It was the high priest of Hindu revivalism in the late nineteenth century, Vivekananda, who, however, in a rare outburst of critical honesty, wrote: “We are neither Vedantists, most of us now, nor Pauranics nor Tantrics. We are just ‘Don’t-touchists’… Our God is in the cooking-pot, and our religion is, ‘Don’t touch me, I am holy.’ If this goes on for another century, every one of us will be in a lunatic asylum.”
The Hindus haven’t deterred in their mission to turn the country into a lunatic asylum, but they certainly aren’t lunatics who are out of control. Rather, they are lunatics ‘in’ control of social and political life in India. The lunacy of the Hindus is a rational lunacy. The management of social rules is based upon the politics of segregation which is ruthlessly controlled by upper-caste Hindus. They have rationalized this (caste) system at two levels: an ideological principle of segregation set up by scriptural and historical validation as well as a working system of exploitative norms where this principle of segregation is put into practice in everyday life and in the social sphere. The most notable aspect of this (caste) system is how the norms laid down to define what constitutes it are derived from its exception, of what lies outside it. This is what Ambedkar tried to explain in a note to Gandhi in 1933: “The Out-caste is a by-product of the Caste system. There will be outcastes as long as there are castes. Nothing can emancipate the Out-caste except the destruction of the Caste system.” In the same vein, the norms of touch and touchability come from the limits of touch, from the exception that is deemed untouchable. Just as Ambedkar perfectly figured the inverse logic that only the abolition of the system of castes would correspondingly ensure the abolition of the figure of the outcaste, the problem of untouchability, by the same logic, can only be erased by erasing the sanctified conventions of touch in Hindu society.
Through the course of history, people have been declared untouchables owing to their proximity with dead bodies and filth of various kinds including human faeces. These were mostly occupational hazards, which were fixed as a mark of these people’s identities and they were turned into social outcasts. Hindus have the most prejudiced – apart from the more universally hierarchical – notion of occupation in history. The recent anti-reservation stir proved how meritorious Hindus have the most vulgar and debased disrespect towards ‘menial’ labour. Trainee doctors insulted the broom to flaunt the status of the stethoscope.
Labour is what labour touches. Based on that, Hindu society hierarchises labour by valuing some and devaluing other forms based on the social status of the tool of labour. Ambedkar did say that the caste system, more than only being a division of labour, is a ‘division of the labourer’. Apart from being both, it is also the stigmatised division of the tools and substance of labour. Anything that smelled bad to the Hindu became a source of paranoid repulsion. The caste system is in many ways a system around smells, where the sensation of smelling gets entwined with the idea of touching. There is also a specific story within this story regarding the killing, eating and disposal of the cow, varyingly held as sacrilegious across time by upper-caste Hindus. The sanctification of the cow has marked the mindset of the Hindu. Hindus are holy cows and cows are holy Hindus and there is an invisible umbilical cord between them. But the disposal of dead cattle has been considered as dirty a job as the disposal of human faeces. When it comes to repellent smells, the Hindus treat the sacred and the profane – holy cow and unholy shit – with equal disdain.
People who deal with substances giving off bad smells mark their own untouchability. The Hindu’s other is an olfactory other, where notions of smell colour the idea of touch. Aristotle, in his elaboration of aesthesis in ‘De Anima’ (On the Soul), considered touch as primordial, animalistic and therefore the basest among human faculties. The Hindus, in contrast, turned touch into something sacred, but only in terms of prohibition: most things were not about touch but about ‘not touching’. To touch or not to touch: that has been the central predicament in the lives of Hindus throughout history.
“There is one puzzle left about the Hindu. In his world of ‘active’ untouchability, how does his body survive the restrictions imposed on itself, its daily rituals of don’t-touch-this and don’t-touch-that, of don’t-touch-him-and-her, of don’t-touch-now-or-never? How does a Hindu in his asylum of don’t-touchism survive the lunacy of his self-proclaimed holiness?”
Aristotle, relegating touch to the lower order of human perception, however, grants the discriminatory power of touch as marking off the superior intelligence of human beings in comparison to animals, and something enhancing aesthetic potential. A keen sense of smell, in the Aristotelian understanding, adds to this discriminatory/aesthetic power of touch in human beings. There is a tacit assumption in Aristotle to align the sensuous notion of touch and smell with the familiar and the discriminatory notion with the unfamiliar. Human beings have shown a far greater capacity for adapting to and welcoming unfamiliar smells, and making unfamiliar objects touchable, than Aristotle could imagine. From Ambedkar’s perspective, the Hindus, however, display a sense of discrimination worse than Aristotle’s conservative theory. Because, apart from the general examples of untouchability – both “physical” and “notional” in form – that are common to all societies of old, the Hindus practise another, unique brand of untouchability. Ambedkar calls it “hereditary Untouchability”. This permanent classificatory system of untouchability segregates a staggering number of people within the Hindu social space. Ambedkar identifies what he rightly calls a “terrifying list” of 429 communities which come under the untouchability scanner. It is the most bizarre taxonomy of human beings segregated according to their occupation. Tagore, in his essay on nationalism, admitted (a bit too politely) to Hindus “setting up the boundary walls too rigidly” and “perpetuating the results of inferiority” in their “classifications”.
The untouchables, as Ambedkar explained, are not merely the impure who are kept away during ceremonial occasions. Untouchables pollute everything at all times. It is one of the most defining moments of Hindu law. Sundar Sarukkai, in his perceptive essay ‘Phenomenology of Untouchability’, makes two important observations in this regard. Citing the book On ‘Touching Jean-Luc Nancy’, Sarukkai discusses Derrida’s equation between untouchability and law. Derrida brings in the notion of “tact” as the first notion of the law. Tact, for Derrida, creates a paradox about touch, being a notion of “touch without touching”. So tact introduces a respect for the law that, in turn, forces two people to be tactful about touching each other. Sarukkai finds the problem of untouchability in India lying beyond this situation of tactful touchability. The untouchable is not an autonomous subject of touch, being relegated outside the territory of touching. Also, Sarukkai observes, “the impulse against touching is situated within the ‘object’, the untouchable”.
So if the body of the Brahmin is the body and the source of law, the body of the untouchable is the body of the subject of law. Again, paradoxically, it is the Brahmin’s body which is rendered untouchable by law, while the untouchable’s body holds the only promise of touch, denied by the body of law. In other words, it is only by annihilating its promise of touch that the untouchable subject is forced to fulfil its pact with the law. In the case of untouchability, the law draws the limits of its judgement in advance. This pre-judicial judgement in the case of untouchability puts this abominable system of beliefs and practices into the sphere of prejudice. It reconfirms Ambedkar’s bewilderment regarding the unique feature of what he called “hereditary Untouchability”: something that we find born of prejudice, to sanction a pre-legal law.
It however allows the problem of touch to remain. The denial of touch is as haunting as the desire for touch. In the context of purity, of maintaining the pure body, the element of touch works in insidious ways. What is a pure body of touch? A pure body is one that does not touch itself as much as it remains untouched by others. This predicament of losing touch with oneself is what Sarukkai calls “the potential untouchability . . . of one-self”. If touch is the sphere of the impure, then the pure sphere of untouchability is a sphere of annulled potentiality. By ‘untouchabilising’ others, the Hindu turns himself untouchable.
