A story about love can “unspool the complexities of caste,” says Nikhil Pandhi, the editor of Love in the Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist Anthology of Love Stories published by Zubaan Books, an indie feminist press based in India. Such stories not only serve to give space to the rich, inner lives of Dalit communities but they can be an important resource for anyone who is keen to understand caste. “Rather than quoting an academic treatise, I felt like it is just much easier for them to read a short story,” says Pandhi.
A collection of 17 stories from across India, Love in the Time of Caste makes love the prism through which one can observe, absorb, and critique caste regimes in India. The book powerfully illustrates the ways in which the violence of casteism permeates all aspects of social relations while simultaneously structuring Dalit lives, psyches and sociality too.
Unsurprisingly, these are not sappy love stories with happy endings. Rather, “this is love that is anchored in embodied violence that is so real” that even dreaming, fantasizing and desiring can become perilous. Caste is necropolitical, says Pandhi, but the writers in the book rearrange those desires and reframe circuits of connection and belonging. The stories span a wide range of themes, certainly love but also revenge, inter-caste and intra-caste relationships, heartbreak, healing, toxic masculinity, Dalit women’s agency, the absence of childhood, and, quite often, quests for freedom.
Pandhi states that the stories attempt to explore different ways of inhabiting love. Even the conversation on love “is so saturated by heterosexism and a hetero-patriarchal Brahmanical understanding that it’s hard to even get at it.” To unravel this knot requires a subversion of these norms from within. One goal of the collection was to “rethink Dalits as passionate subjects and Dalit life as capable, in a very critical fashion, of generating new ways of affiliation.”
Anchoring these reflections on love is a deeply considered anti-caste, Dalit feminism that is stitched into the fabric of every single story in the book. Pandhi defines anti-caste, Dalit feminism as “a rejection of Brahmanical norms, Brahmanical sensitivities and sensibilities around touch, around intimacy, around how desire should be performed, around this obsession with respectability politics, around expressions and economies of flesh.” Yet it is not defined by negation but by its capaciousness and creativity.
Pandhi says that he has twenty pen drives of unpublished love stories and he believes this is intrinsically connected to “Dalit feminism as a creative and critical project that is expanding outwards, that is global in its scope, that is looking at global feminisms, but is very conscious of the fact that it also represents something that has a frictious relationship with what is normative feminism in the Indian context.”
In the foreword to the anthology, writer Anita Bharti asks what keeps Dalit life intact despite the excess of violence, harm, injury and humiliation being meted out on a daily basis? Pandhi believes that Bharti’s prescient question is “urging us to think about the fact that hope or that compassion, that maitri, emerges because there is a very intimate understanding of what pain is, what pain does. And one of the things that vedana or pain does is it also potentializes chetana. It also potentializes consciousness. Consciousness is only known to someone who actually knows.”
Buy the book:
Love in the Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist anthology of love stories edited and translated by Nikhil Pandhi — https://zubaanbooks.com/shop/love-in-the-time-of-caste-a-dalit-feminist-anthology-of-love-stories/
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