Journey to Shanti Bhavan

I’m not a specialist in Indian history/culture/politics but I’ll try to tell here in this post a little bit more about the caste system in India. Feel free to correct me, you can do that by commenting and contributing to this post.

The caste system in India has its origins in ancient India but the system as it stands today is a result of the collapse of the Mughal era and the British colonial regime. Varna is a Sanskrit word for class/type and in the Vedic texts (ancient India texts) the society is classified into four varnas: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras, from higher to lowest caste. The Dalits and Schedules Tribes don’t belong to any varna, so they are called avarna. As I understand, there are several interpretations and discussions of the Hindu texts, for instance, in the post Vedic preriod the caste system is described in the Dharmashastra literature.

The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes comprise about 16.6% and 8.6%, respectively, of India’s population (according to the 2011 census); remember that India has approximately 1.3 billion people. In modern literature, Scheduled Caste/Tribes are referred to as Untouchables. The Dalit term means “broken/scattered” in Sanskrit. According to the 2014 NCAER/University of Maryland survey, 27% of the Indian population still practices “untouchability”. They believe that if you touch a Dalit person you’ll be polluted, cursed, or something like that. The documentary India Untouched: Stories of a People Apart (2007) shows situations in which Dalit kids are requried to sit at the back of the classroom while the higher castes kids sit at the front. There is also a scene in which a Dalit man is served in a glass cup, not a metal cup as the others, and he had to wash his own cup. For me, it is very sad to know that this kind of discrimination and prejudice still happens all the time. There is also a documentary called The Backward Class (2014), but this one I haven’t seen it yet.

 

The social mobility is very difficult in India, some believe that if you were born in a given class It is because you deserve that, it’s the karma: your current condition is a product of your past decisions. After the Indian independence, in 1947, a reservation system was introduced in order to to enhance the ability of Dalits to have political representation and to obtain government jobs and education. In 1997, Kocheril Narayanan (1921–2005) was the first Dalit president elected in India. Despite progress, there is still a lot to be done.

These people live below the poverty line, that is, they live with less than $2 a day. I believe that education is the key to break the poverty cycle and that’s why I believe in Shanti Bhavan Children’s Project. The poor kids must receive a high quality education in order to study in the best universities of India and then to achieve good job positions, earn money, and help the others. What can we do to help? Well, if you really want to help you’ll find a way, otherwise you’ll find an excuse. Namaste.

I wrote about the Dalits in this post but I’m not so sure if this term is appropriate because I read somewhere that we should user the term Scheduled Cast instead. I don’t know if ‘Dalit’ is something like the ‘N word’ in the USA.

Donate to Shanti Bhavan and help them to break the cycle of poverty!

 

The first time I heard of Shanti Bhavan Children’s Project I was watching the Netflix documentary Daughters of Destiny, produced and directed by Vanessa Roth, an Academy Award winner. SB is a residential school located in the village of Baliganapalli, in the state of Tamil Nadu, south of India. What is so special about this school? Well, first of all it is a non-profit organization, founded in 1997 by Dr. Abraham George, an Indian business man who lived in the USA for more than 25 years. After succeeding in your business, Dr. George sold his fortune and went back to India to help the people in economic disadvantages. Second, most of children admitted in SB are Dalits or “untouchables”, the lowest cast in India. Besides that discrimination against lower castes is illegal according to the Constitution of India, in practice the violence and prejudice against them are still present in the Indian society. I’ll write about the caste system in a later post.

The documentary tells the story of SB from the perspective of Dr. George and the students Shilpa, Preetha, Thenmozhi, Manjula and Karthika, all of them girls from the lowest caste in India who went to Shanti Bhavan when they were still little girls. I think that the documentary is focused on girls because the day-to-day seems to be harder for them than for boys. Well, I think that this is true in almost everywhere, including Brazil. But if you compare the life of a Dalit girl in India with a life of a poor girl in Brazil we’ll have to agree that in India their lives is harder.

Shanti Bhavan enrolls boys and girls at the age of 4 years old and the kids live in the school for the most part of the time, except during the summer and winter breaks. SB supports them from their first day of school until their last day of college. The school is free of charge and the students are provided with nutritional meals (vegetarian), clothes, shelter, education, healthcare and psychological support. SB is maintained by donations and not by government funding.

Watching the series I could notice that the children have two different lives, one at school and another when they are spending time with their families. For instance, child marriage is very common in India. It is estimated that 27% of girls in India are married before their 18^th birthday. On the other hand, in Shanti Bhavan, girls are taught that they should pursue a career first, gain independence before marriage. When they’re with their families, some may try to convince them to marry, which is not what they should do according to what they learned in school. I also notice that sometimes the relationship with their siblings that are attending a normal rural school is very difficult because of the difference regarding the education they receive. Life at school is very different from life at “home”.

If you want to know more about Shanti Bhavan, watch Daughters of Destiny on Netflix, it’s a 4 episodes documentary. By the way, Shanti Bhavan means “Haven of Peace”. Namaste!

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