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

Liberal-Nationalist Commitment

It might appear then that, although he does not recognise it, Nath breaches the liberal limits of the tradition of reform to which he and his wife Seva belong, a tradition that is made visually evident by the portraits that hang in his living room and which include Gandhi and other luminaries of the socialist tradition within the Congress Party. But Nath's actions never- theless remain circumscribed within a liberal-nationalist com- mitment to eradicating casteism. Many scholars and activists who quote Ambedkar on the necessity of inter-caste marriage do not consider his cautionary remarks that appear a little later in the same text. Liberal reformers do not realise, he writes, that

the real method of breaking up the Caste System was not to bring
about inter-caste dinners and inter-caste marriages but to destroy the
religious notions on which Caste was founded... To agitate for and to
organise inter-caste dinners and inter-caste marriages is like forced
feeding brought about by artificial means. Make every man and
woman free from the thraldom of the Shastras, cleanse their minds of
the pernicious notions founded on the Shastras, and he or she will
inter-dine and inter-marry, without your telling him or her to do so
(emphasis added).

In other words, inter-caste marriage cannot automatically destroy the ideologies of caste; rather, it should be the outcome of a shedding of caste prejudices.

Of course, Nath has not actually chosen Arun for Jyoti, nor has he forced the match. But when Seva suggests that her daughter should revisit her decision, Nath announces that 'now if Jyoti breaks her word, if she wriggles out her respon- sibilities, it would be a kind of treachery...As a father I would feel ashamed if my daughter were to run away....' (p 31). By the end of the play, he acknowledges that, through his loud en- thusiasm, his perpetual excuses for Arun's behaviour, and his repeated invocations of the political virtues of this marriage, 'I pushed my own daughter into a sea of misery' (p 61). He has done more than simply give his daughter to him; as Seva bitterly says 'You yourself were the priest' (p 36).¹⁸ In the name of reconciling his worldly politics with the politics of his home, Nath has come close to the 'force-feeding' indicted by Ambedkar.