One modest achievement of modern India is that gross
inequalities are no longer legitimised. We still put up with them as a reality;
often as a deplorable necessity, but a necessity nonetheless. As a result, our
conceptual innovations, ideological entanglements, or appeals to tradition—our
ideas about equality, in short—seem to mean very little when they come face to
face with an unyielding social reality.
As the renowned Dalit writer Om Prakash Valmiki once asked: What possible meaning could anyone give to an oft-quoted phrase like “Vasudeiva Kutmbakam”—The World is My Family—in the face of an oppressively suffocating experience of subordination? How can we explain the persistence of countless sites that inflict needless indignity—forms of domestic servitude, manual scavenging, inhuman labour conditions? Instead of occasioning a discourse of justice, these very realities seem to silence its demands.
To be sure, all societies experience versions of this silencing; this is not India’s monopoly. But one must admit that the scale of this silencing is unusual in a society that has so many other things going for it: pluralism, a reflective and argumentative culture, and democratic politics. Some would point to the circular character of inequality: we don’t care because we are unequal, and because we don’t care inequality will persist. In fact, many of India’s poor outcomes in areas ranging from health to education are explained away through this logic, which is similar to what contemporary social science calls the equality paradox: you need to already have some equality and reciprocity to make progress towards more.
In a society riven by deep inequality there is not even the minimal basis for mutual concern. Where social distance makes human beings almost a different species in each other’s eyes, why would you expect anything else? Why would a contractor care if one of his construction workers used his hands rather than a brush to apply a dangerous chemical? The more inequality there is, the harder it is to imagine what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes. It has to be admitted that even the most well-meaning and sensitive find it hard to imagine what the suffocation, darkness and sheer physical suffering of being at the bottom of a social hierarchy might be really like. The very thing you would expect to instigate questions of justice makes it hard to raise them.
The idea that the worst aspects of tradition could be transcended without making the whole tradition despicable proved to be a very fragile concept. And finally, the critique of material inequality turned out to be more a critique of materialism than of inequality
As the renowned Dalit writer Om Prakash Valmiki once asked: What possible meaning could anyone give to an oft-quoted phrase like “Vasudeiva Kutmbakam”—The World is My Family—in the face of an oppressively suffocating experience of subordination? How can we explain the persistence of countless sites that inflict needless indignity—forms of domestic servitude, manual scavenging, inhuman labour conditions? Instead of occasioning a discourse of justice, these very realities seem to silence its demands.
To be sure, all societies experience versions of this silencing; this is not India’s monopoly. But one must admit that the scale of this silencing is unusual in a society that has so many other things going for it: pluralism, a reflective and argumentative culture, and democratic politics. Some would point to the circular character of inequality: we don’t care because we are unequal, and because we don’t care inequality will persist. In fact, many of India’s poor outcomes in areas ranging from health to education are explained away through this logic, which is similar to what contemporary social science calls the equality paradox: you need to already have some equality and reciprocity to make progress towards more.
In a society riven by deep inequality there is not even the minimal basis for mutual concern. Where social distance makes human beings almost a different species in each other’s eyes, why would you expect anything else? Why would a contractor care if one of his construction workers used his hands rather than a brush to apply a dangerous chemical? The more inequality there is, the harder it is to imagine what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes. It has to be admitted that even the most well-meaning and sensitive find it hard to imagine what the suffocation, darkness and sheer physical suffering of being at the bottom of a social hierarchy might be really like. The very thing you would expect to instigate questions of justice makes it hard to raise them.
The idea that the worst aspects of tradition could be transcended without making the whole tradition despicable proved to be a very fragile concept. And finally, the critique of material inequality turned out to be more a critique of materialism than of inequality
- Breaking the Silence
Anyone born outside India can empathize but never can completely comprehend this hell on earth.
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