Anu Ramdas
IJDTSA Vol.1, Special Issue: Voices and Silences, No.1 pp.1 to 7, 2013-2014

Mayawati or Hatsheput: Her Place Has to be Shown

Published On: Wednesday, September 20, 2017

The Context

A handbag. A false beard. Two seemingly innocuous objects which transform into fearsome symbols, when they adorn the statues of Mayawati and Hatshepsut respectively. These women statues have unleashed unprecedented amounts of societal outrage. Is the cause for outrage the engravings themselves, or the depicted demeanor, or is it the act of consecrating one’s own statue? The answer would be all three reasons and more. The intensity of the backlash alludes to the kind of transgressive power that Mayawati and Hatshepsut have come to signify.

Several centuries separate these- Mayawati and Hatshepsut. One has an oppressed heritage, the other was a royal. Both aspired for, obtained and commanded power in the political arena and both stood in opposition to known ways of handling political power. Compelling parallels can be traced in the stories of their power management, the most obvious one is that they went on to mark their uniqueness in stone, for posterity. To focus on any one aspect of their lives would be a dishonour to these two remarkable women. Here, I am contexting the reaction to their statues for a precise purpose, that is, to illustrate two forms of oppression: patriarchy and caste, and how they function in relation to woman power. Hatshepsut is among other things, a historical marker for rupturing patriarchal supremacy, and likewise Mayawati is a contemporary marker for cracking open the mantle of caste supremacy.

Caste is a tightly woven mesh of many oppressions, including that of gender. Caste as a complex system of oppressive powers has its origin and practice located exclusively in South Asia, and it can rarely be illuminated effectively with idioms and metaphors from elsewhere. To understand how oppression operates and to contest it, the anti-caste discourse draws widely from the articulation of marginalized communities from all over the world. But it aims to look for meanings, definitions and examples from within the caste universe. Though separated by time, space and cultures, I still chose Hatshepsut because the sub-context here is iconography as a memory-making device for women’s history, and in this regard the parallel between these two women is obvious. As John Berger, the art critic said;

“It’s as though across time, images, I mean it sounds strange to say it, but images recognize each other. Or pay tribute to each other”.

I am a science researcher and my profession shelters my introverted nature. It suits the majority of scientists to not be visible as persons and allow only their work to speak. Does this mean I am limited in my appreciation of career choices that place women squarely in the public sphere and the demands thereof? Unlike science, low visibility is not part of the reward system for politicians. I am impressed that they work and deliver under high visibility; I am also curiously fascinated that they are also the chief arbiters of long term memory-making expenditure. In other words, the power to execute secular iconography (including that of science) is part of their profession’s power perks; they may ignore this aspect or dedicate energy to it.


(Ambedkar Memorial Park, Lucknow)

The architectural palettes of Hatshepsut and Mayawati were vast, in the latter’s case they include hospitals, memorials, highways, sports complexes, rural infrastructure and city enhancements but the elites direct their ire mainly towards the personal statues. This in turn points towards other structures; caste and patriarchy. That power should never have been in the possession of these two women can be grasped from the huge amounts of anxiety their statues produced, documented as furious words and destructive actions. The idea here is not to simply connect these two women leader’s personalities, or study the way they governed, but to examine what they both famously inspired –revulsion, mammoth anger, the collective fear and outrage of the powers they had displaced briefly, in their respective societies.

This takes us squarely to our understanding of iconography as a means of perpetuating old orders. Representation of women as markers of power, as agents of change or as knowledge producers is rarely encountered in the iconography of patriarchal societies. Do we wonder about this? How many women have challenged this primary means of long term memory-making in human history? Or should we say memory-making processes in patriarchal history!

Did other queens rule as kings before Hatshepsut? Her reign is not just a historical aberration- a sudden interruption in the succession of male Pharaohs, but it is a record of what that change could imply at the political level for the history of patriarchy. Because her rule did not simply follow the blueprint laid out by her male predecessors but sharply deviated from it. Her vision was not war and occupation, but trade and prosperity, and her legacy, societal peace and architectural magnificence. Legend goes that she effortlessly defanged patriarchy’s chief political machinery, the military. Restlessness of the elites automatically followed. Hatshepsut thus was an agent of change who deserved hatred from them, potent enough to warrant her disappearance from the evidential records of history.


