The city of Mussoorie is known as “the queen of the mountain”. It is situated in the foothills of the Himalayas at 2130 meters above sea level in the state of Uttarkhand (also called Uttaranchal). It was founded by the British around 1825 when the first hunting station was built here. I was staying in a cottage on a hill, about 30 minutes away from downtown. It had a breathtaking view from the verandah. On a clear day the snow-capped majestic mountain peaks were visible in the distance through the branches and green foliage of trees in the yard, and down at your feet you could steal a glance at the panoramic view of Dehradun, the capital city.
Usually, around 9 in the morning I headed down to the city and I walked past her almost every day. She was a tall and skinny woman. I assumed she lived somewhere above the cottage. She walked on the paved lane carrying a small child, around one year old, holding another one, around three, by his hand, and a girl around six-seven was scampering in front down the road. Over one shoulder the woman had slung two cloth bags full of books. She walked nimbly and the bags tapped her on the back with every step. I wondered how long she could walk this way without making a stop to catch her breath and drop the weight she carried for a minute. She looked so delicate I couldn’t imagine how she was able to do this and one morning I offered to at least take her bags, since we were walking in the same direction. First she refused but then handed the bag to me. I hung it on my shoulder and the little girl held my hand and started pulling me to hurry up. They went to school every morning around the time when I myself needed to leave, so we started to wait for each other at the gate of my cottage and walked together.
Radha lived in the Christian cemetery up on the hill. Her husband was the guard there and was also in charge of maintenance. She invited me for tea and one afternoon I picked up a bag of pencils and pens, a couple of pads, gum and candies, and headed to her place. She lived in a hut with a stone floor. The door was made of wooden slats horizontally attached to each other. The lower section of the door, about two feet tall, was closed up and the adults had to step over it. They explained to me that they kept it this way so that the kids couldn’t go out and no animals could come in, but the top part needed to stay open for fresh air and light. Inside there was only one room with no windows. On the left side of the door there was a stove made of four bricks arranged in a square shape. Several metal pots and plates were scattered next to it. Radha’s mother-in-law invited me to sit on the floor where she had put a pile of clothes and fabric for me. Behind me there was another larger pile of clothes which I was invited to use if I was not comfortable enough. She was a tiny lady wearing big thick glasses with a broken rim that didn’t seem to belong to her. My guess was that she was around eighty, but she told me that she was about sixty. She told me she couldn’t see much but she was a happy old woman, who was waiting for death to take her by the hand.
“Look at the family I took care of – the kids are great, they go to school, they can read and write. We have everything – we have milk delivered every morning, we buy flour and biscuits, we get vegetables and fruits from the market, we get eggs and corn from our village. No one is hungry. It’s just a bit difficult in the winter.” And she pointed to the corner behind me with the pile of clothes.
“Why?” I asked, not clear about what she meant.
She got up, reached into the pile and removed a few layers. I barely recognized in the dusk the little face of a sleeping baby, cuddled among the clothes and blankets on the floor.
“He just turned three months. We will send him to school, like his other sister and brother. Definitely!”
“And then?”
“Then we’ll find a place to send them to work.”
“What kind of job?”
“They will be servants somewhere or maybe will get a better job. They will need to take care of their mother and father who will be pretty old by that time and will need their help.”
I thought about this woman’s life, about how she stepped over the raised platform on the door every day, how she went up and down the big steep stairs in front of the house. There were about ten steps and each one was made of an uneven, unpolished slab of stone about a foot and a half high and two feet wide with no railings on the side for support or protection. I was wondering whether she didn’t slip sometimes in the winter days when the snow gets three to four feet high. Her son usually left the house early in the morning and came back late at night.
“My daughter-in-law and I take care of the house ourselves.”
“What about your son?”
“He is very busy. He needs to go to the village once a week.”
“How far is it?”
“About 10 to 12 miles from here. But he goes on foot. Right through the woods. There is no road, you know. And it’s not easy during the winter with all the snow. He oversees the work his brothers do. The maintenance work of the cemetery is not a lot, not too tiring and it pays well.”
In the meantime my friend Radha started the stove and put the kettle on to make tea. I saw her pour some milk in it and I thought about her children who needed it more than I did. I should have thought of that beforehand, but then it occurred to me that most probably they would only drink the milk that they got from their milkman and that they would be offended if I brought milk to the house. They were so happy to have a guest at home, she reassured me. The only problem with guests was that they needed to know in advance if someone was coming so they could tie up the big guard dog behind the house.
