India - challenging my humanity

An exiled Indian friend of mine told me that Kanjar means fraud or theft. Kanjar is a common Word used to denominate someone who lies, cheats or tricks other people with the intention to do so. Probably with an economic gain in sight.
I learned early in my Indian experience that this popular meaning of the word corresponds in actual life to the usual response when people of Jhalra Pattan, my home town for the next three months, hear that me and my four fellow travellers are working with the Kanjar communities. Their villages are scattered around the Jhalawar district, tiny dots in people’s consciousness and non-existent on the more rudimentary map of the world. However, two of these villages are my world now.
The townspeople stop their cars, bikes or bicycles to ask our Indian guide what white people might be doing in the vicinity of Jhalra Pattan. He tells them we are working with the Kanjars. The townspeople repeat in wonderment. Kanjars. Why teach them - they cannot learn. Why work with them - they’ll only rip you off and steal your valuables. Why care about their frequent run-ins with the police - nobody else does. I read these beliefs and opinions on people’s faces and later hear them translated by our guide; there is no doubt that the reality of the Kanjari lifestyle is created by social stratification and total exclusion. When I hear these beliefs I am amazed by the way the townspeople offer the answers to their own questions while they themselves are entirely ignorant to the irony and the basic misunderstandings that govern the interaction between them and the Kanjars.
So what is a Kanjari community member to me? A human being. A person. A life, a story, a dream, a hope and endless mind-blowing desperation. A mother’s solitary suffering. The bright eyes of a child that tells you about possibilities, opportunities, a life to be lived in constant struggle. A life that deserves better than what the future holds as it is at the moment. The smiles of the fifty Kanjari children that beamed up at us that very first day in Jarel seemed fragile and ghostly in my memory - and yet they are the most viable and sustainable resource to work with. The very livelihood of a child whose mother is too weak to carry him, whose spirit is broken by continuous disappointment, whose love is insufficient to console him for the harsh conditions he lives under - a love too simple, for a mother’s love for her child is the simplest thing in the world, to protect him from the ignorance of the society that surrounds him. A love incapable of shielding him from police brutality, harassment and social depravity.
In the eyes of the perpetrators of these stupefying and plainly common human crimes of the social mind, the Kanjars have brought their suffering on themselves. They have stolen from the collective dignity of the townspeople and made their way through theft, prostitution and fraud; they have dishonoured their own communities and lowered themselves into the gutter of humanity. They deserve nothing better than what they have. It is what they have learned and what they teach; they have guarded their communities against the outside world creating a mental, emotional and physical barrier between themselves and the world on the outside. The cocoon in which they lived for years served as a protective and strengthening nest; inside its walls they could not be harmed, they could prepare for unwanted visitors - any visitors that is - and they could build a community, strong and self-sufficient, sustainable only through isolation. When cut off from all surroundings, the cocoon’s world became the protection, the resurrection, the construction of a reality that was theirs - at least most of the time - to build on, build in, survive in. With the cocoon serving as the framework for their everyday lives, the Kanjars created the vision that they could protect themselves and their offspring against the malevolence of humanity outside. They consolidated their placement outside humanity, consolidating the firm beliefs of the townspeople - that the Kanjari people are less than worthy, less than citizens, less than human.
A human being does not need to be aware of her own humanity to be human. Humanity is ingrained in the very fabric of existence, intertwined with the illusions and barricaded dreams of mankind. A human being can lived in the ideas of others, be stripped of the basic dignity that all humans deserve by the very thoughts of others.