What color is the plate?
Brace yourself. This one is really horrifying.
Jodhpur: In a shocking incident, a lower caste Dalit student of a government school was beaten up by his teacher till he started vomiting for touching plates being reserved for the upper caste.
According to media reports, the episode happened on October 1, a day before Gandhi Jayanti in Government Higher Secondary School in Osian town of Jodhpur, when a seven-year-old picked up a green coloured plate (reserved for the upper caste) where mid-day meal was being served.
“I picked up a plate reserved for upper caste students mistakenly and started having the rice on it. When the teacher saw this, he started hitting me badly on my head. I started vomiting,” Ramesh, a Dalit, told TOI.
That will be the Times of India.
That’s just…stunning. Special plates for the upper castes? And different plates for those dirty filthy lower ones? What must that do to children? It makes me want to cry and scream even without the beating to the point of vomiting part.
But there is that part. Teachers are allowed to hit children? On the head? And they do? Because a small child picked up a “wrong” plate?
According to Dalit Adhikar Network, “the plates there are coloured red and green for Dalits and upper castes, respectively. The seven-year-old had to be rushed to Umaid Hospital in Jodhpur. His treatment went on for six days.”
Malaram, father of the Dalit student, was also allegedly beaten up when he came to pick up his son from school.
“The cook in the school noticed Ramesh picking up a plate reserved for upper caste students. He complained about this to the teacher, who bashed up Ramesh. He kicked Ramesh and pulled his hair. He thrashed him severely, and this led to some internal injuries in his ears, because of which he still fears going to the school. When I visited the school, the teacher thrashed me too,” said his father Mala Ram.
That’s the caste system. It’s an evil invention.
I used to share a room with a woman from London. She often criticized our lack of a class system in this country, because at least in England, you knew what your place was. Now, I know, at least now, the class system in England doesn’t usually generate this type of behavior, but what in the world is it that makes anyone, especially an intelligent, educated, liberal person like my friend, think it could be a good thing to be relegated to a particular “class” on birth, based on nothing but who had ancestors that were able to grab all the goodies for themselves centuries ago, so you are now “lower” class?
Right?
And until quite recently the British class system did generate a lot of very shit behavior. One of the more annoying things about Downton Abbey is the way Julian Fellowes pretends it was so much friendlier than it was. Servants might as well have been a different species.
Yes. She couldn’t see that. It was just a “way of ordering society” that made sense to her because she was brought up in it. But I would put her in a much higher spot than the worthless Prince Charles any day of the week. She was a very good scientist, and a very good person, neither of which I will say for the hereditary monarch who thinks he’s better than other people because he happened to be born into a family that managed to remove all the members of the last ruling family a number of generations ago and seize the throne (from a ruling family who had probably done the same themselves)
It’s just another form of identity politics, isn’t it? It’s, “Oh, for the good old days, when everybody knew who they were, and signalled accordingly.”
Ah, for the good old days of Traditional Values™, when Dalits had to eat off the floor and lick it clean afterwards!
I’m actually more bothered by a kid being severely injured by a teacher than the plates system But I also can see that the plates system lead to the injuries. Once people are encouraged to think one group of people is dirty, they are inclined to fear contamination and use violence to enforce the class system.
I hope that teacher is removed from the school and sent to prison, but I suspect that, much like enforcers of denied US class system, no consequences will be faced.
Samantha – I agree with you overall, but I do think that the plates system is extremely serious. To teach a young child that they are “different” and “inferior” will have long lasting consequences even in the absence of physical violence. Even if it doesn’t lead to physical violence, it begins an othering process that makes people essentially foreigners in their own home. Children have enough to do just growing and learning without being treated to the suspicion and hatred that attaches to “the other”. It really isn’t much different than the othering that goes on between the races here, even though this student actually does look like the other students.
There’s an enormous difference between class and the ethically repugnant Hindu caste system which has condemned generations of oppressed individuals to the lowest and most squalid positions in Hindu society, it’s sanctified by religion so we mustn’t criticise. One controversial interpretation is that the caste system developed to distinguish the Aryan conquerers from the Dravidian inhabitants of India. Some years ago when I was attending a course on Indian studies I asked the lecturer whether the caste system was originally racially based, from her attitude that was obviously not a question that should even be contemplated.
iknklast @1
“I used to share a room with a woman from London. She often criticized our lack of a class system in this country, because at least in England,”
Oh, inknlast, I’ll bet that the US has a class system, like any other country, it’s presumably a lot less obvious than the English version, but it exists nevertheless. Any society with such relatively low levels of social mobility such as the US has a class system.
RJW – yes, I agree there is a class system, but it tends to be loosely based around money (and a little around education) rather than hereditary class. That’s what she was critiquing – our lack of a hereditary class system, and the ability to move (though often with much difficulty) into another class that meant people didn’t “know their place” in society, because they could, at least in theory, move out of it.
I didn’t mean to imply we had no class system; that was her reading, not mine. I’ve sat in an airport too many times waiting for the “first class” passengers to board first, sitting in their nice roomy seats with much more leg room. And many other ways in which the upper classes let those of us in the middle-, working-, and lower-classes know our place.
Iknlast @ 9
Thanks for the clarification. Traditionally the English could rely on accent or other social institutions as class indicators, so when they move to countries with more subtle class distinctions, such as here in Australia, as some British immigrants have told me, they initially miss the cues,
When you refer to a ‘hereditary class system’, I presume you mean a formal class system. As I pointed out earlier, the US has one of the lowest social mobility statistics in the OECD, lower than many European countries with, I’d presume, more traditional class structures.