September 2014

Apologies to all our readers and contributors who have been waiting for the next issue. It will be out by March 2016! We very much appreciate your understanding and patience. This issue will be dedicated to Gouri Majumdar, Gayatri's mother who passed away on 1 March, 2015.

“You would not cry if you knew that by looking deeply into the rain you would still see the cloud.” ― Hanh Nhat Thich 

september 2014

i.
A Disappeared Person                                                                                                     4 poems
K Srilata

A person can disappear
and leave no trace at all.
Such things are known to happen.                                                                  

Missing persons cast no shadows.
They don’t leave used dishes in the sink,
nor square bits of body soap,
nor toothbrushes that have flowered slightly
nor notes declaring love, etc., on the fridge.
But growth, and all sorts of things,
are possible in the life
of a person who has disappeared.
And so, always,
always,
like the blade of a knife,
the guilty thought of that possible presence,
leaving used dishes in some other sink,
and square bits of body soap,
and toothbrushes that have flowered slightly,
and notes declaring love etc. on someone else’s fridge,
ruining,
ever so slightly,
the geometric alignment
of our lives.

Boundaries

I am standing outside

a house that is no longer mine.

They have slammed the doors

on me

and will not  hear

my knocks,

hesitant, even to my ears.

Laughter,

from the other side,

leaks through

like the fragrance of spices.

The October air is colder

than it should be.

It stings like barbed wire.

Behind me, a Slow, Full Moon

Behind me,

a slow, full moon has risen,

and in its light,

a grove of  banyans,

rest their long,

hennaed

hippie-hair.

Weary creatures return

by moonlight,

my heart too.

Slender

A café is a good place to begin

this dark, twisted story of love and grief,

a good, neutral place

where everything appears to be about the quality of the bake,

and the strength of the coffee.

We are having lunch, my friend and I.

She lost her only son five years ago to liver disease.

(He drank himself to an early death.)

Her husband followed last year.

She is fifty-five, five-feet-four and must weigh

over a hundred kilos.

A decade ago, she was what they call slender.

But even retrieving that word now is to mock her.

I banish it and watch her order more than she ought,

try not to look as she proceeds to eat and drink

a disorderly procession of things:

Lime soda, a burger, French fries and cheese balls (as an afterthought),

half a pizza, and finally, a large sundae.

But she catches my eye and the game is up.

“The thing is,” she says heavily, “I never could bring myself to drink.”

ii. 

My Failing Eye                                                                                                           poem
Debsruti Basu

There is a manner 
in which things shape up, 
inside my head. 
Like well-paved roads, 
leading to fallen houses. 

I know all the stories.
I remember them with the precision 
of how they began —
how each eyelash dropped a lie, 
or a truth, combining the two. 

And I have my endings, 
like curtains that were once lace —
holding up the window, 
like a body of its own. 

My hands lie folded, 
on my sterile chest. 
With no children to feed, 
neither to own,          

I sleep like an old nostalgia shop.

But you, you remember to leave this city —
leave these walls, 
this village, nameless. 
For when the shutter finally falls down, 
don’t see your face, 
for sale —
crumbling within. 

iii.

What She’s Become
(the monster inside her)                                                                                          poem
Ananya Dontula

She sits in front of her laptop
Eyes watering
Heart beating
For now she thinks
Beating for now

Beating for the things she doesn't know
The things she's done learning
The people that she doesn't want to hurt
So she stays
In front of that laptop
Eyes front

Typing rapidly
Scars peeking out from her shorts
And the sleeves
Of the old shirt she loved
It smells like her
But it doesn't fit like her
Or feel like her

She feels like she's someone else
Like, she's not the person
That she grew up as
Cause that person was happy
And never had to fake anything
  
Never faked a smile
Or a laugh
And genuinely sat there
With people she loved
And trusted
Now those people don't know her

They don't know her,
But she has to pretend for them
So she does
Eyes front
Heart beating
For now, she thinks
Beating for now  
 
iv.

The Marital Rape of Draupadi                                                                                3 poems
Chandramohan S.

Chained to a wedlock with five keys,

Forced upon every time each of her husband

Comes and leaves.

She resists and then yields later

Like the earth.

One day she will testify before

The National commission for Women.

Moral Police

when lover couple

hid in a hood of a tree

they chanced upon

love letters

some of them half-burned

some of them centuries old

along with a picture of

Shoorpanaka sans her

nose, ears and breasts!

Autobiography of Hidimbi

“The tribal is out of my poem”

Laments the English Poet E.V.Ramakrishnan .

After reading Chinua Achebe

Chimamanda Adichie  realized that

“people like her,

girls with skin the color of chocolate,

whose kinky hair could not form ponytails,"

could also exist in literature.

Hope after reading this poem

Hidimbi contemplates on her autobiography

without bleaching her self portraits.

 v.

Sometimes I Wish                                                                                                poem
Diwakar Anand
Sometimes I wish I could say what's in my heart,
Sometimes I wish my heart said nothing;

Sometimes I wish what was said remained unsaid,
Sometimes I wish what was unsaid was said;

Sometimes I wish silence meant spoken words,
Sometimes I wish spoken words meant silence;

Sometimes I wish I could make people happy,
Sometimes I wish I could make myself happy;

Sometimes I wish I could live,
But Today, I just wish I died.



vi.                                                                                                                           article      

Untouchability, Ambedkar and Related Tensions in India’s Independence Struggle

Arturo Desimone
 
Introduction

In this essay I will discuss the phenomenon of Untouchability in India. We will examine the social and class position and status of Untouchables in Hindu society. I will explore these topics to the background of the ideas of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, one of the leading figures of the Indian Independence Movement against British colonialism. This paper will touch upon the implications of the strife and rivalry that arose between Ambedkar and Gandhi, showing what Gandhi’s struggle with Ambedkar meant for Indian society and for the plight of the Untouchables, and the Dalit movement’s rejection of Hinduism, even the pacifist neo-Hinduism of Gandhi.

I will argue that Gandhi’s achievements are not the whole story of India’s independence struggle. The liberation-effort encompassed elements that were not aligned with Gandhi and that were striving to achieve a much more profound and thorough upheaval and lasting change in the power structure of India. Elites such as the Brahmans dominated this power structure. Their exploitation of the immense under-classes persisted after the departure of the British and the successes of the National Liberation Movement. These inequalities remained, even though many activists and movements at one point seemed likely to be successful in their struggle to change their country more dramatically than stopping at the ousting of British colonialism.

I will also examine the use and abuse of the Aryan invasion theory by Brahman elites. The Aryan invasion theory is a hypothesis which Orientalist scholars championed in the 18th and 19th centuries about an Aryan race invading ancient India. Brahman upper class groups used this theory, which colonialism brought to them, to justify what Ambedkar called the ideology of “Brahmanic Supremacy,” by imagining they were of different ethnic and racial stock than the excluded lower classes and Dalits.

To the background of this exposé of the Aryan invasion theory, which Ambedkar was among the first to contest, I will try to say something about the relationship between class and racism This essay will also deal with the Dalits’ mass conversions to Buddhism, and the social and political connotations of this Dalit endorsement of Buddhist teachings or Neo-Buddhism.

