With a critical date before the Madras High Court hearing that would decide on his academic career drawing near, the plaintiff has an unusual request to his legal counsel. When his time comes, he wants to rise, not to speak, but to sing his case.
The extraordinary nature of the request reflected the character of the man behind it: P Senrayaperumal, a folk singer from Tamil Nadu, who has, against all odds, become an assistant professor in the department of history at Manonmaniam Sundaranar University in Tirunelveli.
What he wants to sing, would be called a “sorrow song” by American sociologist and civil rights activist WEB DuBois’ definition, who coined that term for the folk or spirituals sung by enslaved Black people in the United States that later evolve into Blues, Gospel, and Jazz. Unlike the US, folk art in India has not received its rightful place in popular culture.
The professor – a hard-earned title he is in a legal battle to keep – belongs to the Dalit community of Arundhatiyars, constitutionally a “Scheduled Caste” who usually perform odd jobs as leather tanners, cobblers and manual scavengers. Even within Tamil Nadu’s Dalit community, the Arundhatiyars are among the most marginalised.
Senrayaperumal’s family have been folk artists for generations. He is a rare folk singer to transcend the pigeonhole allotted to Dalits in the field of performing artists and academia. His voice, stunning, deep, and melancholic, is a bridge that brings together two Indias, as far from each other as moonlight and wildfire. One walks into universities with English and entitlement; the other walks miles for streetlights, clean water, and hospitals. One is born with the right caste and open doors; the other is still fighting for roads and garbage pick-up. One inherits institutions; the other has to fight in those very institutions to keep what she rightfully owns.
Two years before this court date, Senrayaperumal was fired for what can only termed unsanctioned self-education. The government lawyers maintain he received education “in a reverse manner”. A court has already ruled in his favour, directing the university to reinstate him. However, that has not happened. “If they [university administration] wanted to let me live, they could easily follow the direction of the single judge bench and allow me to work while they challenge the order in a higher forum. This is not just about me. This is about my community, and folk artists too. To be born among Arundhatiyars makes life a big struggle. We have no social or political power... and the university is adamant to not let me in,” said Senrayaperumal, speaking over Zoom in mid-September.
At 13, he had to quit school – a common story among Dalit students – and join his family’s folk theatre troupe, earning money by going from village-to-village performing the "Raja Rani Aattam" literally translating to “King and Queen Dance”. It is a folk dance-drama from Tamil Nadu that blends dance, drama, mythology and oral history – usually performed during weddings, festivals or village celebrations. His family also sings dirges at funerals.
Folk art is highly political in Tamil Nadu. In 1987, during the Self-Respect Movement led by the social activist Periyar E Ramasamy, a Dalit scholar was murdered for suggesting that people from other castes could beat the parai – one of the oldest percussion instruments made from cow or buffalo hide. It is considered a “Dalit instrument” because of the loud sound it makes, in contrast to the violin, Sitar or the Veena, which are considered refined and used in classical music. In fact, the word 'pariah' is a distortion of the Tamil word Paraiyar – a person who plays the parai. It entered the English language through European colonists – eventually becoming a term used worldwide to describe someone considered an outcast.
The anguish of casteism is no different from the anguish caused by racism. It goes beyond hateful slurs and outright violence. Casteism is intimate, woven into behaviours, cultural practices, that cannot be governed, like not sharing utensils or drinking water, discriminating against darker skin, using professions and last names of historically oppressed communities – Paraiyar, Bhangi (sanitation workers who dispose of human waste), Chamaar (leather workers who work with dead animals) as slurs for impure, messy or dirty things. The key to continuing this oppression across generations is keeping these communities out of educational institutions.
Despite dropping out from school, Senrayaperumal pursued higher education through distance learning. For decades, he would perform through the night and study through the day. He went on to complete both his bachelor's and master's degrees, followed by an MPhil in folk arts. Remarkably, after earning these advanced qualifications, he returned to complete his school-level education – enrolling in the Pre-Foundation and Foundation courses designed for adult learners and school dropouts under India’s open university system. From there, he continued his academic journey all the way to the top, earning a PhD in Art History in 2013.
Instead of being lauded as an example, the “reverse manner” is now being held against him, a grudge he recently told The Hindu was based on caste prejudices.
Today, he is fighting in court not just for himself, but for the children of the Arundhatiyar community, who have taken this caste discrimination as further proof that education will not set them free. Without a job for nearly two years, Senrayaperumal helps children in his neighbourhood with homework, and desperately wants them to believe that education will emancipate them.
