Dalit

ahead.

So, you know, in America, all over the world, wherever Hindus are there, regardless of whether they are calling them Dalits or different castes or anything, we know that our culture, there is no issue of any problem in any other country.

So that is the Hindu culture overall, which Bhagavad Gita was mentioning.

There will be fractions, there will be what you call some disagreement, but if you think of culture, we think of humanity and don't think of hurting anyone.

You know, speaking for myself, what has changed my idea of equality and raised my hopes for it is learning more about what was here on this subcontinent before Europeans showed up.

And if we didn't just start our learning with Plato, who really wasn't too swift and quite biased, or if we started with original cultures, the Kwe and the San in Africa, the Dalits in India, and the Native Americans here, we would find cultures in which the paradigm was a circle, not a pyramid.

in which there was no gender in many of the languages.

There was not even he and she, not even pronouns, in which the ideal was balance, not imbalance, not hierarchy.

And if you're thinking, wow, that's pretty Mesoamerican, you're absolutely right.

The writers who came up with Yuuzhan Vong specifically were cribbing from Mayan and Aztec cosmology, but then they also added aspects of Dalit, Melanesian, Polynesian, Austronesian, and Choctaw cultures as starting points or as models.

okay um yeah the the wearing of skins like immediately twigged

yeah

where because they are clearly an occupational caste like a Peshawar caste or viradari they you know are kind of traditionally seen as outside the Ashram like they cannot claim quote unquote foreign descent So they are seen as being even there, sort of in the middle, because they are a Peshawar Zat, but they are not the abject of the abject, Peshawar Zat.

They are not the stigmatized Dalit Muslims, which is now, I mean, I think a very identifiable category, even in the kind of the literature on Dalit Muslims, quite apart from, of course, social realities which have always existed in Punjab and outside.

So even there, they sort of hang in the middle where they are believed to be during these decades, not Ashraf, but at the same time, also not the lowest of the low.

And again, in the middle.

and to kind of argue for, hopefully, a scholarly kind of table at which we could talk about both those problematics together.

Instead of thinking that, oh, when you talk about religion, you have to talk about Hindu, Muslim, Sikh.

And when you talk about caste, you have to talk about Brahmin, Dalit, Darshan.

I mean, not that those are not true.

That was certainly true about first century, but you think about all the different movements throughout church history in the last 2000 years.

And it, you know, uh, whether it was an abolitionist movement or whether it was, um, you know, uh, you mentioned earlier, Don McGavin, uh, the homogenous unit principle and his observation that he made in India, he was a, I think either certainly a second, if not a third generation missionary to India, uh, The reason why he made those observations around the social dynamic of how people come to crisis, he looked at the vast numbers of Dalits, the lower caste system in India.

And he realized that if the gospel was truly going to penetrate what he called the masses, which were largely the Dalits, that it had to lead to social action.

As a matter of fact, this is, I think, the 14th chapter in his book, Understanding Church Growth.

It's a book about church growth.