Indian outcast millionaire mulls caste, riches
By TIM SULLIVAN, Associated Press – 15 hours ago
AGRA, India (AP) — As far back as he can remember, people told Hari
Kishan Pippal that he was unclean, with a filthiness that had tainted
his family for centuries. Teachers forced him to sit apart from other
students. Employers sometimes didn't bother to pay him.
Pippal is a dalit, a member of the outcast community once known as
untouchables. Born at the bottom of Hinduism's complex social ladder,
that meant he could not eat with people from higher castes or drink
from their wells. He was not supposed to aspire to a life beyond that
of his father, an illiterate cobbler. Years later, he still won't
repeat the slurs that people called him.
Now, though, people call him something else.
They call him rich.
Pippal owns a hospital, a shoe factory, a car dealership and a
publishing company. He owns six cars. He lives in a maze of linked
apartments in a quiet if dusty neighborhood of high walls and
wrought-iron gates.
"In my heart I am dalit. But with good clothes, good food, good
business, it is like I am high-caste," he said, a 60-year-old with a
shock of white hair, a well-tailored vest and the girth of a Victorian
gentleman. Now, he points out, he is richer than most Brahmins, who
sit at the top of the caste hierarchy: "I am more than Brahmin!"
But in an increasingly globalized nation wrestling with centuries of
deeply held caste beliefs, there is little agreement about what that
means. Do Pippal and the handful of other dalit millionaires reflect a
country shrugging off centuries of caste bias? Does caste hold still
hold sway the way it used to?
Even Hari Kishan Pippal isn't sure.
"Life is good for me," says Pippal, sitting in his office in Heritage
Hospital, one of the largest private medical facilities in this north
Indian city. "But life is very bad for many, many people."
The vast majority of India's 170 million dalits live amid a thicket of
grim statistics: less than a third are literate, well over 40 percent
survive on less than $2 a day, infant mortality rates are dramatically
higher than among higher castes. Dalits are far more likely than the
overall population to be underweight, and far less likely to get
postnatal care.
While caste discrimination has been outlawed for more than 60 years,
and the term "untouchable" is now taboo in public, thousands of
anti-dalit attacks occur every year. Hundreds of people are killed.
The stories spill from India's newspapers: the 14-year-old dalit
strangled because he shared his first name with a higher-caste boy;
the 70-year-old man and his disabled daughter burned alive after a
dalit-owned dog barked at higher-caste neighbors; the man run over at
a gas station because he refused to give up his place in line to a
high-caste customer.
But amid centuries of caste tradition that can seem immutable, there
has been slow change.
In an extensive survey by the Center for the Advanced Study of India
at the University of Pennsylvania, researchers found that dalits
living in concrete homes, not huts made from mud and straw, had jumped
from 18 percent to 64 percent between 1990 and 2007 in one north
Indian district. Ownership of various household goods — fans, chairs,
pressure cookers and bicycles — had skyrocketed over the same period.
It also found a weakening of some caste traditions, with, for example,
far fewer dalits being seated separately at non-dalit weddings.
While most dalits still support themselves as rural laborers, there is
also a growing dalit middle class, many of them civil servants who
have benefited from affirmative action laws.
"Caste is losing its grip," said Chandra Bhan Prasad, a dalit writer,
social scientist and one-time Marxist militant who has become a
leading voice urging the dalit poor to see the virtues of capitalism.
In a consumer society, Prasad argues, wealth can trump caste — at
least some of the time. Growing economies also foster urbanization, he
says, allowing low-caste Indians to escape traditional village
strictures. Finally, economic growth also means that the traditional
merchant castes are not large enough to fill every job.
"This means other castes also have a chance" in the business world, Prasad said.
To Prasad, the new millionaires are a way to prove that dalits can
make it in a globalized world.
"Don't say (success) is not possible because of the caste system," he
said. "Here is a list of dalits who are doing so well."
The list is impressive, even if its members are far from India's
traditional centers of wealth, power and celebrity. They are, for the
most part, blue-collar rich, often finding their niches in
less-glamorous industries: building working-class housing
developments, manufacturing immense concrete pipes, churning out cheap
polyester shirts.
No one knows how many wealthy dalit entrepreneurs have emerged since
India opened its economy in the early 1990s, sparking some of the
world's fastest economic growth. Hundreds certainly, maybe thousands.
They are also increasingly visible. A decade ago, dalit businessmen
regularly changed their last names, since these almost always identify
someone's caste. Even Pippal did it at first, playing off the
pronunciation of his name and calling his first company "People's
Exports" to mask his caste background.
Now, the dalit rich are chatting over cocktails at meetings of their
own chamber of commerce, and setting up booths at dalit trade fairs.
Top government officials are talking about a venture capital fund to
make financing more easily available to entrepreneurs from India's
outcast communities.
The wealthiest, meanwhile, have become darlings of the Indian media,
held up as proof that modern India is an increasingly caste-blind
society.
Nonsense, says Anand Teltumbde, a prominent dalit activist.
"These stories (about successful dalits) sit well with the middle
class," said Teltumbde, who is a grandson of B.R. Ambedkar, an
independence-era dalit lawyer revered as a hero by dalits across
India. "The entire world has changed ... but the number of well-off
dalits is no more than 10 percent. Ninety percent of dalits live a
dilapidated kind of life."
As for Pippal, he finds himself uncomfortably in the middle of this
debate. He is a rich dalit who thinks very little has changed for
India's outcasts, a man who credits his own success to hard work and
one enormous advantage: ego.
"From my childhood, I was thinking one day I will be a big man," he said.
Raised in poverty, he only made it through high school before his
father became ill, and he had to go to work pulling a rickshaw to
support the family. His first break came when he married a dalit woman
from a slightly better-off family that owned a small shoe workshop.
Dalits have long dominated the shoe business. Caste is largely a
reflection of traditional trades, and since making shoes involved
working with the skins of dead animals, it was left to dalits.
But Pippal shifted the focus of his father-in-law's workshop,
concentrating on high-quality shoes and teaching himself a slew of
languages — English, Tamil, Punjabi, Russian, German — to sell his
footwear more widely. Today, he owns a 300-worker factory where 500
handmade shoes are turned out every day, then packed into boxes
already marked with prices in euros and British pounds. The expensive
ones retail for as much as $500 a pair.
He used his footwear profits to start the small Honda dealership, and
then the hospital. Immense profits are being made in India's private
health care industry, as the new middle class seeks alternatives to
the often-questionable care at most public hospitals.
"I didn't know ABC about hospitals," Pippal said, laughing his barking
laugh. He gleefully talks about the Brahmin doctors who at first
worked for him very reluctantly.
"Now they are earning lot of money from this hospital," he said.
Of course, so is Pippal. He's still a long way from being a
billionaire, but says his businesses have a total turnover of about
$12 million a year.
At first glance, Heritage Hospital doesn't look state-of-the-art.
Pippal's office has stained green carpeting and paint coming away in
bubbly clumps. On a recent day, masons were working near the main
entrance, forcing patients to enter through a dark hallway beneath his
Honda dealership, which is next door. Janitors do little but move
around the dirt with wet rags.
But it is cleaner and has more resources than the public hospitals
most Indians must rely upon. Pippal proudly ticks off its assets: 150
beds, 187 doctors, a range of care from oncology to plastic surgery.
In so many ways, Pippal has proven himself a success. He is rich. He
is greeted with respect on the streets. His children went to good
schools, and grew up with friends from across the caste spectrum.
Yet he also believes that he remains, very often, a figure of quiet contempt.
"These people are very bloody clever," Pippal said of the high-caste
businessmen with whom he deals. "When there are profits to be made,
then everything (about his caste) is OK."
"But in their mind, they're thinking: 'He is a dalit.'"
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