– Panthukala Srinivas and Prudhvi Raj Duddu
PS and PRD: Could you give a brief introduction about yourself, your background and the idea of Round Table India? How did it come into being, and what made you to start this kind of website for unheard voices?
K: I will start with the background of Round Table India (RTI) how it was started, so that it could also give you the idea of people who built it or founded it originally. RTI was
conceived in the year 2008. It was planned and discussed during the year 2008. There was an environment of Dalit, Bahujan blogging that was building up. Blogging had come up around year 2000 and it came to India in 2003 and 2004. I had been blogging since the very beginning about caste issues and I have been part of several group blogs and my own blog has entered its 11th year. There were very few anti caste Dalit, BC and Adivasi bloggers. I was trying to approach this community to find out how many of these actually there. There is a blog aggregator called Blog Bharati. We used to read every post on blogs, choose 7 or 8 blogs and feature them in the aggregator side. It was manually aggregated. I started actually, because my interest is basically anti caste politics, I would search for hours and hours to see who the dalit bloggers are. I was searching on Google blogs, there is a tool called Google blog, and sometimes the Google came up with questions like “Are you really a person? I was one of the very few anti caste bloggers who was speaking for reservations along with a few dalit students from JNU. There were also two groups called Ambedkar.org and Samatha. Ambedkar.org was a resource library for us. There were only a few sites like this, and many sites came up and went away because of fear and the comments and attacks they faced (this problem exists even now). Whoever wrote about dalit issues and caste issues online as a blogger or in social media like Facebook or Twitter—Twitter is still a jungle for most dalit, bahujans—would to disappear after blogging twice or thrice; this happened dozens of times. Around this time I also came across another blog which was run by Dr. Anuram Das, who was originally based in Bangalore India but is now in USA. We were commenting on each other blogs, discussing policy, caste, dalit exploitation, adivasis and OBCs—how these people have a common structural oppression against which they must fight.
We knew that regional media is more progressive when compared with the national media. Which means the regional language media could be more progressive, even though they are very obscure, than English media. This was visible during the Mandal tour; we (Anuram Das, other bloggers and I) used to discuss this issue. There was a group blog called ‘Insight’ which was run by Anup and others. Anup had earlier run the Insight youth voices magazine with four students from JNU. He had brought eight issues over a period of three years. Insight was read across the country. So, there is an environment for blogging in and outside the campus. This was surely because of dalit movement and the extension of Bahujan movement and it was mostly led by students. ‘Insight’ closed down for various reasons. At this point of time we were discussing a more comprehensive portal than just a blog; a website where we could resource dalit history and anti caste history, Ambedkar’s writings and philosophy; where we could also get dalit poetry, women’s poetry, anti caste poetry across religions, Muslims, Buddhist, Christian in whatever form. So, you will find the largest collection of anti caste poetry shared in the blog which in affiliated to RTI. We also wanted to be very current and aggregate news related to dalits and adivasis from mainstream media. We wanted a section on reservation policy, policies affecting dalits, adivasis and OBCs. We planned multiple sections on different issues, a complete portal just like a news site, but on a very micro scale. This, instead of just a blog, is our idea. We do also have a contemporary commentary section and also one section on activism which features activists like Panthukala Srinivas, DIET and others. What are the current events these activists are involved in, what are the books being released, reviews – we took up several leads to approach people from all regions and to reach all sections of readers from India as well as other countries. So, if we are able to reach all these people, the community as such already existed. It sprang together once we started the site. Thus just as the Insight blog was triggered, the RTI idea too emerged with the combination of likeminded people—two dalits and one OBC. It is also probable that various common features we shared with respect to social class brought us together—urban upbringing for example. This is why we chose English (and also because the regional vernaculars are caste specific)—to reach out to all people. This is how it happened. So, broadly speaking the idea evolved in 2008.
PS and PRD: What is the effect of caste in running a social, new media site? How do you run it? How many people are involved in preparing the stories or interviews or features or writing? Did you get any feedback from readers?
