Every Sunday, my pastor gives a “call to faith”—an invitation to conversion—to the congregation. We pray together, applaud any new or returning converts, and hurry outside to loiter over coffee and donuts.

For us, religious conversion is a rather intimate, personal decision with little consequence for one’s social or political standing. Thanks to a remarkably free legal and religious environment in the West (and frankly, a disinterested public), it is as ordinary an act as any.

But in India, the same act can end in a prison cell.

In Uttarakhand, Pastor Nandan Singh Bisht was leading an overnight prayer meeting when a mob of 35 Hindus stormed in. They tore apart Bibles, shattered religious artifacts, and beat him, yelling: “You are a Thakore [upper-caste] by birth—why are you converting people?”

When the police arrived, they ignored the mob and arrested the pastor for violating an anti-conversion law (though he was facilitating a prayer meeting, not conversion), along with his pregnant wife and their three-year-old daughter. Bisht spent eight days in jail, but lost much more than time: “My wife was four months pregnant when I was arrested… because of all the stress and tension, we lost our baby.”

Today, 13 of India’s 28 states enforce anti-conversion laws under the false pretenses of “allurement” and “coercion,” arresting hundreds of religious leaders and stoking anti-Christian and anti-Muslim bigotry and violence. With Maharashtra joining the club this year, roughly 718 million people—more than half of the nation—now live under anti-conversion laws. For context, that constituency amounts to nearly all of Europe, from Russia to Portugal.

A policy governing 1 in every 11 living humans would surely be meticulously developed and widely agreeable—right? Far from it. These laws exist in open contempt of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Their logic is unbearably ambiguous and flimsy, evolving as blanket protections for the Hindu political elite to criminalize other religions whenever and however they want. The punishment is significantly increased or doubled if those who convert are women, lower-caste, or of tribal communities.

These laws are a glaring stain on India’s constitutional promise of religious freedom. So, why do they exist?

I grew up seeing such persecution as bald-faced religious fanaticism, but I’ve since learned that the problem is deeper: India fundamentally misunderstands conversion. And more importantly, it fears what conversion might do to its most cherished system of social control: caste.

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The Pluralism Trap

When Hindu philosopher Swami Vivekananda took the stage at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, he famously analogized religion as a variety of streams mingling together in a single sea. “I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance,” he said. “We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true.”

In Why I Am a Hindu, parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor adds his praise: “As a Hindu I can claim adherence to a religion […] whose rituals and customs I am free to reject, a religion that does not oblige me to demonstrate my faith by any visible sign, by subsuming my identity in any collectivity… Hinduism asserts that all ways of belief are equally valid, and Hindus readily venerate the saints, and the sacred objects, of other faiths.”

India’s most celebrated thinkers hail Hinduism as the most pluralist of religions, giving rise to the most tolerant of societies. They contrast its fluidity and acceptance with the rigid metaphysics of Christianity and Islam, which insist on exclusive truths and singular means of salvation. In a theological sense, this is true. Hindu philosophy holds a capacious view of truth. The Rig Vedic verse “ekam sat, vipra bahudha vadanti” (truth is one, the wise call it by many names) begets the interpretation that there are many margas, or paths, ascending a single mountain of truth.

But its pluralism is a trap.

If all paths already lead to the same summit, then to change them should present no problem. Yet it does. The same tradition that celebrates pluralism condemns those who leave its path. The same Vivekananda who accepted “all religions as true” also ranked them “from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism,” each a way-station to be outgrown on the climb toward a Hindu peak.

Scholar Reid B. Locklin interprets this nuance as conversion-up instead of conversion-over: “The unfolding of such change is primarily up from one level of understanding to another, rather than over from one tradition to another.” German Indologist Paul Hacker described this posture as “inclusivist” rather than pluralist—less a good-faith engagement with other religions than a subordination of them into one’s own doctrinal system. What appears as a warm-hearted hug ultimately muddles, suffocates, and devours other faiths.

In Why I Am Not a Hindu, political theorist Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd documents a centuries-long process of Hinduization, where pre-Hindu, indigenous Indian deities and folk spiritualities were deliberately “converted-up” into Hindu versions of themselves. Lord Jagannath of Puri—the presiding deity over one of Hinduism’s four holiest dhams—originated as a wooden forest god among the Savara tribe of Odisha. Millions of Adivasis (indigenous people) identifying as Sarna, a nature-worshipping faith that rejects idol worship and caste, are forced under the census into one of six recognized religions—effectively as Hindu. Hindu nationalists oppose a separate “Other” census code and insist Adivasi faiths are Hindu.

Anantanand Rambachan, an expert on Hindu-Christian relations, clarifies that while Hindu traditions honor the freedom of religious choice, “these choices were exercised among the religious alternatives which evolved in India and which, in spite of their differences, affirmed significant elements of a common worldview.” Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, while non-orthodox, are native to India and reflect many elements of the Hindu religious universe. In other words, Indians tolerate religious choice, so long as one chooses within ‘the family.’ To choose an “outside” religion, in other words, is to break up the family.

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Home-Wreckers

Vedanta teacher Swami Dayananda Saraswati likened conversion to violence “because of the pain it causes to the family and community of the convert,” Rambachan writes. In a 2003 interview, Saraswati compared it to the plight of Black Americans and argued that conversion means “he has to disown his parents, and their wisdom and their culture, his ancestors, and entire community… So it is great violence against culture, tradition.”

The premise behind this worldview and its political fruit is that Hinduism is a sort of “home base” or “inherited family” for all Indians, and ought to be preserved as such. The Supreme Court ruled that a Dalit who reconverts to Hinduism regains caste-based affirmative action benefits, while one who converts away to Christianity or Islam loses them. The state literally rewards one kind of conversion while penalizing the other.

It’s telling that not a single anti-conversion law addresses—let alone punishes—“reconversion” to Hinduism. This is called Ghar Wapsi, or “returning home.” It assumes that all Indians are ancestrally Hindu, so conversion to Hinduism is simply a homecoming. In his movement-defining 1923 text Essentials of Hindutva, Hindu nationalist politician Vinayak Damodar Savarkar argued that Hindus were the original indigenous people of India and comprised a single nation and race. While this is an extreme and widely debunked idea, it’s reflected in public sentiment.

A 2024 Pew Research survey found nearly two-thirds of Hindus admitted being Hindu is “very important” to being “truly Indian.” In this context, conversion carries the baggage not only of spiritual heresy but national betrayal. Such logic explains why, in a 2022 affidavit to the Supreme Court, India’s central government argued that religious freedom poses a “threat to national security.”

This assumption is sharpened by colonial association. Christianity, Rambachan notes, “became associated, in reality and in the minds of Hindus, with imperialism and with the arrogance and disdain of the colonizer towards India and especially towards India’s cultural and religious forms and expressions.”

India saw no shortage of indigenous participation in Christianity, from first-century Keralite priests to 20th-century Punjabi evangelists. But the faith arrived most prominently on the ships and ledgers of empire, consecrating the machines of conquest. Christianity’s exclusive theological claims to revelation, salvation, and truth came to echo Western claims to political and cultural supremacy—a fusion authored by the British. But though the empire is gone, its trauma isn’t. Christian conversion—even at the minuscule rate of 0.4%—is still seen as a threat to the nation.

The Hindu state often pins Christian conversion on the grounds of “allurement.” Christian converts are commonly slurred as “rice bag converts,” accused of trading their souls for food and social support. Putting aside its ugliness, the term raises the question: if a family relegated to spiritual impurity, poverty, illiteracy, and social violence and terror because of their religion accepts a Christian education, or healthcare, or food—and then accepts its God—was the choice free, or was it bought? What does conversion among the caste-oppressed say about a Hindu society?

Christianity’s telos aspires not only to mend estrangement from God but from systems of domination and disrepair. Historically, this was worked out through “the provision of education, health care, housing, food and clothing”—acts that, Rambachan writes, “are seen from the Hindu viewpoint, as inducements to conversion” but by Christians as inseparable from faith itself.

To consider basic human rights as spiritual bribes is only reasonable in a society comfortable with dehumanizing its people. And this is the core issue of conversion. Rambachan explains: “Traditions [like Buddhism and Jainism] were also easily accommodated because none of these fundamentally challenged the legitimacy of the hierarchical system of caste.” Beneath the language of cultural preservation lies the thing actually being preserved. The unifying substrate of Hindu society is caste, and conversion threatens it.

Ambedkar’s Death Wish

In 1935, Dalit civil rights leader Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar announced he was converting. “I was born a Hindu, but I will not die a Hindu,” he told a crowd of 10,000 at Yeola—and through their gossip, all of India.

He asked his Dalit followers: “Why do you remain in a religion which does not treat you as human beings?” Ambedkar had experimented with countless social and legal means of inducing Hindu religious reform, but found it to be a fruitless endeavor. The religion was incapable of emancipating its oppressed.

Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundarajan gives sharp language to the Dalit condition in The Trauma of Caste: “We are survivors of spiritual violence,” a people “robbed of existential belonging,” and considered “spiritually defiling before God.” For such a people, conversion is the only answer.

Ambedkar set upon a 20-year journey of systematically evaluating religions to arrive at the most reasonable and socially liberative one, and decided upon Buddhism (a particular form he called Navayāna, or “new vehicle”). He converted in 1956 at a field in Nagpur later called Deekshabhoomi (“the ground of vow-taking”), and was joined by half a million of his white-robed followers. Weeks later, he died.

Ambedkar’s scathing indictment of Hinduism and commitment to conversion sent shockwaves through reformist and orthodox circles alike. Historically, Hinduism had no central conversion ritual. Only in the last century, largely in response to Muslim and Christian expansion, did Hindu organizations invent formal rites of conversion or shuddhi (purification). In Outside the Fold, scholar Gauri Viswanathan argues that conversion in colonial India was itself a modernizing act—a Western category being applied to a landscape that hadn’t asked for it. To choose one’s religion was, in a sense, to think like a Christian.

During Ambedkar’s public inquiry, independence leader Mahatma Gandhi loudly opposed conversion altogether, calling it “a blasphemy against God and the self” and “the greatest impediment to the world’s progress toward peace.” Ambedkar’s heresy was not merely to choose Buddhism over Hinduism, but the very notion of choice itself. (Ironically, the word “heresy” comes from the Greek root hairesis, which means “to choose.”)

Conversion did mean destruction in Ambedkar’s view—not of culture, but of caste. Only wholesale change of one’s moral universe—new gods, new rituals, new fellowship—could dislodge a mindset that Hinduism had spent millennia installing. He was partially right. Conversion did dissolve caste, but in predictable and stubborn ways, caste seeped into Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam as well. This doesn’t render conversion futile, however; religious change still strips caste of its theological sanction, even where its social symptoms persist. Ambedkar saw social progress as attainable if it began with a first step into a new religion.

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Anti-conversion laws tell us less about India and more about the power of conversion.

India has forged what Pew identified as the highest combined level of government restrictions and social hostilities involving religion in 2023—ahead of Egypt, Pakistan, Iran, and Indonesia. But the numbers betray the panic: Pew also found that India’s religious composition has barely shifted since 1951, and most changes were from birth rates, not baptisms. The threat of conversion is symbolic, not demographic, which means the laws were never really addressing a real trend or problem. They were about control—the control of a people, and of souls.

That is the principal issue at stake: does a person own their own soul?

“Choice is a reclamation of the most intimate parts of yourself for any survivor, and for victims of spiritual violence it is no different,” Soundarajan writes. “You must let people choose whatever journey their spirit decides without judgment or force.”

A person who can choose their God may one day refuse to be your sweeper, your scavenger, and your outcast. Conversion is not about privileging one faith over another, or erasing one culture in favor of another. It is the not-so, yet-so radical proposition that a soul belongs to the one who carries it, and that no state, no scripture, and no caste would claim it first.

Palgrave’s Golden Treasury passed from his smooth, wizened hands to mine. The weathered book has the texture of the moon, and a smoky blue binding. The pages fray and flake at the edges, and the white pages have aged brown. It is an 1861 anthology of the best English lyrical poems according to British critic Francis Turner Palgrave, featuring the likes of Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats—but I know it mostly as a cherished keepsake from my grandfather, Thatha.

