who lived and worked in the fields and forests were sometimes better able to handle poverty than people whose lives were more rule-restricted even than untouchables. People of the lower castes were sometimes better nourished than Brahmans and those who aspired to be like Brahmans, because lower-caste rural people had a more diverse diet than poor Brahmans. Lower-caste people ate wild food, including field crabs and snails and wild greens, all of which the higher-caste people abjured. People of lower castes ate meat when they could get it, including beef and pork, and raised chickens and ducks when they had the means. But as the forests are destroyed and farmland is depleted, options for living are reduced.
Young people of every caste often aimed to get out of the village and into the city, where they had chances of getting better jobs. Decent nourishment in the hinterlands, when available, was not in itself enough to provide for a decent job. Good education could only be gotten in the cities. Some children moved up in this milieu. The children who moved up and out of poverty were those whose families valued education, who accepted this value, and got university degrees and good work in the cities. These children were both boys and girls. But they had to be allowed into school before they could be educated, and for most Dalits, school was a distant dream.
Those who came from families where literacy and learning were not part of the tradition had to work harder to learn and get ahead. Moreover, Dalit children were often excluded from village schools where caste children studied. Therefore they had little choice but to continue as physical laborers.
Unless one is a landowner, trying to make a living in rural Tamil Nadu is difficult if not impossible in most of the state because of droughts and desertification. Educated people born in villages head to the city for work. So do some uneducated people. But it is dangerous for a woman or girl to travel to a big city. She is in danger also if she stays in the rural village where she was born or into which she married. Thus being born a rural Dalit female is a multiple curse.
The Situation of Dalits in Southern India Now
One event affecting everyone in India, including Dalits, is the rise of the Internet. The accessibility of the Internet has greatly increased the quantity of available information about Dalits, much of it coming from Dalits themselves.10 But most Dalits, in particular the ones I write of here, have no access to the Internet, and so, no matter how insightful and useful what they say may be, they are effectively silenced. No newspaper story, no matter how accurate the content, no matter how riveting the account, can tell what nonliterate Dalit women may be thinking and saying as you sit, stand, or walk with them.
The word “Dalit” comes from the Maratha language and means “ground,” “suppressed,” “crushed,” or “broken.” These are people who until very recently were called “untouchable” in different languages throughout India. In Tamil, “untouchable” is tīṇḍā. People of higher castes have not automatically complied with the recent change of nomenclature. Untouchability was outlawed in India at independence. But most people have ignored this law. Nobody told the untouchable people that they were no longer untouchable.
People tagged as untouchable are not to be touched because their caste-assigned work is to clean away human feces, prepare human corpses for burial or cremation, skin dead animals and tan the skins, consume the meat of cattle who have met their end, and catch and eat other animals, including field rats, termites, and disease-bearing bandicoots (peruccāḷi in Tamil; translated word for word as “big rat”). A person born to a tīṇḍā caste is herself tīṇḍā. Regardless of what such a person eats or does not eat, touches or does not touch, does or does not do, she is considered poisonous, inferior both in body and in mind, inherently diseased and infectious. Even high-caste people who know that the system is wrong are disgusted at the thought of eating food prepared by a person of a much lower caste, no matter how clean in body and habits the person actually is. The word tīṇḍā indicates that a person so designated is inherently poisonous. That property is within her and she cannot change it, any more than a venomous snake can change the fact that its bite can kill.
The term Dalit implies that the oppression, the breaking, the grinding to pieces of Dalits was performed by someone other than the Dalits themselves, by foreigners and by higher-caste Indian people. A high-caste man said to me of the Dalits who worked for him in his village, “They call themselves ‘people who have been put down [tāṛttappaḍḍavarkaḷ].’ Did anyone order them to live as they do?” Even children of higher castes cannot play with children of the lowest castes, because then the higher-caste children would become “like them” (Trawick 1990, chapter 3, section 2).11 The very proximity of a tīṇḍā person could change you, who were innocent, into tīṇḍā. The concept of venom, of poison, is joined with the concepts of danger, of beauty, and of womanhood. These concepts are shown in Chapters 5 and 6 of this book.
In principle, possession of such a dangerous characteristic could confer a certain power on the person who was tīṇḍā, and in some villages such people did have an indispensable place in the ritual order. In some villages, certain deities with certain powers are controlled by the Dalits of that village, who benefit from this control. If they withdrew their services, the village could lose protection from malevolent spirits (Mines 2005). But as the status of a deity grows, the deity’s Dalit association may change. The politics surrounding ritual power and privilege is complex and involves all castes, from the highest Brahmans to the lowest untouchables. Extracting oneself, partly or entirely, from the bonds of Hindu ritual is a difficult task. Today the great inequalities imposed on those classified as tīṇḍā eclipse any ritual privileges they may have.
The poorest of the poor include the tīṇḍā. They are poor largely because they are tīṇḍā. When you are born into poverty, when you are turned away at every turn, when your children are not allowed in the village schools and you can’t afford schooling for them anyway, when you are forbidden to enter holy places and subject to scorn and discrimination in countless other ways, it is not so easy for you as an individual to raise your status higher. Members of lower castes have been working collectively to raise their status for generations.12 They try to raise the status of their caste as a whole—to behave as well-regarded people behave, to get education for their children, to secure reserved seats in governments and in universities, to make money. Housing and ownership of land can make the difference between prosperity and poverty, between food to eat and starvation. Those who seek to raise their living standards commonly think in terms of raising their caste status and think less of individual breakaways from tradition. Such breakaways happen, but they can carry high costs. Few people renounce the caste into which they were born. Although cross-caste marriage has been encouraged and rewarded by members of the Periyar movement and by M. G. Ramachandran of the DMK party in Tamil Nadu, such marriage is risky for the families involved. If one family member behaves in a forbidden manner, or even if a woman is shamed through no fault of her own, the whole family may be brought down. Hence “honor killings” continue to happen and continue to be honored even when relegated to the past.
The question of what it means to be Dalit brings in values of rank and caste, matters affecting, whether positively or negatively, Dalit social mobility and the role of language in Dalit social mobility.
It has been said that Dalits in modern South India accept the caste system as a whole; they just do not accept their place in it (Moffatt 1979). There is a ranked caste system among Dalits in some parts of Tamil Nadu. Those who are low in the overall system find people still lower than themselves. The overall caste system has been replicated on a smaller scale among Dalits in some places. Reports have recently (December 2014) appeared on the Internet of Paṟaiyars beating, raping, and killing members of the lowest castes. These reports come from members of the lowest castes, called Chakkilis or Arunthathiyars. Such reports indicate that solidarity among different Dalit castes is minimal. The power of the