Gandhi, among others, compared the position and function Untouchables of India to that of the Jews in Christian Europe. I will compare the plight, status and experience of Jews and other minorities in Christian Europe to Untouchability in India, summing up by showing how the National Socialist Movement finally invoked the Aryan Invasion theory to justify their destruction of Europe’s Untouchables.

Untouchables or Crushed

“Untouchables” are the outcastes of the Hindu Chaturvarna or Caste system in India. They comprise a wide variety of groups from the lowest social strata of Hindu society. The Indian National Congress’ Constitution of 1950, which B.R. Ambedkar coauthored, outlawed the practice of Untouchability. At that time, of the 300 million Hindus then in India, roughly 60 million were untouchables.

Untouchability is a class phenomenon rather than an ethnic group. In his book The Untouchables, Who Were They and Why they became Untouchables? Ambedkar compares the plight of the untouchables to certain other neglected classes in India’s social fabric, namely the so-called Criminal Tribes, who numbered then 20 million, and “the aboriginal tribes,” who numbered 15 million. The “criminal tribes” were tribes that, like untouchables and “aboriginal tribes,” faced exclusion from mainstream Hindu society. The “criminal tribes” were apparently prohibited from practicing any trade that was not illegal or relating to the criminal underworld. This created a kind of clandestine market or shadow economy for these tribes to subside on. One could perhaps compare their situation to how Christian societies more or less forced European Jews to practice usury and interest rates, business which ecclesiastical authorities prohibited Christians from doing.

Untouchables faced exclusion from the system of Hindu worship. They were not allowed to recite or read sacred texts or attend Yajna rituals. Famously, Untouchables’ breath, the sound of their voice, their shadow were all allegedly polluting to Caste Hindus, like an imagined leprosy which Caste Hindus quarantined through systematic social isolation and discrimination. Dalits traditionally must perform lowly occupations, such as sanitation work, janitorial labor, butchering and fishing. They have typically lived in impoverished ghettos on the outskirts of Hindu villages. Even up to the present, Caste Hindus such as landlords, subject untouchables to violence. There are many cases of rapes, assaults, mass-murder and pogroms. There is also much structural violence in how untouchable communities are marginalized into socio-economic misery.

Recent decades have seen the emergence of a “Dalit” movement. “Dalit,” a word popularized in the 70s, is Sanskrit for “Crushed” or “Oppressed,” an affirmation of the social and historical reality Untouchables have endured for centuries. India has seen the rise of such groups as the Dalit Black Panthers, a militant organization which clearly differentiated, like most Ambedkarites, from the pacifist politics of Gandhi who sought to create an illusion of unity, harmony and cohesion among the whole of Hindu society. The “Dalit Black Panthers,” like other militant organizations around the world borrowed their name and drew inspiration from the efforts of black nationalists in the 60s-era United States. Thanks partly to educational efforts that originate largely in Ambedkar’s attempts to uplift untouchables, a canon of Dalit literature, including influential Indian poets, has developed.

Aryan Invasion

The Aryan Invasion theory is the claim that an invasion of Indo-Aryan warriors from outside of India — according to B.G. Tilak, for example, they originated in the Arctic circle, whereas others suggest somewhere between Western Europe and Central Asia — swept into India, colonizing and conquering the more darker-skinned races that inhabited such places as Harappa and Mohenjo Daro. This hypothesis has come under fire in recent decades in scholarly debate. The Indian right wing also now condemns the Aryan Invasion Theory as conjecture, because that theory suggests a foreign, non-nationally-rooted source for Hinduism and Indian Culture, which believers of Hindutva and Hindu fundamentalist superiority find threatening. According to Klostermaier in his book A Survey of Hinduism, the scholarly debate “has largely degenerated into an ideological battle. The defenders of the Aryan invasion theory call everyone not on their side ‘fundamentalist Hindu,’ ‘revisionist,’ ‘fascist,’ and worse, whereas the defenders of the indigenous origin of the Veda accuse their opponents of entertaining ‘colonialist missionary’ and ‘racist hegemonial’ prejudices.”

 

Ambedkar was one of the first authors to contest the theory. His arguments against it, as early as the 1940s, went unnoticed in a time when most scholars took its veracity for granted. The political function of his opposition was to resist “the Brahmanical vision of the Hindu nation, represented for him not only by the Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) but the Gandhian Congress as well.”

Many present-day Indian scholars claim the purpose of the theory was to legitimize the colonial and missionary project of Britain in India by imagining that Indian civilization’s cultural heritage had come from an invading force that conquered dark indigenous inhabitants.

Scholarship now points to a much older date for Vedic culture in India.

Ambedkar in his book Who Were the Shudras?, according to scholar Arvind Sharma, cites 19th century Indologist Max Muller, who had been the main proponent and champion of the Aryan race theory but went on to recant and say that there was no such thing as an “Aryan race,” that by “Aryan” he understood a linguistic reality, “nothing other than language.” Muller later insisted “I have declared again and again that if I say Aryas I mean neither blood nor bones, hair nor skull. I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language.”

Muller went on to denounce advocates of such a category as “Aryan race” to be guilty of “downright theft.”

Muller’s attempts to reverse this wrong went largely ignored throughout much of his lifetime, according to such scholars as Romila Thapar who wrote half a century after Ambedkar. To further argue for his conviction that Arya denotes the speakers of the Sanskrit language and not a race, he point to 31 places in the Rig Veda wherein the word “Arya” is used, saying “in none of these is the word used in the sense of race.” Ambedkar goes on to attempt disproving the Invasion theory in his The Untouchables, in Chapter VII, “Racial Difference as the Origin of Untouchability.” He cites an Orientalist, Stanley Rice, who in his book Hindu Customs and their Origins divides the origins of Untouchability into two factors: race and occupation. The “race” aspect entails a theory that the Untouchables descend from the pre-Dravidian aborigines, who inhabited parts of India and who an invasion of Dravidians conquered and enslaved. According to Rice the noble Aryan race around 1500 BC then invaded, in turn conquering the Dravidians who they made Shudras.

Ambedkar exposes such theories as speculation and contrived, going into a study of the real meaning of such names as Aryans, Dravidians, Dasas and Nagas.

The advocates of the “Aryan race” theory pointed to a Rig Veda verse mentioning a defeated people who were “anasas.” These scholars translated “anasa” as “without noses,” thereby inferring that these were a flat-nosed people. Ambedkar and more recent scholars interpreted “anasas” as meaning “speechless,” a more figurative, literary term that is not a racial category. 

Ambedkar describes an ancient Aryan culture that, rather than being static, homogenous and monolithic like Aryan Race theorists imagined, was diverse, and complex, including a spectrum of cultures, customs, mythologies, etc., that differed across time. Ambedkar differentiates between Rig Vedic Aryans and Atharva Vedic Aryans. He also proves that many Aryans practiced “unclean” occupations, and that Aryans often had Aryan slaves, thereby discrediting beliefs in ethnic origins of an occupational slave-class, of Shudras and untouchables. 

