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.