Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (16 page)

I arrived in London on a slate-gray morning in December 2017 for a major conference on the topic that had begun to consume my waking hours: caste. Unlike many events I attend, I was going there to listen, to gain a greater understanding of that which I did not know rather than to speak myself. I would be surrounded by people who studied what seemed to be the missing codes to human ruptures. The issue of caste was, to my mind, the basis of every other
ism
. These researchers were now my intellectual tribe. These were people who could see past the hierarchies and false divisions that undermined the species.

The auditorium was packed with sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, graduate students, and I could barely contain myself as I took a seat in the front. A woman who appeared to be of East Asian descent removed her jacket and nodded. There was no flinching or scooting away, there were no quizzical side-eyes as might happen in a similar setting in the States. I was feeling better already.

I took a measure of the crowd and noticed that, here at the crossroads of the world, there was no one else at the conference who looked like me. Most everyone appeared to be descended from South Asia, meaning India, or from Europe, primarily the United Kingdom. Not one person of African descent, from what I could tell, only two or three Americans, all of them white and based in Europe or India. I alone had crossed the Atlantic for this single day of attempting to understand the forces that had shaped the course of my life and those of my ancestors and of many other people before me.

While I had studied the unspoken caste structure in the United States, I had not yet spent time on the original caste system of India. As with many conversations about injustice, the talks turned almost exclusively on the victims and consequences of societal ills rather than on their origins. Panel after panel looked through a different lens at the suffering of the lowest castes, which in India have been called the “scheduled castes” or, shocking to American ears, the “backward castes.” I began to see parallels with America, heard stories that could have been taken from the headlines in the United States about African-Americans and indigenous people.

Both countries had abolished legal discrimination, and yet, according to the panels and keynotes, Dalits were being brutalized by Indian authorities, as African-Americans were being brutalized by police in the United States. And a people known as the Adivasi were fighting to retain their lands and culture in India, as have the indigenous people in America. Two different countries, oceans apart, had found parallel ways to contain the subordinate groups within them. I could close my eyes, change the names as I listened to these reports and feel that I was back in the United States. “Another Dalit murdered by police, another Adivasi murdered by the police,” a woman said. “Why do we not face up to the outrage of state-sanctioned violence?”

At the first break, I was anxious to get a copy of the papers the scholars had read that morning. I had decided early on that I was not going to lean on any recognition that might accrue to me from my first book. In fact, I purposely kept a quiet profile so as not to attract attention to this new project that was then still germinating in my head. I was there on the strength of my own personal presentation, there to be accepted for what people could see—a well-dressed woman, an American, an African-American, well-spoken and focused.

I went up to a professor, an Indian woman, an upper-caste woman, as I would come to realize, who seemed to be in charge. I asked if I might get a copy of the papers that were presented. Would they be made available? She said no.

“You’ll have to wait. Why do you need a copy?”

“I’m a writer, and I have come all the way from America just for this,” I told her. I thought that this level of dedication might impress her. It did not. She directed me to an Englishman who was her senior, and it seemed that, even here among people who studied caste, there might be traditional hierarchy at work. The woman was then pulled away by the press of people, and the Englishman was swamped as well. As in any human grouping, there were cliques and fraternities of people who had known one another or worked together, and, rather than an open conference, this was starting to feel like a family reunion to which I had been admitted by accident.

At the lunch break, I spotted a gentleman who was sitting alone, across from other men who were talking to one another. He was Indian, like three-quarters of the attendees, but he was different. He was carrying a black briefcase, all business and purposeful amid the backpacks surrounding us. Like me, he seemed an outsider among insiders. I felt an immediate kinship.

His name, he told me as I took a seat next to him, was Tushar. He was born in Bengal and was a geologist now living in London. He was more formally dressed than everyone else, blue Oxford shirt collar peeking above his gray tweed jacket, a side part in his thick gray hair, his eyes smiling in quarter moons on his warm, kind face as he talked.

“According to the caste system,” he said, as if informing me of the status of someone he once knew, “I belong to the second upper caste. The warrior-soldier caste.”

