The people who spread images of what had been done to her seemed to agree that her status was being lowered.

We assume in this case that the Dalit wants to approach the Namboothiri? I guess that makes for the closest analogue to this situation.

It's a clever intuition pump, but I think it is flawed. In the case of the Dalit and the Namboothiri, preference utilitarianism should disapprove of the caste system itself for a whole bunch of reasons.

If you take away the religious and cultural framework, and just have them be two people, one of whom (A) strongly desires not to be approached by the other (B), then yes, I would apply the same logic. As long as B is not harmed by avoiding A, then leaving him alone is the right thing to do. If A is as averse to being approached as a normal person is to being assaulted, then approaching them is a very serious crime. Of course, in practice it would rarely be the case that B was not harmed by avoiding A, since 96 feet is a long way. The harm of not approaching somebody so close that you are actually penetrating them, though, is so incredibly slight that I'm willing to ignore it for the purposes of analysis.

Edited to change the word "yards" to "feet". Doesn't change my argument.