Hector Sharp (2013)

This article is dedicated to the memory of the honourable Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar (14 April 1891 – 6 December 1956), revivalist of Buddhism in India, the first Minister of Law for an independent India and the chief architect of the Indian Constitution Drafting Committee. In doing so he made a large contribution to the construction of the world’s largest constitution, and the world’s largest democracy.

Dr. Ambedkar’s struggle for the rights and respect of 60 million ‘untouchables’ allows me to address you through this publication. Without his efforts I would have remained an unfortunate member of that class.

Today India has more than 160 million people who belong to the untouchable class. They are also known in India as ‘Dalits’.

As Australia is a nation with diversity in culture, religion, language and faith, the question of identity became most prominent for me after coming here.

Someone may call his/her identity a nationality, ethnicity or religion, which is a macro level identity. However within every society or community, identities acquire micro form.

I am Indian by nationality and Punjabi by ethnicity, but the acquisition of this  identity only came into play about eight years ago when I moved to Australia. Growing up in India for 19 years, I did not need to say that I am an Indian Punjabi!

It is important to talk about those 19 years of my development as a child and as a teenager in a rural village called Herian. The past eight years as an ‘Indian Punjabi’ did not affect my development as much as those 19 years in Herian.

My philosophy, aims, thoughts, interests, inspirations, decisions, actions and reactions are dependent upon the lifestyle and society that I was exposed to for most of my life in India.

During the transition from childhood to teenage years, the only thing I knew about my identity was that I belonged to a lower caste called ‘Chamaar’ (Cobbler); I had grown up watching my grandfather make and repair shoes for people in our village. He has done this for most of his life and continues to do so. I found nothing wrong with that until some people started abusing my friends and I by calling us “filthy Chamaars”.

I remember being punched in the face by some rich and higher caste boys during our village festival. They had come to visit India from England, and attacked me because I was a Chamaar and had stood next to them to watch the bull races.

I never understood why our caste was so disgusting to them.

My grandparents, who came from Pakistan during the partition of India in 1947, told me that they had experienced the worst of caste-related discrimination. They told me stories of their personal experiences as servants of higher caste people for their whole lives, and continuously enduring abuse  in the name of our caste.

However when I saw it happen to my parents, it really shocked me.

I made it through Year 12 and commenced a degree in science, but my questions were still present in relation to my experiences and observations. I continued to hear unimaginable stories of caste-related discrimination and violence in print and electronic media.

My science studies gave me new methods of observation, exploration, analysis and conclusions, and I brought these with me to Australia as an international student.

Imagine my astonishment when I found two young men arguing with each other and using my caste name as an abusive word in my residential college in Melbourne. There are even custom number plates referring to caste names which can be seen on Melbourne roads almost every day. I felt the same as I used to in India.

According to my observations while an international student in Melbourne, Punjabis often use the words ‘Chamar’ and ‘Chooda’ in order to release their anger on someone or make fun of someone. Often people of African descent are referred to as ‘Chamars’ or ‘Choodas’ as well, because of their dark skin complexion.

At Punjabi social gatherings I have heard people talking about their sexual amusements with women of lower castes who have become their victims while working on their farms.

The astonishing part is the caste mindset of Australian-born Indians who also use the same words as their parents in day to day family life. These people are seen going to temples of God, participating in religious ceremonies, and making donations, and yet these same people are spiteful to others according to their caste.

You might have noticed that overseas-born Indian adults are increasingly posting funny ‘Punjabi Vines’ on Facebook, in which they also declare their high caste supremacy and make fun of ‘Chamar’ and ‘Choodas’.

I have also met an Indian student who is doing her PhD at a prestigious university in Australia, who experienced different treatment from her house mates when her caste was identified. Her utensils were separated from the main kitchen area and they avoided interacting with her.

In order to find the hidden and invisible, I began my search for the reasons behind this unwanted identity, which was not my grandparents’, my parents’ or my choice. I found out that our caste is just one of the 1800 untouchable castes in India.

The identities of untouchables have been changed many times and now they are called Dalits. In some publications they are referred to as depressed classes, broken people or scheduled castes as per the Constitution of India and according to Mr. Gandhi/Harijans.

Historically, untouchables were natives of India and belonged to the Indus Valley Civilisation which existed about 5000 years ago in the western part of the Indian subcontinent, primarily in the region of Punjab along the banks of the Indus River. It had accomplished the status of being one of the most developed civilisations due to its planned cities with the world’s first known sanitation system, the first known system of weights and measures, agriculture and architecture.

People known as Aryans (the Aryans were a tribe of Indo-European speaking, horse-riding nomads living in the arid steppes of Eurasia) entered India from the northwest, and invaded the Indus valley civilisation, destroying all its extraordinary features.

The Aryans became rulers after a long war with the aboriginal Indians (inhabitants of Indus Valley Civilisation/Dravidians) and devised a system of division to consolidate their rule. This was called the Varna System, which divided people into four categories known as Brahmin, Kshatria, Vaishya and Shudra.