I looked at this man who was not much taller than I, small-boned, narrow-shouldered, gentle of face, self-effacingly modest in bearing and wondered on what planet would this man be seen as a natural-born warrior? Here was living proof of the miscasting of caste. This had long ago registered to him as well, and he took the caste ascription with so little solemnity that he was not at first able to give the exact spelling of the caste, or, in Sanskrit, the
varna,
to which he was born. I did not yet know the four
varnas
at the time, or that castes were even called
varnas,
so I asked him to write it down for me. He wrote the words
Khatriya
and then
Kayastras
in my notepad.

“I think it is
Kshatriya
,” he said, as if to disregard its significance by misremembering how to spell or pronounce it. “It’s an issue not well understood. I was raised with social privilege. You are told you are second upper caste, the ruling caste, and that you are to be happy that there are many below you.”

But as a young boy on the way to school, he passed the beggars on the streets asking for money and people crying out that they had no food. His own family sat down to meals with four or five courses—dal and amaranth, mutton and chutney, while less well-off families subsisted on rice and potatoes, and those beneath them on even less.

It was hard to enjoy one’s privilege when so few people had it. When he was eleven or twelve, he began asking why his family had so much and others so little. “Don’t discuss about these things,” the elders told him. “Do your studies. Caste is created by God.”

The afternoon sessions were about to begin, discussions of Dalit protests and corporate encroachment on the land of the Adivasis. Tushar and I headed back to the auditorium, each of us on our respective missions.

As this was England, there was a break for tea, and I gravitated to Tushar again in the crowd. He looked forlorn and impatient now. “They haven’t answered my questions,” he said. “All my life I have lived with this. I am looking for answers about how this began. I will stay to hear more.”

He asked me why I had come all the way from America for this conference. I told him I wanted to understand caste because I lived with it, too. I told him most people don’t think of America as having a caste system, but it has all the hallmarks of one. He listened and did not judge.

“Caste defines everything in India,” he said. “It is the Hindu religion that maintains the caste system. That is why Ambedkar became a Buddhist. It was not an escape for him, it was a liberation. Casteism is another form of racism. God knows how long it will take for people to let it go.”

“I am wondering then, are you still a Hindu?” I asked him.

“I am atheist,” he said. “No religion. Since I was thirteen.”

“What does your family think of that?”

“They think, you are born a Hindu, you die a Hindu. You do not escape caste. But I believe what I believe. Who cares what they think?”

He appeared to have given some consideration to what I had told him about the hierarchy in America. It had puzzled him and intrigued him.

“If you have caste in the U.S.,” he asked me, “where are you in the caste system?”

That is the question that many Indians ask, in one form or another, upon meeting a fellow Indian. It is a line of inquiry that those in the lowest caste know is coming and that they dread. Indians will ask the surname, the occupation of one’s father, the village one is from, the section of the village that one is from, to suss out the caste of whoever is in front of them. They will not rest until they have uncovered the person’s rank in the social order.

Tushar had waited quite some time to ask me this, and would not likely have done so, or thought of it at all, if I hadn’t mentioned caste in America. The idea seemed a wonderment to him. He seemed to want to know how things worked, and where I fit into what, to him, was an alien hierarchy.

I had not expected this question. Nobody had ever asked me before. How could he not know? Was he merely being polite? Hollywood and the news media have exported demeaning images of African-Americans for generations, which means our reputations often precede us, and not for the better. So I was, in fact, strangely grateful for his giving me an option. Even without the language of caste, most any American would know the ranking of the group to which I was born.

But here was a man born upper-caste in India and a skeptic of inherited status, seeing me as an individual who might be of any rank. He was not putting me in a box nor making the assumptions that I labor under every day.

His question was liberating in its innocent lack of judgment. Yet it brought to mind Dr. King’s epiphany nearly sixty years before in India.

“Well,” I told Tushar, “in America, I am assigned to the lowest caste, the American Untouchables. I am an American Dalit. And I am living proof that caste is artificial.”

He gave a look of recognition. My answer was further confirmation of what he considered a disease. We would have other conversations in the following months whenever I visited London. He would share more of the absurdities he had witnessed in the caste system back home.

He remembered the Dalit students whose exams went ungraded. “The tests were not marked,” he said, “because the teacher was upper caste and would not touch the paper touched by a Dalit. So you laugh or you cry.”

