Review: Telegraph, Calcutta: 30 August 2013
Untouchable God (Samya, Rs 350) by Kancha Ilaiah uses dark humour to dig out and lay bare the viciousness of the caste system in India. The author — whose scholarship focuses on criticism of the Hindutva philosophy from the perspective of the neglected castes — uses terse satire in this novel to show how the tyrannical and supercilious ways of thinking of the upper castes can make them as ruthless as the Taliban or the Nazis. In this novel, a Dalit named Pariah is beaten to death for the crime of "thinking about God". To the six important men belonging to the upper castes who 'arrange' his murder, it is a crime for a Dalit to think about god because it may also lead him to thoughts of equality. These six men collectively represent the "Brahmins of India". They belong to six sub-castes based on 'purity', and therefore also embody the similarities and differences that exist among sections of the higher castes. One of them, Namboodri from Kerala, belongs to a caste that created "the most perfect system of discrimination that the world has seen". To add to the irony, Ilaiah has brought into the scenario a coloured American, who has come to India to know more about Mahatma Gandhi's non-violence movement and how it had inspired Martin Luther King Jr.
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