Y.B. Satyanarayana's Sadalaxmi:The Political Rebel

He documented the life and struggle of a Telugu Dalit politician who indeed was a firebrand politician at the time when politics was not an easy field for a Dalit Women, and that from a Bhangi caste.

Before we proceed further, a cautionary note will not be out of place. Post BSP/BAMCEF, it has become all the more standard in the Bahujan movement to categorize the leaders in the movement, particularly among the Dalits, as Chamcha (the spoon or pawn of the Caste Hindus), who do not follow the path shown by Babasaheb Ambedkar and tread the path of Congress.

While we were growing up, anyone among the community who worked in Congress was derogatory called Harijan (the ugly nomenclature imposed by Gandhi on Dalits as a patronizing term) and Harijan and Chamcha became synonyms.

The call for independent politics of the Scheduled Caste is still valid and will remain valid till the total emancipation. Absence of independent political force is the very root cause of the problems the various Dalit politicians are allegedly trying to solve.

Second part of the cautionary note is related to the landmine of the sub-caste where one needs to step on whether one likes it or not without not getting bruised or battered from either sides.

The Telugu-speaking region is one of such regions where the fault lines are drawn to vividly that one sees the statues of Babasaheb Ambedkar flanked by Jagjivan Ram, perhaps the entire Dalit movement has forgotten Jagjivan Ram, but he is kept alive in the Telugu-speaking states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

The sub- caste contradiction in the Dalit movement, any strategy or movement that will tackle this contradiction will be the greatest factor in the emancipation of our communities. 

Y.B.Satyanarayana is a stalwart of the contemporary Dalit movement who is more than aware of these factors and his own life is the example of fighting unitedly for the liberation of dalit communities through Centre for Dalit Studies (CDS) along with another legendary Ambedkarites and stalwart of our times, Laxmaiah Mallepalli.

With these two cautionary notes in mind, we can say that Sadalakshi was an extraordinary person. Born to the Bhangi family migrated from Andhra to Hyderabad,  Sadalaxmi went on to become the Minister of Endowment and Deputy Speaker of the Andhra Pradesh legislative assembly. She fought elections after election in the male dominated upper caste oriented field of politics with a strength of her character.

She mobilised the Bhangi community in Hyderabad area, most of them were migrated from the North India. She was their beloved Behenji. They got her elected and they supported her. She emerged as an important Dalit voice within the Congress party and began her political career same time as Dora P.V. Narasimhao, who went on to become the Prime Minister of India. During the emergency, she left the Congress Party on the call of her political mentor, Jagjivan Ram, and after an unsuccessful bid in the elections, she joined Kamma -dominated Telugu Desam Party (TDP). 

She was one of the firsts voices of the separate Telangana movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Here mention must be made of another firebrand Dalit politician who follow the lines of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar and was the President of Republican Party of India (RPI). Her name and work should be known all over the emancipatory movement.

She was J. Eshwari Bai. Sadalaxmi and J. Eshwari Bai were contemporaries and they often fought with each other, defeating each other in the elections, but shared deep love and empathy for each other and they shared stages in their common goal of Separate Telangana, both of them, the heroines and leading architects of Separate Telangana are now almost forgotten by the Telangana politicians. 

Y.B. Satyanarayana is the son-in-law of Sadalakshi and witnessed her life and struggle first hand. The book being a biography is focussed on her, but the way situation unfolds, the reader gets a view of the Dalit politics, movement, ideological and political faultlines, and the complexities of the movement in Telugu- speaking states. By all means, the story of the Dalit movement is the same all over India.

The story is nothing but the internal caste rivalries as is bound to happen in the system of graded inequality: the more nearer the castes are in the scale the more is the hatred and the more closer they are in the forced bottom rung, the possibilities of cooperation decreases. Babasaheb Ambedkar theorised this complex phenomenon as:Ascending scale of reverence and descending scale of contempt/hatred. 

How to demolish this scale is the biggest question. Perhaps the answer does not lie in the politics, because by nature politics is divisive and competitive in nature. How to use this political competition for forging the much needed alliance is great question. Perhaps, the answer lies in the cultural and ideological awakening.

The recent entry of Dr. R.S. Pravinkumar (RSP) in the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is perhaps a way to go for the Dalit politics all over India: an United All India Dalit Political Federation. 

Well, this bit of a digression was necessary to place Sadalakshi's support for the Madiga movement for compartmentalization of reservations into A, B, C, and D category. This is the landmine for any discussion on Dalit politics as the emotions run high and identities begin to congeal into opposite camps.

We will leave the field open for discussion here, and move on, after this one point. Married to a Madiga man, she was in all out support for the Madiga reservation and MRPS has begun in her house and Krishna Madiga can be said to her protégé in this field. 

To this, if we can bring her two dimensions that might be important for the present day movement is her love for Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar and her bid to make Dalits as the priests of prestigious temples in Telugu-speaking states, we can find reconciliation of both the sides: that we need to find the solutions to internal contradictions within our communities and fight the monster of caste and Brahminism.

This is a must read book from the renowned Dalit leader and activist, Y.B.Satyanarayana and he took efforts to pen it despite his age and declining health shows his commitment to document and present the struggle of the communities.

The lessons from such works can be our guide to future as to how we forge ahead together in our common cause: the end of untouchability which is impossible without the annihilation of caste.