-Ramphal Kataria
Untouchable by Day, Desired by Night
“Caste is not a physical object like a wall of bricks. It is a notion, a state of mind.”
— B. R. Ambedkar
I. The Veins of Caste
Sahab, let’s drop the courtesy.
Caste in India does not merely organise society — it circulates through it, like blood. It decides who touches whom, who eats with whom, who marries whom, who is buried beside whom. It is enforced not only through violence, but through everyday rituals: kitchens, surnames, matrimonial columns, seating arrangements, silences.
And yet — here is the hypocrisy that sustains the system — the same body declared impure in daylight becomes consumable at night.
We disinfect our hands after shaking hands with a Dalit, but not after using the bodies of Dalit women. We speak of maryada and sanskriti, but every basti and every landlord’s haveli knows this truth: caste dissolves only when power desires without consequence.
This is not intimacy. It is licensed violation.
As Gail Omvedt noted, caste survives not despite sexuality, but through it. Sexual access to lower-caste women has historically been one of the most stable privileges of upper-caste power — unacknowledged, unpunished, unquestioned.
Caste collapses only where accountability disappears.
II. The Politics of Purity
Purity, Sahab, was never about cleanliness. It was about control.
If purity were sacred, it would have applied equally. Instead, it travelled in one direction only:
from the upper-caste man downward,
from the powerful to the powerless,
from the owner to the owned.
The Manusmriti did not merely encode hierarchy — it eroticised it. Women, Shudras, and servants were placed in a single moral category: bodies to be regulated, punished, and accessed when required.
This is why, even today, when a Dalit woman is raped, the village does not ask who violated her.
It asks: why was she there?
As Arundhati Roy writes in The Doctor and the Saint, caste is “not just a division of labour, but a division of labourers.” And the Dalit woman’s body is where this division becomes brutally visible — desired as flesh, despised as person.
Upper-caste morality, Sahab, ends exactly where upper-caste power begins.
III. Women as the Currency of Empire
History textbooks call them alliances.
Let’s call them what they were: transactions.
When Akbar married Harkha Bai, remembered conveniently as Jodha Bai, it was not romance. It was realpolitik. Rajput loyalty was purchased through a woman’s body, sealed through ritual, and sanctified by empire.
Jahangir followed the same script when he married Jagat Gosain, mother of Shah Jahan.
These marriages did not dismantle hierarchy — they rearranged it.
As historian Ruby Lal argues, women in early Mughal politics were not passive figures of harmony, but active instruments through which sovereignty was stabilised. Their bodies were the most peaceful battlefields empire ever needed.
Caste and patriarchy did not disappear in these unions.
They were merely rebranded as unity.
IV. The New Moral Police
Fast forward, Sahab.
The crowns are gone. The hypocrisy remains.
Today’s custodians of “Indian culture” do not carry swords — they carry microphones. They shout about love jihad, about bloodlines, about protecting daughters, while attending interfaith weddings in five-star hotels and sending their own children abroad to marry whoever they want.
In villages, Khap Panchayat issues death sentences for inter-caste love.
In cities, the same act is rebranded as “global values” and posted on Instagram.
What changes is not morality — only class protection.
Caste and religion, Sahab, are not walls.
They are curtains.
They part for the powerful.
They suffocate the poor.
V. Untouchability in a New Outfit
Untouchability did not die.
It changed clothes.
You may drink tea with your Dalit colleague today.
But will you accept their surname at your daughter’s wedding?
You may chant constitutional values.
But will you dismantle caste inside your own family?
As Surinder S. Jodhka shows, the deepest site of caste reproduction is not the village well — it is the marriage market. The modern Indian claims equality everywhere except where it matters most.
Every era needs bodies it can both desire and despise.
Today, they stand at the intersection of caste, gender, and poverty — Dalit women, Muslim girls, Adivasi children.
The impurity, Sahab, was never in their blood.
It was always in our gaze.
VI. Conclusion: Equality Only in Sin
So what now?
We have abolished untouchability in law, but not in love.
We worship goddesses and violate women.
We call inter-caste marriage “modern,” but still ask for the surname before the bride’s name.
The most damning truth, Sahab, is this:
the only space where caste truly collapses is still called najaiz.
Equality exists in secrecy, not in sanctity.
Consent exists where power does not have to answer.
One day, perhaps, we will learn to publicly honour what we now practice privately. Until then, caste will keep flowing through our veins — and hypocrisy will keep pumping the heart of this society.
Sahab, let’s not pretend.
References
1. Annihilation of Caste — B.R. Ambedkar
2. The Doctor and the Saint — Arundhati Roy
3. Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World — Ruby Lal
4. Dalits and the Democratic Revolution — Gail Omvedt
5. Caste — Surinder S. Jodhka
6. Untouchable — Mulk Raj Anand
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