(Deir el Bahri, Egypt)

Long after her reign, her story was pieced together from statues, images and inscriptions. All of them disfigured to some extent by her male successors.

Egyptian female king, Hatshepsut, died, images and inscriptions which recognized her as a king were defaced or destroyed. This began the long process of forgetting that Egypt had had a woman who ruled as a king. Female images of Hatsheput were also destroyed especially if they were connected with her power or title as king.

Yet she lives on, her memory tantalizes us with alternate possibilities of how societies may be governed under female leadership, under truly radical women leaders.

A note in the Metropolitan Museum of Art describes Hatshepsut’s statues thus:

“In her temple at Deir el-Bahri there were at least ten over-life-sized kneeling statues of Hatshepsut.”

Does one imagine that someone else built it for her, after her death? They were built during her reign. This ought to gently wake up the critics of Mayawati’s statues, and there are many learned ones -historians, feminists, opinion makers of all hues who go to town about her megalomaniac acts in stone. They have very public and frantic spiritual convulsions exclaiming ‘how can you build your own statues during your own lifetime?’ They all seem to be in a deep slumber about radical women’s histories elsewhere.

Criticism of Mayawati’s ‘blasphemous’ act of consecrating her own statues as a part of the pantheon of Dalit icons, always attempts to separate it from the singular power she alone wielded to halt one of the world’s biggest invisibilising projects- erasure of the evidence of anti-caste struggles. I must emphasize again, she alone commanded the power to give the world the iconography of the centuries old anti-caste movements. Can one imagine America without the positive iconography of the civil rights movement and its leaders? The anti-caste movement has been fighting a much older battle for human and civil rights of adivasis and dalitbhaujan for so many centuries now. It is imperative for the dominant caste elites to keep this completely hidden; the force of their need to retain the caste order far outweighs all the oppressive power of white America’s racism. Now, Mayawati’s architectural investments have blown the cover for good. A simple logic visually unfolds itself to the world; to acknowledge the anti-caste movements and its leaders is to acknowledge caste. To vilify the person who took up this massive corrective to historical misrepresentation is but natural. Those monuments, those statues are not just the heritage of the anti-caste movements, but they are in fact an exposition of India’s moral, political and spiritual pretensions of being a democratic, secular nation with a glorious past. It sculpts for the world– caste. It delineates in tangible form the caste history of India. When the struggle against caste is cast in stone, caste can no longer be a vaguely explained abstraction to be restricted to little academic books and exclusive conferences. Caste is now on the physical landscape, forcing national and international conversations about how India functions as a society. It informs one and all that the basic element of human interaction of people in the subcontinent is the complete and abiding faith in the inequality of humans. Racism is a term that is extremely inadequate to describe this form of human behavior.

The budget for the monuments in Uttar Pradesh went through the usual procedures of obtaining approval from the cabinet. If people in U.P thought it was an outrageous, unwarranted expense it could have triggered mass protests on the streets, it was not a project that happened in a clandestine manner, it was out there for public scrutiny at all stages. Dalit intellectuals and writers have ripped apart the false concern about misuse of public money– they simply want to know who foots the bill for all the iconography of the political leaders and movements of the dominant castes? The basic fact is that the BSP’s monument building projects could have been stopped at any time, if it had violated any known law.

So who is outraged? The brahmanical elites with access to TV studios and mainstream media. The same ones who are gleeful about public money being squandered on ephemeral mega shows like the commonwealth games.

Then what is their outrage about? Is it directed against gender or is it against caste?

How much of this overlaps with the outrage meted out to Hatshepsut’s reign and statues and how much of it overlaps with the need to continue the invisiblizing of the anti-caste struggles? What does it tell us about how caste, patriarchy and class operate?

The outcry from the elites is to hanker after Mayawati’s statues like it is a single mutation that needs quick elimination to restore us back to a world of infinitely powerless dalit men and women.

They seem to say: She is a dalit woman, she ought to reveal and bear the burden of the material deprivation of the most disempowered person, at all times, even if the ‘miracle of democracy’ elected her as the chief minister of a state as big as a country like Brazil. Her place has to be shown.

