sociology: Caste System: Untouchability – forms and perspectives; Challenges of Social Transformation: Caste conflicts
NEWS IN SHORT:
Forty Dalit families in Kantio Kateni village of Odisha’s Dhenkanal district have been subjected to social boycott for the past two weeks after a 15-year-old girl from the community plucked flowers from the backyard of an upper caste family two months ago.
After one family registered its objection, the matter snowballed into a confrontation between the two communities, eventually leading to the social boycott of the 40 Dalit families.
SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
- Untouchability is characterized by certain avoidance of physical contact, social sanction, social disabilities and the maintenance of social distance in the attempt to maintain the purity of an individual.
- There are to ensure that this social distance among the higher and the lower castes are maintained.
- The lower castes are considered so impure that their mere touch is considered to be polluting.
- There is a notion of distant pollution that has existed in many regions of south India, such that the shadow of the untouchable is considered to be polluting.
- Further, in the case of pollution, the upper castes are expected to go through a purification ritual.
- There are three dimensions of untouchability, which are exclusion, subordination, and humiliation.
- Here it is important to note that while other lower castes also face subordination and exclusion, humiliation, however, is specific to the Dalits.
- We find that Dalit is discriminated on various grounds, they are not allowed into the same temples like those of the higher castes, they are also not allowed in the same schools like that of the higher castes, further separate wells, etc.