Brahman elites, according to Ambedkar, used the Aryan-invasion-theory of the 18th and 19th centuries which they encountered through contact with British colonialism to mythologize their origins and justify what Ambedkar called “Brahmanical supremacy.” They imagined themselves to be of another, superior race than the Atishudras, closer to the British colonists. Indian elites such as Brahman landlords used this belief to justify their maltreatment of their lower class subjects.

The untouchables, however, were not the only group to suffer at the hands of powers invoking the myth of an Aryan race: during the most intense period of India’s social upheaval, the Nazi movement in Germany also imagined themselves to be an Aryan race. These self-described Aryans would invade many countries, subduing Untermenschen or lesser humans such as the inhabitants of Slavic countries, the way the Aryan invaders supposedly subjugated Dravidians. They waged pogroms, massacres and atrocities against what could be considered Europe’s Untouchables, the European Jews and gypsies, who the Nazis imagined as the exact opposite of Aryans. The Aryan invasion theory was partly modeled on European Orientalists’ trying to re-imagine Europeans as a Chosen People replacing the Jews: whereas there is little proof of an ancient blue-eyed European invasion of India around 1500 BCE, the Old Testament speaks of the ancient Israelites entering Canaan and conquering it from the Canaanites to seize the Promised Land.

Proponents of the Aryan Invasion theory initially referred to Biblical belief and estimated that 4005 years before Christ the God of Genesis had created the world, which is why they claimed the Aryans invaded India at 1500 BC when in fact the Vedas’ presence in India is far older.

From Time Immemorial: Ambedkar’s Demystifying of Untouchability

Ambedkar in his 1948 book The Untouchables aims to systematically deconstruct the claims and misconceptions that surround the issue of the Untouchables, their origins, the source of their inferior status. Some misconceptions tackled are based on the Aryan invasion theory, which we previously looked at. A general belief about Untouchability was that it was decreed by the Manu smriti, a book of Hindu religious law, which Hindus attribute to Manu, the first man, the Indian Adam. A general misconception is that untoucability begins with the Vedas. Ambedkar finds Untouchability to be, rather than an ancient phenomenon, a medieval one, which consolidated and took form around the year 400 AD, when the Hindu Gupta Emperors outlawed the eating of beef and killing of cows and oxen in their legal code.

This took place after a bloody seizure of power by Brahmans, headed by Pushya Mitra, who committed regicide, murdering Buddhist king Brihadratha Maurya who Brahmans conspired against and killed. The Manu Smriti was written at that time and justified this new order. The Manu Smriti legitimized regicide, Chaturvarna, animal sacrifice and Brahmans’ resorting to arms.

According to Ambedkar, the origins of Untouchability are twofold: they find root in India’s Buddhist past, which had until Ambedkar’s time been largely forgotten and resigned to oblivion; and in the dietary conventions and laws of Brahmins towards beef-eating and the killing of cows, but this second point originates in the preceding one: India’s buried Buddhist past.

There are numerous explanations as to why Buddhism at some point virtually disappeared from the Indian subcontinent while it flourished in other Asian countries. Scholars have attributed it to various factors, one being an economic crisis caused by the demise of the Roman empire. This financial crash affected the Indian subcontinent — then dependent on trade with Roman provinces — to such an extent that sanghas, Buddhist monasteries, could no longer subside or find economic support and had to close.

Another theory is that the similarities between Buddhism and Hinduism made Buddhism so indistinguishable from Hinduism that there was no longer any point in being Buddhist as it was not that different from or adding anything novel to the pre-existing religious tradition. Though this argument has some validity, Hinduism probably began to resemble Buddhism more and differences began to erode because the formers’ adherents, proponents and authorities were under immense pressure from Buddhists and Buddhism. According to Ambedkar, Buddhists—who, he claims, were at one point the majority in India as many Indians had converted to the religion of the “Rebel Saint,” Siddartha Gautama Buddha — among the laboring classes in India objected to the waste and cruelty of Brahman priestly elites’ Yajna sacrifices of cows. To poor peasant masses in an agricultural society who subscribed to Buddhist ethics, the sacrificial killing of cows which could otherwise provide sustenance and livelihood was an act of excess, outrageous. Buddhists had less qualms objecting to Brahman behavior as Buddhism does not recognize the Chaturvarna or Caste division of Hindu society. Ambedkar argues, by citing laws from Hindu sacred texts including the Vedas, the Brahmans originally practiced beef-eating and frequently made Yajna sacrifices of cattle.

Buddhist outrage against the Brahmans’ ritual slaughter of cows, and Buddhist animosity to Caste privilege, seemed to be a premonition of class upheaval threatening Brahman power in the Indian power structure, which impelled these elites to make a compromise. They outlawed the sacrifice of cows and eating of beef, reinterpreting Rig Veda verses about the cows being sacred animals as meaning that one could not kill a cow. This injunction is retrospectively imagined as the Vedas, like many ancient religions, do not see a contradiction between sacrificing an animal and that creature being sacred, worthy of veneration etc.

Moreover, Brahmin elites saw a need to compete with rising Buddhism. Therefore, in a reactionary gesture, they adopted vegetarianism — which was then not a widespread Buddhist or Hindu practice — to go one step further than the Buddhists who advocated abolition of animal sacrifices.

It is possible that Ambedkar’s book also reflects the political reality of his day. The Brahman elites trying to appease and pacify Buddhist lower classes, in order to not be overthrown, bears similarities to how Indian elites were attempting to pacify social and class upheaval in early 20th century India, such as the various peasant revolts and the unrest created by the untouchables who later joined Ambedkar’s movement representing them.

Ambedkar saw Gandhi’s attempt at appeasing the Untouchables by naming them Harijan, People of God, or Folk of Krishna, and thereby trying to artificially include them in Hinduism, as ignoring centuries of Brahman oppression and Hindu exclusion and discrimination as well as denying the alleged Buddhist past of the Dalits. Gandhi, a champion of a new version of Hinduism — one influenced by the thought of Christian anarchist writer Tolstoy and the esoteric Theosophical Society, as well as Gandhi’s own ideas concerning the doctrine of Ahimsa — was seen by the Ambedkarites and Indian Communists as a friend of the Indian ruling elites and Brahmans. Ambedkar referred to Gandhi’s esteemed friend President Nehru as “just another Brahman” and said of the Indian National Congress, which became Gandhi’s party, “Congress is the kept whore of the Brahmans and the merchants.”

Ambedkar’s Buddhism as a Form of Dalit Resistance

Ambedkar’s mass conversion of 3 million Dalits to Buddhism was an attempt to recover the lost dignity of the outcastes, who, according to Ambedkar, were originally Buddhists. Ambedkar’s efforts single-handedly restored the once lost, dormant Buddhist tradition to Indian religious life. 

