A Collage Representing the Caste System- GOST Project (H. Oreck)

Harper Oreck
English II
Ms. Hume

English II G Period

Ms. Hume

12 April 2017

Sweeping Away Their Footprints: Learning About India’s Caste System

In Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, the state of Kerala, where the book is set, is a world of its own; with a successful communist government installed by the town’s Marxist groups and unique religious diversity in the form of coexisting Hindu and Christian communities, the region seems detached from India’s traditional politics and traditions. Beneath the surface, however, the town is plagued by deep-rooted classism and caste-based violence, leading to the murder of a young Paravan, or “untouchable,” at the end of the book. Kerala’s hostility towards Dalits, as “untouchables” are now known, is not unique to the area. It reflects the widespread class discrimination found in India’s rural communities, where, even today, decades of progressive legislation have had been ineffective in eliminating class distinctions; for example, almost 1 in 3 rural schools prevent Dalit children from sitting with children from upper-caste families, 27% of rural villages bar Dalits from entering police stations, and 70% of Dalit women in rural areas are illiterate. I examined statistics like these as part of my creative project, in which I researched the history of class systems in South Asia and made a collage representing India’s caste hierarchy. In the process of learning about the caste system and its role in rural Indian communities, I have gained a better understanding of the deep-rooted traditions and prejudices that led Ayemenem villagers in The God of Small Things to oppose inter-caste relationships like that between Velutha and Ammu, and I’ve become better at recognizing the pervasiveness of classism as a ubiquitous means of oppression. By revealing the social and political context for Velutha’s murder, my project enriched my understanding of The God of Small Things and the events within it.

I decided to center my creative project around India’s caste system because, while classism is a central theme in the book, I knew little about the history of India’s class hierarchy or its scope, and I saw the villagers’ bigotry against Velutha and his fellow “paravans” as individual, anachronistic biases. Maybe, I figured, the older residents of Kerala remained stuck in a bygone world where “untouchables” were still forbidden from human contact, and had not caught up to the newly progressive, communist community around them. My first google search for “caste in India,” however, dispelled my assumption that castes were basically obsolete: scrolling through the results, I saw headline after headline announcing recent mass protests in response to continuing caste-based violence throughout the country. While India outlawed formal class discrimination decades ago in its constitution, de facto inequality and classism has remained extreme in many communities, where dalits are still relegated to jobs carrying rocks or human waste, with no hope of upward mobility. By looking at the structural foundation of the caste system, I saw that caste has functioned as a pillar of civil society for centuries and dictated the fate of entire families, who were unable to escape or exceed their class designation. I began to understand why, even amidst the political changes of the 1960s, Ammu and Velutha were mortally afraid of their relationship becoming public, and never looked to challenge their community’s prejudices: in places like Ayemenem, caste remained a fundamental part of life, central to public identity and so significant that political groups like the Marxist Party did not dare to directly speak out against it. Meanwhile, instititutions like the police force quietly enforce the preferred social hierarchy by unleashing excessive brutality on dalits. By examining tradition, which is itself a major theme in The God of Small Things, I had the opportunityt o better understand the extent of historical and current-day classism in communities like Ayemenem, whose retained entrenched caste-based institutions while also undergoing a communist revolution, and made me more prepared to analyze Arundhati Roy’s novel and its portrayal of caste.