‘A window for seeing, a window for hearing’: On translating Dalit writer Chandu Maheria’s memoir

One of my favourite poems of all time is “To a Crow” from Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems (2004), where the humble bird ponders over a roadside twig, wondering if it’ll be a perfect fit for the nest it is building. The bird’s dilemma represents all creative processes, but it also stands in for the ontological and epistemological dilemma of humanity. A dilemma about a home one dreams of, wishes to erect and inhabit, be it textual, cultural, social, national or universal. To cultures attuned to binaries, home is the self to the other of the outside. But a home, with its inheritance of chains, can also be a cage the self seeks to break free of. Thus, the struggle of a creative practitioner, including a translator, is a concomitant abjuring and conjuring of homes. I decided to translate Chandu Maheria’s Homes Without Windows because it afforded my crow the possibility of both: breaking a home and making a home, leaving a nest and weaving a nest, twig by choice twig.

The seedy architecture of caste

The memoir unearths the vibrant community life of the Dalits who had to migrate post-independence to Rajpur and Gomtipur, the working-class suburbs in east Ahmedabad, from far-flung villages in Gujarat because “there was no place for us there, just none” and because seedy chawls, mushrooming in the shadow of mill chimneys, offered them home. A home without windows, perhaps built to the dictates of caste that Dalpat Chauhan so painfully describes in his story “Home”.

Homes Without Windows is a scathing comment on the seedy architecture of the caste universe whose politics is best captured in Slavoj Žižek’s hermeneutics of toilets. Essentially a schtick, it examines the designs of French, German and Anglo-Saxon toilets to posit the ideologies and cultures of those societies. Indian society remains conspicuously absent from Žižek’s tripartite analysis, but Maheria’s memoir fills that gap. The very first essay presents a profound and multi-layered exploration of the relationship of Dalits with the material, structural reality of toilets and, more significantly, with the idea of faeces. What does a toilet, like the ones at the mouth of Hiralal’s chawl in Rajpur, or its outright, inexplicable absence in different parts of the country even today, say about the character of Indian society? What explains its absence in key human institutions like temples, churches, schools and bazars? Even in homes, for that matter. Notably, toilets in Indian households for a long time were located at the far end of the backyard, that is, away from the sanctum sanctorum of family life. The answer lies in the caste order, rooted in the mendacious metaphysics of purity and pollution, which has been the organising principle of Indian society and, as Alan Dundes shows in Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow (1997), a part of cultural memory. And the people who have borne the burden, the sheer violent brunt, of this toxic ideology are the Dalits, a people ordained to perform dirty jobs as hereditary occupations. At the height of upper caste disgust, a Dalit body, forced to negotiate human excreta, becomes one with it, something which is borne out time and again by unspeakable atrocities like the recent one in which a Dalit youth was force-fed faeces of a dog. The author brings the pathologies of this home in all its revolting starkness and shames us into dumping it.

A longing for equality

Homes Without Windows concomitantly provides us a window to a world not long bygone, a world where identities were not hard-edged or hate-fed but bloomed in the osmosis of lives. A window Forough Farrokhzad sought to “the moment of awareness and seeing and silence.” Thus, in Maheria’s world, Christians celebrated Christmas by organising Natal Garba and Hindus looked forward to sevaiya and holy prasad of Qurbani on Eid and saw teachings of Islam as a part of their moral universe. Here, in a mind-boggling twist to the hoopla of conversion, Hindus called their temples deval (church) and converted Christians insisted on asserting their Hindu identities without guilt. Perhaps, it’s this culture of intermingling that enables Maheria to accommodate Gandhi’s anti-caste campaign within Dalit politics in a luminescent essay, just as it helps him deconstruct the apparently adversarial relationship of the Marxist and Dalit struggles for subaltern emancipation. The way he subverts gender roles in the memoir, invoking the tradition of calling his father Ba (mother), for example, underlines his deep longing for a home of equality, love and friendship. His long essay on his mother Dahima is a paean of love, devotion and admiration for the life of a Dalit woman, spent in fighting odds, altruism and providing her family an anchor of dignity, self-identity and hope.

“A woman as generous as she was truthful and optimistic, Ma never tired of running around for the welfare of her family, neighbours, remote acquaintances, even random passers-by and thus, won glad, grateful hearts, almost in hundreds. Thus, my Dahima, literally a sane mother, was Ma to many.”

Dahima becomes a Cosmic Mother and Maheria prefers to be known, as he was in his Rajpur years, as Dahima no Dikaro (Sonny of a Sane Mother).

Central to Maheria’s polemic is the idea of biradari, a call to transcend the boundaries of ethnic or social identities, a hail to join forces for imagining a common future on a shared, salubrious planet. He rues the emergence of a political context in Gujarat whereby the Dalit and the Muslim residents of Baharpura in Dhoraji remain outside not just of the town but outside the imagination of developers and policymakers. When a large part of society begins to look upon such exclusion as a precondition to the onward march of history, it augurs a dangerous trend, the erection of a windowless, claustrophobic home.

Homes Without Windows is a mirror, reflecting both the self and the home it has chosen to inhabit in all their hideousness and beauty. It dreams of a home, to use Tagore’s vision for Viswa Bharati, where the whole world meets in a single nest. Translation is an intimate act of reading, but reading, if conscientiously done, can also be an act of translation, a thoroughgoing translation of the self, a self at home (with windows) in the world. In the age of slop and destruction of reason, Maheria’s memoir helped me reclaim a lost home – a Rajpur of my own – from the fog of neofascist irrationality, singularities and despair. The name of his home is “Nirant” (A place sans terror/fear). What’s yours called?