Caste
on REM Zoe Lara (in India) (India), 31/Mar/2011 16:31, 34 days ago
There is a culture of having servants here. In the apartment block where I live, there are three storeys, with two flats on the first floor, five on the second, and three built illegally on top of the roof. In the bigger flats, which are mostly shared by young male students and graduates with first jobs, the tenants have chipped in for a servant. I greet him from time to time as he ferries up and down the stairs collecting dirty clothes, or food to do the cooking. I asked the guys next door once whether he has his own room, but they said that he sleeps in the living room. I've seen him joking with our neighbours who own the local store and he seems happy to me. He and I don't share a common language and haven't chatted, but my (stranger's) perspective is that there does seem a definite difference between him and my other male neighbours: he's very much less reserved around me, happier to make silly faces in my presence, and also to yawn and burp and fiddle with his underwear.There is also a lady who the landlady has arranged to have come every week to clean the communal spaces outside our flats. At six months here, there are still a lot of observations that I'm hesitant to put down in case they are wrong, but I can't feel that I have this wrong. She is old and very thin, though scrubs the floor swathed in a sari that makes her tiny figure look flowing and graceful. Whenever I see her on the stairs, she is sweating and bent over. I can't tell you whether she can stand upright. I have never looked into her face because she hides it away from me; and if I pass her directly, she'll stoop down even more, turn her face away or touch my feet. When she rings our doorbell to ask for monthly payment (Rs100 per flat– about £1.40), she hides around the corner, so that I only see her outstretched hand when the door opens. I interpret it as a gesture of begging – yet for agreed payment for agreed work. Yesterday I was working from home and saw her mopping in the heat, so I bought her out a bottle of water from our fridge. A minute later, she rung the doorbell and left the empty bottle on the mat, shuffling away before I opened it so that I wouldn't have to see her.There are more than three thousand castes in India, but most fall into four groups, ranked according to whether their members descend from the head, arms, thighs or feet of primeval cosmic man, 'Purusha'. Outside of these groups is one other: They are not‘twice-born’, like those from the highest group, but unclean, with a status lower than cows, monkeys or cobras (animals, albeit those worshipped according to the Hindu religion). They were 'born' only for the jobs that no one else wanted: scavenging through rubbish to find parts to sell on ('ragpickers' is the name still used here in Delhi), burying the dead, working in sewers, cleaning. They were 'untouchables' and some have worn - or been forced to wear - their untouchability quite literally, with a bell on their body so that higher castes would know to keep away.Though the practice of untouchability– social discrimination based on caste – was formally abolished when the constitution came into force in 1950, I have not met a person yet who would deny its existence now. Such was the entrenched belief in caste-based hierarchy even in the 1980s that if you read the Prevention of Atrocities Act– passed by parliament in that decade with the intention of ending untouchability – you'll find, alongside general prohibitions on committing rape and arson against this group, forcibly evicting them from their land or forcing them into slave labour, a very specific list of outlawed practices.They're based on historical experience and couched in perfectly technical legal language: you must not (1) 'dump excreta, waste matter, carcasses or any other obnoxious substance in their premises or neighbourhood'; (2) 'forcibly remove his clothes or parade him naked or with painted face or body',(3) 'corrupt or foul the water of any spring, reservoir or any other source ordinarily used by members of scheduled castes and tribes so as to render it less fit for the purpose for which it is ordinarily used'. About 170 million people in India belong to scheduled castes and tribes - nearly three times the population of the UK. People in these groups make up 85% of India's estimated 60 million bonded (slave) labourers and 40-50% of those who have been forcibly displaced from their land and livelihood.Caste is something that I have read more about than been able to see. In my books, it defies description, with westerners trying to fit it into categories that we have created and therefore relate to– discrimination based on skin colour, apartheid, social immobility, forced labour – but it straddles across these categories and contains elements encompassed by none of them. I know that it would take me a lot more years and a much deeper understanding of life here before I can begin to properly see, still less understand, exchanges and interactions in Delhi that are touched by caste and its undertones. I don't have an intuitive, life-earnt 'sense' of it, so I'll miss it, or filter an exchange through my western lens and conclude that a rich man is underpaying a rickshaw driver when it'sreally about caste, or something else I cannot yet see. Occasionally, though, I've scratched the surface in my days here and found some things that don't feel they can be anything else, precisely because of how they confound my usual interpretive categories. What strikes - and hurts - most is the thought that the ugly perceptions of one group can be swallowed - internalised - by the very people that their perceptions victimise and disempower. I'd like to be able to touch the feet of the lady who cleans, and have her feel that I meant it rather than react with the assumption that I am – as Iam – an ignorant foreigner who just doesn't understand the order of things.