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Apartheid wall
villagers in front of the wall that separates them from the upper-caste neighbourhood. Right of way was forced open in October 2008 Sun is punishing the parched countryside along Madurai-Theni highway. Large tracts of land are left fallow. “Vanam Patha Bhumi,” says Raja, the taxi driver. This land gazes at the sky, like a hornbill yearning for rain. Farmers rely on rain to irrigate their fields despite the Vaigai dam near Andipatti.
We turn left from the highway at Usilampetti. Raja’s grandfather Mukaiah Thevar left Usilampetti and settled on the suburbs of Madurai many years ago. The family comes back once a year, for the temple festival. He is not quite sure of the place though. “This area was known for caste clashes,” Raja says as we pass Pasumpon U Muthuramalinga Thevar bus stand. “You can see Thevar statues all along this area. Most of the caste clashes happen when someone desecrates a statue,” Raja adds. Thevar was a Forward Bloc MP who became a community icon of the Thevars of Tamil Nadu.
Summer is particularly cruel in Tamil Nadu. Villagers herd their cattle with painted horns to whatever pasture they find. Lonely figures toil in the fields. Cloth cradles swing from the low branches of solitary trees. Corn-like produce is strewn on the road to dry. It is cattle feed.
Cornered
The only opening from the Dalit colony to the village. Vegetables and chilies are grown in small patches. We ask around for the way to Uthapuram.
Around 65 kilometres from Madurai is our destination. A police van parked at the entrance contrasts with the serenity of the village. The large neem tree in front of the Mutharamman temple is a welcome relief. A couple of bored cops lounge in steel chairs in front of the temple, guarded by a fort-like wall built to keep away the Dalits in the village. This wall is Uthapuram’s claim to infamy.
“I am a communist. Ask anyone about Communist Krishnan and you will find me,” the old man at the tea shop begins a political conversation. He tells us the Congress-DMK combine has an edge in this elections and the communists have lost their grip in the past few years. I ask him about CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat’s visit to this village and gets a disgusted reaction. “He is the one who made all problems here. He wanted to break that wall which was here for a long time,” Communist Krishnan turns communalist. The Thevar wouldn’t even spare Karl Marx if he tried to meddle with his caste supremacy.
The
The uplifter and the fallen
Every Dalit household has a picture of B R Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian constitution. Mahalingam was hacked to death by upper caste men in 1989. village is inhabited by Thevars, Naickars, Gounders, Pillais and Dalits, who are cornered to two settlements. We enter the larger colony through the opening near the temple. There is only one way to enter the colony, sandwiched between the wall and the fallow lands. The 20-year-old “theendamai chevaru (untouchability wall)” was built by the Pillais to cut off around 3000 Dalits from the rest of the village. It limits their access to the road to one muddy opening. The Dalits wanted a bus shelter to protect themselves from the cruel sun and the rare rain. But they were even denied the shade of the neem tree.
The apartheid wall was in news in October 2007 when the Dravida Munnetra Kazhakam administration demolished a part of it ahead of the then ally Karat’s visit. Marimuthu and Murugan lead me through slush and dung to show the liberated part. A couple of metre of the wall has been forced open to give the Dalits right of way through the Pillai settlement. Two cops are on duty here too. “We don’t use this way unless we move in a group,” says Marimuthu, who anticipates problem any moment.
The Dalits mark time
Women power
Uthapuram panchayat president V Pushpa with Mariammal, who lost her husband M Peria Karuppan in a cast clash in 1989. by a series of caste clashes - in 1962, 1989, 1991 and finally in 2008, when policemen raided the colony and took into custody all the women and children. “They beat all of us,” says V Pushpa, panchayat president of Uthapuram.
In Tamil Nadu, panchayat presidents are elected directly. Pushpa won in October 2007 when Dalits voted en block for her. But things were not easy. Panchayat council members from the Pillai colony boycotted the council meetings. When their membership was threatened, they came reluctantly, but refused to drink tea ordered by a Dalit. Her predecessor, a Dalit woman named Chinna, was even denied a seat at the council. The panchayat president had to stand through the proceedings while the upper-caste members sat on their chairs.
“When there’s trouble none of us venture to the village. I can’t go the panchayat office,” Pushpa says.
Memories are bitter. In 1989, six Dalits were killed - either by the Pillais or the police - when they tried to build a bus shelter at the opening near the temple. Post master K Periya Karuppan was coming back from a hospital in Elumalai when the violence broke out. His friends M
Castaway
A Dalit woman in front of her ramshackle mud hut Periya Karuppan and Mahalingam were hacked to death even before they got down from the bus. The post master was hacked, but a woman protected him. He lost two fingers of the right hand. He lives on with a steel rode in the right hand and stab marks all over his body.
The families of the deceased didn’t know of the deaths for two days. Most of the villagers had taken refuge in the woods fearing retribution. “We didn’t even see the bodies. They took them to the hospital and cremated them in the government crematorium,” says Mahalingam’s wife Nagamma. The hapless families are still waiting for a court to take up their pleas for compensation.
The Pillais, who lost two of them in the violence, are still adamant. When the wall was breached last year, the community went to the nearby hillock in protest. The Dalits ridicule that they were on a picnic. “We want the wall to go. It is a threat to our self-respect. We also want to relocate the drainage which contaminates our drinking water,” Mahalingam’s son Sundara Pandi says.
Vasi Malai shows me his knee branded by a bullet. He was a
Darkness
Karuppu Swami lost his son, who had just completed plus two, in the police firing. class-ten student when the police fired at him in 1989. “I was just looking at the commotion. Now I am crippled for life,” he says. He was lucky. Two others died. Karuppu Swami lost his son, who had just completed plus two. He and his wife spend their lives looking at the black/white photograph of their son in their one-room hut.
Marimuthu offers me tea from a ramshackle tea shop. The shop owner looks suspiciously at me, the outsider, and proclaims, “It’s cold.” We go to the only other tea shop in the colony. Our hostess gives me tea and vada. She started the tea shop when the other communities shooed the Dalits away from the village. “Earlier there used to be two glasses in the village tea shops, one for them and one for us. Now we no longer go there. We have everything we need here,” says Marimuthu. An elder says the two-tumbler system is still seen at nearby villages.
The Dalits admit they don’t stand united for a cause. “If at all a candidate comes here, he doesn’t mention the wall. We can’t tell him either because his partymen would stop us,” says Chinna Raja, who does graduation at a private college near Usilampatti after completing school in the village. Consequently, the offensive wall escapes the acid test of every elections.
Meanwhile, the neem tree has grown over the walls to extend its benign shade to the Dalits waiting for the bus.
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Hi Don, Your travel blog is very interesting. Please post more.