Dalit man’s finger chopped off in Gujarat after his nephew touches cricket ball.
Madhya Pradesh: India man arrested for urinating on tribal worker.
To be physically at the mercy of another human being is one of my foremost fears. Public humiliation without any substitute is a mousetrap of my nightmares.
In the past two months these two incidents jumped off the phone screen at me. India today is splintered with separations, separateness, divisions, the Other. And I, who mastered the West numerous decades ago, feel a chill go down my spine as caste is in the forefront of Indian society today, certainly on the subcontinent and increasingly among the diaspora. My emotions around this issue are deep-rooted.
Caste is more than class. Caste is not only a segregation based on occupation and wealth but also and, more importantly, sanctioned by the dominant religion, Hinduism. You cannot hurdle out of caste as you can with class. You can only be reborn into a new caste. Then you also have to believe in religion and rebirth. So, the repositionings are only even thinkable if you’re a Hindu. If you’re a Christian, or Muslim, you are locked in. Caste is the infrastructure that tethers Indian society. Race is a distant and very recent concept.
There are five overarching caste categories in India with the Dalits (the formerly “Untouchables”), on the outside of the framework. So far, the stratification seems understandable to the layperson. Let me introduce you to the reality that is mind-numbing of over 2,500 to 3,000 subcastes, based on occupations and the granular divides. In that scenario, a Christian convert from a Brahmin family will maintain a higher status than a Christian convert from the Dalit community. I know. I was born into a family in India that carries a complex load of groupings.
One in six Indians are Dalits today. That’s about 200 million people. Christians are fewer but their social standing is not burdened by the history that Dalits carry. 26 million or so in India are Christians or about 2.3 percent of the population. They were far fewer when I was growing up in India over 70 years ago.
My intention here is not to outline the history of castes or of any religion in India. My intention is singular: to recall how a person born into privilege in a mightily stratified society kept caste at bay by leaning on class standing.
I was born into a Christian family in India a few years after Indian independence. My mother’s family were high-caste Hindus who converted to Christianity and to monotheistic Hinduism, focused on socially democratic values such as anti-priesthood, anti-widow burnings, anti-idol worship. I think their conversion to Christianity was in the late 18th century and by mid-19th, their joint-family compound of houses that encircled a square in north Calcutta, Rambagan, had split between the Hindu half and the Christian half. When I was young, it was still that way. There were two ancestors who made it into the history books from this family ---both poets: Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Toru Dutt. The latter wrote in English and French.
On my father’s side, the genealogical path is murkier. William Carey was an English missionary who started the first degree-awarding university In India, Serampore College, in north Bengal, in 1818. He converted my great-grandfather’s grandfather, Budhui Shah (Sayyad Muhammad Badruddin Shah). The reason for the conversion is still not clear to me and I hope to at least make a strong and studied stab at making sense of it for myself as I research my great-grandfather’s life. Budhui Shah’s grandson, Lal Behari Shah, was the founder of the Calcutta Blind School. From Islam to Christianity from my father’s side.
When I was growing up in post-independent India, a few years after the ghastly fountains of blood-letting that the Hindu-Muslim riots in Calcutta and in the villages close by, not to mention the largest, single movement in human history ---of 14-18 million people who crossed on new borders on the western corners of India and the newly formed Pakistan, I did not feel any burden of religion. As prosperous upper middle-class Indians, my sister and I were looked after by household help and we didn’t pay any attention nor did we know of their caste, though they were all Hindus.
As youngsters, we played in Hindu festivals, went to weddings both Christian and Hindu. Muslim, ahem, not at all. Friends spanned all religions and I remember that because of our last names. Anyone from the subcontinent will tell you that last names are the calling cards to where you “belonged” in that society. Imagine my misfortune now to carry a perfectly fine literary first name—Amit—paired with a last name that in modern India stirs much confusion. “Shah” is a Muslim last name, or it can be a Gujarati (from Western India) last name. The powerful and dark prince of Indian politics, the current Home Minister, is named Amit Shah. So you can imagine the hoops I have to go through with most Indians who I meet for the first time. To then add the layer of a “foreign” religion is the complex India I had admired, which is far from what is celebrated now by chest-thumping Hindu right wingers.
I’ve strayed from my original intent---that caste has no redeeming value in modern society. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, who was born a Dalit, and became the chairperson for the drafting committee of the Indian Constitution and independent India’s first law minister, as Arundhati Roy quotes in her book-length essay, “ The Doctor and the Saint”, wrote: “ ‘To the Untouchables’ Ambedkar said, with the sort of nerve that present-day intellectuals in India find hard to summon, ‘Hinduism is a veritable chamber of horrors.’ “
Those horrors are present every day on the subcontinent and no amount of economic and technological advancement can appreciably make a change unless the “wrongness” is acknowledged.
We see caste issues at Silicon Valley companies where the Indian diaspora is present in force as well as in institutions of higher education in the U.S. Many Hindu hardliners in the West complain that calling for the erasure of caste is anti-Hindu. My simple response is: Why isn’t it anti-human?
In my long life, I have never been overtly discriminated against, in any country, in any society. How’d that happen? I don’t know. I can only infer that it’s because of my privilege of elite schooling in India and abroad and the class-consciousness both in India and the West. I’ve been the only person of color in many work and social situations, but I’ve unabashedly demanded what I thought was mine. I am lucky.
But before I forget, I did feel locked out of one group in India. In the Calcutta I grew up, two soccer (football for Indians) teams were the ones to cheer for, a sort of Yankees-Red Sox phenomena. The teams were Mohun Bagan and East Bengal. Mohun Bagan was supported by ghotis, those who had lived for generations on the western side of Bengal. East Bengal (as the name indicated) was supported by those whose ancestors were from the east of the region. The term ghoti shot up in popularity after independence in 1947 when refugees from East Bengal (now East Pakistan and later Bangladesh) needed to distinguish themselves from other Bengalis in Calcutta. No one was allowed to cross over! I was a ghoti and a Mohun Bagan supporter.
Even Gandhi, with whom I’ve come full circle, couldn’t call out caste as evil. He and Ambedkar (and we’d should all know about Ambedkar) debated all through the years of nationalist struggle.
From Arundhati Roy’s essay:
“Can caste be annihilated?
Not unless we show the courage to rearrange the stars in our firmament. Not unless those who call themselves revolutionary develop a radical critique of Brahminism. Not unless those who understand Brahminism sharpen their critique of capitalism.
And not unless we read Babasaheb Ambedkar. If not inside our classrooms, then outside them. Until then we remain what he called the “sick men” and women of Hindustan, who seem to have no desire to get well.”