Educate, agitate, organise

Bahujan Unnati in Shahdara is one of only two book stores in the Capital (and possibly the country) that deal exclusively in books on caste. Three years ago, its 27-year-old owner changed his name from Vishnu to Vishal Sherwal.

The reason was disenchantment with Hinduism, the religion his parents followed. “I realised that I am not a Hindu. For the last two years, I have not celebrated any Hindu festivals, ” he says, surrounded by books by Dalit thinkers and social reformers such as BR Ambedkar, Jyotiba Phule, Periyar and others. Books by Ambedkar sell better than the rest, he says, especially Annihilation of Caste . “Others like Who Were the Shudras? also do well,” he adds, even as his infant daughter sleeps on a bed in a small room full of books. His elder daughter keeps calling out to him, trying to get his attention.

His wife is busy with household chores. She continues to follow Hinduism and Sherwal does not force her to follow in his wake. The same is true for his other relatives. He has pinned his hopes on the younger generation to be the agents of change.

Ambedkarite ideology helped him realise his true place in Hindu society, he says. Ambedkar had postulated that Dalits, or the former ‘untouchables’, were not Hindus as they were outside the varna (caste) system, being ati-shudras (the most backward among the backward). According to him, the varna system included the three higher castes and the shudras — present-day Other Backward Classes (OBCs). He himself had converted to Buddhism later in life, along with a large number of his followers.

Around the time Vishnu decided to change his name, he started Bahujan Unnati, which also stocks Ambedkarite merchandise: rings, posters, pens, key-chains, t-shirts, flags, statues and so on. “So one can see an Ambedkar statue in the morning when one opens one’s eyes. I would like to incorporate his picture in everything, even headlights (of a vehicle), or night bulbs. I am thinking of starting a factory of my own to manufacture these (new) products or to get someone else to do it for me.”

Sherwal’s merchandise sells well. Till date, he has had over 10,000 t-shirts printed which have all been sold. Rallies and demonstrations are crucial to his trade because organisers often order merchandise — especially flags and posters — in bulk. A lot of the material comes from Sadar Bazaar in Old Delhi. Recent developments — the Una agitation, the suicides of Dalit students Rohith Vemula and Rajini Krish, and several other issues that have made Dalits rise in anger — have led to more rallies and demonstrations. However, it can also get dangerous sometimes. In the past, his stall and the personnel manning it have been targeted.

“We were targeted by the Singh Sena (a caste group affiliated to Rajputs) at Jantar Mantar. They tried to damage the stall and beat my boys up. We retaliated by raising slogans loudly and did not back down, although the police openly favoured them,” Sherwal alleges. Last year, his stall was attacked in Gwalior, outside the hall in which professor Vivek Kumar of JNU was delivering a lecture on Ambedkar. Kumar himself was allegedly attacked by members of a right-wing group.

While selling Ambedkarite merchandise forms an important part of his work, Sherwal’s main focus remains books. Currently, he is supplying books on demand in several languages. “I administrate around 300-350 WhatsApp groups where I get my orders from. I send the catalogue there,” he adds. Orders are made on his Facebook account too. He has received orders from individuals and organisations based in Maharashtra, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat, among other States. Sherwal says he has benefited a lot from social media. “Earlier, I did not even know about the different States that existed in India,” he admits.

The other Delhi shop devoted to anti-caste publishing is owned by SS Gautam, who is also one of the two main publishers of these books under the imprint Gautam Prakashan. Sherwal worked in Gautam’s bookshop before he set up his own. “He is now a distributor of our books,” Gautam says, with a touch of pride in his deep, gravelly voice.

Another publisher is Samyak Prakashan. Sandeep Bouddh, who manages Samyak Prakashan, and Gautam have observed an increase in sales over the last few years, and especially lately, following a rise in Dalit assertion across the country. In addition to books on Dalit issues, Samyak publishes a lot of Buddhism books, according to Shanti Swarup Bouddh, the publisher.

“Our intent behind publishing books on Buddhism is to counter those who malign or misinterpret it. But we also publish books written by those who belong to the larger Bahujan community, namely those from Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes,” he says. He has just finished writing a book on the medieval Hindu ruler Jaichand, commonly perceived to be a traitor; he allegedly betrayed Prithviraj Chauhan and thus allowed Muslim invaders to conquer India. However, Bouddh’s treatise seeks to prove that this is a calumny spread against Jaichand by vested Brahminical interests since he was a Buddhist king. “We want to de-Brahminise the intellectual discourse prevailing in the country,” he adds.

