Caste Is Having a Cultural and Political Moment Globally. It Has Not Always Been So

 Caste Is Having a Cultural and Political Moment Globally. It Has Not Always Been So

For decades before it became a global phenomenon, Dalit writers in diverse Indian languages fought to make marginalized lives visible

A still from the short film “Geeli Pucchi,” starring actors Aditi Rao Hydari (left) and Konkana Sen Sharma. (Netflix)

In the fateful summer of 2020, when the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and police violence against Black bodies dominated headlines in the United States, the word caste — almost singularly associated in the American imagination with a rigid hierarchical social system in India — was reintroduced into the contemporary American discourse about race.

This was the summer Isabel Wilkerson published her bestselling book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” In it, Wilkerson argues that American racism is merely the expression of a caste system such as the one that operates in India — based on both descent and occupation, in which Brahmins, traditionally the priestly or intelligentsia caste, are at the top and Shudras, traditionally the manual laboring caste, are at the bottom.

Dalits, formerly known as “untouchables,” considered outcasts, have been relegated to the most polluting kinds of work, often involving close contact with human and animal bodily fluids and waste. They are ostracized and discriminated against as their presence and touch are historically perceived to be polluting by the dominant castes.

As many reviewers of Wilkerson’s book with expertise in South Asian culture and history pointed out, however, the book freezes Indian caste as a static system as it draws an analogy with the systemic ways in which racial discrimination is deployed in the U.S. to preserve an American caste system based on protecting the privilege of those at the top of the social order.

Three years later, Ava DuVernay released the independent film “Origin,” a dramatized retelling of Wilkerson’s book. The film narrates the story of Wilkerson herself, who must contend with both the personal tragedy of her husband’s death and the national tragedy of Trayvon Martin’s murder. Martin was the Florida teenager who was shot and killed by George Zimmerman in 2012 because he looked “suspicious.” His death was among the early events that shaped the Black Lives Matter movement and a catalyst for Wilkerson to write her book on caste and race in the U.S.

In the film, we watch as Wilkerson travels to Germany and India, stringing together a web of disparate narratives about the consolidation of social and political supremacy in both places to make an analogical argument about race and racism not as an autonomous form but as a symptom, an embodied manifestation, of caste hierarchy in the U.S.

I saw the film in my town Evanston’s lone movie theater. As I watched, I could hear and feel the affective appeal of Duvernay’s film. People in the audience responded with audible sounds of recognition and appreciation for the argument Wilkerson builds about American race and racism, and with gasps of shock and horror when the film cut to images of Dalit laborers in India covering their nearly naked bodies in oil and submerging themselves in clogged sewers.

The final scenes of the film — which juxtapose images of Black bodies stacked in the holds of slave ships crossing the Atlantic with brown bodies in the subcontinent submerged in human feces, and a final, searing anecdote about a young Black child prohibited from joining his white teammates in a swimming pool party — drew sniffles and tears from the audience, myself included.

The affective and political purpose of the film — to reveal a global hierarchy of caste supremacy and abjection that utilizes the tools of racial, religious, ethnic, linguistic and other forms of difference to sustain its power and permanence — was realized in the evolving and audible emotional reactions in the theater that day.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable about the way the film adaptation uses an exoticizing, orientalist gaze on abject, voiceless Dalit (the most caste-marginalized population in India) bodies engaged in cleaning feces from open sewers by hand, something that is euphemistically referred to in India as “manual scavenging.”

Both of these rhetorical strategies are effective for making a searing argument about the systemic nature of racism in America, but both should also leave us wondering about the existence of more complex Dalit subjectivities, histories, lifeworlds and politics in India.

For centuries, Indian media and cultural expression didn’t do much better. The lives, political perspectives and diverse cultures of Dalits have been virtually absent from the long-standing and otherwise rich literary culture of India. Two centuries of British colonial rule in India cultivated an orientalist gaze that rendered Dalits mute victims in need of saving, incapable of self-determination.

It wasn’t until the early 1970s that the Dalit literary voice, long suppressed, found emphatic utterance when a radical collective of protest poets writing in the Marathi language and calling themselves the Dalit Panthers burst into the public sphere.

They were influenced by Oakland’s Black Panthers for Self-Defense (about whom cofounder Raja Dhale had first read in Time Magazine) and radical Black politics and literature from the U.S. They were also steeped in the liberationist anti-caste politics of B.R. Ambedkar, a Dalit activist, statesman and architect of India’s 1950 constitution.

Dalit Panther poets, denied a platform in mainstream publishing houses, turned to the self-published format of the “little magazine,” DIY periodicals in Marathi from the late ’50s that ushered in modernist literature in the early decades of the Indian nation-state.

