4 - Casteism and the Tsundur Atrocity

Summary

The postcolonial history of India involves many of these brutal cases of organized caste-based violence in the rural landscape. The attacks in Andhra Pradesh, in Karamchedu in Prakasam district (1985) and in Tsundur village in the neighbouring Guntur district (1991), represent two brutal instances, although several other atrocities took place before, between and after Karamchedu and Tsundur. At a national level, the early and well-known incidents that occurred during this grim postcolonial trend happened in Kilvenmani village in the Thanjavur district in southern Tamil Nadu, where forty-four Dalits were burnt to death in December 1968. But the cases in Thanjavur and coastal Andhra suggest that modern agricultural technology provided the material basis for the social changes in these villages that led to extreme brutality. As Paul Brass indicates, it is useful to be cautious when explaining violence in the agrarian context simply by referring to a ‘Green revolution’ rather than to more historical explanations. In fact, it is also important to underline caste as a factor in this context. Some of the cases that happened at the same time as the brutal assault in Kilvenmani are not simply cases of violence in a feudal agrarian structure. Caste relations are embedded in the agrarian mode of production, and the term ‘feudalism’ appears inadequate to explain casteism and violence. It is useful to revisit the ontological difference that Ambedkar emphasized exists between touchables and untouchables, between ‘some bodies’ and ‘nobodies’, to understand how the desire to ‘teach Dalits a lesson’ could play out.

Cases of amorous encounters and upward mobility represent possibilities that transgress basic ideas about differences in an ontology of caste. The incident that took place in Kanchikacherla village on 24 February 1968 in Krishna district could be viewed in this context. On that day, Kotesu, a ‘Harijan boy’, was burnt alive. Kotesu had been charged with stealing two pots and a tumbler, and a group of seven people had tied him to a post in the village, beaten him and later burnt him. While the accusation of theft resonates with a stereotype about Dalits being less trustworthy people, Kotesu's parents had another explanation; they thought that Kotesu was having a love affair with the landlord's daughter.