As Senrayaperumal’s case makes its way through the Indian justice system, it spills a few open secrets about the Indian education system. It punctures the myth that, while inefficient and corrupt, our colleges are democratic spaces, open to all. The reality is that the minute a Dalit steps into academic terrain, they are prey surrounded by a thousand predators.
Anyone who is born in this country, subjected to the Indian educational system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic. Young Indians are constantly absorbing – through media, textbooks, and social media – the myths of India’s greatness; yet what they are taught in class does not match the world that they navigate daily, especially if they belong to religious, ethnic or sexual minorities.
On the one hand, the students are told they are born in the world’s largest democracy which guarantees equal rights for all. On the other hand, Dalit students as well as scholars know that if they get into the best schools or colleges, they will be dragged down by some terrible, menacing weight.
It does not take long, of course, for them to discover the shape of this oppression, in classrooms where Dalit students are made to sit on the floor, or outside. Their classmates refuse to share water with them and accuse them of being impure. Before long, they are explicitly told, like Senrayaperumal was, that none of this is for them: the schools, the universities, the temples, the high-paying jobs, and the idea of equality for all enshrined in the Constitution.
If they are really strong and hard-working – like Senrayaperumal was – they can fight to be educated. They may or may not get the education they want but that is not even the core of the matter. The real issue here is that unlike everywhere else in the world, education, in this country, at this moment of time, will not guarantee emancipation. Dalit children resort to open universities for various reasons and Senrayaperumal’s case is, by no means, an aberration. In July this year, 10 Dalit professors alleged caste discrimination in appointments in Bangalore University.
The Indian state makes wars against Dalit scholars in devious ways. It uses bureaucratic language, makes up rules retrospectively, sends an army of tax-payer funded lawyers who never tire, never need to rest, and never run out of money. The fighting people though, they tire. They need rest, and money. They age, and get depressed, sometimes they give up. In that, lies the ultimate victory of the hateful doctrine of caste.
After a 28-minute documentary about his persecution was released by People’s Archive of Rural India, Senrayaperumal’s case has ignited public outrage and become a rallying point against the systemic abuse of Dalits scholars by upper caste intellectuals. Several newspapers have written about the caste discrimination by the Tamil Nadu University. A change.org petition is being circulated. Most importantly, Justice S Muralidhar, a legal luminary, has stepped out of retirement to represent the Professor’s case in the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court.
The government’s lawyers have argued in court that the order of his “reverse” education – postgraduation in 2005 and schooling degree in 2011 – makes him unfit for government jobs. He went to the district court, won, but was not reinstated as the university appealed against the verdict. Now, here we are, with Senrayaperumal pleading through lawyers to be allowed to sing to the judges why he is entitled to the job he has worked for his entire life. Why it is important, as an intellectual exercise, for students to engage with the history of folk art of oppressed communities.
One of the paradoxes of Indian education – which makes it schizophrenic –is that precisely at the point when a student begins to develop a conscience, they find themselves at war with our society. For it is an educated persons’ fundamental job to change society for better, to never make peace with the abominable doctrine of casteism.
Today, as universities across the country spend tax-payer money to keep oppressed minorities out of classrooms, it is clear that a Dalit scholar’s sense of his /her own identity, their ability to assert their personhood, is deeply upsetting to the upper castes. That is the only reason we continue to lie about Senrayaperumal being unfit for the job he is immensely qualified for. We also continue to lie to ourselves. The achievements of upper caste Indians come off the back of historical injustices, exactly the same way as the apartheid South Africa or Jim Crow America benefitted white communities.
Let me make it clear that, if hypothetically, the High Court rules in favour of Senrayaperumal, allowing him to teach the history of folk arts, it would not be liberating him from caste oppression. It would be liberating the rest of us – upper caste, English-speaking, and indoctrinated elite – from ignorance. The court would set us free of the lies we speak about our education system. It would set a precedent for thousands of Dalit scholars too, without whom it is almost impossible for any child in this country to discover anything about the actual history of India that is larger, more various, more beautiful, and more brutal than any educational institutions currently are willing to accept. Far less to teach.
Towards the end of my conversation, I asked him what he would sing, if the court let him. “About my sorrows,” he said smilingly, hoping to be understood.
Vidya Krishnan is an investigative journalist, Nieman Fellow, and author of Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History. Views expressed are the author’s own.