A Blackboard from a school in South India. Notice the columns listing the number of Schedule Castes, Schedule Tribes, and Most Backward Class students attending school. Melli Annamalai explores the implications of caste in Modern India

“Caste is not that much of an issue in India today”, said a good friend of mine recently. This statement has the appearance of being true in the educated middle class of large cities …. because the manifestations are not open. They exist in more subtle forms, such as in marriage (how many of the educated middle class are really open to mixing caste in marriage?) and the even more subtle acceptance of certain ways of life, which tend to be upper caste lifestyles (such as religious rituals), as the way to do things. However, most people do agree that different castes can sit together, can touch each other, are created with the same abilities, and so on.

In rural India, there is no such politically correct view of caste. It is accepted that higher castes are better people than lower castes. It is accepted that lower castes are stupid, and good for nothing. It is accepted that the lower caste way of life is inferior. The caste hierarchy is reflected in the village power structure, in the schools, even in the NGOs.

I arrived at the government school in Melachery as part of my site visit. The entire school community – the teachers, the headmaster, the children, were waiting. I was a bit surprised – it seemed very encouraging that the head master himself was waiting. “They must really like our intervention”, I thought. We discussed the school, the midday meals, and the fact that they needed more teachers. “These children, being SCs, are a bit dull”, said the headmaster. “It is very difficult for schools like these to do better. The students are all SCs and cannot understand everything. We do the best we can to keep things going”. And around us are these bright-eyed children, clutching their books with eager faces, listening to the headmaster …. “After all, he is the teacher and must know everything. What he says must be right …. mustn’t it? No wonder I get only 35 marks in the annual examination”.

Note that these are teachers who are happy with Asha’s intervention and wanted to please me. They are irregular government school teachers, but were there on that day because I was visiting. They were explaining to me why their schools were bad ….they wanted to stress these points to me, as I would no doubt understand and agree with them that teaching SC children was hard and might not even be possible. And maybe provide a magic solution to make their oh so difficult job of teaching SC children easier. Caste differences are such an accepted part of Indian society.

Government policies, while trying to ameliorate caste differences, often highlight them, and do so in the worst possible manner. The government schools I visited had blackboards with the tally of children in that school – categorized by the number of SCs, STs, MBCs (most backward castes). Neat entries in a painted table on a blackboard. Every time a child comes into the class the board does a great job of dinning into their heads – you are SC, or ST, or MBC, and you are up on that board. (see picture below).

Caste is nowhere close to being gone ….children who survive this kind of treatment in schools and make it past class X I can only call the greatest achievers in this world. Isn’t it a good thing we have reservation policies that help these children who have made it past such tough barriers?

Let us not forget that caste is an issue very much alive in India today – it manifests itself differently in different stratas of society. Eradication of caste cannot come only from the children we work with; it has to come from the teachers, from the NGOs, from us, and from entire society.

Melli Annamalai