A group of young Dalit men in Telangana defied years of caste discrimination, humiliation and social exclusion last week, when they insisted that their local village barber cut their hair in the same salon as everyone else. Since their childhood, these men from Timmapur village of Siddipet district’s Jagadevpur mandal were denied entry into the local salon. They were forced to comply with the barber’s practice of cutting their hair under a tamarind tree on the outskirts of the village — one of the many forms of untouchability that continues to prevail across the country to date. But on July 5, five Madiga (Scheduled Caste) men — Posanpally Ramanujam, Gundru Narsimlu, Posanpally Murali, Posanpally Naveen and Gundru Srikanth — resisted this discriminatory practice. And when the barber Shyamsunder still denied them impartial service, they lodged a complaint with the local police against him, and several members of the locally dominant Mudiraj (Backward Class) community who had allegedly pressurised the barber to deny fair service to Madigas.
The resistance wasn’t all that sudden. It had been building for a while, triggered by decades of social exclusion and stoked by a couple of recent incidents of discrimination. A month ago on June 8, Timmapur marked a ‘festival of lakes’ as part of the state government’s decennial celebrations of Telangana’s formation. As the Dalit residents were about to participate in a community cooking event, members of the dominant Mudiraj community and other BC communities allegedly objected. “They humiliated us by saying they wouldn’t eat food cooked by us. They only wanted us to clean up after them by picking up the leaves (used as plates),” Narsimlu told TNM. Affronted by this, Narsimlu (25) said that he and many other Dalit residents stormed out of the event.
Their defiance had its repercussions. They were subjected to harsher social boycott, as people allegedly stopped hiring Madigas to play the dappu (drum) at various events, which is one of their main sources of income. But Narsimlu, Murali and the others decided to double down and escalate their resistance. On July 1, around 40 Dalit men entered a local Hanuman temple where their entry was historically denied. The privileged castes responded by cutting power supply to the temple, and have now boycotted the temple too, another Dalit resident Posanpally Raju (30) alleged.
All of these hostilities culminated in the July 5 incident, when the five men confronted the barber Shyamsunder and demanded services inside his salon alongside the other residents of the village. Visuals of the confrontation showed the barber refusing service, following which the men lodged a police complaint against him and seven elders of the Mudiraj community (including a village leader affiliated with the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) Nayini Mahender), as well as two members of the Rajaka (BC) community. The Jagadevpur police have registered a case of caste discrimination under section 3(1)(v) of the The Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, Gajwel Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) of Gajwel M Ramesh told TNM.
Tree in Timmapur where Dalits are restricted for hair cuts
There are around 500 members of the Madiga community — considered one of the most disadvantaged among SCs — living in Timmapur village, located in the Gajwel constituency represented by Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao. The Mudiraj (BC) community is the most dominant in the village, followed by Gollas (a pastoral community), Padmashalis (whose traditional occupation is weaving), and Rajakas (whose traditional occupation is washing clothes), all categorised as BCs. The barber, Shyamsunder, belongs to the Nayee Brahmin community, also categorised as BC but less powerful than Mudirajs. Nayee Brahmins themselves are often subject to caste discrimination as well.
According to the residents of Timmapur’s Dalit colony, Shyamsunder’s barbershop is situated among the houses of the BC residents of various communities. “Every Friday, the barber shuts that salon, and provides services to Dalits under a tamarind tree on the outskirts of the village,” said Raju.
In his childhood days, Raju remembers classmates from privileged castes bullying him and his friends in the name of their caste. “Though we were friends with classmates from privileged castes, they never allowed us inside their homes. We were never allowed to eat with them either,” he said. There’s one major incident he vividly recalls.
“In 2003, when I was in Class 6, I entered the local Hanuman temple along with a few other boys of my age from my colony, though we knew we weren’t allowed. For nearly six years after that, the temple remained closed, and no one in the village hired people from our colony to play the dappu,” he said. After this, Raju and three other boys from the village left for Gajwel town to study in a government residential school.
Raju now has a bachelor’s degree and works for a private firm. Three of the nearly 40 young Dalit men in the village have attended college, all first-generation graduates. A few others had to stop their formal education after Class 12. Narsaiah, a 45-year-old Dalit farmer from the village said, “Our generation is used to such [discriminatory] customs, but these young men are educated. They don’t tolerate disrespect anymore and want things to change.”
Narsimulu, who has been working as a driver after finishing Class 12, said, "Attending events held by anti-caste organisations and following discussions of anti-caste leaders on YouTube have helped us become more aware of our rights.”
Raju, who is one of the first college graduates from the colony, said he was active in student politics in his college days. “I have been telling the youth in our colony that we should stop normalising casteist practices in our village. It was difficult to convince them at first and I gave up. But the incident at the lake festival had an impact on the others. They themselves approached me and asked if we should resist.”
At the village lake festival in June, when the privileged castes refused to eat food cooked by Dalits, the younger generation decided to take a firm stand, and walked away. When they faced retaliation in the form of a more severe boycott, Raju, Narsimlu, Murali and the others decided to take the struggle back to the Hanuman temple some of them remembered entering as children.
Two decades after his childhood incident, Raju entered the Hanuman temple once again on July 1 along with Narsimlu and others. He alleged that after their entry, the power supply to the temple was discontinued. “The BC communities do not want to enter the temple anymore. They’re saying they’ll build a new Hanuman temple for themselves,” Raju said.
Dalits at the Hanuman temple in Timmapur village
After this, on July 5, Raju, Narsimlu, Murali, Naveen and Srikanth decided to oppose the segregated barbershop system. When they went to Shyamsunder’s salon, the barber declined services citing instructions from caste elders of the Mudiraj and Rajaka communities, which led to the police complaint.
“It was an act of assertion, after experiencing repeated social boycotts in the village for decades”, national secretary of Dalit Bahujan Front (DBF) P Shankar told TNM. After the incident, Shankar and other anti-caste activists staged a demonstration at the Jagdevpur mandal revenue office demanding strict punishment for those practising untouchability towards Dalits in Timmapur. Shankar demanded that the Siddipet district Collector and Commissioner of Police must visit the village and facilitate Dalits’ entry into the temple, barbershop and other public spaces.
Shankar said that the BC communities who hold power in the village are both politically and numerically dominant. “Since these communities don’t face untouchability themselves, they use their relatively advantaged position to dominate Scheduled Castes,” he said, observing that there was a rising trend of attacks on Dalits by BCs in Telangana while listing a few recent atrocities.
In 2018, a Dalit man named Shyamalapalli Yellaiah and his son Shekar were brutally hacked to death over a land dispute allegedly by three persons from the Mudiraj community, in Rajanna Sircilla district neighbouring Siddipet.
In the same district, over 200 Mudiraj men and women from the same Mudiraj community attacked a Dalit colony following a dispute over loud music being played in the colony to celebrate the Dasara festival, injuring several people. An independent fact-finding committee from the Voice of Dalit Collective concluded that the attack was a planned one, flared by caste tensions stemming from the Dalit residents’ attempts to install a statue of Jyotirao Phule or Babasaheb Ambedkar a few years ago. While this plan could not materialise, the relatively dominant cases in the village eventually installed a statue of Maratha king Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.