Sapna Indu Pillai - Week 4

                                                  Weekly Summary – Week 4 


                                                                                                    
                                                                                                                     Sapna Indu Pillai 
                                                                                                                     BALLB Sec – C 
                                                                                                                     2016111





I will be responding to reading Arun Prabha Mukerjee’s Translation of Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan, A Dalit’s life. The book first goes into the title explaining how Joothan refers to the leftover food that uppercaste would give to the lower caste in order to cement their superiority over them and in society. The significance of food and the importance given to food by the upper caste to degrade individuals is looked into closely in the food. The author confesses that reading Joothan was his first insight about the violence faced by the lower castes as he did not know any lower caste individuals and his interactions with caste had been from the lens provided by Mahatma Gandhi. The author in the introduction also talks about how reading about the life Omprakash Valmiki led in the village of Barla in UP being from the Chuhra caste made his realize how tangled in his web of privilege he had been and how reading it in his mother tongue, Hindi had undesirable impact on him. He sheds light on the orgins of the word “Dalit” stating that it comes from the word “dal” which means to crush, grind food into powder and it was adopted by the lower castes to show how they were crushed under the foot of the upper castes and the caste system in society. 

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