Village authorities denied a Dalit woman basic utilities and water.

Evidence

Surekha Bhotmange was forty years old and had committed several crimes too. She was a woman—an ‘Untouchable’, Dalit woman—who lived in India, and she wasn’t dirt poor. She was more educated than her husband, so she functioned as the head of her family. Dr Ambedkar was her hero. Like him, her family had renounced Hinduism and converted to Buddhism. Surekha’s children were educated. Her two sons Sudhir and Roshan had been to college. Her daughter Priyanka was seventeen, and finishing high school. Surekha and her husband had bought a little plot of land in the village of Khairlanji in the state of Maharashtra. It was surrounded by farms belonging to castes that considered themselves superior to the Mahar caste that Surekha belonged to. Because she was Dalit and had no right to aspire to a good life, the village panchayat did not permit her to get an electricity connection, or turn her thatched mud hut into a brick house. The villagers would not allow her family to irrigate their fields with water from the canal, or draw water from the public well. They tried to build a public road through her land, and when she protested, they drove their bullock carts through her fields. They let their cattle loose to feed on her standing crop. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 29

Categorization

• XREF: Direct, concrete illustration of a core claim in this book that caste oppression survived formal legal abolition — connects to the reader’s larger ‘caste annihilation’ study as evidence of what persisted.