Originally posted by: Deviant_Pixel
Casteism and elitism is very much prevalent. It's why in many Brahmin households (including my own granddad) and also non Brahmin, servants are given different utensils. Matlab these people cook your food and they are somehow so 'unhygienic' they cannot share your food. Its not that everyone treats lower caste badly or beats and abuse them but that does not change the fact that discrimination however subtle is still discrimination.
I wonder if it is by state. The conditions you cite were very prevalent in my great grandfather's time. My grand aunt used to rush and bathe if she even touched a lower caste person by accident. Nowadays the landowners are all broke as cost of labor has skyrocketed. Many labor migrate to cities or even abroad for jobs and only women are left behind. You have to be very nice and sweet to get people to work. The police are very strict, if a scheduled cast person even reports a crime it become s very , very serious. Even my grandfather's and my father's generation many upper class people like us all migrated to small towns and started businesses.
But yes those days, separate wells, no entry to temples and basically lower castes work all day in the fields and barely got paid, mostly rice, vegetables and once a year got clothes etc. basically they were feudal serfs. Then there were customs like bonded labor -where parent suffering terribly would come and mortgage their kid as a servant and kid would live with you and work 24x7 till the debt was paid off. All that is gone. At least my state it seems to have flipped the other side-where landowners are going broke and the workers have money and they are the ones going to temples, travelling . ONly the old people remember the caste system. In villages it is still there, but like in my ancestral village-the headman who used to own 1000s of acres now is stuck with a crumbling palatial mansion and can't afford a car. but is too ashamed to get a bus in his village and so walks to the NeXT village to get a bus -while several of the lower caste people have bought cars.
It is changing. I think one good thing in India is in the caste system you can never look at a person and determine what caste he is from. Once they move out of the village and into a town, no one knows and nowadays so many love marriages so very different.