Page 174 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

The Donkey 149

the discourse, the narrator and his community are not concerned with
theology. Their narrative is not a theogony. The decisive intention and
rationale behind the final radical semantic reversal is the installation
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by the Gadī Vadar of the donkey-god as the distinctive deity of their
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community and their collective emblem of recognition. The donkey
in this regard can be paralleled—being considered, in the words of
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the narrator, as Hanuman’s avatar—with a god or a guru that Vadar
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equally consider and own as their deity.
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The identification of the Vadars with their familiar animal carrier
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through granting a status of avatar to their symbolic self-image proves
a deeper and more significant process of community self-assertion than
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their simple association with Hanuman. Here Vadars take the initiative
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to create a god in their image and of their own. Hanuman was not
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at their image nor likely totally nominated at their initiative: they picked
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it up from symbolic idiomatic images (particularly the flying Hanuman
carrying the mountain in his hands) currently circulated; they seman-
tically invested the given figure as they could. Through their donkey
as form of god, to whom they belong, they constitute themselves as a
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community of Gadī Vadars and secure a place in society at large truly
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as stone-workers. On this account they were hitherto assigned in society
a status of servility and a degraded, animal-like nature as human being.
Through this self-authorized installation as their god of their intimate
work companion whom they identify with in their everyday life, they
claim for themselves as stone-breakers another place in the prevailing
system of social communication: a superior status of excellence. With
their donkey-god they symbolically invest a society, conquering in it a
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place truly for themselves as Gadī Vadar, stone-breakers.
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In short, the intention of the discourse is to invert a condition of
subordination. This is accomplished through creation of an appropri-
ate emblem of self-recognition—one’s alter-ego—which truly incor-
porates one’s everyday condition of servility in order to symbolically
transfigure it through a process of revelation of a hidden, powerful
and divine nature.
Conclusion: Whither?
Re-contextualization
One may like to underscore the intractable hegemony of the symbolic
system that at any stage represses the voice and will of the subaltern: