Marco Werman: Suraj Yengde, how do you define caste?

Suraj Yengde:Caste has evolved in the way we’ve understood it as a system of organizing a society. Today it continues, but in a very secular, globalized capitalist context. It’s essentially a hierarchy that you inherit, and you live through it. It operates in prominent democracies, as well as utilizes the gender dynamics to maintain a civicness of a society, thereby producing elements of outcast communities across the world.

Yeah, and the so-called untouchables are the Dalits, the lowest strata in the Indian caste system. Can you explain this concept of untouchability and how it’s been viewed over time and ultimately, I think, rejected?

Over time, what it essentially did was codify it as a regulated arc of organizing a society. They were creating a swath of humanity, very, very brutally, kind of organized in a way that legitimizes the dominance of a group by creating a group of untouchables. So, untouchables really became identified with a caste, and the caste then continued as a stigma over several generations, and today, we have that notion of untouchables, not just in India, [but in] South Asia. It has to be looked through the phases of colonization in the past 200 to 300 years. Slavery has produced it here in the Western Hemisphere, and we see that happening also in Latin America.

How does caste appear today in India? Like what would be the daily manifestations of caste if you were ascribed to the Dalit caste?

India essentially equates [everything] and makes it synonymous with caste. Everything in the political structure is around caste. Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi, for example, announced himself as someone who belongs to a particular caste that doesn’t belong to [the] dominant community. So, every affair, right from education, your religious institution, the jobs you get, is surrounded through the penetrating ideas, as well as the thoughts of caste at work today. So, as a Dalit, for example, access to basic education, access to jobs, as well as access to respectable political positions are challenged because the gaze of the dominant community looks at untouchables still as these filthy, undeserving people who are among us.

So Suraj, you consider yourself Dalit, correct?

That’s right.

What does that mean to you when you’re in India and when you’re not in India?

When I go to India, the viscerality of that experience really comes [out], even though I want to push back and challenge it. But it’s no guarantee that the other person is looking at me the same way. He may not look at me as someone who is an Ivy League professor, an author, an actor, whatnot. He or she is still casting down that gaze of patronage. It’s painful because they are not necessarily looking at the humanity here, but they are more looking at the insecurity that I bring to the position that they hold, which is to say that the untouchables are undeserving. These are people who are from the quota communities. They came here because there was a reservation. They got fewer marks. This whole idea of meritocracy, you know, looks down. When I’m not in India, for example, it’s a different ballgame because then I have more freedom to articulate my views, and there’s nobody saying, “Oh, but you belong to this caste.” That’s not the kind of conversation I’m having.

Just a second ago, you mentioned B.R. Ambedkar. We discussed the clip earlier from Ava DuVernay’s “Origin,” and you’re in the movie explaining the statue of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. The statue’s behind a cage because it’s constantly vandalized. Who was B.R. Ambedkar and why that cage?

B.R. Ambedkar was someone who drafted India’s constitution. It happens to be the world’s largest, longest written constitution, and it draws inspiration from the liberalism that exists across the world, and America was one of them. He was the first untouchable who was born in 1891 to go to school, to matriculate from the Bombay province, and then he came to Columbia. He’s a proud alumni of Columbia, gets his doctorate there, and then goes to London School of Economics, gets a second doctorate. So, it’s almost like an anomaly who comes out of the trenches of the caste system and buried with the heavy weight of untouchability, breaks through it and really becomes this standing icon.

In your book, “Caste: A Global Story,” you make this connection from Ambedkar to really, if not the rest of the world, to the United States. You write that 20th-century scholars of caste like Ambedkar became fascinated with Black literature and the Black liberation movement in the United States. What were the parallels?

The Black movement, for example, by the 19th century itself, was global in nature. As in, the abolitionists here in this part of the world where I’m right now, in the New England area, were really advocating through these channels of common wealth. And so, as a result, the liberation of Black people was very well reported and documented. And Ambedkar, being a product of what was happening during the Harlem Renaissance, we see that there are so many parallels he sees, and he makes a remarkable argument to say that untouchables here were the surplus labor. Whereas here in the Black conditions a of post-slave society, they were this kind of mass exodus of people from South to North, and that’s what they created this kind of new civilization. His mentor, John Dewey, for example, was somebody who wrote about this in Chicago and other regions, creating a new post-migrant society. So, the Black struggle in this sense was really acting as a solidarity for Ambedkar. And he was a celebrity within the Black academic culture. He was invited to Fisk University. He was reported about in Black newspapers, which I also write about as to how they capture this imagination. But somehow, that work is eclipsed by this dominance of looking through this religious nationalism that kind of takes place through Christianity here in America, through the Quaker movement, and the Hindu movement led by [Mahatma] Gandhi. So, this kind of Gandhi-led affliction really promotes this kind of nonviolent move undermining Ambedkar, who was essentially leading a more prosperous and subaltern groundswell of the people who were not having voices.

