Suraj Yengde Postdoctoral fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy/
Aljazeera
The future of the untouchables’ struggle lies in international solidarity and collective work.
Being a Dalit means being in permanent isolation, stuck in the dark chambers of one’s uncharted fears. The Dalit is that stubbornness that the Hindu ideology has adamantly maintained for more than 3,000 years.
I grew up in a world surrounded by Dalits. From early on I was conscious of my identity and that it meant we belonged to the lower strata. Parents and family members disciplined us to make sure we do not mess up elsewhere and face the wrath of the dominant castes – the rich people with power and position.
I grew up celebrating the birthday of B R Ambedkar, the eminent Dalit scholar and former justice minister, who inspired the Dalit movement. We stayed away from Hindu festivals as they were a reminder of our ancestral humiliation and of our secondary status in Indian society.
Our neighbour, a sahukar (merchant) caste, who ran a grocery shop, was one of the few non-Dalits in our neighbourhood. He resented us, but loved our money. He made sure all physical contact with us was avoided when we were paying for our purchases.It is extremely difficult to receive small coins without physically touching the other person; to avoid this “blasphemy”, we were told to drop the coins in an open box. When we paid with a bank note, he would take it with his fingers from the other end, carefully avoiding physical touch.Living among Dalits, the sahukar maintained his and his family’s purity by erecting a concrete wall around his house. The tallest wall in our neighbourhood was between our house and the sahukar’s. He was also extremely suspicious of us; he’d often accuse us of stealing. We were made to feel like criminals in our homes.
When I went to high school, classmates, mostly from the dominant castes, refused to lend their time to me. They were contemptuous, just like their parents, and readily exercised “their right” to caste discrimination.
My only close friends in the school were Dalits and I had the profound pleasure of hanging out at their home and sharing their food, a privilege I was denied by the dominant caste peers. The fact that I was never invited to break the bread in an upper caste home kept reminding me of my pitiful isolation. I was the child soaked in sweat in the summer heat, with a dry throat, desperate for a glass of water, standing outside a Brahmin classmate’s house. Never was I invited inside the house, nor was I entertained in the courtyard.
I walked home thirsty after school till I graduated. And today I still see Dalit children who, just like me, are walking down the same street, thirsty and famished.
The caste system holds us responsible for our suffering. Solidarity and support from non-Dalits do not exist, even today in the 21st century.
Isn’t it absurd that we are now actively exploring another planet to settle and scouring other galaxies for life, but on our own Earth we are still unable to shake millennia-old inhumane and unscientific customs and perceptions that selectively devalue human life?
It is. And it is equally absurd that so-called progressive Indians lavishly spend their energy pushing a Hindu-only narrative of the Indian civilisation and choose not to accord any respect or equal status to us, the declared despicable, the wretched of the earth.Stuck in this dark chamber of millennia-old, forcibly-imposed inferiority complex, fear and terror, we struggle to break free. The only way out is self-love.
Caste systems around the world
It was not until university that I learned that there are other societies beyond India that have their own outcastes or untouchables. It was then that I came across a report written by human rights expert and lawyer, Smita Narula, called Broken people: Caste violence against India’s “untouchables” commissioned by Human Rights Watch. It put the caste systems across the world into perspective for me.
It referenced the “Buraku people of Japan, the Osu of Nigeria’s Igbo people, and certain groups in Senegal, Mauritania and Somalia” who suffer under “their own caste or caste-like systems”. The terrorism my community faced in our lives seemed no longer exclusive to us and certainly not attached to our fate only.
This “discovery” took me to places with hopes of finding fellow oppressed peoples who are fighting the monster of caste discrimination and hatred.I started asking people from across the world about the caste system in their societies. During a lecture at Harvard University, for example, I asked Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, but he gave a rather vague answer about the Osu. I soon realised that most of the people I was meeting and asking were almost always the Brahmins of their societies who used their privileged position to tactically downplay or avoid mentioning the suffering of the subalterns.
The Fourth World
In addition to the uniqueness of caste being a descent-based, inherited form of inescapable discrimination, there are other types of prejudice that result in similar oppression. There is what we can call a Fourth World of outcastes around the world who have been left out of the prominent discourses and debates concerning human rights and social and economic justice.Today, there is an urgent need to identify these underprivileged groups and establish international solidarity networks.Such solidarity work has been undertaken before but it has received little public and theoretical attention. Its traces were lost within the dominant discourses on nation-state building and the pursuit of democracy.
It is what happened with the international links built in the mid-20th century by pioneers like Ambedkar, who put the Dalit situation on the global map. He connected with African American leaders like W E B Du Bois; African American organisers and civil rights leaders paid attention to his work. Ambedkar also reached out to the Buddhist South and East Asian countries.