Casteless Mumbai is a myth

A California-based professor dips into Dalit literature, poems and manifestos to discuss how a city that's hailed as cosmopolitan is not just one of haves and have-nots, but one steeped in caste prejudices too

In Mumbai, class differences are stark. A high-rise abutting a slum, a swimming pool within shouting distance of a swollen drain, and the homeless taking shelter outside a five-star hotel, are everyday sights. As a land of opportunity and challenges, it has continued to straddle these contrasts for over a century. Rarely ever, though, have we seen the megalopolis through the prism of caste.

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In a new book, Juned Shaikh, associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, examines why our view of Mumbai as a city of haves 
and have-nots alone, could be a narrow one.

Drawing  from rare sources written by the urban poor and Dalits in the Marathi language—including novels, poems, and manifestos—Shaikh’s book, Outcaste Bombay (University of Washington Press), explores how language, literature and activism, became an important battleground for caste and cultural politics. 

Mumbai’s slums, says Shaikh, are not just quintessential markers of class, but also important sites to witness caste clusters. Pic/Atul Kamble

Shaikh believes that the “entanglement of class and caste [in Mumbai] had the effect of shrouding caste in the cloak of class, and by extension, modernity,” sustaining the perception of casteless-ness in the city. “One associates caste with extreme forms of prejudice or violence—beating, lynching, etc. And because it is extreme, one assumes that it is exceptional and is only found in villages. But caste works in multiple ways, many of which are mundane. Since it is an everyday feature of life, most people assume it’s not there.”

He explains how, for instance, access to housing, jobs, business opportunities, education, or even the partner one marries, often depends on caste. “In the case of Bombay, the perception, or the fable—as historian Gyan Prakash calls it—was that it was a cosmopolitan city. This made it difficult for some people to acknowledge caste. But by the end of the 20th century, there were already gaping holes in the myth, particularly because of the frequency of communal, and caste violence. Now, I think many Mumbaikars are more open to consider the reality veiled by the fable.”

A journalist and former resident of Mumbai, Shaikh says he came to political consciousness, as a young adult in the 1990s. “As you know, this was the decade of multiple political, economic, and cultural changes in India. One important change was the explosion of caste-based regional political parties. Another was the regularity of violence directed at Dalits. A third change was the economic liberalisation in India—it was celebrated, but also critiqued in newspapers and magazines,” he recalls.

Juned Shaikh

But the event that remained marked in his memory dated back to 1997 when a sub-inspector ordered his platoon to open fire on a mob of Dalits for rioting at Mata Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar in Ghatkopar after the desecration of a statue of Dr Ambedkar. Ten were killed and 26 injured in the firing. “It made me realise that caste violence was not just a feature of rural India, but also of cities… But I must add, caste is one optic of my book, the other important lens is class. All of us juggle multiple identities simultaneously—caste, class, language, ethnicity/religion, gender. Dalits in Bombay did it, too.” 

In his book, Shaikh discusses at length how the seeds for Indian Marxism were sown in then Bombay, and how Dalit activism helped stir caste-consciousness.

Shripad Dange, one of the most influential Marxists, he feels, wore “caste blinkers”. “The blinkers prevented him from seeing his caste privilege. It also prevented him for seeing how caste had shaped the lives of many lower caste and Dalit workers,” he says, adding, “When the workers supported the anti-Brahmin or the Ambedkar-led Dalit movement of the 1920s and 30s, he was incensed. He called these movements fascists and reactionary. He believed that a class revolution would get rid of caste; Ambedkar and Dalit Marxists believed that the class and caste revolution should happen simultaneously otherwise the caste question will remain even after the communist revolution.”  

Important, however, were the early works of Dalit writers like Annabhau Sathe whose loknatyas, written between 1944 and 1955, dealt with issues of housing, unemployment, strikes and wages. Later, Baburao Bagul and Namdeo Dhasal, followed his lead.

Shaikh says his personal favourite work by Sathe is Muka Miravnuk (Silent Procession), which he wrote in 1949. “It is set in a chawl in Parel and discusses many things—tenancy, sub-tenancy, squatting on streets, anxiety about the loss of class, tensions within the neighbourhood over public water taps, and mobilising to protest against government policies. All these are issues that are still relevant to many people in Mumbai,” he shares.

Bagul, a protégé of Sathe, “prescribed that writers move beyond simple representation” of the humiliation and suffering experienced by the Dalits, to address the “socio-economic and cultural structures” that produced it.

“Bombay was, and still is, a very literary city. In the 20th century, writers working in many languages, Hindi, Marathi, Urdu, English, Gujarati to name just a few, were part of networks that discussed and debated Indian literature and world literature. Both Bagul and Dhasal were part of these networks. Their writings will offer Bombayphiles wonderful insights into the relationships of power—caste, class, and gender—that their characters were enmeshed in. For them literature was more than just aesthetics. It was a means of highlighting the humanity of those abhorred by society—the sex worker, the Dalit, the poor, the mavaali. And literature for them was the means to raise consciousness and transform the social conditions that deemed them inhuman,” he says.

Apart from capturing the Dalit experience in literature, Shaikh also trains his lens on the city’s built environment, and how it perpetuated the caste and class divide. And it was everywhere, to see.

In a recent podcast interview, he discussed how caste was a significant player in building Bombay’s cotton textile industry, a pillar of the city’s economy for more than a hundred years. Speaking about it now, Shaikh points out that Indian capital has mostly relied on caste to nourish itself. “In order to start a cotton textile mill in Bombay in the 19th century, you needed a few things, including  money capital and labour.” Indian industrialisation, he says, always depended on the availability of cheap and largely unskilled staff. “To source this cheap labour from villages and towns across India, the mill owners relied on caste. Their agents, generally a mukadam or jobber, recruited workers from his own caste and kinship network. They would recruit workers who were dependent on them for a job, for housing, and for petty loans in times of need. Apart from the patronage extended by the jobber to workers, he also disciplined them by coaxing and coercing them to work 10, 12, 14 hour days. Therefore, we see the concentration of particular castes. Many were from the Maratha-Kunbi caste from the Konkan. Then, there were Dalit workers from the same regions,  and Muslim weavers, known either as Momins or Julahas, from northern India.”

Mumbai’s slums too, he says, are not just quintessential markers of class, but important sites for living and experiencing caste. “The poor started living in slums in the 19th and 20th centuries because they were underemployed and underpaid and could not afford rents in chawls and buildings because they were remitting money to families in villages. They wanted to save as much [as possible] from their low-wage work and therefore, 10-15 people lived in a 
room. Over a period of time, such chawls housing was declared slums,” he says.

The Dalits who occupied the slums had low-paying jobs in textile mills, at the docks, in the municipal corporation and at city hospitals. “So, in slums today, you find people of various castes and religions, but you will also find a clustering of Dalits. In a nutshell, the lens of class is important to understanding slums, but caste is important, too.”

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