cents. At the end of the causeway, four legless and armless torsos were writhing on the ground. The heads attached to the torsos were chanting fervent prayers to Allah. My own legs were shaking by the time we got up to the mosque, and for years afterward, I wondered how a man can lose all four of his limbs and still survive. The Indian government cites endemic infection, arterial disease, severe burns, traumatic injury, deformity, and paralysis as some of the reasons that ten million people in India have lost limbs.
Geeta instructed me rather harshly that I would have to “get over” my “Western oversensitivity” if I was to live in India. I tried to follow her advice and get better at inuring myself. I learned to skip over the almost daily newspaper articles about traffic accidents and natural disasters—“82Dead in Bus Mishap”; “Hundreds Washed Away on Flood Plain.” Even with death tolls that would have been front-page news in the United States, these stories were relegated to the inside pages of the Indian papers; there were simply too many of them.
I always read the reports about caste-related violence, though, drawn to the topic with horrified fascination. Not long after I moved to India, the papers got hold of a story about several untouchable villagers in the North Indian state of Haryana. They were leather tanners, a job reserved for the lowest of the low because it involves working with dead cows. The police stopped the men when they were on their way to the market to sell a cow hide, accusing them of killing the cow to tan it, which is illegal in most Indian states. The villagers insisted that the cow had died naturally, but the police brought them in, and rumor spread fast. A mob gathered outside the police department, rushed into the building, and dragged the five men out. They were beaten to death in front of the police department.
The English-language press ran articles with headlines such as “Five Men = One Cow.” Television talk shows pondered whether caste inequality had improved at all in India’s sixty-plus years of independence. One fierce and poetic newspaper op-ed began: “Thanks to my upper caste credentials, I don’t have to skin a dead cow for a living. Nor are my ‘community members’ not allowed to enter temples or stopped from drinking water from village wells, or forced to use a ‘marked’ cup in the local tea-shop, or made to eat human excreta as divine punishment.”
I went to see the journalist who’d written it. Vijay Mukherjee had the brooding look of an aging Marxist—furrowed brow, receding hairline, string bag of books over a shoulder. It’s not an uncommon style in today’s India, where communism remains a potent force in politics and attracts millions of followers. Still, Vijay seemed out of place in the sleek office building in central Delhi where he worked as a senior writer for one of India’s top-selling English-language papers. That impression was only exaggerated when he sat down in front of my microphone and his account of the caste system morphed into a furious hour-and-a-half-long monologue. He worked himself into a sweat inspite of the air-conditioning, pounding on the table and rendering my radio recording unusable.
The word
caste
, he told me, is actually a conflation of two Indian concepts:
jati
, which describes the community, clan, or tribe that you marry into, and
varna
, the place this group occupies on the hierarchy mandated by Hindu scripture. There are four main
varnas
, topped by the Brahmins—traditionally the teachers and priests—who are followed by the kings and warriors, the merchants and farmers, and the service people. Inside each of these four categories are thousands of
jatis
, or subcastes. And below the lowest category are the untouchables, literally outcastes from the system.
Indian scholars think caste stratification evolved gradually, as the idea of religious purity became central to Hinduism. Unlike Christianity and
Geeta instructed me rather harshly that I would have to “get over” my “Western oversensitivity” if I was to live in India. I tried to follow her advice and get better at inuring myself. I learned to skip over the almost daily newspaper articles about traffic accidents and natural disasters—“82Dead in Bus Mishap”; “Hundreds Washed Away on Flood Plain.” Even with death tolls that would have been front-page news in the United States, these stories were relegated to the inside pages of the Indian papers; there were simply too many of them.
I always read the reports about caste-related violence, though, drawn to the topic with horrified fascination. Not long after I moved to India, the papers got hold of a story about several untouchable villagers in the North Indian state of Haryana. They were leather tanners, a job reserved for the lowest of the low because it involves working with dead cows. The police stopped the men when they were on their way to the market to sell a cow hide, accusing them of killing the cow to tan it, which is illegal in most Indian states. The villagers insisted that the cow had died naturally, but the police brought them in, and rumor spread fast. A mob gathered outside the police department, rushed into the building, and dragged the five men out. They were beaten to death in front of the police department.
The English-language press ran articles with headlines such as “Five Men = One Cow.” Television talk shows pondered whether caste inequality had improved at all in India’s sixty-plus years of independence. One fierce and poetic newspaper op-ed began: “Thanks to my upper caste credentials, I don’t have to skin a dead cow for a living. Nor are my ‘community members’ not allowed to enter temples or stopped from drinking water from village wells, or forced to use a ‘marked’ cup in the local tea-shop, or made to eat human excreta as divine punishment.”
I went to see the journalist who’d written it. Vijay Mukherjee had the brooding look of an aging Marxist—furrowed brow, receding hairline, string bag of books over a shoulder. It’s not an uncommon style in today’s India, where communism remains a potent force in politics and attracts millions of followers. Still, Vijay seemed out of place in the sleek office building in central Delhi where he worked as a senior writer for one of India’s top-selling English-language papers. That impression was only exaggerated when he sat down in front of my microphone and his account of the caste system morphed into a furious hour-and-a-half-long monologue. He worked himself into a sweat inspite of the air-conditioning, pounding on the table and rendering my radio recording unusable.
The word
caste
, he told me, is actually a conflation of two Indian concepts:
jati
, which describes the community, clan, or tribe that you marry into, and
varna
, the place this group occupies on the hierarchy mandated by Hindu scripture. There are four main
varnas
, topped by the Brahmins—traditionally the teachers and priests—who are followed by the kings and warriors, the merchants and farmers, and the service people. Inside each of these four categories are thousands of
jatis
, or subcastes. And below the lowest category are the untouchables, literally outcastes from the system.
Indian scholars think caste stratification evolved gradually, as the idea of religious purity became central to Hinduism. Unlike Christianity and
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