The Rooster Coop & Its Impact On Sri Lanka

By Basil Fernando –

This article is link to earlier article “Beneath The Skin Deep Liberalism Lies Cancerous Caste Prejudices“

Following is an incident which happened in a suburb in the deep south of Sri Lanka. In this area, there was a dominant family which has been the most powerful family in the area for some generations. People feared the family and particularly the head of the family. All the businesses which were mostly things like shops, and other trades belonged to the members of the family. In all the local societies the head of the family was always treated as the chairperson or the president. That was the case of the co-operative society also which quite a popular enterprise throughout the country was during that time. At one particular meeting at the co-operative society, presided over by the head of this family, one young man who had just passed out from the school got up to ask a question. It was on some small matter of relating to minor affairs. However, the head of the family presiding over the meeting was angered by somebody daring to ask a question from him in public. What was worse was that this boy’s mother had worked for the prestigious family as a servant-woman. The old man took this as an insult. The same day he got the boy to be called to his house and with a big knife stabbed the boy to death and then carrying the knife in his hand went and surrendered himself to the police. That was the extent to which the idea of dominance prevailed and it was the son of this old man who was a graduate from a university who narrated this story. Much later when this son was asked as to whether his father ever regretted having killed this boy, his firm reply was no. He merely thought he had carried out his duty.  In trying to understand this man’s behaviour, as well as those of many others throughout the whole period of many centuries, it would be useful to spend a short while on a novel that explained the way how these things happened in India. Many Indian writers over a long period of time have tried in many ways to expose similar kinds of behaviour that has happened almost everywhere in India. These writers mostly wrote in their own local languages. One of the books that excellently explained the way caste worked to keep the vast masses of India in subjugation is the novel written by Aravind Adiga titled The White Tiger. 

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger which won the Booker prize in 2008 is perhaps the most insightful narrative which exposes how deep the influence of the caste structure is on the mind and the soul of Indians. The book is written in a satirical style. 

The author calls India’s interior system of social control as the Rooster Coop. The novel is written by way of a series of letters written by a young man named Balram Halwai who was from an extremely lower caste family and faced enormous hardships as a child. By describing his childhood, the stark poverty of the countryside and the draconian societal rules that keeps India’s oppressed masses under subjugation has been told most powerfully. As a young boy, Balram finds a job of cleaning the floor of a restaurant. While attending to such work, he discovers the art of getting some information about the world, by listening to the conversations among the people who attend the restaurant. There he learns how the exploitation takes place by four families who dominate and profit by all the productive activities in the village. Later, Balram through the help of a driver learns to drive and looks for a job. He finds a driving job in one of those four families. Balram later accompanies the son of the rich man who has come from United States with his wife. This young couple is western educated and their ways are different to that of the landlord family. This son is sent by the family in New Delhi mainly to promote the family business by cultivating contact with the powerful politicians. In fact his job was to arrange for a bribe in order to cultivate a business opportunity. He carries a bag full of cash to be distributed to his patrons. Balram who observed all this also understands why the underclass Indians obey the type of family patriarchs like his rich masters. He knows that there is one simple law operating which keeps the whole system together. That thread was the uneven and disproportionate punishment that would be imposed on anyone who in any way offended their masters. The punishment is not directed merely towards a single transgressor, but to his whole family meaning the larger family of the clan. One serious act of transgression could led annihilation of the entire clan. If anyone were to dare to think of a future beyond those prescribed for them within the social order, he would have to take the risk of facing the certainty that his whole clan will be annihilated if he were to take the risk. It would be the rarest of rare persons who will take that risk. It is such a person that is named ‘The White Tiger’. 

Balram who understood this eternal law decided to take the risk knowing the drastic consequences that his entire clan including his grandmother, parents and the young ones in the family would face as he too wished to become rich and powerful like his masters. He kills his employer’s western educated son, takes the bag of money that is being carried around to give bribes and disappears. Next he emerges as himself an entrepreneur, utilising the skills that he has observed in order to ensure his advancement. 

Balram sums up his understanding of the dynamics of Indian society and Indian entrepreneurship under the title of a Rooster Coop. This inimitable description is worth being reproduced

“The Fifth Night

Mr. Jiabao.

Sir.

When you get here, you’ll be told we Indians invented everything from the Internet to hard-boiled eggs to spaceships before the British stole it all from us. Nonsense. The greatest thing to come out of this country in the ten thousand years of its history is the Rooster Coop.

