PROBABLY, the first court observation that KG Balakrishnan, India’s new Chief Justice designate, made was when he was all of eight years. That was when he used to climb the worn laterite steps to the old Munsif’s court in Ettumannor, carrying food for his father, a poor Dalit court clerk who had struggled through much of his life.

‘’Balan came back to ask me one day: Everyone else in the court look nice and fair, why is my father the only dark one?’’ remembers Sarada, the Chief Justice’s mother, at the small ancestral home in Vellassery, a village near Kottayam.

Preceding the man who would preside over the country’s judiciary, the first Dalit to do so, are generations that had braved great odds, survived many slights. Their socially prescribed humiliations had followed them till even a couple of generations ago. ‘’Even in Vaikom, the nearby town, Dalits weren’t allowed into local restaurants. They had to dig a hole in the ground outside, put a piece of plantain leaf in it and have their food served on it,’’ recalls brother KG Vijayan, now a Deputy Collector with the state government.

Their mother can’t forget the past either. ‘’Balan’s father would get transferred from court to court and we needed to find new homes to live. But people would often refuse to rent us houses, simply because we are Dalits. Even village barbers would decline to cut our hair, for the same reason. It was often difficult, very difficult.’’

BORN to a manual labourer who lived and died toiling for local landlords, Gopinathan, Balakrishnan’s father, was the first in his family who tried breaking out of the vicious cycle of poverty and deprivation. Gopinathan was focused on going to school, something that lay outside much of the Dalit mindscape of his time. It wasn’t easy. He could often forgo food, but textbooks were a problem — he had no money to buy them. ‘’He used to tell me how he would borrow the school texts from his classmate in the neighbourhood in the evenings, sit through the night writing down everything in them and return the books early next morning,’’ says his wife.

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