The Indians

by Sudhir Kakar

  DIRT AND DISCRIMINATION

  A cardinal feature of caste which makes the caste experience different from that of growing up in a clan or a tribe is the phenomenon of untouchability.

  The 150 million untouchables, the dalits, of India comprise a number of ‘impure’ castes which occupy the lowest rungs in the hierarchy of Hindu society. Earlier—and in many parts of rural India even today—the visceral withdrawal bordering on revulsion at a dalit’s approach was so strong that the dalits were denied access to temples, thoroughfares and other public spaces. Their housing was segregated, their children not allowed to attend the common village school and their women forbidden to draw water from the public well lest the drinking water become contaminated.

  The degradation of a vast number of other human beings to an extent that members of higher castes in parts of rural India recoil not only from their touch but even from their shadow continues to be a matter of great shame for many Indians. Mahatma Gandhi regarded untouchability as the biggest blot on Hindu society and passionately fought for its eradication the whole of his adult life. In a letter to a correspondent who had talked of upper-caste intolerance of the untouchables, he writes: ‘I abhor with my whole soul the system which has reduced a large number of Hindus to a level less than that of beasts. The vexed problem would be solved if the poor panchama [literally, ‘fifth’, that is, below the fourth caste of shudra in the varna classification], not to use the word ‘untouchable’, was allowed to mind his own business. Unfortunately, he has no mind or business he can call his own. Has a beast any mind or business but that of his master? Has a panchama a place he can call his own? He may not walk on the very roads he cleans and pays for by the sweat of his brow. He may not even dress as the others do...It is an abuse of language to say we Hindus extend any toleration towards our panchama brothers. We have degraded them and then have the audacity to use their very degradation against their rise.’5

  Vigorous social and political movements in the last century, as also the process of urbanization, have considerably mitigated the horrors of untouchability. But they have by no means disappeared. In its issue of 19 September 2005, the news magazine India Today carried a report from a village in Orissa where, for the first time, a dalit girl had been admitted to college for higher education. When the eighteen-year-old girl rode a bicycle to college, the upper-caste-dominated village threatened the dalits with social boycott if she did not walk to college instead. According to custom, dalits in this village can only walk barefoot. They are not allowed to take wedding processions through the village or cremate the dead in the common cremation ground. If they are invited to upper-caste weddings, it is only to wash the feet of the wedding guests.

  Modern egalitarian ideologies have indeed led to a questioning of the hierarchical principle among sections of society, especially in the lower castes. But these ideologies have not quite succeeded in breaking hierarchy’s tenacious hold on the Indian mind. What the egalitarian ideology has undoubtedly accomplished is to increase the hypocrisy, the gulf between private disparagement and a politically correct public stance towards the dalits.

  We have already mentioned that most anthropological scholars of Hindu society agree that ‘pollution’ or ‘impurity’ is the central organizing principle of the caste system and, hence, also of untouchability. What are the psychological roots of a tradition that so demeans and degrades so many Indians? In the only serious psychological study of untouchability, the eminent folklorist Alan Dundes has postulated that in the Hindu mind, the untouchable is intimately associated with faeces, and the Hindu horror of faeces, instilled by the culture’s toilet training, is the ‘cause’ for the persistence of untouchability.6 Although we agree with Dundes’ exposition on the importance of dirt as the primary psychological moment in the phenomenon of untouchability, we are sceptical about the (Freudian) responsibility of toilet training for this state of affairs. There is no parallel in India, for instance, to the Western scatological fixations in speech. Equivalents of ‘Merde!’, ‘Shit!’, ‘Scheisse!’ are not common expressions of frustration in any Indian language; nor is there any counterpart to ‘Asshole!’ or ‘Arschloch!’ as a familiar term of abuse that gives vent to infantile rage—Indians prefer various incestuous possibilities instead. In other words, it is not in India but in European and Anglo-American speech that one hears the long-postponed vengeance of a child forced to control its bowels.

