Caste hierarchy is maintained by ubiquitous violence rather than consent.

Evidence

How can a system of such immutable hierarchy be maintained if not by the threat of egregious, ubiquitous violence? How do landlords force labourers, generation after generation, to toil night and day on subsistence wages? Why would an Untouchable labourer, who is not allowed to even dream of being a landowner one day, put his or her life at the landlord’s disposal, to plough the land, to sow seed and harvest the crop, if it were not out of sheer terror of the punishment that awaits the wayward? (Farmers, unlike industrialists, cannot afford strikes. Seed must be sown when it must be sown, the crop must be harvested when it must be harvested. The farmworker must be terrorised into abject submission, into being available when he must be available.) How were African slaves forced to work on American cotton fields? By being flogged, by being lynched, and if that did not work, by being hung from a tree for others to see and be afraid. Why are the murders of insubordinate Dalits even today never simply murders but ritual slaughter? Why are they always burnt alive, raped, dismembered and paraded naked? — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 302

Categorization

• XREF: The comparison of Dalit farm labour to American chattel slavery and the observation that agricultural work cannot tolerate strikes (unlike industrial work) is a striking structural argument. — connects to: Both dominant and subordinate castes prefer to seek authority from the male master. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1939; Cultivation and repression both rest on inherited class violence.
• QUESTION: The claim that farmers ‘cannot afford strikes’ because of sowing/harvesting immovability is analytically rich — worth exploring whether this distinguishes caste labor exploitation from industrial exploitation in a way Ambedkar’s political strategy depended on.