Dvija (Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya) must throw leftover food of Shraddha on the ground for Chandala (Untouchable), dogs, and birds to eat. (Manu Smriti 3.92, Markandeya Purana 26.45-46; Kurma Purana ll.18.105-6.

O Hindu,

You say we are dirty,
But it is your gaze
That stains.
You say we are less than human,
But it is your humanity
That keeps shrinking
To fit inside a caste mark.

Look at your Hindu/Muslim history:
A long procession of broken Dalit wrists
That still learn to write and learn to read an Oxford book.
For every Dalit boy they erase,
Another boy carves Ambedkar's name
Into his notebook like a wound
That refuses to close.
Just like my wound in Nagalim or in India.
For every Dalit girl they silence,
Another marches with a blue flag,
Turning shame into syllabus.

You tried to make us nobody
So thoroughly
That even the mirror forgot us.
But we learned to polish the glass
With our scars
Until faces appeared
Millions of us,
Standing shoulder to shoulder,
Refusing to vanish
By your brutal caste system.

We are forced to forgive
What is not even acknowledged,
To move on
From a pit they are still digging.
We reply in the language
You fear most:
We call ourselves human,
Without your permission.
We reclaim the Dalit ghetto,
Dalit school,
Dalit street,
Dalit Church,
The Constitution of India,
But not our skin.

Total dehumanisation
Was your project,
But incompletion
Is its only success.

Because we are still here.
Because the broom in our hands
Has become a pen and an
Oxford book.
Because every time
A Dalit child says, "I am,"
Without bowing her head,
An empire of hierarchy
Cracks a little more
Along its sacred spine.

Remember this
When you speak of atrocities
As if they were cows.
Someone is making this storm
With deliberate hands.
And somewhere, right now,
A Dalit voice is naming it,
Refusing the Hindu or Muslim scripture,
Rewriting what it means
To be human
In a Sanatan-Sharia land that built its gods
On our broken Dalit skins.

We are not your karma,
We are not your curse,
We are not your scavengers,
We are not your slaves,
We are not your footnotes.

We are the proof
Even after the centuries
Of organised cruelty,
I refused to be fully killed.
But you killed my child for marrying
Your daughter in your Sanatan Hindu land in 2010.

Call this what it is:
Not tragedy, not accident,
But caste.
Not collateral damage,
But the Dalit Genocide.

And know:
Until the last chain of it
Is shattered and buried,
There will be voices like my mother, "Suguna Yadav,"
Like mine, like my killed baby in honour,
Rising from the honour killing houses,
Butcher houses and dry wells,
Saying again and again:

We were always human.
It is you
Who must learn
To become so.

You say "impure"
As if the word were not soaked
In your own filth.

You drag us into the gutter
And then point
And say,
See, dirty.
You forced the Dalit child
To open his mouth
To the night soil of your man, and
To drink your urine,
And call it discipline,
Call it a lesson,
Call it putting him
In his Dalit place.

You unzip your caste pride
And piss into a steel tumbler,
Hold it out to a trembling Dalit girl
Drink,
And later boast
That they have defended
The sanctity of the Hindu and Muslim village.

They stand in the darkened room
Around a Dalit girl's body,
Hands on her mouth
Hands on her hair,
Hands tearing her childhood
Into unrecognisable pieces.
And afterwards,
They light incense,
Chant verses:
Jai Hind, Jai Bharat Mata, Allah Ho Akbar
Or wash themselves in cold water,
Certain their gods will see
What caste has authorised.

Dalit houses burn like dry scripture:
Thatch, tin, schoolbooks,
Christ's face on the wall
Melting into black tears.
The fire doesn't know caste,
But the hands that lit the match certainly do.

Outside the village,
Our hamlets cling to the edge
Of things like my wound that never heal.

Out of town,
We are a smear of tin roofs
The bus never stops for.
Far from the city,
We are the address
No caste civilian will speak aloud.
In the capital,
We exist in a data column,
In a footnote in a report,
In forgotten committees
Where non-Dalit pens debate
Whether our humanity
Is economically viable.

This is not just pain.
It is an ontological wound
To the soul,
An injury to being itself.