Radha had lost two children. She was expecting again. I did the math quickly; this was going to be her seventh baby. I had my second daughter just nine months ago and now I wondered how her body was going to endure and recover from another pregnancy. I thought about the harsh winter months here in the mountain and about her kids — whether they had warm clothes, winter jackets, mittens and hats. I couldn’t imagine how they lived during the harsh winter months up high in the mountain here and how warm they could keep the house for the newborn baby. I looked around the room again and I felt the chill of the bare walls and stone floor.
It was time for me to leave although my hostess was insisting that I stay for dinner. I promised I would come again for tea another day, because my evenings were usually busy. The kids walked with me down to the front gate of the cottage where I stayed. I was about to send them back home, when we saw in the distance the figure of a man stumbling and tottering on the pavement up the hill. They recognized their father, raced with bare feet down the road and jumped up to give him a hug. When he came close, his face seemed familiar. I put my palms together to greet him thinking that I had seen him somewhere, when something fell on my head and crawled to my neck. I jumped and screamed, leaned forward, lowered my head down and shook it, off. It was a light grey, almost transparent scorpion, about as big as my thumb.
“There are plenty of these during the monsoon season,” noted the father casually and continued:
“They drop from the trees, they move on the ground, get inside the sheets while you sleep…”
“In your bed?” My heart sank when I thought of the little baby in his house, tucked between the sheets and blankets on the floor. Then he added:
“That’s how we lost two children already. Their venom is not so dangerous for grown-ups, though. Don’t worry”.
Until the end of my stay in Mussoorie I never forgot to air the sheets before I went to bed. I continued down the road trying to recall where I had seen him before. I passed a side stall where a bunch of men were drinking and then I remembered; it was here that I noticed him hanging out with these men several times in the last couple of weeks.
I asked myself why if he wasn’t so busy, he didn’t try to get a second job to support his family to have a better life, to renovate the house, to put some furniture in it, at least beds, buy some shoes and boots for the kids. Then I realized how ridiculous my thoughts were, how culturally inadequate. Reality here was different than the one I was basing my judgments on in terms of standards of daily living, necessities, opportunities, expectations and dreams. Some outsiders consider such people fatalist and passive. However, considering the local social stereotypes and attitudes, it is clear that there is practically no chance of someone from the bottom of the hierarchical pyramid to get hired and secure a well-paid job. Similarly, it would not even occur to you to change a profession when you were born into a particular family and into a particular caste, jati, related to a specific profession and social status, regardless of whether it is crafts, entertainment, cleaning, gardening, trading, farming, medicine, law, politics and so forth.
Radha’s family belongs to the lowest layer of the Hindu society, that of the untouchables or the dalits. They are considered outside of the four major classes or varna system, which is assumed to have divine origin. The untouchables form the fifth class and within it, in turn, they have their own hierarchy, which subjects them to further segregation, mostly based on the important dichotomy, between purity and impurity. Traditionally, it is believed that each individual is born with certain inclinations and abilities which are used according to one’s dharma, or moral and social duty. In popular Hinduism, being born into a particular caste, jati, is determinative and consequential vis-à-vis the individual’s nature. This concept is illustrated in many folk stories through a zoomorphic metaphor, according to which the tiger cannot learn to graze and the deer to hunt. It is an essential facet of the popular stories about animals, collected in the Panchatantra, circa 3rd century. These fables have traveled all over the world through the Silk Road and through their translations and modifications in about fifty languages. In the context of their composition, the animal characters represent particular hierarchical layers. The way animals are depicted with a distinctive unchangeable nature, they cannot establish random friendships or form accidental alliances33. Similarly there are rules defining human relationships and associations according to the underlying message of the texts, which perpetuates descent-based discriminative attitudes, apparently quite suitable to many members of the upper castes.
