decided to quell the Tamil resistance through a cunning mixture of spirituality and sex a millennium ago. (The Aryan invasion is said to have occurred in India 3,500 years ago around 1500 BC). Tamil kings desiring Aryan princesses married them and in the process bringing in the Brahmin priests and the bigoted Hindu caste religion in the Tamil kingdoms of the Cholas, Pandyas and the Cheras in the South of India a millennium ago. Thus the Tamil kings were done in by their sexual desire and religious tolerance. Recorded Tamil history and literature is itself 2,500 years old. The Tamil language is dated to be several millenniums old. Tamil is the language of the Black people and is considered as the oldest language of India.
Therefore the Aryan castes of "Kshatriyas" (royals) and Vysyas (traders) are absent in Tamil Nadu. But the Aryan caste of Brahmans are present in Tamil Nadu. These Tamil Nadu Brahmans are a wily lot who are vehement in preserving the bigoted values of Hinduism. These Brahmans have been divided the Tamils into the touchable "Shudras" (the lower caste Hindus who are landlords and traders) and the untouchable outcaste Panchamas (Dalits). Thus the lower caste Hindu Tamils who are also Dravidian have been made slaves of the Hindu values and willingly accept the superiority of the Brahmans and the caste system. In the Tamil Nadu region it is mostly the Dravidian lower caste Hindus who attack and torment Black Dalits.
Historian Romila Thapar, in volume one of A History of India, observes as follows:
"The main stress in the ordering of castes appears to have been the division of society into brahmans and non-bramans (in Tamil Nadu). Among the non-brahmans there is as compared to north India, little mention of the `Kshatriyas' and the Vysyas' but the `shudras' are prominent. The `Shudras' were divided (in south India) into the clean Shudras whose touch was not polluting and the unclean Shudras (Panchamas-Dalits) who were debarred from entry into the temple. The picture which emerges suggests that the Brahmans were in control of powerful positions and that the non-Brahmans were more or less working for them. The Brahmans naturally emphasized caste loyalties and caste assemblies, since this would prevent a wider basis of unity developing amongst the the non-brahmans (Tamils)."
The above phenomena is peculiar to the region of Tamil Nadu where the Dravidians have been pitted against fellow Dravidians by the cunning and wily Brahmans who spearhead the Hindu caste religion. In the rest of India all caste Hindus, where upper or lower caste, are all caucasoid and brown skinned. Dalits are all starkly differentiated by their indigenous features and black skin. It is not uncommon to find fair skinned people among Dalits, just like some fair skinned African-Americans. But it should be observed that even fair skinned Dalits are differentiated by their indigenous features, while Hindus whose colour varies from dark brown to ivory are easily differentiated by their caucasoid features.
The White tribes that invaded India and disrupted Black civilization there are known as Aryans. The Aryans were not necessarily superior warriors to the Blacks but they were aggesssive, developed sophisticated military technologies and glorified military virtues. After hundreds of years of intense martial conflict the Aryans succeeded in subjugating most of northern India. Throughout the vanquished territories a rigid, caste-segmented social order was established with the masses of conquered Blacks (called Shudras) essentially reduced to slaves to the Whites and imposed upon for service in any capacity required by their White conquerors. This vicious new world order was cold-bloodely racist, with the Whites on top, the mixed races in the middle, and the overwhelming majority of Black people on the very bottom. In fact, the Aryan term varna, denoting one's societal status and used interchangeably with caste, literally means color or complexion and reflects a prevalent racial hierarchy. Truly, India is still a racist country. White supremacist David Duke claimed "that his 1970's visit to India was a turning point in his views on the superiority of the White race."
Caste law in India, based originally on race, regulated all aspects of life, including marriage, diet, education, place of residence and occupation. This is not to deny that there were certain elements of the Black aristocracy that managed to gain prominence in the dominant White social structure. The masses of conquered Black people, however, were regarded by the Whites as Untruth itself. The Whites claimed to have emerged from the mouth of God; the Blacks, on the other hand, were said:
Servitude to Whites became the basis of the lives of the Black people of India for generation after generation after generation. With the passage of time, this brutally harsh, color-oriented, racially-based caste system became the foundation of the religion that is now practiced throughout all India. This is the religion known as Hinduism.
The greatest victims of Hinduism have been the Untouchables. Indeed, probably the most substantial percentage of all the Black people of Asia can be identified among India's 160 Untouchables. These people are the long-suffering descendants of Aryan-Sudra unions and native Black populations who retreated into the hinterlands of India in their efforts to escape the advancing Aryan sphere of influence to which they ultimately succumbed. India's Untouchables number more than the combined populations of England, France, Belgium and Spain.
The existence of Untouchability has been justified within the context of Hindu religious thought as the ultimate and logical extensions of Karma and rebirth. Indus believe that persons are born Untouchables because of the accumulation of sins in previous lives. Hindu texts describe these people as foul and loathsome, and any physical contact with them was regarded as polluting.
