In the wake of nationwide protests against the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations for reservations in 1990-91, Anveshi was one of the first women’s organizations to engage with the question of caste. We took positions in debates in newspapers and public meetings and took an active role in publishing a widely circulated booklet titled Baadhitulapai Bandalu (Stoning the Sufferers) by Samatha Sanghatana. This was aimed principally at SC and BC students who had been emotionally devastated by the metropolitan dominant caste backlash. The English version of this booklet was a seminal article in the Illustrated Weekly of India called “Blaming the Victims”. Our intervention enabled to put into question the idea of ‘merit’ that underlay those protests. It is important to note that Anveshi took this intellectual and political initiative against the groundswell of near-unanimous support for the anti-reservation position that arose spontaneously in the national press and in middle-class feeling.`
After Tsundur (1992)
The Tsundur massacres of Dalits (1992) and the cases filed after that incident are another benchmarks in response to which our engagement with the questions being raised by the Dalit movements grew in the following directions. We began to engage with casteism as it operated in the procedures and institutions of everyday life and popular culture in modern India. Anveshi commissioned studies on gender and caste in everyday life, one of which was conducted by K. Sajaya. Much later, Anveshi also opposed the rustication of Dalit students at Hyderabad Central University in 2002. This resulted in a short, but influential, article on Caste in the Metropolitan University in The Hindu and a more detailed exposition in the Economic and Political Weekly.
When the Tsundur trial began after fourteen years in 2006, we followed the process of trial and wrote it up for local newspapers. In 2012, continuing this line of work, Anveshi brought out a Broadsheet on the food culture, politics and Dalits.
Two, we began to examine seriously the feminist theorization of the gendered ‘subject’ in the context of policy and practice in India. Anveshi’s subsequent work in several different areas such as family, education and law in is deeply invested in pursuing the implications of Dalit questions for the notion of ‘subject’ in feminist theory. First, what are the implications of the normative woman and family-relationship that underlie policymaking in family/criminal law and education? How do these normative ideals erase/shape the caste of the subject in the formulation and implementation of these policies? In what ways do these assumptions shape outcomes? Secondly, how far do the legal and institutional reforms suggested by the women’s movements take cognizance of the operation of caste? What are the problems caused by this?
Third, we began to make critical interventions in the sphere of power/culture. An example of this is the research into and the publication of Nallapoddu (Black Dawn, 2003), a pioneering anthology of hitherto unknown Dalit women’s writings edited by Gogu Shyamala. This anthology brought together Telugu writings of Dalit women since the early nineteenth century until the early twentieth century—52 writers in all. Many have since been translated into English.
The publication of Nallapoddu not only brought Anveshi in contact with a range of Dalit women writers, activists, students and academics, but has also created a space for Dalit women and men to pursue endeavours that do not generally find any support in other institutional spaces.
In 2006, we consolidated this learning into a program called the Short Term Fellowship Programme (2006-2009) that aimed at creating a space for Dalit women and men to pursue otherwise institutionally unsupported. The programme (which also has non-Dalit fellows) aimed to further their research and writing skills in both fiction and academia. Of the many outcomes of this programme, two need to be specifically mentioned—Dandora and Merit Interrupted. The former is a documentary on Madiga Dandora Movement that agitates for categorization of Scheduled Castes into more, and the second documents the struggles of the students to pursue their education in the social welfare hostel hostels.
After Nallapoddu: Studies on Dalit women in Politics and Movements in Andhra Pradesh
From 2004-2009, Anveshi undertook two significant projects on Dalit women’s experiences in mainstream politics. One focused on their experiences in various political movements and mainstream politics, and the second on their experiences in panchayat raj institutions.
The study on Dalit women in Panchayat Raj had three researchers, Joopaka Subhadra, D. Sujatha and Sarath Davala.
Sujatha Devarapalli investigated the role and location of Dalit women sarpanches in a geographical area, East Godavari district, where ‘obvious forms of casteism’ (two-glass system etc.) have relatively abated, where ‘capitalist’ power structures are in place in terms of contract systems, etc. and where literacy and political participation of Dalits is relatively higher compared to other areas of Andhra Pradesh. She interviewed Dalit women sarpanches among whom, there are graduates, a lawyer and who finished high school. All of them hail from ‘political’ families, where husbands or fathers, fathers in-laws worked in the Panchayati raj structure at various levels. While the Dalits do occupy positions of political power, the actual control of resources in the village continues to be with the upper caste families in the village. And it should be mentioned here that in these villages, for nearly a decade Dalits have been sarpanches. The apparent peace between Dalits and the upper castes, even in the village with a history of violence against Dalits, raised some important issues about the changing role of the sarpanches, changing role of the dominant castes and the caste politics in general etc.
Sarath Davala, assisted by A. Suneetha, examined the working of Dalit sarpanches, men and women in six villages of Alamur Mandal of East Godavari, where a Dalit-led NGO was very active. Dalit communities of Madiga, Mala and Relli here saw the opportunity to elect a sarpanch from their communities as a historic one (‘our fellow’s photo would adorn the walls of the panchayat office’), which came once in twenty or twenty-five years. The community’s desire to select one of their choices only succeeded in some instances where they were able to strategize vis-à-vis the dominant community in each of the villages, Kamma or Kaapu castes. The ability of the elected sarpanches, men or women, depended on this factor – whether they carried the will of the community. Many a time, the dominant communities, by their sheer combined numerical strength, ensured that a Dalit of their choice got elected. Among the six villages, three had such sarpanches. The rest, elected with the will of the community, had a track record of prior battles on behalf of their communities. They had fought either for assigned or endowment land, for installation of Ambedkar statue in the village or against the placement of public toilets in Dalit localities. In several of these battles, the Dalit NGO played a role and provided legal support to file cases under the SC, ST Atrocities Act when the Dalits were attacked by the dominant caste people in the village. One Dalit woman sarpanch, Nagamma, was able to get the village fortified against the annual floods by getting a bund constructed. She also occupied the panchayat office and continued to train other sarpanches after her term got over.
The other significant study in this area was conducted by noted Telugu Dalit woman writer, J. Subhadra, who focused on the ‘Dalit women’s experiences in Telangana’, with the objective of narrativizing their experiences in the form of short stories. Telangana has its own specific and contested history. Rich in terms of movement politics, whether Telangana Armed struggle (where peasants and agricultural workers rose in massive rebellion against feudal landlordism in 1948), Naxalite movement (where the Marxist Leninist parties organized agricultural workers and marginal farmers for increase in wages and for land distribution), Maadiga Dandora, the Dalits are politicized very differently here. She sought to bring this rich history of movements, under the constant presence of state violence combined with persisting feudal caste hierarchies inflected by the contemporary articulations of Telangana and Madiga questions to her study.
Subhadra (2006-2008) published fifteen short stories in different Telugu newspapers and little magazines such as Andhra Jyothi, Bhumika on the basis of this study.
Gogu Shymala’s research on writing the political biography of one of the most respected Dalit women leaders in mainstream politics T.N. Sadalakshmi raised tough issues about Dalit women’s representation. Sadalakshmi saw herself as a leader of everyone, not of Dalits alone, but she did everything in her power to secure the interests of the Dalits. Despite being considered as ‘quirky, stubborn and uncompromising’, she thrived in mainstream politics for nearly five decades? This study resulted in the publication of her political biography, Nene Balaanni (I am the force) in 2011.
Though each of the projects has a varied focus, all of them together opened up the category of ‘Dalit woman’–—shifting it away from the ‘victimized’ one—to give it a richness and diversity. In fact, these projects opened out new ways of understanding what is traditionally called women’s participation in the political process. Dalit women, here can be seen as leaders, often emerging from experiences of suffering, unwilling entrants into political parties, often turning into eager stake holders in the political process and as women who, although belonging to a patriarchal family, are able carve out a strong identity which is attentive to the needs of their community and constituencies.
Studies on education and domestic violence
In the area of education, Anveshi undertook to produce Different Tales: Stories from Marginal Cultures and Regional Languages and intervene in one of the most critical areas of culture: children’s literature. Our widely circulated children’s stories question some dominant assumptions about childhood, growing up and culture. Popular knowledge about gender roles, cultural refinement, intelligence, morality, psychological selfhood, childhood experiences etc. is mostly derived from the groups belonging to the dominant culture. They then enter into official records (such as textbooks of child psychology, sociological descriptions of childhood and so on) and go on to influence public policies. Regional and oral narratives from marginal communities have a way of inverting the logic of such dominant narratives. More important, they would enhance the self-image and confidence of those children who feel acutely inadequate as they are continually forced to measure themselves, their homes, their neighbourhoods and their culture in general against the “standards” of the textbooks. We have collected a large number of children’s’ stories from the marginalized communities, both in oral and written form, in Telugu and Malayalam. Through the production of these stories, we aimed to generate reading material that would reinforce a positive image of the lives and cultures that are rarely represented in the well-entrenched and recognized domains of children’s literature.
In 2008, these stories were produced in the form of beautifully illustrated books (Head Curry, Spirits from History, Two named Boy, Braveheart Badeyya, School Stories, Mother, Sackclothman) in Telugu (by Anveshi), English and Malayalam (by DC Books, Kerala). The Telugu books have been recommended by the Andhra Pradesh government as suggested additional reading material for all secondary and high schools run by the government. They have been bought by schools in two districts under this program. In addition, UNICEF distributed them to schools in one district. From 2017, Ekalaya Bhopal has translated and has been producing these books in Hindi. And in 2020, Sukanya Kanrelly‘s edited Kannada translations of the stories are going to be published by Mysore-based Abhiruchi Prakasan while Ekalavya agreed to re-print them in English shortly.
