Nowadays who sees caste?

Nowadays who sees caste?

I understand I am treading on a politically sensitive topic in this blog. I am using some words in this blog which may sound objectionable to some people, so I start by declaring that I mean no malice while using any of these words, and I am using them only because they stung my auditory sensitivities and I want to transfer that sting to you through these writings.

“Doctor, I am guessing you are a brahmin”, said a patient as a closing remark during a conversation today. The words stung quite harshly. Read alone, there is nothing hurtful about the words that were uttered. Being someone born in a privileged community, being referred to by the caste name, should usually not incite this kind of response. But it did. To understand why I would like to narrate the incidents that led to this statement.

It was a routine clinic day. However, the clinic was not too busy. After finishing the clinic early, my colleagues and I came to the doctor’s resting room to sit and relax for a bit before our lunch could arrive. As we sat there discussing some patients that we had seen today, a lady, about 60 years of age, clad in a bright orange saree, with a clean, well combed and groomed hair and some expensive gold jewelry in her neck walked into the room without even asking for permission. She casually remarked, “Isn’t this the place where the training programs of this organization usually happen?”. We said, yes, but she is welcome to sit and relax in the room. The lady immediately made herself comfortable under a fan and started listening to our conversation. She was participating in our conversations as though she was part of our team. Our food arrived. And as we started eating our food, we asked her if she would join us. She refused and said that she had just eaten. But she was constantly trying to strike up a conversation with us as we sat there eating.

We were very uncomfortable with this lady jutting her nose into lunchtime chat and the discomfort must have been very obvious that the lady remarked to one of our staff, “Don’t you belong to village A?” Then my colleague responded to this, “No she belongs to village V”. To this, the lady remarked in a very sarcastic note, “Oh, yes you live between village A and V, yes, yes”. That remark was loaded with a lot of caste-ist meanings. In Tamil Nadu, villages are distinctly separated based on caste lines, where people of scheduled castes are usually separated out from the village and live in the fringes. So when someone is referred to as living between villages, they are being directly put in their “position in society” in front of everyone gathered in the room. Suddenly our staff’s face became disturbed and she became quiet.

The lunch continued in an uncomfortable silence and then the lady remarked, “you people are coming here to serve the patients here, then you must be Christian missionaries”. This time we ignored the remark and continued the lunch. It was becoming too uncomfortable answering her questions and listening to her un-invited caste and religion-based remarks. Then she brought out her case records, even as we were eating and showed them to me. She asked a lot of questions about her illness and I patiently responded to her in a tone and tenor that was as professional as I could muster given the circumstances and the fact that my lunch was being interrupted. At the end of all this, she said: “Doctor, I am guessing you are a brahmin”. Before I could retort something nasty, I was called off to catch the bus that would soon be arriving for our return home and so I left without saying anything. You can now see how the sentence stung me.

I was brought up in a typical middle-class family in a very protected background, where I grew up seeing a small world where life was simple, harmless, uneventful and my entire society had a lifestyle very similar to mine. I went to a school where the majority of my classmates belonged to the same caste as me and I never saw or understood what caste can do to the society. Even reservation in admission to medical education did not bother me. I had secured a good rank in the medical entrance exam and it didn’t matter whether there was reservation or not, I had gotten the medical seat that I thought I deserved. My first brush with the ugly effects of the caste system was when I was thrown into rural areas of Vellore, during my postgraduation training, when I started noticing the clear distinction between the villages and the scheduled caste colonies. Tamil Nadu villages were divided into these very strict caste colonies. Once I remember standing on a road leading to a burial ground. The notice on the road read, “Paraiyar Idukadu” (burial ground for paraiyar caste – a particular scheduled caste). For the first time in my life, I realized that even when dead, people of the village and the colony had to be buried in separate spaces, one “holier” than the other. I am not talking about long ago, just about 10 years ago, and that too in a village that was relatively well developed and close to the city.

