Dalit to Delight
Children of a Lesser God:
- ‘Children of a Lesser God’ is a 2018 South Korean TV series – ‘The God of Small Things’ is a Booker-Prize winning novel (1997) by Arundhati Roy. The novel explores how small and seemingly insignificant things in one’s childhood shape people’s behaviour and their lives. It also explores the lingering effects of casteism in India.
- In the Bible, it is said that God created people in His Image and Likeness (Gen 1:27) – I assume He created all people in the same way; but all His created human beings are not considered to be equals. Is our theology flawed or has it succumbed to the social strata or varna, degenerating into untouchability?
- One devastating impact of casteism is feeling inferior – Either built-in in the genes due to generations of suppression, slavery, discrimination, and exploitation or it is forced onto the people.
- Dalits are considered to be non-people or entities of workforce or vote-bank. They are psychologically broken and are reduced to feeling worthless. They are reduced to the ashes of suppression and destruction of human dignity and equality.
Way to rise above Suppression:
- The key to rise, like Phoenix, out of nothingness is education. Education opens one’s mind and enriches one’s heart and empowers one’s hand – Education is a holistic formation leading to social transformation. Education helps one to surf the storm of social violence, religious side-lining, and political belittling.
- Education makes them entrepreneurs: not job seekers but job creators – This should cause ripple effect.
- Education leads to enlightenment of realizing the need to be organized in order to become a power to be reckoned with. The formula of Dr Ambedkar: ‘educate, organize, and agitate’ has become a working formula we have experienced.
- From education springs up human rights movements: This presupposes understanding, acceptance, and unity among the suppressed and broken people. When the Broken and Fragmented come together, there is beauty and unity – There, vulnerability becomes formidability.
- Kintsugi is an art of putting together broken ceramics with gold – The broken pieces are pasted together with gold lacquer. And the gold lines between the cracks give the ceramics a new aesthetic.[1] Education, especially job-oriented, empowers people at the bottom of the social pyramid. Hence, there is need to promote polytechnical, skill-based training, technical education – This gives the escape velocity from social barrier. It is not as proposed by NEP2020 promoting traditional casteism in a new light but tailor-made to the talent and capacity of the downtrodden.
- People’s movement creates the Butterfly Effect. The term the butterfly effect is associated with the popular saying, “A butterfly beating its wings in Hong Kong can unleash a storm in New York.” In other words, any change, no matter how small, ends up creating completely different circumstances due to a process of amplification.[2] We need to create the critical point and rest would boom.
Need of the Hour:
- People’s movements initiated by people like Fr Antony Raj SJ in 1989 brought in awareness to the Dalit Christians – This was bolstered by the Jesuit preferential option for the poor and the Dalits. The Jesuits in Tamilnadu, in addition to arts and science colleges, have two colleges of education and an engineering college with the policy of at least 30% admissions to the target people – Efforts are taken to appoint 50% of teachers from our option people in our schools and colleges. And every year so many Dalit students go out as graduates and some of them are doing excellently well providing leadership to their fellow Dalits.
- One other front to work on is clergy and religious circles. Clergy empowerment needs to begin with vocation promotion, accompanying the option people in the minor and major seminaries, preparing the potential leaders – This is a long term project but very essential.
- The immediate need is to identify potential leaders in local church – The prerequisite is unity and common purpose among the Dalit clergy and religious and to find common ground and base with the Dalit people of God. Our expectation and demand should not be A or B should become a bishop but Dalits should become bishops.
- The picture among the religious Congregations seems to be a little better and promising. Again, we need to work on vocation promotion and formation of leadership.
- In the process of empowering the powerless we need to promote and strengthen people’s movement. In his book A Crusade for Social Justice, P.S. Krishnan depicts two worlds of Have’s and Have-Not’s as the world of Possession, Position, and Power vs Poor, Punished, and Powerless. His idea is the poor and the marginalized should have a piece of land which gives a sense of worth. Then education would make them feel that they have something to offer to the society.
Synodal Approach:
- The people at the bottom of the social pyramid should be helped to ascend to the pinnacle of the pyramid; and people at the periphery of the society should become the center of decision making leaders.
- Effective social movements would make people feel and act that they are second to none – And they could rise up to any challenge or obstacle in the society.
- This, in the spirit of synodality, is the bottom-up renewal of the Church and society and not the corporate model of top-down model of giving direction to people.
- In this noble task we need to start with the youth who would determine the future of the society and of the world.
- The origin is: inner awakening, sharpening: through education, and fruition: in people’s movement – individual psychological enlightenment should evolve as social psychology of ‘we-can-do’ attitude.
- In the crusade of making the untouchables as unreachable in dignity and power, we need networking at local, national, and global levels.
- This is the way to transform ‘Dalit’ into ‘Delight’. It is possible and it is needed but we need to work concretely with timeline on the above mentioned strategy.
* Presentation during a meeting with Cardinal Anthony Poola at Achrapakkam
Francis P Xavier SJ
02Oct2022
[1] H. Garcia and F. Miralles, Ichigo Ichie, Quercus, London, 2019, p.99.
[2] Ibid, p.78.