We get feedback all the time from almost every university. When we approach people they say ‘we read RTI’ and it is mostly upper caste people who keep praising us a lot—but we don’t fall into that trap, because we know for them we are data to be studied; for them our writing is something to be stolen and not cited or given courtesy. We are quite aware that upper caste academy and media, especially, have been trying to poach on us; every few weeks people point out that they have stolen inappropriately this writing or that writing from our site. So, we are quite aware of that, but my vision and objective from the beginning is to have impact on the readers. The focus was primarily on building a platform where democratic debates are given to the dalit-bahujan educated public. We are very aware that a cream of the community in many senses has emerged, and there are all highly educated, very articulate people, they have fought and come up to a high level. They will not take any kind of bullshit and they are intensely involved in the movement. Their impact is such that you know we have been provided a ground where people can congratulate and speak to each other. However even this is limited because we need to recognize the time line in the caste system itself. If untouchability was born in the fourth century and then traveled south by 1080, 4th AD to 1080, it took a long time and by 1080 it was experienced strongly. It kept strengthening itself through every form of sociopolitical approval even in the colonial period. We are aware that that these time lines are long. What we felt was that this critique should sustain itself, remain open to all kinds of challenges and adapt itself to all kinds of circumstances. What its impact is, you as a social researcher, should measure it and tell us. It has been a brilliant experience; I am now 51 years old, and I hope I can continue to learn during the rest of my life as I have in these 7 years. Our impact cannot be measured in terms of awards received or in terms of capital generated or revenue generated. Our award is in terms of meeting every new epistemic challenge by the ruling class and every form of violence committed at the village, town level or in the universities. This platform could challenge this violence everywhere; however, this is happening on a very minute scale. This should happen on a bigger scale, but the existence of this platform for seven years is an achievement and it is attracting the belief of the community. Two to three hundred writers—from Delhi to Kerala, from Assam to Gujarat, from Punjab to Odessa, from here to UK to Germany to USA to Australia—spend time on this site and some of them write repeatedly. The many contributors and readers have a kind of ownership over RTI. Their trust in us, their faith in us, their confidence in us and their sense of finding meaning in this site is crucially important. This is the best indicator of the impact. It keeps us committed and sustains our interest and energy. If I was 20 years younger I could be doing much more, but even at this age it gives me energy to work more. Despite having extra jobs our other editors like Anup and Bhanu, put in that extra effort—this is our capital. It is a medium or platform sustained fully by a community. However, even though the community is always a promise it will never be fully homogeneous, it will never be fully undifferentiated, there will be differences of opinion that will strongly oppose each other but across globe these people feel a sense of ownership and have a stake in it. It continues to be appreciated and that can’t be measured.
PS and PRD: Is there anything important you would like to say to the readers?
K: Yes, we have built this space together. It should be sustained and it depends on totally on the community which has been involved. It is a communal home. Everyone has contributed to it brick by brick. I am a strict follower of Manyawar Kanshiram sir, I envisage a bahujan society. He said in a meeting “I believe in two nation theory those who are oppressors and those who are oppressed”. So the educated community has a larger responsibility among the dalits and bahujans too—they have to seek and understand each other. This space has to be sustained and expand into other dimensions. We are expanding into publishing so that we don’t remain mere clients to upper class publishers and media. So this model can be replicated. We could develop knowledge and research completely independent of mediation of brahmanic institutions like academia or media just like BAMCEF and Ambedkar’s discourse are constructed. There is a need for bahujan civil society to grow. The brahmanic civil society is old, dying and decaying but it won’t give up without a fight because of the 2000 years old history of caste. We underestimate our strength. We have to build bahujan civil society and the dalit is the natural leader. The dalit movement should strengthen itself through production of much knowledge that is very necessary, and we should do it independently. We don’t need upper caste mediation or white people’s mediation. We will probably build concrete institutions too, but that is for future, but the message is that we can build independently. We don’t need to seek brahmin or upper caste support in any sense because we are the producers of this. Kanshiram sir also said, when he was once asked where will you get money for all these elections? He said ‘it is simple the bahujan samaj produces all the wealth in this country, why will we be short of money?’ He was never scared of lack of resources but we should beware of lack of confidence in ourselves.
Panthukala Srinivas, teaches in English and Foreign Languages University.
Prudhvi Raj Duddu, teaches English to college students in Hyderabad.