Little information available on intersection of law, caste in India: writer Manoj Mitta

New Delhi: It is a struggle to look for information on the "intersection" of law and caste because very little has been documented since the British rule, writer-journalist Manoj Mitta has said.

The writer was speaking about documentation on India's first law against untouchability, which was pioneered by R Veerian, a Dalit legislator from Madras in 1924.

"Our documentation culture is so poor, our histories are so dominated by whatever were the dominating interests at the time. These remarkable efforts, achievements never got their due. He (Veerian) is somebody who against all odds pulled off a very modest legislation. But it was the beginning of a very important process and yet we know nothing about it," Mitta noted.

Speaking at the launch of his new book, "Caste Pride", Mitta noted if he were writing about law and race in the US, it would have been a struggle to find anything substantially new.

"But when it comes to the intersection of law and caste in India, this area is a virgin territory. There is so little work done on it that I ended up by default making quantum leaps in terms of information, there were huge gaps and there were huge achievements of this nature to be talked about," he said.

Veerian's long legal and legislative battle afforded the lower caste people in erstwhile Madras complete access to public spaces, including roads around temples that were earlier out of bounds for the members of the 'Depressed Classes'.

Viceroy Irwin formally gave his assent to the bill on January 13, 1927, and the law was notified as Act I of 1927.

"It was the first ever enactment against untouchability, and we don't even know about it. Not even despite the fact that it was something that was piloted by a Dalit, the sheer heroism, the valour, the romance of it. It should have been a reason for us to know about it, to celebrate the achievement. He is not part of the very big Ambedkarite pantheon, because Veerian never got his due," Mitta noted.

The book, published by Westland, looks at the history of caste-based mass violence in India in the context of pre- and post-Independence sociolegal reforms.

Initially, intended as a third book in a trilogy on mass violence in India, "Caste Pride" became a deeper discourse over a course of seven years about the impunity, which involved investigators, prosecutors and judiciary at large, against Dalit atrocities, even though a special law on caste-based violence had been enacted in 1989, he said.

Mitta has earlier written books on the Sikh massacre of 1984 — "When a Tree Shook Delhi", and the 2002 Gujarat riots — "Modi and Godhra: The Fiction of Fact-Finding".