Untouchable: The Caste Question — Riddhima Shrivastava
They said the village was a being.
Not in the soft way grandmothers spoke about during story time - of hearts and hugs and everyone being “family”- but in a way that was carved into stone and ritual. The pandit would recite it during festivals, his voice dripping with authority:
“In the beginning was the Great One, the Purush, stretched beyond the sky. From his mouth came the Brahmins, from his arms the Kshatriyas, from his thighs the Vaishyas, from his feet the Shudras.”
Then he would look up from the Rig Vedic verse, eyes sliding over the crowd, and the village would silently arrange itself into the same order: mouths in the front, arms behind them, thighs at a respectable distance, and feet somewhere near the back wall, close enough to serve, far enough not to touch.
In this village, everyone knew what part they were supposed to be.
In the front row sat Ravi’s father, spine straight, sacred thread twining against the brown of his neck. He nodded along with the verse, lips moving on the Sanskrit. Behind him stood the sarpanch and his sons - arms of the village, heavy with bracelets and sticks. The shopkeepers and moneylenders rustled in the middle, the thighs, smelling of stored grain and soft cushions. And at the back, near the sandals piled outside, stood Ravi’s friend Sita, her hair still damp from the extra scrubbing her mother insisted on before entering the temple courtyard.
Sita’s family were the feet. Which meant, according to the story, that they were closest to the ground and furthest from God.
Unless, of course, the god decided to walk.
Ravi had always liked the Purush story as poetry. The idea of everyone being part of some unimaginably huge being - stars blinding his skin, rivers in his veins - made his scalp tingle. At night, lying on the terrace under a sky stitched together with smoke and constellations, he would imagine the entire village as a single sleeping man: the banyan tree as ribs, the well as a navel, the cremation ground as the place where the giant shed old skin.
But as he grew older, he started to notice how adults used the story less as poetry and more as property deed. “Know your place,” they would say. “Even the Ved says so.”
The Brahmins spoke often of unity.
The Shudras scrubbed the temple steps in silence.
*****
The first time Ravi saw blood on the temple steps, it was Sita’s.
They had been playing in the alley, chalking out squares for a game while the aarti bell rang inside. When the hymn reached the line everyone loved - “let all beings be happy”- they dashed to the courtyard to watch the lamps float away in the water.
The stone was still hot from that day. A stray shard of broken diya lay exactly where the "feet" stopped and the “thighs” began. Sita’s heel found it. She gasped; a soft sound lost under the cymbals. Blood bloomed under her foot, bright against the pale marble.
Ravi grabbed her arm. “You’re bleeding,” he hissed.
She tried to tuck her foot under the edge of her skirt. “Don’t make a scene,” she muttered. “They’ll say I dirtied the floor.”
He looked around. The pandit’s voice rolled on about sacrifice, how Purush had been cut and divided so that the world could be born. Ravi wanted to shout, 'Another foot is cut right here.' Instead, he tore a strip from the bottom of his own kurta and wrapped it around her heel.
When the hymn ended, his father noticed.
“What happened?” He demanded.
“Stone,” Ravi said quickly. “I stepped on it.”
His father frowned at the torn hem. “Be careful,” he snapped. “This is a holy place.”
Later, when they were back in the lane, Sita limped, laughing softly. “See? The body of the village is fine,” she said. “Only the feet got hurt.”
Her smile was too sharp to be called a joke, too tired to be called anger.
*****
Sita’s grandfather had his own way of telling Purusha Sukta.
He never recited the Sanskrit verses; he said his tongue was too cracked for that. Instead, he would sit on an upside-down bucket near the public tap, watching the Kshatriyas of the village ride past on bikes, and tell the children his version.
“In the old story,” he began one evening, “the gods cut up the Great Person to make the world. Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras - everyone got a piece, and everyone became a piece.” He flicked a mosquito away from his knee. “It was meant to remind people that they shared a body.”