Aryans kept themselves in the first category of Brahmin, and the other three classes below them. Every Varna had its own duties, and no one could exceed the boundaries of their caste lest they be punished by the Aryans/Brahmins.

Only the Brahmin could teach, rule, conduct religious practices and write history or holy books. Kshatria had a duty to protect the Brahmin and had the sole right to keep and use weapons. Vaishya could do business and pay Brahmin huge shares of profit. Shudra were there to serve the other three upper classes by various means such as cleaning, leather work, agriculture, carpentry or steel work. Shudra were not granted any rights at all.

The founder of Buddhism, Siddharth Gautam Buddh, today known as ‘Buddha’, played a revolutionary role against the Varna system. He preached his philosophy for most of his life in India and as a result of his social revolutionary work, India became a Buddhist nation for about 500 years, under the Mauryan Empire. Buddhism did huge damage to the discriminatory system of Varna by accepting people from all Varna, particularly Shudras, in Buddhist organisations called Sangha.

At the end of Maurian Empire, in order to revive the Varna system, Aryans killed Buddhists on a massive scale and treated the rest in inhuman ways.

The Aryans repeated history as per their ‘divide and rule’ principle, dividing the Shudra into thousands of castes so that they could never get together and rise up against them. This was the period when the caste system came into play. It was distinct from the Varna System in that it contained thousands of further categories of Shudra, categorised as either touchables or untouchables. According to this new system, all the Buddhists were stamped as untouchables.

Touchable Shudras had norights either, but they were still able to be touched as they interacted with Aryans to some extent. Untouchables were treated worse than slaves. Their value was much less than that of a dog or a donkey. They were not allowed to go to school/temple, they were not allowed to hear and pronounce texts of Hinduism, which were written in the Sanskrit language. It is important to mention that all the religious texts of Hinduism are written in this language.

If an untouchable heard any Sanskrit holy words, he would be turned deaf by having molten lead put into his ears, and if anybody spoke against the caste system, his tongue would be chopped off. Their footprints on the road were considered unfortunate and to erase them a broom would be hung behind the neck of an untouchable, which would clean the road while he walked. An untouchable could not even drink water from a pond of water where a donkey or a dog would drink. If they did, the pond would be subjected to purification by enchanting holy texts, and adding cow urine of cow to the pond!

Untouchables could not wear ornaments, used only shrouds as their clothes, ate left overs from higher caste people or were forced to eat dead bodies, lived in filthy areas, could never earn wealth by any means, could not participate in administration, and were never allowed to cross the ocean.

Women endured additional torture irrespective of their touchable or untouchable status, as they could be raped anytime by a person of higher caste whenever they were found alone, were forced to sleep with other men if they could not give birth, and would be burnt alive with the dead body of their husband to reach heaven, according to religious custom. If they revolted they were tortured and forcefully burnt alive, and this tradition was known as ‘Sati Pratha’. A newborn baby girl could be drowned to death in a tub of milk with the expectation of a male child next time.

As you can see, the Cobra of the caste system hinders the overall development of an untouchable as a human being with a venom that kills their identity, human rights, self respect and self esteem. It snatches the opportunity for a person’s mind to develop, and pushes people to living hell.

The venom which is thousands of years old still flows in Indian society, and the upper classes have tried to keep it hidden from the world. They have indulged in organising sporting, cultural and religious events, but never looked closely at the majority of Indian people’s suffering.

My grandfather still works as a cobbler. According to the caste system he is an untouchable ‘Chamaar’ because he works with leather. My father is a welder in a production unit for Indian railways, and while he does not work with leather, people still recognise him as a ‘Chamaar’. It would not surprise me if I became Prime Minister, and still received the same treatment!

According to Buddha everything is bound to change and nothing is permanent. I believe the above situation will change some day.

I will always be confronted with this ideology, which regards a person as lower in society on the basis of their caste, irrespective of personal character. But I believe that character decides who you are, not a caste.

During the entrance of Islamic faith in India, many people from lower castes embraced Islam to escape the leprosy of the caste system, as Islam contained no caste discrimination. The religious scripture of Sikhism (Sri Guru Granth Sahib) also spoke against the Varna/caste system.

After a period of a thousand years we can still find traces of the caste system in Indian society. Many people have sacrificed their lives to eradicate it.

The caste mindset is embedded in Indian society and some activists have lodged a petition in the UK to make laws against caste discrimination among Indian Diaspora in the UK. The first International Dalit Rights Conference was held in Washington DC in March 2015.

The United Nations has also released press notes declaring the caste discrimination as a human rights abuse issue.

Caste is a disease of the mind and the only cure is reform. It is a hard and slow task, but still I am doing my part as much as I can.

Personally I have come to the conclusion that the real identity of a human being is their individual character and to me, caste, religion, nationality or ethnicity are not actual factors of human identity.

I would like readers to rise above any system which divides us and creates friction between us. The caste system is one example from my own experience, but there are many other forms of racism and discrimination still alive. Let us work together to eradicate these social evils.

Rajinder Azad is an international student studying science at the University of Melbourne. This is his first article published in Quarterly Access.