COLUMN ONE India woman is an 'untouchable,' with a Midas touch

Dalits still face discrimination in India's caste system, but Kalpana Saroj has worked her way up from poverty, becoming a manufacturing tycoon.

"Before, Indians thought the only way up was life after death, assuming they avoided hell," said Chandra Bhan Prasad, a dalit researcher and activist. "Now, not having a mobile phone is hell. Dalits can't become Brahmins, but they can become capitalists. Once you become rich, you become free."

The manufacturing tycoon — one admirer called her "a real slumdog millionaire" — is among a legion of dalits embracing new opportunities in business, politics, the arts and academia as prejudices ease and economic reforms open new doors in a culture that traditionally emphasized fate and reincarnation.

Saroj, a dalit, or "untouchable," epitomizes what was once unthinkable in India: upward mobility for someone whose caste long meant she would die as she was born: uneducated, dirt-poor, doomed to a life of dangerous and filthy work.

NEW DELHI — She was called dirty, ugly, a "little packet of poison," the offspring of donkeys. These days, Kalpana Saroj is called something else: a millionaire.

"I'm aware people may still look down on me because I’m… (Mark Magnier / Los Angeles…)

Others counter that a few Horatio Alger bootstrap stories can't sugarcoat the continued suffering of the 17% of India's 1.2 billion people facing discrimination under an ancient, complex system that traditionally determined one's occupation and social status at birth, with Brahmins at the top and "unclean" dalits at the bottom shoveling human waste.

Saroj, 51, once hissed at by Brahmins, has built a business empire that employs thousands of upper-caste workers, she said. As she sipped tea in a luxury New Delhi mall, she was wearing gold bracelets, diamond earrings and a traditional salwar kameez worth thousands of dollars. (After her daughter settled on studying hotel management a few years ago, Saroj bought her a hotel. With her son now in possession of a pilot's license, she's shopping for a plane.)

Emerging from extreme poverty and pariah status to a position of strength and wealth has certainly been satisfying, she said. That fact that she is a woman — in a country ranked by the United Nations as among the world's most dangerous places to be born a girl, given high female infanticide, inferior healthcare and nutrition — made her rise more extraordinary.

And although her ascent hasn't been without its share of speed bumps or caste-related jibes, she said, she has tried to channel anger and frustration into getting things done.

"I'm aware people may still look down on me because I'm a dalit," she said. "But even when I was very agitated, I never lost my cool, always trying instead to find my way out of difficult situations."

Saroj was born in Repatkhedha, a tiny village in the western state of Maharashtra, the eldest daughter of a homemaker and a policeman. Dalits were barred from drinking from Brahmin wells, and school for Saroj was an eight-mile walk on dirt paths, interrupted by occasional beatings by upper-caste children.

When she was 8, she asked her mother why, and was told to accept her fate.

"This was my world," she said. "I didn't really think about it."

She was married off at 12 to a laborer from Mumbai at the insistence of an uncle who considered girls "little packets of poison."

"Your daughter's an ugly, dark-skinned kid," he told her father. "If someone from Mumbai is willing, you'd darned well better marry her off."

Her husband, his alcoholic brother and wife all beat her. Sometimes her brother-in-law would yell: Whom did her mom sleep with to produce this donkey?

"All my dreams were shattered," she said. "It was hell."

After six months, her father rescued her. But the village ostracized her and she ended up drinking rat poison and fell into a coma, barely surviving. Afterward, villagers concluded that she must have a guilty conscience.