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In an opinion piece in The Hindu last year, André Béteille argued that it is organised political parties and the new televi- sion shows which harp on continuing tensions rather than on the changes that have taken place in caste relations: 'It will be a pity if we allow what goes on in the media to reinforce the consciousness of caste and to persuade us that caste is India's destiny'.4 Béteille argued that inter-caste marriages are slowly on the rise because the norms of arranging them are changing: 'what is happening is that other considerations such as those of education and income are also kept in mind in arranging a match. At any rate, it will be difficult to argue that caste consciousness in matrimonial matters has been on the rise in recent decades.' Béteille conspicuously avoids discussing marriages that are not arranged, as well as non-marital sexual or romantic liaisons. Such cases show us that precisely because caste relations are not static that caste tensions can also escalate. Violence is routinely enacted upon the bodies of dalit women and men as punishment for their supposed sexual transgressions; panchayats rule against inter-caste liaisons, and upper-caste groups complain that dalits threaten their women. These are hardly media fabrications: the truth of Justice Bhagwati's 1986 observation that 'rape is increasingly becom- ing a form of caste war' has been tragically and repeatedly demonstrated in recent years.5 Sexual and gender relations re- main a volatile arena for both challenging and enforcing caste hierarchies; equally, one could argue that caste is a crucible in which gender and sexual norms are flouted or maintained.
KANYADAAN was written three years before Justice Bhagwati made his remarks to the Maharashtra State Women's Council in 1986. It does not depict an inter-caste marriage that is pun- ished by family, society or state. On the contrary, it depicts a marriage that is accepted by Jyoti's parents, and that survives the particular obstacles that it faces. The relationship is never- theless scandalous, and it indexes precisely some of the ques- tions of caste and sexual transgression that are raised by more dramatic scenarios, in literature as well as in reality. The figure of Arun Athawale, as I will discuss, may have been shaped by Tendulkar's own very particular engagement with dalit litera- ture and activism. But that particular engagement indexes not just a local history but ongoing debates on a variety of issues including sexual violence and its connections with caste and class politics, the politics of literary representation, as well as the analogy between race and caste. In what follows, I will ex- amine this engagement and show how KANYADAAN unravels and embodies some of the most troubled aspects of the rela- tionship between caste and gender in postcolonial India.
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KANYADAAN bears little resemblance to iconic dramas of love across racial or caste boundaries - Shakespeare's Othello (1604), for example, or Stanley Kramer's Guess Who Is Coming to Dinner (1967) or The God of Small Things (1991), to take three divergent cultural and historical examples. In Kramer's film, the character of John Prentice played by Sidney Poitier is, apart from his skin colour, ideal son-in-law material; as an early review put it: 'He is a noble, rich, intelligent, handsome, ethical medical expert who serves on United Nations committees when he's not hurrying off to Africa, Asia, Switzerland and all those other places where his genius is required.'6 Othello, despite the racist remarks of some characters, is a respected and honoured general in the service of the Venetian state, and the Duke of Venice pronounces him 'more fair than black'.7
KANYADAAN's Arun is a far cry from both: he is neither up- wardly mobile like Prentice or Othello; nor is he tender, and gentle like Velutha in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Whereas the passionate love-making of the inter-caste couple in Roy's novel works to highlight the violence visited upon them, Arun never articulates love or desire for Jyoti, and erotic passion seems absent on her part as well. As opposed to Velutha's political consciousness and affiliations, Arun's anger against caste society seems to find expression only in personal taunts against his in-laws, violence against his wife, and a cynical exploitation of 'Sarvoday professors or Marxist scholars' who will lavish public praise upon his writing (p 55). Thus, KANYADAAN eschews all the ways in which these other narra- tives garner empathy for erotic transgression.
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