  Our own explanation, diverging from Dundes in some respects, would go something like this: translated into the language of psychological experience, to be pure is to be clean while to be polluted is to be dirty. For the upper-caste child, a dalit is a member of a group that is permanently and irrevocably dirty. The child’s knowledge is not anthropological or religious-textual but a knowledge-feeling that is pre-verbal and has, so to speak, entered the child’s very bones. Many a time while growing up, the child has sensed the sudden kinesthetic tension in the body of his mother, father, aunt, uncle, when a dalit has come too near. He has registered their expressions of disgust, unconsciously mimicking them in his own face and body at any threatened contact with an untouchable. Given the child’s propensity to place himself at the centre of all experience, he effortlessly links the family’s disapproval and revulsion toward the untouchable to those times when he has been an ‘untouchable’ himself, that is, the times when he has been the subject of unruly tantrums, uncontrollable urges relating to food and, above all, when he has been filthily, gloriously dirty.

  All young children, everywhere in the world, try to disown their ‘bad’, socially disapproved dirtiness by projecting it outside. It is first projected on to animals and later to other people and groups of people—‘reservoirs’, as the psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan calls them.7 These reservoirs are available to the child as a pre-selection by his own caste group. Since ages, the untouchables have been the selected reservoir of dirtiness for the upper-caste child, just as Muslims were and still are for Hindus (and vice versa). It is significant that Gandhi recollects his mother telling him when he was a child that the shortest cut to purification after touching an untouchable was to cancel the touch by an even dirtier one—by touching a Muslim.8

  Viewing an antagonistic group as dirty, and thus subhuman, whereas one’s own cleanliness is not only humanely civilized but next to godliness, is commonplace in ethnic conflict. ‘Dirty nigger’ and ‘dirty Jew’ are well-known epithets in the United States. The Chinese regard Tibetans as unwashed and perpetually stinking of yak butter, while Jewish children in Israel are brought up to regard Arabs as dirty. In the Rwandan radio broadcasts inciting the Hutus to massacre the Tutsis, the latter were consistently called rats and cockroaches, creatures associated with dirt and underground sewers, vermin that needed to be exterminated.

  As the psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie has pointed out in a classic paper, there exists in all of us, as a legacy from our early childhood, an unconscious image ‘of the body as a kind of animated, mobile dirt factory exuding filth at every aperture.’9 The disavowal of this ‘dirt fantasy’ can take many forms, and it is interesting to see how it operates in different cultures. There is relative unconcern in India with public hawking, belching and farting, or bringing one’s hand in direct contact with faecal matter when washing one’s anus (with the left hand) after defecation. In contrast, in the West there are strong taboos around bodily apertures, around noises or smells that emanate from an aperture and may draw attention to the opening and thus to the dirt factory humming behind it. The idea of spitting publicly or going to the lavatory without the protection of toilet paper will fill a Westerner with visceral disgust. Indians, on the other hand, find Western cleanliness regimens equally disgusting. There is an amusing anecdote about the well-known classical singer Siddheswari Devi of Benares who, accompanied by her daughter Pappo, went to England on a month-long concert tour. Her student and biographer, Sheila Dhar, was surprised to see her back in Benares within a week of her departure. On being asked the reason for her precipit
ate return, Siddheswari Devi exploded, ‘Such dirty people! I will never go to Vilayat [specifically England, but a generic term for Europe] again.’

  She then proceeded to elaborate:

  We were given a room upstairs in the house of a mean-faced English witch. After my journey, I naturally wanted a bath. We hardly recognized the bathroom because it had carpets on the floor! I suspected right away that these people cannot be very serious about washing themselves if they could have carpets in their bathroom. There was no brass lota (mug) no wooden patta (low seat) to sit on and scrape one’s heels clean. Nothing. Just flowered carpets. Along one wall there was a long white coffin-like tub which Pappo said one could fill with water and treat like a bucket. She said she would pour the water over me with a plastic mug she found in the room. But where was I to sit? What on earth do these people do themselves, I wondered. Pappo informed me that they simply sat in the tub and splashed their own dirt on themselves and called that a bath!

  Siddheswari Devi tells her daughter to roll up the carpet so that she can use the wooden boards underneath as a seat and asks her daughter to pour water over her. There are loud screams from below as the water from the singer’s bath drips into their English host’s fish stew.