Go to Old Delhi, behind the Jama Masjid, and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting on each other, jostling just for breathing space; the whole cage giving off a horrible stench—the stench of terrified, feathered flesh.

On the wooden desk above this coop sits a grinning young butcher, showing off the flesh and organs of a recently chopped-up chicken, still oleaginous with a coating of dark blood. The roosters in the coop smell the blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they’re next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop.

The very same thing is done with human beings in this country.

Watch the roads in the evenings in Delhi; sooner or later you will see a man on a cycle-rickshaw, pedaling down the road, with a giant bed, or a table, tied to the cart that is attached to his cycle.

Every day furniture is delivered to people’s homes by this man—the deliveryman. A bed costs five thousand rupees, maybe six thousand. Add the chairs, and a coffee table, and it’s ten or fifteen thousand. A man comes on a cycle-cart, bringing you this bed, table, and chairs, a poor man who may make five hundred rupees a month. He unloads all this furniture for you, and you give him the money in cash—a fat wad of cash the size of a brick. He puts it into his pocket, or into his shirt, or into his underwear, and cycles back to his boss and hands it over without touching a single rupee of it! A year’s salary, two years’ salary, in his hands, and he never takes a rupee of it.

Every day, on the roads of Delhi, some chauffeur is driving an empty car with a black suitcase sitting on the backseat. Inside that suitcase is a million, two million rupees; more money than that chauffeur will see in his lifetime. If he took the money he could go to America, Australia, anywhere, and start a new life. He could go inside the five-star hotels he has dreamed about all his life and only seen from the outside. He could take his family to Goa, to England. Yet he takes that black suitcase where his master wants. He puts it down where he is meant to, and never touches a rupee. Why?

Because Indians are the world’s most honest people, like the prime minister’s booklet will inform you?

No. It’s because 99.9 percent of us are caught in the Rooster Coop just like those poor guys in the poultry market.

The Rooster Coop doesn’t always work with minuscule sums of money. Don’t test your chauffeur  with a rupee coin or two—he may well steal that much. But leave a million dollars in front of a servant and he won’t touch a penny. Try it: leave a black bag with a million dollars in a Mumbai taxi.

The taxi driver will call the police and return the money by the day’s end. I guarantee it. (Whether the police will give it to you or not is another story, sir!) Masters trust their servants with diamonds in this country! It’s true. Every evening on the train out of Surat, where they run the world’s biggest diamond-cutting and-polishing business, the servants of diamond merchants are carrying suitcases full of cut diamonds that they have to give to someone in Mumbai. Why doesn’t that servant take the suitcase full of diamonds? He’s no Gandhi, he’s human, he’s you and me. But he’s in the Rooster Coop. The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy.

The Great Indian Rooster Coop. Do you have something like it in China too? I doubt it, Mr. Jiabao. Or you wouldn’t need the Communist Party to shoot people and a secret police to raid their houses at night and put them in jail like I’ve heard you have over there. Here in India we have no dictatorship. No secret police.

That’s because we have the coop.

Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent—as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way—to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.

You’ll have to come here and see it for yourself to believe it. Every day millions wake up at dawn —stand in dirty, crowded buses—get off at their masters’ posh houses—and then clean the floors, wash the dishes, weed the garden, feed their children, press their feet—all for a pittance. I will never envy the rich of America or England, Mr. Jiabao: they have no servants there. They cannot even begin to understand what a good life is.

Now, a thinking man like you, Mr. Premier, must ask two questions.

Why does the Rooster Coop work? How does it trap so many millions of men and women so effectively? Secondly, can a man break out of the coop? What if one day, for instance, a driver took his employer’s money and ran? What would his life be like?

I will answer both for you, sir.

The answer to the first question is that the pride and glory of our nation, the repository of all our love and sacrifice, the subject of no doubt considerable space in the pamphlet that the prime minister will hand over to you, the Indian family, is the reason we are trapped and tied to the coop.

The answer to the second question is that only a man who is prepared to see his family destroyed —hunted, beaten, and burned alive by the masters—can break out of the coop. That would take no normal human being, but a freak, a pervert of nature.

It would, in fact, take a White Tiger. You are listening to the story of a social entrepreneur, sir.

To go back to my story.

There is a sign in the National Zoo in New Delhi, near the cage with the white tiger, which says:

Imagine yourself in the cage.

When I saw that sign, I thought, I can do that—I can do that with no trouble at all.

For a whole day I was down there in my dingy room, my legs pulled up to my chest, sitting inside that mosquito net, too frightened to leave the room. No one asked me to drive the car. No one came down to see me.

