India, like the US, is a country of immigrants

Thus spake India's Supreme Court:

While North America (USA and Canada) has new immigrants who came mainly from Europe over the last four or five centuries, India is a country of old immigrants in which people have been coming in over the last ten thousand years or so. Probably about 92 per cent of the people living in India today are descendants of immigrants, who came mainly from the North-West, and to a lesser extent from the North-East.

This observation comes in its ruling on a horrible case that was an atrocious treatment of a "tribal" woman by upper caste folks

The case related to Nandabai, 25, belonging to the Bhil tribe, a Scheduled Tribe in Maharashtra. She was beaten, kicked and stripped, and then paraded naked on the village road, over an alleged illicit relationship with a man from an upper caste.

The Court underscores the importance here:

it is the duty of all people who love our country to see that no harm is done to the Scheduled Tribes and that they are given all help to bring them up in their economic and social status, since they have been victimised for thousands of years by terrible oppression and atrocities. The mentality of our countrymen towards these tribals must change, and they must be given the respect they deserve as the original inhabitants of India.

And that:

It is time now to undo the historical injustice to them.

Yes.  One of the many troubling aspects of India.  But, by and large everybody seems to accept their respective places in society, even if it is a harshly unequal treatment.

My freshman year roommate in engineering college told me that he was not keen on going home for the break, which puzzled me.  He explained--back in his village, even the kids of upper-caste folks would call his father by name and order his father around.  Calling somebody by their first name is an enormous sign of power in India.

Am reminded of an NPR segment from a few days ago.  If the Indian court referred to the country as a land of immigrants, now it is the land of opportunity as America was/is.  But,

"In India, you're eternally a master and eternally a servant," Giridharadas tells NPR's Steve Inskeep. "Servants in many ways have been seen — and [have] been taught to see themselves — as being not someone who is situationally inferior, but someone who is eternally, intrinsically inferior."

It is a country that is very hard to understand.