Nobody comes to his rescue or asks questions about his well-being. Nobody sees the suffering child as a human being. Although there is little about the past of the unlucky child in the story, it could be imagined that there might be some sort of arrangement not unlike the caste system wherein the child is selected to pay for the almost utopian existence of the people who live in the city of Omelas. However, the similarity is that both are not given a chance to explore possibilities in their lives. The only difference being that while the child in the story is kept alive and not allowed to die, Dalit scavengers are pushed to die forcefully. Like the condemned child, they remain at the boundaries of society who do not know if, waking up on any particular day, it will be the last day of their lives. More specifically, it could be manual scavengers who teeter at the edge of Hindu society. While reading Guin’s story, the thought struck me that the imprisoned, discarded child in the story could be Dalit. Many of my Dalit friends have left the country to pursue their higher education in elite institutions abroad. How to apply it to the world in which we live in? In this essay I will try to look at the story with an Ambedkarite lens. Those who have read Ursula Le Guin’s short story Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, might be in a fix as to the ways in which the story can be interpreted.
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