A Gardener in the Wasteland by Srividya Natarajan

So even as many of us tend to see ‘caste’ through the peephole of various isolated cardboxes - as an almost abstract phenomenon that provides dissertations to scholars or as an easy electoral tool used and misused by heartland politicians or as anthropological set of parameters to study various aspects of Indian society down the ages or as a benign marker used by families to perpetuate happy kinship norms through marriage - Natarajan and Ninan make us stare at the very real viciousness, injustice, violence and not-subtle-at-all tyranny that caste wields over millions in India to this day. The artwork by Aparijita Ninan, with its bold black and white, thick outlined drawings reminiscent of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis books, riffs perfectly with Srividya Natarajan’s intelligent and moving narration.Ī Gardener in the Wasteland slips in and out of the ‘here and now’ where we constantly find Natarajan and Ninan in 2010 Delhi exploring, understanding, commenting on and ultimately sharing the world and ideas of Jotiba Phule and his wife and ‘business partner’ Savitribai. What makes this graphic book such a stand-out among scores of publications on India’s political and social histories is that it resusciates Phule’s iconic - and iconoclastic - work while constantly reminding the reader how it remains such a cogent, palpable, living text even in ‘sovereign socialist secular democratic republic’ 21st century India.

Phule’s weapon of choice was his 1873 publication, Gulamgiri (Slavery), a scathing attack on brahminism and Hindiusm, in which he not only attacked the codified exploitation of the ‘sudras’ and ‘atisudras’, but also called for the uplift of India’s ‘lower castes’ through education and by aligning their cause with the British. One hundred and thirty-three years before Richard Dawkins launched his frontal attack against the idea of god in his 2006 book The God Delusion, Jotirao Govindrao Phule declared war against a religious system that sanctified one class of people trampling over others deemed to be inferior.

A Gardener in the Wasteland by Srividya Natarajan