Yes, Kamala Harris’s Caste Matters
The Hidden Secret behind India’s America
In 2018, yet another year that India was the top remittance recipient country in the world, I, an Indian immigrant twice over, had finished my Master in International Development at the same university as the sitting French President, gone onto securing a freelance position at a top tier event communications agency, produced live digital content for aforementioned President among other Heads of State and Government, moved into one of the most affluent of Paris’s 20 arrondissements, and had a month long vacation in Spain.
That same year, in Pune, not very far from Mumbai, one person died from clashes between lower caste Mahars and upper caste Marathas. As the violence slowly spread to Mumbai, where my immediate family is based, I recall their general impatience with the situation, with one member clearly stating, “Protesting is acceptable, but why all this violence?” I listened half-heartedly as I worked on yet another blogpost for a client. India was far away now; caste even further away. Apart from liking the odd anti-caste post on social media, the extent of my involvement was limited. My focus, after all, was to keep my nose down, play the good immigrant and focus on my career and the results would speak for themselves; the Indian dream at its meritocratic best.
THE INDIAN DREAM
I use, of course, the Indian dream loosely as distilled to me through my upbringing in the then income tax free United Arab Emirates; just another Indian that made up 27% of the country’s population, its largest share of immigrants. Over a period of 15 years, I bore witness as the desert country slowly transformed itself into a green shell for tourism without even realising that the systematic oppression of immigrants lay at the heart of its success story. My father was a senior member of the national bank’s Treasury department, my mother worked for Veolia. What systematic oppression?
Caste was certainly not something my parents were thinking of as they struggled as immigrants in the Middle East while unexpectedly finding themselves pregnant with a child they were not financially equipped to have. In those initial years, my parents, like so many immigrants before them, often found themselves on the margins of legality, subletting an apartment with another couple and their family, working in the informal sector and sometimes going unpaid for it.These immigrant narrative tropes, replayed generation after generation, are not unfamiliar to us. And they were probably just as tangential to Shyamala Gopalan as she moved to Berkely, California at the tender age of 19.
Like Kamala Harris’s mother and her family, mine is Brahmin. And much like Harris, caste has not been a subject of discussion for most of my life. But it is the pivotal factor that allowed Harris’s grandparents to finance the first year of her mother’s education at The University of California, Berkeley. It is what allowed Gopalan to become part of the state’s intellectual elite and establish herself as a renown researcher in the field of breast cancer research. Just as caste has played an unseen role in my life, so too has it in Harris’s and her origin story.
While I was aware of the systemic racism my parents faced at work, I had no inkling of the thousands of other Indians present in the U.A.E, toiling under inhumane conditions, being beaten, harassed and assaulted at construction sites, in homes and everywhere in between on a daily basis.
I remember the first time I heard of caste. I was no older than 10 and was expected to hand in an essay about a figure I looked up to. I was happy to go with Mahatma Gandhi, but my mother insisted I be different, and so we went with D. B. R. Ambedkar. The conversations about caste that followed were limited, but definitely included the idea that all of ‘that’ was behind us now. Only today do I realise the irony of a young boy of Brahmin heritage first invoking the name of the primary champion of caste abolition so as to ‘stand out’ at school.
Caste bubbled its way from the bottom of my consciousness once again at the age of 15, when my grandmother proudly declared at a dinner party that we had been Kamaths before religious conversion; an upper caste South Indian surname if there ever was one. The next natural step for me to understanding caste was through literature. Fiction has always been my gateway into comprehending systemic oppression. The human emotion behind storytelling- good storytelling- is what eventually leads many of us to problematise the obvious. So it comes as no surprise, then, that the next foot that kicked light through the door of my privilege as a South Indian Brahmin Catholic was a novel by a South Indian Brahmin Catholic writing about a family of South Indian Brahmin Catholics.
God of Small Things changed my life. It was one of the first books of Indian literature I had ever read voluntarily in my deeply white washed Catholic upbringing and it sowed the seeds of Marxism, feminism, and anti-caste struggle in me. Never again would I take my caste privilege for granted. From then on, I idolised Arundhathi Roy and believed that this sharp-tongued, quick-witted, controversial woman had the answers to our country’s problems hidden away in the back of her head. But like with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and J.K. Rowling, I was soon to be set for bitter disappointment. Arundhati, you of all people should have known that your caste privilege has shaped your life and mine as much as it has shaped the neo-Dalits who have converted to Buddhism. When you said, “If he touched her, he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win,” you were so close to getting the point.