Aishwary Kumar, in his essay, ‘The Ellipsis of Touch: Gandhi’s Unequals’, quotes Gandhi who is trying to distinguish between the general principles of impurity and hereditary untouchability: “Every time my mother handled unclean things she became untouchable for the time being and had to cleanse herself by bathing . . . I refuse to believe that anyone can be regarded untouchable by reason of his or her birth, and such untouchability as recognised by religion is by its very nature transitory – easily removable and referable to the deed and not the doer.” By leaving a justifiable space for what Kumar calls “transitory and necessary untouchability” in relation to ceremonial and other everyday practices, Gandhi leaves intact the Hindu culture of paranoid excesses regarding touch. But Kumar quotes Gandhi again in the essay which throws up a further complication in Gandhi’s stand against hereditary untouchability: “Does untouchability in the case of a cobbler or scavenger attach to birth or occupation? If it attaches to birth, it is hideous and must be rooted out; but if it attaches to occupation it may be sanitary rule of great importance. It is of universal application . . . the scavenger’s children may remain scavengers without being or feeling degraded and they will be no more considered untouchables than Brahmins. The fault does not therefore lie in recognizing the law of hereditary transmission of qualities from generation to generation, but it lies with the faulty conception of inequality.” It is interesting to note two immediate things: one, Gandhi holds sanitary rules as a permanent feature across time; two, without making an issue out of the law of heredity, Gandhi, instead, deflects the matter onto a universal question: the moral principle of equality. Kumar reads Gandhi’s conception of inequality as one where there is a lack in the spirit of acknowledging each other’s skills, and his idea of equality being the production and dissemination of knowledge across vocations. But, as Kumar goes on to argue, the Gandhian satyagrahi practised an “sacrosanct and ironic untouchability” where the untouchable, in the capacity of being ‘superiorly’ unequal, merely became “the sacred message of one satyagrahi to another” without being able to intervene in that creative circuit of Satyagraha. In other words, the ‘Harijan’ became a separate and separated passive register vis-à-vis the active agent of passive resistance. Even though Gandhi brings the untouchable and the satyagrahi within the sphere of touchability, the untouchable ends up being, in Kumar’s sharp observation, “the exemplary hostage and unequal witness to satyagraha”.
The disciplinary field of fostering equality spoils the act of Satyagraha and its politics of suffering by turning it into an act of moral necessity. This pushes the idea of agency in one direction, where only the privileged facilitate the grounds of equality. The untouchables remain spectators to such a theatre of sacrifice. It immediately connects with Manu’s role in Gandhi’s practice of ‘brahmacharya‘. Gandhi made Manu read out her diary jottings to him every night and constantly edited them. The diary is absolutely silent on any detail of the “experiment” of ‘brahmacharya‘. Manu notes in her diary, while in Noakhali during the riots of 1946, when the practice of brahmacharya had begun, that “any loose talk on the experiment is most condemnable”. Manu wasn’t authorised to freely tell her own story about the experiment. Gandhi authored her text. This secret episode of touch – or of touch without touching – between Manu and Gandhi now lies erased. It was also this “tact” between them, holding a respect for the law, which defines Gandhi’s attitude to the Harijan. But in both cases, it creates different rules for different agents – one for Gandhi and the satyagrahi and another for Manu and the Harijan. To redraw the connection between Manu and the untouchables: Gandhi’s paternalistic attitude towards the Harijan also sought the legitimacy to speak on his behalf. Ambedkar realised that the muted figure of the Harijan could speak for himself only as Dalit, an identity a Dalit could name and claim for himself. It was a symbolic and historical gesture of the untouchable figure naming itself in order to participate as an active agent in a possible, touchable future.
There is one puzzle left about the Hindu. In his world of ‘active’ untouchability, how does his body survive the restrictions imposed on itself, its daily rituals of don’t-touch-this and don’t-touch-that, of don’t-touch-him-and-her, of don’t-touch-now-or-never? How does a Hindu in his asylum of don’t-touchism survive the lunacy of his self-proclaimed holiness? The answer lies in how Hindus, in their denial of the body, and their bizarre division of bodies into pure and impure ones, derive the norm of this denial by declaring its exception: the shadow. It is not merely the body of the untouchable that cannot be touched – it is also the untouchable’s shadow. This shadowy world of bodies is one where the disembodied shadow has a body and the body is a disembodied shadow of itself. A shadow is where ‘light does not fall’. But since the empty shadow has the shape of the body, the attributes of the body are extended to the shadow. This is a hallucinatory perception of a double-bind where bodies are shadows and shadows, bodies. Hindus live in the shadow of a touch, feeling touched by shadows. Everyone lives inside Plato’s allegorical cave of flitting shadows. Such a primitive condition prevents the quasi-Aristotelian subject, discriminating through touch, from getting out of the Platonic parable of ignorance. The Hindus pray to the sun every morning, but the sunlight hasn’t released the dark hubris hiding in their bodies. The Hindu body is a slave to the hallucinatory ‘moksha‘ of his soul.