The basis status of India's Untouchables has changed littled since ancient times, and it has recently been observed that "Caste Hindus donot allow Untouchables to wear shoes, ride bicycles, use umbrellas or hold their heads up while walking in the street." Untouchables in urban India are crowded together in squalid slums, while in rural India, where the vast majority of Untouchables live, they are exploited as landless agricultural laborers and ruled by terror and intimidation. As evidence of this, several cases from 1991 can be cited: On June 23, 1991 fourteen Untouchables were slaughtered in the estern state of Bihar. On August 10, 1991 six Untouchables were shot to death in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. On August 16, 1991, an Untouchable woman was stripped in public and savagely beaten in the southern state of Andra Pradesh. On September 6, 1991, in the western state of Maharastra, an Untouchable policeman was killed for entering a Hindu temple. Official Indian figures on violent crimes by caste Hindus against Untouchables have averaged more than 10,000 cases per year, with the figures continuing to rise. The Indian government listed 14,269 cases of atrocities by caste Hindus against Untouchables in 1989 alone. However, Indian human rights workers report that a large number of atrocities against Untouchables, including beatings, gang-rapes, arson and murders, are never recorded. Even when charges are formally filed, justice for Untouchables is rarely dispensed.
Possibly the most substantial percentage of Asia's Blacks can be identified among India's 160 million "Untouchables" or "Dalits." Frequently they are called "Outcastes." Indian nationalist leader and devout Hindu Mohandas K. Gandhi called them "Harijans," meaning "children of god." The official name given them in India's constitution (1951) is "Scheduled Castes." "Dalit," meaning "crushed and broken," is a name that has come into prominence only within the last four decades. "Dalit" reflects a radically different response to oppression.
The Dalit are demonstrating a rapidly expanding awareness of their African ancestry and their relationship to the stuggle of Black people throughout the world. They seem particularly enamored of African-Americans. African-Americans, in general, seem almost idolized by the Dalit, and the Black Panther Party, in particular, is virtually revered. In April 1972, for example, the Dalit Panther Party was formed in Bombay, India. This organization takes its pride and inspiration directly from the Black Panther Party of the United States. This is a highly important development due to the fact that the Untouchables have historically been so systematically terrorized that many of them, even today, live in a perpetual state of extreme fear of their upper caste oppressors. This is especially evident in the villages. The formation of the Dalit Panthers and the corresponding philosophy that accompanies it signals a fundamental change in the annals of resistance, and Dalit Panther oganizations have subsequently spread to other parts of India. In August 1972, the Dalit Panthers announced that the 25th anniversary of Indian independence would be celebrated as a day of mourning. In 1981, in Bangalore, India Dravidian journalist V.T. Rajshekar published the first issue of Dalit Voice--the major English journal of the Black Untouchables. In a 1987 publication entitled the African Presence in Early Asia, Rajshekar stated that:
"The African-Americans also must know that their liberation struggle cannot be complete as long as their own blood-brothers and sisters living in far off Asia are suffering. It is true that African-Americans are also suffering, but our people here today are where African-Americans were two hundred years ago. African-American leaders can give our struggle tremendous support by bringing forth knowledge of the existence of such a huge chunk of Asian Blacks to the notice of both the American Black masses and the Black masses who dwell within the African continent itself."
DR. CHEIKH ANTA DIOP AND THE CULTURAL
ROOTS OF THE DALITS: INDIA'S BLACK UNTOUCHABLES
By V.T. RAJSHEKAR

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is not generally appreciated that Blacks live all over the world, comprising the world's largest oppressed group. That Asia has a large Black population is also not well known. Indian Blacks themselves are not aware of this fact. Lately, a strong Black identity has emerged and the slogan, "Black is beautiful" is catching up fast, at least among militant Blacks. Such a feeling is putting pride back into the broken hearts of Black natives, also uniting them with the struggle of their Black comrades in Africa and elsewhere. The Black liberation struggle against white racism, inequality and male domination is an international struggle.
A distinguished Black physicist, historian and linguist, Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop was among the first to establish that Egypt was the world's first civilization and that it was Black. He showed that humanity originated in Africa, and that the first human being, the first person, was Black. The Blacks migrated from Africa to other parts of the world. The Blacks are also the ancestors of Indian Untouchables (Dalits). That is why the Blacks wherever they are, belong to one single family. Hence, the relevance of Diop's work, for India's Black Indus Valley Civilization is now widely accepted.
Diop's discoveries, therefore, establish that India's Black Untouchables (with their African origin) are the ancestors of all humankind. Hence, they have to be proud of their Black Untouchable origin and their glorious cultural past. The whole world owes its origin to Black people--our people. African history laid the foundation of world history.
Collective historical consciousness is a means of survival. If India's Black Untouchables are today hiding their identity, ashamed to own their origin and admit that they are Untouchables, it is because they are not aware of their glorious past. Diop says that the Blacks can regain their personality, can become proud of their past if they are told "who they are," and "what they are." That means we have to discover our roots, our goddesses, our religion, our ancestors, our history.