In the area of domestic violence, Anveshi’s two research studies raised significant questions related to women’s negotiations with law and community institutions. The first study on ‘Institutional Responses to Domestic violence’ conducted by A. Suneetha, Vasudha Nagaraj and R. Bhagya Lakshmi (2000-2003), after examining what women do in the face of domestic violence found that, even though Dalit and backward class women approach police stations and counseling centers more often, their access had to be mediated by family, local leaders and other ‘community’ institutions. In a subsequent study, Vasudha Nagaraj investigated the working of a ‘caste panchayat’ (2007-2010) in one of the largest Dalit bastis of Hyderabad. While analyzing how such panchayats had become ‘integrated’ with formal institutions such as police stations and courts, she noted that the norm of conjugality that operated in the panchayat that solved a dispute was based on equal share of responsibility, rather than equal rights, which was also responsive to the discourse of women’s rights.
The study on Dalit women and domestic violence (2012 -13) by Gogu Shyamala, Sujatha Devarapalli and B. Sattemma sought to understand and evolve a Dalit women’s perspective on domestic violence by focusing on the interface of Dalit women survivors of domestic violence with counselling centers and police stations. Focusing on the issues emerging in the contemporary Dalit family, poised at the cusp of economic, social and political changes, it seeks to evolve a perspective that focuses on Dalit women’s predicament on how to deal with the pressure and violence that such changes bring vis-à-vis their need for a family.
Gogu Shyamala (2019-2020) is currently investigating the gender and caste critique that underwrites the Dekkali Puranam performed by Dekkali artists of Telangana.
Miscellaneous Projects
Problems of First Generation Dalit Research Scholars
Mirapa Madhavi’s study was based on interviews with more than 20 Dalit research scholars from University of Hyderabad about their paths to the University and the casteism that they experience in the classrooms, in the other university spaces and the ways in which it obstructs their research and writing. Apart from comments on demeanour and language, the university also pushes them into a space where they have no resources to cope with the cultural and other kinds of difference that they encounter for the first time. The remedial courses in English language often do not improve the skill as it lacks any connection with what is taught in the classroom. Once they enter into the research programme, the crisis at home often pulls them back making it difficult to recoup and resume the writing. The crisis faced by the first generation scholars are multiple and require rethinking of the university research programmes.
An essay based partly on this study was published in the Anveshi Broadsheet on Sexuality and Harassment ed. by Asma Rasheed and Madhumeeta Sinha.
Dalit students in Social Welfare Hostels
Domala Mallesh studied the problems of inmates of social welfare hostels in Hyderabad and documented the utter indifference and neglect that they are subjected to. As the scholarships are not released on time and no mess facilities are available, the very objective of the hostels – to enable students to pursue their education without a hassle, is totally defeated. Students, forced to cook for themselves, hire themselves out to the catering services in the evening to sustain themselves. Political rallies also recruit them to bolster their numbers. Most importantly, there have been cases of the students of social welfare hostels being used for clinical trials by the companies without disclosing the dangers as a result of which a few died. Most of these findings were incorporated into a moving documentary called Merit Interrupted/Memetla Chaduvale.
Dalits and Christianity
This project seeks to understand the negotiations of the Dalit communities with modernity through the institutional and cultural spaces opened up by Christianity. Sarath Davala worked on this project for a period in Anveshi. He then continued the work independently.
Dalit Women Corporators in Urban Governance
Documenting the experiences of Dalit women Corporators in the Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad, this project seeks to understand the processes by which they negotiate their functions in the intersection of bureaucracy and local political bodies. K. Sudha Rani worked on this project.
Banamati: Miracles Exposed
Banamati is a tradition practised mostly in the Telengana region of Andhra Pradesh. This project attempts to map the various understandings of this practice and investigate the rationality that lies in such a practice. The study is located in the context of the refusal, in modern scientific approaches, of the knowledge of the villagers and their logic. Napari Praveen Kumar worked on this project.
Madiga Dandora: A Study and Celebration of Sub-Caste Cultural and Political Assertion (2006)
This work by Panthukala Srinivas was a documentation of the Madiga Dandora movement which started in 1994 demanding categorisation of reservations for sub-castes. Srinivas conducted interviews with movement leaders, activists, commentators and ordinary people from different Dalit castes, and also used archival footage of the movement collected by him since 2004. The project culminated in a documentary film titled Dandora: Dagapadda Gunde Chappudu (Dandora: Resonance of Deceived Hearts). The film has raised an extremely significant debate in civil society on the condition, culture and politics of sub-castes in India today.
The Micro-Politics of Caste in Everyday Life (1988-89)
K. Sajaya worked on this short-term research project. This project was commissioned in the aftermath of the Karamchedu caste atrocity and of upper-caste students’ protest against the implementation of the Murlidhar Rao Commission report which recommended raising the reservation quota for Backward Classes in educational institutions. Interviews were conducted with women and men from Backward and Scheduled Caste communities, working/studying in educational and other professional institutions. The focus was on their life histories, day-to-day experiences in the workplace, their self-perception and their opinions about job reservations. The findings of this project were published in the Telugu journal Nalupu, in April 1992.