more recently still. Native Americans are as marginalized here as Adivasis are in India today.
Poverty and Disease
As early as the Sangam period in Tamil Nadu, drought for lack of rain was named in the texts as a danger. Rain is praised lavishly in ten early verses of the Thirukkuṟaḷ. During British rule, famines in India took countless lives. Millions of Dalits in the Madras Presidency, now Tamil Nadu, died from the famine of 1876–78 (Kolappan 2013). During famines in the British period, grain was hoarded by landholders. British in India took what was grown as food and sold it overseas. The workers were the ones that died. These events have been remembered by survivors. Food is carefully looked after. Food is the most important thing. No hungry person must see another eating. The necessity of feeding another before one feeds oneself is an unwritten rule, closely followed. But in a hierarchical social system, which direction the food goes in is of utmost concern, and the direction is down. The lowest eat the leftovers. Those who own the crops own the world. Hunger is always just around the corner and has been that way for millennia in southern India. Memories are passed on through generations. Seeds are cherished, planted, and reaped. The memory of a past better than the present remains. In the struggles of the present, little space remains in the mind to consider the long-term future. And honestly, how much can anyone predict? Memories of mythic heroes and heroines played out in street and temple dramas, Bible stories, stories of gods, stories of sacrifice, battle, triumph, and slaughter all enter into the lives of people who watch them as street or temple theater. Such stories from long ago are reenacted in household and family dramas, in village dramas, and in song. In such dramas, a man may beat or kill his wife or sister if he deems her faithless. A landlord may beat or kill a worker if he catches the worker stealing. Epic battles of higher versus lower castes are carried out. People of lower castes may be deemed monkeys. But children are to be loved, cherished, enjoyed, dressed up.9
Disease does not affect only the poor. Communicable disease spreads to everyone. Immunities can protect a person but not completely. Bacteria and viruses change every year so that an immunity from last year will not necessarily help this year. And there are many different diseases caused by many different kinds of organism. All diseases caused by microorganisms spread. Some can be prevented and some can be treated; others one just has to live through. Most preventions and treatments fail to reach everybody. Those who are not reached can only pray, recover by themselves, or die. In India, countless millions are not reached.
The people who must clean up raw human excrement and untreated sewage in India are people of the lowest castes. Manual scavenging of underground sewers by men, and of above-ground excrement by women, continues throughout India to this day. Disease and death from this work are not uncommon (Times of India 2015; Campbell 2014). This is a special problem in the cities and in tropical areas.
Poverty causes hunger, which weakens a person and makes them more vulnerable to disease, which in turn can kill the afflicted. Babies and little children are the most vulnerable. They get into contaminated water, get diarrhea, and die of dehydration. Antibiotics and careful rehydration combined with nourishing food can save a child in danger of dying. Cholera is a big killer of children as well as of adults, but again, skilled treatment can save the sufferer from death. If there is no therapy available, the person, whether adult or child, dies. In India, for the very poor, no prevention is available, and likewise no therapy can be had. Wherever people, including children, defecate in the open, other children are likely to get sick. Some will recover and some will die. There are simply not enough doctors in India willing and able to treat so many sick and dying children. I once saw a doctor turn away such a dying baby, washing his hands and telling me, “That baby is dead.”
What poverty does to people, most of all to people categorized as untouchable, is painful to contemplate. Poverty can mean humiliation. Poverty can mean starvation. It can mean not having enough. It can mean having to decide which children to feed how much. Poverty can lead to malnutrition, which can cause vulnerability to disease and ultimately to death. The prospects of poverty, starvation, and death are terrifying to anyone who must face them. Dalits are most likely to face poverty, because they are considered dispensable by landowners and indeed by anyone of a higher caste. If they can make themselves indispensable by any means, then they can eat. But they will not necessarily eat well. This topic is addressed most poignantly in Chapters 1 and 5 of this book.
Pregnancy and childbirth are dangers afflicting only women. These dangers are well known. Healthy young women with good midwives and/or doctors available, and modern technology to assist, are in less danger of suffering and dying. Such care was not always available even for the wealthy. Now it is. But the poor in India, above all untouchables, have little or no access to such easy amenities. Doctors are often not kind and not fair. Fair treatment means treating all patients with the same degree of competence and concern.
Breast-feeding a baby for as long as three years or more is, among the poor in India, one of the best ways to keep a child healthy. Babies are passed around. In some societies, women will share the breast-feeding of babies. I don’t know if this happens in India, but I have seen a grandmother nursing a grandchild of hers in a village of Tamil Nadu. Such practices are considered backward by modern Indians. In other contexts, they make perfect sense.
In India, people who live in cities stand a better chance of making a living than people who live in the countryside. But life for the poor in an Indian city is no easier than in the countryside. The poorest in the countryside flock to the cities, where giant slums have grown and continue to grow. Raw sewage runs in the streets, iridescent black or green and toxic. People sleep wherever they can. If they have a work space, they sleep in the work space. The hardest working, most ingenious people in the world live in Indian slums. While information technology and other computer technologies have become a source of employment for educated Indian youth, the slums are where recycling of plastic and other useless waste is done, not by machines but by human hands. Dharavi in Mumbai is the largest, most renowned slum. But there are slums in every city. Infectious disease is the biggest killer. Starvation, mostly of children, continues. Tiny, skeletal, barely alive bodies may be seen with their mothers in railway stations. A starving girl child may still be dressed in pretty clothes.
Contempt of the poor is undisguised. Most Dalits are poor. Although India is, in name, a democracy, democratic sentiments are scarce in that country. The continued reality of caste discrimination is both cause and result of the long-standing malice against the poor and people of the lowest castes. Maltreatment accompanies malice. Neglect fosters poverty and death. The feeling expressed again and again is that the poor deserve their fate, just as low-caste people deserve theirs. Poverty in India is severe, with rural Dalit women and children faring worst of all. Meanwhile some Dalits, in efforts to raise their status, are encouraged to join right-wing political parties which promise that everyone who joins their party may “become a Hindu”—as though Hinduism were a club. The reports go on and on.
Polarization of wealth is now more serious than ever in India, as it is in America. Political corruption, use of political office to enrich oneself and one’s friends, and use of wealth to obtain political office have reached new heights in recent decades. New opportunities for individuals and corporations to amass enormous wealth have increased with globalization, and cheap labor is easily found in India. The tremendously wealthy benefit directly at the expense of the very poor. This is happening in the United States, too, but the poorest are not as poor as the very poor in India.
Most of the people I have written about in this book lived in poor villages. Even the children of landlords about whom I have written previously were malnourished. They lived in crumbling old houses. Brahmans, and those who sought to be like Brahmans by adopting a Brahman diet, were badly disadvantaged unless they owned many cows and could provide their children with ample milk and milk-based products. But owning and maintaining even one milk cow was out of the range of some landlords. A buffalo would have been more practical. Goats
