Inter-Caste Marriage and the Liberal Imagination Vijay Tendulkar's KANYADAAN

Marginalising Sexual Desire, Foregrounding Violence

Anupama Rao reminds us that a 'crucial but invisible conse- quence of dalit politicisation ... is that the desire for upward mobility was recast as a desire for sexual access to upper-caste women' (p 235).⁴⁸ In the context of colonial rule, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks suggests that the desire of a black man for a white woman is structured by the hierarchies of colo- nial rule, rather being than the result of his attempts at upward mobility. The desire of black woman for a white man, on the other hand, is indeed seen by Fanon as the result of such false consciousness. (There is actually a thin line between these posi- tions.) But what is important is also that Fanon was challenging colonial and racist representations of black male desire as patho- logically geared towards white women, and inevitably violent. Such representations that have a very long history, stretching back in fact to the early modern period, and Shakespeare's Othello remains one of the best-known exploration of this controversial question. Beyond inter-racial love, Fanon explores the deep scarring of black masculinity in racist societies, and in The Wretched of the Earth the forms of anti-colonial insurrection; he was therefore important to dalit writers, including Dhasal.

KANYADAAN treads this uneven ground but marginalises sexual or romantic desire, foregrounding violence and social expedi- ency.⁴⁹ After hurting her, Arun attempts to make Jyoti smile by reciting: hasli re hasli, ek Bammaneen fasli! - 'It's a jolly game! Caught a brahmin dame' (p 18). By the end of the play he flaunts the match as his political victory: 'Our ancestors trudged around with a load of shit on their heads. It's my great good fortune which made a fair and lovely bird from a well-to- do, high-class background, fall to my lot' (p 56).Seva has learnt from Arun and Jyoti's neighbours that he 'beats her, even kicks her;' she bitterly tells Nath:

the truth is that your dalit son-in-law, who can write such a wonderful
autobiography, and many lovely poems, wants to remain an idler. He
wants his wife to work. And with her money he wants to drown himself
in drink, and have hell of a time with his friends. On top of that, for enter-
tainment, he wants to kick his wife in the belly. Why not? Doesn't his
wife belong to the high caste? In this way he is returning all the kicks
aimed at generations of his ancestors by men of high caste (p 48).