Until then, for instance, I hadn't seriously considered many daily experiences of the "backward" caste people in the villages. One simple, but profound, comment that a fellow student made in the first semester echoed within for days, and haunts me even now. He said that he didn't want to go home for the holidays because he would not be able to be passive when upper-caste kids bossed over his parents and addressed them by their first names, while his parents had to behave submissively towards those tiny tots.
I had not heard anything like that from somebody my age. After all, in school in the industrial town we grew up not worrying about caste. Of course, I knew that some of my classmates were brahmins and many were not. But, that didn't stop our interactions as classmates and friends. The "modern" township had created for us an environment in which we could talk the highfalutin talk about social problems and progress but without any idea of the nitty-gritty details of the real lives of really oppressed people.
The commie-sympathizer in me was fully awakened. Or, to use a modern expression, I became woke.
It has been more than forty years of life after high school, during which I have traveled far away, literally and mentally, from the brahmin world.
The older I got, and especially after getting to America, the more I thought about all these. In one of my early letters to my parents when I was in graduate school, I wrote about the luck of the draw. I wrote to them that had I been born in a different house, I might have grown up a Muslim or an untouchable. The randomness of these bothered me, and it pissed me off that the traditional Hindu explanations conveniently justified all these as divine!
Back when I had a Facebook presence, when proudly posting my family's old photographs in Facebook, it occurred to me that only those of us who grew up in privileged backgrounds even had photos from the past. The poorer people, and if they were also from the lower castes, had barely anything and, therefore, there was no question of photos of their grandparents and great-grandparents. A privilege that I had taken for granted.
I noticed quite a few Facebook posts that celebrated "TamBrahm"--Tamil Brahmin--practices. Of course, people ought to celebrate and cherish their unique community foods and music and the like. But, when celebrating, they ought to also acknowledge the terrible impact that TamBrahm has had on lower-caste communities. And that is what they did not do, and they didn't want to either.
TamBrahm and other brahmins from all over India dominate in the tech world. When even the much adored tech sector in India is plagued with caste issues, is there really any hope that conditions will improve soon?
Most IT companies in India are privately owned and are not required to comply with the government’s affirmative action policies. This cemented the view that entry into the tech industry was purely based on individual capability and that factors such as religion, gender, and caste were irrelevant. Given its close links to U.S. companies, the IT sector came with the promise of creating a level playing field where people could succeed solely on merit.But in reality, tech did not make the world flatter. Instead, caste hierarchies replicated themselves within the industry. One 2011 report on caste in the Indian IT sector concludes “that caste is not disappearing from Indian society; rather, it is dramatically adapting to modern circumstances.”
It has always been the case that caste adapts to the changing conditions, and even spreads to the US along with the people who come here. The large diaspora creates communities of Indians based on the kinds of divisions that one might experience in the old country--language, religion, and caste. And even if people do not openly talk about caste, that unsaid can be easily picked up if one paid attention.
In June 2020, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a lawsuit against American tech conglomerate Cisco alleging discrimination against an Indian Dalit engineer — listed as “John Doe” in the complaint — over his caste. The engineer, who had immigrated from India to the U.S., alleged that two of his dominant caste co-workers, also Indian immigrants, harassed him. In fall 2021, the case was voluntarily dismissed, and was later refiled at the state level, where it is still ongoing.
Casteism is not merely in the workplace. As more and more students come from India to study here in the US, some of them also bring along the plague. So much so that the California State University (CSU) system recently adopted a caste discrimination ban. The CSU system "added caste to its non-discrimination policy, prohibiting caste-based discrimination or bias across its 23 campuses." How unfortunate that the plague has spread so far away from the old country!
It is terrible that the oppressed feel that they need to hide their caste details if they want to live and prosper in a world created by and for the upper-castes. "I strongly feel that instead of putting the responsibility of speaking out about casteism on the Dalit people, the onus should fall on the oppressors to speak up. We did not cause this suffering or harm done to us. Why are we the ones who should be fixing this?"
I agree. As I wrote in this post more than five years ago, deep down within me, I want the leaders of the Brahmin community to issue a formal and heartfelt apology. In the lectures that the "learned" masters deliver, I want them to engage with their followers on the awful practices of the centuries, and lead an honest introspection.
I have practically given up on the old country when it comes to serious issues like caste and religion; unlike the racial tensions here in the US, in which we can see progress being made despite the best efforts of white supremacists. The least that Indians can do is not bring the plague here!
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