The Village - 16

...Then there are meaningful ways devised to prevent them from attending the schools. In the grand tradition of separation between jatis the students from the weakest of society are made to sit separately. They are also not allowed to draw water from school taps for the purpose of drinking for the fear of contamination. They have to wait for somebody from upper caste to open the tap so that they drink water and who will also close it afterward. Further to add insult to injury the teacher never misses a chance to scold or punish them in a humiliating manner in front of the class or the school on filmsy grounds. It is always caste exemplary. The insults are added after insults as if though the ever present insults in their lives are not enough. The more they are insulted the more soothing it is to others. A cloud of insults always hovers over their heads ever ready to rain furiously. At times the punishment can be corporal and so severe and so frequent that the student stops going to school. Even the social insulting is some times sufficient for them to leave the school. Had it not been for British and their egalitarian outlook the untouchables would have never got the education. The British with an attitude of superiority in favor of their educational system overrode the dharmic and social and divine objections of upper castes in allowing the lowest stratum to enter the schools. They did the greatest damage to sacred, pure and divine Varna dharma in forcing the upper castes and the lowest castes to sit together in the schools. Not even the Muslims tried that with the Hindus. Anyway the people whose dharma got contaminated must have gone straight to hell or must have taken the birth of jackals, lizards, insects, worms and other lower level form of lives.

Just out of context, there are people who consider the Vedic Rishis being superior to Newton and Einstein on the grounds best understood by them. They agree with each other and live in eternal bliss. The explanations they offer are restricted to themselves and not to be told to lower strata people. They also illogically consider the Vedic education to be superior to modern education.

And in rural areas there is a system of two tumblers. It is matter of preventing the contaminations of different castes through touch. It is a matter of keeping away the clean from the unclean. The village restaurant is a small dingy makeshift arrangement of dirty wooden work. All the broken, uneven and unequal pieces of wood are joined to give it a semblance of a room. The gaping holes are covered with dirty and torn cloth pieces. No cleanliness reaches there but they keep the clean separate from unclean. One set of tumbler is meant for the use of higher caste people. There is one more lone tumbler for the use of the lowest stratum of the society. A member of the fifth stratum has to drink the tea in the tumbler marked for untouchables. After that he has to clean it and keep it back. Then another fifth stratum member can repeat the process. And if there are many of them then they have to drink tea in sequence. No staff from these dingy and dirty restaurants would touch this tumbler and neither would clean it. The higher caste people would not drink from this tumbler to maintain the sanctity of their higher social status. It is an indication of wisdom of ancient people who categorized people into different compartments and made their dwellings and other things separate to keep the pollution at bay. However, the new generation of the lowest section of the society does not believe in such wisdom, they are infused or contaminated with the ideas of modern world and considers it to be inhuman thereby questions the entire philosophy of Varna dharma...