Untouchables in cities - 7

A special mention has to be made of the manual scavengers in the Hindu society without which any discussion on untouchability would not be complete. They are the people of last of the fifth stratum. They are the real rotten bottom of the stinking heap. They are the lowest of lowly. They are dirt of the dirt. They are marvelous examples of this scientific heredity division of labor based on purity. It is a showcase of how to make people’s life worse than hell and be proud of it. Every Hindu takes advantage of their dirty services and then disowns them in dharmic manner. They are the recipients of contempt, disdain and hate from all the dharmic sections of Hindu society. Often I wonder whether it is the lowest end of Hindu society or it has to go further down. If one end claims to be most spiritual, renunciating and pure then the other end is condemned as the dirtiest, dealing in human excreta. They find no place in any kind of social discussion. They are the proud medals of dharmic and caring society. They are simply invisible to exalted and pure defenders of Varna dharma who are extremely disinterested in looking at the dirty and unclean people with born impurities. They work in a stinking environment. The presence of untouchables and especially that of manual excreta scavengers makes the Hindu society a stinking society. Wonder of wonders, this stinking society is one of the most enduing one. Karma theory gets hold of everybody except that of pure lawmakers because they know it is the false one. And it rains with all its dirt on manual excreta scavengers when combined with purity based scientific heredity division of labor and the art of crippling the lowest stratum of the society. The impurities after impurities are permanently heaped upon them with all the righteousness existing in the world. These people are involved in cleaning and carrying human excreta in a basket or pale on their head. The rotten people are doing rotten jobs while the pure spiritual and merciless people turn their heads away with utmost disdain. They cannot bear the sight of these social lepers. Their purity forbids it. The disdain, here, reaches its height in Hindu society. This is the permanent ruthlessness of the spiritual and pure Hindu society. These scavengers do their work with bare hands only with a broom. They collect the human excreta from houses in baskets or pales and carry it on their heads or in their hands, and throw it in a far away place. This stinking greatness of Hindu society is a permanent part of their daily life. There is no way in which one can feel the worthlessness, indignity, rottenness and stinkiness of their lives. We simply lack the required sensitivity for the purpose; never been in their shoes. They are the ultimate untouchables next only to actual untreated lepers. They do it in a place where the open or covered sewer system is not in place. In such places they and their generations are involved in cleaning the toilets full of human excreta. In other places where such sewer system is in place, they have to dip their bodies in the blocked sewer system to clear the blockage there. This blockage of sewer system does not happen infrequently. Their lives are actually guttered. They do this without raising their voice in protest as if they are predestined to do this work submissively. Their attitude seems like that they have been born for this purpose. You see everybody has got a purpose in his life. They also have one. Rather they were born with one, quite naturally. They may feel like raising their voice against it. However, the voices they raise are never heard. Their feeble voices ultimately turn into ineffective murmurs and into silence at last. They are very poor and do not have means to sustain their fight and we know that Hindu society provides for crippling a full group of people not only individuals. The finest examples of crippling are the disabling the right to property of Shudras and demilitarization the society. Their murmurs are ignored jointly by the upper castes and others. For a civil society, which consists mainly of upper castes, such a thing does not exist. All the higher castes, relative to scavengers, are in total agreement in disagreeing to their objections. Why they? Why not others? It is all in the Karmas, my dear. They pay for their unseen, unconfirmed and unverifiable Karmas. Besides society groups get exclusive specialized cheap heredity labor to get the unclean stinking jobs done. Such an arrangement also means that others do not get the chance to do such a job in their lifetime. And everybody washes his hands off them and moves forward. They are without any real friends in the society even among rest of the untouchables who have different heredity occupations. They fight a losing battle every day. Their plight is not shared by anybody else and it is not possible. Only those who experience it can feel it. They live in a highly pressurized, insulted, and hungry bottom of the society, which is closed horizontally as well as vertically. They have neither horizontal escape nor vertical escape. All such adharmic things are not provided in spiritual pure pious and eternal Hindu dharma. And as the society doubles as market also, a manual excreta cleaner does not find a place there. For example he cannot put up a tea stall in the areas where his caste is known. There are simply no customers for his tea which is considered as polluted. So he is back to work as manual excreta cleaner. Here, the Hindu social system shines in all its glory. He is the veritable prisoner of the veritable excreta house of the society of highly cultured and spiritualized people with a great traditional cultural heritage. Everybody is busy asserting his status superiority over this most polluted human being. He is absent from all the social cultural and economic discussions. It is a stark example of permanent intelligent cruelty.

