Salman Khan and Shilpa Shetty show privileged Indians are at peace with casteism
So, Salman Khan is in trouble again, along with Shilpa Shetty, this time over the use of a casteist slur.
In a clip that is going viral on the internet, Khan, while promoting his latest movie Tiger Zinda Hai in a talk show, says he does not do certain dance steps if they “make him look like a bhangi”. Shetty too, in an unrelated clip, is seen telling a journalist how [unkempt] she looks at home - “I look like a bhangi”.
Bhangi or Mehtar is a derogatory term used to refer to members of the Valmiki caste, a severely disadvantaged group in the Indian caste hierarchy. The actors were using the term to describe themselves in unflattering situations, which is obviously offensive.
The Valmiki community has complained against the two actors, in Rajasthan, Uttarakhand as well as Delhi. Taking note of the complaints, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC) has sent notices to the information and broadcasting ministry as well as the police chiefs of Mumbai and Delhi, asking what action they had taken against the actors.
Friday saw several protests against Khan, with cinema halls screening just-released Tiger Zinda Hai being vandalised in Rajasthan. While neither Khan nor Shetty has so far responded to the latest outcry, this is a script of casual casteism we have seen before.
Too often, socially dominant groups, when called out for using terms derogatory to lowers castes, offer ignorance as defence: “We didn’t know what the term meant, sorry if you didn’t like it”, sometimes followed by “but no need to get so worked up, dude".
In June, a jazz club in Delhi had come under fire for scheduling an event by a band called “Bhangijumping”. While the show was eventually cancelled following protests, the initial defence offered by the band as well as the club was that they had no idea what the word meant and the name was a play on the words “bungee jumping” and the intoxicant “bhaang”.
The incident had generated a lot of buzz on social media, and the comments section had shown that the band and the club were not the only ones who didn't have “any idea” about the term’s deeply offensive origins.
The Valmiki community was traditionally forced into the form of labour considered the lowest in society – cleaning toilets and scavenging, including handling dead bodies.
The sense in which the word is now used – unkempt, unclean, homeless, drug addict – is problematic, as it ties up a community with a wide variety of undesirable traits. It is also shamelessly insensitive – the upper castes forced them to do “dirty work”, and then vilified them for being “unclean”.
That many people continue to use this term, and several others like it, without being aware of their casteist origins shows a special kind of blindness – the ignorance born out of privilege.
Bollywood, as a reflection of the society, has had several such controversies. In May this year, Baahubali 2 courted trouble over a derogatory reference to the butcher community.
In 2009, Shah Rukh Khan’s Billu Barber had to drop “barber” from its name after protests from hairdressers. In 2007, Yash Chopra had apologised after a line in the title song of Madhuri Dixit’s Aaja Nachle caused uproar. The offensive line – which said mochis (cobblers, a lower caste) were pretending to be better than they were (sunars, goldsmiths) was later deleted.
Today, the usage of such terms is not just offensive, but also illegal. In 2011, the Supreme Court had ruled that calling Dalits by their caste with a view to insult them was an offence under Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities Act).
Again in March this year, the SC had ruled that calling someone “dhobi” (washerman) or a Harijan was on offence, observing: “It [such a term] is basically used nowadays not to denote a caste, but to intentionally insult and humiliate someone.”
While there are people in the country who still believe that lower castes are lesser beings who need to be “kept in their place”, equally culpable are those who refuse to accept how all-pervasive and omnipresent casteism is.
All those who pretend that “caste” is something limited to khap panchayats and vague reports of atrocities in faraway villages are either spectacularly ignorant, or willfully blind.
In a country that has seen millennia of caste oppression, the very fact that caste has not left much of a mark in your life speaks of immense privilege – you were either born upper caste, or your family has enough wealth and/or education to pass off as one.
Also, you have conveniently ignored the caste-based discrimination prevalent all around you – how domestic helps were served food in different plates, how most of your family friends had similar surnames and your servants’ had similar, how your teachers, especially in colleges, had certain surnames, the peons the other, the sweepers quite another.
Did your parents have certain colleagues they socialised with, but did not invite to family functions? Did you grow up hearing “jokes” which were basically casteist slurs? When the 2G scam came to light or when reports of Uttar Pradesh’s lawlessness were discussed, did somebody around you remark, “This is what happens if you give power to a lower caste”?
Chances are, the only time you discussed caste was while criticising the reservation system in jobs and colleges, full of righteous hurt and anger at the discrimination against you.
As the protests over Salman Khan's comments rage, chances are the focus will shift to the vandalising of the iconic Rajmandir cinema hall in Jaipur, rather than the actual reason for the protest. While violence is always condemnable, the protests should not be delegitimised or brushed away as oversensitive hyper-reaction.
If you are not aware of how pervasive caste is and how it is used to humiliate, denigrate and diminish people every day, not just with overt violence, but through a million insidious ways, you are part of the problem.
Tiger Zinda Hai faced protests from the MNS, too, over screen-space for Marathi films. However, it has garnered “fantastic response”, on its first day, according to PVR. Bhai is likely to get his happy ending. Hopefully, the protests involving him and Shetty will manage to wake people up to the reality that casteism "zinda hai".