What happens when an Indian goes to India?

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URBANE INDIAN

The gods of Air Canada had deemed it necessary to place me in the most uncomfortable seat possible; the one in the middle row of four. There I sat, all six feet, 196 lbs. of me for 16 hours, including the two hours we spent on the runway waiting to take off. Maybe the crowded airplane seats would serve to acclimatize the passengers to a country with a population of about 1 billion.

After fighting claustrophobia all the way, I landed half a world away from home, primed for a series of conferences. The first was in Jaipur where I was introduced as Professor Drew Hayden Taylor. News to me! I didn't bother to correct them. I tried to act smarter.

Here I encountered Dalit literature. The Dalits, also known as the Untouchables, are the lowest caste in Hindu society. They used to do all the menial work for the higher castes and were considered unclean. Some had to walk with a broom tied to their backs to sweep the ground where they'd walked.

The caste system was officially abolished in the Indian constitution back in the 1950s, but prejudices like this die hard. Dalits make up a quarter of the population. Much like the Native people of North America, they've discovered literature as a means of liberation, beginning to write their own stories, tragic survival narratives of an oppressed people finding their voice.

One of my travelling companions, Alok Mukherjee, a high-caste brahman, translated a book titled Towards An Aesthetic Of Dalit Literature by Sharankumar Limbale, and was discussing it at the conference. At one point a woman stood up and asked him, "Now that (the Dalit) are being appeased by the government, why are they still complaining and upset?" Boy, did this sound familiar to my Aboriginal ear.

Wandering around Jaipur, I began to develop a strange sense of "otherness." I did not belong and was indistinguishable from any other white tourist. I saw a Caucasian couple that looked and dressed like me riding an elephant. They even waved to me. On the drive up to see a fort, a man came running up to the car and banged on my window, shoving his guide's license against the glass, begging us to hire him. He picked my window because my fellow travellers were obviously South Asian. My companions told me to "get used to it. You're white here."

A few days later we flew to Hyderabad, the location of the conference on post-colonial commonwealth literature in English.

The first controversy hit when conference-goers fumed that no Dalit writers had been invited to present papers. E-mails flew all over the place like bats in an insect frenzy. Later that night, at the official book launch of Mukherjee's translation, it was pointed out that the author, a Dalit, had not been invited. Kind of awkward, to say the least.

As we got ready to return to our hotel, a conference volunteer asked if we needed a ride. I asked if he was our driver, and he laughed, saying, "No, I'm upper-caste." As they say, you can cut the tree down, but the roots run pretty deep.