Intellectuals have often derided modernity, calling it something that brought in the fragmentation of the strong community structure in the Indian villages and families. However, My Father Baliah by YB Satyanarayana brings out the obvious emancipation of the dalits by the coming of modernity, British rule and the advent of new occupations by institutions, like railways.

The book has been written as a tribute to three generations of Satyanarayana’s family (placed between late 19th and early 20th centuries), who fought centuries of oppression to etch out an identity for themselves. The railways helped the family in this journey. It was the railways which removed the segregation that the Indian villages offered the untouchables whose colonies were always situated at the periphery better known as ‘dalit bastis’ (the practice continues in most villages in independent India).

At the book release function on the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University on March 22, Satyanarayan said, “The untouchable colonies were situated in the east while the Varna houses were situated in the west. This was so, so that the wind, which blew from the west to the east, would not pollute the high-caste houses.”

Satyanarayana and his family belong to the Madiga caste in Andhra Pradesh. By a stroke of luck, his great grandfather Narsiah got a grant of 50 acres of land by the Nizam of Hyderabad, whom he gifted a pair of beautifully made shoes. However, he only got two acres, out of those 50, because the local landlord (dora) expressed his resentment on an untouchable being the owner of such a large tract of land.

Though Narsiah got a minuscule portion of the land he was otherwise authorised to, he was grateful because he was the only untouchable in the area to ever own any piece of land. The land brought prosperity and soon his family rose to a higher standard in their society. However, it was short-lived and Narsiah’s son, also called Narsiah, lost his family, including his newlywed wife to cholera, referred to as ‘Gattara’ in the village. In those days, if a person in the family died of Gattara, no one from the community took part in the funeral proceedings fearing spread of the infectious disease to their own houses. Hence, when Narsiah buried his wife, after carrying her on his shoulders to the burial site, he realised that there is nothing more left in the village for him. The landlord’s son was torturing him to give away his piece of land and his family was entirely consumed by the deadly disease. Taking his younger son Baliah with him, he moved to his maternal uncles’ place in the city where he got a job with the railways.

Hiring in the railways reflected the caste structure of the society with only the very low-paying and dangerous jobs being given to the untouchables and the Shudras because the upper caste would not take them. This is where Narsiah got a job as a ‘pointsman’ in the railways and started his journey towards educating his eight sons and grandsons towards making them professors and principals in schools and colleges. Satyanarayana writes about Baliah who inherited the vision of education from his father Narsiah and carried it forward to make sure that the caste stigma that his society was faced to live with, would be blurred by knowledge. The family would live on jowar rotis for days on end because Balaih’s eight sons needed books. Baliah would make sure that the children woke up at four in the morning to study before they left for the school. Satyanarayana said, “My father wanted all of us to become station masters in the railways because that was the highest post for him in the world. He took great pains to realise that vision and in that, he went far ahead of his original plan.”

The casteless outlook of the British officers, the more or less egalitarian atmosphere of the railway colonies and the access to railway schools helped them reach high levels of success – four doctorates in a single family of dalits is rare even today.

The book is a memoir of a son about his father, however, it doubles as an ethnographic account of a dalit family to study the effect of modernity and education on caste. It offers a first-hand account of the effect of the railways on helping dalits break their caste barriers to come into the mainstream. The effect of modern British institutions, especially the army which created the Mahar regiment and offered similar facilities to them, has been studied in detail. However, the contribution of the railways as another institution which broke traditional caste barriers has not been studied enough and is yet missing from the libraries.

Satyanarayana’s book does not complain. It is not a book that makes you feel sorry for the characters who brave many odds and societal estrangement to reach their goals set by their father. It is a book that talks about overcoming adversity. In terms of dalit literature it is a new landmark because it narrates without preaching and celebrates the process of carving out an identity where none was possible.