Ambedkar claimed Buddhism’s decline originated in Brahman conspiracies, in the medieval power grab and destruction of Indian Buddhism that according to him the Brahmans had carried out in Indian Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

As mentioned earlier, Ambedkar thought that Buddhism was once a contender for dominance in Indian religious life, threatening to become India’s major religion. Ambedkar and his colleagues saw Buddhism as a revolution, a revolutionary movement opposed to caste and to Chaturvarna, and which had threatened to topple the Brahmins from power. It is likely that Ambedkar’s interest in reviving Buddhism was related to this history, to this view of Buddhism being a revolutionary force threatening and overthrowing a decadent, reactionary Hinduism and the power of the Brahmins whom Ambedkar despised.

Ambedkar saw religion as a “social force” and “source of power.” Contrary to popular views on religion, Ambedkar stressed that religion should not aggrandize or ennoble poverty. He did not interpret the Buddhist and Christian messages of non-attachment to material possessions as an exhortation to tolerate social and economic inequalities, that pious people living in misery should accept the wealthy exploiting them. Instead, Ambedkar claimed that Buddha and Marx both agreed on the need to abolish private property. He stated these beliefs in his speeches on Buddha and Marx at the Buddhist conference in Kathmandu in 1956. He thought Buddha to be more radical and severe in his teachings on relinquishing property, pointing to the lack of possessions among monks in sangha orders. He also thought the Buddha’s methodology of fighting social injustice, through pedagogical efforts, teaching, and action rooted in love, was more effective that Marx’s alleged strategy of power and violent revolution.

Ambedkar was a new kind of Buddhist, and an Indian nationalist with ideas of a kind of radical social democracy influenced by John Dewey (who Noam Chomsky often refers to in his critiques of corporate power in the United States) and not a communist, despite that his later followers in the Dalit movement, who see Ambedkar as their father and liberator, are often of a socialist or leftist bent. 

Ambedkar thought that Marxism emphasized industrial labor and industrial workers, rather than agricultural labor and peasants. Much of the untouchable community comprised peasants involved in agricultural work. Part of India’s population still lived under feudal conditions, in serfdom. Marxists during and after the Russian revolution have commented on how Leninism contradicted basic Marxist theory, by organizing a so-called communist revolution in Russia, a country still living under feudalism and aristocracy. According to Marxist dogma, a country must first pass from feudalism to the capitalist order and mode of production, in order to create the superfluity of goods that will make a communist society possible after the workers’ revolution.

The fact that Marx largely neglected the plight of peasants, favoring industrial laborers, might have been a factor in Ambedkar’s rejection of communism, along with Ambedkar’s loathing of violence and his espousal of and firm faith in democratic institutions. He founded the Independent Labour Party in 1936, and according to his biographer Keer he was the first legislator in Indian history “to introduce a bill abolishing serfdom of agricultural tenants.”

Ambedkar had formerly said that the identity of a minority disappears once that minority no longer faces exclusion, oppression and discrimination from the majority. But he turned 3 million of the Dalits, from a socioeconomic class of oppressed people, into a religious minority, thus further articulating and defining a Dalit identity different from the Hindu majority in ways other than class. He hoped his revival of anti-Casteist, democratic and socially conscious Buddhism among the Dalits would spread to the rest of India, thereby unifying India across class and sectarian lines despite that the Untouchables would initially differentiate themselves from the rest of their country people by adopting another religion that had become near-obsolete there. This political take on Buddhism as a rational, democratic movement of liberation prepared large segments of the Dalit community who did not choose Buddhism to later adopt ideas of Liberation Theology, a Christian movement typically associated with Latin America and South Africa. The intellectuals who developed the Liberation Theology movement tailored it to the needs of the politically oppressed and economically impoverished, making post-independence Indian Dalit communities fertile soil for their ideas.

I think that the Buddhist belief in liberation from Samsara, the chain of rebirths, was in this case a metaphor for liberation from a repressive hierarchical and class-based society. The Ambedkarite Buddhists certainly identify the dukkha or suffering they experience as being largely rooted in their socio-economic misery.

Many Christians, such as the rebel peasants in the Rhineland and Germany during the time of the Reformation in Europe, who rose up against feudal authorities and landed nobility in the 16th century, saw the message of Christian redemption and salvation as a metaphor for their building a classless, egalitarian society where they would not be hungry, humiliated serfs living under feudalism. They imagined salvation in the form of such a classless New Jerusalem.

Similarly the Nirodha (or cessation of suffering) and Nibbana of Buddhist salvation for Dalit Buddhist converts must have been a metaphor for not merely transcending and abolishing Samsara but of hoping to transcend harshly stratified class-society.

Untouchables West and East: Parallels Between Indian Untouchability and  Europe’s Minorities

Gandhi is an essay touching on Palestine and his criticism of Zionism in 1938 wrote “My sympathies are all with the Jews. I have known them intimately in South Africa. Some of them became lifelong companions. Through these friends I came to learn much of their age-long persecution. They have been the untouchables of Christianity. The parallel between their treatment by Christians and the treatment of untouchables by Hindus is very close. Religious sanction has been invoked in both cases for the justification of the inhuman treatment meted out to them.”

Gandhi said of Indian Untouchability: “The nearest approach to it found in the West is the untouchability of the Jews who were confined to the ghettoes.”

This comparison is, I think, not at all far-fetched, even though there are significant differences between Jews in the Middle Ages and Indian Untouchables. Untouchability is more a class denomination whereas Jews are typically identified as an ethno-cultural and religious minority, even though class did play an extremely important role in the treatment of Jews.

Not only the European Jewish experience resembles Untouchability. There is also the position and status of the “gypsy” or “Romani” communities in Europe since the 14th and 15th centuries. During the Holocaust, Nazis massacred gypsies.

The Romani word for the genocide they endured, Porrajmos, means “the great Devouring.”

Ironically, many contemporary scholars believe that the gypsy ghetto populations of Europe possibly originated in migrations from Northwest India. The Romani language bears close similarities to Sanskrit. Some Hungarian gypsies have, like Indian Dalits, even converted to Buddhism with the help of an Ambedkar-inspired pedagogical institution that has a Hungarian division to educate Romanis.

European Jews for centuries inhabited ghettoes and faced exclusion and discrimination from most institutions that were open to Christians. Medieval society, what we typically understand under the word “feudalism” — which is a modern word — was arguably organized according to the class division of the Pre-Christian Indo-European society. This society was divided into what the medieval Anglo-Saxon monk Aelfric called the bellatores, oratores and laboratores, translatable as the fighting class (bellatores), the praying class (oratores) and the toiling, laboring classes (laboratores).

There are also studies indicating that the ancient Latin word for priest, Flahen, is directly etymologically related to the word Brahmin.

The medieval aristocracy and landed nobility descended from the warrior or fighting class. The priesthood and monks of the middle ages inherited the status of the praying class and the serfs underneath them were the laboring class. Jews, who were forbidden to carry weapons or farm land and for obvious reasons were not in the Christian priesthood, seemed excluded from this hierarchical threefold division of feudal society. In this sense we could perceive them as similar to outcastes, who, like the Indian untouchables, also gained the status of despised outsiders because of reasons related to faith. In the Untouchables’ case it was their past Buddhism; in the case of European Jews, their religion and related power struggles with ruling elites and religious orthodoxy who had adopted different versions of Christianity as the official state religion. The oppressive policies of Christian clerical officials towards Jews were also important in strengthening and defining a particular version of Christianity that was different from other “Christianities” that were prevalent and popular in Late Antiquity.

