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Who are India's Untouchables?
National Geographic
by Tom O'Neill and Heidi Schultz
Discrimination against India's
lowest Hindu castes is technically illegal, but try telling that to the 160
million Untouchables, who face violent reprisals if they forget their place.
The case of Girdharilal Maurya
The sins of Girdharilal Maurya
are many, his attackers insisted. He has bad karma. Why else would he, like
his ancestors, be born an Untouchable, if not to pay for his past lives?
Look, he is a leatherworker, and Hindu law says that working with animal
skins makes him unclean, someone to avoid and revile. And his unseemly
prosperity is a sin. Who does this Untouchable think he is, buying a small
plot of land outside the village when untouchables historically have not been
allowed to own land? Then he dared speak up, to the police and other authorities,
demanding to use the new village well, when water wells have been segregated
by caste in India
for many, many generations. He got what Untouchables deserve. One night,
while Maurya was away in a nearby city, eight men
from the higher Rajput caste came to his farm. They
broke his fences, stole his tractor, beat his wife and daughter, and burned
down his house. The message was clear: Stay at the bottom where you belong.
To be born a Hindu in India
is to enter the caste system, one of the world's longest surviving forms of
social stratification. Embedded in Indian culture for the past 1,500 years,
the caste system follows a basic precept: All men are created unequal. The
ranks in Hindu society come from a legend in which the main groupings, or varnas, emerge from a primordial being. From the mouth
come the Brahmans—the priests and teachers. From the arms come the Kshatriyas—the rulers and soldiers. From the thighs
come the Vaisyas—merchants and traders. From
the feet come the Sudras—laborers. Each varna
in turn contains hundreds of hereditary castes and subcastes
with their own pecking orders.
A fifth group describes the people who are achuta,
or untouchable. The primordial being does not claim them. Untouchables are
outcasts—people considered too impure, too polluted, to rank as worthy
beings. Prejudice defines their lives, particularly in the rural areas, where
nearly three-quarters of India's
people live. Untouchables are shunned, insulted, banned from temples and
higher caste homes, made to eat and drink from separate utensils in public
places, and, in extreme but not uncommon cases, are raped, burned, lynched,
and gunned down.
Dalit, a term that has become synonymous with
Untouchable, is the name that many Untouchables, especially politically aware
individuals, have chosen for themselves. The name means "oppressed"
and highlights the persecution and discrimination India's 160 million Untouchables
face regularly. First used in the context of caste oppression in the 19th
century, it was popularized in the 1970s by Untouchable writers and members
of the revolutionary Dalit Panthers (the name was
inspired by the Black Panthers of the United States). Dalit has largely come to replace Harijan,
the name given to Untouchables by Gandhi, much like the Black Power movement
in the United States
led to the replacement of the labels colored and Negro with black. For some
activists, Dalit is used to refer to all of India's
oppressed peoples whether Hindus, Muslims, Christians, tribal minorities, or
women.
Water Rights
Photograph by William Albert Allard
Colorful jugs line a neighborhood well where an Untouchable family takes its
turn at the daily ritual of gathering water. Across India members
of upper castes often refuse to share water with Untouchables, convinced that
any liquid will become polluted if it comes in contact with an Untouchable.
In the countryside Untouchables are often forbidden to use the same wells and
ponds as upper caste villagers. Municipal governments have begun to install
separate water pumps. But in most rural tea shops, Untouchables still are not
permitted to drink from glasses served to upper caste customers.
For more on this article, including the debate it raised
among Hindus, Indian-Americans, and others, see National Geographic's The
Untouchables
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