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

Really a KANYADAAN

Does KANYADAAN offer a simply functional reading of Arun's violence along the lines that Geetha criticises, suggesting that it is a simple result of his social positioning as a dalit? Or does it pathologise 'Dalit masculinity' in the manner that Ramdas indicts? Literature has the potential to break out of a stultifying binary between these two positions by showing that patriarchal attitudes have enormous influence upon men whose masculinity is always questioned in mainstream society. Violence is inevitable in caste society only to the extent that dominant ideologies of sexuality and caste, working together, shape the attitudes of men across caste divides, although not identically. To show such shaping is not necessarily to embrace stereotypes or suggest that sexist violence is inevitable among dalit men. Jyoti's pre- dicament reminds us of the interlacing of upper caste and dalit masculinities, and how both together construct and limit what she, as a woman, can do.⁵⁴ In that sense, the marriage is really a KANYADAAN, in which female desire is necessarily absent.

But that is exactly what also marks the problem for the depiction of both dalit and female subjectivity in the play. Jyoti cannot imagine her relationship with Arun as anything other than a relation of suffering on her part. In the tradition of drawing parallels between dalit and African-American lives, Ramdas then turns to the lyrics of Billie Holliday's 'Fine and Mellow' to indicate a more nuanced reality: 'My man don't love me/Treats me oh so mean/He's the, lowest man/That I've ever seen/He beats me, too/What can I do/But when he starts in to love me/He's so fine and mellow/My man...' But Holli- day's song does more than simply indicate the possible coexist- ence of love and violence. Ramdas does not quote the rest of the Billie Holliday song where the speaker makes no promises to stay: 'Love will make you do things/That you know is wrong/But if you treat me right baby/I'll stay home everyday./ But you're so mean to me baby/I know you're gonna drive me away/Love is just like the faucet/It turns off and on.' In other words, Holliday's lyrics promise no fidelity in the face of pain.

Despite this, Holliday's song still reminds us that love and violence, tenderness and anger can be intermeshed; although the context of the song and of Ramdas' remarks is not inter-racial or inter-caste coupling, it throws into relief the absence of any affective and sexual ties between Arun and Jyoti. It is this lack that binds the play into a stalemate. The desire of the high-born woman for the low-born man has the potential to counter ide- ologies of the supposed bestiality of latter.⁵⁵ The transgressive potential of inter-caste desire has been dismissed by Aijaz Ahmad as merely utopian and romantic in an essay on The God of Small Things.⁵⁶ Such a reading is hardly sustainable given the brutality and pain, death, and dismemberment that are the result of Ammu and Velutha's affair. But it is true that the non-linear structure of the novel brilliantly reverses the actual timeline of events, pushing the painful result into a past, while keeping alive the promise and hope articulated in the moment of desire: the last word of the novel is 'tomorrow'. But surely, to affirm the ways in which desire can be radical, even if only momentarily, is not to romanticise it. Or perhaps we should go even further and ask whether romance, in the sense of a certain utopianism, is not a necessary feature of any radical endeavour. Without it, we can get only flattened narratives of duty and sacrifice.