The Channar Revolt that took place in the 19th century in the erstwhile princely state of Travancore reverberates even today. This paper aims to understand the context of the revolt, the questions and themes it brought forward, and how such questions continue to influence women’s lives. It seeks to make sense of the act of resistance and revolt by the systematically oppressed and exploited Dalit women and see how they are reflected in present-day resistance undertaken by women in different contexts. Further, this paper recontextualizes such themes of oppression and resistance while talking about the conditions of Muslim women in India.
The History of the Channar Revolt
The Channar Revolt was an extremely significant movement that enables us to understand how different identities of women function together. “People who live the lives of ‘women’ have a specific socio-economic and cultural location that disempowers them. Women of ‘lower’ castes would experience this oppression differently from those of upper castes” (Menon, 2009). Women inhere several identities simultaneously, and exploitation may accrue either because of enmeshing of different identities or they even might be because of any one identity at any particular moment. The lives of women are defined by the structures of society and its ensemble of various contestations and contradictions of gender, class, caste, and community. The historical underpinnings of the Channar revolt show how caste and gender enmesh together to inflict atrocities on Dalit women.
In the 19th century, in the erstwhile princely state of Travancore, there existed a practice that enforced women from the Nadar community to stay bare-chested in front of the upper caste men (Singh, 2019). Such a practice was considered to be a symbol of respect toward them. They were not allowed to wear the upper cloth which the upper caste women could wear. Further, if any Nadar woman rebelled by covering her chest in front of the upper caste men, she had to pay a tax called ‘The Breast Tax’ which was equated according to the size of the breasts of the woman in question. The Maharaja and the colonial empire held that the Nadar women must not dress the way they wanted to and must follow discriminatory practices that were enforced by the upper castes. “The dress and adornments of women as objects” made “their bodies ‘distinguishable’ in terms of caste identities, so that purity and social position of each caste could be ascertained” (Valsa, 2018-19). However, the Nadar women questioned such blatant discrimination and demanded dignity and respect.
Whenever the women from the Nadar community tried to cover their breasts in front of the upper caste men, they were met with extreme physical and sexual violence. The tussle between the upper-caste men and the lower-caste women continued for years. The colonial state even allowed the Nadar women to wear blouses similar to those of Christian or Persian women if they converted to Christianity. Such proposals were not acceptable to the upper caste men who felt that their power was reducing over the Dalit community. However, the women continued their struggle against upper-caste violence and formed a long-prolonged movement. The movement climaxed, when Nangeli, a Nadar woman was asked to pay the breast tax for covering her chest. Nangeli out of utter despair and as a final act of rebellion chops off her breasts and did not pay the tax. She died at the site of the protest and her husband jumped on her funeral pyre out of sorrow and fear of any further upper-caste violence.
Questions and Themes Raised by the Movement
Caste-Gender Entanglement
“A marked feature of Hindu society is its legal sanction for an extreme expression of social stratification in which women and the lower castes have been subjected to humiliating conditions of existence. Caste hierarchy and gender hierarchy are the organizing principles of Brahmanical social order” (Chakravarti, 1993). The enmeshing of caste and gender in determining the identity of a marginalized woman is reflected in the ordeal faced by Nadar women and their resistance. Brahmanical patriarchy controls women to preserve their order and honour is attached to them because they become are the carriers of caste. “Women are regarded as gateways-literally points of entrance into the caste system” (Chakravarti, 1993). Lower caste women are subjugated, humiliated, discriminated and violated because they belong to their community. Oppressing and exploiting lower-caste women is also a way to oppress the men in those communities. The honour and respectability of low caste men (if they are given any) are called into question by violating “their women”. The oppressors while oppressing the marginalized women question the manhood of the men of their communities.
Control over Bodily Autonomy and Sexuality
“A fundamental principle of Hindu social organization is to construct a closed system to preserve land, women, and ritual quality within it. The three are structurally linked and it is impossible to maintain all three without stringently organizing female sexuality” (Chakravarti, 1993). The Nadar women were not allowed to cover their chests with the upper cloth not just to maintain caste differentiation but to also demonstrate upper-caste control over their bodies, sexualities, and existence. If the upper cloth worn by the upper caste women was a marker of their respect and modesty, itself a patriarchal construct to control women; the marginalized women were considered immodest and available to upper caste men whenever they want. The body of the Dalit woman was sexualized and presented as loose objects of desire for pleasure. The resistance of Nadar women shows how bodies become crucial sites of contestation. While the nakedness of Nadar women symbolized the casteist-feudal nature of their oppression and sexualization, Nangeli’s act of chopping off her breasts when she wasn’t allowed to cover her forced nakedness symbolized that body is more than mere sexualized objects. It is a matter of autonomy, dignity, and self-respect.
