Thursday
Of the non-fiction books that have impacted me the most over the past ten years—there haven’t been many since I normally stick to novels—Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents leads the list. For the first time in my life I understood why racism persists in America, despite Martin Luther King, Barack Obama, and the many, many African Americans one sees in sports, entertainment, and public life.
Wilkerson contends America has an unacknowledged caste system, which she compares to India’s treatment of the untouchables or Dalits and the Nazis’ systematic discrimination against the Jews. With this in mind, I have found myself particularly attuned to mentions of caste in the Indian novels I have been reading. These include A Fine Balance, by Indian Canadian author Rohinton Mistry, and Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things.
Mistry’s account of the Dalits dramatizes for me what we are seeing in this country. I’ll share passages in a moment but first some words on how America’s caste system works.
Every immigrant group, upon entering America, is tacitly invited to see themselves as superior to African Americans, and not a few accept the invitation. Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White is one study of the process, but certain Eastern Europeans, Asians (South, East, and Southeast), Mexicans, Central and South Americans, West Indians (most notably Cubans but not only Cubans), and even Africans have also attempted to buy in.
A former Ethiopian student who lived with us recently told me a revealing story. When he was working in the campus coffee shop, he had both white and Black friends amongst the staff. At one point, however, an otherwise kindly white worker informed him that one of his Black friends was an “n-word.” In other words, seeing that he was missing a distinction that helped define who she was, she set out to instruct him. Fond of him, she thought she was doing him a favor by inviting him to join the in-group.
In the same conversation—we were dining with him and his wife in Washington, D.C.—we learned about a Trump supporter in the Ethiopian community who had become impossible to talk to. Among other things, this woman characterized longtime African Americans (i.e., the descendants of slaves) as shiftless and lazy. She was sure that Trump would distinguish her from these others because she saw herself as a hard worker.
MAGA, of course, has its own opinions on the subject. Certain high-profile influencers have gone after J.D. Vance’s Hindu wife, and on Elon Musk’s X there is currently debate about whether Jews can be considered white. While Musk himself says that Jews “look extremely European in every way” to him, he adds that DNA testing is needed to know for sure.
Our caste system is 300+ years old so I can only imagine how entrenched it is in a country like India. In Mistry’s novel we get a glimpse into how Dalits were taught their place in a small village in the early part of the 20th century:
For walking on the upper-caste side of the street, Sita was stoned, though not to death–the stones had ceased at first blood. Gambhir was less fortunate; he had molten lead poured into his ears because he ventured within hearing range of the temple while prayers were in progress. Dayaram, reneging on an agreement to plough a landlord’s field, had been forced to eat the landlord’s excrement in the village square. Dhiraj tried to negotiate in advance with Pandit Ghanshyam the wages for chopping wood, instead of settling for the few sticks he could expect at the end of the day. The Pandit got upset, accused Dhiraj of poisoning his cows, and had him hanged.
We also learn how the class distinctions are passed on to the next generation:
Thus Dukhi listened every evening to his father relate the unembellished facts about events in the village. During his childhood years, he mastered a full catalogue of the real and imaginary crimes a low-caste person could commit, and the corresponding punishments were engraved upon his memory. By the time he entered his teens, he had acquired all the knowledge he would need to perceive that invisible line of caste he could never cross, to survive in the village like his ancestors, with humiliation and forbearance as his constant companions.
At one point, when Gandhi is campaigning for freedom from British rule, Dukhi hears members of the Indian National Congress speaking out against the caste system. “How can we even start to be strong,” says one, “when there is a disease in our midst? First we must be rid of this disease that plagues the body of our motherland.” He continues,
What is this disease? you may ask. This disease, brothers and sisters, is the notion of untouchability, ravaging us for centuries, denying dignity to our fellow human beings. This disease must be purged from our society, from our hearts, and from our minds. No one is untouchable, for we are all children of the same God. Remember what Gandhiji says, that untouchability poisons Hinduism as a drop of arsenic poisons milk.
Speaking to a Muslim friend, Dukhi says, “I wonder if the zamindars in our villages would ever clap for a speech about getting rid of the caste system,” to which his friend replies, “They would clap and go on in the same old way. The devil has stolen their sense of justice, nah—they cannot see or feel.
His friend wants Dukhi to send his two sons to him to apprentice as tailors, which would be a radical departure. Dukhi resists until his young sons are punished for entering a school. He has their thrashing explained to him:
Your children entered the classroom. They polluted the place. They touched instruments of learning. They defiled slates and chalks, which upper-caste children would touch. You are lucky there wasn’t a holy book like the Bhagavad Gita in their cupboard, no sacred texts. Or the punishment would have been more final.
The punishment prompts Dukhi to take up his friend’s offer, even though he loses his own livelihood in this departure from custom. His sons do in fact become tailors, entering the world to become part of the book’s subsequent plot.
I know that the fortunes of the Dalits have changed significantly since that time. Yet, as in America, despite legal protections discrimination still continues.
To switch novels, I think of the way that police treat a Dalit character (Velutha) in The God of Small Things. When a Christian Syrian woman has a relationship with Velutha (the action is set in 1969), the police track him down and beat him to death. They appear driven, not by individual will, but by thousand-year-old “love laws” that dictate “who should be loved, and how. And how much.” Roy tells us that the book’s twins, who have befriended Velutha and who witness his murder,
were too young to know that [the police] were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilizations fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of the powerlessness.
Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.
Men’s needs.
Describing the killing of Velutha as “history in live performance,” Roy says that the police “were exorcising fear”:
Unlike the custom of rampaging religious mobs or conquering armies running riot,…the posse of Touchable Policemen acted with economy, not frenzy. Efficiency, not anarchy. Responsibility, not hysteria. They didn’t tear out his hair or burn him alive. They didn’t hack off his genitals and stuff them in his mouth. They didn’t rape him. Or behead him.
After all they were not battling an epidemic. They were merely inoculating a community against an outbreak.
If one realizes that America’s own caste system goes this deep, it explains a lot about our politics. So what if Democratic policies benefit workers and farmers while GOP tax cuts benefit only the wealthy. MAGA Republicans are deeply grateful to Trump for his birther lie about Obama and his assault on Diversity, Inclusion and Equity. They love that he hates the people they want to feel superior to.
It helps explain why his poll numbers aren’t even lower.