Dalit Panther poetry radically depicted people subjected to abject poverty and social exclusion — prostitutes, lepers, slum-dwellers — all in a language that the English translator Dilip Chitre has described as waging “a guerilla war against the effete middle class and sanitized world of literary readers.”

Perhaps the best-known Panther poet was Namdeo Dhasal, who, by his own proud admission was, as he describes in his poem, “Cruelty,” “a venereal sore in the private part of language.”

Dhasal’s most oft-quoted poem, “Man You Should Explode,” was published in his collection “Golpitha” in 1973, when he was just 24. (The excerpts below were translated by Chitre.)

In the poem, Dhasal envisions, in an angry and unapologetic idiom, the utter destruction of a global civilization built on philosophical, literary, religious and political foundations of inequality. In the vision of this poem, it’s only in this destructive wake that we can eradicate caste and all forms of inequality and hierarchy, imagining a new humanity:

One should open the manholes of sewers and throw into them

Plato, Einstein, Archimedes, Socrates,

Marx, Ashoka, Hitler, Camus, Sartre, Kafka

Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, Hopkins, Goethe

Dostoevsky, Mayakovsky, Maxim Gorky

Edison, Madison, Kalidasa, Tukaram, Vyasa, Shakespeare, Jnaneshvar,

And keep them rotting there with all their words

One should hang to death the descendants of Jesus, the Paighamber, the Buddha, and Vishnu

One should crumble up temples, churches, mosques, sculptures, museums

One should blow with cannonballs all priests

And inscribe epigraphs with cloth soaked in their blood

Man, one should tear off all the pages of all the sacred books in the world

And give them to people for wiping shit off their arses when done

……

After this they should stop calling one another names white or black, Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, or Shudra;

Stop creating political parties, stop building property, stop committing

The crime of not recognising one’s kin, not recognising one’s mother or sister

One should regard the sky as one’s grandpa, the earth as one’s grandma

And coddled by them everybody should bask in mutual love

Man, one should act so bright as to make the Sun and the Moon seem pale

One should share each morsel of food with everyone else, one should compose a hymn

To humanity itself, man, man should sing only the song of man.

The poem is notable for its utter irreverence for any social, political, religious or literary institution, for civilization itself and the way in which it categorizes people, exalting some and excluding others. As angry and totalizing as the poem is in its demand to “explode” it all, Dhasal ends with a utopian vision of a world returned to an elemental humanism.

The radical worldview of the Dalit Panther poets, who disbanded as a formal organization in 1977 but many of whose members continued to write and publish for years afterward, inspired a new generation of Dalit writers across a wide range of Indian regional languages who sought to create a literary space in which to represent Dalit lives and lifeworlds in their own words.

While the “caste question” had become especially acute in the middle of the 20th century, as Mahatma Gandhi sought to cultivate upper-caste compassion for marginalized castes by renaming “untouchables” as “harijans” (children of God) and Ambedkar advocated for a radically representative politics in India’s nascent parliamentary democracy, Dalit representation in literature emphasized their exploitation and suffering.

The most famous example is Mulk Raj Anand’s English-language 1935 novel “Untouchable,” in which the titular “untouchable” Bakha, a manual scavenger like those depicted in DuVernay’s film, is so mired in his own embodied experience of untouchability that he cannot intellectualize the systemic sources of his own oppression.

Standing at a “pollution distance” from a crowd gathered to listen to Gandhi at the end of the novel, Bakha swoons with pride when Gandhi announces he “loves scavengers,” before another politician mentions the “flush system” that “clears dung without anyone having to handle it” as the technology that will rid manual scavengers of their untouchable stigma.

Caught between these two limited emancipatory ideologies — the promise of freedom from exploitation, either through a performative politics of sympathy or the deliverance of modern technology — Bakha is stuck. Anand relegates Bakha’s power of understanding to a merely bodily one, writing on the final page of the novel:

He began to move. His virtues lay in his close-knit sinews and in his long-breathed sense. He was thinking of everything he had heard, but he could not understand it all. He was calm as he walked along, though the conflict in his soul was not over, though he was torn between his enthusiasm for Gandhi and the difficulties in his own awkward, naïve self.

“Untouchable” cemented Anand as one of the most illustrious Anglophone Indian novelists of the 20th century; subsequent editions were published with a foreword by E.M. Forster and, in 2004, India’s then-Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh launched a commemorative edition of the novel.

The comparison of the silence and the objectification of both Bakha and the latrine cleaners in DuVernay’s film version of Wilkerson’s book nearly a century after the publication of Anand’s novel is uncanny. It is also, as made clear in Dhasal’s poem, something Dalit writers have long had to combat.

The radical intervention of the Dalit Panthers in India’s poetry landscape elicited an outpouring of literature in the decades that followed across India’s regional languages, which sought to depict the truth of the Dalit life experience, both its dignity and indignity, painting a nuanced portrait of Dalit life and community.

