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

In one of the few detailed literary-critical engagements with the play, Aparna Dharwadker argues for the 'ultimately apolitical nature of Tendulkar's intervention' in the play; this cannot be read, she writes, 'as a topical vehicle about the politics of 'untouchability' a loaded ...but as a 'play of ideas' about the relation of the political to the personal and of the public to the private'.¹⁹ But it is impossible to divorce these two domains - the question of caste and the relation between personal and public politics. Indeed, as Ambedkar and Periyar were at pains to suggest, it is the ideologies and practices of caste that most powerfully expose the fact that the personal and political cannot be separated.²⁰ Caste is enforced, and challenged, both in the most public and most intimate of domains; it structures the separation between public and private spaces, as well as their intersections. That is precisely why Tendulkar chooses inter-caste marriage as the grounds on which to discuss this relationship.

But at the same time, this play also allows us to interrogate Tendulkar's own claim to an emotional distance from his analytical positions: 'The writer in me is more analytically than emotionally committed one way or the other. The writer in me raises inconvenient questions, instead of choosing his side and passionately claiming thereafter that it is always the right one...'²¹ Tendulkar's exploration of the relation between the public and the private, as well as those between art and politics, language and action in KANYADAAN can only be understood if we understand that the 'inconvenient questions' were provoked not by analysis alone, but by a deeply emotional engagement with caste, shaped by his inter- action with the Dalit Panthers. Tendulkar's engagement with Panther writing also allows us to understand both the possi- bilities and the limits of his depiction of caste and violence in KANYADAAN.

2

Arun is not simply a violent wife-beater; he is also a writer of some talent. Jyoti likes his poems, and upon reading parts of his autobiography, 'I felt I could do anything to make him happy...his poems and his autobiography have inspired me with complete faith in him' (p 10). She is sure of this, even though she really is not clear why she is marrying Arun; the very manner in which they get engaged establishes a pattern whereby Arun invokes his inferior status and she feels obliged to placate him. As Jyoti tells her parents,

Arun asked me, isn't the very idea of marrying me dreadful to you? I
said, what is dreadful about that? Arun said, you don't think that I am
an absolutely worthless fellow? I said, no! He said, this is incredible,
and added, in that case, let us get married. And I nodded (p 11).

Arun's finished autobiography takes the literary and politi- cal world by storm; Nath is also enchanted by it: 'Fantastic! Amazing! How many years it is since I have read anything so beautiful! ... It moves you to the core without ever becoming sentimental! ...And the language. But this is our true, living language, utterly free from the impact of English. Belongs one hundred percent to our own soil' (p 46).

While Nath appropriates Arun's language for an Indianness free of the colonial taint, dalit language can hardly be counter- posed only to English. As dalit intellectuals point out, the languages of the upper castes are at least as distant to them as English.²² Although the audience never hears any of Arun's literary language, its supposed power and beauty, along with the colourful, enraged vocabulary he does use on stage, very obviously evokes the Dalit Panthers, whose political origin in the late 1960s is inextricably bound up with literature. As is well known, Namdeo Dhasal, Arun Kamble, Arjun Dangle and others who founded Dalit Panther were all writers and poets. Marathi 'little' magazines such as Vidroh, Magova, Asmitadarsh and Aamhi, provided a forum for their writings that questioned the political and social order, and also 'challenged the literary mono- poly of high-caste Hindus ... [they] created a new language through which dalit resistance to power and oppression could become a public discourse, and established the trend for dalit politics in which virtually every dalit who could write became a poet before becoming an activist.'²³ KANYADAAN's exploration of the relation between the public and the private, between art and politics, language and action, and its depiction of dalit masculinity can only be understood in the context of Tendulkar's engagement with such literature.