Both populations lived in ghettoes and originated as economic immigrants and migrant populations. According to Ambedkar, the ancestors of untouchables were originally “Broken Men” from defeated and economically bankrupted tribes who emigrated into quarters on the outskirts of prosperous agricultural villages to gain subsistence from the agricultural-based economy. The Broken Men had been formerly from nomadic cattle-herding, pre-farming societies.

In the case of Jewish groups, Jews were often migrants and immigrants who lived in special, marginal quarters. This immigrant aspect of Jewish life has persisted into the 20th and 21st centuries: Jews have consistently been economic immigrants to places like the United States, Palestine — now Israel, a recently established immigrant country — Argentina etc. The Russian Tsar before the Russian revolution banished Jews from Eastern European urban centers condemning them to live in an elaborate system of migrant slums called the Pale of Settlement.
 

European elites reinterpreted Christian scripture and theology to justify a traditional, Pre-Christian, Indo-European structure of society, the feudal socioeconomic order, and cast the Jews as an accursed race guilty of being a polluting force. (Medieval beliefs attributed the Jews with poisoning of wells and defiling the sacred Host). They used the inferior position and persecution of Jewish and other lower strata populations to consolidate power, and probably to direct the aggressive energies of the laboratores or toiling serf class away from the oratores and bellatores onto a seemingly external enemy, allegedly foreign to this social fabric. This history bears strong similarities to how Brahman elites reinterpreted and reworked the texts of the Mahabharata and the Manusmrti to justify their power; changed their religious practices of Yajna cattle sacrifice and re-imagined their history, while mobilizing popular aggression of lower castes like the Shudras away from them and onto the inhabitants of Untouchable ghettos. This agitating propaganda probably gave Shudras the satisfaction of having a caste ranked beneath them, inferior to them. The untouchables and their misery in the Indian case were probably useful for the rulers’ consolidation of power and of this class system, a system which Gandhi would, more than a millennium later, come to uphold and sentimentally defend, much to the horror of the Untouchables and Ambedkar.

Gandhi chose to defend the righteousness and sanctity of Chaturvarna despite that his pacifism and philosophy of Satyagraha largely developed through his discipleship and influence under Leo Tolstoy, a nobleman turned Christian anarchist who sympathized with the suffering of Russian and European serfs and oppressed peasantry, and who believed in striving towards a stateless and classless future society. 

As earlier mentioned, the perpetrators of violence against Europe’s Jews and gypsies, like the assailants of India’s Untouchables, would justify their oppressive measures by referring to the Aryan Invasion theory as scientific fact.

Ambedkar supported the formation of Pakistan when Gandhi and many Indians opposed it, saying that if Indian Muslims had “the will to live as a nation,” then their claims of nationhood were legitimate and so was Pakistan. (To support his arguments he referred, ironically, to writings of the notoriously racist

 Orientalist, Renan, on the nature of nationhood.) This is similar to the case of the Zionist movement in Palestine, who formed the state of Israel around the same date as the creation of Pakistan, 1948, also in the aftermath of a partition resolution.

Gandhi, Ambedkar, Congress and the Pacification of Class Upheaval

Ambedkar in his book What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables called Gandhi “a mad man” “with the genius of an elf” who “can never grow up and grow out of caste ideology.” 

The reason for this harsh language towards Gandhi — who is the subject of many modern-day hagiographies and who much of Western popular culture holds to be a saint of the 20th century — was that he, in the eyes of the untouchable movement upheld Chaturvarna and strongly opposed the untouchables’ battle for self-determination and dignity.

Ambedkar accused Gandhi of harboring hatred towards machinery, Western civilization and technology. Gandhi legitimized and defended this belief system by referring to Western thinkers like Jean Jacques Rousseau, Ruskin and Tolstoy.

Gandhi allegedly thought mankind should do away with machines and advanced technology, even though it would be impossible, according to Ambedkar, to have such things as leisure and culture without them. Gandhi did not, however, reject class society or condemn the hierarchies of Indian civilization. Gandhi went to great lengths to justify the Brahmans’ privilege. His coining the term Harijan for the Untouchables in order to emancipate them was, in Ambedkar’s view, more evidence that Gandhi believed the Untouchables had to remain an isolated, separate population that could never integrate and unite with the rest of Hindu society or hope to obtain equal rights and dignity.

Gandhi is famous for his habits of peaceful protesting and making suicide threats of fasting to death in order to achieve political ends without violently assaulting the persons and property of others. Many would find it hard to believe that even pacifism can be at times a violent, oppressive political force that can serve ends which are not necessarily for humanity’s betterment. 

In the early 1930’s, Ambedkar, against the background of the Untouchables’ campaign of satyagraha to gain access to public wells in the village of Nasik, at the Round Table Conference demanded that the Depressed Classes (the Untouchables) receive “constitutional safeguards through separate electorates, prior to devolving a measure of sovereignity to India, whether within or outside the British Commonwealth.” Temporary separate voting constituencies for the Depressed Classes would have awarded them a degree of self-determination they had never previously attained. Gandhi fiercely rejected this proposal. Though he had conceded to special electoral constituencies for Muslims — perhaps hoping this concession would satisfy the Muslims and thereby prevent the emergence of Pakistan — he maintained that untouchables were Hindus, insisting “I cannot possibly tolerate what is in store for the Hindus if these two divisions (caste and untouchables) set forth in the villages and therefore I want to say with all the emphasis that I can command that if I was the only person to resist this thing I would resist it with my life.” According to B.A.M. Paradkar’s study The Religious Quest of Ambedkar, when British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald “announced the ‘Communal Award’ which conceded separate electorates to the Untouchables,” Gandhi immediately declared a fast unto death to protest it, threatening suicide, “the object of which was to deprive the Untouchables of the benefit of the Communal Award by this extreme form of coercion,” according to Ambedkar’s 1945 j’accuse-like text.

This quarrel and subsequent negotiations between Gandhi and Ambedkar resulted in a compromise, damaging to the Untouchables, called the Poona Pact. Paradkar suggests that the closure of a political outlet — the thwarted dream of separate electorates — for the Depressed Classes’ frustrations, might have led to their mass conversions to Buddhism, a religious answer to replace the political one.

Furthermore, Gandhi condemned the 1929 Satyagraha of Untouchables against Hindus for admission to wells and temples. Gandhi at one point became president of the Indian National Congress. Ambedkar accused the Congress of acting in the interests of Indian and Brahman elites and upholding Untouchability. Former Congress member Annie Besant, founder of the Theosophical Society and instrumental in proclaiming a Brahmin child, J. Krishnamurti, as Theosophy’s messiah, in her argument for maintaining the institution of untouchability, claimed every society has naturally “as the basis of the social Pyramid, a large class of people, ignorant, degraded, unclean (. . .) who perform many tasks necessary for Society. It springs from the aboriginal inhabitants (. . .) conquered and enslaved by the Aryan invaders.” She went on to elaborately describe how untouchables in their filth are as disgusting as British slum-dwellers, and defended the religious righteousness of Caste society and Untouchability.