He told me about the upper-caste woman in an office where he once worked. She would get up from her desk and walk the length of the office, down the hall and around the corner, to ask a Dalit to get her water.

“The jug was there next to her desk,” he said. “The Dalit had to come to where she was sitting and pour it for her. It was beneath her dignity to get the water herself from the desk beside her. This is the sickness of caste.”

He recalled the heartbreak of the Indian fixation on skin color, which was caste within caste, and the hatred of darker Indians, who tend to be lower caste but not always, and how they suffer for this accident of fate, as do African-Americans and other people of color in the United States and in other parts of the world.

His older sister happened to be darker than most of his siblings, and, when she reached courting age, she was told she would have to boil milk and skim the skin from the boiled milk and spread it on her face prior to sleep every night before the young men came to interview her for marriage. “Imagine,” he said. “Week after week. Night after night. She knew she would be rejected, and she would close the door to her room and cry. I was twelve. I remember to this day. She got married, but that’s not the point. She should not have to go through all of this. The cruelty of it.”

We had both been miscast, each in our own way, and could see through the delusion that had shaped and restricted us from the other side of our respective caste systems. We had broken from the matrix and were convinced that we could see what others could not, and that others could see it, too, if they could awaken from their slumber.

We had defied our caste assignments: He was not a warrior or ruler. He was a geologist. I was not a domestic. I was an author. He had defied his caste from on high and I, from below, and we had met at this moment in London at our own Maginot Line of equality, standing on different sides of the same quest to understand the forces that had sought to define us but had failed.

In late 2015, two economists at Princeton University announced the startling revelation that the
death rates of middle-aged white Americans, especially less-educated white Americans at midlife, had risen for the first time since 1950. The perplexing results of this study on mortality rates in the United States sounded alarms on the front pages of newspapers and at the top of news feeds across the nation.

The surge in early deaths among middle-aged white people went counter to the trends of every other ethnic group in America. Even historically marginalized black and Latino Americans had seen their mortality rates fall during the time period studied, from 1998 to 2013. The rise in the white death rate was at odds with prevailing trends in the rest of the Western world.

Americans had enjoyed increasing longevity the previous century, with each succeeding generation, due to healthier lifestyles and advancements in medicine. But starting just before the turn of the twenty-first century, the death rates among middle-aged white Americans, ages forty-five to fifty-four, began to rise, as the least educated, in particular, succumbed to suicide, drug overdoses, and liver disease from alcohol abuse, according to the authors of the seminal study, Anne Case and the Nobel laureate Angus Deaton. These “deaths of despair,” as the economists called them, accounted for the loss of some half a million white Americans during that period, more than the number of American soldiers
who died during World War II. These are people who might still be alive had this group kept to previous generational trends.

“
These are deaths that do not have to happen,” Case said at a conference on inequality. “These are people who are taking their lives, either slowly or quickly.”

The worsening numbers were “persistent and large enough” to drive up white mortality rates overall and to outweigh the gains in longevity from advances in the treatment of cancer and heart disease. The turnabout reversed “decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States,” Case and Deaton wrote. “No other rich country saw a similar turnaround.”

For this group of Americans, mortality rates rose at a time when
rates in other Western countries had not merely dipped but had plummeted. The rate for middle-aged white Americans rose from about 375 per 100,000 people in the late 1990s to about 415 per 100,000 in 2013, as against a fall in the United Kingdom, for example, from about 330 per 100,000 to 260 per 100,000 over the same period. A graphic of the mortality rates for leading Western nations shows an upward line for the death rates of middle-aged white Americans against the plunging lines for their counterparts in fellow Western countries.

What could account for the worsening prospects of this group of Americans, unique in the Western world and singular even in the United States?

The authors noted that, since the 1970s, real wages had stagnated for blue-collar workers, leading to economic insecurity and to a generation less well off than previous ones. But they acknowledged that similar stagnation had occurred in other Western countries. They noted that comparable Western countries had a more generous safety net that could offer protections not available in the United States. Yet white Americans would not be the only group affected by wage stagnation and a thin safety net. Blue-collar workers of other backgrounds would be equally at risk from the uncertainties of the economy, if not more so. Black death rates have been historically higher than those of other groups, but even their mortality rates were falling, year by year. It was white Americans at midlife who were dying of despair in rising numbers.

