Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [108]
My mind became bent trying to follow the logic of all this and the ways in which the untouchables were treated. They had to sweep the streets and to gather up human dung with their hands. To the Hindus they were not only untouchable, but unhearable. In times gone by they couldn’t play musical instruments in some villages because they would pollute the ears of any Brahmans who heard the music; they couldn’t walk on some roads because they would be seen and thus pollute the vision of the Brahmans; they had to carry a bell when they walked to announce their presence so that Brahmans could avoid unintentional contact. In one village I saw an untouchable standing outside a store trying to be heard. The merchant came out on his porch and asked, “What do you want?” The untouchable answered, “I want some rice.” The shopkeeper told him how much it cost, then backed off; the untouchable placed some rupees on a post outside the shop then backed away, the merchant came out, took the money, put the rice on the post, then disappeared, and the untouchable came forward slowly and took the rice. He had accepted his position in the hierarchy. Meanwhile the shopkeeper had to perform a religious ritual to purify himself because he had been polluted by the untouchable’s money.
The Bihari children I filmed were emaciated and covered with smallpox lesions and scabs; many were dying. Usually there was no hospital for many miles; if there was one, it was understaffed and had little medicine or food. The hospital beds were gray with flies and the children were laid out on them according to caste; even there the untouchables were outcasts. In almost all the villages, children suffered from malnutrition and diarrhea. Mothers had no milk because they had had no food and little water. One little girl came up to a relief worker who was offering her food and she reached out with the folds of her sari to collect it, but the garment was so threadbare there wasn’t a square inch of cloth strong enough to hold the food.
In many villages cows had chewed the thatch off the roofs because they had nothing to eat, and people were so thin it seemed incredible that they could walk. If you touched the cheek of a child, a hollow spot remained in her flesh after you removed your hand; the skin had no resiliency and was like that of a cadaver.
In one village I was photographing a group of Indians when a woman came out of the crowd and offered her baby to the camera as if it possessed a magic that could save her child. As I photographed dying children, it seemed surreal that not far away people were killing each other in Vietnam. How I would have liked to take a tiny portion of the money being spent on bombs for that country to hire teams of hydrologists who could go from village to village digging new wells.
India’s caste system is the most insidious social system man has ever devised, though in principle it is no different from caste systems in all societies. Similar hierarchies exist in all anthropoidal systems, among humans, baboons, chimpanzees and gorillas. In India the system is simply more complex and stratified, with some nineteen thousand subcastes in Hindu society. People born into inferior castes are presumed to have done evil in a previous life; at the top of the hierarchy, the Brahmans claim to be descendants of the holiest priestly class. Yet even some Brahmans won’t marry other Brahmans because they are not in the same subcaste. Because of Gandhi, it has been illegal since 1949 to treat untouchables as inferior, but laws can’t change how people think. Even with all his force and power,