Lalitpur Killing Shows Caste Violence Is Sustained Through Everyday Humiliation

Lalitpur killing is a manifestation of underlying caste norms that demand bodily submission, service & hierarchy.

A Dalit man was killed, allegedly for refusing to massage a coworker's feet, in Lalitpur, Uttar Pradesh.

(Illustration: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)

On 14 June 2026, a Dalit man was killed, allegedly for refusing to massage a coworker's feet, in Lalitpur, Uttar Pradesh. The setting of the crime scene was an informal get-together of four coworkers at one of the coworker’s residences in Civil lines. On refusing to massage his coworkers feet, Rajkumar, the victim, was beaten to death with a belt and an iron rod by the three drunken men, as reported by @dalit_history.

Despite the fact that not all cases like this make it to the headlines, the cases of violence against oppressed castes is a very common sighting and everytime I spot a disheartening case like this, I, more often than not, go back to the documentary, India Untouched: Stories of a People Apart.

It portrays caste violence not as an aberration but as an everyday social process that sustains hierarchical order in contemporary India.

Caste Endures Through Violence

Moving between rural and urban spaces, the film demonstrates that caste endures through multiple forms of violence, which together normalise exclusion and foreclose the possibility of equality. These forms of violence are not excessive eruptions; rather, they are routine mechanisms through which caste reproduces itself in daily life.

One of the most affecting scenes in the documentary features a young Dalit child asking, ‘What is this untouchability?’

This moment captures what Ambedkar identified as the most insidious dimension of caste: its ability to shape consciousness from birth.

The child’s confusion reveals how caste violence operates mentally and emotionally long before any overt act of physical harm.

As the film shows Dalit children made to sit separately in classrooms or denied access to common utensils and water resources, caste appears as a pedagogy of humiliation: teaching inferiority through repetition rather than force.

Physical violence, however, remains central. Scenes of manual scavenging and degrading labour exposed how Dalits are systematically tied to pollution and danger. Gail Omvedt’s analysis of caste as an extractive social order helps clarify the dynamic that violence disciplines labour by ensuring that Dalits remain locked into stigmatised forms of work.

Tying Dalits to such labour is not merely economic arrangements but enforced practices backed by the threat of punishment. The visibility of violence shows compliance even when violence itself is not immediately enacted.

It is important to note that the film also hints at caste violence operating beyond labour and segregation. Ambedkar warned that caste survives not through explicit brutality alone but by embedding hierarchy into social ‘common sense' and administrative reason.

The documentary shows how discrimination manifests in schools, work places, and local governance through informal exclusions, biased evaluations, and the selective enforcement of rules. Such institutional violence is especially effective because it disavows intent, allowing caste domination to persist without appearing violent at all.

Systemic Abuse and Inherent Bias

Equally important is the role of internal differentiation in sustaining caste violence. As Jyotirao Phule’s critique of Brahmanism makes clear, hierarchy is reproduced not only from above but through graded inequalities within subordinated groups themselves. By encouraging oppressed castes to identify upward rather than challenging the system, violence is displaced downward, fragmenting solidarity that might otherwise threaten caste order.

The film implicitly captures this dynamic by showing how everyday humiliations are often enforced by non-elite caste actors themselves, revealing caste as a self-producing social logic rather than a static imposition. Caste violence is also deeply gendered.

Uma Chakravarty has extensively demonstrated that the control of women's bodies, sexuality, and labour is central to maintaining caste boundaries and ritual purity.

In the film, Dalit women appear as particularly vulnerable objects, exposed to exploitative labour and social degradation. The dynamic is important to understand how caste sustains itself through the intersecting regulation of classed, caste-marked and gendered bodies.

Reel & Real

I bring in the Lalitpur killing and India Untouched together not to suggest that they are identical forms of violence, but to show that they emerge from the underlying principles of the caste order.

The killing of Rajkumar and the demand to massage his coworker’s feet is the manifestation of the same underlying principles: a demand for bodily submission, service and recognition of hierarchy.

The documentary throws light on the fact that such violence in classrooms where Dalit children are separated, in labour that marks Dalit bodies as polluted, in institutions that disguise discrimination as routine procedure, and in gendered practices that regulate caste boundaries.

The film therefore allows us to understand the Lalitpur incident not as an aberration, but as the visible eruption of an everyday social logic that caste continuously reproduces.

(Sharmistha Shivhare is a student at Ashoka University. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)