People tagged as untouchable are not to be touched because their caste-assigned work is to clean away human feces, prepare human corpses for burial or cremation, skin dead animals and tan the skins, consume the meat of cattle who have met their end, and catch and eat other animals, including field rats, termites, and disease-bearing bandicoots (peruccāḷi in Tamil; translated word for word as “big rat”). A person born to a tīṇḍā caste is herself tīṇḍā. Regardless of what such a person eats or does not eat, touches or does not touch, does or does not do, she is considered poisonous, inferior both in body and in mind, inherently diseased and infectious. Even high-caste people who know that the system is wrong are disgusted at the thought of eating food prepared by a person of a much lower caste, no matter how clean in body and habits the person actually is. The word tīṇḍā indicates that a person so designated is inherently poisonous. That property is within her and she cannot change it, any more than a venomous snake can change the fact that its bite can kill.
The term Dalit implies that the oppression, the breaking, the grinding to pieces of Dalits was performed by someone other than the Dalits themselves, by foreigners and by higher-caste Indian people. A high-caste man said to me of the Dalits who worked for him in his village, “They call themselves ‘people who have been put down [tāṛttappaḍḍavarkaḷ].’ Did anyone order them to live as they do?” Even children of higher castes cannot play with children of the lowest castes, because then the higher-caste children would become “like them” (Trawick 1990, chapter 3, section 2).11 The very proximity of a tīṇḍā person could change you, who were innocent, into tīṇḍā. The concept of venom, of poison, is joined with the concepts of danger, of beauty, and of womanhood. These concepts are shown in Chapters 5 and 6 of this book.
In principle, possession of such a dangerous characteristic could confer a certain power on the person who was tīṇḍā, and in some villages such people did have an indispensable place in the ritual order. In some villages, certain deities with certain powers are controlled by the Dalits of that village, who benefit from this control. If they withdrew their services, the village could lose protection from malevolent spirits (Mines 2005). But as the status of a deity grows, the deity’s Dalit association may change. The politics surrounding ritual power and privilege is complex and involves all castes, from the highest Brahmans to the lowest untouchables. Extracting oneself, partly or entirely, from the bonds of Hindu ritual is a difficult task. Today the great inequalities imposed on those classified as tīṇḍā eclipse any ritual privileges they may have.
The poorest of the poor include the tīṇḍā. They are poor largely because they are tīṇḍā. When you are born into poverty, when you are turned away at every turn, when your children are not allowed in the village schools and you can’t afford schooling for them anyway, when you are forbidden to enter holy places and subject to scorn and discrimination in countless other ways, it is not so easy for you as an individual to raise your status higher. Members of lower castes have been working collectively to raise their status for generations.12 They try to raise the status of their caste as a whole—to behave as well-regarded people behave, to get education for their children, to secure reserved seats in governments and in universities, to make money. Housing and ownership of land can make the difference between prosperity and poverty, between food to eat and starvation. Those who seek to raise their living standards commonly think in terms of raising their caste status and think less of individual breakaways from tradition. Such breakaways happen, but they can carry high costs. Few people renounce the caste into which they were born. Although cross-caste marriage has been encouraged and rewarded by members of the Periyar movement and by M. G. Ramachandran of the DMK party in Tamil Nadu, such marriage is risky for the families involved. If one family member behaves in a forbidden manner, or even if a woman is shamed through no fault of her own, the whole family may be brought down. Hence “honor killings” continue to happen and continue to be honored even when relegated to the past.
The question of what it means to be Dalit brings in values of rank and caste, matters affecting, whether positively or negatively, Dalit social mobility and the role of language in Dalit social mobility.
It has been said that Dalits in modern South India accept the caste system as a whole; they just do not accept their place in it (Moffatt 1979). There is a ranked caste system among Dalits in some parts of Tamil Nadu. Those who are low in the overall system find people still lower than themselves. The overall caste system has been replicated on a smaller scale among Dalits in some places. Reports have recently (December 2014) appeared on the Internet of Paṟaiyars beating, raping, and killing members of the lowest castes. These reports come from members of the lowest castes, called Chakkilis or Arunthathiyars. Such reports indicate that solidarity among different Dalit castes is minimal. The power of the caste system appears ironclad on all levels. A highly educated Tamil friend of mine, who lives in Canada now, has suggested that the caste system is so widespread and entrenched because it is “sexy.” I disagreed with him when he said that, but maybe he had a point. Caste and sex in India go together hand in glove for more than a few men.13
Like people in India, people of all classes in the Anglophone nations are concerned with the minutiae of social rank. Likenesses between caste in India and race in America have been drawn by some scholars.14 The likenesses do not overshadow the differences, but the likenesses are indisputable. African Americans in the United States are regarded by some with fear and contempt just as untouchables in India are.
Nowadays the untouchable status of Paṟaiyars is linked to the ritual jobs that only they are allowed to do, jobs that are considered by caste Hindus to be severely polluting. The concept of pollution among caste Hindus is as entrenched as the caste system itself. In the American south, slaves could be cooks, and still today, black people cook in the homes of wealthy southern whites. They also clean the house and mind the children. Proper southern ladies do not do such work. In the days of slavery, a slave woman might nurse the baby of her white owner while the slave’s own baby would be left alone in the fields. Songs about this practice are sung even now. No antipathy toward the owners, no anger comes through.
Dalits in India are considered too polluting to cook for non-Dalits. Only Brahmans are allowed to cook in Brahman homes, at weddings, and at vegetarian restaurants. Just as untouchables are considered inherently impure, Brahmans are considered inherently pure. I knew one Brahman man in Madurai who sent others out to kill a snake in his backyard. It was considered wrong to kill a snake, so this Brahman sent his servants to do it for him. This Brahman’s morality and mine were strangers to each other. In some areas of Tamil Nadu, Dalits treat ritual jobs as a niche market reserved for them and guard that privilege because it is also one of their main sources of income. Others disdain all such work.
The most numerous Dalits in Tamil Nadu are Paṟaiyars, whose numbers give them power. Close in status are those who by tradition are nomadic forest dwellers, but there are not so many of them. These are so-called tribal people, those outside the caste system, who once lived as hunters and gatherers and now have nothing to hunt or gather. Some have homes and land, but others move from place to place, gaining subsistence by a range of means that will be detailed in Chapter 4. Some of those who have been given homes and land cannot use them because they have no water there, and they have no income and no jobs.
By far the worst off are truly homeless people in India who have been lost to or rejected by everybody, including their own families, and have neither a home where they belong nor a group who will take them in. The bodies of such people are picked up in the morning by members of scavenging castes and discarded