“The fear of water”: Understanding the Dalit Struggle for Water in Gautam Vegda’s “Hydrophobia”

Gautam Vegda’s “Gold-unTouch” unveils the hope of Paso, for the magical touch of King Midas to eradicate the social ostracism encountered by his family. His hope for the golden touch was shattered by the harsh realisation of his inherent magical touch, thetouch of untouchability. The story reveals the anguished state of the Dalit community in the casteist 21st-century Indian society, where the Dalits have been treated as polluting outcastes. However, the condition of the Dalits becomes more precarious whenthey are treated as dehumanised, denied fundamental rights to human necessities. Paso’s mother was granted water, however, not as a human being, but as a Dalit. The story of Paso’s mother raises an essential question about the Dalits’ access to or denial of water. Water, a natural source, does it transform into the begetter of casteism with its denial to the Dalits? What if consuming water, even from “the battered steel bowl”, translates into the symbol of violence, orchestrated by casteist politics? Through the discussion of Gautam Vegda’s seminal poem “Hydrophobia”, the paper attempts to address that the environment can never be understood as a separate ideology, but is inherently intertwined with the politics of caste. Water, as Vegda perceived it, as a Dalit, is never a natural medium, but a determinant of casteism.