The caste that owns the most land and therefore holds the most power in that village are the kshatriyas--the caste of kings and queens and their vassals and military chiefs. When the kings and kingdoms disappeared, many kshatriyas became wealthy landowners. Besides kshatriyas there are other upper castes in Adavi Kolanu such as kammas and reddys, and many lower castes: washermen, potters, barbers, blacksmiths, and so on.
Outside the village (untouchables are never allowed to live within the village proper) there are two separate communities of untouchables--malas and madigas--with different occupations. Malas work as agricultural laborers and madigas haul away dead animals.
Although to a caste Hindu both malas and madigas are equally repulsive, the two groups each think the other inferior. They don't intermarry or eat sitting next to each other and they usually, though not always, live in separate colonies--malapallis for malas and madiga-goodems for madigas. But they do not consider each other's touch polluting.
When Prasanna Rao and Maryamma moved to Adavi Kolanu, they set up their house in that village's malapalli, in a small tattered hut by the pond. The thatched roof was full of holes and whenever the breeze turned into a wind it would fly off the mud walls.
The mission school where they worked as teachers gave Prasanna Rao and Maryamma each a monthly salary of one rupee, which wasn't enough to buy them even a week's worth of food. To help them get by, the untouchable Christian folk of Adavi Kolanu and the surrounding villages, both mala and madiga, made a collection of rice every Sunday after the church services and donated it to the young couple. The Christians were so impoverished that each week the rice they collected scarcely amounted to five cups. Each family also contributed two dung cakes for cooking fuel. Prasanna Rao and Maryamma were even poorer now than when they lived with their parents. Despite the higher status that comes with non-manual work, they would have been better off materially if they had been laborers like their parents. They could have devoted their time to catching fish or gleaning fields rather than spending the whole day at school without earning enough for two square meals a day.
But they were happy, and not just because they were teenagers in love. They had started their adult lives in a way that their parents would never have been able to imagine. Maryamma's mother had learned to read and write but she had never had the opportunity to do much with her skills. Prasanna Rao and Maryamma were educated and they were educating others. That gave them a sense of self-respect and earned them the respect of the other untouchables whose children they taught. The whole community felt proud of them.
They had also, unlike the previous generation, been brought up entirely in the Christian religion, and that too had an immense effect on their consciousness. In church they were taught that Jesus loved them as he loved all human beings, as a father would love his children. In two thousand years no untouchable had ever heard that they too were children of God. Hindus believe the brahmins sprang from the mouth of Brahma the creator, the kshatriyas from his arms, the vaishyas from his thighs, and the sudras from his feet. The untouchables did not come from any part of Brahma. They came unsanctioned from the dust under his feet. That was what all the untouchables had always believed too.
What was going on in national politics also affected how Prasanna Rao and Maryamma thought of themselves. In the early thirties in the context of the independence movement the untouchables' demand for social justice had been placed on the agenda. Gandhi and the Indian National Congress had been forced to pose as champions of the untouchables. The untouchables in the villages may not have been able to follow these events in depth but they were aware that something was being talked about the rights of untouchables.
Soon after moving to Adavi Kolanu, Maryamma gave birth to the couple's first son, a beautiful infant with red skin, soft curly hair, and big eyes. His parents called him G'nana Satyamoorthy--Wise Figure of Truth. G'nana, which means "wise," was in memory of Maryamma's father G'nanandam, the railway gangman who had died of smallpox at the age of twenty-seven, and, through him, in honor of his wife and Maryamma's mother, Marthamma. When G'nana Satyamoorthy was born, Marthamma came to live in Adavi Kolanu to help care for him.
Maryamma had no milk in her small breasts. She paid a half-starved, black-skinned young mother named Mariamma one meal a day to nurse G'nana Satyamoorthy along with her own child. Her huge breasts had enough milk in them for two.
The three women, Maryamma, Mariamma, and Marthamma, all doted on G'nana Satyamoorthy. Every evening his proud father took him for a ride across the pond in a canoe. The canoe man was a madiga named Samson who was as strong as Samson in the bible. He and Prasanna Rao were friends despite one being madiga and the other being mala. They would pluck lotuses and present them to the child.
The young couple was, as the saying goes, as contented as a full pitcher.