History does not repeat itself in exact terms, but it rhymes and often, it rhymes in suffering.
Marginalized people across continents have carried the weight of systemic hate and historical injustice. Be it the brutal colonization of Indigenous people in America or the centuries-old oppression of Dalits and Shudras in India, the pattern is eerily familiar: the dehumanization of people simply because of who they are, where they are born, or the work they do.
We often hear Christopher Columbus hailed in schoolbooks as a “discoverer.” But what is rarely taught is that what he truly discovered was a land already inhabited by thriving nations like the Taino, the Arawak, and the countless Indigenous tribes who lived with deep ecological wisdom and complex social orders. Columbus did not just “find” America; he brought with him genocide, slavery, and the beginning of one of the largest Indigenous population collapses in human history.
Indian Americans, too, have felt the shadow of this colonizer’s legacy. The first time the term “Indian” was used for Indigenous Americans was because Columbus thought he had landed in India. This mistaken identity layered two different marginalized communities under a single, colonial gaze both exoticized, both exploited, both stripped of autonomy. Even today, many Native Americans are still called “Indians,” a reminder that their names, lands, and lives were never respected on their own terms.
Meanwhile, in India, an entirely different but equally cruel system has persisted: caste.
Dalits and Shudras: communities pushed to the margins of society for thousands of years have been systematically denied basic rights, dignity, and representation. Caste is not just about hierarchy; it is about humiliation. It is about being born into a role society deems “impure,” “untouchable,” or expendable.
Even today, in 2025, manual scavenging a practice where people (almost always Dalits) are forced to clean human waste without proper tools or safety is still prevalent in parts of India. No one should have to clean someone else’s excreta with their bare hands. It is not just unhygienic or unsafe it is inhumane. And yet it continues, hidden behind our “developing nation” slogans and sanitized statistics.
What Columbus did with the sword, caste did with the scriptures.
Oppression changes form but not function. It thrives on who we choose not to see. It grows in the corners we leave untouched. It festers in every unacknowledged history, every textbook that hides the truth.
But history is not only made by the powerful. It is remembered and rewritten by those who rise, again and again, from the margins.
The Cherokee who walked the Trail of Tears. The Dalit women who write poetry in Ambedkar’s name. The indigenous elders protecting their land. The sanitation workers demanding dignity.
To honor them is to name the pain, to confront the systems that made such cruelty possible and to never pretend this is only the past.
Because oppression may begin in history,
But it is undone in the present.