In 1957, Thatha worked as an English tutor at the Government Arts College in Kadapa. He stayed at the Berachah Prayer House, a seafoam-green building with rusted copper gates. The house sat on the tree-lined Nehru Road, which meant he had frequent visitors: monkeys.

One day, a particularly daring macaque slunk through Thatha’s window, dipped its furry hands into his bookbag, and pulled out Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Alerted by the rustle or intuition, Thatha stepped into the room just long enough to share a glance with the monkey. The macaque sprang up through the window, into the heavy neem tree above the prayer house. Thatha rushed outside to find it glaring at him, fidgeting through pages, cooing and grunting deviously. He yelled, and they argued for nearly an hour before the monkey eventually lost interest—but not before ripping many pages out, letting them flounder down in front of Thatha’s eyes, which were wet with fury.

Thatha records the incident in the book’s final pages, explaining that the blue cloth binding on the book’s spine was an effort to salvage the monkey’s mischief. He doctored it with great care, like he treated his collection of ink pens, collared shirts and lungis, and newspaper clippings.

Along with this incident, Thatha’s notes on history, poetry, and myth are littered in the book’s margins. He quotes St. Coleridge and explicates 152 lines of Milton’s “L’Allegro,” describing the Greek idea of Eudaimonia and goddess Euphrosyne. A clueless reader might mistake these scribbles for that of a Victorian intellect, a trained sophist. But in fact, they were the notes of a man born Untouchable, to the impoverished villages and lemon fields of Coastal India, a then-British colony. It was such a man who ironically wrote himself into Palgrave’s poetic canon, next to Shakespeare.

“Labour and Poverty”

I’m not sure when Thatha first stumbled upon Palgrave’s collection, but I imagine it was in one of Guntur’s chaotic outdoor bookshops, cramped between communist manifestos and Hindu cartoons. The price is noted on the back: 3 rupees. Today, that is equivalent to 3 U.S. cents. In Thatha’s time, though, 3 rupees could afford a family an outing at the cinema, a hefty bag of rice, or a book of world-class poetry.

He opened the book to skim its dedication, which reads: “If this collection proves a storehouse of delight to Labour and to Poverty, if it teaches those indifferent to the Poets to love them, and those who love them to love them more, the aim and the desire entertained in framing it will be fully accomplished.”

Whatever “Labour and Poverty” Palgrave imagined, I doubt he pictured the black soil and labyrinthine canals of Tenali, Andhra Pradesh. Thatha was born there, to a people who knew how to sing, joke, pray, and indeed do hard labor amidst abject poverty—but not how to read nor write. As long back as one could remember, they were denied the ability to do so. Literacy was a privilege the gods apparently reserved for Brahmin boys and girls, and perhaps a few others that squeezed their way in.

But the magic of progress is that it can happen in an instant, subverting many millennia of inherited destiny.

In those days, the British established public schools that accepted everyone, irrespective of caste. One opened its doors in Tenali—a low, ashen building with a thatched roof, shaded by a white-barked elm. It sat on the edge of a seasonal lake that rose annually to swallow its resident taro and eelgrass. It was in that dim classroom, on an earthen floor, that Thatha became the first in his entire lineage to read and write.

It is hard to convey the profundity of becoming literate—not just for a person, but for a people. It is, as though, with every page turned and word scribbled, generations of oppression and immiseration melt away. Thatha understood literacy as a gift of God, a divine intervention that bore inherent joy and triumphant promise for a new, free future. And he took that promise rather seriously.

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Every night, he washed his only shirt and trousers to wear to school the following day. When he earned a spot at the Lutheran English Medium School in Guntur, he made the daily trek of 26 miles between Tenali and Guntur on foot—the equivalent of a marathon—to attend school, often on an empty stomach. The path was tenuous and unpaved, bordering a railroad and vast, dangerous quarries. In his final year, a sympathetic train conductor (and fellow Untouchable) allowed Thatha and his peers to ride the train for the remainder of the year.

Reading English didn’t merely thrust Thatha into opportunities restricted to those before him, but into his now deepest passion: literature. If there is any evidence for Shakespeare’s greatness, it is that the first man in his bloodline to read him became immediately, helplessly enraptured. Thatha read every single one of Shakespeare’s works, memorizing many dialogues. He narrated them to his daughters often, and later, to his grandchildren. In fact, Thatha so loved the man’s work that he suggested naming me “Shakespeare” when I was born on the poet’s birthday. Thankfully, my mother disagreed.

A Canon You Can Touch

Some months after Thatha gave me Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, I brought the book to my English class. We were thick in a curriculum about Victorian poetry and prose, and though it bored me, I hoped the book might spark some nascent passion for Shakespeare that I accidentally inherited from Thatha.

But when class began, my teacher stifled my hopes: “Much of ‘the canon,’ as we know it, is just a collection of privileged, white men who had access to write themselves into history,” she said. “We read these authors because they’re in the curriculum, but they’re only considered ‘classics’ because they had access and power at that time. Women or people of color didn’t.”

I fingered the book’s pages, like the monkey that once rifled through it, swallowing a growing realization that she had a point. Was I just uncritically accepting a Eurocentric library of mediocrity? I closed the book, resolved to read more “diverse” authors. I didn’t consider the irony that I was closing not only Shakespeare’s words, but my grandfather’s.

Thatha, a man who suffered unspeakable injustice and misery, didn’t see Keats or Shakespeare as privileged, imperious white men peddling mediocrity. He saw in their words beauty, and even freedom.

On the routine first day of school, Thatha told me, his Hindu instructors had a habit of dropping his heavy textbooks into his hands, from a distance, to avoid polluting themselves by touching the same object he did. When his teachers collected their students’ homework, they paused at Thatha’s desk to ask him to place it on the table instead. He wasn’t alone in these dehumanizing encounters. The same day he gave me the blue-bound book, Thatha told me the first story I’d ever heard about Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, an economist, jurist, and chief architect of the Indian Constitution—and fellow Untouchable.