  The next morning when Siddeshwari Devi wants to use the lavatory and doesn’t find a water mug, she is shocked. ‘Don’t they need water to clean themselves afterwards?’ she asks her daughter. No, replies the daughter and shows her a roll of paper. ‘This is what they use to clean themselves with.’

  I could not believe it. I asked her to swear that that was all they used, and she did. Something happened to me from that moment onwards. I felt so faint and couldn’t even breathe properly...I ordered Pappo to go down and brave the witch’s wrath and boldly ask for a second mug because I insist on it...the witch came bounding up the stairs to see for herself what was required...What did we want a second one for? Pappo explained as best as she could. We clean ourselves with water and our hands and the mug has to be different from the one we use for the body bath afterwards. The witch was trying to take in what Pappo was telling her but just could not believe that anyone could use their hands to clean themselves even with the aid of water. When light dawned at last, it was the witch’s turn to feel faint and sick. She collapsed on a chair in shock. All I wanted was to go home as fast I could.10

  In India, this ‘dirty fantasy’ is generally dealt with by projecting the unconscious image of the mobile dirt factory, of the wild animal rutting in the squalor of its own excrement, onto a group of ‘outsiders’: the untouchables. The brahmin can only be pure because the dalit is polluted.11 A pure body must not come in contact with impure substances; the pure avoid impure foods such as (in large parts of the country) meat, impure professions and activities such as those of the cobbler and sweeper, and even contact with people who are looked down upon as impure.

  Whereas in the West there is much effort expended in masking the dirty inside, in India it is directed towards shifting the dirt outside. We see the reflection of this psychological predilection in the immaculate cleanliness inside Indian homes and the garbage dumped outside into public spaces. As has been perceptively remarked by many before us, Indians are a very clean people who live in a filthy country.

  The animated family discussions around bowel movements (pushing the faeces outside) before the start of the day have struck many Western observers of the Indian scene as obsessive. The Indian preoccupation, though, is not with faeces alone but a whole chain of substances in which faeces is only the last link. In Freudian terms (and in the words of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott), what is operating here, in the Indian mind, is a basic ‘oral fantasy’ that goes something like this: ‘When hungry I think of food, when I eat I think of taking food in. I think of what I like to keep inside and I think of what I want to be rid of and I think of getting rid of it.’12 The primary elements contributing to a dirty inside are the consumption of ‘dirty’ food and the retention of the ‘dirty’ part—‘what I want to be rid of’—in the transformations of food, that is, faeces. (We will come back to the traditional ideology of food and what constitutes bad or ‘dirty’ food—food that lowers human consciousness—in the chapter on health.) It is no wonder that the largest set of prohibitions in interactions between castes have to do with food, and the first thing any caste attempting to raise its status does is to publicly announce a change in its food habits.

  In large part, then, the equation of untouchables with dirt has to do with their consumption of ‘dirty’ foods, including the leftovers of higher castes that have been polluted by spittle, another product of the dirt factory that is the body. Accepting food or water from an untouchable was—and among many Indians, still remains—the surest way of losing one’s caste status. For centuries, the preferred story used by Hindu reformers fighting the evil of untouchability is of the god-king Rama accepting berries from the hands of an untouchable tribal woman, Shabari.

  Since the presence of faeces in the body is the second major definer of a dirty inside, there is a powerful psychological association between untouchability and faeces even when the taboo around body openings does not exist in India as in the West. The link is corroborated in the outer world by the fact that some untouchable castes have been traditional sweepers of latrines, carrying buckets of night soil on their heads.

  A relatively neglected aspect of the psychological sources of untouchability is the visual aspect of dirt, its darkness as compared to the light hue of cleanliness. In the universal ‘dirt fantasy’, dark is dirtier (and more sinister) than fair. Generally speaking, a brahmin will be fairer than the untouchable who will tend to have the darkest complexion among all the castes. The equation of dirt with dark colour is well known to any upper-caste Indian child, especially a girl, who has been told by her mother to rub her skin every day with a mixture of dough and cream and who is convinced that the thin dark slivers sloughing off her face or arms are concrete proof of her skin becoming lighter.

