by Radha Lath

I’ve been reading Isabel Wilkerson’s book “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents.” As a Hindu, I thought her use of the caste framework to understand race in America was potentially disorienting, but truthfully, I ended up being fascinated. She argues that in the Hindu caste system, as well as in the racist founding ideologies of the United States, those on the higher rungs will shape shift however they need to, to alter the definitions of who is privileged, but the end result is always that Dalits in India, and Black people in America, will still remain dehumanized.

I was extremely personally convicted by the book as I got drawn in. I spent the days that it took to read the whole thing in chronic pain. My lower back and my shoulder ached fiercely, a biting, mean spirited pain that delighted in robbing me of sleep, simple activity, and gentle communion with my family. At first I did not associate pain with my reading. What a preposterous notion, right? I was also having a psychic unraveling that I will address later. In all of it, I scolded myself for not being better at self care, and I pushed myself to labor physically because, well, those are my duties in a household where autism is its beating heart and pulsing veins.

One awful night, when I could not get to sleep because the hounds of pain were gnawing at me, I decided to try a kinder approach, and had a gentle talk with my shoulder. I told it things like—It’ll be okay. You don’t have to hold up the whole world. I love you. You’re safe. And in that way that happens when we finally submit to how much we need our minds and bodies to have the most passionate love affair we might ever experience, my pain finally ebbed, and I fell asleep with tears of gratitude streaked across my cheeks.

What, you might ask, was it about this book? Well, I, like many Indians living in America, am situated in two caste systems—the traditional Hindu one, and the colorist one here in America. For me personally, I have a huge amount of privilege in one, and am considered of the “model” minority in the other. Of course, misogyny factors into the former, and racism into the latter, and those entities combine to tarnish some of the gloss of privilege, but the fact is that it has taken a lot of internal work for me to be on the side of liberation and justice, and I will always have to rein in my own impulses. I have been mulling over the steep costs of patriarchy. On an everyday scale, this terrible system robs women of meaningful time together. It erects artificial barriers between us which we come to believe are natural. It warps our relationships in fundamental ways. It purposefully structures narratives in ways that ensure that we will not see ourselves meaningfully represented in the major creation stories, so that we will never have access to a full range of emotions about our natural state of being in the world. It disconnects us from the processes of and rights to our own bodies. And that is not even touching on the more extreme outcomes, nor does it address the shape shifting laws that uphold perpetrators of violence, and which make daily life a fearful struggle for so many marginalized people.

India has been reeling, deeply divided by the recent gang rapes and murders of young women from the Dalit caste. Rapes of Dalit girls and women by upper caste men are shockingly common. And justice for them is usually not pursued with as much fervor as when such horrors are perpetrated on upper caste girls and women. In one of the recent cases, the police locked up the victim’s family, took away their phones, and proceeded to burn the woman’s body, depriving her of proper mourning rites, plus ensuring that there would be no forensic evidence to convict the rapists. The town authorities have also made it dangerous for the family to receive visitors.

As Wilkerson notes in her book “Caste,” when she discusses the trauma inflicted by slavery, and this applies to modern racism, patriarchy and Hindu casteism also, if you are deemed less than human, then whatever is considered a natural human reaction is forbidden to you. So grieving your dead, or keening with pain at the enforced separation from your own spouse or child, is not allowed. Unrestrained and even innocently extroverted behavior from girls and women is taboo, and justifies the enactment of sexual violation and torture. Demands for justice are seen as ludicrous, because justice is for actual humans.

I felt awful typing the above paragraph, but I stand by the truth of it. The ways in which Black Lives Matter protestors have been targeted as traitors and antagonists have shown us that yes, Black people are actually expected to allow state sanctioned murder to occur without consequence. Yet that is a shock only to people who are not Black. Racism is so often the gateway to other forms of bigotry, and who would have a keener understanding of society’s most heinous impulses than the people who have not had the luxury of being ignorant of its entitlement and cruelty?

There were so many thoughts flitting through my mind as I read this amazing book. Wilkerson talks about how caste is kept intact by the presence of a sentinel on every rung. It’s true—look at how poor white people glorify rich ones, finding heroes among those who will never deign to share their riches or access. Aspiring to rich whiteness is also a way of refusing solidarity with Blackness. Refusing the fear of being exposed as not being that different from the least valued. Asian Americans have made wonderful sentinels too, haven’t we? Look at how we cling to anti-Blackness. How we allow ourselves to be dehumanized, but because it is not as savage as what is perpetrated on our Black cohorts, we call it microaggressions, and we call that belonging, and friendship, and equality, and respect. Guns don’t often get pulled on us, though. THAT would be bad…

Wilkerson writes about the shock troops on the front lines, i.e. people from the “lowest” caste who “arrive,” and who climb to positions where they are underrepresented. They have to keep fighting for legitimacy and against erasure, as so many Black women are familiar with, knowing that bigotry is why the fight never seems to end, and also why the shock troops are subjected to endless gaslighting when they call it out. This made me think of the suicides of students and professionals like Rohith Vemula and Dr. Payal Tadvi, aspiring young Dalits in India who were harassed, bullied, and physically attacked by upper caste cohorts and even teachers, till their spirits broke. Their crime? Stepping out of their assigned “lowly” roles. How dare they wish to lead their sub-communities to betterment? If ever we doubt that individual acts of bigotry and state policies are conjoined, we have only to reflect on what happens when such cases come to light. Who ends up controlling the narrative. Whose idea of justice ends up prevailing.

