CHENNAI, India'It never ceases to amaze me that people accept poverty. Its very coexistence with the enormous wealth it so often neighbors seems antithetic to the principles of egalitarianism embraced by the most influential members of the global community.
Maybe it's surprising to me because I am an American, and for most Americans poverty is distant'it's a National Geographic photo spread on East Africa or a Christian Children's Fund commercial. Real poverty, with its stench and desperate outstretched hands, does not exist in America. Yes, there are homeless and hungry. But there are not barefoot, illiterate children starving in the streets by the thousands. There are not towns without running water ten miles from major cities. Americans are not generally confronted by hordes of children pointing to their mouths and begging every time they step outside. Faced with real poverty for the first time, I found myself shaken, my throat tightening painfully at the sight.
India knows poverty. You feel it the moment you enter the country; the sight of it is inescapable. The lowest class, the Dalit or 'untouchable' caste, is 300 million strong and in plain view. Even the upper middle class areas of cities like Chennai are dotted by beggars and people sleeping on the streets. Thousands live under tarps by the sides of roads, beneath bridges and on the beach. Severe malnutrition is a real issue.
While the burden of destitution is not borne by the Dalits alone, they do bear the brunt of it, as they have for generations. At the bottom end of a caste system with long-standing religious and cultural bases, many Dalits face discrimination rivaling that directed at African Americans in the period before the Civil Rights Movement.
When I asked a friend in Chennai about the Dalits, she told me they didn't exist anymore. Casteism was essentially outlawed years ago'in fact, the Indian constitution was largely written by a Dalit. Yet two days earlier I stood in a tiny village without running water or adequate educational opportunities, where every person was a Dalit by birth. I heard numerous stories about workplace and hiring discrimination, about the backlash of the middle classes against efforts to enter Dalits into the higher education system.
A friend told me about Sundara Raman, an idealistic bank manager who hired a poor Dalit water-carrier in the 1980s. One of the senior accountants in the office warned him, 'No upper caste person will be prepared to eat at the same table as the untouchable. Do you expect them to drink water from this person's hand'?
But Raman pressed on, influenced by his progressive education and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. He was pleased with his hiring choice, Kishore, who arrived for his first day of work newly groomed and wearing his new pressed uniform. By eleven in the morning, though, the tension was palpable. None of the workers would drink Kishore's water and he stood awkwardly beside a desk, his brass waterpot and cups on the floor beside him. His dark eyes were beginning to fill with tears, and the office workers were asking permission to get water from a nearby restaurant.
Raman stood by his hiring choice, but within a few days it became clear that the situation would not change and Kishore finally quit. The bank workers never did drink his water.
Poverty and caste are different, but are often profoundly linked. Raman could have hired an equally poor water-carrier from a different caste, but it is unlikely that the workers would have refused to drink his water. Poverty is not necessarily caste-specific in India'not every Dalit is destitute, not every Brahmin is comfortable. But it is undeniably caste-related. Dalit communities are systematically deprived of basic public resources like running water. They are discriminated against in the workplace. They continue to be widely considered untouchable or unclean and are therefore implicitly separated from public participation. They experience poverty as a perpetual cycle in a way members of other castes do not.
What is especially horrific about the Dalit situation is not simply that they are poor, but that this poverty has been passed down generation to generation for thousands of years'and that, without serious social change, it is being handed down to another generation of Dalit children.
There is debate in India and around the world over whether racism and casteism are the same. It sounds like a spectacular waste of time. Whether we can place the neat label of 'racism' on the Dalit plight, there are human rights at stake when any group is subjected to systematic or widespread discrimination based on something as arbitrary as ancestry. While India holds the politically correct idea that no Indian ought to be discriminated against for their caste, discrimination continues and the cycle rushes on. While the world wonders how to best phrase the Dalits' struggle, a generation grows up with a second-class education.
My friend's father, an Indian businessman, told me, 'India has many faces.' I wonder how many of them will look like Kishore's in 20 years.