Roy falls into a known and well-worn pattern of caste erasure; a deliberate, systemic political, social, and economic policy that goes back decades. Over time, it has become amply clear to me how much my privilege played a role in the construction of my Indian dream and that of my parents’, allowing us to move away from the motherland and to become good immigrants in our country of choice. Throughout my childhood in Abu Dhabi, caste was never discussed, even among my parents’ almost exclusively Indian circle. While my progenitors dealt in their own way with systemic racism and oppression at work, I had no inkling of the thousands of other Indians present in the U.A.E, toiling under inhumane conditions, being beaten, harassed and assaulted at construction sites, in homes and everywhere in between on a daily basis. What we had all forgotten at our fun family barbecues was that this juxtaposition was entirely necessary for our own existence. Behind us were always the domestic help that ate from different cutlery, the construction workers we never talked about and treated with something bordering contempt. It was not as if they did not share the same kind of passport as us. Yet their erasure was necessary so that we, the colourless elite, could exist. Their presence was necessary for our survival; they helped define who made a good immigrant and who, a bad one.
In erasing caste from the equation, Savarnas like myself accentuate casteism, carrying it in our perfumed luggage to the next leg of its journey across borders.
CUE AMERICA
No country best illustrates the nefarious effects of casteism and its pervasiveness among the diaspora better than America. While the idea of the American Dream is part of the larger cultural ethos and fabric of the country, the Indian Dream (which fundamentally relies on caste oppression just as the American Dream does on the subjugation of minorities and the First People), is a more subtle one. It has risen like a spectre from the dinner tables of the dominant caste and class Savarnas who are clear eyed about the malaise that has seeped into their home country and for which they hold much responsibility.
The Indian Dream, then, is about leveraging privilege to send the next generation abroad so as to reap from the imagined equality, imagined racial equality, and access to equal opportunity ostensibly provided by Western countries. But in erasing caste from this equation, Savarnas like myself and my family accentuate casteism, carrying it in their perfumed luggage to the next leg of its journey across borders. America to Indians is the space where we can leverage our privilege through social signalling and make it to the in-group. But for Brahmins like myself, our indigenous indicators of social status and privilege — language, accent, clothing, behaviour — no longer carry the same weight in a country where we are immigrants. To cash in this privilege, then, to edge closer to whiteness, is necessary. And doing so requires creating a subset of ‘them’- Indians that we do not, indeed, must not resemble.
In Trump’s America, I am a subset of human. But in Modi’s India, I am always a Brahmin. I can look at the news and tsk while drinking my Starbucks cappuccino. But my humanity will never be called into question as long as I do not dissent.
More importantly, by indicating that it is blind to all differences that come before and after it, the American Dream leaves space for us to graft the Indian one upon it as we like. The sham of a purely meritocratic society is thus an idea that Indians, Indian Americans and the Indian diaspora buy into wholeheartedly. And I am as much party to the propagation of this myth as anyone. This explains why I virtually broke down for three months post the 2016 election. Trump’s rise to power shattered all of this in a single instant in a way that Modi’s never would: in Trump’s New America, I am, more than ever, not as much of a human being as a white person. But in Modi’s India, no matter what else happens, I am a Brahmin. I see the news in India and can tsk while drinking my Starbucks cappuccino. I can get upset about human rights violations and abuses, the powerful erosion of free speech and democracy. But my humanity in India is not called into question as long as I do not dissent.
Do you see now why Mindy Kaling, Priyanka Chopra, Lily Singh and Hasan Minhaj signal their lack of awareness about caste issues? For the first seventeen years of my life, apart from proclaiming the then unknown Ambedkar as my hero and the aforementioned incident with my grandmother, I was ignorant of caste. An entire cultural context and history explains exactly why: post-colonial India decided that rampant casteism would continue in practice while ‘extinguishing’ it at a structural level through reservations and the anti-untouchability laws in the Constitution. And just like that, the conversation was deemed finished.
To reiterate the point are shows such as Never Have I Ever. Praised across America for its storytelling, it was widely bashed in my circles for its caste blindness, ableism, reverence to odd and disconnected clichés (such as when a Tamilian family member uses a Gujarati accent out of nowhere), subtle Islamophobia, nods to caste endogamy, and general warmth towards the current genocidal administration. So it was no surprise that Savarnas heaved a sign of relief when it came out. Kaling’s irresponsibly ignorant storytelling finally gave their children representation at America’s ethnically diverse table. They had their own show that depicted, more than ever before, how to recalibrate their upper-caste privilege as a proximation for whiteness while also being truly, authentically themselves. Everyone calling out the caste privilege of Never Have I Ever was just spoiling the fun.
But Dalits are not able to do any of this. Their humanity is called into question at every step of the way in their home country and abroad. They cannot leverage the affluent, privileged networks and connections to attain the American Dream the same way we Savarnas do, even abroad, as best explained by the Cisco case.
My great grandfather was an orphan at 12. He eventually became one of the wealthiest copper merchants and largest private landowners in his town. A sizeable majority of his descendants have become foreign citizens. A question that haunts me till date is where are the descendants of Dalit orphans from my great grandfathers’s generation right now?
