Chandu Maheria (b. 1959) should be among India’s most-celebrated intellectuals. Over the past four decades, he has authored more than 1,000 columns, published books on migration, the water crisis and B.R. Ambedkar, edited anthologies of Dalit literature and lent a steady hand to the anti-caste movement. Yet he is hardly known outside his native Gujarat, and this is only his second essay to appear in English. The savarna elites who control Anglophone magazines and publishing houses have found no use for him. They did not care about caste or vernacular journalism.

One hesitates to describe Maheria as a memoirist, though his writings generally draw on personal experience. All too often, the value of a Dalit autobiography is reduced to its ethnographic content. In the late 1970s, Shanta Gokhale, the doyenne of Marathi literature, was shocked by the “graphic description of life in rural Maharashtra” presented in Daya Pawar’s Baluta (1978), which is sometimes described as the first modern Dalit memoir. Four decades later, a young critic in The Wire reflected that Omprakash Valmiki’s 1997 Hindi classic Joothan “shows just how far removed we are from the lived experiences of Dalits”. (Both take their titles from the leftover scraps of food given to Dalits as “compensation” for performing their hereditary caste occupations in the village.)

Maheria, who grew up in a Dalit ghetto on Ahmedabad’s industrial eastern fringes, has experienced his fair share of suffering. Indeed, his life has been marked by hunger (“When I saw my sticky-fingered classmates sampling pakoras… I burned with jealousy”), privation (“Our chawl .... didn’t have even a single toilet attached to it”) and humiliation (“Though Dalits and non-Dalits drudged in those mills together under the same precarity and pressure, their dining sheds were segregated”). Yet to fixate on such details would be to uphold the caste system’s first principle: namely, that upper castes can think and create, while the lower castes merely endure their circumstances. It would deepen what the scholar Gopal Guru describes, in another context, as the “pernicious divide between theoretical Brahmins and empirical Shudras”.

Maheria’s writing commands our attention for its literary merits: sly humour, warm character portraits, vivid description and, above all, philosophical depth. In a typical move, he will examine a common object – a roti, a piece of interior decoration, a public toilet – and find the secrets of the caste system hiding within. In this essay, his subject is the chappal, a leather slipper traditionally made by Chamars, a Dalit community whose ancestral trade was leather tanning and cobbling. In this humble item of footwear, he ventures into the maze of Hindu metaphysics, analysing tanning’s status as a ritually polluting but socially indispensable occupation, reflecting on the enduring associations between feet and social lowliness (Shudras are said to have emerged from the feet of a cosmic, primeval man, while Brahmins came out of his head), and looking back, with pain but without rancour, at his own largely barefoot childhood.

Equator selected this sketch from a portfolio of 12 prose self-portraits translated by Hemang Ashwinkumar; the manuscript is looking for a publisher.


—Ratik Asokan

Even after all this time, whenever our extended family gathers under one roof, whether in grief or happiness, and their conversations turn to the past, one episode from my childhood never fails to delight them.

The year is 1964 or 1965. I am a lisping kid of five or six. Much against his wishes, buckling under the pressure of his conservative parents, my progressive father – or ba, as we called him – has agreed to make arrangements for the child marriages of my elder brother and sister. The wedding ceremony is to take place in Khadol, our native village in central Gujarat. Hearing that her well-to-do son, who works in a textile mill in Ahmedabad, is coming home with his family to marry away his children, my grandma is elated – even more elated than a Patel mother receiving her US-based son at Ahmedabad airport.

It is my first ever train journey. Setting out early in the morning, we disembark at Anand and from there catch a bus to our village, arriving around noon. The preparations begin as soon as we enter the vas, the Chamar ghetto on Khadol’s outskirts. Women pound and winnow the grain we have brought along – millet, sorghum and rice. Someone sets up a small, brass idol of Lord Ganesha as a part of the Ganesh Sthapana ritual. Enterprising young men go from house to house along the street, asking to borrow everyone’s best sarees, and then start erecting the ceremonial tent. We children strut around in our brand-new clothes and chappals. In the rush of activity, no one notices when night falls.

This is my first night in our native village, and the one that will live in my memory forever. Exhausted after a full day’s work, everybody silently finds a place here and there, inside or outside the home, where they spread mattresses or just plain bedsheets on the floor. As night thickens outside, I doze off on a quilt in a corner, still wearing my new chappals. Assuming that I am fast asleep, my mother tries to slip them off, and I wake up with a start.

