If the Chandala, i.e., untouchable, hears the Veda, then molten lead must be poured into his ears; if he recites the Veda, then his tongue should be cut off; if he memorises Veda, then his body must be cut into two parts (Gautama D S 12.4-6; Atri Samhita 1.19; Skanda Purana V.iii.200.6; Brihaspati Smriti 20.12).

O Hindu,

For six thousand years,
You have said:
You are not,
Except as our shadow,
Our broom, our drain.
Our enemy.
Our example of what not to be.

You lined up the scriptures
Like barbed wire:
Varna, ashraf, ajlaf
Chatur varna sadism,
Islamic cruelty,
A whole metaphysics
Built to convince the world
That some souls
Are born closer to god/Allah,
And some are
Born sewage.

Hindus and Muslims drew on purity
Into the air with ash;
Hindus and Muslims preached beheading
Dalit bodies and infidels
Between the calls to prayer and pooja.
Both sides are finding language
To keep our bodies
On the floor,
Our hands far
From the Oxford book,
From the altar,
From the Mosque,
From the Hindu temple bell.
You told us:
My touch pollutes you.
My breath taints the air.
My presence is a desecration.

But who is really desecrated
When a grown man
Forces a Dalit child to eat human excreta?
Whose soul is rotting
When a mob makes a Dalit woman
Drink your urine
And laughs while she chokes?
Whose humanity is the twisted one,
When a Dalit girl's body
Is treated like public property
Because of the caste she was born into?

You have tried to erase us
not only from the land,
But from reality:
No entry into the village, town, or city.
No rights, no freedom, no civil liberties.
No entry in the temple.
No seat in the school.
No plot in the main cemetery.
No house inside the village, inside the city.
No welcome in the market.
No dignity in the public and private space.
No outrage in the newsroom.
No justice in the court.
No life, love, liberty, or light in the Continent.

You rename atrocity
As a "custom."
You rewrite genocide
As a "caste violence."
You translate
centuries of torment
As a "caste problem."

The wound is not only
in the Dalit body burned,
or the Dalit tongue forced to swallow their excreta,
Or the Dalit womb torn open,
or the back scarred by caste lathis.

The ontological wound is in the sentence:
they whisper,
over and over,
until it becomes the air we breathe:
You are less than human.
You are impure.
You are dirt.
You are untouchable.
Our gods and Allah made you to serve us.

O Hindu and Muslim,
You said it was about honour.
You said it with the blood
still drying on your hands.

The Dalit boy's only crime
Was loving your daughter
without lowering his eyes,
loving across a caste line
cut into the earth
long before either of them
could walk.
His only crime was
Standing straight before a world
That bends some spines by force.

Just like my feelings
For your Nagalim daughter
Tender as first light on hills,
Stubborn as roots in stone
I hold her name
Without shame on my tongue.

He loved across a caste line
Cut into the earth
Long before history was born,
A wound mapped onto soil and skin,
A border Hindus and Muslims
Guard with silence and with fire.

I love across another line
Drawn in dust by frightened hands
Naga, Nagaland, and Nagalim story
Stacked like walls between us.
They say the earth remembers
Which feet may cross,
Which hands must never touch.

Yet see how the rain
Does not choose a roof,
How the wind forgets
The fences of men.

If there is any crime in love
It is only this:
Refusing to bow
Before a Sanatan-Sharia lie,
Refusing to let old scars
Decide the distance
Between my heart
And your Naga daughter's name.

He didn't touch a god;
He only touched
Your girl's hand.

A Dalit boy,
A non-Dalit-caste girl,
Two hearts daring
To conjugate love
In the same future tense.

Just as my Hindu
Kapu/Reddy caste wife
Once dreamed
To live with me
Until her last breath
In 2009.
A simple verb,
A shared tomorrow.

For that dream,
Her own Kapu parents
Her younger sister
Dragged her
From the sentence
We were writing together.

They abused her,
Beat her,
Humiliated her and me,
Wounding her body
And soul
Before thousands
Of scholars and students
Before books and pens,
Before the Mooknayaks,
Before mute witnesses,
Of a campus
That teaches
Gopal Guru's
Cracked Mirror
Humiliation theories
John Rawls's
Justice theories
From the safety of pages.