 

Conclusion

Untouchability did not originate in a social order that an Aryan invasion created. It is not ancient, but stems from medieval India. Its origins are not racial or ethnic. If Ambedkar’s thesis is correct, Untouchability arose due to an attempt of medieval Indian elites to consolidate their power after the threat of social upheaval and after Brahmans organized political coups d’état. More than a millennium later, Gandhi, to whom many attribute the liberation of India from colonialism, seemed to fear the social chaos that Untouchables, later to be known as Dalits, might create if they succeeded in their power struggle. Gandhi, though radical in his philosophy, championed adherence to Caste society, at least according to Ambedkar and authors whom the latter influenced. 

Ambedkar’s Buddhism bore some similarities to the approach to Christianity that the Liberation Theology movement advocated and was a medium for expression of Dalit ambitions for liberation from class oppression. 

During the time India was struggling for independence, minorities in Europe, namely the Jewish population, became victims of the same Aryan invasion theory that Brahmans, influenced by colonialism, invoked to justify maltreatment of Untouchables. It appears European Jews were not alone in the darkest hour of their suffering.  

Works Cited

Ambedkar, B.R. The Untouchables, Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables, New Delhi, October 1948

Ambedkkar, B.R. What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables, Thacker and Co. Bombay 1945

Berryman, P Liberation theology London: Pantheon, 1987 - globalchristians.org

Chidester, David Christianity: A Global History, Harper Collins New York 2000

Contursi, Janet A. 'Political Theology: Text and Practice in a Dalit Panther Community' p. 2, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 52, No. 2 (May, 1993), pp. 320-339 Published by: Association for Asian Studies

Dharwadker, Vinay 'Dalit Poetry in Marathi' World Literature Today, Vol. 68, 1994.

Gandhi, Mohandas K. 'Passive Resistance and Anti-Semitism', 1938, in The Selected Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Ed. Duncan, Ronald, Beacon 1951

Joshi, Barbara H. Untouchable!: Voices of the Dalit Liberation Movement, Zed Books, London 1983

Klostermaier, Klaus K. A Survey of Hinduism (Third Edition), State University of New York Press, 2007

Lewy, Guenter The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Manian, Padma, Harappans and Aryans: Old and New Perspectives of Ancient Indian History p. 31 The History Teacher, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Nov., 1998), Published by: Society for History Education

Massad, Joseph 'Zionism's Internal Others: Israel and the Oriental Jews' p. 61 in Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Summer, 1996), pp. 53-68 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Institute for Palestine Studies

Omvedt, Gail. 'Gandhi and the Pacification of the Indian National Revolution', Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 5, 1973. 7 pgs

Sharma, Arvind 'Dr B.R. Ambedkar on the Aryan Invasion Theory and the Emergence of the Caste System in India', Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume: 73 Issue: 3 (September 1, 2005), pp: 843

Tamas, Judith, 'A Hidden Minority Becomes Visible', Journal article by Judith Tamas; Childhood Education, Vol. 77, 2001.

Wikinson, T.S., Thomas, M.M.(editors) Ambedkar and the Neo-Buddhist Movement C.IS.R.S. Social research Series Madras 1972

vii.

Bishnupada Ray                                                                                                    2 poems                                                                                        

Brain Mapping

the colours of a twilight

take on the colours of my thought

longitudes and latitudes crisscross

and an in-built GPS starts tracking

the elusive motive dots

in the hypothalamus a desert rock

under denudation and exfoliation

torn away from the better days

of enriching environment

looks at the sky where lines meet

and the linearity of lost pathways

twinkles with a galactic matrix

the archetypal fossil relics

open up the mystical lines of loss

of articulation

on this map of an ancient mindset

my articulation gets lost in sand

like the people of the wind

and my psychotropic words

roll past the desert gland

like all freelance tumbleweeds

and hang on some lonely acacia

to form a weird architecture.

Palmystery

the road hits an exhausted space

driving through night the eyes get

an imprint of the overstretched highway

that morphs into an obscure lifeline

the wheel unsettles the line of fate

by tending to obliterate the light

to be in-different with the night

to follow the motion of the stars

this motion the brain cannot hold

the muscles rebel to come to a halt

reflex falls dead upon the indicators

as the road hits an exhausted space

in the parenthesis all road signs

create the norms of stern sun signs

to regulate all moments and miles

outstretched on a palm of allegories.

viii.

Twilight                                                                                                                2 poems
Shipra Agarwal

The light is fading 

bit by bit 

both around me 

and inside. 

I turn away 

from the setting sun 

to the shimmering lights 

of the city, 

they attract my attention 

but repulse my soul. 

And then, there is the darkness 

growing stronger every minute 

threatening to engulf me. 

Should I run to the lights 

and kill my soul? 

Or should I wait for the dark 

to drown it, drown it?

On the Threshold

Long ago

you painted a picture for me 

of a house with purple walls,

somewhere between the city and the beach. 

I had closed my eyes then 

and heard you sing 

of a love found and lost. 

I tried to find it again, but 

it was gone,

that fleeting look of tenderness in your eyes,

so was the picture 

and I thought it to be 

another one of my reverie. 

And yet, months later 

here I stand 

on the threshold 

of that figment of your imagination. 

How did you make it real? 

When did you show me the way to it? 

I think I know the answers deep down . . . 

But, what I don't know 

is the way forward from here. 

Should I knock on the door

or should I just walk past it? 

Would you smile when you see me, 

would you let me in? 

and if you do 

would there be a way out again

for me?

ix.

A Fan                                                                                                                   poem

Mohd.Shakil Kidwai

Working continuously
with all its blades
like in the competition of life
a man self-made

                           moving clockwise
                           in only one direction
                           so as it is firm
                           to move forward with attention
like the rigidity of a man
towards its duty
without any reward
of gratitude

                            Throwing down ward
                            the air cold
                            as in a wrestling competition
                            like a bold

Challenging all the competitors
of his age
without losing
any courage.

x.

Evensong                                                                                                              4 poems
Ranjani Neriya

of an evening

an oriole comes to rest

in the eucalyptus tree

and someone in the house next door

begins to sing

it is as if a magical dust mote

has landed on the pond’s periphery

to rein in the

thrown-out circles of time

back to the vortex

and a landscape stirs,

it is hackney carriages

coconut groves, cowbells

lusty green fields

a house of polished floors

with niches for Buddha icons

blue gods, silk embroidery

hung in intricate frames, as

a quiver of moon rays dart

from silver cups of

fragrant saffron milk

on a rosewood tray

she sings of the body’s cavern

where the heart began

as she awaits

the daedal peal of a

lamp-lit voice calling home.

