Abstract
Through her vast body of work, Gail Omvedt advanced our understanding about caste, patriarchy and environment. But she lives in our memory as essentially a revolutionary thinker, social activist and prolific writer. Merely because no university employed her on a regular basis, some think that she was not an academic. It is true that in almost 50 years of her work in India, Omvedt joined academic institutions as a researcher and teacher only for short durations. But a permanent affiliation with an academic institution is no prerequisite of being an academic. She remained an academic even without any permanent affiliation with any academic institution. A permanent affiliation would perhaps have been more desirable in one sense. Imagine what a bright crop of students and scholars she would have produced from her perch in academia, if she were given one!
I have heard and read many obituaries by her co-workers and colleagues. No one mentions the experience I had. So, here, from memory, is my one and only meeting with Omvedt. The place was in a Jawaharlal Nehru University mess, around the latter part of 1990 or early 1991. The implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations had been announced by the beleaguered V. P. Singh government. A frenzied opposition to it was taking place everywhere in Delhi. In her piece in Economic & Political Weekly, Omvedt had described the agitation against Mandal Commission a ‘twice-born’ riot against democracy. She believed the purpose of Mandal was to end caste monopoly over public sector jobs (Omvedt, 1990). Omvedt, in fact, began the piece with saying a ‘caste war’ was on and your caste decided your opinion on it. So, a discussion was futile. But, still, she went on to write 8,000-words on the Mandal Commission! I just pointed this irony out to her, jokingly. We were in the University's mess where several students had huddled around her to discuss the Mandal Commission. She looked at me angrily and even asked me to shut up if I could not discuss serious issues seriously. That moment I realised Omvedt did not suffer fools gladly.
The Activist Thinker
Propelled to activism by her vision and work both, Omvedt believed that her research was ‘not just to understand the world but to change it’. Like a good anthropologist, she learnt Marathi, the language of the area she was studying. But she did not stop there. Omvedt married Dr Bharat Patankar, a gynaecologist, younger to her by eight years. He was the son of freedom fighters. Together, they established the Shramik Mukti Dal (Liberation Party of Labourers) in 1980 and lived in a village called Kasegaon located in district Sangli in Maharashtra. It is here that Omvedt breathed her last.
As a thinker, Omvedt integrated several frameworks to understand inequality in all its complexity. As we know, though culturally plural and socially stratified, all the regions of the world have always been ruled by power structures. In class-divided societies, power is exercised more easily through common cultural values. But power of dominant sections in ethnically divided societies, like India, is maintained by a mixed bag of modern policies and traditional strategies (Omvedt, 1973). Omvedt wished to study this latter phenomenon.
Before Omvedt, caste was studied in relation to texts, hierarchy, race, class, tradition, modernity and so on. In her initial work on the non-Brahman movement in western India, Omvedt demonstrated her perspective. She noted that Jyotirao Phule (1827–1890) was a cultural revolutionary who was both anti-tradition and anti-religion. But, even though other contemporary commentators of the upper castes did, he never used the category ‘Hindu’ in his work (Omvedt, 2004). Omvedt studied Phule first, but later went on to understand other revolutionaries following diverse paths. She had to use new ways of looking at their ways of resistance to power. Through her innovative methodology, Omvedt identified new indicators of dalit subordination and they were listed as taxes, torture, inequality, hierarchy and walls forbidding entry into sacred or elite spaces. Resistance to all these, forms the core of her voluminous work.
Gail Omvedt studied the archaeology of inequality and injustice while exploring the possibilities of dalit liberation. She looked at the roots of egalitarian thought starting with intellectual activists and leaders of the subaltern castes from the early modern times by which she meant the Mughal period. She used her stint as a research fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library to produce her masterpiece Seeking Begumpura in 2008.
Why India?
In the this of xenophobia, I am tempted to ask the basic question, why did Omvedt come to India in the first place? Why did she become an Indian citizen? Let us try to answer these existential questions. Omvedt belonged to the generation of the revolution of 1968. In 1968, howsoever briefly, political action wed utopian ecstasy in the West. Led by students across the capitalist world, it was also the first revolt to be televised. Historians believe that all centres of revolt had different causes. These ranged from the Vietnam war and anti-colonialism to some local causes like the violation of civil rights and large-scale student arrests as in Paris.
Gail Omvedt had seen all this before setting foot in India on fieldwork for her PhD. Why did she choose India for her fieldwork? Was she an anti-colonialist who wished to see the Dependency Theory in action? Did she believe that, for global change, the rest of the world or ‘the periphery’ had to revolt with the workers in the West or ‘the core’? Or had Omvedt come for work, but later just fell in love with Indians like Verrier Elwin did? What made Omvedt settle in India? Why did she have only an academic relationship with her field area like fellow American scholars Eleanor Zelliot (1926–2016)? Zelliot and Omvedt had collaborated academically. In 2000, Omvedt translated the autobiography of Vasant Moon, Growing Up Untouchable in India to which Zelliot wrote an introduction. In 1978, both had also written a piece called ‘Introduction to Dalit Poems’ for an issue of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars.
Eleanor Zelliot stayed in the US, but not Omvedt. Why? If Patankar was her reason to love/stay in India, then, should he not write her intellectual biography? What led Omvedt to select the themes she did? How did she work to become a reputed scholar even though she did not have a permanent full-time academic job with a university? What effort did she put in to become the researcher respected by scholars? How did she maintain the reputation of someone who honoured deadlines like a sacred trust?
The evidence on all this is not available and we must await an official biography to answer such questions.