January12, 2003
Is Casteism
Racism?
Lecture delivered on Semester
at Sea “India Day”
Prof. Larry Glasco
14 October 2002
You are about to enter a country with one of the world’s
great civilizations. You will meet a people whom you will find graceful,
gracious and hospitable. You will enjoy one of the world’s pre-eminent
cuisines. You will be enthralled by the sights, sounds, smells, energy,
tradition and modernity that all coexist side-by-side in a place that my wife
and I consider our personal favorite on the voyage, one that constantly
intrigues and fascinates.
You will also be entering a country that has very serious
problems. One of these we will be
talking about later today, that of with religion. But India has another problem, one that I believe will prove much
more difficult to resolve than that of religion. I am referring to Untouchability, to the plight of India’s lowest
caste, the so-called Untouchables. They
go by several names--Scheduled Caste (their official, government-given name),
Harijan (given by Gandhi) and Dalit (their own choice). Whatever the name, they
suffer crushing discrimination, segregation and exploitation. Gandhi termed their treatment a blot on
Hinduism, and devoted much of his life to ameliorating their condition. But it persists to this day, and has
improved only marginally. It will long
be one of India’s most difficult and challenging problems.
[Their story will be told in part tonight on Ship TV, a
60-minute report on Untouchables. Watch
it.]
India’s 200 million Dalits approach the size of the entire
U.S. population. Their plight and their struggle for equality and human rights
has been every bit as intense as that of the students in China’s Democracy
Movement. The victims of Tiananmen
Square, however, had one big advantage; the TV cameras of the world were
trained on the Square that night; as a result the world knows of their fate and
has protested it.
India’s 200 million Untouchables suffer every bit as much
or more, but so far have done so outside the limelight and even the attention
of the world. Indeed, few outsiders have any first-hand knowledge of their
plight. Semester at Sea students are among those few. Those who visit Dalit villages and return to tell their story are
among the most informed people in America about this tragic situation. It is incumbent on them to return and tell
others, for those who oppress hate the light of knowledge to be shined on them.
The plight of India’s Dalits, I would argue, is remarkably
close to that of black Americans.
Because Dalits are not racially different from their upper-caste
neighbors, casteism may not be racism by formal definition, but caste-based
discrimination bears enough similarities in practice, in outcome, and in struggles
to end it that it could well be considered a close cousin.
I first met the Dalits on a SAS voyage in 1993. I had known about the caste system before
going to India, and even something about the so-called Untouchables. I also knew the system had been abolished
legally, but I expected to find vestiges of it that survived.
I was totally unprepared, however, for the strength,
pervasiveness and brutality of the system, one that I considered something of a
relic of the past, a fitting subject perhaps for anthropologists, but not one
of immediacy and sharp conflict, something that should be in the day’s
headlines. I recorded my impressions at
the time in an essay which I have put on the ship’s network, and which I urge
you to read.
What first caught my attention occurred during our visit
to the Dalit Liberation headquarters in Madras, where I saw two large
portraits, one of a man I did not know, but who turned out to be the universal
hero and past leader of the Dalits, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. The other, surprisingly, was of Martin
Luther King. When asked about King’s
portrait, Henry Thiagaraj, the leader of the group, replied, “oh, yes, Martin
Luther King and his civil rights movement inspired us to press forward ever
more aggressively in our own struggle.
Our people identify very much with black Americans; our youth even bill
themselves as Dalit Panthers, after your Black Panther Party.
Henry and I discussed similarities between blacks in
America and Dalits, of similarities between casteism and racism. The most
obvious and direct similarity is that many Dalits, especially in southern
India, had been slaves of the upper castes.
After emancipation in the 19th century, their fate resembled
that of the newly emancipated blacks in the U.S., who were quickly forced into
a condition of neo- or debt-slavery, called peonage. The same happened to many Dalits, who work even today as bonded
or debt-labor in a form of neo-slavery.
Dalits, like blacks a century ago, suffer extraordinary violence at the
hands of those who dominate them.
Official government statistics show that Dalits suffer more than 100,000
murders, arsons, and rapes annually. Dalits, like blacks, are given jobs that
others shun. Blacks formerly dominated
among garbage haulers, Dalits today clean the nation’s latrines. Dalits live in segregated settlements in the
countryside and, like America’s blacks, in ghettoes in the cities. Just as at
one time blacks could not drink from the common fountain, today Dalits cannot
drink from the village well. Like
blacks a century ago, the bulk of Dalits are landless laborers working rice and
cotton plantations. Like blacks in the
pre-Civil Rights South, Dalits must do all sorts of things to show deference to
their superiors. They remove their shoes, for example, when passing through an
upper caste village; in the US, blacks used to get off the sidewalk of Southern
towns to allow whites to pass. Like
Blacks, Dalits cannot be served in many restaurants; if they are served, it is
in separate glasses and cups. Upper
caste men have access to Dalit women, by force if necessary; but Dalit men dare
not date or try to marry an upper-caste girl under pain of death and
mutilitation by a lynch mob, like the sexual-based lynchings of US
history. Dalits are given all sorts of
negative associations—stupid, lazy, dirty—not too unlike the stereotypes of
blacks in the US.
