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Foul-mouthed and Indecent
Arun flaunts his foul language, explaining his behaviour as conditioned by his difference from upper-caste society. He tells Jyoti:
Our tongues always tasting the flesh of dead animals, and with relish!
Surely we can't fit into your unwrinkled Tinopal world. How can there
be any give and take between our ways and your fragrant, ghee
spread, wheat bread culture? ... At times a fire blazes ---I want to set
fire to the whole world, strangle throats, rape and kill. Drink up the
blood of the beasts, your high caste society (pp 17-18).
He taunts Jyoti with being unable to deal with the hardships of his world; when she replies that she is 'not one of those deli- cate touch-me-not creatures. I belong to the Seva Dal tradition'. Arun's response is to twist her arm until she cries out in pain.8
This is an early hint of violent behaviour that escalates after their marriage. When Seva, Jyoti's mother, asks how they will manage financially, he deliberately shocks her by announcing that he and his wife will 'be brewing illicit liquor ... It's a first class profession for two persons. The man bribes the police and the wife serves the customers. People call her aunty. The more striking the aunty's looks, the brisker the trade...' (p 21) Thus Arun seems to combine various stereotypes of dalit masculinity as they have developed since colonial times - wounded, vulnerable, threatening, and sexually bestial.9
Central to the play's dynamic is Jyoti's father Nath, who, unlike parents in the other texts I have mentioned, is thrilled with the match. Indeed he insists on it despite all the warning signs of disaster. Therefore, technically, there is no conflict between Jyoti's filial and marital loyalties.10 In patriarchal societies, as Claude Levi-Strauss pointed out, women function as 'gifts' from father to husband and seal the bond between men; the passage of the bride from father to the husband seals the alliance between their families and maintains the status quo. The personal desires of bride and groom are redundant to the logic of such alliances.11 KANYADAAN, the brahminic ritual codified by the lawgiver Manu, was explicitly designed to maintain caste endogamy and conforms to such logic.12 The ideal of same-caste marriage was, in practice, often violated; brahma ideologues, as Uma Chakravarti explains, sought to contain such violations by rationalising them. Manu's theory of 'varnasanskara' allowed for the possibility of a higher-caste man taking a wife from a lower caste, as long as she was not his first wife (therefore the line of patriarchal descent could be kept relatively 'pure'). Such a union, or 'anuloma', was regarded as part of the natural order of things, but the reverse, the union of a high-caste woman with a lower-caste man, described as 'pratiloma' was banned, regarded as unnatural, and understood to result in the 'true confusion of castes'.13 Today, pratiloma unions continue to be evoked by Hindu supremacists as the ultimate nightmare, in language identical with that of white racism with respect to miscegenation between white women and black men.14 Thus, for the father of the bride to extol the desirability of such a match, one that can never seal an alli- ance between the two families and preserve caste distinc- tions, but on the contrary ruptures social hierarchies, is per- haps the ultimate subversion of the tradition of KANYADAAN.
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