~Lets get the basics out of the way: nothing to do with caste....basic hygiene (Twitter feed, Rupa Subramanya), It is not about the people, their caste or where they come from anymore. (Caste and the Kitchen, Aanteladda blog) Yup, you heard it right. Caste has nothing do with who cleans our utensils, who cooks our food, who cleans our shit....In other words, caste does not exist. One is forced to wonder, how many brahmins are engaged in manual scavenging? Or why 1.3 million dalits in india are still swacch-ing our shit? Of course, caste is pragmatic. it is pragmatic to not worry about who collects our garbage, it is pragmatic to not care why a crime is committed against a Dalit person every 18 minutes, it is pragmatic to not know the caste of your maid, your cook etc, it is pragmatic to marry a person from the same caste, it is pragmatic to deny caste, cocooned in our sheltered lives while reaping the benefits of its existence, it is pragmatic to be apathetic, it is pragmatic to be a casteist upholding the standards of purity set by their not-so-different ancestors. The grandsons and granddaughters of Manu no longer use religion as the preferred metaphor for caste, they have moved on to more eloquent idioms of prejudice like hygiene. roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7879%3Apragmatics-of-caste&catid=129%3Aevents-and-activism&Itemid=195
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 13:01:59 +0000
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