When ma asks that I part with my footwear, I flatly refuse. She tries to cajole me, but I am stubborn. The more she struggles to pull the chappals off, the firmer my grip on them becomes. Hearing the rising commotion, people rush over to witness the tug of war between mother and son. Quiet amusement gives way to hearty laughter, and soon the crowd is egging me on. Ba comes over too, and tries to reason with me, but I remain as unyielding as a rock, inviting spanks on the back and then the bottom. I cry my eyes out, but emerge victorious, and sleep with the spoils of war, my small feet tightly hugging on to those chappals.

The reason I put up such a struggle was fear – the fear of losing my brand-new chappals to a thief or a sniffing street dog. New clothes were one thing, but I really didn’t want to take any chances with my chappals. I had never owned a pair before. For that matter, I never used to wear any kind of footwear around our chawl, even while using the public toilets.

The “hereditary occupation” assigned to us Chamars is tanning and cobbling. In Khadol, we shared our rear veranda with Govind, an old fellow who would sit hunched over his anvil from dawn to dusk, stitching up a great variety of footwear – chappals, mojdis, cheap flat-soled slippers – as well as leather straps for waterwheels. Most other Chamar households in the vas were engaged in the same line of work. All day, the vas throbbed with the footfalls of the upper-caste Patel and Thakor women who arrived from Khadol proper to have their measurements taken. But in the casteist village economy, we Chamars were less like salespeople and more like bonded contractors.¹

The residents of the Chamar vas were surprised to learn that the child of their urban caste-brother had never owned a pair of chappals before – that the son of a man who worked in a textile mill in the Manchester of India went without chappals, was a bitter irony not lost on those poor, unlettered villagers. For them, it was an object lesson in how the destiny of tanners persisted across geography and history.

I don’t remember ever wearing a pair of chappals at the municipal school in Rajpur where I was a pupil until year seven. Even today, when I visit my alma mater, my gaze lowers to the grimy, unshod feet of the students playing and running about. And whenever I see devotees of the god Rama making their holy processions down the street, bellowing their war cries and carrying the god’s paduka (wooden sandals) at the helm, those children’s unshod feet flash before my eyes.

In the Mahabharata, even King Dushyant was ordered to move about barefoot in sage Kanva’s ashram, as befitted the ascetic code of conduct. But at the Democratic School at Gomtipur, where the landed and genteel classes sent their scions, the capricious administration had decreed that students could not enter the premises this way. A pair of slippers in those days cost about one or one-and-a-half rupees – a paltry amount, but one that few Dalit households could afford. This was lost on our worthy, savarna teachers, however, who were more interested in policing divisions of caste and class than in enlightening us.

On the first day of classes, some of us barefoot students from the Dalit chawls were duly turned away at the school gate. The mix of surprise and shock I felt then remains present in my mind after all these years. As we made our unshod hegira home, no Rama paduka came to our rescue, nor was there any kind of NGO or charity-run chappal service to help us.² Later in the term, if a student was caught red-handed – or rather, bare-footed – they would be thoroughly thrashed by our custodians of civility.

As a good student, I managed to befriend boys from well-to-do savarna families. Some even visited our dilapidated house in the chawl. On one such occasion, I brought down a portrait photograph of my family that hung on a flaking wall in our front room, and showed it to them with great delight and pride. One of them asked, “Why aren’t you wearing chappals in the picture?” My brilliant retort: chappals were not allowed inside the photographer’s studio. Today, that framed image sits cosily on my office desk. Often, when I look at it, I marvel at the ties the artist had slipped around the necks of my brother and me. How dapper we looked, even as our unshod feet dangled from our chairs.

Once upon a time, an adventurous king, forced to walk barefoot on roads that were too stony for his chariot, hit upon the idea of covering all his kingdom’s streets in leather. His clever minister found him an easier and cheaper solution: wrap your own feet in leather, he suggested.

That is one origin story of footwear. I’m not sure when and how that modest invention turned into a status symbol in India. Even today, Dalits in several villages of South India are banned from traversing non-Dalit areas with their chappals on – the savarna population considers it an affront. Such glaring discrimination, which persists after decades of independence, singes my soul, just as the hot asphalt roads of my childhood once burned my tender feet.

Not that I am unfamiliar with discrimination. During childhood visits to Khadol, in the mornings, I would gape as ma and other women from the vas, water-pots and chappals in hand, marched out in a group towards a distant scrub for a squat. They put their chappals on only after leaving the village. It wasn’t until much later that I grasped the patriarchal basis of this curious behaviour. Women were considered “paon ki juti” – as disposable as the soles on our shoes. How dare they wear chappals in the presence of men? The same Dalit man who lorded it over his wife at home also walked through savarna quarters with his chappals in hand – and without any dawning epiphanies.

