MEERUT, India -- When Srichand, among the least touchable of untouchables, was killed Sept. 2, he was doing the humiliating work of his subcaste, the balmikis, going from house to house with a broom, a scoop and a bowl, carrying away the "night soil" from the dry toilets in people's houses.

Srichand had been chosen for death by a gang of jatavs, another untouchable subcaste that is a few notches above the balmikis in India's ancient pecking order. Days before, a balmiki boy had left the city with a jatav girl, a departure that the balmikis took to be teen-age love and the jatavs considered a spiteful kidnaping.

While the spark for this strife was a disputed romance, the kindling lay in the caste-based tensions of India, where a half-century of well-intended efforts to erase the lines of prejudice have in some ways made caste more important than ever.

Bhagwat Pura is a neighborhood of narrow alleyways where the noise of smoke-belching trucks gives way to the squeal of handcarts. Amid the cement hovels, some jatavs still live side-by-side with balmikis, and it was from here on Aug. 27 that the boy disappeared with the girl. Rumors quickly began to stoke animosity, and taunting from both sides overheated into stoning and looting. Even after the police found the girl unharmed in a nearby town five days later, the trouble went on.

On Sept. 2, 45-year-old Srichand -- who used but that single name -- began his work day at 4 a.m., going off to his city job, sweeping excrement into sewers. It paid him $71 a month. On the morning he died, he was warned not to go into the tense streets. "We work daily so that we make money daily so that we eat daily," he responded.

Around 10 a.m., he came home to join his wife, Uma. Side-by-side, they made the rounds each day to 40 houses, collecting night soil. This earned them another $14 a month.

They had just come from a Muslim house when the jatavs leaped from hiding. "First, they started beating him and then they dragged him to an alley," she said. "My husband told me, 'They'll kill you, so run,' And I ran."

She stopped when she heard gun shots. Hurrying back, she found her husband bleeding from wounds made by bullets and a knife.

"I saw no more," she said. "I fainted."
Legends of Inequality Rooted in Scriptures

Indian civilization, so rich with wonderment and greatness, has been marred by the proposition that all men are created unequal.

Ancient Hindu scriptures tell of how the gods created the world and the social order within it by sacrificing a primeval man, Purusha. From his face came the priestly elite Brahmans, his arms the warrior Kshatriya, his thighs the merchant Vaishyas, his feet the servile, hapless Shudras. Beneath them all were those whom nature had ordained to be unclean -- people destined to do filthy work. The jatavs are an offshoot of such pariahs, a sub-caste scorned because of their traditional work as cobblers, which requires the handling of dead flesh.

Names for sub-castes have varied, and sometimes the hierarchical order has differed as well, but the result has always been the same, a ranking of human worth.

In modern India, caste has not disappeared, only changed. "The ritual side of caste -- the eating separately, the maintaining of ritual distances, may have broken down -- but the politics of caste has become extremely important," said Andre Beteille, a sociologist at the Delhi School of Economics. "Different castes unite into coalitions, and the coalitions are always shifting."

Most untouchables are now agricultural laborers, no longer doing the polluted work associated with their kind. In the minds of many others, however, that change means nothing. The stigma is indelible, coursing from one generation to the next.

The most villified remain the balmikis. There are roughly 4 million of them, and 500,000 still carry "night soil," according to Bindeshwar Pathak, a Brahman who has won international honors for trying to free balmikis from inherited shame.

That effort at liberation is complicated not only by age-old biases, but also by India's immense poverty. Some 700 million people, primarily villagers, still defecate outside, Pathak said. Among the urban poor, dry latrines continue to be common.

"We do the work a mother does for her children, but we are not looked upon as mothers but as scum," said Suresh Richpal, a balmiki. "Our children go to school, but teachers have it in mind: He is the son of a scavenger. He is worthless."