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“Very high status, well reputed, high connected Bramhin Industrial Textile Export Family, settled near Delhi, invite Alliance for their beautiful, fair, slim, homely, religious convent educated girl, July 79 born, MBA Delhi, widely travelled. Boy must be smart & well educated, belonging to a well established Business Industrialist family”[1].

This real advertisement from the Hindustan Times is a clear example of how the caste system works in India. A society divided and organized in professional gilds whose access is only allowed by birth. This system has been prohibited for years to avoid inequalities, but in reality not many people conform to it. This was so much the case that, even today, most marriages only take place among people from the same caste. Actually, the parents themselves are the ones who, from the day their child is born, try to arrange a marriage that might happen 15 or 20 years from the moment the child is born. Even though they are so farsighted, things are not always that easy. Sometimes the lack of candidates make the parents look for suitors in the classified section of a newspaper, and when that happens, the sky is the limit.

In a certain way, the caste system is not very different from our social class system, but the first one, not only apply to social relationships, but also to cosmology. In other words, it applies to the way the Indian people understand the existence of the man in this World. According to Hinduism, the way people behave in this life, will establish their caste in their next life, but we cannot forget the determining factor that, no matter how good you are now, you will have to wait until your reincarnation to access a superior caste.  So it is a real bargain for this entrepreneur called God and his sale representatives on Earth, who establish a variable compensation that will not be settled until the next life. Who is going to complain then? Especially, when one of the main clauses of the agreement is to forget everything from the previous life.  It is even a better bargain, if that was possible, for the superior lineages. With this system of veiled threats they insure their status quo over the lower and oppressed castes, who must decide if they want to break the “divine” rules to improve their lives now, and take the risk of being condemned in the next one, or resign themselves to their miserable destiny and behave accordingly and expecting a better fate in the next vital turn.

But this system does not include everybody. There are some so excluded that they don’t even have a caste. They are the Untouchables. Disowned by everybody and scorned by some, they are treated as inferior human beings every time they are ignored. The worst jobs fall on them, with no other reward that the obligation to do them day after day. The funny thing, if there can be something humorous about all this, is that there is nobody more Indian than the Untouchables. They are the real descendants of the first civilizations that dominated the Indian sub-continent, until they were conquered by Aryan tribes who brought the caste system.  It is a pyramid-shaped society structured in four different levels: first, the clergymen, followed by the aristocrats and warriors, after them, professionals and merchants and finally farmers.

Within this system, there is no place for the locals. Darker than their new masters, they were enslaved from the beginning. This happened about 3000 years ago. From then until today, the Untouchables only earned their name, and it was hard-earned. There has never been any other group of people, ever, who have been slaves, with or without chains, for so long. They only own one thing: the colour of their skin.  They are noticed because of it. And because of it, people get away from them.

New Delhi, capital of India