Your Chappals, Our Skulls 

Even after all this time, whenever our extended family gathers under one roof, no matter what the occasion, their conversations turn to the past, and one episode from my childhood never fails to amuse them. 

The year is 1964 or 1965. I am a lisping kid of five or six. Much against his wishes, buckling under the pressure of his conservative parents, my progressive Ba has agreed to make arrangements for the child marriages of my elder brother and sister. The wedding ceremony is to take place in Khadol, our native village in central Gujarat. Hearing that her well-to-do son, who works in a textile mill in Ahmedabad, is coming home with his family to get his children married, my grandma is elated – more elated than a Patel mother receiving her US-based son at Ahmedabad airport. 

It is my first-ever train journey. Setting out early in the morning, we disembark at Anand and, from there, catch a bus to our village, arriving around noon. The preparations begin as soon as we enter the vas, a Chamar ghetto on Khadol’s outskirts. Women pound and winnow the grain we have brought along – millet, sorghum and rice – while crooning wedding songs. Someone sets up a small, brass idol of Lord Ganesha as a part of the Ganesh Sthapana ritual. Enterprising young men go from house to house along the street, asking to borrow everyone’s best sarees, and then start erecting a ceremonial tent. We children strut around in our brand-new clothes and chappals. In the rush of activities, no one notices when the night falls.

This is my first night in our native village and one which will live in my memory forever. Exhausted after a full day’s work, everybody silently finds a place, here and there, inside and outside the home, to spread mattresses or just plain bedsheets on the floor and hits their makeshift beds. As night thickens outside, I doze off on a quilt in a corner, still wearing my new chappals. Assuming that I am fast asleep, Ma tries to slip them off, and I wake up with a start. When she asks that I part with my footwear, I flatly refuse. She tries to cajole me, but I am stubborn. The more she struggles to pull the chappals off, the firmer my grip on them becomes. Hearing the rising commotion, people rush over to witness the tug of war between mother and son. Quiet amusement gives way to hearty laughter, and soon the crowd is egging me on. Ba comes over too and tries to reason with me, but I remain as unyielding as a rock, inviting spanks on the back and then the butt. I cry my eyes out but emerge victorious and sleep with the spoils of war, my small feet tightly hugging those prized pair of chappals. The reason I put up such a struggle was fear – the fear of losing my brand-new chappals to a thief or a sniffing street dog. New clothes were one thing, but I really didn’t want to take chances with my chappals. I had never owned a pair before. For that matter, I never used to wear any kind of footwear around our chawl, even while using the public toilets.

The ‘hereditary occupation’ assigned to us Chamars is tanning and cobbling. In Khadol, we shared our rear veranda with Govind, an old fart, who would sit hunched over his anvil from dawn to dusk, stitching up a great variety of footwear – chappals, mojdis, cheap flat-soled slippers – as well as leather straps for waterwheels. Most other Chamar households in the vas were engaged in the same line of work. All day, the vas throbbed with the footfalls of the upper-caste Patel and Thakor women who arrived from Khadol proper to have their measurements taken. But in the casteist village economy, we Chamars were less like sales people and more like grahaks, the contracted customers. The residents of the Chamar vas were surprised to learn that the child of their urban caste-brother had never owned a pair of chappals before – that the son of a man who worked in a textile mill in the Manchester of India went without chappals was bitter irony not lost on those unlettered, poor villagers. For them, it was an object lesson in how the miserable destiny of tanners persisted across geography and history. 

*

I don’t remember ever wearing a pair of chappals at the municipal school in Rajpur, where I was a pupil till Class 7. Even today, when I visit my alma mater, my gaze lowers to the grimy, unshod feet of the students playing and running about. And whenever I see devotees of Lord Rama making their holy processions with the god’s paduka down the street, bellowing their pet war cry – Saugandh Rama ki khate hain, mandir wahin banayenge [We swear by Rama, the temple will come up there, only there] – those children’s unshod feet, walking, dangling and swinging, flash before my eyes. 

In the Mahabharata, even King Dushyant was ordered to move about barefoot in Sage Kanva’s ashram, as befitted the ascetic code of conduct. But at the Democratic School in Gomtipur, where the landed and genteel classes sent their scions, the capricious administration had decreed that students could not enter the premises this way. A pair of slippers in those days cost about one or one-and-a-half rupees – a paltry amount, but one that few Dalit households could afford. However, this was lost on our worthy, Savarna teachers, the Daves and Thakores who were more interested in policing divisions of caste and class than in enlightening us.