In caste terms, these are the least well off, most precariously situated members of the dominant caste in America. For generations, they could take for granted their inherited rank in the hierarchy and the benefits that accrued from it.

We may underestimate, though, the aftershocks of a shift in demographics, the erosion of labor unions, the perceived loss of status, the fears about their place in the world, and resentment that the kind of security their fathers could rely upon might now be waning in what were supposed to be the best years of their lives. Rising immigration from across the Pacific and the Rio Grande and the ascendance of a black man as president made for an inversion of the world as many had known it, and some of them might have been more susceptible to the calls to “take our country back” after 2008 and to “make America great again” in 2016.

In America, political scientists have given this malaise of insecurities a name: dominant group status threat. This phenomenon “
is not the usual form of prejudice or stereotyping that involves looking down on outgroups who are perceived to be inferior,” writes Diana Mutz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “Instead, it is born of a sense that the outgroup is doing too well and thus, is a viable threat to one’s own dominant group status.”

The victims of these deaths of despair are in the same category of people whom, centuries ago, the colonial elites elevated as they created the caste system. The planters bestowed higher status on European yeomen and those of the lower classes to create a new American category known as white. In earlier times, even those who owned no slaves, wrote the white southern author W. J. Cash, clung to the “
dear treasure of his superiority as a white man, which had been conferred on him by slavery; and so was determined to keep the black man in chains.”

By the middle of the twentieth century, the white working-class American, wrote the white southern author Lillian Smith, “
has not only been neglected and exploited, he has been fed little except the scraps of ‘skin color’ and ‘white supremacy’ as spiritual nourishment.”

Working-class whites, the preeminent social economist Gunnar Myrdal wrote, “
need the demarcations of caste more than upper class whites. They are the people likely to stress aggressively that no Negro can ever attain the status of even the lowest white.”

In a psychic way, the people dying of despair could be said to be dying of the end of an illusion, an awakening to the holes in an article of faith that an inherited, unspoken superiority, a natural deservedness over subordinated castes, would assure their place in the hierarchy. They had relied on this illusion, perhaps beyond the realm of consciousness and perhaps needed it more than any other group in a forbiddingly competitive society “
in which downward social mobility was a constant fear,” the historian David Roediger wrote. “One might lose everything, but not whiteness.”

In the midst of the Great Depression, the scholar W.E.B. Du Bois observed that working-class white Americans had bought into the compensation of a “
public and psychological wage,” as he put it. “They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white.” They had accepted the rough uncertainties of laboring class life in exchange for the caste system’s guarantee that, no matter what befell them, they would never be on the very bottom.

The American caste system, which co-opted this class of white workers nearly from the start, “drove such a wedge between black and white workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests” who are “kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interests,” Du Bois wrote.

These insecurities extend back for centuries. A Virginia slaveholder remarked in 1832 that poor whites had “
little but their complexion to console them for being born into a higher caste.” When a hierarchy is built around the needs of the group to which one happens to have been born, it can distort the perceptions of one’s place in the world. It can create an illusion that one is innately superior to others if only because it has been reinforced so often that it becomes accepted as subconscious truth.

“
Nobody could take away from you this whiteness that made you and your way of life ‘superior,’ ” Lillian Smith wrote. “They could take your house, your job, your fun; they could steal your wages, keep you from acquiring knowledge; they could tax your vote or cheat you out of it: they could by arousing your anxieties make you impotent, but they could not strip your white skin off of you. It became the poor white’s most precious possession, a ‘charm’ staving off utter dissolution.”

Given that the hierarchy was designed for the benefit of the caste that created it, “
the basic restrictions upon marriage, occupation and public gatherings separate the two groups into two self-perpetuating castes, in such a way that the white group is assured the higher privileges and fuller opportunities,” wrote the anthropologists W. Lloyd Warner and Allison Davis of the bipolar caste system exemplified by the Jim Crow South. This affords the dominant caste “a tremendous gain in psychological security…as a result of their categorically defined superiority of status.”