There are so many words to describe footwear: upaan, chappals, pairs, shoes, mojdis, footwear, slippers, sandals, flat-soled slip-ons… but this universe is reduced in the imagination of the Gujarati Dalit to just one word: khasadan, which (along with variations like khasadakootun, khasadankhor, khasadanbaji), literally means ‘shoes’ but connotes contempt, lowliness, uncouth behaviour, someone accustomed to beatings with shoes, and so on. How pertinent it is that ma’s eldest brother, Kala mama, peppered all his conversations with this signature line: “Your chappals, our skulls.”

Perhaps this takiya kalam –a mantra of life, if you will – applied to a whole generation of Dalits who grew up amid overt discrimination and unchecked feudalism. Those were the days when Dalits were beaten with khasadan at the drop of a hat. Well into the 1970s, the dominance of the Darbars – the landed nobility – in the Bhal region of Gujarat was so total that a Dalit man, seeing a pair of shoes on the threshold of his house, had to turn around and walk away – the shoes indicated that a Darbar man was molesting his wife inside, exercising his traditional right over her body.

In 1975, when a group of young Dalit men in Golana, armed with a new consciousness of freedom and equality, challenged a Darbar, he had to jump out of the window and run for his life, leaving his shoes behind. The next day, the rapist’s father stormed the vas, swore filthily at the men, women and children of about 100 Dalit families, and claimed his inviolable right to molest any untouchable woman of his choice. Though the Dalit youths were determined to put an end to institutionalised sexual exploitation, the vas elders finally made amends for their insolence by walking through the village with the rapist’s torch, turban and shoes in their mouths, right up to the Darbar’s house, to return his son’s belongings. Perhaps that’s what Kala mama meant when he said “Your chappals, our skulls.”

Another footwear-related memory from that time has not faded. My youngest paternal uncle, Khushal mama, had made both ends meet by crafting and mending shoes all his life. He procured all his trade supplies from Ahmedabad and sat outside a Bania businessman’s pedhi, or shop, with his peti, his cobbler’s box. In time, he came to call his peti a pedhi: each morning, as he set out for work, he announced, for the benefit of everyone at home, that he was going to his shop. Even today, for most Chamars in the cobbling business, their peti, however modest and makeshift, is a pedhi. What a brilliant way to elevate your low occupation! That’s probably as far as samrasata – the Hindutvawadi’s much- touted ideal of social harmony – ever really comes into being in India.

Thanks to some good teachers and the state policy of affirmative action, I finished college and secured a government job. Even then, the idea of owning leather chappals didn’t tempt me. For years, I wore plastic slippers to work, until one scorching afternoon in May, when I was sipping a cup of tea in Bawari bazar with my poet-friend Harikrishna Pathak, who systematically and sophisticatedly denounced my footwear, explaining its ill effects on his eyes. Spooked, I bought myself a pair of leather chappals from Khadi Haat on my next payday.

In time, I graduated to leather shoes and exulted for a few years in the corporate feeling they gave me. In 2001, when I was to go abroad for the first time to attend the World Conference against Racism in Durban, I purchased an expensive pair of sports shoes on the advice of better-travelled friends. My feet took a liking to them, and now I can’t give the bloody things up.

These days, I spend anything between two and five thousand rupees on a pair of shoes without batting an eyelid. But that image of my young self, curled up on the floor in the Chamar vas of Khadol village, toes clinging to my very first pair of chappals, will not vanish, not even for a fleeting moment, from my old mind, which is otherwise gradually loosening its grip on the past.

Critics often distinguish between the literature of sympathy and the literature of experience, posing this rhetorical question: “Who knows the bite of the sandal better than the wearer?” Fair enough. But this is a story of a boy who seemed destined to go without chappals altogether – a boy who, for a long time, only knew footwear by its absence.

Where, I wonder, are the critical theories that can appraise a story like that?

1. In the caste economy of the village at that time, Dalit and upper-caste households mutually exchanged services and goods as part of an informal contract; the two parties addressed each other as gharak, i.e. customer. Dalits wove fabrics and footwear for the savarnas, and also worked in the fields of their feudal overlords, who in return provided them with food and other supplies from time to time. The exploitative nature of this barter economy cannot be stressed enough.
2. Gandhi, who possessed a rare understanding of caste and the poverty of his countrymen, used to build a chappal parab, a roadside hut full of piles of footwear for people participating in anti-colonial agitations and rallies. Anyone could borrow a pair at the start of a march and return it at the end. This move sought to reconfigure the public sphere by marrying it to the idea of Swaraj, or self-rule. I am indebted for this insight to Tridip Suhrud.