“There were 600 local countries in India before 1947,” he said in a creaky voice, slowly and matter-of-factly, as if back in his teaching days. “The Maharaja (king) of one of those countries, Baroda, gave Ambedkar a scholarship to do his studies in England. After Ambedkar finished at the London School of Economics, he came back and the Maharaja of Baroda gave him the job of financial secretary in his state—a very prestigious role. But a low-ranking employee—the lowest category, in fact—dropped the job file on the floor instead of handing it directly to him.” Thatha’s eyes were wide and unflinching at this point, as if recalling his own similar encounters. “Ambedkar denied the job and went to the U.S. to do his master’s at Columbia.”

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It occurs to me that this vignette from Ambedkar’s life not only paralleled Thatha’s, but the intellectual universe of Dalits (Untouchables) writ large. Hindu society barred Dalits from participating in its intellectual, religious, and artistic spaces, which were dominated by Hindu ideas, aesthetics, and systems. There was no possibility for a boy from the lemon fields, classified as a pollutant, to think or articulate himself within such a paradigm.

It’s no wonder that Thatha saw in British poetry not white supremacy or privileged ignorance, but a desirable, accessible freedom. The ideals of the West, instantiated in its ancestral Greek mythos and Victorian poetry, decorated in the prophetic language of the Bible, were in fact inspiring and refreshing to a man who was made to sweep away his own footprints and denied water from Touchable taps, haircuts from Touchable barbers, and food from Touchable tables.

The Only Lightbulb

Thatha went on to write around 100 original poems in both Telugu and English. Captivated by the person of Christ and fascinated with biblical history, he translated multiple volumes of first- and fourth-century historians Josephus and Eusebius into Telugu. He published two original volumes titled బైబిలు చార్ట్రికా వస్తువాలు (Bible and Historical Facts). This all warrants much more detail, but Thatha’s greatest legacy was not his words, but his light.

Caste Hindu landowners refused to offer their property to Dalits or Christians, so Thatha and his family set down roots in a Dalit Christian enclave of Cheruvu Madhavaram, a Khammam district village marked by a large lake and agrarian economy. Thatha and his wife, my Ammamma, served as a principal and teacher at public Zila Parishad High Schools throughout the Khammam district for 30 years.

Of all the lanky, laboring boys and girls in their village, absolutely none had made it to middle school. Moreover, as Christians, they were denied state benefits enjoyed by Hindu Dalits—free textbooks, scholarships, and reservations (affirmative action quotas). Failing in their elementary ages, they were absorbed into their ancestral destinies as farmers, basket weavers, masons, and bullock cart drivers. Such is the prophecy of caste—as Ambedkar famously analogized, it not only spawns human beings into a tower with ranked floors, but cuts off every conceivable exit. To Thatha, literacy was the fire escape.

One hot day, he erected a shamiyana—a canvas canopy, stretched across four bamboo poles—in front of his home. And hanging from its center glowed a crowned jewel: a fluorescent lamp. It was the only lightbulb in their neighborhood; much of rural India had no electricity at all in those days, so people typically burned kerosene for light. Thatha’s rare purchase was made with a single purpose: to create space for neighborhood children to study, even late into the night. And they did.

Day and night, while moths and lizards flocked to the lamp, Thatha and Ammamma tutored students. He bought them notebooks and pens, and even paid school entry fees for particularly poor students. He instituted stringent expectations for students and teachers alike. He admitted everyone he possibly could into school, irrespective of age; James, the local mason, was in his late 20s, but Thatha tutored him alongside high schoolers.

A few of Thatha’s faculty contested his methods, complaining that he was too heavy-handed on them. At one point, the District Education Officer warned him: “Do you think this is a monarchy, [that you can] rule with an iron rod?” But the results were undeniable.

Within a few years, Thatha hauled the high school graduation rate from zero to the highest it had ever been in Khammam. The same officer ended up praising him. Many of those students now work as engineers, tax collectors, and government officials, with families of their own. Their lives and livelihoods are transformed, as are the possibilities of the many that came after them. I am one such beneficiary.

Palgrave’s Golden Treasury reclines in my bookshelf these days, wearing a thin veil of dust. Pages are still missing that the macaque carried off into the neem tree and never returned. Even as a native English speaker, I can hardly wrap my mind around the laborious parlance of its poets. But I cherish it above all my other books, because it is a symbol of what poetry, what reading might do to a person, to a family, and to a community.

After all, had Thatha not tutored those children, had he not bought that fluorescent lightbulb, had he not made the marathon to school day after day, had he not flipped those very first pages in that Tenali classroom by the lake, and had a loving God not captured his heart and character, how many brilliant minds would have been lost to the fields, arrested by their caste? The great words of the past possess brilliant potential to inspire freedom, but they require a literate mind and willing spirit to make a new destiny out of them—whether for one man or for many.

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“We are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

When British General Charles Napier attempted to ban sati (widow immolation) in the early 19th century, a group of Hindu priests protested on grounds of custom. Sati was their religious rite, and ought to be respected. Napier reportedly responded: “Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property.”

Beneath this showdown of colonist and native, of liberal belief and Brahmanical ritual, was a subterranean rift: Napier and the priests were speaking entirely different moral grammars.

Grammar is the sort of thing that operates just below our nose. When a child first learns to speak, they practice grammar before ever formally studying it. Grammar structures the very terms of discourse itself; we can’t intelligibly discuss anything outside of its universe. In the same way, political life is downstream of deep moral grammars—ontological assumptions that structure what is right or wrong.

The notion of “moral grammar” was originally proposed as a universal theory—that all humans share innate moral intuitions regardless of tradition. That’s not quite what I mean. Though we may navigate a shared moral landscape, there are deep canyons separating us on questions of right and wrong—namely, ones carved by religion. This piece is about those canyons.

Religion, for better or worse, has tuned our sense of rightness, defined the sacred and profane, and presupposed our political ebbs and flows. Religiously derived moral grammar is why, despite every secular attempt to shoo religion out of public life, we never fully will. It’s also why we might be more or less sensitive to emergent moral pressures, from AI ethics to wokeness, without realizing it.