Gautam is an author as well, having written, edited and compiled over 100 titles. He manages his shop in Shahdara with his son Anuj Gautam. It is located in an area where mostly Dalits live. He started the business in the early ’90s when he found that books on caste written by Dalit writers were in short supply. He has kept going, although he has had to supplement his income with his pension — he retired as a government employee. “Ambedkar’s birth centenary was in 1991. Subsequently, Ambedkar Chairs were started (in universities and government departments). But they could not find enough books to conduct research. So I began to collect these books. And people started to come looking for them from all over India and even abroad. That interest has continued,” he says.

Unlike Sherwal, whose shop is a modest establishment functioning out of a room in his house, Gautam Book Centre consists of three storeys. The ground floor where we meet is packed with shelves and almirahs touching the ceiling, piled with books. His collection runs into thousands, and he has published around 250 books by now, including literary works. He believes that although there is a certain demand for these books (which helps him sustain the business), the mainstream world of publishing and readers in general remain indifferent at best — or hostile at worst.

“This is all untouchable and Dalit literature. They (the mainstream ) are taking it as against themselves. They are not promoting it. They don’t want to,” Gautam says.

In fact, he believes that the interest demonstrated by the academia and media in Ambedkar’s writings, in particular, and Dalit writing, in general, is to “counter the issues, to misinterpret things.” Explaining the difficulty further, he says, if a Dalit “speaks of caste, he is casteist. But if an upper-caste does so, he is progressive.”

Nevertheless, Gautam says, some of his titles continue to sell very well, including books by Ambedkar, especially Annihilation of Caste , and Kanshi Ram’s Era of Stooges (Chamcha Yug) . “Recently, we published a book on the Chamar Regiment, which people were unaware of. That did well,” he adds. Chamar Regiment was one of the two Scheduled Caste regiments of the Indian army, raised by the British in the early 1940s, and disbanded soon after. The other was Mahar Regiment, with soldiers recruited from the caste Ambedkar belonged to.

Despite some success, Gautam says there are still way too few publishers doing what he does. “Other than Samyak and us, who publish in Hindi, and Navayana, who focus on English titles, there are a few others issuing books in regional languages. But the number is not more than 10 overall. There is not a single publisher of Dalit books in Daryaganj, the hub of publishing in India and the largest book market in Asia. Ultimately, Hindi literature is Hindu literature,” says Gautam. According to him, even Premchand, acknowledged as the best Hindi writer, denigrated Dalits in stories like ‘Kafan’. In his view, Dalits express their concerns best through autobiographies and he has published several of them, apart from novels, criticism and short story collections. However, it will take more time before Dalits start to write about concerns not related to their identity, he believes.

Funding, too, remains an issue, Gautam says. Sherwal agrees. He has applied for a bank loan in order to start his publishing venture. “There are a few writers who are in touch with me. In the next two years, I aim to publish 50-60 titles. I would like to start with the complete works of Ambedkar, yet to be printed fully,” he says.

According to S Anand, the runaway success of his annotated edition of Annihilation of Caste , which has sold over 18,000 copies by now, has helped him underwrite the losses he made by publishing books by other Dalit writers. The book has a lengthy introduction by Arundhati Roy and was denounced by many from the Dalit community for this reason. However, Anand is clear that his audience is non-Dalits who need to read these works so that they can change in their outlook about caste-related issues. Even his authors are mostly non-Dalits. “Only 30-35 per cent of the titles I have published have been written by Dalits,” he says, as construction continues next door, and the noise drowns our voices. He has a chic office in the fashionable Shahpur Jat, where he also keeps several of his titles. Along with books on Dalit issues, he publishes philosophy and other genres, including poetry. In fact, he maintains that he is “not a publisher of Dalit books” as such. Nevertheless, some of his titles concerning Dalits have done well. “ Riddles of Hinduism has sold 3,000 copies in just nine weeks. The Myth of the Holy Cow also keeps selling,” he says.

New entrants in the field are also active. Ashok Das, who runs the popular monthly Hindi magazine Dalit Dastak , has also begun to publish books. He participated in the World Book Fair in Delhi in January and told BL ink that the response was “very good.”

This comes with a caveat: 95 per cent of the visitors to Das’s stall are Dalits who come “due to increasing literacy among them, awareness created due to social media and growing polarisation caused by the BJP government at the centre”. However, non-Dalits are now turning up to take a look, too. “They consist mostly of scholars or the genuinely curious but some of them come just to see what’s going on and how to counter it,” Das chuckles. By now, he has published a total of five books, including one on Ambedkar and a poetry collection. “We are now working on a book on Kanshi Ram,” he says.

With old and new players in the fray, it looks quite likely that publishers of Dalit books are here to stay.

Abhimanyu Kumar and Aletta Andre are Delhi-based journalists

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