Caste hierarchy over farm labour is maintained through terror and violence

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.) — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 302

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Relates closely to the sacrifice essay’s imagery of ritualized violence against the powerless, though distinct; more centrally it parallels how stable agrarian systems rely on terror, echoing the Lindow Man and sacralized coercion discussions.