What Congress And Gandhi Have Done To Untouchables

by B.R. Ambedkar

rudiments of education, religion and morality. Their bodies, at present, are ill-odorous and foul with the liquor and strong-smelling food, out of which for generations they have been built up; it will need some generations of purer food and living to make their bodies fit to sit in the dose neighbourhood of a school-room with children who have received bodies from an ancestry trained in habits of exquisite personal cleanliness, and fed on pure food-stuffs. We have to reuse the Depressed Classes to a similar level of physical purity, not to drag down the dean to the level of the dirty, and until this is done, dose association is undesirable. We are not blaming these children, nor their parents, for being what they are; we are stating a mere palpable fact. The first daily lesson in a school for these children should be a bath, and the putting on of a dean doth; and the second should be a meal of dean wholesome food; those primary needs cannot be supplied in a school intended for children who take their daily bath in the early morning and who come to school well-fed.

Annie Besant