The Untouchables of India

The Untouchables of India

The least challenged racism remains that of Indian Caste system. Indo-Aryans started the Caste system in India after they conquered it, to preserve their racial purity in India. Now the Caste system is a part of Hinduism. The Hindu religious name for the Caste system is Verna, which literally means color system. Darker-skinned people, Dravidians, who were defeated by Aryans, became outcaste or Untouchables of the Verna system.

The following list gives a broad idea of what untouchabilty means:

• Denial or restriction of access to public facilities, such as well, schools, roads, post offices, and courts.
• Denial or restriction of access to temples where their presence might pollute the deity as well as the higher caste worshippers, and from resthouses, tanks, and shrines connected to temples. Untouchables... are forbidden to learn the vedas (the earliest and most sacred books of orthodox Hinduism).
• Exclusion from any honorable, and most profitable, employment and relegation to dirty or menial occupations.
• Residential segregation...by requiring them to remain outside the village.
• Denial of access to services such as those provided by barbers, laundrymen, restaurants, shops, and theaters or requiring the use of separate utensils and facilities within such places.
• Restrictions on style of life, especially in the use of goods indicating comfort or luxury. Riding on horseback, use of bicycles, umbrellas, footwear, the wearing of gold and sliver ornaments, the use of palanquins to carry bridegrooms...
• Requirements of deference in forms of address, language, sitting and standing in presence of higher castes.
• Restrictions on movement. Untouchables might not be allowed on roads and streets within prescribed distance of the houses or persons of higher castes.
• Liability to unremunerated labor for the higher castes and to the performance of menial services for them. (Marc Galanter, Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), P. 15.

According to the Indian census of 1980, there were 200 million "Untouchables" of the lowest Castes. These 200 to 300 Castes are subjected to very inhuman treatment based on practices advocated in the Hindu religious manual Manu Smriti. The life, property and honor of Untouchables still remains threatened by the higher Castes.

Pollution and purification are key concepts in the Caste system. They are based on Hindu beliefs that each Caste group can maintain its status by restricting contact with the "polluting" effects of the lower Castes and by regulating its contact with objects thought to be inherently impure.

Caste members customarily marry only members of their own Caste. There are about 3,000 Castes and more than 25,000 sub-Castes in India, some with only several hundred members and others with millions.

The tragedy is that with the rise of Hindu religious nationalism nowadays, the Caste system is regaining its power, shaken a bit by modernization. Most wealth and power is by and large in the hands of the top three percent of Castes in India."