Last evening I watched a beautifully made old Hindi film called Sujata. It put into spotlight the horrible treatment people here got thanks to something that was practiced for centuries in our country and is still being practiced in some parts of our country today – the caste system.
By Mihir Joshi
As parents we do a lot of thinking. I mean…a lot of thinking. And I find myself thinking about things I may have quite easily ignored before.
I live in Mumbai and my circle of friends and family, like me, are all educated people who take so many things for granted. And understandably so. We never think about things that don’t affect us because we are often too busy dealing with issues in our own lives. But this past week I read a few things and watched an old Bollywood movie that really got me thinking. Let me elaborate.
Throughout history there have been injustices. One set of people often considered themselves better or more important than the other.
Here’s one thing I read. Gator bait. Have you read or heard of this term? No it isn’t a cool energy drink. This is a term used to describe babies! Black slave babies in a certain part of America, to be precise. White hunters hunted alligators and they used black babies as bait to lure them out of swamps. Babies were reportedly tied like goats around a stick near the water and hunters waited for alligators to come to eat them so they could shoot them. This was because alligator skin was a prized commodity. They had no qualms about using real babies to do their hunting because to them black people were nothing more than animals.
Another crazy ritual from the black slavery days was the concept of wet nurses. White women who gave birth to babies didn’t want to do the messy part of being mothers so they’d get their slave women who had delivered babies recently to feed their child to a point where their own babies would suffer and die from malnutrition.
Last evening I watched a beautifully made old Hindi film called Sujata. Nutan was ethereal in it and the songs were great but let’s talk about what the film really was about. It put into spotlight the horrible treatment people here got thanks to something that was practiced for centuries in our country and is still being practiced in some parts of our country today – the caste system. It got me thinking. Was the caste system our form of slavery?
There was one particularly horrible line in the movie where a “vidwaan brahman”, a learned scholar explained to the gentleman who adopts Nutan, an untouchable girl, that the “achut” people emit a gas that is harmful to people of higher and better castes. He explained why it is essential to wash one’s hands after interacting with “such people”. When the good man asked the scholar “Have you seen such a gas?”, the scholar retorted by saying that it was science. You believe that food has vitamins even if you can’t see it right? It is just science that such gases exist.
I was flabbergasted! How do you counter such insanity?
This was possibly the same logic used by the Nazis to exterminate millions of Jews or the same logic that any oppressive group of people used to eradicate or suppress those they felt were their inferiors in any way.
So where do all these thoughts fit in with our life today? Well, when I saw Sujata and saw how Indians used to distinguish between people…no, not just people, even kids it blew my mind. Can you imagine your son or daughter being told that they can’t do something because of the colour of their skin, or their religion or their sexuality or what their parents do!? Thankfully we live in a relatively better world today but are we there all the way? Just because we don’t personally experience or see something it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. We need to be more aware and more inclusive. Here’s hoping for a better future your kids and mine.
Also Read| How to raise inclusive children in a changing world
(The writer is a singer and his debut album Mumbai Blues won the GIMA Award for Best Rock Album in 2015. He hosts his own talk show-The MJ Show and does live Hindi commentary for WWE. Views are personal. Follow him on twitter @mihirjoshimusic)
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