At the outset, I’ll acknowledge that it is inevitably reductive to view entire groups through the lens of their religion—and even more so to compare religions. As I outline in my piece on moral progress, there are many likely variables—and interactions between said variables—influencing the moral outcomes of our world. But as a religious person, I believe religion has “spiritual” power—unilateral capacity to target the substrate of our conscience and shape our moral intuitions. That’s why Dalits en masse embrace religious conversion as the greatest act of liberation from caste. I think they’re onto something.

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You Are More Christian Than You Think

During the reflective isolation of the pandemic, I noticed that certain progressive political behaviors felt oddly religious. Practices like land acknowledgements, mandated reflections on privilege and oppression, and cancel culture were reminiscent of rituals and beliefs I first saw in church: confession, doctrines of “original sin,” and communal purity maintenance. That’s because they’re encoded with the same moral grammar.

In historian Tom Holland’s view, many progressive causes—even ones that are unpopular among Christians, like LGBTQ+ issues—are actually remnants of an underlying Christian grammar. In Dominion, Holland outlines how Christianity was the first tradition to valorize the weak, poor, and marginalized as bearers of divine worth. We take that kind of view for granted, but it would have been unthinkable in its day.

The typical Roman citizen believed that “good” was synonymous with strength, nobility, and power; in this paradigm, the sick, the poor, and the disabled didn’t have dignity. Christ and his followers emerged in this empire with a revolutionary inversion: “There was no human existence so wretched, none so despised or vulnerable, that it did not bear witness to the image of God,” writes Holland. “Divine love for the outcast and derelict demanded that mortals love them too.” Jesus’ ministry and teachings about the “Kingdom of God” inverted common ideas of power, money, and community, and subverted Roman values of emperor-worship, wealth, and status.

Holland describes how, in the Greco-Roman world, babies were “exposed” in rubbish heaps or roadsides, left to die or be taken by slave traders for the sin of being born female, disabled, or poor. This practice was rarely questioned and even encouraged by the highest minds of the day, like Aristotle. Early Christians would rescue these abandoned infants, sometimes seeking out rubbish dumps for discarded babies and raising them as their own. This Christian moral vision slowly rubbed off on emperors Constantine (315 CE), Valentinian I (374 CE), and Justinian I (529 CE), reshaping Roman law and leading to the eventual prohibition of infanticide. This wasn’t merely charity supplementing Roman law; it was a foreign moral grammar slowly rewriting it.

In Nietzsche’s language, this was the triumph of slave morality over master morality. Whereas master morality—a valuing of what is noble and powerful—was popular at that time and many other times, our modern moral instinct to protect the oppressed, distrust power, and moralize on behalf of victims is the direct heir of the cross.

The paradox in Holland’s analysis is that Christian moral grammar can critique and even overcome Christian tradition and practice, which may itself be misaligned with its implied morality. For centuries, Christians rationalized the practice of slavery with theological beliefs. But within its own pews, the religion gave a prophetic minority the moral resources needed to end slavery altogether. As historian David Brion Davis details in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, abolitionists harnessed first-order Christian beliefs about human dignity, equality, and communal unity to redefine the otherwise ubiquitous practice as “sin” and “evil,” igniting the spiritual fuel that ultimately powered slavery’s abolition.

In his seminal 1835 analysis Democracy in America, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville called religion (i.e. Christianity) “the first of political institutions” in the U.S. Modern democracy inherits Christian pity, humility, and equality as inevitable moral-political axioms. This underlying grammar is why Westerners tend to frame their moral claims in terms of fairness or rights. Political movements thrive on rights-based or victim-based framing. Even today, progressive ideas which push the boundaries of moral thought succeed because they strike the right chords in our “Christianized” cultural hearts. The person who feels viscerally that some policy is wrong, not just inefficient or suboptimal, is almost certainly drawing on inherited religious capital they haven’t acknowledged.

This isn’t to say that Christianity is the only source for such attitudes, but because of its role in the formation of the West, we are all more Christian than we’d like to admit. We translate its moral grammar in secular, universal vocabulary, but its sanctity echoes in every word. We’ve shouted away religion, but spend our lives wandering in its shadow.

Living in a Dharmic Universe

The Bhagavad Gita—one of Hinduism’s most beloved and influential scriptures—begins in a chariot. On the battlefield of Kurukshetra, the warrior prince Arjuna surveys his opposing armies and sees among them his own cousins, teachers, and beloved kin. The realization shatters him. “My limbs fail,” he tells the god Krishna. “My body trembles… my bow slips from my hand.” It is, in every way, a classic moral quandary—weighing duty against love, sorrow, and fear.

But Krishna is strikingly unsentimental and philosophical. He responds, “From where has this impurity come upon you at a time of crisis? […] Yield not to unmanliness.” Arjuna’s confusion, Krishna argues, arises from a deeper metaphysical mistake. He assures Arjuna: you are not this body. You are not these relationships. You are Ātman—the self that was never born and will never die.

Notably, he mentions his caste: “Considering your own dharma as a kshatriya (warrior caste), you should not waver. For a warrior, nothing is higher than a righteous battle.” In other words, the most moral, right thing that Arjuna can do, is to fulfill his role—his caste role, to be precise—completely.

This is Vedic moral grammar in its purest form: the question is never simply “What do I want?” or even “What am I owed?” It’s: “What is my dharma, or duty—and am I fulfilling it?”

Unlike the Abrahamic religions, Vedic ethics doesn’t derive morality from divine command, but in cosmic order that predates gods and humans alike—Rta—and to which all beings owe conformity. Dharma is the socialized form of this cosmic order—the right conduct appropriate to one’s nature, station, and moment. In Indian private and public life, dharma is king.

For instance, Indians are famous for their multigenerational households, where grandparents, children, and extended families share a common home and economic unit. This might be explained as Indian warmth or an economical measure, but it’s logic is fundamentally dharmic. Each member of their family is bound by dharmic duty to their families, and breaking such obligations is not simply a matter of “re-prioritizing” or “setting boundaries,” but violating one’s alignment with a cosmic order.

As an organizing principle, dharma offers much that is desirable. It embeds the “self” in preexisting relationships and obligations, generating a web of mutual accountability. It encourages humility, situating people within a vast, impersonal order and non-linear time. And because dharma is always role-specific, it is pluralist and appreciates diverse expressions of “the good life.” These are not trivial goods, and they manifest in the beautiful parts of Indian society. Moreover, they are welcome antidotes to Western pathologies of hyper-individualism, workaholism, and chronic hurry—which, as philosopher Max Weber identified in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, have their share of Christian roots.

