Apastamba Dharma Shastra 1.1.1.4-5 "[There are] four castes Brahmana, Kshatriyas, Vaishya, and Shudra."

O Hindu,

To split human beings into
Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, Untouchable:
To place some at the summit of heaven
And bury untouchables below the floor of hell
Is not just a mistake of history;
It is a crime against the very idea of being human.

So name it clearly:
Not tradition.
Not culture.
Not destiny.

Total Dehumanisation.

And in naming it,
Refuse it.

Imagine a day when a child is born
And nobody asks, "What is your caste?"
A day when the only hierarchy
Is between cruelty and compassion,
And compassion sits higher, always sits higher.
A day when those once or now called untouchable
Touch the world, loved and married freely:
Its daughters,
Its books,
Its temples,
Its parliaments,
Its dreams
And the world, at last, is not defiled
But redeemed by their touch.

Until that day,
Every whispered protest,
Every broken taboo,
Every shared meal across forbidden lines,
Every lover's hand held in public
Against the barking of old gods and new bigots:
These are not small acts.
They are hammers at the base of a vertical lie.

For a civilisation that measures itself in caste and cultures,
The true test is simpler:
Can it look into the eyes of the one it called Untouchable
And finally see, without flinching,
An equal human being
Not below, not above.
But face to face?

When that gaze holds, unbroken,
The caste ladder shatters.
The scar begins to heal.
And what was once defended as holy order
Will be remembered, clearly,
As what it always was:
The darkest chapter of your making
Total Dehumanisation
In the history of human civilisation.

We were born with our names already broken,
Syllables chewed and spat
Into the dust outside the village.

Before we learned to write,
We learned to read distance:
The arc of a Hindu/Muslim's shadow,
The length of a caste lathi,
The diameter of a Hindu/Muslim well,
We could not touch,
Though our thirst flaked our tongues
Like old paint.

Our mothers were warned
To keep our shadows leashed.
We grew up trained in disappearance:
Do not learn,
Do not write,
Do not speak,
Do not sit,
Barefoot,
Walk behind,
Speak softly,
Eat leftover,
Touch nothing
That might kill us.

The first lesson of caste
Is not hatred;
It is measurement.
They measured our skulls,
Our blood, our surnames,
Our doorways, our ghettos,
Our graves, our bones,
Our skins, our intestines;
They measured how much pain
Our Dalit body could swallow
And still rise at dawn
To sweep the human excreta
Of those who called themselves pure.

In school, the word "untouchable"
Sat on my desk like a second spine
Sharper than Islam,
Heavier than my satchel.
The teacher read "equality"
From the book with his clean hands,
And skipped my raised untouchable fingers,
As if questions from my mouth
Might stain the school.

Outside, on the temple steps,
The gods refuse our offerings
But not our minor girls.
We were allowed to ring the temple bell
Only with our absence,
Hear the echo of a divinity
That shut its doors
The moment it heard our footsteps.

O Hindu/Muslim,

You say:
It is just tradition.
It is just Hindu Dharma.
It is just an incredible Indian culture.
We see:
Our bodies hung from neem trees,
Dalit women paraded naked at noon;
Just like Sumi Nagas paraded me nakedly
In front of the Superintendent of Police Singh in Dimapur;
Entire Dalit ghettos burning like dry grass,
Fed to a history
That always relegates it as "teaching a lesson"
Never a "Dalit Genocide."

Our dead do not fit
Into their BBCs or UNOs statistics.
They are filed as
A "caste dispute,"
A "caste feud," or
A "caste rivalry":
Anything but what it is:
Six-thousand-year-long campaign
To gas Dalits
Into ashes.

In the police station,
Our pain is cross-examined.
Who saw?
Who touched?
Who raped?
Who killed?
Who gassed?
Who filmed?
As if the welts on our backs
Need witnesses besides our ashes.
As if the screams of Dalit girls
Must have paperwork
Before they count as screams.

This is total dehumanisation:
Not only the blow,
But the explanation
That follows:
How we provoked it
By sitting in front of Hindus/Muslims,
By wearing a white cloth in front of them,
By speaking English in front of them,
By reading an Oxford University Book,
By smiling,
By bathing,
By walking with footwear,
Imagined it,
Deserved it,
How the system is sound
And only our bones are faulty.