Manu 3.239; Mahabharatha 13.23.5: "Chandala is equal to dogs and pigs."

O Hindu,

We are told
We must not dream
Of becoming:
A Reader,
Bent over bright margins
Where new worlds germinate;

A Scholar,
Turning pages until dawn
Burns its questions into our eyes;

An Intellectual,
Weaving arguments
Like constellations over a darkened earth;

An Artist,
Whose hands remember colours
No flag has yet permitted;

A Poet,
Turning wounds into syllables,
Syllables into wings;

A Writer,
Patient as a seed
Waiting for its one good rain;

A Scientist,
Listening for the quiet grammar
Of stars and cells;

A Theorist,
Who rearranges history
The way a river rearranges stones;

A Philosopher
Of a new world
In which no one is born
Pre-written.

We are commanded instead
To rehearse a narrower alphabet:

We are forced to dream
Only of fixed jobs,
Of political positions,
Of lawmakers and union posts,
Of ministers and teachers,
Of government desks
Where dust thickens over files;

Of Chief Ministers and Prime Ministers,
Of Presidents and Chief Justices,
Of sanctioned sweepers
Stiff uniforms,
Of broom-handles like mute sceptres
Of an inherited humiliation;

Of state jobs,
Of professors fenced in
By syllabi like barbed wire;

Of one-room houses
To the roadside houses;

Of IAS, IPS, IFS,
Acronyms like handcuffs
Glittering in the dark;

Of promotions
That climb only the narrow staircase
From politician to prime minister,
From nameless labour to numbered badge;

Of cotton cloths
That bear our sweat but not our stories,
Of "Mooknayak" positions
Leaders and public servants
Required to be silent,
Voices hired only
To police their own echoes.

Yet in the marrow
Something older than law,
Refuses this Hindu script,
This costing our Dalit lives
As footnotes
Beneath someone else's god.

Somewhere in the body
A rebel pronoun stirs,
A tongue unlearning
Every word for "obey."

That Hindu writes its own cruelty
In gold-leaf centres,
Then calls it destiny;

That the Hindu community
Is haunted
By the brilliance it burned,
And by the brilliance is buried
Under names like "Dalit,"
"Untouchable,"
"Madiga,"
"Infidel."

So let me write instead
What refuses to be killed.

Of the word
That survives every book,
The verse,
That outlives every Sanatan-Sharia fatwa,
The life
That insists on more than labour,
The love
That will not fit inside a border,
The liberty
That keeps inventing doors in concrete walls,
The light
That finds its way
Through Hindu and Islamic blades.

We must not dream, they say,
Of being Readers,
Scholars,
Intellectuals,
Artists,
Poets,
Writers,
Scientists,
Theorists,
Philosophers
Of a new world.

Then let us do
What we must do:
Open our Oxford, Cambridge, Colombia books in our ghettos,
Learn to read each other's scars as text,
Compose theories,
Paint futures on the inside of our skulls,
Until they bleed outward into day.

Let Hindu, Muslim
Every name and nation
Stand accused
Before the single tribunal
Of the unwritten Dalit child,

Who, holding a pencil,
Like a small and dangerous flame,
Refuses every Hindu, Islamic script
That does not begin:

"We, the once silenced,
Claim the right
To dream beyond
Your political positions, jobs, your gods.

We the forbidden
Dalit readers
Will write
The world
Again."

In the corner
Of the Dalit ghetto,
A Dalit girl with bruised knees
Reads Ambedkar, Gopal Guru by the streetlight.
She hears of John Rawls,
Of Johan Galtung,
Of Pierre Bourdieu,
Of Western intellectuals,
Beyond masked scholarship
Of Hindu leftism,
Beyond uncivilised Muslims.
She inhales a new air:
"I was not born
To eternally clean
Your waste."

In the Muslim's shadow,
A Dalit boy recites both the Quran
And the Constitution,
Underlines "equality"
With the same finger.
He looks at the separate row
His family stands in
Asks quietly:
"Which god ordered this?"

We begin to breathe
Differently.

Total Dehumanisation
Wanted our spirits,
To forget
What it means
To exist without apology.

Yet here we are,
Naming each lash,
Each exclusion,
Each scripted insult,
Each holy verse
Twisted into a noose.

We refuse
To let Hinduism
Hide behind its ritual,
Or Islam
Hide behind rhetoric,
Or any religion,
Claim peaceful or
Innocence
While walking on our cracked bones.

We drag the truth
Into the open:

Purity was never
About the soul,
It was about power.
Untouchability was never
About god.
It was about control.

You called me
Madiga,
Chamar,
Candala,
Ati-Shudra,
Achhut,
Kamin,
Bhangi,
Names meant to fix us
At the bottom of the world.

We are turning
Those same names
Into our words,
Verses,
Books,
Book covers,
Into signatures
Under legal petitions.

You built this nation
On our broken bones.
You wove your gods
With our broken fingers.
You cleaned your temples and mosques
With our bleeding hands.

And still
You say we are less.

Know this:
Every time we inhale
After an insult
And do not disappear,
Your system cracks.

Every time a Dalit child
Walks into a classroom
With their head held high,
Your sacred books tremble.

Every time we say
"We are human,"
Without adding
"Despite of our caste,"
Your idea of god
Loses a little ground.

You designed
Total Dehumanisation
As our fate.

We are making
Total Humanisation.
That is our revolution.

From the gutter's edge
From the cremation ground,
From the sewer pit,
From the outskirts
Of every sacred city,

Our breath
Carries a new Church prayer,
In no one's language
But our own:

May no Dalit child
Ever again
Learn their name
As an apology.

May no religion
Ever again
Eat from the plate
Of caste
And call it holy.

Until that day
We will live,
Speak,
Organise,
Read,
Write,
Fight,
Convert,
Confront,
And will rise again
In the spirit of Jesus Christ

With the stubborn truth
Of our own existence:
We were never untouchable.
It is your conscience
That cannot bear
To touch
What you have done.