Seven-year-old Kamlesh, one of the images featured in 'Being Untouchable' at HOST gallery.

In a small gallery off Old Street, a woman with a glass of wine and Vero Cuoio shoes stares at the photograph of another woman—thousands of miles away—shovelling shit from a public latrine used by 450 people. The caption says it’s a job this faraway figure merits because she is a Dalit, an untouchable, the lowest caste in Indian society.

A child severely burnt for walking on the wrong footpath, a widowed leprotic widow—the exhibition of humanitarian photographs, “Being Untouchable,” taken by Marcus Perkins, brings one face to face with the daily horrors Dalit people endure under India’s system of social stratification. It is a centuries-old system, supported even by Mahatma Gandhi.

This endorsement of subjugation by the so-called “father of the nation” is something provocative young writer and poet Meena Kandasamy asked the audience to