The Brahmins brought the dead body of a child from their community to Lord Ram’s court. They wailed that there must be adharma happening somewhere in his kingdom. Perhaps a Shudra was doing tapasya. Why else would a Brahmin boy drop dead suddenly? They urged Lord Ram to uphold dharma. The king went looking and in a dense forest, found a boy chanting Sanskrit mantras. Ram asked him who he was and what he was doing. The boy answered, his name is Shambuka, he is a tribal and he was doing tapasya. Immediately afterwards, an arrow from Ram’s bow pierced Shambuka’s heart. As the tribal boy hit the ground, the Brahmin boy woke up.
This story in the Valmiki Ramayana comes true every few years, when a Shudra, Dalit or tribal student, who dares to seek education, pays with his life. The most recent was a nine-year-old boy from Rajasthan, Indra Meghwal, who allegedly drank water from a vessel reserved for his upper-caste teacher.
Education is not a naturally joyful process for many Dalit students. Several news reports detail their harassment and humiliation in schools all over India. They are often made to sit away from other children or queue up separately for midday meals. At times, they are beaten up by upper caste teachers and students. In several places, common water taps are not for them. Higher education too isn’t immune to the oppressive conditions, that forced Dalit students like Senthil Kumar (2008) and Rohith Vemula (2016) and Payal Tadvi (2019) to take their lives.
In many places in the country, even today caste determines a person’s occupation. Labour is an obligation, not a choice. As Ambedkar pointed out, caste is the division of labourers, not labour. The system dictates that a person born a tanner, for instance, cannot become a carpenter even though he likes working with wood not leather. It makes reading the written word the preserve of certain groups while obligating others to work with their hands. This segregation stands in the way of creating holistic knowledge. For instance, skinning dead animals and making leather used to be still is, in several parts of the country the occupation of people from certain castes. Their work would acquaint such people with animal anatomy. But they weren’t supposed to read and so there was no way medical science could make use of their expertise. In contrast, Brahmins would never touch a dead body. This hierarchy hindered the holistic acquisition of medicinal knowledge.
This system hasn’t gone away completely today. It stunts knowledge creation and smothers imagination and innovation. The hereditary occupations of the first three varnas in the caste system are worship, war or trade. But such people need food to eat, clothes to wear and chairs to sit on. Who makes all this? The concept of dharma, or caste obligations, asks lower castes to provide productive labour for the upper castes. In Why I am not a Hindu, social scientist Kancha Illaiah associates the karma theory with labour extraction. “If you should do your karma but not expect the fruit, what will happen to the fruit? Upper caste who are not doing labour, not producing the fruit, will appropriate it,” he writes.
The monetary value of labour is determined by the position of the labourer on the caste rung not the social need for labour. That’s why most manual jobs from domestic labour to garbage workers yield abysmal wages. As providers of essential services, sanitation workers should be paid wages similar to doctors. But not only do we pay them less, we also make their work hazardous and ignore their deaths in manholes.
Stuck in the era of ascribed status and codes, our education system can hardly encourage critical thinking. Indian schooling focuses on rote learning and exam results. One-time examinations, rather than a range of assessments, are used to judge the abilities of students.