The ‘war of words’ of the elite in the media is typical of the method by which brahmanism or caste is kept alive and functional from the very top of the caste order. They will not wield the sledgehammers themselves. Vandalism will surely happen in the not too distant future. This will be followed by theorization from the same elite’s brethren in the academia about lower castes vs. dalits which results in the destruction of anti-caste monuments in U.P.

This outrage is not only the moral high-ground occupied by the elites but is in fact the fearful acknowledgment that not so often in human history do we come across a woman with the power to command the engraving of her own image in stone, which has the approval of an elected government. Here is a dalit woman who did just that. Unlike most of the female statues scattered around the world, from past to present times, neither are her statues tailored to the male gaze nor are they signposts of male benevolence, these represent her sense of history and were built to her own specifications. So there! Go on, bring in the sledgehammers.

But just pause to think about what it is that one would like to deface and destroy, the woman or her caste?

Her roofless abode gives her a clear view of the fields and the village she guards over. She is my paternal family’s deity, revered as a force of nature as are the scores of female gods of the Shudra, Atishudra and Adivasi cultures. Her free spirited nature echoes the attitude of another goddess in Siddalingaiah’s narrative of village deities: one who refuses a temple with a door, saying, ‘I would like to go and come as I please.’ Within the timeless non-brahamincal world, female iconography is rendered in ways whereby it is ‘her gaze’ which is anxiously worried over, as it could mean, protection, forgiveness and peace.

From the 10th and 11th centuries AD onwards, with the onset of large scale temple building activities, female iconography begins to appear on temple panels. Here the female form is rendered through the brahmanical male gaze, though the imagery itself is not inspired by brahmin women. From Multan to Somnath, from Konark to Hoysala to Thanjavur temples, all of them bear sculptures that have been inspired by the temple-women, drawn almost exclusively from the shudra and atishudra castes. These visuals radiate the highly disciplined intellect and body literacy of these subjugated, ancestral dalitbahujan women. Throughout the ages, the collectives of temple-women were known to be rigorous knowledge producers, surpassing the productivity of the best universities, bequeathing to the subcontinent, civilization-sustaining bodies of knowledge. Yet, for us, the images are life size portrayals of women manacled by caste and patriarchy. Contemporary dalitbahujan women are often ambiguous about celebrating these images as immortal style icons of amazing grace and ability. This visual history highlights an ancient struggle in progress– against caste, the father of all hegemonies.

Memory determines who we are and how we see the world. Our memory holds a vast cache of superimposed visuals from the primeval to the immediate. When I pause on the images of Mayawati’s statues, I read an aura of liberation stemming from anti-caste and anti-patriarchal assertions. How can I not celebrate this moment in our visual history that has been self-represented?

While Hatshepsut’s defaced statutes reveals the story of woman power and patriarchal fears, the verbal defacing of Mayawati’s statues exists in a more complicated matrix of violence. Because hers is a story of anti-caste and female assertions colliding forcefully with ancient caste anxieties and patriarchal fears.

Media’s bared fangs

Since the political rise of Mayawati, much before the statues became a topic, the mainstream media, as an eager patriarchal and upper caste participant has provided us an interesting opportunity to witness, document and analyze the intersection of caste and gender biases, displayed in carnival mode. Language as a register of violence is a good place to decode the oppressor’s complex of fears and anxieties, especially if it is coming from elite sources. Ratna Mala in her article, Ambedkar and Media, gives us snapshots of how this process unfolds so as to intimidate an assertive marginalized community by demonizing their radical leaders.

The volume of material that has accumulated on a single dalit woman, Mayawati, is now a sizable archive for anti-caste scholars wishing to study language as a register of caste and gender violence.

The consistent caricaturing of Mayawati in the media is often received as caste stereotyping, it is rarely perceived and objected to as gender stereotyping as well. The message: The verbal humiliation of this woman leader is meant only for her and the dalits. No offense is meant to other Indian women by this blatant denigration. Otherwise, there would have been loud objections from women or feminist organizations, right?