                                                           

Of Distances                                                                 

“oh, the school is just four rosaries away”                                                      

                                                                                                                                         

on those long-ago days,

for a way home, we

measured the sky

fabled a fantail of stars 

heard streams glide

combed winds going by

soon, barleycorns in a row

cubits in the palm of the hand

calculated the stretch 

patterns engrailed on trees

stele in loam, marked

a traveler’s need 

*

geodesic flight of pixels

electric-hued notes, screened 

in thickets of mined light

wise us today,

to catch the spring

before the robin does, or

clouded in wild surmise

we say it is a stone’s throw

or as far as the crow flies, but

for Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Mercy

their life soul-lit and haven a prayer,

footsteps are numbered in rosaries.

Calling Long Distance

in the empty  house, the phone rings

and I pretend you are there

entering the room,

your slippers flapping,

brow furrowed, wondering

here it is a polar morn

windless maple, deplumed sky,

there the sun is perhaps

diminishing, stretched like lustring

in a shellacked squall of crows,

silvering the far creek

by the huddle of gray huts

the sisal periphery

calendula siege

gorge of allamanda

pliant after rain

across wavelengths of dark

into the echo of nothingness

through the hyaline which keeps

our once-bonded elements

so strangely separate, I call

to wish you were there for me

but the coda tapers off

into the din of a silence

deafening and long.

Vignette

                      

you could toss a grain of sand

and create a storm

so breathless is the morn  

bobwhite in the mimosa

spills lazuli of

last night’s rain

dwellings froth

hush into cleansed  

waves of glass  

the paved stone has knurled

tales of wilderness to tell

compiles new history    

in the coppery weave 

languid conifers stretch

like tired pilgrims

somewhere, a peddler

on a broken street sings

the worn-out tape of his wares

his knotted knees keening

to the safe geometry of ever

circling back to where he left. 

xi. 

I Want to See a World From the Window                                                                      3 poems 

Pushkar Bisht

I want to see a world from the window, 
A happy world, 
A quiet world, 
A beautiful world, 

I want to see a world from the window, 
A true world, 
A holy world, 
A bloodless world, 

I want to see a world from the window, 
A world full of shining colours everywhere, 
A world fully dedicated to love, 
A world which knows only the way of humanity, 

I want to see a world from the window, 
A world which starts its day with a smile, 
A world which ends its days with a thanks to the Almighty, 
A world which sleeps at night in a tuneful song,

In Hour of Darkness, I Remember You

In hour of darkness, 
I remember you
And the darkness of my life quickly flutters away

In hour of happiness, 
I remember you
And the happiness comes much more

In hour of difficulty, 
I remember you
And my faith goes stronger 

In hour of death, 
I remember you
And I breathe my last with a smile

In hour of losing courage

I remember you
And I become more confident 

In hour of failure, 
I remember you
And my failure turns into success due to you

In hour of seeking you
I don’t remember you
Because you are in me and I am in you

Here Lies a Poet Dead

Here lies a poet dead, 
After going through deep melancholy of life 
In the bed of death 
Sorrow doesn’t engulf the poet any more, 
And silence takes him in its core, 

The poet does not cry now, 
The world mourns to lose a shining star, 
Which always shone in the dark . . .
Who will come again to love? The sad world ponders 
But I must come in other forms again to love 
And compose beautiful poems 
For my beautiful world that has shed its tears in my memory . . .

A man of thoughts, 
No more poetry he pens down 
But he sleeps peacefully 
In his grave, 
And the grass grows green, the dew fallen upon 
What a beautiful morning 
To a poet, 
We wake up with Mother Nature 
The sun shines bright upon that, 
And the poet smiles to feel all this 
Over his grave 
The birds sing their song 
In the early morning 
And the poet rests at peace for long

The stars like little drops of rain twinkle, 
In the sky . . .
With a poet they all mingle 
And the night hugs him tight 
In its sweet dreams . . .

I miss all the creatures.
xii.

The Strong Man                                                                                              2 poems
Amy Sandra

How can a faceless man be seen?
How can a voiceless man be heard?
All he bears is a pliable spine
that no body can break.
“I am a strong”, the man says.
His strength desires games
of resistance and loftiness.
Little he knows,
he soon will break
with the spine that melts away.
He will never stand again.

Ugly Poem

It keeps on growing like the moss on the old building in the rainy season, like the fungi on an old man’s “rusted weapon”.
It keeps on showing like the stray dog’s itch, like the chain smoker’s yellow-brown teeth.
It keeps on stinking like a vagabond’s armpit, like the big momma’ 3-day old bra, like the fish in the dump, like the dead rat hiding under the sofa.
It keeps on giving in like a man with no spine, like a drunkard who finished all the wine.
It keeps on repelling like the one white strand on a strange man’s mole, like the greedy pig’s burp.
It is ugly, i know.
He is the ugly, i say.
I tell him everyday.
I mean them all in every way.
Love is the only beautiful part of you tonight.
Your ugly tests love everytime.
It is ugly, i know.
He is the ugly, i say.
And, I mean it all in everyway

books 

xiii.  

Promise 
Ranjani Neriya                                                                                                                    book news
(excerpt from review)

PROMISE - A Life, a collection of poems by Ranjani Neriya and published by Leadstart, Mumbai, is beautiful, lyrical and unusual. Just a month shy of her 80th birthday, the poet is no stranger to the world of publishing. Her articles and short stories have featured in many Indian and American journals, including The Indian P.E.N and the Midwest Poetry Review.

It seems like a natural progression to move on to a full-fledged book. That’s books, actually. These 64 poems constitute a second collection of poetry. 

(Neriya's poems are featured in this issue of brown critique. Read on. . . http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/a-collection-of-poems-written-by-the-nearly80yearold-ranjani-neriya/article6405521.ece - September 12, 2014)

xiv.

Where I Live
Arundhathi Subramaniam  

                                                               

"Where I Live combines Arundhathi Subramaniam's first two Indian collections of poetry, On Cleaning Bookshelves and Where I Live, with a selection of new work. Her poems explore various ambivalences - around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megalopolis, myth, the politics of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey. Her new poems are a meditation on desire in which the sensual and sacred inextricably mingle."

Where I Live, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Bloodaxe Books Ltd; Reprint edition (September 8, 2009)

xv.

Mirrored Reflections
Antonio Gomes

Dr. J. Anthony Gomes takes the reader on a voyage in verse that traverses the globe - from Goa (India) to Staten Island (NY), the Algarve in Portugal, Rio in Brazil, the Asturias in Spain, Caracas in Venezuela, and Yagamata in Japan. His verse connects the reader with the Orinoco (one of the longest rivers of South America), the Inca site of Machu Picchu, Bahia in Brazil, street scenes in NYC, and the varied experiences of an expert dealing with the heart. Back home, his youthful memories take us to dusk in Loutolim village, Goa; the legend of an attempted robbery at Aldona village; the streets of Bombay; and the nostalgia that many a Goan migrant feels for home.
Grace Schulman, poet and distinguished professor of English, says the second poetry volume of the cardiologist-who-writes "captures the landscape and rhythms of his native Goa, his travels, and his patients." 