Then when I worked in a rural Non-Governmental Organization, I became acutely aware of the strong influence of caste on the society. One day, as I was seeing patients in the rural clinic, a term pregnant lady was brought to the clinic with a 40% burn wound. After giving her first aid, starting an intravenous line and transferring her for further management to Chennai, I heard from our community health worker that it was an attempt at a caste-based honour killing. The Nayakar caste girl married a boy belonging to Parayar caste. So when she became pregnant, the parents of the girl brought her home to give her a valaikappu or baby shower and doused her in kerosene and lit her instead. It was a rather harsh brush with the caste system.

I once was suturing the laceration on the leg of a guy who had been injured in a road traffic crash. There was no power supply. The ambient temperature was oppressively hot. The only place with good lighting was the ward. There was no proper cot there for making a person lie down and suture a wound. So in a rather uncomfortable and bent up position, I was standing and suturing the wound. The relative of this man, was really drunk and he was standing there watching my struggle. I was sweating so profusely that in order to avoid the sweat from contaminating the suture area, I stood up from my bent down position for a minute to let my sweat dribble down from my forehead and at the same time stretch my back a bit. This guy saw this gesture, peeped into the wound, saw the wound only half done, thought that I had finished and remarked loudly, “Paappan thane nee? Athan appadiye vittutte.” (“you are after all a brahmin, that’s why you left it just like that”). Those were words from a drunk man’s mouth. They were meaningless. I ignored what he said and finished the suturing. But that day, at that time, in that situation, those words hurt. It was made clear to me again that I cannot run away and hide from caste.

From then on, I started understanding the tentacles of caste in almost everything in the clinic. Our housekeeping staff would prepare the lunch for us, but would never sit with us to eat, because people of certain castes cannot eat with people of certain other castes. Three housekeeping staffs in the clinic once had a fight over who should do which job, and I learnt that the fight was because they belonged to different sub-castes and each of these castes saw a certain job as below their grade. Once when asked, a patient told that he would never attend the wedding or good events of another patient belonging to their same village as they belonged to different castes. And once I overheard an angry patient yelling at our housekeeping staff using the word “sakkilichi nai” (dog belonging to the sakkiliyar caste) in a derogatory tone, which almost brought a riot in the clinic. There was caste everywhere around me.

When I enter my weekday place of work, it is like I go to a cinema shooting set. The place is fake because on face value there is complete equity everywhere. Sitting in the heart of the city, the central government institution has affirmative action based on caste and there is supposed to be caste-based equity in terms of recruitment to all posts. Yes, reservations work well in our institution. We have some brilliant young students from underprivileged castes, who are here, thanks to the caste-based reservations. We are fortunate to have some of them. They will go on to improve the quality of life of their entire families and villages. But the reality is far removed from ideas of justice and equity. There are far few of them in real positions of power. There are an overwhelming large number of people from underprivileged castes in janitorial and housekeeping services and a large number of powerful people from privileged castes in the top positions.

A few months ago, when I brought up the issue of caste with a colleague of mine, she remarked, “who sees caste nowadays?”. Though for clearly political reasons we don’t see the kind of caste brawls and street fights in my institution, like how we see in the rural NGO, the statement “who sees caste nowadays?” is clearly a joke. To me, the statement just means people who are in the safe nets of the city in central government jobs can afford to become blind to caste and refuse to see it, although it exists all around them. But just because we chose not to see it, it does not mean caste does not exist. The fact that when I enter the broom closet of my department to pick up a cloth to dust my table, my housekeeping staff comes running from somewhere, grabs the cloth and says, “you should not be doing this job sir” is a testimony to me that caste exists everywhere. I don’t know if caste and caste inequities will go away in my lifetime. But sharpening my sensitivity to caste has made me a better person. I was thinking on my way home today, what would I have told that lady who guessed my caste. I probably would have said, “you can give any caste label to me that you feel comfortable with. As long as I am a doctor, and I am helping you, I am your relative, I am your friend, I am your caste”