Access to Public Spaces
Marginalized women, who resist oppression also try to claim the public spaces so long denied to them. When the upper-caste men inflicted physical and sexual violence on women by tearing away their upper cloth in public spaces, they tended to force them to remain inside their homes and maintain distance. However, an unequal society does not allow people at the bottom of the hierarchy to stay at home. The unequal division of resources questions their survival. Dalit women bear the burden of economic backwardness and have to toil in public spaces and face violence for sheer survival. The resistance is, therefore an act to gain visibility and reclaim a hyper-masculinist public space. Women transgress the morality of the public space when they do exactly what they are told not to do.
The Reaction of Ruling Regimes
The Channar Revolt brings out an important dimension of the state or regimes in power. The then-British colonial rule sided with people in social-economic power. It maintained that the lower caste women must follow “caste differentiation”. When women rose in revolt, it was a threat to the social order that the state had to protect. While we can say that the 19th-century state was feudal, patriarchal, and colonial, their stance was obvious. In the present context, the contemporary regime has constantly sought to erase specific histories that have challenged the social order and people in power. The chapters dealing with the details of the Channar Revolt and caste oppression were subsequently deleted from the CBSE textbooks (Ameerudheen, 2019).
Recontextualizing the Channar Revolt in the Contemporary Context
An unequal society always requires someone to be at the bottom of society. The emergence of a right-wing, hyper-masculinist, casteist, authoritarian state in India is ensuring that Muslims habitat to the ‘new bottom’ of society. The abrogation of Article 370 to change the demography of the only Muslim majority state, the CAA, and the responses to resistance that developed against it, hijab ban, mob lynching, love jihad, demolition of houses in Muslim colonies, jailing of Muslim activists, etc. clearly shows the agenda of the state which is to dehumanize and other Muslims as a community.
When it comes to Muslim women, ironically, the state becomes their political liberator against the “oppressive Muslim Men” as in the case of Triple Talaq (Sur, 2018). The government argued that criminalizing Muslim husbands uttering spontaneous divorce while the marriage isn’t annulled would liberate Muslim women. Such developments show that the state tries to pit women against their community while doing nothing that improves their socioeconomic situation. Similarly, when the government repelled Article 370, it claimed to liberate women from its oppressive and orthodox community that didn’t allow them to “marry outside” the state. Thus, under the pretext of liberation, it sexualized Kashmiri Muslim Women.
While Muslim women were considered to be bodies staying in the confines of their homes, during the Anti-CAA protest they turned their bodies into markers of resistance (Gajjala, 2020). They asserted their Muslim identity by wearing Burqas and Hijabs, something that most Muslim women do not necessarily wear. Such assertions were important to bring out the narratives of the regime that marks that the CAA had no religious connotations. More recently “the Sulli deals” auctioned Muslim women online marking nothing but sexualization and exotification of minority women already facing brutalities by the state.
In consonance with the Nadar revolt and the question of dressing and agency, to choose to wear what one woman wants to wear, we can situate the debate surrounding the Burqa controversy and its subsequent ban in educational institutions. The state determines on behalf of the women that following a certain practice is oppressive and the only way to liberate them is by banning them outrightly (Sanghvi, 2022). While Muslim women have been protesting such an act, claiming that the Burqa or Hijab is a matter of their choice, the state does not just deny them autonomy and choice, it also infantilizes them as people who aren’t capable enough to determine what is exploitative and liberatory.
The Irony of Freedom
Much has unfortunately not changed since the 19th century. While we are celebrating 75 years of Indian Independence under the tagline, “Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav”, a nine-year-old Dalit child is beaten to death for drinking water from the pot of his headmaster (PTI, 2022) and the eleven gang rapists of Bilkis Banu are set free, garlanded and celebrated under the Gujrat state’s remission policy (Dahiya, 2022). What does freedom mean to the marginalized in this country? Women belonging to marginalized communities still face extreme forms of exploitation, oppression, violence, and prejudice. The recontextualization of themes in this paper is not simply a passive act. It is an attempt to draw inspiration from these women who are fighting every day, against oppressive structures within the family, educational, and work institutions, society, and the state. Hope in such dark times looks cruel and a mere privilege. But as we take on this journey of looking for a better society, we must remember that bell hooks said, “the conviction that feminism must become a mass-based political movement if it is to have a revolutionary, transformative impact on society” and as Angela Davis said, “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time”.
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Tahseen Fatima is an MA student at the Centre for Political Studies (CPS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).