“Then why…?” Ravi started, glancing at Sita.
“Then,” the old man continued, “some clever Brahmins heard ‘mouth’ and thought ‘master.’ Some strong Kshatriyas heard ‘arms’ and thought ‘owner.’ Some crafty Vaishyas heard ‘thighs’ and thought ‘trader.’ And some cracked heels -Shudras- heard ‘feet’ and were told to think ‘filth.’”
He smiled, but it did not reach his eyes.
“The irony, children, is this: the story meant that if you stab the foot, the mouth will scream. Instead, they learned to cover the mouth and say the foot is used to pain.”
Sita picked at the dirt. “So why keep telling the story?” she asked. “Why not throw it away?”
Her grandfather looked up at the sky, where the sunset was slowly giving way to dusk.
“Because it is also a dangerous thing,” he said slowly, “to let the ones who used the story have it all to themselves.”
He tapped her forehead lightly.
“If they use the giant to keep you under their heel, you remind them that the same giant has a heart under your ribs.”
Ravi felt a chill settle on his arms. He had never heard anyone speak like that about verses his father said “even the gods stand up to hear.”
That night, he lay awake listening to the village breathe - snoring, barking, the distant clanking of a late train. Somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, he imagined the Purush stirring. Not in the sky, but under the soil of their own lanes.
When he closed his eyes, the village lines glowed: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras. The brightest light, strangely, pulsed near the edge, where the drains met the fields.
*****
The year the well began to taste like rust, the sarpanch called a meeting.
Everyone gathered under the banyan tree, its roots prickly like exposed veins. “Water is low,” he declared. “We must protect what we have. From today, only families with proof of land ownership may draw from the main well before sunrise. Others can use the old hand pump near the waste ground.”
The waste ground where Sita’s people lived.
Murmurs rippled. The Vaishyas nodded; the Kshatriyas smirked; the Brahmins said nothing and watched.
“What about them?” someone from the back asked.
The sarpanch shrugged. “If the body is in danger, you protect the important organs first.”
The ‘important organs’ never seemed to be the ones that touched the ground.
Ravi’s father nodded approvingly. “In times of crisis, order must be preserved.”
Later, as they walked home, Ravi asked, “Order of what?”
“Of society,” his father said. “Of dharma. It has always been this way. The Purusha Sukta itself shows us the structure.”
“But if the feet dry up…” Ravi began.
“Then they dry up,” his father said sharply. “We cannot let sentiment weaken the body. Better to lose a toe than a tongue.”
That night, Ravi dreamt of a giant limping through a burning field, toes cracked and bleeding, tongue reciting praise for its own wisdom.
*****
A week later, on the day of the village’s annual Purusha recitation, the temple was packed.
A thin canopy sagged under the heat; incense smoke crawled along the ceiling. The pandit oiled his hair, adjusted his sacred thread, and began the hymn. The opening verses were abstract and grand: the thousand heads, the thousand eyes, the cosmic being enveloping all that was and would be. People listened with the vague piety reserved for things too large to imagine.
Then he reached the verse everyone knew:
“From his mouth the Brahmin was born, from his arms the Kshatriya, from his thighs the Vaishya, from his feet the Shudra.”
There it was—the line that stitched the universe to the village caste list.
Every time he reached the word ‘feet,’ his voice never quite touched the back of the courtyard.
As usual, the Brahmins tilted their chins upward a fraction. The Kshatriyas puffed their chests. The Vaishyas exchanged satisfied looks. The Shudras stared at the floor.
Only this time, Ravi noticed something else.
Sita wasn’t in the courtyard.
He slipped out, ignoring his father’s frown, and found her near the back steps, filling a plastic can from the small temple tap.
“You’re missing the hymn,” he said.
She gave him a flat look. “No, I’m living it.”