But for all its shinier fruits, dharma has some rotten ones.

India’s caste system has endured for millennia, in large part, due to the underlying moral grammar of dharma. As the Hindu legal text Manusmriti details, dharma explicitly prescribes, sanctifies, and sustains caste. Because transcending caste requires trespassing role-based barriers and ritual purity, Indians are reluctant to forsake their first-order sense of cosmic duty. Moreover, the Vedic doctrine of karma provides a theodicy—a theoretical reconciliation—for inequality. To be born as a Dalit or Brahmin is simply the karmic fruit of one’s past. Caste violence and suffering is cosmically intelligible and, in fact, an act of God.

In The Religion of India, Weber called karma the most consistent theodicy ever devised. It works in consonance with the Vedic view of time, which is non-linear. In it, the universe breathes through vast cosmic ages—yugas—that rotate endlessly. If one’s dharma is to perform their caste role well to secure better karmic outcomes in the next life, on a cyclical time scale, what reason do they have to rebel against the social order?

In the Christian view of time, history has a beginning, a crisis, and a destination. For better or worse, this creates a unique moral urgency that seeps into its grammar: injustice is not cosmically scripted but historically contingent, and therefore correctable if acted upon. Progress, in the political sense, inherits the Christian teleos of “redemption.” This is a captivating energy and vision for anyone concerned with moral progress, but it meets its limits in a dharmic universe.

A 2021 Pew Research survey on religion in India found that 70% of Indian Hindus believe it is very important to stop caste discrimination—but 64% also believed one’s caste is determined by karma. That’s the sort of untenable tension that moral grammar creates. When one feels emotional urgency for justice but possesses a moral grammar that rationalizes injustice, the grammar will always win. In the way that Christian moral grammar quietly (and albeit slowly) enabled moral progress on the problem of slavery, Vedic moral grammar hamstrings progress on the problem of caste.

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Pulling the Weeds, Leaving the Crop

Social pathologies play on our all-too-human tendency to dominate others, and caste is no different. But it’s unique in that it has a spiritual mandate and explanation. That makes it impervious to change, even to the best attempts of its reformers.

Even Mohandas Gandhi, India’s beacon of independence and reform, wrote in his journal Harijan: “I do not believe the caste system, even as distinguished from varnashrama, to be an odious and vicious dogma. It has its limitations and defects, but there is nothing sinful about it, as there is about untouchability. And if untouchability is a by-product of the system, it is only in the same sense that an ugly growth is of a body, or weeds of a crop.”

Gandhi’s metaphor is revealing; he believed one could pull the weeds without uprooting the crop. Dalit jurist B.R. Ambedkar believed the weeds were the crop. Responding to Gandhi’s response to him, Ambedkar writes in Annihilation of Caste, “What the Hindus call Religion is really Law, or at best legalized class-ethics… Under it, there is no loyalty to ideals; there is only conformity to commands… I have, therefore, no hesitation in saying that such a religion must be destroyed.”

To Ambedkar, dharma cloaks the power structure inherent in caste in religious garb. It is not as much in service of cosmic harmony as it is in service of the Brahmin class; and if it is in service of a cosmic design, then such a design was damaged from its beginning. Dharma’s highest goods—cosmic humility, embeddedness, duty—are load-bearing walls in the very same structure that makes caste possible. One can’t remove caste without rethinking the entire building. Gandhi wasn’t willing to, so he saw caste as inevitable.

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Like the medieval Bhakti movement, there were and are several Hindu reformations that aim to disarm caste, but whether Hinduism writ large possesses the moral resources to undo its own caste system remains to be seen. Dalits, generally, are skeptical.

Weeks before his death in 1956, Ambedkar publicly converted to Buddhism, rejecting not just Hinduism’s hierarchy but its metaphysics of duty and deserved suffering. He explains his decisions to a Hindu audience, arguing that conversion alone would liberate.

Whether religious conversion really works is another topic—one I explore here. The deeper lesson here is not whether religion is good or bad for moral life; it is that moral life itself is religious, whether or not we want it to be. The Western liberal who can’t explain why exploitation feels sacred-wrong, not just strategically unwise, or the Hindu reformer who wants caste abolished but cannot quite will its destruction are both living inside grammars they can’t reason out of. After all, they didn’t really reason into them to begin with.

Despite secularism’s thesis, moral progress is not an intellectual program. It is a matter of influencing what people find sacred—whether it is a Roman emperor, a Brahmin priest, a disabled baby, an enslaved man, or the inviolable worth of a woman who stands facing a burning funeral pyre.

From 4th-century Chinese Buddhist monk Faxian, to 11th-century Persian polymath al-Bīrūnī, to 20th-century French anthropologist Louis Dumont, to modern scholars like Nicholas Dirks, caste and untouchability have been documented for millennia—but rarely from an autonomous Dalit perspective. Suraj Yengde’s Caste: A Global Story aims to change that.

Yengde is probably the most prominent Dalit intellectual alive today. He holds a doctorate at the University of Oxford and conducts postdoctoral research at Harvard University, writes columns at India Express and Art Review, appeared in Ava Duvernay’s film Origin, and penned award-winning books like Caste Matters and The Radical in Ambedkar.

But in person, the man behind the credentials is warm and approachable. He wears a big smile and colorful suits, and muses between scholarly precision and vulnerable admission.

I had the privilege of sitting down with Yengde to discuss his new book, Caste: A Global Story: a first-of-its-kind, Amartya Sen-endorsed publication that maps the Dalit experience as a globally distributed condition spanning the indentured labor of the Caribbean to the glittery towers of the Gulf, the literary bustle of Maharashtra to parliamentary debates of the United Kingdom. It is less a polemic and more of an archive, a repository. It doesn’t merely regurgitate the same arguments and analyses from Dirks and Dumont, but directs necessary attention to historical and modern questions concerning caste, from a Dalit perspective. We spoke about the aspects I found most interesting: Dalit-Black solidarity, caste in Trinidad and the Middle East, the hopes and pitfalls of Dalit political movements, and a critique I had.