At any point in time, Mayawati does not enter the public consciousness as a powerless person, which confounds the elite’s perception of an orderly caste world. She even denies the liberal caste hindus their pretentious role as occasional patrons of caste victims. Hence they launch into attack mode, openly brandishing their caste and gender prejudices. But here too, Mayawati does the unexpected, she neither recognizes their warring platforms nor accords them the status of worthy opponents. So we get a grotesque display of a one way media aggression against an unavailable Mayawati.

Patriarchy has No Gender – bell hooks

Mayawati’s appearance, her choice of clothing, her marital status, her not being a mother — essentially every social construct about the feminine has been used to diminish her personhood. These gender insults are dished out by men and women with claims of being liberal, modern, educated, intellectual, feminist and whathaveyou. How do they do it? How do they manage to not self-censor themselves from disrespecting a woman from such public platforms as TV studios and news columns? They are unfettered by modern norms, Mayawati’s identity as a woman does not present an obstacle to their exhibition of patriarchal incivility. Though the disrespectful language targets her gender, there are no consequences, no call for decorum, no demand for the respect due to a citizen who is a woman. Their caste allows them the freedom to reveal and revel in, in full public view, their natural barbaric state of misogynistic patriarchy.

Other than Mayawati there are at least 4-5 women currently occupying the public sphere as powerful politicians. None of them are subjected to any kind of verbal humiliation that would denigrate their person. They all belong to upper castes.

This differential treatment of women politicians by the Indian elite in TV studios, press rooms and academia is then clearly focused on Mayawati’s caste identity.

We could easily conclude, caste supersedes gender when the object of disrespect is a dalit woman. But not all dalit women elicit such a reaction from them. Ritualized caste violence on dalit women rarely makes it as a deadly serious topic of discussion in the media. On the rare occasion it does, these civilized folks in the media will never verbally humiliate a dalit woman victim of such atrocities. None of them will be caught dead denigrating her in public. Here it would appear like their reactions nervously acknowledge both caste and gender. Thanks to the anti-caste movements including the creation of the SC/ST POA Act.

Let’s order the above upper caste reactions and see what pattern emerges:

Caste and gender are both packed into respectful gear when the object of conversation is an upper caste woman in power.

Caste and gender are nervously acknowledged when the conversation is about a dalit woman victim.

Caste displaces gender when the conversation is about Mayawati, a powerful dalit woman.

What underscores these startling switches?

Power. Power that should never have been in the hands of a woman from an untouchable caste.

Consequently, it is the fear of power, fear of the dalit-woman-with-power that pretty much motivates the upper caste narratives on all things Mayawati.

Anti-caste feminism

When the dalit community reacts to the disrespect of a woman leader, they are usually reacting to the caste offense but not so categorically against the tightly associated gender offense. Here is the cue for the anti-caste movements to work out new (and fine tune existing) mechanisms to counter the fluidity of caste plus gender discrimination.

It has to be noted here, along with upper caste men, women writers, academics, politicians and media women participate enthusiastically in this continuous caste and gender demonization of a dalit woman leader. The ease with which they use offensive language while introducing, mediating or discussing topics related to Mayawati, informs the world that there is not even a pretense of sisterhood with dalit women (outside of victim status). This indicates one of the two possibilities: illiteracy about women’s rights, or the superficial adaptation of feminist stands. Literacy in feminism has not imparted any critical ability to sensitize, address and rectify caste plus gender oppression that plagues the majority of women in the subcontinent. At least it does not seem to have any effect on the evidently college and university educated women who hold forth on Mayawati in the media.

Women of non-dominant castes have little to benefit from superficial, and borrowed feminist assertions, as gender crimes and discrimination against us are rarely a function of gender alone. It invariably co-sediments with caste, and caste as dalitbahujan intellectuals have repeatedly explained, is a concentrate of several oppressive factors. That we exist in a caste ecosystem and it is the interconnectedness of oppressions which needs engagement seems not to register in the feminist discourse, if there is one at all.

Anti-caste assertions have traditionally approached caste as an interjunction of gender, religious, class and spatial oppressions, therefore it is well placed to reinforce gender rights and protections. Feminism that is rooted in the anti-caste philosophy has to work more vigorously towards ensuring safe, dignified and respectful space for women of non-dominant castes.

