op feel free to tell me to shut up because I know I do not have a full grasp of this issue like I should BUT
I’m a child of indian immigrants in the west and I thought I understood casteism because we definitely brought that shit over with us to the new country, but I don’t think I really understood it until my dad was talking about his childhood.
we were talking about his childhood in the first place because he’s having some issues with his brothers right now (he’s the youngest kid and his brothers can’t accept that he’s a grown man that makes his own decisions (he’s 60)) and he was talking about how they used to be so close and their childhood was so good and blessed but then he was like ‘but maybe it was always rotten, maybe there was always this seed of judgement in us’
he was talking about how they, an upper mid caste family in a tiny farming village, would hire low caste workers to help out during the harvest. as part of their wages, they would get meals from the family. but because they were low caste, they weren’t allowed to use the same plates and cutlery as my family. it was thought that them using the dishes would permanently contaminate them. they weren’t even allowed to keep their own ‘contaminated’ plates in the house. instead, they would take their meals on banana leaf plates. and I was like ‘ok that’s fucked up but banana leaf plates are commonly used by all castes’
then my dad explained ‘if we were to give them sambar, they would dig a small hole in the ground and line it with leaves, and we would ladle the sambar into that. if they wanted water, we would ladle handfuls of it into their hands and they would drink it all and silently ask for the next ladle. this was part of my daily chores as a child, to feed grown men in such a degrading way. something about it felt wrong to me, but I was a child who couldn’t understand why.’
I was already shocked at that but then he continued ‘once, there were no banana leaves, so I went to give him the plate I was holding. the man wouldn’t even take it from me, knowing how the rest of my family would react. when he accidentally brushed against it, I was surprised and dropped the plate. he then picked up the plate and built a small fire from the branches nearby and threw the plate in. these were steel plates, so they could survive that. he then used a different leaf to pick up the plate once it had cooled enough to give it back to me. not once had I even spoken or asked him to do this, but he knew that the plate needed to be purified before it entered our house. I think I was eight years old.’
I think this was coming up for him because he was already realizing that his family weren’t always good people based on their interactions with him and this made him see their actions through a new light. my dad left the village and eventually the country fairly young so I think he hadn’t interrogated his fond childhood memories like that. honestly, it made me think less of my family.
I’ve heard some people compare castes to different sects of christianity and I don’t think that’s a good comparison. that’s bias based on thinking you’re the best. casteism is having a hierarchy and knowing exactly where you stand in that hierarchy and knowing that you can’t change that no matter what. that you are dirty and that you were born dirty and that you will never be clean.
being mid caste means we get shit from brahmins, so I thought I understood. I’d read about dalits, so I thought I understood. but that was the day I really started to understand.
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