Most importantly, although Dalits bear no physical
features like skin color to distinguish them from others, their status is
carefully noted, especially in the villages, and they cannot escape its stigma,
for it is inherited and permanent. A
Dalit is simply someone born to Dalit parents. A Dalit who becomes educated or
wealthy or prominent remains a Dalit.
Some say casteism is different from racism because it is based on
religion, not on biology, but a Dalit who leaves Hinduism and becomes, say, a
Christian (as many do) does not escape the stigma of being Dalit. He is simply
a Dalit Christian. Nor is untouchability
related to performing dirty or polluting work, for ¾ of Dalits simply work as
landless agricultural laborers and do no ritually polluting work.
Henry and I agreed on the similarities of blacks and
Dalits, and on the appropriateness of Martin Luther King’s portrait on his
wall. But then I asked why was there no
picture of Gandhi on the wall. I could
tell this upset Henry, but he restrained himself and replied that Dalits have a
very bad image of Gandhi and consider him no friend at all. The reason is that although Gandhi hated
Untouchability and considered it a blot on Hinduism, he also was a
traditionalist and believed in the caste system. Gandhi just wanted to make
caste kinder and gentler, but he insisted that everyone should stay in their
traditional castes, and continue to do the jobs their parents had done. The difference was to be that no one would
not be thought less of for doing such tasks.
A latrine cleaner, in his eyes, would have as much dignity and respect
as a priest or a doctor. Ambedkar and
other Untouchables naturally hated that idea because it meant that for the rest
of time they would be confined to cleaning latrines and doing other dirty jobs;
they wanted the caste system abolished, not made more humane.
Untouchables suffer severe discrimination and segregation
because they, and they alone,
perform jobs that are considered dirty and defiling, jobs that deal with death,
dirt and blood. They handle dead cows
and dead people, they clean latrines and haul rubbish, they wash clothes
stained by menstrual blood. Dalits detest
those occupations, but do them because they have no alternative or will be
punished by upper castes should they refuse to do them.
Caste is based on more than ritual and pollution, however.
It is preeminently a system of economic exploitation. The great majority of Dalits – some 75% -- do not clean latrines
and handle dead cows and bodies. They
are simply landless agricultural laborers, toiling in rice fields and the like,
who are prevented from acquiring land by wealthy landlords who want to keep them
working for near slave-like conditions.
If Dalits try to organize to raise wages, landlords bring in the police
or even private militias and thugs to terrorize and even kill them.
Many Dalits do in fact labor in slave conditions, debt
slavery rather than chattel slavery.
Wealthy landlords and businessmen keep Dalits in debt, and force them to
work for minimal wage to pay off debts which they never can because the
interest on the debt is too high. The
debt is then passed off to their children, who also labor as debt slaves.
All of this is illegal.
Caste discrimination was outlawed in 1948 in India’s first
constitution. This constitution, by the
way, was written by one of India’s Dalit leaders, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. India, moreover, tried to ease the plight of
Dalits; in addition to outlawing caste discrimination, the government created a
vigorous affirmative action program, one more extensive than anything in the
United States, with quotas (called reservations) for Dalits. India has even had a Dalit president, a
largely ceremonial position but one that is symbolically significant. In cities, young, educated Indians pay
little heed to Untouchability, except when it comes to dining and marriage.
The problem is that ¾ of Indians lived in rural villages,
where things are only beginning to change.
In the villages, however, as in cities, Dalits are on the move,
demanding access to land, to temples, to wells and water, to better pay, to
respect. These demands accelerated in
the 1970s and 1980s; by the 1990s they had provoked an upper-caste backlash
that has turned increasingly violent, a violence that has been manipulated
politically by the new ruling ultra-conservative, orthodox Hindus BJP party and
used to ride to power. Caste and caste
politics have become highly politicized in India, and ironically the movement
by lower castes to mobilize to improve their lot has increased caste
consciousness and caste conflict. Of
course, not all conflict is a bad thing, and conflict can be preferable to
peace with intolerable injustice.
The Dalit struggle differs from that of American blacks in
one crucial, tragic way. America was
founded on the ideal of freedom and equality.
Of course, slavery and racial discrimination contradicted those ideals,
but that very contradiction provided key leverage for ultimately making the
removal of racial discrimination and inequality part of the realization of what
America is all about.
Indian society has been based on Hinduism, and the good
news about Hinduism is that it has traditionally been one of the world’s most
tolerant religions when it comes to matters of faith. Even today, despite what the newspaper headlines say, the vast
majority of Hindus and Muslims live in relative harmony and friendship
throughout the land. The bodes well for
a resolution of the current Hindu-Muslim tension and violence that now wrack a
few states and cities in India.
The bad news about Hinduism is that it is the world’s
religion most committed to the doctrine of inequality. Inequality, as embodied in caste, is one of
its cardinal principles, and it is this unfortunate doctrine that makes caste a
much more intractable problem than religious conflict, and makes the Dalit
struggle a much more difficult challenge than was that of blacks in
America.
Dalits, however, know that, as Martin Luther King
proclaimed, the trajectory of world history bends toward freedom, toward
democracy, toward equality. India’s Dalits will not quit their struggle until
they have attained their full place in the sun. In that way, too, one hopes that the outcome of their struggle
will achieve at least the relative success of that of blacks in America. One cannot help but wish them well.
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Sent by Prof. Larry Glasco,
University of Pittsburgh, USA
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