Things began to change in the 1960s when civil rights legislation opened labor markets to women of all races, to immigrants from beyond Europe, and to African-Americans whose life-and-death protests helped unlock doors for all of these groups. New people flooded the labor pool at the precise moment that manufacturing was on the decline, and every worker now faced greater competition.

“
In the span of a few cruel years,” wrote the
New York Times
columnist Russell Baker in the 1960s, of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, “he has seen his comfortable position as the ‘in’ man of American society become a social liability as the outcasts and the exploited have presented their due bills on their conscience.”

Some people from the groups that were said to be inherently inferior managed to make it into the mainstream, a few rising to the level of people in the dominant caste, one of them, in 2008, rising to the highest station in the land. This left some white working-class Americans in particular, those with the least education and the material security that it can confer, to face the question of whether the commodity that they could take for granted—their skin and ascribed race—might be losing value.

There had always been a subordinate caste, and everyone knew who the subordinate caste was and had positioned themselves accordingly. “
Always [the Negro] was something you had to prove you were better than,” Lillian Smith wrote of the white working-class dilemma, “and you couldn’t prove it, no, you couldn’t prove it.” The beliefs and assumptions had all contributed to a “collective madness—and it is that—which feeds on half-lies and quarter-truths and dread.”

Those in the dominant caste who found themselves lagging behind those seen as inherently inferior potentially faced an epic existential crisis. To stand on the same rung as those perceived to be of a lower caste is seen as lowering one’s status. In the zero-sum stakes of a caste system upheld by perceived scarcity, if a lower-caste person goes up a rung, an upper-caste person comes down. The elevation of others amounts to a demotion of oneself, thus equality feels like a demotion.

If the lower-caste person manages actually to rise above an upper-caste person, the natural human response from someone weaned on their caste’s inherent superiority is to perceive a threat to their existence, a heightened sense of unease, of displacement, of fear for their very survival.
“If the things that I have believed are not true, then might I not be who I thought I was?”
The disaffection is more than economic. The malaise is spiritual, psychological, emotional. Who are you if there is no one to be better than?

“
It’s a great lie on which their identity has been built,” said Dr. Sushrut Jadhav, a prominent Indian psychiatrist, based in London, who specializes in the effects of caste on mental health.

Thus, a caste system makes a captive of everyone within it. Just as the assumptions of inferiority weigh on those assigned to the bottom of the caste system, the assumptions of superiority can burden those at the top with unsustainable expectations of needing to be several rungs above, in charge at all times, at the center of things, to police those who might cut ahead of them, to resent the idea of undeserving lower castes jumping the line and getting in front of those born to lead.

“
His whole life is one anxious effort to preserve his caste,” wrote the Dalit leader Bhimrao Ambedkar of the dominant caste. “Caste is his precious possession which he must save at any cost.”

When people have lived with assumptions long enough, passed down through the generations as incontrovertible fact, they are accepted as the truths of physics, no longer needing even to be spoken. They are as true and as unremarkable as water flowing through rivers or the air that we breathe. In the original caste system of India, the abiding faith in the entitlement of birth became enmeshed in the mind of the upper caste and “
hangs there to this day without any support,” Ambedkar wrote, “for now it needs no prop but belief—like a weed on the surface of a pond.”

The anxieties of the least secure in the dominant caste are not unlike those of a firstborn child expected to take over the family business. He may have neither the interest nor the specialized aptitude for it but feels duty-bound, pressured to take the reins, even though a younger sibling, say, a sister, is the one who was always good with numbers and has the temperament to run things but is not considered because of the family hierarchy of who goes first and who inherits what. This creates unsustainable expectations in a culture that proclaims to be egalitarian but was set up for certain people to dominate by birth.

Custom and law segregated the white working and middle classes for so long that most would not have been in a position to see firsthand the headwinds confronting disfavored Americans. The hand of government in the lives of white citizens has often been made invisible and has left distortions as to how each group got to where they are, allowing resentments and rivalries to fester. Many may not have realized that the New Deal reforms of the 1930s, like the Social Security Act of 1935 (providing old age insurance) and the Wagner Act (protecting workers from labor abuse), excluded the vast majority of black workers—farm laborers and domestics—at the urging of southern white politicians.