Feasting on the Moon

An excerpt from “Love in the Time of Caste”, edited and translated from Hindi by Nikhil Pandhi

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Feasting on the Moon — Book Cover: "Love in the Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist anthology of love stories"

Karva Chauth — the fabled festival of women. Amidst donning and flaunting brilliant bangles, intricate mehndi, shimmering saris, matching bindis, glittering lehengas, elaborate hairstyles, fragrant gajras—and decking oneself from head to toe like a flamboyantly overdressed queen—lay the customary fast that every woman was piously expected to observe from dawn, while fervently praying for the long life of her husband!

But that very morning, I had a hearing at the Civil Courthouse. For the past ten years, I had been caught in the same exhausting loop—running back and forth between courtroom dates and everyday life. All because my lord, lover, and husband had filed for divorce.

My crime? That I failed to be the proverbial wife-woman-mate, the quintessentially servile companion he had always willed me to be. My lord had only one ambition in life: to be a communist revolutionary. But before he could claim the nation or society, his imperial fantasies demanded a domestic dominion—one serviced eighty percent by his wife and the remaining twenty by his daughter. Meanwhile, his only consistent desire was to remain our supreme master, the one who demanded — and expected — both moral and material sacrifices from us, without question.

In the…

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Rajni Tilak

Rajni Tilak is a well-known Dalit Rights Activist and a Hindi Dalit writer. She was born on 27 May 1958. There are around eleven books published in her name including two poetry collections. She has received a number of awards as well as Outstanding Woman Achiever’s Award 2013 from National Commission for Women. Currently she is working as the national convener of Rashtriya Dalit Mahila Andolan (RDMA). The following interview was conducted at her workplace: CADAM (Centre for Alternate Dalit Media); M-3/22, Model Town- III, Delhi-9; on 13 October 2016 at 2 pm by the research scholar.

Translator

Nikhil Pandhi

Nikhil Pandhi is a socio-cultural anthropologist and queer feminist researcher, and an award-winning anti-caste literary translator from India. His translations have received international acclaim, including the inaugural PEN Presents Award from English PEN. He teaches at Dartmouth College, where he holds a postdoctoral fellowship in the Society of Fellows. He earned his PhD in anthropology from Princeton University, was also a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, and completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Delhi.