ABSTRACT
Tucked away in a nondescript corner of Dainik Bhaskar, a brief report titled Hey Ram! Chhuachhut ab bhi Zinda (‘Oh God! Untouchability Is Still Alive’) described how the family of a seventy-year-old man called Rameshwar refused to claim his body after he succumbed to his injuries following an accident. The reason for this refusal was that Rameshwar, after his death, had been touched by a cleaner of lower caste working in the hospital. According to the family members, the lifeless body was no longer ‘pure’, and taking it back for last rites would mean spreading the ‘contamination’ to others, which could potentially lead to their ostracization from the community. Despite its brevity, the report took the liberty of deviating from the
journalistic focus of ‘just’ narrating a caste-related incident that ostensibly took place around Gandhi’s birth date in a small village in the Khandwa district of Madhya Pradesh. By using Hey Ram – the famous last words of Gandhi – in the title with all its ironical implications, this piece provoked the reader to rethink the meaning of sovereignty and equality in the modern nation-state of India.2 With an elegiac tone lamenting the rigidity of caste structure, the writer managed to express extreme disapproval of practices that reduced living human beings to such deplorable depths that even the dead became ‘untouchable’ in their presence.