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A One-Sided Love Affair

Yengde hails from Nanded, a small town on the borders of Telangana and Karnataka, in the Marathwada region of Maharashtra. It’s not the kind of place frequented by the globally mobile.

“You don’t want to go there,” Yengde told me, half-laughing. “It’s like thirteen, fourteen hours by train from Bombay, or an overnight train from Hyderabad.”

Yet in Caste, Yengde describes how that small, “backwards” area quietly generated global impact. Historically fertilized with anti-caste religious reforms, the region blossomed into a hub for Dalit literary and political culture from the 19th century onward.

The first known Dalit newspaper, Sooryodhayam, was published in Tamil in 1872. By the early twentieth century, Yengde details, Dalit publishing had spread across languages and regions. Marathi labor leader Kisan Faguji Bansod ran multiple papers out of Nagpur; Ambedkar himself founded four periodicals, beginning with Mooknayak (Leader of the Voiceless) in 1920. For Dalits, literature became infrastructure for subsequent political movements, and a precious medium of resistance—self-assertion in a language they were long denied.

Literature was also their gateway to the Black experience. Yengde describes how scholars like M.N. Wankhede and Janardan Waghmare systematically introduced Du Bois, Baldwin, and other African American writers to Marathi readers, drawing structural comparisons between the two communities and their struggles. In 1972, a group of Dalits in Bombay founded the Dalit Panthers, consciously forged with a name and universalist agenda inspired by the Oakland-born Black Panther Party. Yengde’s own father was a member. They wrote in Bhoomika: “From the Black Panthers, Black Power emerged. The fire of the struggles has thrown out sparks into the country. We claim a close relationship with this struggle.”

But Yengde dubs this long-distance relationship with a stinging phrase: a “one-sided love affair.” Dalit writers read their Black counterparts voraciously, but the reverse wasn’t true. While earlier generations of Black intellectuals like Du Bois and King occasionally acknowledged Dalits, the post-1960s Black cultural world lost the thread, in part due to language—early Dalit writing wasn’t translated into English until much later.

Yengde laments a deeper problem still: often, Dalit identity only becomes legible through analogy to Black suffering. Waghmare and others argued that through the narrative of Black victims of race, Dalit victims of caste might finally be recognized. Solidarity was both genuine and strategic. But when Dalit humanity only exists in tandem with the other’s, it is at the whims of public engagement with the other’s issue. Moreover, it only only registers when refracted through a white oppressor rather than a Hindu one. This obscures caste, which is native to India.

“The question of solidarity is more so diasporic in nature and academic in its concern,” Yengde reflected. “I asked so many of our Dalit leaders back home why they didn’t build solidarities with Black people [in America], and they understand, but they are too preoccupied with addressing their own intricacies and systems in real-time. I began to think I was super-imposing a certain notion of solidarity on them.”

Yengde’s book isn’t a counsel of separatism. He is clear that solidarity remains essential and “beautiful,” but solidarity built on borrowed suffering cannot sustain a movement indefinitely. At some point, the case for Dalit humanity has to stand on its own terms.

Caste in the Caribbean

As it once did for me, it routinely shocks people to learn that much of the Caribbean is ethnically Indian—an inheritance of Britain’s indentured labor trade. For all the research done on this diaspora, there is virtually none investigating caste. “There’s no Dalit angle, because there was no Dalit doing the research,” Yengde told me.

Of the nearly 150,000 Indian indentured laborers shipped to Trinidad and Tobago by the British Empire from 1845 to 1917, over 90% were of caste-oppressed backgrounds. “The records from the [boats] tell us the majority of the people who live on those islands are of Dalit or Shudra descent—majority are Dalits,” he explained. Brahmins, who lived in relative comfort in India, had little reason to board those ships. Trinidad, in a sense, became an accidental Dalit-Shudra haven.

Yet when Yengde spoke to descendants of those laborers today, he found people identifying as Brahmins. He encountered caste pride, caste ritual, and caste endogamy. The structure survived the crossing, undergoing what he calls “creolization.” What didn’t survive was the Dalit identity itself.

The brutal uniformity of plantation labor largely eliminated caste’s economic and occupational features, and left what was softer: caste as identity, prestige, and theological memory. It survived most visibly in the priesthood, marriage, and temple fellowship. Crucially, Yengde found Hindu Nationalists making significant inroads among Indo-Trinidadians—while anti-caste politics had barely begun.

“Caste has a possibility to disintegrate in diasporic societies,” Yengde told me. But the disintegration is uneven. The top of the hierarchy reasserted itself; the bottom dissolved. People converted, reinvented themselves, and adopted new identities.

Yengde poses the question bluntly: “Can there be a caste system without Dalits?” In the Caribbean, he finds, the answer may be yes. This is a genuinely important finding for anyone thinking about caste as a global system.

Who Is Building the Middle East?

Similarly, Yengde levies a much needed caste lens at the Middle East—a society absent from existing caste literature. He draws a deliberately careful parallel between the indentured labor that built the plantation economies of the colonial Caribbean and the South Asian migrant labor currently building the glittering skylines of Dubai and the United Arab Emirates.

“Today’s Dubai or the Middle East is like a rising powerhouse,” he said, comparing it to 18th-century Britain. If the analogy holds, who is building the towers? “Many of them that I studied were Dalits,” he told me. “So, there is also a Dalit story to tell when you talk about the development of the Middle East.”

To document that story, Yengde went inside the labor camps. Access wasn’t easy. He conducted interviews outside camp fences, from inside parked cars, and under dim light to avoid surveillance. What he found was a community living under conditions that echoed indenture: multi-year contracts, restricted mobility, and physical displacement. “They can’t go back for another year or so because of the conditions of the kind of work contract servitude they have,” Yengde said. Yet within these constrained conditions, something remarkable was happening.

“They are organizing themselves, though it’s not allowed. They’re trying to think about the world.” These construction workers from Punjab, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh were raising funds, celebrating Ambedkarite holidays, and keeping up with Dalit politics back home. Their Dalitness yielded a bond of shared identity and commitment across linguistic, regional, and educational differences.

