Why do we have different cups and plates for domestic workers in India?

I am just back from a visit to India to visit our family members and wanted to write about a phenomenon there. I wrote this piece in Telugu for my Facebook so the writing style might not make sense in some places.

Here in the UK we're used to doing our housework, so it's normal for us to be a little embarrassed when a domestic worker does our household chores which happens in India, but we find a few things that bother us a lot. It is not that I have not seen these things before but in the last five or six years I have read the works of Baba Saheb Ambedkar, Jyotibha, Savitri Phule, Malcolm X, Balagopal and many others who worked for the cause of caste abolition and labour welfare, because of that, my way of thinking, social outlook has changed. The things I do have changed. In this background, one thing that bothered us (me and my wife Kajal Kolluguri who thinks like me) the most, is that there are different cups and plates for domestic workers in all houses. In addition to this, they eat sitting outside if not on the floor.

If you ask about the reason for this, the answer is about their cleanliness, but that is a completely inconsistent answer because they are the ones who make the food we eat in most cases, if there is any objection to their cleanliness, it should be when they are cooking and not when they are using the same plates. And in most cases, I have seen, domestic workers are cleaner and healthier than us. The root cause of our thinking in this matter is the caste system because in it we consider those who are below us in society to be inferior and unclean rather than equal to us.

This way of thinking is not limited to the castes at the higher end of this system. As Baba Saheb rightly recognised the caste system, is a graded hierarchy, which means that even if someone else insults us or discriminates against us based on caste, we do not think of abolishing the caste system because there still will be people who are considered inferior in this system and gives you the liberty to treat them the same and/or think it is the responsibility of the people at the bottom of the scale to push for a social change. When they have made these attempts, they are suppressed with extreme violence (Google Karamchedu or Tsunduru Massacre).

So it's imperative to ask ourselves why we see our fellow human beings as less than us and still think that they should have their different cups and not dine with us and what we can do to stop this disease.

#Caste #CasteBasedDiscrimination #India