Who are the Dalits?
Every sixth human being in the world today is an Indian, and every sixth Indian is a Dalit, an erstwhile 'Untouchable'. The Dalits and the tribal peoples (Adivasis) of India together make up a quarter of the population, 250 million people. That is about the same population as the United States, all of them considered Untouchables.
The Dalits are not a race or a tribe. Nor are they a political or religious group. They are simply those Indians who along with tribal peoples languish at the very bottom of India's hierarchical, strictly segregated system of social organisation. The authorities label them the Scheduled Castes (SCs).
Caste segregates all Indians from birth. There are four main caste groups in society. The Brahmins (scholars and priests), the Kshatriyas (kings and warriors), the Vaishyas (traders), and the Shudras (artisans and labourers). Within these groups there are hundreds of individual castes, often based on occupation. The Dalits are excluded. They don't count as part of society. The British classified the entire system, effectively entrenching caste divisions.
There is no escaping your hereditary caste. A Brahmin marrying a Shudra or Dalit is unthinkable. This reflects the Hindu teaching that the caste groups were born from the body of the original primordial man: The Brahmins came from his head; the Kshatriyas from his shoulders; the Vaishyas from his thighs; the Shudras from his feet. The Dalits? They were, in effect, the dirt beneath men's feet.
'Dalit' translates as 'crushed', 'scattered', 'oppressed' or 'downtrodden'. Dalits were restricted to 'impure' occupations - burying bodies, slaughtering animals, cleaning latrines - and excluded from education and forced to live in ghettoes on the edges of society.
They were unfit to mix with higher castes socially, to dine with them, to attend the same temple, even to use the same well lest they pollute the water. If an upper caste person came into contact with an untouchable they would ritually clean and purify themselves.
Since the introduction of the Indian Constitution in 1950, these discriminatory practices have been outlawed. In the government textbooks that our children study, there are powerful condemnations of 'untouchability'.
Fifty years of democracy and lawmaking has not erased centuries of caste-based prejudice and discrimination, however, and the Dalits remain the downtrodden, the illiterate, the marginalised and exploited.
We hope that the work of SLA can help, in however small a way, to fight this injustice. If you are interested in knowing more you might wish to contact the Dalit Solidarity Network UK, Thomas Clarkson House, The Stableyard, Broomgrove Road, London SW9 9TL Tel: 020 7501 8323
The International Dalit Solidarity Network (IDSN), based in Geneva, has an informative Web site.
