Caste in urban India
August 4, 2017 12:43 AM   Subscribe

The caste system is almost non-existent, at least in urban areas… How caste prejudices work in urban India - not very detailed but paints a picture. posted by hawthorne (12 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
The way these taboo systems interact with caste and economic class is really strange, and I think complicated. My broad sense is that, in urban India, class is now the really important driver and the really crude old markers of caste discrimination--not sharing utensils or physical space etc--are rigorously enforced when people are of different economic classes and somewhat more disregarded when economic status is the same. [Of course, caste discrimination still plays a role in unequal economic status, so.] And there's been a generational shift on these things, so that I would be a little surprised to meet an Indian woman of my age who really behaved in this way re utensils and things whereas I would expect it from someone of my mother's generation.

On the other hand, my only cousin to have an arranged marriage has mysteriously found a girl who he would have been allowed to marry 300 years ago, caste-wise, even though the community of such people in America is even smaller than the community in India. The rest of my urban middle class Indian cousins have not had arranged marriages, though, and have mostly married people they definitely--in caste and regional terms, though not economic terms--would not have been allowed to marry 300 years ago. And on a third hand, my dad has a neighbour who will not eat food cooked by anyone other than a Tamil Brahmin and therefore can't be invited to dinner. So. It's complicated and dispiriting, but not static.
posted by Aravis76 at 2:01 AM on August 4, 2017 [13 favorites]


And on a third hand, my dad has a neighbour who will not eat food cooked by anyone other than a Tamil Brahmin and therefore can't be invited to dinner.

Out of curiosity does this person ever eat at a restaurant, or does the caste implications only extend to other Indian subcontinent peoples? ie Would they eat from Mario Batali's restaurant, but not from food cooked in your parents kitchen?
posted by koolkat at 2:17 AM on August 4, 2017


No idea, I don't know them well enough to say. They're an elderly retired couple and employ a Tamil Brahmin cook who prepares all the meals that the wife doesn't cook; my impression is that they don't go out much. You do also get restaurants, in Delhi and elsewhere, where you are guaranteed a Brahmin cook. This is a decent piece on how caste interacts with cooking in India, which explains some of the oddities.
posted by Aravis76 at 3:16 AM on August 4, 2017 [14 favorites]


As a footnote to the point about class and caste, I would be amazed if my dad's neighbours allowed their upper-caste-but-lower-class cook to sit on the sofas in their house or even to drink from the same glasses. There is no ritual impurity problem with her--she's the same caste as they are--but I bet they preserve the boundaries as a way of marking their class difference. (In the really old days, caste didn't track class in such a simple way. My mother still remembers going to the houses of relatives where, as a small child, she had to avoid touching the cook who served the meals - because she was of a lower caste to him, and he would have to go off and bathe if she touched him. It's really complicated.)
posted by Aravis76 at 4:19 AM on August 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


Just as with race in the US, one can nitpick about whether something is a class marker or a caste marker, but it's one hell of a coincidence that a lot of Dalits seem to fall on the wrong side of class markers.

(It's a chicken-and-egg, of course. Dalits have been subject to millennia of atrocious oppression and modern Dalits have inherited multigenerational poverty, marginalization, and downtrodden-ness. One can go around endless circles of arguing whether modern-day Dalits are underprivileged because they are low-caste or whether they are treated as low-castes because they are underprivileged - the fact is that both these things are true and each reinforces the other.)
posted by splitpeasoup at 9:18 AM on August 4, 2017 [2 favorites]


Yes, I'm not denying the obvious causal connection between casteism and economic underprivilege. I was making a much narrower and more tentative point about how the specific customs around caste discussed in the article have mutated to take account of urban modernity. You're getting a lack of interest in and a blurring of strict caste boundaries among the economically privileged, as traditional regional boundaries break down. So the fine shades of caste as it operated in Tamil Nadu a hundred years ago, and the kind of detailed caste-specific behaviours that came with it, have a much weaker hold on twentysomething middle class Tamil kids in Delhi. Meanwhile, as between the urban middle class and the economically underprivileged--which includes a disproportionate number of Dalits--caste boundaries are still depressingly robust, as the article details.
posted by Aravis76 at 10:55 AM on August 4, 2017


I highly recommend Ajantha Subramanian's work:

The Meritocrats: The Indian Institute of Technology and the social life of caste (YT lecture, 44:49)

She discusses how caste is converted to merit in IIT madras before being shipped internationally as Modi's "Brand India."
posted by yaymukund at 11:54 AM on August 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


Out of curiosity does this person ever eat at a restaurant

I have a Brahmin friend in the US who loves the fries at McDonalds. He said as long as he can't see the kitchen, he doesn't know that they're not Brahmins... Other than that he doesn't eat out much, and never at Indian restaurants.
posted by miyabo at 3:23 PM on August 4, 2017


I'm confused about the term "NGO types". It is mentioned twice in the FPP article, and appears to be said in a condescending way. The only NGO acronym I can find is "non-governmental organisation", but I don't think that is what is meant in the article.

Does anyone know what the article means by "NGO types"?
posted by cynical pinnacle at 3:40 PM on August 4, 2017


cynical pinnacle, I don't think you're missing anything... I took "NGO types" as a flippant reference to the sort of people who work at non-governmental organizations, not unlike "social justice warriors" (SJWs).
posted by yaymukund at 5:49 PM on August 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


I read "NGO" as basically meaning "nonprofit". Imagine the type of person who works for a charity or policy organization -- urban, cosmopolitan, left-wing, probably somewhat bohemian.

i'm glad to see this discussed. i've noticed in myself a tendency to try and squeeze these systems of oppression and inequality into the same framework as racism in the US, when that doesn't really make sense. I see this mistaken tendency in others too, and I've noticed wealthier, more conservative and nationalistic Indians use this fact to erase the problems of caste -- that it's really just the colonizers trying to impose their mindset onto India, and there aren't any real problems, or anyway there aren't anymore, and they were totally the fault of colonial rule anyway, which is gone, so there's no problem.
posted by vogon_poet at 12:09 PM on August 5, 2017 [1 favorite]


Thank you yaymukund and vogon_poet for weighing in - the explanations made sense.
posted by cynical pinnacle at 12:42 PM on August 6, 2017


« Older The Grandest Stage of Them All   |   If lightning is the anger of the gods, they care... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments