by themselves, or die. In India, countless millions are not reached.
The people who must clean up raw human excrement and untreated sewage in India are people of the lowest castes. Manual scavenging of underground sewers by men, and of above-ground excrement by women, continues throughout India to this day. Disease and death from this work are not uncommon (Times of India 2015; Campbell 2014). This is a special problem in the cities and in tropical areas.
Poverty causes hunger, which weakens a person and makes them more vulnerable to disease, which in turn can kill the afflicted. Babies and little children are the most vulnerable. They get into contaminated water, get diarrhea, and die of dehydration. Antibiotics and careful rehydration combined with nourishing food can save a child in danger of dying. Cholera is a big killer of children as well as of adults, but again, skilled treatment can save the sufferer from death. If there is no therapy available, the person, whether adult or child, dies. In India, for the very poor, no prevention is available, and likewise no therapy can be had. Wherever people, including children, defecate in the open, other children are likely to get sick. Some will recover and some will die. There are simply not enough doctors in India willing and able to treat so many sick and dying children. I once saw a doctor turn away such a dying baby, washing his hands and telling me, “That baby is dead.”
What poverty does to people, most of all to people categorized as untouchable, is painful to contemplate. Poverty can mean humiliation. Poverty can mean starvation. It can mean not having enough. It can mean having to decide which children to feed how much. Poverty can lead to malnutrition, which can cause vulnerability to disease and ultimately to death. The prospects of poverty, starvation, and death are terrifying to anyone who must face them. Dalits are most likely to face poverty, because they are considered dispensable by landowners and indeed by anyone of a higher caste. If they can make themselves indispensable by any means, then they can eat. But they will not necessarily eat well. This topic is addressed most poignantly in Chapters 1 and 5 of this book.
Pregnancy and childbirth are dangers afflicting only women. These dangers are well known. Healthy young women with good midwives and/or doctors available, and modern technology to assist, are in less danger of suffering and dying. Such care was not always available even for the wealthy. Now it is. But the poor in India, above all untouchables, have little or no access to such easy amenities. Doctors are often not kind and not fair. Fair treatment means treating all patients with the same degree of competence and concern.
Breast-feeding a baby for as long as three years or more is, among the poor in India, one of the best ways to keep a child healthy. Babies are passed around. In some societies, women will share the breast-feeding of babies. I don’t know if this happens in India, but I have seen a grandmother nursing a grandchild of hers in a village of Tamil Nadu. Such practices are considered backward by modern Indians. In other contexts, they make perfect sense.
In India, people who live in cities stand a better chance of making a living than people who live in the countryside. But life for the poor in an Indian city is no easier than in the countryside. The poorest in the countryside flock to the cities, where giant slums have grown and continue to grow. Raw sewage runs in the streets, iridescent black or green and toxic. People sleep wherever they can. If they have a work space, they sleep in the work space. The hardest working, most ingenious people in the world live in Indian slums. While information technology and other computer technologies have become a source of employment for educated Indian youth, the slums are where recycling of plastic and other useless waste is done, not by machines but by human hands. Dharavi in Mumbai is the largest, most renowned slum. But there are slums in every city. Infectious disease is the biggest killer. Starvation, mostly of children, continues. Tiny, skeletal, barely alive bodies may be seen with their mothers in railway stations. A starving girl child may still be dressed in pretty clothes.
Contempt of the poor is undisguised. Most Dalits are poor. Although India is, in name, a democracy, democratic sentiments are scarce in that country. The continued reality of caste discrimination is both cause and result of the long-standing malice against the poor and people of the lowest castes. Maltreatment accompanies malice. Neglect fosters poverty and death. The feeling expressed again and again is that the poor deserve their fate, just as low-caste people deserve theirs. Poverty in India is severe, with rural Dalit women and children faring worst of all. Meanwhile some Dalits, in efforts to raise their status, are encouraged to join right-wing political parties which promise that everyone who joins their party may “become a Hindu”—as though Hinduism were a club. The reports go on and on.
Polarization of wealth is now more serious than ever in India, as it is in America. Political corruption, use of political office to enrich oneself and one’s friends, and use of wealth to obtain political office have reached new heights in recent decades. New opportunities for individuals and corporations to amass enormous wealth have increased with globalization, and cheap labor is easily found in India. The tremendously wealthy benefit directly at the expense of the very poor. This is happening in the United States, too, but the poorest are not as poor as the very poor in India.
Most of the people I have written about in this book lived in poor villages. Even the children of landlords about whom I have written previously were malnourished. They lived in crumbling old houses. Brahmans, and those who sought to be like Brahmans by adopting a Brahman diet, were badly disadvantaged unless they owned many cows and could provide their children with ample milk and milk-based products. But owning and maintaining even one milk cow was out of the range of some landlords. A buffalo would have been more practical. Goats and chickens would have been more practical still. But all of these animals require space, water, and feed.
Those who lived and worked in the fields and forests were sometimes better able to handle poverty than people whose lives were more rule-restricted even than untouchables. People of the lower castes were sometimes better nourished than Brahmans and those who aspired to be like Brahmans, because lower-caste rural people had a more diverse diet than poor Brahmans. Lower-caste people ate wild food, including field crabs and snails and wild greens, all of which the higher-caste people abjured. People of lower castes ate meat when they could get it, including beef and pork, and raised chickens and ducks when they had the means. But as the forests are destroyed and farmland is depleted, options for living are reduced.
Young people of every caste often aimed to get out of the village and into the city, where they had chances of getting better jobs. Decent nourishment in the hinterlands, when available, was not in itself enough to provide for a decent job. Good education could only be gotten in the cities. Some children moved up in this milieu. The children who moved up and out of poverty were those whose families valued education, who accepted this value, and got university degrees and good work in the cities. These children were both boys and girls. But they had to be allowed into school before they could be educated, and for most Dalits, school was a distant dream.
Those who came from families where literacy and learning were not part of the tradition had to work harder to learn and get ahead. Moreover, Dalit children were often excluded from village schools where caste children studied. Therefore they had little choice but to continue as physical laborers.
Unless one is a landowner, trying to make a living in rural Tamil Nadu is difficult if not impossible in most of the state because of droughts and desertification. Educated people born in villages head to the city for work. So do some uneducated people. But it is dangerous for a woman or girl to travel to a big city. She is in danger also if she stays in the rural village where she was born or into which she married. Thus being born a rural Dalit female is a multiple curse.
The Situation of Dalits in Southern India Now
One event affecting everyone in India, including Dalits, is the rise of the Internet. The accessibility of the Internet has greatly increased the quantity of available information about Dalits, much of it coming from Dalits themselves.10 But most Dalits, in particular the ones I write of here, have no access to the Internet, and so, no matter how insightful and useful what they say may be, they are effectively silenced. No newspaper story, no matter how accurate the content, no matter how riveting the account, can tell what nonliterate