On the first day of classes, some of us barefoot students from the Dalit chawls were duly turned away at the school gate. The mix of surprise and shock I felt then remains present in my mind after all these years. As we made our unshod Hegira home, no Rama paduka came to our rescue, nor was there any kind of NGO or charity-run chappal service to help us. Later in the term, if a student was caught red-handed – or rather, barefooted – they would be thoroughly thrashed by our custodians of civility. 

As a good student, I managed to befriend boys from well-to-do Savarna families. Some even visited our dilapidated house in the chawl. On one such occasion, I brought down a portrait photograph of my family that hung on a flaking wall in our front room and showed it to them with great delight and pride. One of them asked, ‘Why aren’t you wearing chappals in the picture?’ My brilliant retort: Chappals were not allowed inside the photographer’s studio. Today, that framed image sits cozily on my office desk. Often, when I look at it, I marvel at the ties the artist had slipped around the necks of my brother and me. How dapper we looked, even as our unshod feet dangled from our chairs. 

*

Once upon a time, an adventurous king, forced to walk barefoot on roads that were too stony for his chariot, hit upon the idea of covering all his kingdom’s streets in leather. His clever minister found him an easier and cheaper solution: Wrap your own feet in leather instead.

That is one origin story of footwear. I’m not sure when and how that modest invention turned into a status symbol in India. Even today, Dalits in several villages of South India are banned from traversing non-Dalit areas with their chappals on – the Savarna population considers it an affront. Such glaring discrimination, which persists after decades of independence, singes my soul, just as the hot asphalt roads of my childhood once burnt my tender feet.

Not that I am unfamiliar with discrimination. During childhood visits to Khadol, in the mornings, I would gape as Ma and other women from the vas, water-pots and chappals in hand, marched out in a group towards a distant scrub for a squat. They put their chappals only after leaving the village. It wasn’t until much later that I grasped the patriarchal basis of this curious behaviour. Women were considered ‘paon ki juti’ – as disposable as the shoes on our feet. How dare they wear chappals in the presence of men? The same Dalit man who lorded it over his wife at home also walked through Savarna quarters with his chappals in hand – and without any dawning epiphanies. 

There are so many words to describe footwear: upaan, chappals, pairs, shoes, mojdis, footwear, slippers, sandals, flat-soled slip-ons … But this universe is reduced in the imagination of the Gujarati Dalit to just one word: khasadan, which (along with variations like khasadakootun, khasadankhor and khasadanbaji), literally means ‘shoes’ but connotes contempt, lowliness, uncouth behaviour, someone accustomed to beatings with shoes, and so on. How pertinent it is that Ma’s eldest brother, Kalamama, peppered all his conversations with this signature line: ‘Your chappals, our skulls.’ Perhaps this takiya kalam – a mantra of life, if you will – applied to a whole generation of Dalits who grew up amid overt discrimination and unchecked feudalism. Those were the days when Dalits were beaten with khasadan at the drop of a hat. Well into the 1970s, the dominance of the Darbars in the Bhal region of Gujarat was so total that a Dalit man, seeing a pair of shoes on the threshold of his house, had to turn around and walk away. For the shoes indicated that a Darbar man was molesting his wife inside, exercising his traditional right over her body.

In 1975, when a group of young Dalit men in Golana, armed with a new consciousness of freedom and equality, challenged a Darbar, he had to jump out of the window and run for his life, leaving his shoes behind. The next day, the rapist’s father stormed the vas, swore filthily at the men, women and children of about 100 Dalit families, and claimed his inviolable right to molest any untouchable woman of his choice. Though the Dalit youths were determined to put an end to institutionalized sexual exploitation, the vas elders finally made amends for their insolence by walking through the village with the rapist’s torch, turban and shoes in their mouths, right up to the Darbar’s house, to return his son’s belongings. Perhaps that’s what Kalamama meant when he said, ‘Your chappals, our skulls.’

Another footwear-related memory that time has not faded. The Chamars in the vas of my mama’s village never dragged carcasses; in fact, most of them didn’t have anything to do with tanning. My youngest maternal uncle, Khushalmama, had made ends meet by crafting and mending shoes all his life. He procured all his trade supplies from Ahmedabad and sat outside a Bania businessman’s pedhi, or shop, with his peti, his cobbler’s box. In time, he came to call his peti a pedhi:Each morning, as he set out for work, he announced, for the benefit of everyone at home, that he was going to his shop. Even today, for most Chamars in the cobbling business, their peti, however modest and makeshift, is a pedhi. What a brilliant way to elevate one’s low occupation! That’s probably as far as samrasata – the Hindutvawadi’s much-touted ideal of social harmony – ever really comes into being in India.

Excerpted with permission from “Homes Without Windows”, by Chandu Maheria, edited and translated from the Gujarati by Hemang Ashwinkumar, published by Juggernaut Books, 2026.