India's Hidden Slavery Review

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(More customer reviews)This film is essential for our future and education. India is supposed to be one of the largest democracies in the world, and soon a permanent member of the Security Council, but without reaching the proportions of the ancient Greek or ancient Roman situations, it is tainted by the existence of a good ten percent layer of slaves in the midst of their society, the Dalits that are evaluated to be maybe up to 250 millions today, the famous untouchables, that caste of pariahs who have been declared from the very start by the Hindu religion, as far as the Rigveda something like three thousand years ago, as forever born non-divine, hence impure, hence not worth any real position or even visibility in society, and as being just barely tolerable for the dirtiest tasks in the worst possible un-salaried or hardly salaried positions, forever dependent of some greedy contractors who can reduce them to dogs surviving in a dilapidated kennel. In other words slavery. The religious justification of this exploitation of human beings by other human beings is going to make it difficult to eradicate it. The film is very clear about the social depravation this caste system produces in this unclassifiable enormous minority. But the situation is even worse, and I have been able to see it with my own eyes, when some political movements who found their inspiration in the extreme Maoism of some fifty years ago turn the fact that these Dalits are denied the right to possess anything into the supreme quality of representing the future of humanity in total dispossession of individuals to the sole profit of collective ownership of all riches, and first of all the land. That's the only explanation you can find in the refusal by the Hindu Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka to accept the land the Sri Lankan government wanted to give to all Tamil plantation workers. These myths of the future of the world being represented by the most alienated and deprived people in a society, those who only have their chains to lose and loosen, will still survive some centuries because it is a spiritual and mental chain of an invisible nature. Luckily the tremendous development of India is pushing away some attitudes and developing new solidarities and trans-social, and in India trans-caste, cooperation. And the Dalits find the educational help they need from the Christians churches who reach beyond belief divides, just as I have seen it in Sri Lanka with and from the Buddhists. This film is thus an essential piece of information about the future: India has to finally get rid of this ugly problem by promoting these Dalits out of their depravation, at least if they want to be recognized in their emerging status by the rest of the world. That will require in India that all those who consider the liberation of humanity from bondage and dependence should find the way to coming together and joining hands and efforts to free energies and desires to grow in every single individual, in even single group of human beings, in every single community. I do believe India is able to re-invent human liberty and equality by their bringing up to the surface the deep inspiration they have always had in the collaboration between and among different communities. I will yet be slightly critical of the film in the fact that it does not at all allude to the Mogul Empire and then the British Empire who have exacerbated that dependence and that caste system into an ossified straight jacket for the Dalits, though that very same society had been able to produce Buddhism which is the very negation of this caste system and the assertion that all men are equal in front of enlightenment and nirvana, at least the small vehicle Buddhism I know.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines


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