At the heart of it, access to social signalling that I talked about earlier is rooted in privilege, and is not something that is granted to them. And herein lies the heart of the problem: minorities in a certain context selectively forget that they are oppressive majorities in others, that the level of access to resources that they have is not available to all. If I had a rupee for every Savarna I’ve crossed in India and abroad that whines about reservations, I’d have enough money to build a Ram Mandir. Savarnas forget that we carry the mark of this oppression with us and, worse, perpetuate said oppression in order to claim minority status and benefits in another context, all the while further erasing the path for those oppressed. This is most frustratingly seen in affirmative action debates in the United States that Savarnas benefit from while being opposed to caste-based quotas in India.
Association with the American left for American Indians is thus a question of survival. Doing so protects the upward mobility that, though constantly in erosion, is still viable for upper castes in America. Though this relationships becoming frayed, notably after Harris half-heartedly bleated about Kashmir, it is still present. And this explains the phenomenon of selective ‘equal rights’ advocacy of the key members of the aforementioned American Indian pantheon, all of whom have, to some degree or other, claimed ignorance on caste-related human rights violations in India.
And Kamala Harris is now at the heart of this narrative. Coming as a Senator and a potential future Vice President of the United States with Tamilian Brahmin heritage in a country where 67% of Dalits said they faced discrimination at the workplace compared to 1% of Brahmin respondents according to Equality Labs, her silence on human rights violations and caste in general has been deafening.
But this does not surprise me. While I humbly make space for the Black and African American communities to tackle her over what she has done to their communities in California, I will say that Joe Biden’s Vice Presidential pick has a studied reputation for standing for whatever issue is most popular in the moment. Issues that are front and centre for the Democratic Party and the United States are ones that she champions. A political weathervane, she lays claim to her Indian heritage at her convenience. And unfortunately, caste just isn’t something that even the most progressive of Democrats apart from Pramila Jayapal think is a problem right now, despite its impact on America today. So, no matter how many dosas she makes with Mindy Kaling, Kamala Harris’s Brahmin identity, like my own, is derived from systematic oppression that goes back centuries. Her silence on it is your largest clue. And this remains another one of her many blindspots.
As awareness of caste and its nefarious effects sprung into my consciousness, I got a taste of what resistance looked like. A colleague from India asked me about my surname and where I was from upon our very first meeting in order to determine my caste. When I recently engaged with an Indians in Paris Facebook group to check whether there were any support groups for lower castes in the country, reactions ranged from polite befuddlement to questions regarding my sanity, along with a helpful heap of gaslighting the suffering of lower castes. The consensus, apart from a few dissenting voices, was that casteism was a disease that didn’t exist here, and importing it to France was unacceptable.
What is particular to the privileged Savarnas like myself is the complete denial and forgetting of the elaborate networks that allow us to rise out of poverty. Since poor Brahmins have access to networks that have been developed over centuries, it is easier to lift them out of poverty than lower castes. Shyamala Gopalan was a single mother. And now, with a long list of accolades and credentials behind her, her daughter is very close to becoming America’s first ever Black, the first ever Asian American and the first ever Female Vice President till date. I look at my own life for comparison. My great grandfather was an orphan at 12. From there, he became one of the wealthiest copper merchants and largest private landowners in his town. Another great grandfather lost vast tracts of land to his tenants after land reforms in post-independence India. Yet the majority of his descendants have lived their lives abroad, becoming foreign citizens, and are doing incredibly well for themselves. I wonder where the descendants of Dalit orphans from my great grandfathers’s generation are now; whether there even are any to speak of. Since just as recently as 2012, for example, 93% of dalit families were below the poverty line. And so this question haunts me till date: where are they now?
All my life I questioned why domestic help could cook for us, feed us, bathe us, play with us, but never use the same washrooms, plates, and utensils as us. Today, I know why. I’m also acutely aware of how my privilege has helped me accrue yet more privilege; unsurprising to most who’ve studied how the idea works in practice. But I now know that using such privilege is key, simply because when I do so, no matter what, it is not my own humanity that I am trying to gain recognition for. The person or people I am engaging with are not questioning my suffering, but someone else’s; therefore, it is less triggering for me to engage than it is for others. This is always the case when you fight for the humanity of a group of which you are not a part. And this is all the more reason why I need to stand up. Because I benefit from this privilege. And Kamala Harris has and continues to do so, too. As long as she is not part of the solution, she is part of the problem. And we need to do this together, not just because we should, (as if it were not reason enough,) but because we can.
To members of the Indian diaspora, here are a few resources that will be useful.
Resources:
- Equality Labs’s modus operandi is to provide practical tools for South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities to make new interventions in longstanding systems of oppression and advocate for themselves. Their resources page was incredibly helpful in writing out this piece.
- Dalit Solidarity Network is a great place to learn more about caste discrimination in the West, the U.K notable.
- Reservations in India: A Resource Kit: A comprehensive resource list that will help in understanding the question of reservations and caste privilege in India.
- Sumeet Samos: Sumeet’s instagram page is very active and has a bunch of useful highlights.
Editor: Saanchi Saxena