  Evidence of the pan-Indian preference for fair skin and a denigration bordering on scorn for the dark-skinned is all around us. Whereas in the West anti-wrinkle creams and other products against ageing are a gold mine for pharmaceutical companies, in India, especially among the middle class, products that promise a whitening of the skin chalk up record profits. Television commercials for ‘Fair and Lovely’ cream for women and, more recently, ‘Fair and Handsome’ for men; the natural equation of light skin with nobility, beauty and high birth in proverbs, tales and legends; matrimonials in newspapers and on Internet websites specifying ‘fair’ brides—all these are accepted as being in the natural order of things. ‘Black is beautiful!’ is not a slogan that will catch on in India anytime in the near future. Fair skin, then, is eminently touchable, desirable, whereas dark skin is an outer manifestation of inner dirtiness and remains ‘untouchable’.

  This brings us to the case of the fair-skinned foreigner and the ambivalence with which he is often regarded. On the one hand, he is a consumer of dirty, forbidden foods, especially beef, which pushes him towards the untouchable spectrum in the caste hierarchy. And, indeed, as we shall see in the chapter on health, very traditional brahmin households will still not let a foreigner enter or even come anywhere near their kitchen. On the other hand, the fair skin of the foreigner negates the presumption of dirt and untouchability. The psychological association of fair skin with everything ‘clean’, ‘regal’ and ‘desirable’, together with memories of being ruled by fair-skinned invaders and the presumption of wealth associated with fair-skinned visitors, makes most Indians fawn over the goras (‘whites’). A dark-skinned African, on the other hand, will often be an object of condescension, even ridicule. Little wonder that many a gora leading an anonymous, run-of-the-mill life in his own country feels like a special ‘somebody’ in India, the admiring gazes and flattering tones of voice constantly feeding his self-esteem, his narcissism.

  Coming back to the connection between the ‘dirty’ (and necess
arily ‘dark’) and discrimination, we will end this section with a story. Tales and legends play a crucial role in introducing a child to his society, and the tale of the crow and the sparrow, told in many regions of India with but slight variations, conveys the culture’s view of untouchability to the growing child in a narrative rather than a discursive form. In his book Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow, Alan Dundes relates a version of the tale from the state of Maharashtra.13

  There was a crow who wanted to eat a sparrow’s nestlings. He once went to her house and asked for the desired feast. The sparrow was shrewd and knew that she was unable to give an open fight to her stronger opponent. She thought for a while and said meekly to the crow, ‘Oh crow! You can surely eat my babies if you want. But there is one condition. You know that you are a mahar, an untouchable, and I am a brahmin, so please do not touch my babies as you are. You must wash yourself, beak and all, and then eat them up.’

  ‘So be it,’ said the crow and went to the river. As he was about to take a dip in the water, the river said, ‘Oh crow, you are a mahar, so do not enter my water.’

  ‘Oh river, I have to bathe in the river and then go and eat the sparrow’s nestlings.’

  ‘In that case, bring a pot and take water in it.’

  The crow then went to a potter and said, ‘Oh potter, give me a pot. With the pot I bring water. With the water I bathe. After bathing I eat the sparrow’s nestlings.’

  ‘In that case,’ said the potter, ‘you have to get me earth; because all the pots that are here are broken.’

  The crow then went to the earth and started digging the earth with his beak and he was not able to do much digging. So he went to the deer and begged for its horn. The deer said that if the crow could arrange a fight with a dog, then only would its horn be broken. The crow went to a dog and begged him to fight with the deer and thus help him get the horn, so that he could dig the earth and thus get a pot made by the potter and then having washed himself, he could feast on the sparrow’s nestlings. The dog consented to fight but said, ‘Oh crow! I need an iron ball to throw at the deer. So get it for me.’ The crow then went to the ironsmith and begged for the ball. The smith made a ball in the fire and gave it to the crow. The crow held the hot burning ball in his beak and was burnt to death. The sparrow was thus spared her young ones.