Every day, I see new things I haven’t seen before. And every day, I adjust and try to make sense of them, get my footing and move on...only to be caught off-guard by something else. Yesterday, getting out of my rickshaw to go home, I noticed the streets were significantly more busy that usual. There seemed to be some kind of street fair or festival going on. The road was packed with people and lined with clusters of sellers selling various items on mats (there were at least 30 carts ALL with elderly woman sitting cross-legged on their carts amidst pyramids of motichoor sweets (see photo below.) There was one mat covered with KNIFES...and one little boy was standing barefoot walking across the pile! Anddd there were tattoo “parlors” (for a lack of a better word.) Rather, men covered in ink held small battery powered needles and sat on blankets...just dishing out tattoos! No biggie. Among other things being sold there were bulk selections of flip-flops, nail clippers, puppets, spoons, and henna powder, and big posters of Indian babies wearing posing wearing fluffy costumes? Needless to say, I didn’t really know what to do with all this sensory overload.
sugarsugarsugar!
When I eventually made it back to my house, I was greeted by my host-family’s “vacuum-boy” (again, for a lack of a better word.) He comes once a week to vacuum the rooms and clean the family’s car. My host-dad said that he was waiting for me to get home so he could clean my room. The vacuum boy isn’t allowed in my room unless I’m there, so I had to awkwardly lead him upstairs and sit on my bed fumbling around on my laptop as he vacuumed my pretty-spotless floor. I felt so uncomfortable with the whole situation.
Which brings me to this point: Paying people for household labor is not reserved for the “rich” in India. Middle-class families usually employ at least a few people to do various jobs around their house. I asked my host-mom why they have people do work for them (when they are fully-capable of doing it themselves.) She said that since there are so many poor people, it is important to give them opportunities to make money for themselves. This is entirely different from the my American outlook about paying people to do work for you.
I’d consider my family (biological family) to be part of the comfortable American middle-class. We have two cars, can take vacations, are able to buy the expensive orange juice, and are all college educated. Despite my comfortable upbringing, we never paid anyone to do manual labor for us (landscapers, cooks, cleaning people.) My sister and I grew up mowing our yard, taking out the trash, and doing our own laundry....sometimes.. (I’m sure my mom may have a different take on that.) Either way, we were taught to be self-sufficient and be responsible for our things. To me, I associate only upper-middle/upper class families who “can afford to do that” as the only ones who have pair-labor workers in their home.
I would also consider my homestay family here in India to be a “middle-class family” although indicators of “status” differ from American indicators. (While I don’t consider myself to be “rich” by American standards, I am definitely $rich$ here. The fact that I paid money to come here makes that pretty clear.) My homestay family has 1.) a Dhoti, a clothes washer who comes every day and hand-washes our clothes in our bathroom. The family pays him Rs. 400 per month for each person’s clothes. That’s $8 a month for one person’s clothes daily. 2.) A cook- my host parents said that because they’re so busy with their music school, they don’t have much time to cook for themselves anymore. Their cook comes every day at 11:00am to prepare lunch and comes back again at 5:00pm to make dinner. I’m not sure how much they pay her, but my host-mom said that she is a “poor woman.” 3.) A scrubber/sweeper- this young-looking girl comes every Sunday and gets on hands-knees and scrubs the entires house down. Last time she was here, I was sitting on my host-parents’ bed watching a Hindi soap opera with my computer on my lap drinking chai while this 20-something year old girl was crawling on the floor, mopping with a dishcloth. Again, this whole situation made me feel REALLY uncomfortable. Even though this is a normal-occurrence for my host-family, I still am having trouble coming to terms with the stringent differences between people’s social-statuses and how they are treated because of it. Even the cook takes her shoes off a few steps below where the family places theirs.
I’m not one to draw any overarching conclusions here, and I’m certainly not one to judge the ways of a culture that’s been doing it’s thing for thousands of years...but there is definitely a residual system of caste-oppression that is responsible for the differing social statuses among Indians.
Even though caste-discrimination and “untouchability” has been illegal for over 50 years, this system is still deeply-rooted in the Indian subconscious. Some people I’ve met told me their caste within 10 seconds of meeting them- “My name is Blank and I am a Brahmin.” How am I supposed to respond to that? What does that even mean? Some people greet each other with their “caste-specific” greeting. Others don’t really talk about it, like my family. I had to ask them if they associate with their caste or not. They said that they do, but it doesn’t seem like they define themselves by it. They haven’t brought it up since. Caste is a touchy subject to talk about. It seems that Indian society is trying to move past and distance itself from it. However, even if “caste-talk” is swept under the rug, that woman with the Shudras (lower caste) last-name is most likely the one to end up sweeping that floor.
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