“People think casteism only comes in the form of beatings or open abuse, but nowadays, it also comes in the form of subtle gestures,” Dr. Lakshmanan, an associate professor at the Madras Institute for Development Studies, tells me while discussing the nature of caste discrimination in higher education institutions. N. Sukumar too writes about the diverse manifestations of caste discrimination in his book, Caste Discrimination and Exclusion in Indian Universities: A Critical Reflection.
He documents how professors threaten to cut Dalit students’ attendance and coerce them into doing domestic chores, among many other practices that cannot always be proven to be caste discrimination. This invisibility frequently creates silos of suffering, in which Dalit students are gaslit into thinking that their struggles are unreal, and that these institutions are too modern for something as regressive as casteism to exist within their walls. Collectivity is snatched, and caste-based structural inequalities are disguised as individual, subjective experiences.
The reservation lens
Higher education institutions are frequently portrayed as being immune to caste. Upper-caste students and faculty are assumed to be casteless by virtue of their modernity. But casteism has also reinvented itself, in large part through the language of meritocracy. The social logic of merit is arranged in a way that the same groups of people benefit from it that are already empowered by the caste system. In her book The Caste of Merit, an ethnographic study of IIT Madras, Ajantha Subramanian writes that the relationship between individual merit and caste networks often go unnoticed.
In this context, she writes, opening up institutions such as IITs is met with opposition not in the name of caste, but in the name of preserving merit. Merit offers caste a new path, because of which caste is only seen through reservations while the privilege that dominant castes possess is unrecognised as capital.
In his recently published These Seats are Reserved, advocate Abhinav Chandrachud describes reservations as unique legal provisions that emerged out of India’s social context. He traces the history of the need for reservations and the social life of these legal provisions.
He notes that the opposition to reservations in the Indian Constituent Assembly was primarily on two grounds: first, that it works against efficiency, and second, that it was regressive to claim that caste still exists in a free, modern nation. These arguments are not relics of the past and are still used to contest the use and need of reservations. Avatthi Ramaiah, a professor at the Centre for Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), says that without reservations these so-called progressive spaces would be filled solely by upper caste students.
Even today, much of the attention around reservation continues to be around the notion of a ‘deserving’ candidate rather than the historical wrongs perpetuated by the caste system. As a professor who has taught at TISS for over two decades, Dr. Ramaiah has seen generations of Dalit students come and go with a range of experiences. He says children from upper caste backgrounds come with severely casteist notions that their families instill in them, which they try to impose on their Dalit classmates. This is a complex social problem that reservations alone cannot cure; however, reservations are the bare minimum.
The prevalence of verbal taunts
The perception that reservation dilutes merit often leads to harmful jokes, slurs, gossip, and isolation of students among their peers. Existing legal remedies often cannot respond to these intricacies. Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe cells mandated by the University Grants Commission are frequently defunct; where they do exist, they are not responsive to complaints. Remedies such as provisions under The Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 and The Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955 are challenging to access. The lawyers I spoke to said it is difficult to prove caste discrimination in court because the register of the court often cannot recognise the subtle and nuanced nature of casteism that occurs in these so-called progressive spaces. Furthermore, caste-aware people in the legal system are just as rare as those in educational institutions.
Finding solutions
There is a need for remedies that are attentive to not only the external violence, but the internal trauma, the crushing loneliness, and the damage to self-esteem that casteism creates. Dr. Lakshmanan, for instance, points to the need for a space that is not just about protests but a safe space for Dalit students to share their problems — a circle of friends. For real change to occur, the “culprits have to also be sensitised, not just victims and survivors”. At TISS, all first-year students must attend foundational courses that touch upon various aspects of caste and gender discrimination. Dr. Ramaiah has been teaching these classes for many years, and he says that carefully facilitated classroom discussions like these have a huge effect on helping upper-caste students unlearn their casteist ideas. Several other academics insist curriculum changes are critical to creating caste-aware institutional spaces. However, there is an over-dependence on individual faculty members from SC/ST community members to resolve caste discrimination-related issues on campus. These remedies must not be a burden on the already marginalised, they must be institutionalised and smoothened in a way that they become intrinsic to higher education and inequity becomes unimaginable.
The writer is a researcher based in New Delhi