Resistance to empowerment

Media’s one sided assault on Mayawati, the person, peels open for us, the layers that camouflage the structural connections to ritualized as well as everyday violence of caste and gender on dalit women, occuring throughout caste society. To mistake this media aggression as a story in a vacuum, is flawed reasoning. To imagine that this verbal violence is disconnected from the physical violence on Krishnaveni and other dalit women political leaders at the Panchayat level, is fragmented reasoning. To distance this demonization of one dalit woman from the boycott of dalit women cooks and dalit women anganwadi workers by upper caste school children, all over the country, is to miss seeing the nervous system that sustains the whole body of caste. From TV studios to school kitchens, the violent response is towards the process of empowerment of dalit women.

Therefore when the verbal violence against a powerful dalit woman like Mayawati, by the brahmanical elites, goes unchallenged, it means we are opting to be indifferent spectators to the entire process of caste and gender violence against all dalit women associated with any or the smallest signs of empowerment. And more significantly, we’ll lose an opportunity to analyze the caste and patriarchal biases in our society which connects the brahamincal elites in cosmopolitan cities to the upper caste village goons.

Contexting Mayawati for ourselves

The dalitbahujan internal critique of Mayawati as a political leader has always been far more stringent and powerful than anything the non-dalitbahujan can come up with. But this may not be disseminating as easily as the crass mainstream criticism. In this confusing haze of introspection within dalit movements and abuse from the upper caste elites, let it not be said, women like me failed to transmit effectively the struggles of contemporary dalitbahujan women leaders. Let it not be said, that we allowed only the dominant castes’ verbal and real sledgehammers to be heard. Let it also not be said, that we allowed introspection to slip into self-criticism, meaning trying to make ourselves more acceptable to others, that we participated in the erasure of the very real affirmations of Mayawati as an able politician.

In her profession, Mayawati is unmatched– as an administrator, in her calm capacity to wield power, to enforce law, to maintain peace, to ensure development, and in her deep commitment to change the course of a 3,000 year old river of oppression. A river so loaded with ancient detritus, gushing forth with the massive force of collective upper caste greed, which forever leaves the dreams of the untouchables, and other marginalized gasping for air, to survive.

If Hateshepsut replaced military conquests with trade, Mayawati upturned the way development proceeds. She took the bottom up route, an approach few political leaders have had the courage to take. It is not the statues and monuments which make her a dalit leader, it is not even the first ever paved roads, drains and concrete houses in the Ambedkar villages in UP, or the numerous empowering schemes for girls and women under her leadership, rather it is her phenomenally consistent ability to place the most oppressed human, the dalit, in the center of her politics, never ever budging to the dominant castes’ colossal pressure tactics.

This political leader who is a woman and a dalit has our respect for what she has achieved so far, and also bears the burden of our expectations of her to emerge as a historic marker for peace, progress and dignity. She, changed the way we dream. Not as individual battles won, but with wins on a scale that only power at the helm of affairs can do.

As Kuffir said, following the 2012 UP election results, ‘There’s no way Mayawati is going to lose, and I mean that in too many ways, even if she gets lesser seats. She has already won visibility through a self-respect programme that people will always remember and use that as a benchmark to measure other parties.’

Across time, images do pay tribute to each other, my tribute is only in words: Mayawati, the anti-caste leader.

References

Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. U.K: Penguin publication.

Hooks, B. (2010). Teaching critical thinking. New York: Routledge Publication.

Kersenboom, S.C. (1987). Nityasumangali: devadasi tradition in south India. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass publishers private limited.

Jain, S. (2003). Encyclopedia of Indian women through the ages, the medieval ages. Delhi: kalpaz Publication.

Ratnamala, V. (2012). Ambedkar And Media. Countercurrent.ORG. Available from

http://www.countercurrents.org/mala030512.htm

Kumar, N. (2011). From Limca books to Forbes Magazine avilable from

http://roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3432:from-limca-books-to-forbes-magazine&catid=119:feature&Itemid=132

Siddalingaiah.(2011).Village Deities. Available from http://roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3276:village-deities&catid=118:thought&Itemid=131

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