levels. A highly educated Tamil friend of mine, who lives in Canada now, has suggested that the caste system is so widespread and entrenched because it is “sexy.” I disagreed with him when he said that, but maybe he had a point. Caste and sex in India go together hand in glove for more than a few men.13
Like people in India, people of all classes in the Anglophone nations are concerned with the minutiae of social rank. Likenesses between caste in India and race in America have been drawn by some scholars.14 The likenesses do not overshadow the differences, but the likenesses are indisputable. African Americans in the United States are regarded by some with fear and contempt just as untouchables in India are.
Nowadays the untouchable status of Paṟaiyars is linked to the ritual jobs that only they are allowed to do, jobs that are considered by caste Hindus to be severely polluting. The concept of pollution among caste Hindus is as entrenched as the caste system itself. In the American south, slaves could be cooks, and still today, black people cook in the homes of wealthy southern whites. They also clean the house and mind the children. Proper southern ladies do not do such work. In the days of slavery, a slave woman might nurse the baby of her white owner while the slave’s own baby would be left alone in the fields. Songs about this practice are sung even now. No antipathy toward the owners, no anger comes through.
Dalits in India are considered too polluting to cook for non-Dalits. Only Brahmans are allowed to cook in Brahman homes, at weddings, and at vegetarian restaurants. Just as untouchables are considered inherently impure, Brahmans are considered inherently pure. I knew one Brahman man in Madurai who sent others out to kill a snake in his backyard. It was considered wrong to kill a snake, so this Brahman sent his servants to do it for him. This Brahman’s morality and mine were strangers to each other. In some areas of Tamil Nadu, Dalits treat ritual jobs as a niche market reserved for them and guard that privilege because it is also one of their main sources of income. Others disdain all such work.
The most numerous Dalits in Tamil Nadu are Paṟaiyars, whose numbers give them power. Close in status are those who by tradition are nomadic forest dwellers, but there are not so many of them. These are so-called tribal people, those outside the caste system, who once lived as hunters and gatherers and now have nothing to hunt or gather. Some have homes and land, but others move from place to place, gaining subsistence by a range of means that will be detailed in Chapter 4. Some of those who have been given homes and land cannot use them because they have no water there, and they have no income and no jobs.
By far the worst off are truly homeless people in India who have been lost to or rejected by everybody, including their own families, and have neither a home where they belong nor a group who will take them in. The bodies of such people are picked up in the morning by members of scavenging castes and discarded in places not named in news stories.
Members of named scavenging castes are those who pick up all the discarded filth on the streets, by the railroad tracks, and in the sewers. This filth includes not only human feces but also human bodies, body parts, animal feces, and dead animals. Formerly members of these castes were called “sweepers.” They are subject to humiliation and early death.
One notch up in the ritual status hierarchy are agricultural workers. They are not itinerant, but they are still untouchable. Living as an agricultural laborer, or any kind of day laborer, is almost always a losing proposition. Most of the wealth is concentrated in the cities. People who live as small farmers or agricultural laborers suffer. Agricultural laborers have been the pariahs, the outcastes of former times, and to a great extent they still are. Some remain bonded, at the mercy of their owners. But some do escape that life and find employment in the cities.
Middle and higher castes do not generally see themselves as oppressed but feel severely threatened when lower castes gain power. Those considered to be members of “other backward castes,” as well as those who employ Dalits as agricultural laborers, fight harder than anyone else to keep the Dalits down (Narula 1999; Scuto 2008; Human Rights Watch 1999, 2008; Mayell 2003).15 Intercaste marriage is an especially contentious issue (Shaji, Kumaran, and Karthick 2012; Subramanian 2012; Jagannath 2013). While a well-placed higher-caste man may marry a Dalit woman for progressive ideological reasons, if a higher-caste girl marries a lower-caste man, the whole family may be shamed and the girl may be in danger and despised. Even if a low-caste girl marries a man of higher caste, she and her family are likely to be subject to shame, as are the boy and his family. Only the most progressive families can make such a marriage work. Again, these are notable exceptions to the general rule. Other backward castes, sometimes identified as Shudras, are said by some Dalits to be the main killers of Dalits. But “other backward classes” (OBCs) still struggle for dignity, which they can find only in a casteless society, by joining the Buddhist religion in the hundreds of thousands (Suryawanshi 2015). And the Hindu right is recruiting Dalits to become Hindus, from which category Dalits were previously excluded. Religions thus become political parties. For how long, in which countries, and by which religions has religion been used or not used for political purposes?
Before Dalits were invited to become Hindus, there was a movement in India called Hindutva, which still exists and professes to follow the social texts of ancient Brahmanism, equated by members of the Hindutva movement with pure original Hinduism. This movement controls the government of India now. From a different perspective, one may reasonably say that Hindutva represents a narrow understanding of what it purports to represent—that there was no original Hinduism, there were just assorted groups of people in what is now India, engaging in assorted practices, worshipping assorted gods and goddesses. As valuation of the Sanskrit language grew and as literacy also grew, Brahmanism took hold. In this view, a clear hierarchy of human beings existed, in which Brahmans owned and controlled the sacred texts. Brahmans in India became powerful because of their exclusive access to certain forms of knowledge. But Brahmans as a caste are not the chief oppressors of Dalits today. Some Brahmans, most notably Arundhati Roy, are supporters of the Dalit cause. By nature, one is not born a Brahman any more than one is born a Dalit. One must learn how to be what one is said by others to be. From this writer’s point of view, Brahmans are not the problem. OBCs are not the problem. The whole caste system is the problem.
While Hindutva continues, a movement exists among modern Dalits in Tamil Nadu against Tamil nationalism of any kind, because these Dalits consider that Tamil nationalists have used rhetoric in support of caste abolishment to advance their own cause while paying scant attention to the plight of real Dalits, who are sometimes themselves considered to be foreigners from the north, with a language of their own, and therefore not really Tamil (Omvedt 2015). Kuṟavars, technically a scheduled tribe, are romanticized and at the same time excluded from advancement because of their supposed otherness. Modern Dalits consider that such romanticization is harmful to them, just as Gandhi’s calling them Harijans and thereby romanticizing them actually demeaned them and did them no good. Some modern Dalits therefore may despise the image of Gandhi while elevating Ambedkar to first place in their movement.
As cosmopolitanism advances among Dalits, local knowledge and local dialects, most of all nonliterate dialects, fall by the wayside. But as long as violent oppression continues, a prime motivator of the old folk songs remains. Anger in traditional Paṟaiyar songs is directed toward the god of death (Yama), the blue sky, and the singer’s own departed kin. Low-caste singers dared not express direct anger toward higher castes in traditional laments because of possible reprisal. This was earlier. Now some are singing of their oppressors by name, and what they sing of is not pretty.
Understandably, modern, educated Dalits reject the traditions in which they have been trapped for generations. They have been wrapped in a cloak of death, filth, and slavery that has constituted their very identity, and they want nothing of that now. Some of them work at office jobs in the cities, they are educated, and they do not want to be associated with this old, horrible, village life, still less with the monstrosities that lie behind the rituals. It is an act of bravery for them to come to the villages in which they were born, speak to
