Word: castee
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Social Sediment. The Untouchables are castoffs from one of the world's most rigid social orders. Around 1500 B.C., according to many scholars, fair-haired Aryan invaders formalized the four-tier Hindu caste system and introduced a color factor.*The tiers soon evolved into economic strata, and by 500...
Today the Untouchables remain the most backward group in a still backward land. India's literacy rate of 25% is shocking enough, but it drops to 10% among the Untouchables. More than one-third of the Untouchables are landless farm laborers toiling for 260 a day. Those who have...
Casual Brutality. The sting of Untouchability has softened somewhat. No longer, for example, are any harijans expected to use earthen spittoons hung round the neck because their spitting on the ground might "pollute" barefoot Brahmans. Until the 1930s, the lowliest Untouchables were virtually "unseeable" as well in some parts of...
Untouchables are regular victims of brutality. In remote villages, "uppity" harijan women are sometimes paraded nude through the streets and then raped. A scuffle between an Untouchable laborer and some caste Hindus in Tamil Nadu State on Christmas Day in 1968 led to an arson attack on an Untouchable ghetto...
Osborne's constant concerns are present-male camaraderie, an outcast's attempt to crash a caste system, scorn for a decadent elite-but in A Patriot for Me, they appear like footnotes on a blank page. History may be his favorite reading, but drama is no pastime art...