Why be a Cockroach, when you can be a Prophet?

Suicide is an individual decision forced upon the individual by the determinist forces of ruling social ideas.

It’s a personal debasement of one’s own self owing to the subordinated image of oneself, one has created within his own mind.

To quote Frantz Fanon from Black Skin, White Masks, “ Subalterns have been skilfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair and abasemennt.”

What should be noted here is that no man would ever love to take his own life, had it not been forced upon him through forces of social cohesion and regulation. (Read Durkheim)

For example, to choose to live and prefer to live unmarried with a child in Indian society might force a woman to not live at all or either abort the child born not out of wedlock.

The premise being that individual will is being dominated by norms of what can be called the dominant social ideas of a history and time.

It is an almost accepted reality that a Brahmin may call oneself the supreme spiritual being, in touch with the ultimate cosmic reality of life, by just being born into a certain group of humans, who have made it etched in everyone’s mind, their own subjective understanding of the universe and established it as the only rock solid life governing principle .

At the same time, this idea denies to an entire class that touch with the ultimate beingness, thus ontologically hollowing out, that class of people both as a class and as individuals.

Can I claim to be a prophet of that class and be accepted? No? How is my claim of being the prophet of dalits any different than from a Brahmin claiming to be the ultimate cosmic being?

Of course, it can be contested but do both claims warrant equal contestation?

Where does the inconsistency of subjective spiritual experiences being eulogised and in one case and shunned in the other with mockery, and ridicule.

The point here is not wether I am to be considered a prophet of Dalits or not, rather the idea that you have robbed a people from having their own subjective interpretations of being with ridicule, abject detest, humiliation and debasement.

So the world can accept a Dalit who calls himself a cockroach but shun a Dalit Man who calls himself a prophet of the dalits just because he is not from a European university?

In this light I would like to mention a dalit scholar from Oxford university, who has internalised this debasement and accepted the subordination forced upon his people by claiming to be like a cockroach.

It is to be noted here that however hard may be the circumstances, one shall never devalue his self, for self builds the social and  vice versa and negative effects of devaluing one’s own self are debilitating and akin to internalisation of oppression of one’s people and their soul that has been forced upon oneself and one’s social group.

It brings me back to the opening line of this write up that calling oneself a cockroach owing to his social groups subordination is nothing short of a collective suicide of the emancipatory potentials of a people, who are very dear to me.

So My dear Comrade, why be a cockroach, when you can be a prophet?