My life had been written away. I was to go to jail for a killing I had not done. I was in terror, and yet not once did the thought of running away cross my mind. Not once did the thought, I’ll tell the judge the truth, cross my mind. I was trapped in the Rooster Coop.

What would jail be like? That was all I could think about. What kinds of strategies would I follow to escape the big, hairy, dirty men I would find in there?

I remembered a story from Murder Weekly in which a man sent to jail pretended to have AIDS so that no one would bugger him. Where was that copy of the magazine—if only I had it with me now, I could copy his exact words, his exact gestures! But if I said I had AIDS, would they assume I was a professional bugger—and bugger me even more?

I was trapped. Through the perforations of my net, I sat staring at the impressions of the anonymous hand that had applied the white plaster to the walls of the room.”

The foundation of caste based societies and its contemporary relevance

The famous Sri Lankan Buddhist monk, internationally recognised as a scholar of repute in his lifetime, Walpola Rahula, during one of his last visits to Sri Lanka from abroad where he spent several decades of adult life as the head of the department on Religion in an American University after also being a recognised scholar at Sorbonne University France, made the remark in a publicised TV interview referring to Sri Lanka saying there are no free men here- what you have are slaves.
The remark is nothing new. It is particularly in the manner in which people vote at elections frequently a repeated comment found is that- it is the people themselves who bring to power their own tormentors. The inability to resist oppression, and to find ways to assert themselves in order to improve their own conditions is what is implied in such remarks. 

However, what has not been asked is as to how such a situation of subservience, fear and unwillingness to fight for their own rights came about in the first place. It is when the cultural roots of this subservience is being excavated that one could easily see the link between long centuries of which the impact of the Rooster Coop prevailed in Sri Lanka that one could find the explanation for the contemporary situation. 

Some who say that the references to caste will disappear in 10 or 20 years should give some attention to understanding the meaning of the rooster coop and the long centuries of during which entire social organisation of Sri Lanka in the South as well as in the North and the East was structured around the belief structure on which the rooster coop has been founded. 

In India, there had been a conscious attempt in an extensive scale to grasp this problem and particularly since the 20^th Century this debate has had a central place in Indian political debates. 

In the Indian Congress Party itself, till the time closer to independence, there were two major trends. One was to deal with the social problems within India itself. Among such problems the problem of caste oppression together with problems such as child marriages, oppression of widows expressed by experiences such as Sati, eradication of child labour figured prominently. The other trend was for independence from the British rule and the establishment of self-governance. At least over the century these matters were severely debated, organisations developed, mass education took place and thus there was a historically recognisable conversation on these matters. These debates led to many reforms and reform movements. All these factors had their impact on the making of India’s constitution. The records of the debate in the constituent assembly itself reflect the extent of these debates. That by agreement of all parties, a man representing the lowest social strata of that society who are now known as Dalits, was selected as the Chief Architect of this constitution. He was Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, most outspoken critic of the Indian caste system and one who openly advocated its annihilation 

However, in Sri Lanka even up to date there had been no such debate on the impact of caste on the social consciousness of the people. The tendency is to either deny the existence of such a problem or to state that it is not such a big problem at all. However, while publicly stances are taken, in the private sphere, everyone acknowledges that one of the greatest obstacles for Sri Lankans to come together in solidarity, as one nation, is the issue of caste. Despite of this, there are many forms of erasures that have developed to avoid confronting this issue. 

In India, even despite of massive attempts to deal with this issue from many points of view, the influence of the rooster coop still remains, although, modified to some extent, by the influence of the influence of these movements. However, for the future, this will remain one of the major challenges for India particularly as it tries to compete in the global stage and even in the Asian region itself, both, in the economic and international relationships. Now the challenge of dealing with the rooster coop is the deeper parts of how this belief system on which the rooster coop is based is to be dissolved and dismantled. This poses challenges not only in the area of economic development and social developments but also in the ability to deal with the interior aspects of this influence in psychological and spiritual realms. Inter-generational trauma and inter-generational psychological habits and even the modes of linguistic expressions are all bound up with this many thousand year old traditions in India. 

Naturally, the situation is much worse for Sri Lanka which has not even tried to deal with the problems of the rooster coop or even to acknowledge it. The mere critique of corrupt politicians without relating it to the corrupting system, the foundation of which is the rooster coop will only create resentments and protests. These in themselves, are not adequate to bring about a fundamental change needed in order to become a dynamic society with possibilities of interchanges and channels for co-operation among the people. 

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