Mirrored Reflections, Antonio Gomes, published by Goa 1556 in 2013

xvi.                                                                                                                                       book review

Caged Vision and the Creative Breakthrough: 

Jaydeep Sarangi’s A Door Somewhere?

Bishnupada Ray

 

Creativity is a dream, a dream of idealism, by which the poet separates himself from his indifferent existence, an existence that suffocates his being and from which he strives to obtain a release, to get a creative breakthrough, to find a door somewhere. Surrounded by the contingent world of survival and crass materialism, he gathers his sensitivity into a creative sensibility around this caged vision of his trapped being and struggles to redeem himself by the creative urge of breaking himself free, by breaking through the cage, door or no door. The tormented vision of the poet demands a creative justice.

Jaydeep Sarangi’s latest book of poetry is all about this caged vision and creative breakthrough, which Jaydeep portrays with simple touches of narrative and feeling. The floating verse of the philosophy of the surface of this quotidian world moves on with an unmistakable sense of banality and a lack of punch, for the poet does not express anger or distress or makes a strong statement of being, but collects the surface things with delicate care and records them with an artistic neutrality that appears to go well with his kind of poetry.

The poem “Each Time” is a testament of his poetic faith:

Each time it rained

I looked at my caged bard

Observed its summer dance

With wings wide.

It prompted words for my poems

I waited till I could meet someone near the doorway

Of my dream

Wet trees looked at me in amazement.

 (“Each Time”)

Or we may take his poem “A Door” as an example of his poetic motto:

A poet is a translator

He translates for his reading world

Through a door

Whispers in time

To another door somewhere.

(“A Door”)

Jaydeep’s persona is, as Wordsworth says, ‘a man speaking to men’, and we now know this persona needs to communicate through his creative process to someone outside the door, to see someone on the other side of his being. After Silent Days Jaydeep listens to all sorts of sound, perceives all sorts of colour, gets drenched in all sorts of feelings, and he needs to break himself free in order to communicate, for he is confident that someone waits for him. This someone is possibly the reader who is a precondition of the poet’s redemption and who will bring to him a bag of happiness through the joyful reading of his poetry, and the poet finds his nirvana through a tribute to this reader.

A Door Somewhere?: Poems by Jaydeep Sarangi, Jaydeep Sarangi, Cyberwit, Allahabad 2014.

contributors

A poet and fiction writer, K. Srilata is a Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras. Srilata was a writer-in-residence at the University of Stirling, at Sangam house and at the Yeonhui Art Space in Seoul. Her debut novel Table for Four, long listed in 2009 for the Man Asian literary prize, was published by Penguin. Srilata has three collections of poems, Writing Octopus (Authorspress, 2013), Arriving Shortly (Writers Workshop, 2011) and Seablue Child (Brown Critique, 2002). She also co-edited the anthology Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry. Her work has been featured in The BloodAxe Anthology of Indian Poets, The Harper Collins Book of English Poetry, Wasafiri, Recours au Poeme, Caravan, Fulcrum, The Little Magazine, Kavya Bharati and in two anthologies published by the Sahitya Akademi. 

Debsruti Basu, 22, is from Calcutta. Currently she is pursuing a post graduate degree in Literature in English under the University of Calcutta. In her words "I basically write poetry to live in the abrupt, incomplete silences that dwell out of all my experiences. If asked to choose between sweltering heat and the rain on any useful day, will jump to the dry, bright side at the drop of a hat. I swear by hugs and tragedies and believe that there’s nothing a long conversation and a cup of tea cannot solve. And yes, still waiting for that Hogwarts letter, Headmaster."
Ananya Dontula is a 16-year-old poet based out of Hyderabad. Chandramohan. S is an English poet based in India. His poems reflect the socio-political struggles of the marginalized , the working class and the nomadic  outcasts of the World who are victimized and then forgotten as nations clash and wage relentless war. His work has been profiled in New Asia Writing, Mascara Literary Review and About placejournal.Counter-Punch poetry,Thump Print magazine,The Sentinel, American Diversity Report, Poetry 24 online , Green Left Weekly(Australia), The Baroda Pamphlet, Art in Society ,News Verse News , Chronogram etc.
Diwakar Anand is a budding entrepreneur in the food industry who loves to travel and amaze at the natural and man-made beauty. He loves to write poems and short stories on topics relating to life, love etc.
Arturo Desimone was born and raised in Aruba (Dutch Caribbean) to parents of immigrant origins foreign to the island (an Argentinean father and Russian-Polish mother). When he was 20 he emigrated from Aruba to the Netherlands, where he lived for 6 years, then left to lead a nomadic way of life better enabling writing fiction, poetry and making drawings. Now he is based in Buenos Aires Argentina, his grandparents' home town. His poetry and fiction have been in Horror Sleaze Trash, Small Axe Salon, Hinchas de Poesia Unlikely Stories and at the blog A Tunisian Girl .Arturo's has been published in brown critique before.
Bishnupada Ray is an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Bengal. An Indian English poet and his latest book of poetry Winter Sky and Selected Poems was published by Brown Critique in 2013.
Shipra Agarwal is a day dreamer, whose head is incessantly filled with words and lines and songs and stories. A thirst for life has taken her down many winding roads: Medicine, Marketing, Verse, Prose, Dance Schools, Book Stores, Yoga Camps, Theatre Groups; she’s still searching for the one that leads to her, still wandering!

Dr Mohd. Shakil Kidwai is a reader (Chemistry) in Lal Bahadur Shashtri (PG) College (Gonda).
Ranjani Neriya's poems, articles, short stories have appeared in several Indian magazines. In the U.S. her poems have been featured in journals. She has published 2 collections of poetry -  BATIK in 1994 and PROMISE - A LIFE - in October 2013.
Pushkar Bisht was born on 26 June,1985, in the town of Pithoragarh, the Queen of the Mountains. He now lives in New Delhi (India) , with his parents. Pushkar studies Philosophy, English Literature & Science in college. Bisht’s poetry is drawn from his observations of the world around him. He takes inspiration from the simple, and often routine, events of everyday life, and from the relationships he forms with family, friends and casual acquaintances. He is touched by the plight of people who are less fortunate than he, and this is clearly reflected in his work. Bisht often breaks the rules of poetry. However this is done intentionally, in order to appeal to readers from all walks of life. As with most poets, Pushkar’s personal beliefs and values mould his thought patterns, and he creates a variety of visual images with his carefully chosen words and phrases.
Amy Sandra works and lives in Delhi and Mumbai. In her words: "Being a faithful lover of freedom, people and art, and an 'intentional' stumbler, life has given me only a voice as my comforter, my identity and my resource. Skeptical of my beliefs and slowly drifting into my 'illusions', introspecting and observing, I dared to bring a stammering voice into the ears of the deaf and the deafened. I CHOSE TO WRITE -- write till I could reach myself and many others bringing out their voices within. The journey has not been a walk by the beach, but I believe that is what I chose to make it, even though my 'destiny' was said to be set. A passout from Miranda House, Delhi University, adorning my volatile experiences of life and the corporate, I am glad to share my work in Brown Critique. I hope you would have something to nudge you, even if, at the farthest end of you."