26/10/2023
Felled by caste pride in Tamil Nadu’s Nanguneri town
PREMIUM
August 26, 2023 03:04 am | Updated August 30, 2023 06:20 pm IST
On August 9, a Dalit boy and his sister were brutally assaulted at home by their schoolmates who belong to an intermediate dominant caste in Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu. While the siblings have survived, fear has gripped the Scheduled Castes in Nanguneri. P. Sudhakar reports on the ways in which caste violence affects the lives of the people on the fringes
SUDHAKAR P.

A police van stands outside the house of Dalit Anganwadi worker Ambikapathi, in Nanguneri town in Tirunelveli district. Ambikapathi’s son and daughter were attacked by three OBC boys on the night of August 9. | Photo Credit: A. Shaikmohideen
The blood has dried on the steps of Ambikapathi’s single-room house in Nanguneri, a drought-ridden and crime-prone town in Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu. This is the spot where, on August 9, her children were brutally attacked by her son’s classmates. The asbestos roof and small porch are clean, but the reddish-brown streaks serve as a reminder of the caste violence that erupt periodically in southern Tamil Nadu.
Ambikapathi, an Anganwadi worker, fears for the lives of her children — her son is 17 and her daughter 14 — but is relieved at the moment that they have survived the assault by the three boys, all Thevars, a dominant, intermediate Other Backward Classes (OBC) community. “My son used to keep getting harassed just because we are Dalits, at the government-aided higher secondary school in Valliyoor [about 12 kilometres away]. Those boys would keep asserting their caste superiority. They would force him to do petty tasks for them, such as buying snacks, ci******es, and tickets to travel by private buses. When he resisted, he was beaten up,” she says.
