Manu Smriti 2.148:
"Jati stands for 'Janma,' birth."
Apastamba Dharma Shastra 1.1.1.4-5:
"[There are] four castes 
Brahmana, Kshatriyas, Vaishya, and Shudra."

O Hindu,

You said:
"At the top, it is you, the Brahmin:
Head, pure thought, pure tongue, pure birth.
Below you, Kshatriya:
Shoulder, steel and state, the arm of sacred wrath.
Then Vaishya:
Thigh, coin and cattle, the pulse of trade.
Then Shudra: Reddy, Kamma, Kapu, Velama or Rythu,
Foot, hands and knees, the dust that builds your sanatan roads.
And beneath even dust, a nameless shadow:
It is I, the untouchable.

You carved this ladder into the spine of a continent,
A vertical scar running from the
Hindu scripture to the Untouchable street.
You called it the Hindu order.
You called it Sanatan Dharma.
You called it, cosmic law.
But its true name is Total Dehumanisation.

For what else to call a world
Where a baby's first cry is not "I am"
But "You are less?"
Where a Dalit mother's milk is declared impure
Because of the caste it flows in?
Where a Dalit child's breath is cursed
Before they ever touch a clay?

You stand at the summit of this cruel invention,
Your robes bright with the borrowed light of gods,
Scriptures in your hands like notarised chains over my body.
You call yourself the mouth of the divine,
But your sanatan cruelty is louder than any hymn you could sing.

Kshatriya stands below you, armoured in sanctioned violence,
His sword blazing with the right to kill untouchables.
He guards the borders of a heaven on earth
Where entry is reserved for the above four castes by birthright,
Denying passage to those who deemed impure
And his only job is to send them to lynching centres
Whose only crime is being born as an untouchable.

Vaishya counts and weighs, and sells my flesh,
Sending my flesh into gas chambers and into slavery.
He chisels price tags onto human backs,
Balances ledgers on broken spines,
And calls it "Gupta Nidhi" prosperity.

Shudra bends, carries your sanatan orders,
The entire sanatan building standing on his aching foot.
He builds the temple where he slits my throat,
Plasters the walls of killing my body,
And cooks the food with my blood and flesh.

And then, beneath all of your brutal architecture,
In the sewer of this vertical structure,
You throw me the Untouchable.
I am not even a rung on your ladder.
I am the ground itself,
Trampled to prove that you are all standing tall.

You say to me:
"My shadow pollutes your water.
My presence desecrates your gods.
My touch is a stain you cannot wash away."

So you command me to clean your latrines
With my bare hands and broken skin,
To lift your trash, bear your dead,
And scrub your excrement from the floors of your holiness:
And then you call "me" unclean.

What word is there for a system
That takes a living, breathing, thinking, loving human being
And turns them into a walking taboo, carrion, carcass, corpse?
An object of ritual disgust?
A crime against purity, simply for existing?

This is not inequality.
This is not Hindu Dharma.
It is not mere injustice.
It is not civilisation.
This is Total Dehumanisation.

It is turning me into a warning sign:
"Do not approach."
It is writing into the script of everyday life:
"You are lower than the animals we worship.
You are filth in the universe we revere."

It is you, the Brahmin who sprinkles holy water on a stone idol
But flinches from the water carried by my hands.
It is the Kshatriya who would die for a king's honour
But will not lift a finger while my inter-caste-born child was killed
By his own Hindu-Kapu-caste grandparents and aunt in 2010.
It is the Vaishya who haggles over a few grains of rice
But will not pay a living wage to the Shudra
Who sweeps his shop before dawn.
It is the shudra, the Rythu or subaltern, himself despised,

Still spitting downward on those below,
Because someone must exist to prove
He is not the lowest of all.

This is the deepest cruelty of caste:
It does not merely chain bodies:
It colonises my mind.
It teaches the Dalits to dream in smaller cages,
To measure their own worth in the distances
By how far they are from the "untouchable" at the bottom.

And yet.
In my Dalit slums and swept-out alleys,
In leather-tanning yards and wet latrines,
Among those declared less than human,
The most human thing of all persists:
Refusal.

A man, untouchable,
"Touches his own face in the dark and thinks,
"My skin is not a sin."
A Dalit girl, barred from the temple,
Finds God in her own Dalit Church and
Wonders how any divinity could be offended by her breath.
An old Dalit woman, who has scrubbed other people's filth
With hands they refused to shake,
Watches the sky at dusk and understands
That no star ever asked her caste
Before it burned for her.

No scripture can annul that structure.
No ritual can erase that truth.

For the Brahmin who believes himself made of finer dust,
For the Kshatriya who believes his sword more sacred than a Dalit life,
For the Vaishya who believes profit is more real than Dalit pain,
For the Shudra who believes he was born a Dalit killer,
The greatest heresy is this simple fact:

There is no vertical line in the human soul.

Hierarchy is a story repeated until it sounds like the truth.
But a lie does not become the truth
Just because it survived for thousands of years.
Oppression dressed in silk and Sanskrit
Is still oppression.
A chain inscribed with holy verses
Is still a chain.