The most popular genre of this generation of Dalit writers was autobiography. Omprakash Valmiki’s autobiography “Joothan” was first published in Hindi in 1993 and was an instant classic (an Anglophone readership was introduced to the work a decade later when Arun Prabha Mukherjee’s translation was published by Oxford University Press).

The unique combination of laying bare the truth of a harsh existence with a forceful reclamation of human dignity is evident even in the title, which can be loosely translated as “scraps,” referring to the leftover bits of food on the plates of wedding guests that would be scraped together into a mass and offered to a household’s Dalit workers and their children. “Joothan” opens with a searing childhood memory in which Valmiki’s mother, after years of accepting these scraps gratefully, finally angrily rejects them when offered:

That night the mother goddess Durga entered my mother’s eyes. It was the first time that I saw my mother get so angry. She emptied the basket right there. She said to Sukhdev Singh, “Pick it up and put it inside your house. Feed it to the bridegroom’s guests tomorrow morning.” She gathered me and my sister and left like an arrow. Sukhdev Singh had pounced on her to hit her, but my mother had confronted him like a lioness. Without being afraid.

Just one year earlier, in 1992, Faustina Bama, born into the “Paraiyar” caste (from which we get the English word “pariah”) in Tamil Nadu in southern India, published an autobiography that detailed her dismay at the casteism in the Roman Catholic Church in which she had taken the vows of a nun.

Her story is particularly important for breaking down the myth of caste and casteism as merely “Hindu” phenomena, as well as presenting an intersectional analysis of caste-based and gender-based discrimination that shapes the lives of Dalit women.

Translated into English by Lakshmi Holmstrom and published by Oxford University Press in 2000, Bama’s autobiography won India’s important Crossword Book Award and has become a foundational text of the canon.

More recently, writers like Sujatha Gidla (“Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India”) and Yashica Dutt (“Coming Out As Dalit”) have published autobiographies in English about lives lived in both India and the U.S. Like Wilkerson’s “Caste,” these have been important for bringing caste to bear on global structures of discriminatory hierarchies, but less in an analogical way than in an intersectional one.

The short story, a wildly popular genre in many Indian languages, with a rich history of addressing the politics of the emergent nation-state after colonialism, has also been an important venue for Dalit storytelling.

One popular theme among many, which parallels African-American literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is that of passing. Published by Oxford University Press in 2023, Joel Lee and K. Satyanarayana’s anthology “Concealing Caste: Narratives of Passing and Personhood in Dalit Literature” includes examples from Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu and English.

First published in 1963 (but not translated to English until 2018), Baburao Bagul’s Marathi short story “When I Hid My Caste” was — like the Dalit Panther poetry of the same period — a literary revelation. Centered around a mixed-caste group of railway workers, a shared love of poetry ingratiates a Dalit worker to his upper-caste foreman’s brother, who is unaware of his caste. When it is discovered, the worker is beaten mercilessly, insulted and driven from the upper-caste character’s home.

Certainly not triumphant in its ending, the story was a radical one for, as Lee and Satyanarayana point out, suggesting that a modern democratic subject in industrializing, urbanizing India can choose to conceal his caste; that it is not always already written on the body.

Written more than 50 years later, Ajay Navaria’s Hindi short story “Tattoo” tells a very different urban story of caste inscrutability: The Dalit protagonist is a middle-class professional in Delhi who joins a private gym. Initially feeling that he doesn’t belong, nervous that the shabby state of his sneakers and the “Jai Bhim” (praising Ambedkar) tattoo on his arm will reveal him as an outsider, he is, at the end of the story, amazed to find out that the urbane, gold-chain-wearing young trainer who registered his membership and from whom he tried to hide his caste identity is also a Dalit.

The gulf between these two stories tells a tale of a shifting urban experience for some Dalits, one in which increased class mobility, a more widespread anti-caste politics and an effusion of Dalit youth culture are rapidly changing the lived landscapes of the city (if not yet India’s more rural areas).

In 2016, the suicide of the University of Hyderabad doctoral student Rohith Vemula, after the university took disciplinary action against him for his anti-caste political activities, galvanized a new youth movement across the country. The note he left behind has become a rallying cry for India’s youth, frequently read at demonstrations and vigils, while his story has become a catalyst for new literature, plays and music.

Yashica Dutt’s memoir, “Coming Out As Dalit” (second edition 2024), traces her life trying to pass in India as non-Dalit, and her journey from India to New York to attend graduate school at Columbia University, where she learned to embrace her Dalit identity. In the book’s prologue, she identifies the birth of her own political awareness as an outcome of Vemula’s death:

The day after the news broke, Tuesday, January 19, 2016, I finally read the letter that Rohith had left behind, as I sat at my favorite table at a too cold café in Manhattan’s Chelsea: “My birth is my fatal accident.” “Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of stardust.” I read it once. Twice. And then once more. I had never read anything written by a Dalit before! I had certainly never read anything written by a Dalit in English — the language I had hoped would help me escape my own Dalit identity.

