America's 'untouchables': the silent power of the caste system. By Isabel Wilkerson
In the winter of 1959, after leading the
Montgomery bus boycott that arose from the arrest of Rosa Parks and before the trials and triumphs to come, Martin
Luther King Jr and his wife, Coretta, landed in India, in the city then known
as Bombay, to visit the land of Mahatma Gandhi, the father of nonviolent
protest. They were covered in garlands upon arrival, and King told reporters:
“To other countries, I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim.”
He had long dreamed of
going to India, and they stayed an entire month. King wanted to see for himself
the place whose fight for freedom from British rule had inspired his fight for
justice in America. He wanted to see the so-called “untouchables”, the lowest
caste in the ancient Indian caste system, whom he had read about and had
sympathy for, but who had still been left behind after India gained its
independence the decade before.
He discovered that
people in India had been following the trials of his own oppressed people in
the US, and knew of the bus boycott he had led. Wherever he went, the people on
the streets of Bombay and Delhi crowded around him for an autograph. At one
point in their trip, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the
country, to the city of Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with
high-school students whose families had been untouchables. The principal made
the introduction. “Young people,” he
said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United
States of America.”
King was floored. He
had not expected that term to be applied to him. He was, in fact, put off by it at first. He had flown in from another continent,
and had dined with the prime minister. He did not see the connection, did not
see what the Indian caste system had to do directly with him, did not
immediately see why the lowest-caste people in India would view him, an
American Negro and a distinguished visitor, as low-caste like themselves, see
him as one of them. “For a moment,” he wrote, “I was a bit shocked and peeved
that I would be referred to as an untouchable.”..
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/28/untouchables-caste-system-us-race-martin-luther-king-indiaSECULARISM IN A HOUSE OF GOD
The Supreme Court, Gandhi and the RSS
The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi: Inquiry Commission Report (1969)
The Abolition of truth
The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi: Inquiry Commission Report (1969)
The Abolition of truth
