The dalit in India - caste and social class

Social Research, Spring, 2003 by Sagarika Ghose

Dalits are the main targets of what are termed "caste-related crimes'. Over 2000 dalits died in the three years between 1989 and 1991 as a result of"atrocities against harijans" (Memorandum of Dalit Writers Forum, 1996: 9). In the rural countryside, stripping, hacking to death, massacres and lopping off heads are the marks of a horrific bestiality inspired by the unshakeable taint of dirtiness. (6) The dalit body, powerful, suppressed, and perennially dirty from such tasks as removal of dead cattle and waste, tanning, or toddy tapping (collecting juice from the bud of palm tree flowers) is to be violently exorcised, ritually cleansed, from the pure "Aryan" body of the Hindu caste system. (7)

It is the argument in this paper that despite the far-reaching legislative and educational quotas for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, and their undoubted benefits, dalits still are savagely attacked in the rural countryside and in the urban milieu untouchability still knocks at the closed doors of such institutions as the arranged marriage, the caste Hindu temple, the classical music concert, and the private sector. The cultural hegemony of the dvija remains virtually intact. Dalitness continues to exist as much as an idea as a physical reality. The idea of the polluted bonded servant is so ingrained in the subcontinental mind that the dalit remains at the bottom of the intellectual and emotional landscape of contemporary India, however far he may advance in a public career and agitate for change. Every child born into an upper-caste Hindu family grows up with a mind's eye image of the acchyut (Untouchable). The Imagined Untouchable is squalid in appearance and it is the religious duty of a "pure" Hindu to consider him perpetually inferior.

The Emergence of the Outcaste Pariah: The Dalit and the Brahmin

"'If a kalash (vessel) of water comes into a bhangi's (Untouchable's) hand,' sing the women of the dalit Vankar caste, 'he'll drink and drink until his stomach bursts'" (Franco, Macwan, and Ramanathan, 2000: 193).

The poor Untouchable! So eager just for water, that when he gets it he drinks until his stomach bursts!

An enormous body of scholarly work exists on the Indian system of castes. For Dumont (1980), Indian society has always been defined by the hierarchy of castes. Caste "is above all, a system of ideas and values, a formal comprehensible rational system ... [imbued with] the idea of hierarchy" (35). "Purity" and "pollution" remain central to the caste system--indeed, central to Hinduism itself--and for the Brahmin purification and hygiene are a necessity (Dumont, 1980: 52).

This argument is opposed by, among others, Dipankar Gupta, who argues that Dumont's idea oversimplifies caste and papers over regional particularities and transactions.

   It is impossible to construct a uniform hierarchy of caste
   based on the notion of purity and pollution. No caste would
   acquiesce to its placement among the so-called "untouchables."
   No caste would agree that members of other castes
   are made up of substances better than theirs. No caste
   would like its people to marry outside the community. No
   caste would like to merge its identity with any other caste.
   No caste accepts that it has originated from a shameful act
   of miscegenation. Any suggestion of being half-breed is dismissed
   haughtily across the board by all castes" (Gupta,
   2000: 33).