15 years ago for the first time, I was interested in investigating the life of Dalits of Dhaka in Bangladesh. Although the city gets neat and clean and tidy by this community, very few city dwellers have a broad and clear idea of their life. And if you want to know the total number of Dalits in Bangladesh, your eyes will go above the forehead with surprise – approximately 6.5 million.
By Muhammad Tanim Nowshad
The Dalits are Hindus from a broader sense, the primeval people of the Indian subcontinent, the untouchables, and finally Harijan i.e. the people of God, the term coined by Mahatma Gandhi, the father of India. However, if we carefully read their history, we will discover that God has shown very little mercy to them. They do not belong to the four castes (Varnas) of the Hindu Caste System i.e. Varnasrama. In the Purusha Sukta (Hymn of the Cosmic Being) of Rigveda (10:90) the creation of the four Varnas (four castes) has been recounted. It describes that the four Varnas emerged from the body of a primeval man.
The Brahmin emerged from his mouth, the Kshatriya from his arms, the Vishya from his thighs, and the Shudra from his feet. However, the problem arose when the distribution of works functioned based on their status. The Brahmins were commissioned to read and teach religious books i.e. the Shastras and perform the religious rites, the Kshatriyas to fight for the nation, and the Vishyas to administer trade and commerce. The Shudras were given all the menial tasks to do like farming, sewing, cobbling, homemaking, and so forth. However, they were not and never expelled from the fabric of the Varnasrama. However, the Dalits have been thrown out of the extent of the caste system. They have been stigmatized as the untouchables.
When Manu Samhita, a controversial religious text of the Hindus, promised rigorous punishments for the non-abiding Sudhras, we can easily guess the attitude of the society based on the Varnasrama towards the Dalits. They were given those works, which are abhorrent to others like sweeping feces and sewage, cleaning drains and water passages and streets, dissecting corpses for forensic and medical purposes, removing toxic garbage, etc.
It is historically debatable, whether the Dalits were ever a part of the Shudra community or not. Some historians say that they were. In the ancient Harappan civilization (approximately 6000 BC) the Dalits happened to exist in the Shudra community. But it is a matter of further investigation, whether among the Shudras any clannish hierarchy preexisted or not. Some threads of intersectionality might have come out from here. Some historians consider that the Harappans happened to build a pre-Aryan agrarian civilization when the debate loomed large on the base of Aryanism and its historical existence.
Many historians now believe that the so-called Aryanism is simply a blatant myth, which was always pampered and indulged by people gripped by psychopathy and bipolar disorder like Adolf Hitler, Viktor Hermann Brack and Philipp Bouhler – the promoters of the Nazi eugenics theory. The so-called Aryans never existed in the world other than in the mind of some groups of people, who cherished pathological resentment against some races and groups and imposed a fabricated racial superiority upon their groups or races in order to annihilate or at least marginalize their opponents and enemies. They also imposed this superiority upon other races in order to create an alliance with them. In this way, Hitler’s propaganda wanted to incorporate the Dutch, the Italians and some other races into the Aryan fold. Therefore, some political opportunists, religious and racist sociopaths have vivified this mythic race through their polemical literature.
Another problem has arisen on the historicity and factuality of the Harappan civilization. Many historians define it to be a Proto-Dravidian civilization. But it is widely circulated information that the social stratification was primordially promulgated by Aryavarta i.e. the ancient abode of the Aryans. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the constitution maker of India, who himself was also a Dalit, argued that during the persecution of the Buddhists the untouchability was deliberately used as an excuse and a tool to stigmatize and marginalize some groups (The untouchables: who were they and why they became untouchables?). Ambedkar later converted to Buddhism.
Now let us take a look at the Dalits of Dhaka. They are the primordial inhabitants of the city. The first large group or the first bevy of the Dalits came and settled down here just after Dhaka had been declared the capital of the Mughal provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa by Islam Khan in 1610. Their first group was invited to live here in order to keep the city clean, especially to remove the corpses of cows, horses and pigs. They were non-Bengalis. A lot of Dalits or untouchables especially the Non-Bengali Dalits preferred to continue to live in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) even after the partition of 1947 as they had been living here for generations in order to avoid the ordeal of the rigid Hindu caste system. The second bevy migrated here under the aegis of Jogendranath Mondol after the partition of India. But the Dalits of Dhaka came and settled here long before that. It is also true that later many people of the second bevy also came here to earn their livelihood as it is the capital of the country. The Dalits of Dhaka mainly speak in Hindi, Bhojpuri, Kanari and Telugu; so a cultural bifurcation has become inevitable because of the Bengali speaking majority of the city. They are divided into 8 major clans i.e., Balmiki, Lalbeghi, Dumar, Dom, Hela, Hari, Basfor and Raut.
