The dalit in India

Dalit: The Word and the Sentiment

I search for God, whom should I hear?

I made stone temples, carved God out of stone

But priests are like stone,

They imprison God.

Whom shall I hear?

We were born Untouchables

Because of our deeds.

-Dalit devotional song (Franco, Macwan, and Ramanathan, 2000: 191)

The dalit or "Untouchable" is a government servant, the teacher in a state school, a politician. He is generally never a member of the higher judiciary, an eminent lawyer, industrialist or journalist. His freedom operates in designated enclaves: in politics and in the administrative posts he acquires because of state policy. But in areas of contemporary social exchange and culture, his "Untouchability" becomes his only definition. The right to pray to a Hindu god has always been a high caste privilege. Intricacy of religious ritual is directly proportionate to social status. The dalit has been formally excluded from religion, from education, and is a pariah in the entire sanctified universe of the "dvija."1

Unlike racial minorities, the dalit is physically indistinguishable from upper castes, yet metaphorically and literally, the dalit has been a "shit bearer" for three millennia, toiling at the very bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy. The word "pariah" itself comes from a dalit caste of southern India, the paRaiyar, "those of the drum" (paRai) or the "leather people" (Dumont, 1980: 54).

At 150 million, dalits or "scheduled castes" and "scheduled tribes," form about 20 percent of India's population (Census of India, 1991). Backward castes as a whole, taking dalits, tribes, and Other Backward Castes (OBCs) into consideration, form about 52 percent of India's population.2 Today, wide-ranging policies on affirmative action have opened up government service and state education to dalits. But areas of freedom are limited, largely to sectors that are under the aegis of the state, such as the civil service or state-owned enterprises. Exclusion from cultural and social networks emerges from the dalit's crucial exclusion from the system of castes (Mendelsohn and Vicziany, 1998: 39).

The dalit's pariah status derives its strength and justification from religious texts. In the Manusmriti,3 the dalit is described as "polluted," in the same way as a menstruating woman, a widow, or a person who has recently been bereaved is polluted. The dalit...