I’ve got a quote from your book I’d like to read, Suraj. “We cannot speak of caste as a common ancestral practice that originates in one country and replicates similarly elsewhere. To do so is to ignore the ability of caste to reproduce itself as a system that accommodates itself to local customs and introduces its hierarchical logic as a justifiable practice of old.” So how does caste reproduce itself outside of India?

I mean, you look at the Indian labor, for example, in America, right? Who are these people? What’s their composition? Because when you go to India, in any college or any education institution, caste follows you. And if you are somebody who doesn’t have to carry the caste certificate, that means you are from the dominant caste community. Nevertheless, the demography is very diverse. So, people who graduate from all engineering colleges or even medical colleges or any institutions, when they essentially come to America as an H-1B laborer or a laborer within various visa categories, they come here and live within that echo chamber because [the] American system recognizes this racial disparity but doesn’t adequately pay attention to these intra-community caste-like systems. And that’s why it’s not just India or South Asia. It also occurs and happens in [the] Caribbean. That’s where one part of my book takes us.

The quote I read is from your chapter about the Dalit diaspora in Trinidad in the Caribbean, as you said. Many Dalits who came to Trinidad saw an opportunity to distance themselves from the caste system that placed them at the bottom of the rung in India. At the same time, many of them assert a Hindu identity as a way of staying connected to their heritage, especially in a place with strong Christian influence like Trinidad. Hinduism has a strong connection with caste. So, what role does caste play for Indo-Trinidadian life?

More than 38% of Indo-Trinidadians are from the Dalit background. They were the descendants of untouchables. And it makes sense, right? Why would you leave a place, the alluvial soil and the riches of your own country, and go far away to a distant island which you don’t even know? It is because of these tremors of caste system that untouchables voluntarily choose to cross across this multiple oceans to reach Trinidad and form a big corpus of Indo-Trinidadian population. But the Hinduism that they practiced is not this necessarily Brahmin caste Hinduism. For them, Hinduism was very much a memory, a distant realization of their ancestry. So, they would recite various Ram-related kathas, the “Ramayanas,” and so forth, which was not Brahminic in nature because it was subaltern Hinduism, if you know what I mean. And then, there were lots of Hindu dominant caste activities that proliferated them into becoming more Hindu by presenting Christianity as a counter. And thus, kind of within these two kinds of challenges and schisms, many untouchables assimilated into this kind of Hindu order, and many of them eventually changed their names to higher caste names. So today, if somebody in Trinidad or Guyana or Suriname identifies as an Indian of a higher caste, most likely they may not be that.

Oh, interesting. Just looking further afield, I was listening to a scholar recently arguing that the value to external forces of a Palestinian child in Gaza is the same as that of a Black child in the US South. Would you argue that caste shows up in both of those situations?

Absolutely. In fact, in the movie “Origin,” even I kind of make that comparison. It’s the same system that we see in operation. The genius of the caste system is [that] it exists, yet there is no adequate language to capaciously challenge this, to really assimilate the experience of everyday people. That’s why these comparisons that we see are often thrown around as categories like race and race-like, which is not adequate to understand the rest of the world. That’s why if you look at the experience of a Black child here in America or a Palestinian child in Gaza and elsewhere, we see [the] same phenomena of repeated oppression that is based on this inherited hierarchy where one group establishes its unchallenged supremacy while creating a punishing system and experience for [the] majority.

And finally, just to return to the movie “Origin,” I saw a clip of you recently with Ava DuVernay on the red carpet at Cannes when the film premiered a few years ago. There’s now discussion of caste on social media, and I wonder what has bringing this difficult and complex topic of caste into the arena of popular cinema and culture done to move the needle?

I think that movie is really a great statement on what art and what creativity can do. And I think many people are now coming to terms [with it]. It tells us that the American conscience is ready to understand, and there are solidarities, especially among Dalits, the Black, the Native Americans. And if they are not as prominent, we ought to make them now. And let the 21st century — like [W.E.B.] Du Bois said, the 20th century was going to be a century where the world will wrestle with [the] color problem. My hope is the 21st century will wrestle with the caste problem that exists around the world.