In this caste bound society an educated untouchable with a white-collar job is never treated as equal. He is always treated as an intruder in the sacred and hallowed sections of the upper castes. His presence has to be endured and tolerated and any contacts have to be avoided. They are even supposed to contaminate their hallowed environment. Any Chamar or Bhangi having an officer level job remains what he was, a Chamar or a Bhangi. He is really never accepted in the circle of upper castes. They are made to feel inferior through various means devised for such purpose. The crass untouchability is out; the subtlety is in. These new subtle means are devised to circumvent the anti-untouchability law. New indirect taunting remarks are created. New actions, which indicate his inferior status, are also created. Sometimes the force is also used. The civil society maintains its civil face while maintaining its casteist character.

Untouchables in cities - 6

There are two groups of people in untouchables. There are those who have benefited from the policy of reservations and those who have not. Those who have not benefited from reservations are doing small and lowly paid jobs and are living in slums. The other group is that which has taken the benefits of reservations and enjoy relatively well paid government jobs. These people are the elites of untouchables. Generally, these elites live in middle class areas. Many of them are highly educated and hold high government posts.


The reservations in government jobs and education in government educational institutes is strongly resented at ever hierarchy in the system. The unofficial effective system is biased against them. Hence there are no chances of anybody getting any promotions without reservations in the promotion scheme. The elites of the untouchable society have not been able to do much for their more unfortunate brethren. It looks like that they tend to shrink away from their responsibilities or have taken to individualism whole heartedly in a group oriented society much to the detriment of their own castes. All the gains of reservations seem to have been frittered away on their own families only. The resources that they have gained from reservation system have not been ploughed back into society and neither have they provided an effective leadership to their people. This may be due to absence of any will on their part. Or it may be due to the fact that government servants are not allowed to take part in political or commercial activities. Their steadfast refusal to combine and do really something effective is stunning. Their mind numbing isolation from their suffering brethren is a matter of grave concern. Then the people who have not benefited from reservations have not shown any initiatives to take the guidance or help from their elites and back it with sincerity and hard work. Both the groups seems to have gone into a kind of inaction or rather in sleeping mode and once a while they would make some murmuring voices against the injustice done to them and then again go to sleep. The injustice done to them seems to be none of their real concern. The frozen minds are accompanied by frozen actions and frozen initiatives. They appear to believe in Hindu Karma theory. The destiny is set for them. They have to go beyond simply formation of associations and the resultant meetings.

Untouchable in Cities - 5

The distribution of benefits of quota system has been uneven within the untouchable community. The untouchables themselves consist of many jatis and sub-jatis. Some have benefited more than others have. This is an issue of concern within the untouchables and especially among those who have been left behind. By and large the main beneficiaries of reservation system are those people who got the education earlier than others. There were also the people who moved earlier to cities. The higher education was generally available in the cities only. These people reside normally in lower middle class and middle middle class areas. However, many of them try to hide their caste and take up the surnames of upper castes very well knowing that their tormenting presence there is resented by the upper caste people. In beginning this creates some confusion but sooner or later the social networking reveals their true castes and everything is back to normal. This social networking spreads from village to cities and then backward and from cities to cities and even to outside the country. This social networking includes offices and educational institutes etc. Indeed there is no escape from this social network; it automatically extracts caste of everybody. It feeds on information and curiosity. Especially the curiosity whether somebody has arrived to contaminate their neighborhood or not. The moment an upper caste man comes to know that his neighbor is an untouchable he curses all his past lives, his fate and all his accumulated Karmas. After that he keeps a safe distance from him. After that he avoids any exchange of any eatables on any occasions. If it is not avoidable then he takes them and silently dumps them in dustbin afterward. In big cities generally nobody asks other’s caste directly. Here people depend on social networking and discreet inquiries. If it is asked then it is asked in an indirect manner. Normally people ask other’s caste in case of marriage. When asked about his caste an untouchable would not reveal his true caste if pushed further then he would feign to belong to a higher caste. Here the person from upper caste would nod his head in agreement very well knowing the true caste of the man in question and return the feigning.