Cheikh Anta Diop has proven that the core of our problem is cultural rootlessness. The most important task facing us, therefore, is to reconstruct the links that tie us as communities. Humanity was born and developed in Africa. The first human was Black, and Black is beautiful. The Blacks lost their historical memory because we were fed by false history books. The rule of oppression will soon end with the reconstruction of world history, taking the aid of the tools provided to us by authorities like Diop, Runoko Rashidi, and Ivan Van Sertima--all world famous Black scholars.
Exceptionally valuable writings reflecting close relationships between Africa and early India have existed for more than two thousand years. In the first century B.C.E., for example, the famous Greek historian Diodorus Siculus penned that, "From Ethiopia he (Osiris) passed through Arabia, bordering upon the Red Sea as far as India.... He built many cities in India, one of which he called Nysa, willing to have remembrance of that (Nysa) in Egypt, where he was brought up."
Another important writer from antiquity, Apollonius of Tyana, who is said to have visited India near the end of the first century C.E., was convinced that "The Ethiopians are colonists sent from India, who follow their forefathers in matters of wisdom." The literary work of the early Christian writer Eusebius preserves the tradition that, "In the reign of Amenophis III [the mighty Dynasty XVIII Egyptian king] a body of Ethiopians migrated from the country about the Indus, and settled in the valley of the Nile." And still another document from ancient times, the Itinerarium Alexandri, says that "India, taken as a whole, beginning from the north and embracing what of it is subject to Persia, is a continuation of Egypt and the Ethiopians."
It is safe to say that when we speak of the Dravidians as a people we are speaking of the living descendants of the Harappan people of the ancient Indus Valley who were pushed into South India as the result of the Aryan invasions. This is certainly consistent with Dravidian traditions which recall flourishing cities that were either lost or destroyed in antiquity. The term "Dravidian," however, encompasses both an ethnic group and a linguistic group. The ethnic group is characterized by straight to wavy hair textures, combined with Africoid physical features. In reference to this Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop stated that:
"There are two well-defined Black races: one has a black skin and woolly hair; the other also has black skin, often exceptionally black, with straight hair, aquiline nose, thin lips, an acute cheekbone angle. We find a prototype of this race in India: the Dravidian. It is also known that certain Nubians likewise belong to the same Negro type...Thus, it is inexact, anti-scientific, to do anthropological research, encounter a Dravidian type, and then conclude that the Negro type is absent."
Dravidian, in addition to its ethnic component, however, is an important family of languages spoken by more than a hundred million people, primarily in South India. These languages include Tamil (the largest element), Kannada, Malayalam (from which the name of the Asian country Malaya is derived), Telegu and Tulu. The term "Dravidian" itself is apparently an Aryan corruption of Tamil.

Ancient Africoid statue of Hindu diety Vishnu
From at least the third century C.E. three major Dravidian kingdoms existed in South India: the kingdoms of Pandya, Chera and Chola. Pandya was the southernmost Dravidian kingdom. The major city of Pandya was Madurai, the location of the famous chapel of the Tamil Sangam (Academy). The Sangam, of which there were three, was initiated by a body of forty-eight exceptionally learned scholars who established standards over all literary productions. The Pandyan rulers received these intellectuals with lavish honors.
It is also important to note that in the kingdom of the Pandyas women seem to have enjoyed a high status. This is the exact opposite of the regions of India where the Aryans ruled. In these lands of Aryan domination it is said that a woman was never independent. "When she is a child she belongs to her father. As an adult when she marries she belongs to her husband. If she outlives her husband she belongs to her sons." An early queen of the Pandyas, on the other hand, for example, is credited with controlling an army of 500 elephants, 4,000 cavalry and 13,000 infantry.
In 1288 and again in 1293 the Venetian traveler Marco Polo visited the Pandyan kingdom and left a vivid description of the land and its people. Polo exclaimed that:
"The darkest man is here the most highly esteemed and considered better than the others who are not so dark. Let me add that in very truth these people portray and depict their gods and their idols black and their devils white as snow. For they say that God and all the saints are black and the devils are all white. That is why they portray them as I have described."
To the northwest of Pandya was the kingdom of Chera (present-day Kerala). Northwest of Pandya lay the kingdom of Chola, said to be the place where Saint Thomas the Apostle was buried. The same Marco Polo who visited Pandya referred to Chola as "the best province and the most refined in all India."
The Dravidians were an unsually advanced seafaring people, with the Cholas, in particular, distinguishing themselves amongst the dominant maritime powers of their era. Through its ports, the great kings of Chola traded with Ethiopia and Somalia, Iran and Arabia, Combodia and China, Sumatra and Sri Lanka, exporting spices and camphor, ebony and ivory, quality textiles and precious jewels.
It seems readily apparent that the Dravidian kingdoms and the Dravidian people were quite well known internationally. When Augustus became head of the Roman world, for example, the Dravidian kingdoms sent him a congratulatory embassy. Dravidian poets describe Roman ships, which carried bodyguards of archers to ward off pirates, while the Dravidian kings themselves employed bodyguards of Roman soldiers. In respect to the ancient East, at least one author has identified a Dravidian presence in the Philippines, no