More than 165 million untouchables live in India. They are latrine and sewer cleaners, sweepers, grave-diggers, leather-workers, cow-dung-collectors, washers, etc. They do the dirtiest jobs and are considered dirty. In the villages and smaller towns, the majority of people from the upper jatis avoid them and stay away even from their shadow. If they accidentally come into contact with the untouchables, they immediately perform purification rituals. In many places, Dalits are not allowed to pray in the temples, although they clean them. They often cannot use the main village well or water pump, they must use their own cups in many tea stalls, and are permitted to squat outside of the shack but not to sit at the tables. They always wipe the floors, starting inside out to wash away their steps. The kids are needed for work to support the survival of the family and for this reason are often not sent to school. If they are, however, they are often segregated, , despite affirmative government actions; they frequently play far from the other children, are seated at the back in the school classrooms, are often excluded from certain activities, eat their food outside of the lunchroom, and are sometimes even forced to clean the floors and toilets during the breaks. As a result, they usually drop from school. Clearly, because of their origin and their occupations many untouchables suffer discrimination, social segregation and physical marginalization. They often have limited access to water supplies, to fertile land, education, health care, legal defense and other primary human rights. According to Manusmriti, the Laws of Manu, killing a dog, an owl or a frog deserves the same punishment as the killing of a shudra (ch.11, 132), who is even higher than the outcast.
Certainly, the level of education has increased, the exposure to the outside communities has expanded and hence the caste-related mentality has been changing tremendously, especially among the members of the upper middle class in the big metropolitan areas and voices of intellectuals have been raised in defense of fundamental human rights. Several central and state government attempts are run to protect the rights of oppressed citizens through stimulating and protecting programs and due to such efforts successful inclusion of dalits into the political, educational and business mainstream has taken place. Grass-root movement has also evolved as the main pillar of support for the dalits in an attempt to raise awareness among the rest of the population about injustice committed to them. A couple of obvious examples of success and social changes are Mr. Narayanan, the first Dalit elected to serve as President of India 1997-2002 and later on Mayavati who served several terms as the Prime Minister of Uttar Pradesh 2007-2012.
Nonetheless, these are still exceptional cases and in certain areas of the country law enforcement has been unsuccessful to produce results or has been circumvented. Cases of physical abuse, lynching and killing have remained unreported, uninvestigated and unpunished. In addition to caste-related mistreatment, untouchable girls and women are subjected to sexual tyranny as victims of rape, kidnapping, and violence committed by men of the same class as well as the upper castes. Many cases of Devdasi, Jogin and Chira practices have been reported, where young girls are forced to marry a deity and consequently are sexually exploited on a regular basis34.
In February 2007 I attended a seminar at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law when I learned about the story of Banta Singh from Punjab, who is a poet and singer writing about social injustice, and also a human rights activist working for the protection of dalits’ rights. However, his popularity and the cause he was engaged with goaded a group of upper class men to rape and kill his daughter who was two years old. He started a court case against them in pursuit of justice, but in January 2006 they got a hold of him and beat him to near death. At the hospital the doctors succeeded in saving his life, but he lost both his hands and a leg. However, these unfortunate events did not stop him and today he continues to sing about his untouchable brothers’ and sisters’ suffering. His case has attracted the attention of internationals human rights organizations:
“They took my limbs,
but I have still my voice.
I can still sing.”
In September 2006 another brutal crime against the family of Bhayyalal Bhotmange occurred in Khairlanji, a small village, just outside of the city of Nagpur in Maharashtra. A mother and a daughter were raped, mutilated with sticks, paraded naked and killed; the two sons were also killed in public. It was covered up for sometime by the local villagers, who witnessed it, and by the police and doctors. A journalist for the Times of India, Sabrina Buckwater investigated and reported the massacre in the Sunday Times of India, Mumbai on October 29, 2006. According to Sabrina, whom I met a few years later, the story ignited protests and riots by dalits and activists in areas in and around Nagpur. The unprecedented media attention that covered these events helped with the investigation of the case to be done in a timely manner and thus justice to be served. In addition, it triggered further discussions of caste-related crime both inside and outside of India on an unprecedented scale.
On December 27, 2006 Prime-Minister Manmohan Singh himself admitted that there are too many cases of caste-based human rights violence35. In 2007 the European Parliament and the U.S. Congress officially condemned India’s failure to eliminate discrimination and to prosecute the perpetrators. Gradually more and more reports about violent events are finding their way into the local media and many NGOs have focused their educational campaigns on such discrimination. Changes are taking place and people’s intolerance towards such injustices are rapidly growing.
