Sudhanshu Joshi

Khalishpur is located on the famed last resting place along the route of Panchkosi Parikrama at Kapil Dhara, the fabled Ashram or abode of Kapil Muni (Saint Kapil). It is located 10 Kilometers from the District Head Quarter in Varanasi. On the Southern most tip of Khalishpur is Musharaj named after the presence of some 40 Musahar families who live in the hamlet. Musahars are also known as the community of Rat-catchers. Its location at the tip of the settlement is no accident, symbolizing as it does the existence and survival of the community at the fringes of the hierarchal Hindu fold. Socially excluded, they face a Brechtian dilemma. The community faces exclusion in all walks of life to the extent that if an upper caste person sees their face first thing in the morning then he curses them; foreboding the occurrence of an inauspicious event.

Being untouchable, they however continued to perform an important function for the rich landed aristocracy by keeping their verdant paddy fields free of rat infestations, besides providing family labor for the land. Traditionally dependent on forests they lost control following nationalization. The families living here are traditionally landless. Some 8 families were given small patches of land by the government under the land to landless programme some 12 years back but they could not get control over the land. A local organization Human Welfare Association recently fought on their behalf to obtain physical control on their land with the District Administration. They raise pigs and live in thatched roof houses. Devoid of any land, bereft of their access to forest produce, with little formal education, unorganized as a political constituency and generally displaced in and around the area of Eastern Uttar Pradesh because of the series of development projects such as power plants, dams, development of new townships; the Musahars barely survive by remaining tied to their fate as rat catchers, working in brick kilns, stone crushing and their women and daughters making leaf plates. To mitigate hunger they sometimes even have to eat rats. ‘Musa’ means rat and ‘Ahara’ means food, hence their name as a community is Musahars!

Musahars are estimated at between half a million to three quarters of a million in Eastern Uttar Pradesh and in the neighbouring State of Bihar they are estimated to constitute 15% of the total Dalit or low caste population, Musahars account for around close to 3 Million. In Khalispur hamlet out of a population of 200 families the children in the school going age are around 110, yet not even one of them appears to be properly clad. There is a Government Primary School in the hamlet where the children face everyday abuse from the higher caste people, hence stopped going to school. When I ask them why you do not go to school one of the girls responded that ‘the higher caste students tell us that we smell bad’. Another girl said that we are often cursed that ‘we do not take bath, we do not have clean clothes’. Another girl informed that she was told in the school that she ‘stole the slippers of another child’. She was beaten and now refuses to go to school.

The impact of all this is that the children in the family and community have very strong feelings against the schools and believe that the school is only hell bent upon closing the doors for them under some pretext or another. There is nothing that the community thinks it can do to motivate and inspire their children to attend full time schools due to the structural and deep rooted stigmatization that determines the social exclusion faced by the children.

School has become the place to experience exclusion and an institution that reinforces it every day. It is so strong that the children are not motivated to attend the school despite the fact that they are entitled to receive a scholarship of Rupees 450 or close to $ 10 every year if they attend classes regularly. They also receive mid-day meals and school uniforms. The girls in the community felt ostracized in the school. One commented that ‘the ridicule we face in the school is aimed to prevent us from coming to school and sit with the children from the other relatively higher caste children’. The complaints were many, some common ones of discrimination were, ‘we got mid-day meals a few times but the food we get is not the same as for the children from other communities, it is either the left-over or in less quantity’ or ‘One child from the family got food and the others were shooed away’. Another common complaint is ‘we are forced to sit on the floor and cannot use the desks and benches to sit in the classroom as they are meant for the children from the higher castes’.

I was not surprised then that the Musahar girls aged between 6-14 years from the entire hamlet were playing and working alternatively in the common land. The other case  children from the village were in schools. I asked them if any family from the hamlet sends their children to school. The answer from the elderly people was a flat no. One child victimised and abused in the school results in none from the family attending school. There is a spiral effect. One thing was very clear that the attraction of freebies such as the mid day meals, school uniforms and small scholarships remunerating the children to draw them out of work into school will not be effective if the children face on day to day basis social exclusion.

There has hardly been any change in the attitude of the Government school management, village community and higher caste students in the last few years as per the Musahar elders. ‘Initially our children did not even think that they have an entitlement to attend full time school. In sixty years of independence of India the change today is that some had the courage to go to the school to seek admission. They do give us admission now, legally it cannot be denied. It is a punishable offence to deny education especially to us. But they create the compelling environment that our children do not dare attend the school’.

Interestingly this denial of education is not because of the caste equation between the higher caste communities and the Musahars. They are also victims in the hands of other lower castes who are and relatively resource rich. There are layers and layers of sub-castes in India each trying to establish its own ritualistic superiority over one another and school is the best place to practice these agrarian power relationships.

It was most visible as dozens of very young girls sat around the hamlet under the shade of a big tree making leaf plates and saucers. The women and children do their daily rounds to forests to pick leaves. The collection of the leaves by them from the forests is every time is another story of humiliation in the hands of the forest guards as they are treated as thieves, dispossessed from their own resource base and then on the ride home on rails carrying loads miracle if they are not caught. These leaf plates and saucers, ironically made by untouchables whose hair looks unwashed, bodies scruffy and clothes untidy, are used during any family or community ritual such as weddings, head shaving ceremony of the children, name giving of the child, Mahabhoj or big feast to bring peace for the soul of the dead, or in every day Kathas and myriad offerings in temples and homes. These leaf plates and saucers are used for offering flowers, holding earthen pots with little burning lights on the banks of the highly venerated river Ganges every evening on the Ghats or Banks of Varanasi presenting to both locals and foreigners an experience of  religiosity and other-worldliness.