NEW DELHI: Ashana Bhan lies at the absolute bottom of India’s layered social hierarchy. She is from the bottom-rung caste, the Dalits, and the bottom-rung gender, making her vulnerable to the worst brutalities.

Ashana was born in a village in the northern Indian state of Haryana among the Dalit community known as the Shamars, after the Sanskrit for tanners.

At 45, she lives in New Delhi with her husband, a cousin who is also a Dalit, the preferred term for the “untouchable” caste to which some 250 million Indians belong.

Ashana and her husband live with their five children under a roof of plastic in the filth of a shantytown dangerously close to the polluted water of the Yamuna river.

Her worn face and body bear witness to the ordeal she has been through, which she recounted with shame in broken Hindi.

“When I was a child, my father used to beat me because I wasn’t strong enough to work in the fields,” she remembered, her voice a near murmur.

“Then came the high-caste people, who would make us slave away without feeding us and used to beat us, too,” she said.

The Dalits, long regarded as impure for their traditional jobs dealing with bodies, animals and waste, are at the bottom of India’s 2,500-year-old caste system, which separates “the pure” from those who could sully them.

The complex hierarchy was officially abolished when India won independence from Britain in 1947. But it persists in the day-to-day interaction of many of India’s one billion-plus people.

For Dalit women, the caste system is another indignity in a society they feel treats them as second-class citizens.

“I was twice-cursed,” Ashana said.

“As I am a woman and a Dalit, I have been treated like an animal all my life,” she said. “No, worse than an animal.”

Like 77 per cent of Dalit women, Ashana is illiterate. And like many of them, she was put to work on the fields of high-caste owners, who humiliated her and raped her several times.

“The masters would treat us as if we had been objects. In the villages they could decide to kill us when they wished, and some of them spent their time terrorizing us,” she said.

She recalled being raped and paraded naked in the village.

“Those who were saying I was not pure and refused to share water or food with me were the first to do sexual things to me that I couldn’t even understand. It began when I was 12.”

Arriving in New Delhi two decades ago in hope of work, Ashana has never found a fixed job. She tries to win food for her family by carrying bricks to construction sites where her husband sometimes works.

But the Indian capital proved little safer.

“Physical abuse started again on the part of my bosses,” Ashana said.

“My husband isn’t powerful enough to defend me, so I don’t say anything. It’s better that way.”

Dalit activist Raja Shekar Vurnu said lower-caste women are easy targets.

“It is very easy to discriminate against a Dalit, to abuse her, because she is so weak, so low in the social ladder, she has such low self-esteem that she will not even be able or willing to fight,” he said.

According to official statistics, more than 28,000 crimes, including murder and rape, were committed in India last year by members of higher castes against lower castes.

“Rape shows the hypocrisy of high-caste people who call Dalits ‘untouchables’ but do not hesitate to attack their women,” said Ruth Manorama of the National Federation of Dalit Women.—AFP