27 | 2021 – Political Mobilizations of South Asians in Diaspora: Intertwining Homeland Politics and Host-Society Politics
An Interview with Prof. Meena Dhanda, a UK-Based Anti-caste Academic Activist.
INTRODUCTION
Punjab-born Meena Dhanda moved to the UK in 1987 as a Commonwealth Scholar in Philosophy at the University of Oxford. There she became a researcher specializing on caste among Punjabi youth both in the UK and Punjab (Dhanda 1993; Dhanda 2009). In 1992, she started teaching Philosophy and Cultural Politics at the University of Wolverhampton, a city with a large concentration of Punjabi-speaking people of Indian origin (2011 census). She has since published several articles on caste in the UK (Dhanda 2020, 2017, 2014) and has become one of the important voices in the debates on the prevalence of casteism in the UK. She joined the UK anti-caste movement in 2008. In 2013, she was appointed Principal Investigator [PI] of a research project on “Caste in Britain” funded by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission. She has also regularly appeared in British media, as featured in the documentary Caste Aside (Mogul 2017) and was the sole consultant for a BBC1 documentary: Hindus: Do we have a caste problem? (Qayum 2019), which has been viewed by over 1 million people.
She talked about her anti-caste activism experience in the UK with Nicolas Jaoul, a French anthropologist who has specialized on the Ambedkarite movement in India and worked on its British counterpart as well (Jaoul 2006, and in this special issue).
Nicolas Jaoul (NJ): Let me first ask you to introduce some elements of your biography and socio-cultural background and tell us under what circumstances you settled in the UK.
Meena Dhanda (MD): I grew up in Ludhiana, Indian Punjab, in a prominent business family that had seen very good days—my father travelled widely for the hosiery export business—but in the early-70s was hit by decline. My grandfather Padam Das Dhanda was the first to register a telephone in the city (with the number “only 2”) and his cousin Hans Raj Dhanda was a pioneer of Ludhiana hosiery dating back to 1932. I went to a Catholic convent English-medium school, excelled in my studies and recall growing up with a strong resolve to be an independent professional and not to follow the family tradition of marrying into another business family. I almost had contempt for businessmen, largely due to their patriarchal attitudes. The main influences for acquiring a sense of gender equality were my mother’s independent attitude attributable to her upbringing in cosmopolitan Bombay and my father’s open-mindedness due to international travel. I hated the thought that my parents may have to save for a dowry, which a businessman would have expected. So, with a view to become an independent woman, I studied the sciences in higher secondary, and Economics and Mathematics as an undergraduate and then, partly to leave Ludhiana, for my masters I chose to study Philosophy, which was not taught in my hometown. It was a financial burden for my father but he agreed to fund my postgraduate education and thus I arrived at Punjab University (PU), Chandigarh. That opened a door for me. A year and a half after joining PU, in the course of my masters’ degree (1980–82), I had a cross-caste, cross-religious marriage with a Sikh Marxist university lecturer in Economics, against the wishes of my largely Hindu family; a year later I had my daughter. My mother was a Radhasoami (of the Dayalbagh branch in UP)1 who initially objected to my marrying a meat-eating, alcohol-consuming non-Radhasoami. I was shocked when my father asked about my prospective husband’s caste. On learning he was a Jat, his retort was, “but Jats are Sudras.” But within weeks of my marriage, when their Radhasoami guru M.B. Lal gave his blessings, so did my parents, thereafter accepting my marriage unreservedly. Throughout this tumultuous period, I had become active in campus politics through a student group we helped to organize in 1980 called the Democratic Students Forum (DSF), which contested student elections and won an important post in 1980, upsetting the hegemony of established parties. DSF was broadly an independent leftist grouping. Many of us have practiced in our professional lives the values we espoused as students. As seemed to be the case in left groups at the time, we did not discuss caste, and in hindsight that was reflective of our caste privilege.2 I campaigned for the rights of women hostellers at PU. Campaigning taught me a lot about politics, but nothing about caste at that point. An eye-opener for me was the first visit in 1982 to my Jat husband’s village, where a street divided the poor landless “majhbi” (Dalit) households from Jat households, although both groups were Sikhs. My husband’s Marxism may have relaxed his interactions with the “siris” (the landless laborers contractually employed on his family farm) but the caste-based spatial distancing was starkly there. This discrepancy was disturbing for my naïve political expectation that his ideological values should have had an impact on his family’s lived relations rather more than they had done. This was the period of militancy in Punjab, followed by the horrendous anti-Sikh violence of 1984. Personally, it was a very difficult period, as a majority of my relatives on my father’s side were practicing Hindus, my mother’s side were Radhasoamis, and from my husband’s side there were Sikhs: there were endless intense arguments on the political situation amongst members of the extended family. Fear and tension were at a peak. In 1985, I passed the national exam for a UGC (University Grants Commission) Junior Research Fellowship in Philosophy and when the opportunity arose, I applied for and was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to pursue my doctoral studies (DPhil) in Philosophy at Oxford University on the subject of “The Negotiation of Personal Identity,” published a few years later. (Dhanda 2008) I wanted to eventually figure out the deficiencies of mainstream Anglo-American political philosophy (e.g. in Charles Taylor’s writings) when applied to understanding the identity of the Untouchable becoming a Dalit. That brought me to the UK in 1987, and my young family came with me.
1 The founder of the Radhasoami faith, Swami Shiv Dayal Singh, the son of a money lender born of Khat (…)
2 On student politics in South Asia, see SAMAJ’s special issue (Garalyté and Martelli 2019).
NJ: What made you interested in this issue of untouchability and the Dalit movement while still in India? Did you know about the Backward and Minority Castes Employees Federation (BAMCEF), the Dalit Soshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti (DSSSS or DS4) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which were active in Punjab?
MD: My parents were Congress voters and my husband’s family were supporters of the Shiromani Akali Dal founded in 1920, the largest Sikh political party worldwide. Whilst in India the question of Untouchability and Dalit identity was mainly theoretical for me—a puzzle in political philosophy. I did not know about BAMCEF, DS4 or BSP. My Marxist husband, who was the president of the Punjab University teachers’ union, rarely discussed caste politics. After starting my DPhil research, I began reading more about the condition of Untouchability. Barbara Joshi’s edited collection Untouchable: Voices of the Dalit Liberation Movement (Joshi 1986) was one of the first books on caste I read in the UK. I read about Ambedkar, not his own writings, which I discovered much later, though I had occasion to interact with Valerian Rodrigues who was also in Oxford at the time working on Ambedkar. My first theoretical reflections on Untouchability and the limitations of Western political philosophy in understanding it were published in a French journal article (Dhanda 1993).
SOURCE- South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal; https://journals.openedition.org/ (UNDER CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE)
