Indian Culture & the Dalit Class the

Indian Culture & the Dalit Class The economic boom in India which is riding on a burgeoning technology and services sectors has not reached the deep recesses of Indian culture, particularly in rural areas of India where culture is entrenched and access to the new economy is constrained. Producer Siobhan Sinnerton and Ramita Navai from Unreported World expose the terrible circumstances of the 170 million Dalits -- the broken people or the untouchables -- to light.

The most oppressed group of humans anywhere on earth, the Dalits inhabit the bottom of the Indian caste system -- a place as symbolic as it is real. This paper very briefly considers the Dalit's existence from a social conflict perspective, a structural-functional perspective, and from a symbolic interactions perspective. Structural functional perspective. Structural violence is deeply embedded in the foundation of a society -- in their way of being over the long-term.

When generation after generation is unable to meet their basic needs, the normal development and growth of individuals in those groups will be impacted. The depth of integration that structural violence achieves allows it to become established in a society or geographic region, the process of which is facilitated as people rationalize and tolerate structural violence. Structural violence is known to be insidious, happening subtly and indirectly, to entire classes or groups of people.

As James Gillian (1983) argued, the more marginalized people are, the greater their rate of death and disability -- not because of intrinsic differences between the socio-economic strata from which they hail -- but because of differences in their life experiences and treatment. The nexus at which status inequalities are accepted and embedded in a society is culture. The term cultural violence refers to the legitimizing process that occurs when structural violence is viewed as normative by a society. The Indian caste system is a most exact example of cultural violence.

Social conflict perspective. Structural violence -- the forces that created and sustain the caste system in India -- is a phenomenon made manifest through social inequalities (Christie, 1997). The organizational structures of political and economic systems -- in fact, of every system within which marginalized people come in contact -- cause and sustain the sort of hierarchical relations that enable dramatic differences between and across sectors of societies.

Within these hierarchies -- which are dramatically present in Indian castes -- the people at the top have privilege, wealth, and power, while those at the bottom of the hierarchy are dominated, oppressed, and exploited (Christie, 1997). People are harmed and killed as a result of structural violence but, unlike direct violence, it is subtle, occurring more slowly and more pervasively. However, we are shown in the video, the ease with which structural violence is coupled with direct.