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HBO is adapting this into a miniseries, so you can be someone who read the book first! Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1996, here's the description:

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.

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"Hate crimes including violence against Dalits and Adivasis were committed with impunity. More than 50,000 suspected crimes against members of Scheduled Castes and more than 9,000 crimes against Adivasi people were reported in 2021. More than three-quarters of India’s prison population were in pretrial detention, with Dalits, Adivasis and members of other disadvantaged groups being disproportionately represented. Throughout the year, media reports demonstrated that the Dalit community, including Dalit children, faced increasing oppression and violence from members of dominant castes, including loss of life for exercising their basic rights such as drinking water from a common well. Despite a formal ban on manual scavenging, at least 19 sanitation workers suffocated to death after being forced to clean sewers and septic tanks by private businesses, political leaders and the police. Almost three-quarters of sanitation workers across India belonged to Scheduled Castes." India, 2022 Report

Human Rights Watch issued two reports in both 1999 and 2007 about the conditions of Dalits, explaining that "Exploitation of labor is at the very heart of the caste system. Dalits are forced to perform tasks deemed too “polluting” or degrading for non-Dalits to carry out. According to unofficial estimates, more than 1.3 million Dalits – mostly women – are employed as manual scavengers to clear human waste from dry pit latrines. In several cities, Dalits are lowered into manholes without protection to clear sewage blockages, resulting in more than 100 deaths each year from inhalation of toxic gases or from drowning in excrement. Dalits comprise the majority of agricultural, bonded, and child laborers in the country. Many survive on less than US$1 per day."

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues reports that "caste-affected women and girls are often the victims of caste-based and sexual violence, trafficking and are especially vulnerable to early and forced marriage, bonded labour and harmful cultural practices. Violence and the threat of violence against them frequently go unreported, allowing a culture of invisibility, silence and impunity." Read full 2016 report here, and the NAACP resolution which followed.