Street sweepers in Bombay: a “ritually polluting” job.
A woman defending India’s Untouchables garners support in the countryside.
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The
Burakumin, Japan’s invisible outcasts
“Japan’s smooth
social fabric is just an illusion,” says Nadamoto Masahisa, who teaches modern history
at Kyoto University. “It’s still based on invisible castes and as Burakumin, we’re
at the bottom of the ladder.” Alongside his teaching, Masahisa is fighting to defend
the Burakumin (or Eta-Hinin, which can be translated as “polluted or dirty non-persons”)
whom society continues to shun.
The Buraku, as they are also known, were seen until the second half of the 19th century
as an “untouchable” minority. Numbering over two million in a country of 126 million
people, they live in some 5,000 ghettos, which are the direct result of an official
outcast status that was abolished in 1871 at the start of the Meiji era, when the
country began industrializing at a rapid pace.
The word Burakumin referred then to those who laboured mainly in slaughterhouses,
tanneries, knacker’s yards and morgues—people who worked with bodies, carcasses and
blood, occupations that are unclean according to Japan’s ancient Shinto religion.
All official discrimination against the Buraku has long disappeared. The authorities
point to the fact that members of this invisible caste today have the same legal
rights as all other Japanese. They have the same physical traits, speak the same
language and share the same religion.
But written laws are not always the same as what goes on in people’s minds. Masahisa
and other militants are campaigning against unofficial discrimination toward the
Burakumin by property-owners, estate agents and company officials. “A lot of Japanese
think twice before renting to a Burakumin,” he says. “If a person is identified as
one or says he is, everything becomes harder. If you rent to a Buraku, people say
you’ll have bad luck.”
In modern Japan, the Burakumin are also socially marginalized. “In the 1960s and
1970s, they provided most of the workers in construction and industry,” says a lawyer
who is fighting against the wage discrimination long practised in large companies
against the Burakumin. “Today they’re the first victims of the economic crisis.”
Their concentration in areas such as Osaka and the old imperial capital of Kyoto
makes them easier to spot, which only encour-
ages many to deny their social origins. To take one example, an influential politician
from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Hiromu Nonaka, has always denied his connection
with the Burakumin.
Even worse, some bourgeois Japanese families make illegal checks on the ancestors
of their children’s future spouses “to avoid polluting the family,” as they put it.
They hire special genealogical agencies to comb through the old koseki (family registers)
at the prefectures, often with the tacit approval of local officials.
Richard Werly,
French journalist based in Japan
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There
is only one caste—humanity
Pampa,
Indian poet and writer, ninth century
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India’s
ancient caste system persists, subjecting millions to degrading poverty and human
rights abuses. Attitudes die hard, despite government legislation to usher in change
For centuries, the untouchables
of Paliyad, a nondescript village in western India’s Ahmedabad district, have known
their place. Many of them are manual scavengers, cleaning the toilets of upper-caste
villagers or toiling the land, sometimes for less than a handful of rice a day.
“We’ve known that we must stay away from them [upper-caste people] since the day
we were born,” says Rajesh, who is going on 19. “At the tea stalls, we have separate
cups to drink from, chipped and caked with dirt, and we’re expected to clean them
ourselves. We have to walk for 15 minutes to carry water to our homes, because we’re
not allowed to use the taps in the village that the upper castes use. We’re not allowed
into temples, and when I attended school, my friends and I were forced to sit just
outside the classroom… the upper caste children would not allow us even to touch
the football they played with… we played with stones instead.”
More than 160 million people, a sixth of India’s population, continue to bear the
burden of a 2,000-year old caste system sanctioned by Hindu theology, which locks
people into a rigid role by virtue of their birth.
Codes
to suit the upper class
Though
the term “untouchables” was abolished in 1950 under India’s constitution, the “oppressed
people” or Dalits as they are now referred to, continue to be discriminated against.
They are denied access to land, forced to work in humiliating and degrading conditions
and are routinely abused by the police and upper-caste groups, which enjoy the state’s
protection
Though India has sought to overcome the inequities of caste and discrimination through
affirmative action—reserving quotas in education, government jobs and political bodies—these
policies have benefited only a few. The highest office in the land, that of the largely
ceremonial President, is today held by a Dalit, K.R. Narayanan. But all the horrors
of India’s caste system persist at the grassroots; attempts to defy this rigid social
order invariably result in violence or economic retaliation.
Perhaps the world’s longest surviving social hierarchy, India’s caste system entails
a complex ordering of social groups on the basis of ritual purity. Attributed to
the law-giver Manu, the system was spelt out over 2,000 years ago in the Dharma Shastra,
the cornerstone of the Hindu religion.
According to Manu, every individual is born into one of four principal varnas, or
large categories, and must remain within that caste until death, although the particular
ranking of that caste may vary among different regions in the country and over time.
In order of precedence, the Brahmins are the priests and teachers, presiding over
knowledge and education; the Kshatriyas are the rulers and soldiers; the Vaishyas,
merchants and traders; and the Shudras, the peasants, labourers and artisans. The
untouchables fall into a fifth category outside the varna system, and were often
assigned tasks too “ritually polluting” to merit inclusion within the traditional
varna system.
Clearly, caste discrimination was an ideological construct that was deployed by the
upper castes to create and maintain their monopoly over cultural capital (knowledge
and education), social capital (status and patriarchal domination), political capital
(power), and material capital (wealth).
The codes were often pernicious, and rules were bent to suit the upper castes. In
northern India, for example, untouchables were forced to use drums to announce their
arrival, and even their shadows were thought to be polluting. In the south, some
Brahmins stipulated that the lower castes would have to maintain a distance of 65
feet (22 metres) from them in order not to contaminate their betters.
Yet this caste-based discrimination also had a pragmatic dimension. The untouchables,
excluded from the education and books of the Brahmins, were nevertheless allowed
to develop their own stores of knowledge, in agriculture or midwifery for example.
But there was a catch—this knowledge was only allowed because it benefited the upper
castes.
A
case of racism?
Caste
is still frequently used as a cover for exploitative economic arrangements. Even
today, most Dalits are not permitted to cross the invisible “pollution” line that
divides their part of the village from that occupied by the higher castes. And yet
a Dalit woman, whose very shadow is polluting, is allowed to massage the body of
the upper-caste woman she serves. Upper caste men, meanwhile, think nothing of raping
Dalit women or consorting with lower-caste prostitutes, even though touching them
by accident in the street is a sacrilege.
One of the main reasons why the caste system has survived is because the hierarchical
notion of social good it perpetuates is legitimized by the lower castes themselves.
They replicate this hierarchy by imitating the cultural values of the upper castes,
imposing discrimination on castes even lower than their own. Sociologists claim there
are more than 2,000 castes and sub-castes within the five categories. These are called
jatis, endogamous (inter-marrying) groups that are divided along occupational, sectarian,
regional and linguistic lines. Even as outcasts, the Dalits divide themselves into
further castes. This proliferation allows for discrimination both horizontally and
vertically, thus making social relations all the more rigid and impermeable.
The plight of India’s untouchables and the regular human rights abuses against them
elicits short-lived public outrage, leaving the state under little pressure to engineer
large-scale social change. This is why a coalition of Dalit groups and activists
have lobbied hard for their plight to be on the agenda of the UN World Conference
against Racism.
“Caste is India’s hidden apartheid,” says Martin Macwan, 41, convenor of the National
Campaign on Dalit Human Rights. He argues that like racism, caste discrimination
is “based on descent.”
Their demand has sparked off a national debate about the nature of caste discrimination
and whether other countries should be allowed to interfere in what the Indian government
considers “an internal matter.”
The government has opposed the inclusion of caste on the UN conference’s agenda on
the grounds that caste and race are not synonymous. “Race and caste are distinct,”
insists Soli Sorabjee, India’s attorney general and a member of the UN Subcommission
on Prevention of Discrimination. India, a vigorous campaigner against apartheid,
claims that it has done everything possible to grant equality to India’s lowest castes.
A fifth of the seats in parliament are reserved for members of the scheduled castes
(the official term for Dalits), and some states are governed by powerful political
parties based on alliances with the lower castes.
Campaigns
to end the stigma
Quotas
and job allocations, however, have not brought equality, dignity, or even safety
for India’s “broken people.” In villages, the social stigma remains too strong to
obliterate by laws alone.
Official figures speak for themselves: recorded crimes and atrocities against the
lowest castes averaged 26,000 a year between 1997 and 1999 (the latest figures available).
Considering the police are often reluctant even to record claims against the upper
castes, these figures expose just the tip of the iceberg.
About two-thirds of the Dalit population are illiterate, and about half are landless
agricultural labourers. Only seven percent have access to safe drinking water, electricity
and toilets. And a majority of the estimated 40 million bonded labourers (who work
as slaves to pay off debts), including 15 million children, are Dalits.
A national campaign to highlight abuses against Dalits was spearheaded by human rights
groups in eight Indian states in 1998, and caste has been taken up as an issue internationally
for the first time by organizations including Human Rights Watch. While some Dalits
have resisted subjugation and discrimination by armed struggle, these are invariably
quelled by more powerful upper-caste private militia like the Ranbir Sena in Bihar,
which has been held responsible for a series of massacres of poor Dalit peasants
and landless labourers.
Macwan agrees that including caste discrimination in the conference’s final resolutions
would be only a symbolic victory, changing nothing in reality. “The only solution
is to change people’s minds,” he declares.
Broken People: Caste Violence against India’s Untouchables, published
in March 1999 by Human Rights Watch, www.hrw.org
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There
is no difference among classes of people. All the world is of divine origin.
The
Mahabharata, ancient Sanskrit epic
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