Certainly, such extremes are also exceptions; they don’t happen everywhere and all the time. Undoubtedly, however, attitudes of superiority and inferiority are deeply rooted in the local mindset and find expression in the traditional division of the society. It is not easy to revise the thinking related to the caste system and to disregard the stereotypes related to its hierarchy. After all, depending on their descent, age and gender, members of the Hindu society follow a particular code of behavior, fulfill pre-defined duties and carry out specific responsibilities. Usually, individuals are not alone; they rarely compare or compete with others outside of their group; in general, they do not face a plethora of alternative ways of living, do not undergo detours or get lost; they hardly ever strive to become an exception, or forget their past or sever relations with their family. Thus, they are an integral part of the community, whose skills, knowledge, and experience are transmitted from one generation to another. Therefore, when changes start happening from inside they have a chance to persist and become trends. An example of such efforts is the mass conversion into Buddhism undetook by a large number of dalits led by Dr. Ambedkar in the 1950s, the leader of the Dalit movement, in order to escape discrimination in the Hindu context. Hence, it is not constructive to impose foreign measures and foreign perspectives when dealing with a culturally specific situation. Since foreign thinking is different foreign actions are often inappropriate and appear threatening or arrogant. For that reason, an effective strategy would be to support human rights with education and with raising awareness about certain issues, only after which a local movement usually takes shape and structures are established from the bottom up. Nowadays there is a global need to sustain a dialogue across cultures, but it is efficient and constructive only when it is based on a consideration of the specifics and an understanding not only of the differences between people, but also the sources of these differences.
I often give as an example a TV report I saw some years ago about the tragic events in a family in a small village in Afghanistan. The Taliban had come in while the father was away and gang-raped his three daughters and killed his wife. The girls, motionless, were staring ahead and the father was devastated. Their house was half-ruined. Their reputation had been destroyed; the girls were never going to be married and were going to struggle to survive all their lives. A really hopeless situation. The same crew returned to this family in a couple of years. The reporter found stipends for the three sisters to attend a school in Kabul, hoping that later on they would get jobs and secure some future for themselves. The father rejected this offer right away. He also rejected the offer that he and his daughters accompany them and find a job in Kabul. He looked at his girls, pointed to the crumbling walls of his house and said that this was the house where he was born, where his father was born, and his grand-father, and his great grand-father and this was the house where he was going to die along with his children. Denying this opportunity would seem heartbreaking or even absurd, but understandable when considering this person’s priorities and sentiments which are rooted in a specific reality and culture. Conversely, Greg Mortenson’s humanitarian work comes to mind as an important example of how it is possible to actually make a difference. In his case it is in the war-torn mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is the author of Three cups of Tea, whose complete truthfulness in the book has recently been questioned. In spite of certain possible embellishments, however, what is important is that he embarked on an extraordinary campaign after listening to the local voices and examining local needs, focusing on building schools for girls and boys, with strong local initiative and community involvement.
I often think of our last meeting with Radha. As always we were rushing down the lane towards the kids’ school. I was leaving the next day and I was telling her how happy I was that I met her and her family. I also thought that she was lucky, because Mussoorie was a peaceful place and her kids would have a better chance in life. I recalled my meeting with the Kalpna in the pottery village and the chance to build a future that she and her family had…
Oddly, a few times I tripped badly and she supported me and when she lost her balance I gave her a hand. Something felt bizarre. I looked down, but I couldn’t see the cobblestones. My own body from waist down was barely visible. I looked around. Above I could see the green crowns of the trees crystal clear. Their branches were aiming up toward the blue sky above us as if to reach the scintillating golden beams of the sun piercing the lavish foliage. But I couldn’t see their trunks where they were touching the ground. What looked like a thick pall of white smoke was crawling down the road. I sniffed. There was no smell. This could be mist, I thought, vapor, but then there had been no rain in the last couple of days and the heat hadn’t started yet. A blanket of dense white fog was moving along with us. Radha saw my perplexity and whispered: “Clouds. These are the clouds over Dehradun.” Clouds had descended upon the city in the foothills of the mountain and were penetrating the forest and we were walking on top of them. She smiled:
“This is called ‘walking in the clouds’…”
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33 See for more The Pancatantra, The Book of India’s Folk Wisdom. Trans. Patrick Ollivelle. Oxford University Press, 1997.
34 See for more Mikael Aktor. “Untouchables, Women and Territories: Rituals of Lordship in the Parasara Smrti.” Leslie, Julia and Mary McGee, eds. The Intreplay of Gender, Religion and Politics in India. Oxford University Press. 2000. 133-157 and Jogdand, ed. Dalit Women Issues and Prespectives. New Delhi: Gyan Publication, 1995.
35 See for more “Human Rights Watch and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice” (CHRGJ) New York University School of Law Report, 2007 http://www.hrw.org/reports/2007/india0207/ and Smita Narula. Broken People: Caste Violence Against India’s “Untouchables”. Human Rights Watch. 1999.