I recently wrote about the box-office smash-hit Black Panther , and sought to locate its success in the back story it created of an empowered black nation. Amusingly, it raised the hackles of some readers, who not only mocked the idea, but promptly said that African-Americans were loan defaulters, dole parasites, drug dealers, and so on. Even more amusing, the comments weren’t made by Ku Klux Klan knights, but by Indian citizens.
Why should we, ourselves often at the receiving end of racial discrimination, attack blacks? Because at no point must it seem that we are making common cause with anyone fighting racism. Since that famous UN conference on racism in Durban in 2001, when Dalits and other disadvantaged castes sought to bring casteism on par with racism, many of us find it necessary to stoutly defend Hinduism, and we do it in two ways. First, we deny that casteism exists at all. Second, we insist that caste is nothing like race.
I rather like the brazen postmodernism of the first defence; the rejection of anything as blasé as a given truth. So how does that work? Well, if we’re upper caste, ‘modern’ and ‘educated’, chances are we don’t lynch Dalit boys for wearing watches, we eat the laddoo the office boy brings, we give Diwali tips to the man who cleans the sewers, and your driver’s daughter got a reserved seat in college. All this makes us swell with pride at our own amazing inclusiveness. Naturally, we reject the existence of casteism altogether.
If, however, we are bludgeoned with irksome evidence like homes burnt or jobs denied or tenants turned down, we explain it away as just an employment scheme run by good ol’ Manu that went awry over time. But racism? Of course, caste isn’t as bad as racism, and we will stoutly deny that the world has any right to preach human rights to us.
African-American blues musician Daryl Davis was in Chennai this week, and he spoke of how he had befriended 200 Ku Klux Klan members , and how they had given up their clan membership after getting to know him. “If you sit down and talk to them, they can be convinced their hate is mistaken,” he said. Then, a speaker pointed out that this might not quite work in India where, of course, upper caste people cannot touch lower caste persons or marry into their families or eat their food.
Here, it started off as ritual purity, was cemented into hate, and has today coalesced into anger. It is not easy to dislodge this, especially because positive discrimination measures such as reservations have been grossly politicised and castes wedged further and further apart by vote bank politics.
It is not easy to dislodge also because the idea that a place in heaven will be denied to those who break the rules is not only strongly entrenched, but reinforced over and over again. In the last couple of decades, as Brahminical groups and bhakti cults have grown rapidly, they have sought not only to fan fears that Hinduism is under threat, but also that upper caste purity and rights are under siege.
I was an imposter at a religious discourse recently, and a priest with doe-brown eyes pleaded with his audience to stay true to the Vedas and follow the rules of ritual purity. ‘How lucky you are,’ he said, ‘you are not only born Hindu, you are born Brahmin. Can such good fortune be denied?’
Meanwhile, that other evening, after Davis’ talk, a band of Tamil musicians called The Casteless Collective came on stage. They rapped, they drummed, they danced, and they sang. About separate wells, about cleaning sewers, about untouchability and segregation. There was something in their eyes when they sang that went straight to your heart, a raw pain that made you flinch. In so many ways, we have let so many people down.
But there was something else too in the air that evening, a pulsing, exultant energy. It made me believe that the margins have begun to be redrawn and it might no longer be easy to fix them as before. And two days later we read that the Supreme Court has made it illegal for khap / katta panchayats to interfere in any marriage , inter-caste or inter-religion.
Where the writer tries to make sense of society with seven hundred words and a bit of snark
