The act of mocking someone or something is to laugh at someone in an unkind way. It is an act of making fun of someone or something to hurt the individual or group in an indirect aesthetic way. The aesthetic use is different from explicit means of domination and discrimination like restrictions on economic mobility, access, education etc. Yet it is an effective tool to humiliate, deride and ridicule the marginalized even as it is put forward as a ‘joke’. It involves the use of satirical jokes, humour and casteist slurs about the socio-economic and cultural institutions of marginalized communities, to target the individual or the community and enforce their worldviews by projecting themselves and their beliefs as necessary superior.
Mockery was used as a social and political power by dominant twice-born communities to demean or insult the marginalized castes in Indian society. The Aryans saw the native languages and culture of Aboriginals as inferior and established the hegemony of the Sanskrit language and Brahminical culture in their day-to-day and public life which was alien to the natives. The Aryans made jest of the native culture to advance their own culture and power. The mockery was used in the past as an instrument of power to sideline and psychologically dominate the lower caste groups. It has been used by colonial powers to humiliate the colonized. Homi K. Bhaba maintains that Macaulay once observed that a “single shelf of a good European library was worth the entire native literature of India and Arabia” (Bhaba 1994). He argues that the British made a mockery of Indian education and culture by using the Eurocentric framework to demoralize them. Mockery is mostly used by the powerful over the less powerful people and not vice-versa (ibid).
Mockery is often used as an aesthetic tool by the elite castes to demean the reservation system implemented after the Mandal Commission report (Rawat & Satyanarayana 2016); (Sukumar & D’Souza 2023). The students of marginalized backgrounds are marked as quota students and demoralized by some of the caste Hindu students. When they cannot explicitly attack the reservation system itself, they crack jokes and mock the reservation system to destroy the self-confidence of marginalized students. This mockery of the reservation system is not restricted to academic spaces. Within the public sphere, the notion of caste-based reservation is widely mocked and demeaned. Caste-based reservation is portrayed as unethical and exclusive of the poor on many unrelated grounds. They ignore the fact that the foundation of the reservation is caste discrimination and injustice faced for centuries by the marginalized communities. The consequent stigmas and deprivations are still visible. An individual can change his economic status but cannot change his caste. The mockery is a very effective and aesthetic strategy of elite power and knowledge. The belief in the idea of social justice and caste-based reservation is mocked as a colonial mindset. The savarnas make fun of every institution aiding the upliftment of the downtrodden and marginalized communities of India. The savarnas with the facade of decolonization make a mockery of even the Indian constitution as a colonial product alien to Indian tradition. They have problems even with the constitution as it upholds the notion of social justice for the upliftment of marginalized communities.
Realizing the dangers of confrontation and domination, the caste Hindus adopt the tools of mockery, satirical humour and a snide smile to target the self-confidence of the marginalized students. The British mocked Indian education and culture because they wanted to produce mimic men who later became the challenge for the Britishers but the Savarnas on the contrary mocked the marginalized when the latter tried to proceed for the realization of their socio-economic development. They obstruct them with different casteist remarks popular in day to day life of the savarans i.e. “gadha agar naal thukva lega toh ghoda nahi ho jayega” (Even If the donkey gets the horseshoe thumped, it will not become a horse). Many other similar casteist slurs are used to mock the efforts of the downtrodden to uplift themself. The mockery and ridiculing of caste fellows and leaders are perpetuated at two levels. At the local level often, their political aspirations are crushed even before they have taken root. When a young boy from the Mallah community wears new outfits the new upper caste members often pass derogatory and degrading comments on them: “कहां से आइल बा हो ? एकर माई दादा इने ओने मछरी मारा ता … आ ई हरामी ऐसे घूमा ता जइसे कहीं के राजकुमार हवे” (where has he come from guys? His Mother and grandfather are hunting fishes here and there and this bastard is roaming like he is a prince of somewhere).The upper caste like the Nazi perpetrators used the psychological tools of domination to destroy any possibility of solidarity among the specific marginalized community. These tactics led to the loss of social connectedness and resulted in what Orlando Patterson calls “social death” (Jogdand & Sinha 2015).
A few months back some students of Jain University, Bangalore in the name of art made fun of Babasaheb Ambedkar and the Dalit Community (Belur 2023). Students from marginalized communities often suffer psychologically and commit suicide due to such a toxic environment of mockery in educational institutions. Most students from the upper caste considered students from SC as unworthy of getting any fellowship and humiliated them when they got the different fellowship by making a mockery of them i.e. “ab toh tum bade aadmi ho gaye ho” (now you have become a big person) as if they were less human before getting the fellowship (Sukumar 2022).
In academic spaces, marginalized students are ridiculed as quota students. The savarnastudents have developed their own set of strategies to psychologically hurt their counterparts from marginalized backgrounds. When a student coming from the Dalit Bahujan community asks questions in the classroom, the savarna students would silently laugh at their way of expression and language etc. to discourage them from asking further questions in future classes.
It may be argued that the mockery by the upper caste is a defensive tactic used to make up for the social loss brought on by the modernist entrance of Black people in the US and Dalits in India. To put it another way, the assertion of Black people in the US and Dalits in India is suggested by the fear of the coming of the “kaliyug.” Fear of being equalized or, in the worst situations, outperformed by previously underprivileged people (Guru 2009). The use of aesthetic tools of discrimination is an indication that the nature of discrimination is changing from explicit to implicit mode. Social jealousy seems to be replacing ritual untouchability (Lakshman 2023).
References:
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture.
Belur, R. (2023). Atrocity Case Against Jain Varsity Students for Insulting Play on Ambedkar, SC Community. Deccan Herald. 11 February 2023. Retrieved September 27, 2023, from https://www.deccanherald.com/india/karnataka/bengaluru/atrocity-case-against-jain-varsity-students-for-insulting-play-on-ambedkar-sc-community-1190219.htm
Guru, G. (2009). Humiliation: Claims and Context. Oxford University Press.
Jogdand, Y., & Sinha, C. (2015). Can Leaders Transform Humiliation Into a Creative Force? Journal of Leadership Studies, 9(3), 75–77. https://doi.org/10.1002/jls.21413
Lakshman, A. (2023, September 27). The Dalit of the new millennium has matured: Sudha Pai. The Hindu. https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/the-dalit-of-the-new-millennium-has-matured-sudha-pai/article67350088.ece
Rawat, R. S., & Satyanarayana, K. (2016). Dalit Studies. Duke University Press.
Sukumar, N. (2022). Caste Discrimination and Exclusion in Indian Universities: A Critical Reflection (1st ed.). Routledge India.
Sukumar, N., & D’Souza, P. (2023). The Journey of Caste in India: Voices from Margins. Routledge.
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Ankur Kumar is a Research Scholar at the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Delhi.