How Students are Made to Wear Caste Markers in Tirunelveli Schools

Caste markers are still used to segregate students in the schools of Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu.

Caste is still a pervasive reality in the schools of Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu. Photograph used for representational purpose. (Photo: iStockphoto)

The Indian Express has published an in-depth report on divisive caste practices followed by schools in Tirunelveli, about 650 km south of Chennai. According to the article, students are made to wear wrist, head, neck bands of different colours – red, yellow, green and saffron – denoting their caste. It’s what students wear on their wrists, on their foreheads, around their necks, under their shirts. A Class X student of the Government Higher Secondary School in Tirunelveli town, who displays his green-and-red kayaru, a wrist band of interwoven threads, said, “The upper castes have yellow-red bands, so we have these.”

The report further explicates how this belt in southern Tamil Nadu is known for violent caste conflicts between OBCs and Dalits. Hence these wrist bands become markers that tell children who is a friend, and who isn’t.

<p>Though there are no written rules, students usually know their ‘colours’ by the time they reach high school. It’s red and yellow for Thevars, blue and yellow for Nadars, saffron for Yadavs — all socially and politically powerful Hindu communities that come under the Most Backward Classes (MBC) category — while students of the Dalit community of Pallars wear wrist bands in green and red and the Arundhathiyars, also Dalits, wear green, black and white.</p>

<p><b>“Wearing caste on the wrist – green for Dalits, red for Thevars”, <i>The Indian Express</i></b><br></p>

In August, while investigating the increasing number of clashes between student groups, the district administration found that wrist bands were often used to target on the basis of caste. The district collector then asked the education department to ban wrist bands in schools in Tirunelveli. There was no written order, only a direction issued at a meeting of the education department.

Yet caste markers survive in the form of coloured pottus (tilaks), and lockets with photographs of caste leaders worn by students, and various other everyday social conventions.