The Bangladeshi Dalits fell in the trap of ‘double seclusion’ and ‘double marginalization’ as they are untouchables among the Hindus and at the same time a minority in a country, where the Muslims are the majority.
Surinder Jodhka an expert on the South Asian Caste system mentioned that the endogamy of the area is an ocean barrier to cross the caste purview. This is also true for the Dalits of Dhaka. The intermarriage rate among the Dalit clans of Dhaka is very low, although the ambitious Dalits have the tendency to cross the threshold of the caste parameter. The girls want to marry higher caste Hindus, even Muslims. The reason is not only the desire to uplift their social status, but also economic. Many Dalits cannot live in good houses although they have the financial ability. It is because the owners are reluctant to rent them houses. They have lack of water and the sanitation problem is severe in their abodes. The Dalit quarters are still almost like the ghettos. The new plan of the Dalit quarters by the government of Bangladesh might ghettoize them more and expedite their seclusion from the mainstream. It may intensify their social exclusion in some ways.
The sanitation problem, the polluted abode and the uncertainty of the availability of public goods are almost the same in the case of the urban, suburban and nonurban Dalits. The Dalits have some special traits of capability failures due to their caste and social strata and the prevailing dominant religious conventions. Amartya Sen, an Indian economist and Nobel Laureate, has presented a holistic parameter to evaluate poverty. He showed vividly that the failures of a human being to become and to do what he wants is his actual poverty. Hence he has termed these capabilities ‘doings’ and ‘beings,’ and altogether ‘functionings.’ The inability to fulfill these desires is according to him ‘the capability failures’ and hence these are the indicators of actual poverty. From him, we can exemplify the capability failures of the Dalits in case of their access to public places like temples, religious congregations and so on. In many cases the Hindus of upper classes are reluctant to accept their presence among the gatherings till today. The Dalits cannot generally marry any Hindu men or women of the upper classes even in Bangladesh like other parts of the Indian subcontinent. They have invisible or quasi-invisible barriers (unlike India where the barriers are strongly visible in many cases) to enter into any Hindu social gatherings arranged by the upper classes. In many cases they even hesitate to cross the invisible threshold of their regimented belief that they are untouchables due to the will of God. The psychological inhibitions that have emerged from their dogmatic worldview or weltanschauung also plunged them into some capability failures in their practical life. In India the Dalits have raised their voice some extent to break the caste-clutch. But in Bangladesh the process seems to be comparatively slow. These scenarios are more or less same everywhere in general. A self-imposed marginalization is ubiquitously flagrant more or less.
Although Islam tried to promote a classless society like other Semitic religions, the Muslims failed in many cases in the Indian subcontinent to attain their goal. We can discover the Muslim Dalits in India as Ali Anwar, a Muslim Dalit, showed in his book ‘Masawat Ki Jung: The Battle for Equality’(2023). He showed the existence of the Arzals or the inferior Muslims and the Dwij community of the quasi-Brahminical Muslims. Surinder Jodhka mentioned the Ajlafs along with the Arzals even before. The Muslims of these lower strata are altogether called the Pasmanda Muslims. The situation is not so drastic in Bangladesh, but there was a watershed in the names of Ashrafs and Atrafs even before the birth of Bangladesh. The Jolas i.e. the weavers of East Bengal (present Bangladesh) were considered to be the Atrafs, the low bred Muslims. But could the Bangladeshis overcome these dichotomies completely even after their achievement of independence from the Pakistani iron clutch? Bangladeshi society is divided into multiple layers. Many religious communities also prefer the established people with considerable clout in the society. It was strongly prevalent during the regime of the unified Pakistan. It could not assume and equalize the Dalits even in the name of Islam, who came under the aegis of Jogendranath Mondol; a Dalit leader and himself a Dalit, who was the first law and labor minister of Pakistan. He returned to India being disappointed. The present Bangladeshi mindset is cherishing the same phantom subtly and sometimes unconsciously. The Dalits have been ghettoized in 27 hubs (12 are prominent) in and around Dhaka. A very few of them could establish their career outside the precincts. They are not unified as they have internecine strife, which is an obstacle before obtaining enough social capital to secure their collective interests. As a result, they could flourish themselves as successful individual entrepreneurs. The Dalits of Bangladesh are regimented patriarchy. But in Dhaka the women enjoy relatively more freedom. This opens another frontier of dilemma. They become educated, and due to the open media, they know the world faster, but finally, they discover that their world is confined to their precinct. They discover their capability failures and newer types of intersectionality every day. “It is better to be born an idiot, rather than handicapped conscious beings”- said a Dalit girl to me. Her name was Anuradha. I heard it with a friend and sighed.
