No kitchen boy here

Travelling through Bihar and looking at how our education system actually serves the poorest in India, I wonder whether this ‘Right to Education Act’ will ever get off the ground.

With the caste system still firmly in place in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, crafty headmasters and upper caste Panchayats find ingenious ways to keep the lowest castes out of school.

The lower castes aren’t cute little innocents either. Visit their habitations and if you’re a first time visitor, you’ll be appalled. They’re smelly, unhygienic, indolent, grasping, vulgar, violent, often piss-drunk, and sometimes unfriendly. If you think that the Musahars, Doms, Mesthars, and Nats are the ‘gentle unwashed’, it’s time to lift up your head from the poppy fields forever.

If you have been brought up in the Western tradition, or have had the benefit of good ol’ Christian schooling [and I mean good OLD Christian schooling] that planted stuff like cricket, Old Bailey, and that peculiar notion of fair play in your hyperactive sub-conscious, you’ll say, “Chaps, these poor buggers have been given a raw deal for centuries. All that they’ve been allowed to do is to clean other’s shit, carry corpses, and scavenge. They’ve been social outcastes for a thousand years, and it’s time to be a bit more accommodating. Teach them to clean up, and probably move them from the outhouse to the vegetable garden.

One of my favourite Black poets, Langston Hughes, spoke about a beautiful black boy being relegated to the kitchen and not being allowed to the dining room. These four kinds of Dalits would never be allowed anywhere near a staunch Brahmin’s kitchen, for Crispen’s sake. Before you call me racist, take a walk to the centre of a Musahar Tola in any of Bihar’s rural districts, and surrounded by the sights and sounds of destitution and degradation, amidst the shit and piss and snorting pigs, stark naked kids, unwashed men smelling of cheap arrack unashamedly scratching their crotches and toothless women with lice-filled hair scratching their emaciated rumps, drink from a pitcher of water offered to you by one of the inhabitants. Let me tell you, if you drink the water, you either have great faith, or great foolishness.

I probably get by because my patron saint is Francis of Assisi.