Separate ... and unequal

I hated my undergraduate college for a number of reasons.  At the top of the heap was the air of intellectual apathy.  Nobody cared!

There were a few good things that also came about from that miserable experience.  Topping the list was the fact that for the first time I was interacting with my peers fully cognizant of our respective religions and castes.

All the way through high school, while there was no ignorance of the religious and caste differences that existed, the college experience was new.  We were adults and seeing each other for who they were in the highly stratified Indian society.  It was a quick immersion learning experience for me.  And I learnt a lot.

At the first major semester break as all of us prepared to head home, one of my peers said he was staying back in the hostel (dorm.)  Out of a genuine interest, I asked him why he was not going home.  His reply was not one that I would have ever imagined in a million years.

He explained that back in his village, even the kids of upper-caste folks would call his father by name and order his father around.  Therefore, he didn't want to go home and deal with those issues.

I was stunned.

As kids from an industrial town, whenever we went to grandmas' villages, we could never bring ourselves to calling any of the domestic workers by name.  If we wanted them to do anything, we would simply walk up to them and tell them whatever it was.  The discomfort of childhood had now grown into a serious issue in adulthood.

As some of my cousins and I in the extended family started getting away from the traditionally arranged marriages, and instead found our respective spouses, I began to understand that there also existed various levels of tolerance and intolerance.  An Iyer/Iyengar marriage was not the most blessed event but was acceptable.  A spouse who was a brahmin from another language/culture was, well, ok.  Then began an exponential decrease towards intolerance and hostility.  At the rock bottom of non-acceptance and potential excommunication was marriage to a Muslim or a Dalit.

Caste and religion continue to wreak havoc in the old country.

I had always hypothesized that most immigrants to the US bring along with them oversize baggage of religion and caste.  Maybe people have written about them and I have missed their work.  This multi-part series from PRI's The World and WGBH promises to look into it.  "Dalit activists and respondents to a 2018 survey say that — when surrounded by others of Indian descent — caste bias follows them to the land of the free."  The four-part series, will "explore this stigmatizing effects of India's caste system that immigrants have imported to the United States"