Annie revisited...and I am asked my caste

Last year at the vocational training center I shared an office with the woman in charge of the Digitization of Data program here. She was scanning forms for the untouchability survey, the analysis for which was actually just completed by a team from the US and UK. She's now working on a new survey, this one on the practice of manual scavenging in Gujarat. (Manual scavenging is the traditional caste duty of Valmikis, a Dalit sub-caste considered the lowest in the caste hierarchy.)

Anyway in October of 2007 I wrote a blog post about her experience with two local women from the nearby village of Nani Devti refusing to take water from her because she is a Dalit. In that post I called her Annie, which is short for Angela, her Christian name. Annie is Gujarati, and was born and raised in a town about a hundred kilometers away.

Annie just had a baby boy about 8 months ago. When I left India she was 9 months pregnant, so we've been joking about how her son is comfortable playing with me because he recognizes me from last year.

Annie started working a few months after giving birth, and somehow mangaged to take care of the baby and work in the office at the same time. She keeps the cradle just next to her desk, rocking it as she works. About two weeks ago she hired a local woman from Nani Devti to help her take care of the baby during the day so she could be more productive.

It went fine until yesterday, when Annie asked the woman if her son eats lunch at primary school. The woman said he doesn't, because "he's a clean boy". Annie asked what that had to do with anything, and the woman said that the cook at the school who makes the food is a Vankar, a member of a Dalit sub-caste. Annie said that she's also a Vankar, which surprised the woman. Then the woman said she doesn't eat anything prepared by Valmikis, the Dalit sub-caste associated with manual scavenging. Annie said that she's also a Valmiki, and wanted to know if the woman would continue to watch her son. The woman evaded the question. The next day the woman didn't show up to work, and Annie called her (nearly everyone in India, even the poor, have cell phones) to find out what was going on. The woman said she was sick, and couldn't work that day. Annie asked if she would come the next day, and the woman said no. So that was that; the woman has refused to work for a Dalit. Now Annie is working on finding a new person to take care of her son. There is a migrant laborer who has been working here that Annie is trying to get, and I think today is her first day.

Later on in the day yesterday, I was taking a bus back to the center from the nearby town of Sanand. The old man behind sitting behind me was excited to speak with a foreigner, and when I told him I was going to the Dalit vocational training center next to Nani Devti he got even happier.

Then he asked me something I didn't understand, and I had to ask him to repeat himself a few times. By the third or fourth time I realized he was asking me what my caste was, and if I was a Vankar like him. I told him I don't have any caste, and that in America we don't have castes.

The interaction struck me as an interesting one. Nani Devti is an isolated little village that functions largely on caste lines. The man looked to be about 60 years old, and was coming home from a small shopping trip to Sanand. I don't know if he can read or not, or what he knows about the world. To him, maybe, the way Nani Devti functions is the way the whole world functions, with every person belonging to a particular caste in the hierarchy -- even a white guy from the US who can only speak faltering Gujarati. Caste is not the exception to him, it's not something that's on its way out of society like the newspapers sometimes say. Caste is part of the foundation of his worldview, as it is for people across this country, especially in rural areas but in cities as well.

Monkeys in the ashram!

I was leading an orientation session outside today when a troop of about a dozen langur monkeys entered the ashram grounds and began feasting on the ample supply of foliage. We stopped the session for about 10 minutes so everyone could get cameras and watch the monkeys frolic on the grass, climb the trees, and do other things that monkeys like to do. If you know me at all you know that I think monkeys are awesome, so I was happy to break for them. Langurs are not aggressive towards people, but they can be aggressive towards each other, so anyway there is no harm in watching or taking pictures.

At first they just sat on some trees, bending branches and eating the leaves, and we got back to the session. Pretty soon, though, the monkeys became a bit more brazen. Branches started breaking, monkeys started chasing each other at full speed (and they can really move surprisingly fast) right next to our group, and fights (monkey on monkey only, of course) began to break out. The ashram groundskeepers, three or four friendly guys about my age, then came over with sticks and chased them away. Amazingly, the group was able to maintain its focus and the session actually went well.

Indians often seem surprised by Westerners' excitement at monkey encounters, and some are shocked to learn that there are no monkeys bounding around in American cities, and in fact no wild monkeys at all in the US. To many Indians, monkeys are just pests, since they are not eaten and can't be used for any kind of productive labor like cows or water buffalo. The relationship is probably analogous to the one people in the US have with deer, which have staked their claim to suburban America, eating garbage and shrubs. Though I suppose deer have yet to be responsible for the death of a the deputy mayor of our nation's capital...