thelede
14 THE CARAVAN
/ nikhil latagajanan
On a Sunday morning at the usually
crowded Bandra Kurla Complex in
Mumbai, the loud beating of drums
began echoing through empty streets.
It was a group of youths from Dhara-
vi, the largest slum in Asia, who had
gathered for their weekly practice of
parai attam.
The youths, part of a group called the
Neelam Kalai Kuzhu—Blue Arts Collec-
tive—began by chanting a Tamil slogan:
Parai ongi olikatum
Idhu uzhaikum makkalin vidutha-
laikai
Engal parai mulakam savukaga alla
Uzhaikum makkalin valvukaga
Onki adipathil kiliyatum
Paraigal alla suya sathiya perumai
pesuvor mugathiraigalLet the parai sound loudly
For the freedom of the working
people
Our parai shouts not for death
But for the life of the working people
By beating loudly
Let the veils of proud casteists be
torn apartParai attam refers to a performance
of the parai—a hollow drum made of a
wooden frame, with cow skin stretched
over one side, played with sticks of
unequal size and thickness—accom-
panied by a folk dance. The parai is
said to be one of the oldest percussion
instruments in human history. It has
its origins in ancient Tamil society,
where it had several uses: gathering
people, broadcasting announcements
and warnings, celebrating weddings
and festivals, as well as invoking divine
spirits during funeral processions.
Over the years, it was the last
usage that came to be identified with
the instrument. Under Brahminical
orthodoxy, the parai was considered
a funereal instrument played only by
Dalits. “You play the tabla, you play the
mridangam, but you beat parai,” Avatthi
Ramaiah, a professor in the centre for
the study of social exclusion and inclu-
sive policy at the Tata Institute of Social
Sciences in Mumbai, told me. “The word
itself suggests how much prejudice there
is behind it.” The stigma associated
with parai attam was passed down the
generations. Most Dalits stopped playing
the instrument during the Self-Respect
Movement led by the social activist Peri-
yar E Ramasamy in the early twentieth
century. In 1987, during a protest in the
Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu, a Dal-
it scholar was reportedly murdered for
suggesting that people from other castes
could play the parai.
The founders of the Neelam Kalai
Kuzhu are fourth-generation Tamil
migrants in Mumbai. Since the 1960s,
many Dalit and other oppressed-caste
families began migrating to the finan-
cial capital from Tamil Nadu, partic-
ularly the district of Tirunelveli. They
were fleeing caste atrocities, as well as
seeking employment, since land back
home was concentrated in the hands
of the dominant castes. Tamil Nadu
was known for its leather industry, and
Dharavi, where most members of these
communities settled, became a major
centre for tanneries.
In 2014, Raja Kutty, who runs a
shop in Dharavi, started the Jai Bhim
Foundation along with his elder brother
Suresh Kumar, his sister-in-law Vennila
Kartikaran and his friend Nithyanand.
The JBF’s aim was to raise awareness
about caste discrimination by popu-
larising the writings of the anti-caste
intellectuals BR Ambedkar and Periyar.
On 17 January 2016, Rohith Vemula,
a doctoral student at the University of
Hyderabad, committed suicide follow-
ing a discriminatory discipline process
that led to his expulsion, sparking
nationwide outrage. The JBF was part
of a joint-action committee that organ-
ised a peaceful protest rally in Dhar-
avi. The rally, which was reportedlyattended by some five hundred people,
was attacked by activists from the
Hindu-nationalist Rashtriya Swayam-
sevak Sangh. Several protestors were
hospitalised with injuries.
According to a social-media post
by Ajmal Khan, one of the protestors
injured in the attack, the police refused
to intervene despite being present
at the scene. “To lodge a complaint
against the attackers, the protesters
had to camp outside the Dharavi police
station.” It was only when they refused
to leave that the police agreed to file a
complaint under the Scheduled Castes
and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of
Atrocities) Act. However, soon after the
crowd dispersed, the police released the
RSS activists it had detained, who filed
a complaint of their own, against Raja
and other organisers of the protest. The
matter was eventually resolved through
police mediation, but Raja and two oth-
ers continue to attend hearings in a case
filed against them, for organising the
protest without obtaining a no-objection
certificate from the police.
The clash changed how the founders
of the JBF perceived their role in the
anti-caste movement—simply organis-
ing events on the birth anniversaries
of social reformers was not enough
to get the people on their side. To
better reach the masses, they formed
the Neelam Kalai Kuzhu as a cultur-
al wing. Ideology and culture, they
realised, could not be seen separately.
Art could bring people together, and
its role was not limited to entertain-
ment. It could be used to generate
mass awareness. “Art and culture
was there from the time of Buddha,
Charvaka, Sant Kabir to the present
time of Annabhau Sathe,” Raja told me.
“Everything came to us through the
culture only.”
Since the elders in their community
had never played the parai due to the
stigma attached to the instrument,
the members of the NKK picked up
the basics from artists based in TamilThe Sound of the Fury
How an ancient art form became
a symbol of resistance / Caste