He flushed. “Listen,” he blurted, “about the Purush…my father says it proves the order. But your grandfather said it-”
“Your father worships the body that sits on top of everyone,” she interrupted. “My grandfather worshipped the body that feels pain at the bottom.”
She capped the can. “Both are in the same verse. Depends on where you’re standing when you repeat it.”
The bell clanged inside. The priests’ voice rose, sonorous, about sacrifice—how the gods offered the being into the fire, how from that dismemberment came the world.
“Tell me something, Ravi,” Sita said, tilting her head. “If the whole world was created from one sacrifice, why do some people still have to keep dying a little each day to prove the others are pure?”
Her tone was light, almost conversational, but the question landed like a stone in his stomach.
Before he could answer, the pandit called for the “special abhishek.” The well-off families had pooled money to pour milk and honey over the deity’s stone feet. Sita picked up her can, which was filled with plain water.
“You coming?” She asked.
He hesitated. “We’re not supposed to-”
“Touch?” She finished.
“Interfere,” he said weakly.
She laughed once, a short, bitter sound.
“Don’t worry. The god’s feet are stone. They don’t feel who is pouring what.”
*****
Inside, the ritual unfolded like every year.
The pandit chanted; the men in the front stepped forward, one by one, to pour thick white milk over the feet of the deity. It ran in little rivers down the stone, pooling at the base. Children watched, stomachs clenched with a hunger trained to call itself devotion.
When it was the turn of the Vaishyas, they added honey and ghee. The smell was sweet, cloying. Someone whispered that such offerings brought prosperity, that the god would bless their shops and granaries.
At the very back, near the doorway, a few feet shifted. Sita stood there with her can, water sloshing against cheap plastic.
The pandit saw her and frowned. “Not now,” he said. “Wait until the main abhishek is over.”
“It is over,” she replied quietly. “If the god’s body is all of us, then it is not finished until all of us have touched it.”
Heads turned. Ravi’s father hissed his name in warning, though Ravi hadn’t yet spoken.
The pandit’s mouth tightened. “Do not twist sacred ideas, girl. There is a maryada. This is not the place for argument.”
“Then where is?” she asked, just as softly. “If not in front of the god whose body you keep cutting?”
A ripple of discomfort moved through the crowd.
Ravi’s chest burned. He remembered her grandfather’s voice: If they use the giant to keep you under their heel, you remind them the same giant has a heart under your ribs.
Before he could lose his nerve, he stepped forward. “Let her pour,” he said. His own voice surprised him by not shaking. “If we are all part of the same body, what difference does it make who pours what where?”
His father’s hand shot out, gripping his arm. “Enough,” he whispered fiercely. “Do not insult tradition.”
“Which tradition?” Ravi asked. “The one that says we are all pieces of Purush, or the one that pretends some pieces are dirt?”
Silence fell so heavy it felt like a solid thing.
The pandit lifted his ladle in a trembling hand. For a second, Ravi thought he would strike him with it. Instead, the old man laughed - a short, almost admiring sound.
“You children and your questions,” he muttered. “The scriptures sew with one hand and you pull with the other.”
He looked at Sita. “Pour your water,” he said. “But remember: once you insist on being part of the body, the body’s sickness is also yours.”
She stepped forward.
The crowd parted, not in welcome, not exactly, but in shock. She climbed the few steps to the sanctum, the same steps she scrubbed every week, and stood before the stone feet now slick with milk and honey. For a heartbeat, she simply looked at them.
Then she poured.
The clear, cold water ran over the sticky mixture, cutting white streaks through it, diluting sweetness into something thin and cloudy. It washed the dust and leftover offerings alike, splashing onto the stone floor. A little stream formed and trickled towards the threshold, where it mingled with footprints of everyone present.
Ravi watched it reach his toes.
So did his father.
In some distant hall of memorized verses, someone’s carefully sorted categories began to blur.
*****
That night, the village hummed with talk.
