India’s Untouchables
Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi is best known as the man who led a successful nonviolent revolution to free India from British colonial rule. While he inspired his countrymen to unite against a foreign power that had dominated them for 200 years, he also waged a heroic and tireless battle on the home front. He fought hard to rid Indian society of the age-old and deep-seated prejudice against the Untouchable castes. Caste is determined by birth, and marriage is restricted to members of the same caste, so that a family's position in society is passed from generation to generation.
Who are the Untouchables? They are not mentioned in the Rig Veda, the most sacred book of the Hindus, where the caste system is described. It is unclear how certain occupational groups—such as sweepers, scavengers, butchers, launderers, keepers of cremation grounds, and leather workers—came to be treated as “untouchable.” Their touch, and in certain areas even seeing them or their shadow, was supposed to pollute the higher castes. They were made to live apart in clearly defined areas and were strictly forbidden to enter temples or use wells. They were treated with harshness and contempt.
Hindus, particularly the priestly Brahmans, consider contact with bodily excretions (including blood) and dead animals to be polluting, making those who worked with these substances unfit to worship gods or cook food. For Hindus, bathing cleanses the pollution, but the Untouchables were considered permanently polluted and incapable of being cleansed. The rules of the caste system made escape from this despised position virtually impossible. These restrictions were spelled out in ancient legal texts produced by the priestly Brahmans around the beginning of the Christian era, since they had assigned to themselves the comfortable position of being at the top of the caste hierarchy.
The earliest invaders from central Asia, the Aryans, conquered the non-Aryan peoples of India. Some historians believe that the Aryans married some of the native inhabitants and enslaved the rest, who eventually became the Untouchables. This form of slavery, though not based on race, was equally dehumanizing, and the Untouchables of India have suffered discrimination and been exploited for 2,000 years. Many Untouchables believe in legends that link their low status to the mistakes of their ancestors. For instance, an ancestor who had dragged a dead dog from an assembly of Brahmans in the dim past was condemned, along with his descendants, always to carry away carcasses of dead animals. Over time, Untouchable castes themselves developed ranks and considered other groups more or less polluted than themselves. Launderers, for example, felt superior to leather workers, and butchers looked down on men who tended the dead in cremation grounds.
Gandhi condemned the idea of untouchability. He called it a crime, an evil, a blot on the name of Hinduism. He sincerely believed that the curse of oppressive British rule was a just punishment for the sin of untouchability that high-caste Hindus had shamelessly practiced for many centuries. He wrote long and passionately against it: “Has not a just Nemesis [British rule] overtaken us for the crime of untouchability? Have we not reaped as we have sown?... We have segregated the pariah and we are in turn segregated in the British Colonies. We deny him the use of public wells; we throw the leavings of our plates at him. Indeed there is no charge that the pariah cannot fling in our faces and which we do not fling in the faces of Englishmen. [I]t is necessary for us Hindus to repent of the wrong we have done, to alter our behavior towards those whom we have ‘suppressed’ by a system as devilish as we believe the system of the [British] Government of India to be.... It is a reform not to follow Swaraj [self-rule, freedom] but to precede it.”
Gandhi set a bold example for Hindus to follow. At age 12, he argued against untouchability in his own home. As a young lawyer in South Africa, he cleaned his own latrine to emphasize the dignity of menial labor. Later, in India, he adopted an Untouchable girl as his daughter and insisted that his political followers, many of them wealthy Brahmans, do their own sweeping, toilet cleaning, and rubbish disposal. He was not afraid to suspend the freedom movement against the British to persuade Indians that the destruction of untouchability was his first priority. He fasted, prayed, agitated, and eventually brought large numbers of Hindus to believe that untouchability had no place in their society.
Caste prejudice is hard to eliminate and still persists amid the substantial progress India's ex-Untouchables have made in the 45 years since independence. Gandhi raised the consciousness of both Untouchables and high-caste Hindus to work toward equality in the future.
Answer in COMPLETE sentences!
1. Think about the Hindu belief of reincarnation. How might this belief justify treatment of the lower castes?
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2. Do we have an “unofficial” caste system in the US? How?
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