Author: Isabel Wilkerson
Publisher: Random House 2020
Caste is the bones and race is the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.
We had something similar to the caste defined by Wilkerson at least until the early 80s in Sri Lanka. A friend of mine told me the following story. He was admitted as a junior executive to a leading company in Sri Lanka in early 80s after his graduation. His colleagues (at the company) asked if he was from Royal. When he said no, they asked if he was from St. Thomas. When he said no, they were flabbergasted. "We hire only Royalists or Thomians as executives," they said.
When Wilkerson traveled to India, the untouchables of India accepted her as a fellow untouchable from America. Bhimrao Ambedkar went to Columbia to study economics in 1913. Living just blocks from Harlem, he saw firsthand the conditions of his counterparts in America. Ambedkar tried to dispense with the demeaning term untouchable. He rejected the term Harijans applied to them by Mahatma Gandhi. He spoke of his people as Dalits, meaning “broken people”, which due to the caste system they were.
Wilkerson recalls a personal experience when she came back to America from India.
On the way home, I was snapped back to my own world when airport security flagged my suitcase for inspection. The TSA worker happened to be an African-American who looked to be in his early twenties. He strapped on latex gloves to begin his work. He dug through my suitcase and excavated a small box, unwrapped the folds of paper and held in his palm the bust of Ambedkar that I had been given.
“This is what came up in the X-ray,” he said. He turned it upside down and inspected it from all sides, his gaze lingering at the bottom of it. He seemed concerned that something might be inside.
“I’ll have to swipe it,” he warned me. He came back after some time and declared it okay, and I could continue with it on my own journey.
“So who is this?” he asked. The name Ambedkar alone would not have registered and there was no time to explain the parallel caste system. So I blurted out what seemed to make the most sense.
“Oh,” I said, “this is the Martin Luther King of India.”
“Pretty Cool,” he said, satisfied now, and seeming a little proud. He then wrapped Ambedkar back up as if he were King himself and set him back gently in the suitcase.
A Nigerian playwright once told Wilkerson that there are no blacks in Africa. “They are Igbo, Yoruba, Eve, Akan, Ndebele. They don’t become black until they go to the UK or US.” “They are just themselves”.
The Indian caste system is an elaborate fretwork of thousands of subcastes, or jatis, correlated to region and village, which fall under four main varnas, Brahmin, Kshtriya, Vaishya, and Shudra, and the excluded fifth, known as Untouchables or Dalits. It is further complicated by non-Hindus—Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians—who are outside the caste system but have incorporated themselves into working of the county and to the varnas.
Many Dalits look at the world, beyond India, and identify themselves with the oppressed people of the world. Some Dalits followed the American civil rights movement and in the 70s, organized themselves as Dalit Panthers, inspired by Black Panther Party.
Over the centuries, the dominant caste has taken extreme measures to protect its hegemony. In some parts of India, the lowest caste people were to remain a certain number of paces from any dominant-caste person while walking out in public. They have to wear bells to alert the high caste people of their presence. In the Maratha region a low caste person has to drag a thorny branch to wipe out his footprints and prostrate himself on the ground if a Brahmin passes. Touching anything that had been touched by an untouchable was considered polluting to an upper caste person and required rituals to purify such misfortune.
Dalits were beaten to death if ever they stole food for the sustenance denied them. It was a crime for Dalits to learn to read or write, punishable by cutting off their tongue or by pouring molten lead into the ear of the offender, according to V. T. Rajshekar, the editor of the Dalit Voice.
Wilkerson attended a conference held in London in December 2017. 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 “backward castes”. Even though India has abolished legal discrimination, Dalits were brutalized by Indian authorities. “Another Dalit murdered by police, another Adivasi murdered by police,” a woman said at the conference. “Why do we not face up to the outrage of state-sanctioned violence?”
In a caste system, the lowest caste performs the role of diverting society’s attention from its structural ills and taking the blame for collective misfortune. It was seen as the misfortune itself. This is known as scapegoating. A Jungian Psychologist Sylvia Brinton Perera wrote “Scapegoating, as it is currently practiced, means finding the one or ones who can be identified with evil or wrongdoing, blamed for it and cast out of the community, in order to leave the remaining members with a feeling of guiltlessness, atoned (at one).”
In India, Wilkerson realized that Dalits were friendly towards her and wanted to hear from her. “We read James Baldwin and Toni Morrison because they speak to our experiences,” a Dalit scholar told her. “They help us in our plight.”
Wilkerson had done a masterful job in her thesis including many historical injustices done in the name of caste. She divided her thesis into seven parts. (1) Toxins in the permafrost and heat rising all around, (2) The arbitrary construction of human divisions, (3) The eight pillars of caste, (4) The tentacles of caste, (5) The consequences of caste, (6) Backlash, and (6) Awakening. She finished this important thesis with the following.
A world without caste would set everyone free.
P.s. Vinod Kambli is a Dalit who was as good as Tendulkar when they played for the same school in India. Kambil had a 664 run partnership with Tendulkar playing for their school Shardashram Vidyamandir against St. Xavier’s in 1968. Kambli played only 17 tests for India and his average was 54.20. Tendulkar played 200 tests for India with an average of 53.78. Kambli embraced Christianity in 2017.
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