Some said the end times were near - when children argued with fathers and low-born girls touched the sanctum. Others said perhaps the beginning had been misunderstood in the first place. No one agreed on what, exactly, had cracked, only that something had.
In his dream, Ravi saw Purush again.
Not as an abstract thousand-headed being in the sky, but as a vast figure lying under their fields. His skin was crisscrossed with labels: mouth, arm, thigh, foot. Some parts glowed with constant worship. Others were dark, neglected.
Where Sita’s water had touched the temple floor, a new sensation rippled along the giant’s sole. It rose through his heel, his calf, his knee, like a single cold drop sliding under skin.
The giant flinched.
For the first time in an age, he felt his own cut.
He shifted, ever so slightly.
The Brahmins complained of strange tastes in their sleep.
The Kshatriyas dreamed of dropping their sticks.
The Vaishyas dreamt of their grain rotting if hoarded.
The Shudras, for once, dreamt not of climbing up, but of the whole body lying down together.
Ravi woke with his heart pounding and his throat dry. He crept to the courtyard, where the temple spire speared the sky, and listened. The night seemed unchanged: crickets, a dog, a distant train.
But under it all, if he pressed his ear to the earth, he could almost hear a dull, slow thud.
Like a beating heart, remembering.
*****
The next weeks were not miraculous.
No divine flood swept away the caste list. No voice thundered from the clouds. Instead, there were smaller, pettier miracles and punishments.
Ravi’s father refused to speak to him for three days.
Sita’s family found a pot of milk left near their door at dawn, no note attached. Later that same day, someone spat near their doorstep.
At the next village meeting, a man grumbled that “these new ideas” would ruin everything. Another said, almost under his breath, that perhaps “everything” had been ruined for some long before.
The pandit stopped reciting the varna verse quite so loudly. He still said it - habit is a slow god to dethrone - but he stumbled once, and memories of his own laughter seemed to catch in his throat.
And the well? The water did not magically double. In fact, it grew worse. The hand pump near the waste ground broke one morning, its handle snapping clean off. The mechanic said the main well would need to be deepened soon.
“At this rate,” someone joked bitterly, “we’ll all be feet.”
The irony hung in the air, sour and bright.
Ravi thought of Sita’s question: If the whole world was created from one sacrifice, why do some people still have to keep dying a little each day?
He did not have an answer.
But he had a decision.
The next time the sarpanch repeated the rule about who could draw water when, Ravi stepped out of line and joined Sita’s family at the broken hand pump, carrying his father’s brass lota. His father called his name, voice tight with fury and fear. Ravi kept walking.
“Why?” Sita whispered, half-annoyed, half-amused. “Your place is there.”
“That’s the problem,” he said. “I believed I only had one.”
She looked at him for a long moment, then snorted. “Welcome to the Shudras, then. We walk on the sharp stones first.”
He smiled, though his chest felt like someone had carved a cavity in it and packed it with unanswered questions.
From somewhere beneath their soles, the buried giant shifted again.
If all were parts of the same body, then to care for “another limb” instead of othering it was not charity; it was a form of self-interest that had finally grown large enough to notice its own reflection.
And if that body had been taught, for centuries, to feel some of its own skin as untouchable, then each act of touch was a small, necessary violence against the old order - a new kind of sacrifice.
Not burning a being in a mythical fire, but burning away the comfort that said, at least you are higher than someone.
The Purush Sukta remained.
So did the body of the village.
But somewhere between verse and practice, a child had taken the line that once cut everyone apart and used it like a needle.
The stitching would be long and painful.
The giant, for the first time, did not sleep quite so soundly.
Riddhima Shrivastava is an Indian high schooler who has recently moved to Portugal and is trying to make friends. She writes poems and the occasional short story and has an unhealthy obsession with the colour blue and the word ‘radio”. When she’s not writing, eating or making movies, she’s trying to balance learning Portuguese, French and Arabic at the same time and getting it all mixed up in her head.