Today, Dalit and anti-caste visual and musical artists are increasingly infiltrating the world of Indian popular culture.

The Mumbai-based visual artist Vikrant Bhise, whose large-scale paintings adorn the walls of some of India’s most elite museum and gallery spaces, describes his practice: “At the forefront of struggle against caste-based domination and its vertiginous implications on land, liberty and labor, [my] artistic practice iterates [my] commitment to the revolutionary spirit inherent in the Ambedkarite consciousness.”

The New Delhi-based Siddhesh Gautam, whose tens of thousands of followers know him as “Bakery Prasad” on Instagram, is a mixed-media designer and artist whose prints of Ambedkar and other Dalit and Black American political leaders have been published by leading print publications in India and the United Kingdom.

The Casteless Collective, an indie band based out of Chennai that began performing in 2017, includes Arivu, a popular songwriter and rap artist whose political Tamil-language music has topped India’s popular music charts and made it into several mainstream Tamil-language films. His song “Sanda Seivom” (“We Will Fight,” 2020) was first written for a protest and now has a music video featuring a hoodie-wearing Arivu dancing and gesturing in familiar rap style atop a building in Chennai. In the song, which has more than 1.3 million views on YouTube, Arivu raps

Let us fight

In the streets

If our rights are taken away

They call me Arivu

I’m one in your family

Equality is my dream

Ambedkar and Periyar live forever

And my rap is a product of their rationality

With Wilkerson’s book and DuVernay’s film, as well as the “Cisco case” — in which the State of California brought a suit that alleged caste discrimination among Indian-born engineers working in Silicon Valley — and the wave of American universities and municipalities changing their non-discrimination policies to include caste as a protected category alongside race, religion, gender and sexual orientation, the language of caste has infiltrated American discourse in recent years.

In India, too, despite attempts to sweep caste under the rug in the image the modern state projects to the world, the subject — and particularly the experiences and perspectives of Dalits, those at the bottom of India’s complex caste ladder — has also become significantly more mainstream and global.

Many today will rightly point to Vauhini Vara’s speculative English-language novel “The Immortal King Rao” (2022), which traces the story of a Dalit boy raised on a coconut plantation in India who rises to become a powerful CEO of an American tech company called the Coconut Computer Corporation.

They will cite globally streaming shows featuring strong Dalit protagonists like “Dahaad” and “Made in Heaven” (both on Prime Video) which feature professional middle-class Dalit protagonists.

In “Dahaad,” the detective Anjali Bhaati tracks a serial killer who stages the deaths of the women he kills to look like suicides. Throughout, Bhaati has to contend with both the micro- and macroaggressions of her colleagues over her caste. However, Bhaati is a powerful and sympathetic character, driven by a rage against the epidemic of violence against women.

What is progressive about this series is that caste is not its subject, but rather is integrated into the plot as one among many identity markers, like gender, religion and class, which continue to indelibly shape human experience and opportunity.

Like “Dahaad,” “Made in Heaven,” a dramatic series that follows a pair of wedding planners in Delhi, contends with the ways tradition continues to shape the modern Indian experience. One of the episodes in the second season focuses on the wedding of a Columbia University professor whose Dalit background creates controversy among the groom’s family. Ultimately, the couple eschew normative Hindu wedding traditions for a modern Buddhist ceremony.

“Kathal” (2023) is a feature-length social farce in which a Dalit police officer must covertly hide her investigation into the disappearance of a little girl — a poor gardener’s daughter — while assigned the case of finding two missing jackfruits from the garden of a dominant-caste local politician. Meanwhile, the short film “Geeli Pucchi” (2021) explores the intersectionality of caste and sexuality, playing ironically with the notion of “coming out” when one woman in a growing flirtation with another woman reveals her Dalit identity.

Intelligent, critically daring and slickly produced, these shows and movies bring the question of caste to the fore for a new Indian — and, increasingly, global — audience.

But this is not the whole story. For decades, Dalit writers and activists in multiple Indian languages have been flooding vernacular literary markets with memoirs, short fiction, poetry, art and music that speak radically of distinctly marginalized lives while also manifesting a more liberated future.

As we appreciate the new visibility of caste in transnational popular culture, making it harder to ignore politically, we also benefit from exploring the diverse array of regional-language literatures. The picture that emerges from this rich archive depicts the life of caste, and its resistance, in India as far more complex than that of a static “system” so often fetishized in the eyes of the world.

Courtesy: New Lines Magazine

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