Caste superiority is why people behave so violently, then respond with such aggrieved shamelessness when called out. As the book points out with incisive frankness, Confederate monuments to the decisive losers of the historic war on slavery are defended because of a larger lack of remorse, and a top-down lack of soul searching. Imagine handing the reins of power back to the defeated abusers. Yet that is exactly what was done. Wilkerson effectively highlights Germany’s efforts to atone and make restitution after the Holocaust, showing how the US has failed by comparison, post American Civil War. I really urge people to engage with this book, if you haven’t already. We will never get to fixing what has always been broken if we cannot get past the jingoistic rhetoric of being the greatest nation in the world. Why else do we cry over privileged people going to prison, the rare times that they do? Our tears come from the same righteous victimhood and self aggrandizement.

There is a justifiably cringe-inducing comment that floats around a lot, when Indian caste-decolonizing activists are writing on social media. It is this: that there is rarely any mystery about who is a Brahmin (‘highest’ in the Hindu caste system); they always announce it within five minutes of any discussion. And it’s true. We (shudder) do this, even when we are being self deprecating. As do members of the other “upper” castes.

I think we do this because it’s the biggest elephant in the room. We can’t exactly say “Oh yes, those upper caste devils. Look at them with their air of ritual purity. Decolonize!” We are the system’s most fortunate beneficiaries! Just like white people cannot hide their skin color, “upper” caste folks are known by our last names, speech patterns, and, as even Wilkerson, an outsider to India, came to recognize in us, our bearing, and nonverbal behaviors. We assume the right to be centered. And whether we are white or Brahmin women, we want to be acknowledged for how we too are victims of white and Brahmin patriarchy. Really, what we are doing is bringing our trauma to decolonizing spaces, and inflicting it on people who have suffered worse from those systems in much more intricate ways. We take up oxygen and we say Me Too, but, you know, with really upper crust enunciation.

I mentioned a psychic unraveling earlier. It is this: through the experience of mothering two autistic children, one of whom is also transgender, I have experienced the shape shifting that individuals and communities do in order to erase and diminish the marginalized. It is like an invisible baton. Magically, it is always handed to someone else, never to us. No one even admits it exists, or is being passed. We are autism-friendly, says one group to us, while enacting pity and charity on autism, and shunning the LGBTQ identity as a misguided “choice.” We are welcoming of both, says another group performatively, while practicing ableism and racism even despite good intentions. The policing is endless. There is race, gender, autism, LGBTQ, and also caste (my husband and I are an intercaste couple). In ways we cannot predict, someone or other invariably seeks proof that we belong, or a reason to exclude one or more of our multiple identities. And it is unraveling my being.

So now I have a small inkling of what it is like to lose my privilege, and can bear some minor witness to how much soul extraction it costs me. How much I no longer trust or cherish many old relationships. How many foundational truths have collapsed. How many doors have swung quickly shut before I could shepherd my family through them. Who can think about the gates of heaven when even earthly ones do not dally for us? Is it any wonder my back became bent? I could not even fathom how to keep walking. This is what bigotry inflicts on bodies and hearts. And yet, I have privilege.

My brother, who works in an African country which I shan’t name so that he can indulge in a pretense at anonymity, recently told me about how some of his French colleagues, who are very athletic, will body shame the average Indian for not having what they consider classic yoga physiques. How on earth has yoga come from your heritage, they scoff. After I had rescued my eyes from how far back in my head they had rolled (an asana created and perfected by colonialism, by the way), I thought about how yoga is not a competitive sport in India. Any auntie with a woven mat, dressed in whatever she is comfortable wearing, can do it. There is no call to spandex. No need to show up to a synthetic mat. No lifting of the posterior or pointing of feet towards a living altar (so disrespectful). And certainly no need to have a perfect body in order to partake of our own heritage. (No doubt a lot has changed amongst urban millennials and Gen Z-ers, but I shall leave our bedewed youth to their adaptations.)

I also thought about how easy it is for whiteness to claim our practices and profit from them, while ignoring how postcolonial societies have had to expend resources on recovering from the trauma of colonization. How, in the west, no one would give a visa to an Indian citizen to emigrate just to be a yoga practitioner, so everyone thinks that it is okay to fill the vacuum with white teachers, who tell us our own Indian bodies are unfit for yoga. Who love to expound on mindfulness and tell us to balance our chakras. It is amazing how little self reflection or shame there is. The same applies to us, though. Our culture has learned to shape shift to accommodate the demands of whiteness. So our gurus teach yoga to white aspirants, but we still keep all kinds of doors shut when it comes to Dalits. The baton is always slippery, and it never gets passed to the people who are most connected to rightful indigenous heritages.

In the midst of my horrid back spasm, I stepped out of my comfort zone, and signed up for a sacred rage workshop that was exclusively for BIPOC women. It was timely. I was in such a state of paralysis, I couldn’t even talk about how angry I was. And I felt unsafe in any spaces where spiritual Beckies might show up.

The workshop was led by two women from the Dominican Republic. And it was transformative. When we shared our thoughts after, we were able to hold and be held. No gaslighting. No erasure. No fragility. No batons being deftly passed before we could even perceive them. Steady acceptance. The most holiness I have experienced since my parenting journey began. And despite most of it having been yoga-based, I did not feel even slightly alienated. Instead, I felt this: that yoga was safe in the hands, bodies, and souls of such courageous women. My borders blurred with all the amazing women who let out their pain and were rendered visible, but in loving safety.

And that, dear reader, was my first step towards healing.

Radha.
Source:
Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” New York:
Random House, 2020.