Graded Inequality

In his book, Yengde flags the routine failures of ideological movements, class movements, nationalism, liberalism, and secularism in addressing caste. He finds Ambedkar’s notion of graded inequality, what he calls “evil genius of the caste system,” to blame. It’s a seemingly infinite fragmentation of ranked castes, each one defending its position by discriminating against those below it. The system is self-enforcing, self-expanding, and self-perpetuating, designed to quell any unity among the oppressed. Everyone has someone to look down on.

This is why caste resists conventional political organizing. In Caste, Yengde points out the unspoken: dominant castes account for barely more than 17% of the Indian population—roughly one in six people. Dalits, understood as broadly as the Dalit Panthers defined them, form the overwhelming majority of India’s people.

In the United States, Yengde notes, the dominant majority is being compelled to reckon with the wrongs done to the minority. In India, a dominant minority holds such disproportionate privilege that it can still comfortably look away from the damage done to the oppressed majority. Graded inequality is the mechanism that makes this possible, even when the math disagrees.

Yengde also clarifies a distinction that American audiences frequently miss: in India, the primary source of anti-Dalit violence is not the state but extra-state actors—landlords, caste-dominant groups, private enforcers of social hierarchy. The Dalit Panthers didn’t become full-scale militants, Yengde argues, because they didn’t seek to subvert the Indian state—they sought rights within it. This was a principled Ambedkarite position: Ambedkar had staked his life’s work on the constitutional promise, on law as the instrument of emancipation. But it meant that the oppression they faced was distributed, diffuse, and harder to dramatize for an international audience.

A Critique of the U.S. Story

In an unusual departure from its careful research, Yengde’s account of the U.S. anti-caste movement reveals a conspicuous absence. Equality Labs—the most publicly visible U.S.-based Dalit rights organization, responsible for a groundbreaking 2018 “Caste in the United States” survey and advocacy for caste protections at university and state levels—wasn’t mentioned at all. This gap felt unsettling, considering several smaller and stagnant groups were described in detail. (It’s worth noting that Yengde had strong words for Equality Labs and its leader Thenmozhi Soundarajan—while he didn’t name them—in his postmortem following SB-403).

When I asked him about this, Yengde maintained that Equality Labs was noted in the glossary. He added that he deliberately avoided unresolved cases—the Cisco lawsuit, live legal and political battles—because “the facts are still coming up.”

Principal in any archival effort is the editorial subjectivity of the author. Yengde’s choice of what historical and organizational threads to weave together is itself an argument, and readers of the contemporary U.S. movement will notice gaps like this one. It unfortunately dilutes the strength of the book’s archive, which is otherwise impressively thorough.

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Caste: A Global Story is more historical and ethnographic than it is prescriptive. It’s rich with tension, surprise, and genuine discovery—even with its imperfections. When I asked Yengde what he hoped the book would accomplish, he was bold and optimistic.

“This is your book now,” he said. “When I was in the UK, I told the community: you can no longer say our story was only reported by white scholars, Brahmins, or non-Dalits. Every qualm you had is potentially addressed in this. I’m Dalit. I’m a part of you. I wrote this from your viewpoint. This is [your] position, [your] gumption.”

Yengde surveys nearly 15 countries in these pages, most of them visited in person. He found that caste clearly travels, adapts, and persists across every terrain it touches. But his insistence here is that documentation itself is an act of belonging, of resistance. He is candid that his work captures just a few vignettes of history, and invites others to carry it forward.

Caste: A Global Story is published by Oxford University Press. You can find it here and learn more about Suraj Yengde’s work at www.surajyengde.com/.

“Relationship is the fundamental truth of this world of appearance.” — Rabindranath Tagore

In the most overdue and obvious of findings, the United States was diagnosed in 2023 with an epidemic of loneliness. Lulled into isolation by rabid individualism, late-stage capitalism, and omnipresent smartphones, many Americans now admire other nations for their expressions of community. India is one such exemplar.

As an Indian, I can testify that relationship is one of the great joys of my culture. Even as an immigrant, I was raised by a “village.” We spent our evenings in noisy homes, among giddy adults and children unburdened by bedtimes. Our obligation to one another demanded much of us, but yielded tenfold in love, joy, and interdependence.

But despite producing highly relational people, Indian society is remarkably hostile to relationships.

In both India and my diasporic “village,” I noticed that amidst an abundance of community, my individuality flickered and waned—in a way, generating a second species of loneliness. In The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, novelist Kiran Desai juxtaposes the loneliness of the Indian immigrant—living, eating, sleeping, and working perpetually alone—with that of those back in India, who might be always surrounded but never understood, burdened by secrets, obligations, and the invasive wills of family members.

Deeper still, India’s loneliness prevails because it is intentional. A doctrine of separation governs its polity, its marriages, and its morality: caste.

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Veiling the Face

“All real living is meeting,” writes philosopher Martin Buber. In Buber’s view, genuine life occurs in the I–Thou encounter, where we meet another person as a presence rather than an object. For philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, this encounter is the birthplace of ethics itself.

Ethical obligation begins, Levinas argues, in the encounter with the Other’s face—their vulnerable presence that makes a claim upon us. Relationships are not merely a space where morality is applied, but where it begins. “The face of the other is the face of responsibility,” Levinas writes. In the Christian tradition, this idea is articulated as imago dei—as humans bear the image of God, their “image” or personhood demands dignity and respect.

In lonely societies, ethics suffers. Smartphones aren’t equivalent to a face, leading people to behave in cruel and unusual ways to their anonymous online counterparts. Caste, similarly, operates by veiling the face. It carves society into impenetrable, surveilled compartments designed to prohibit fraternizing.

Caste notions of purity and pollution require distance—separate utensils, wells, temples, neighborhoods, and everything therein. Although economic and technological changes have spawned greater social mixing throughout urban India, this ritual logic limits how close people are willing to get. Untouchability, in particular, makes it impossible to share water, food, or physical proximity—the basic conditions of recognizing shared humanity.

In some cases, the caste system bans Dalits from literally being seen, for fear that even their shadow might pollute an upper-caste counterpart. In The Prisons We Broke, Dalit author Baby Kamble recounts, “When somebody from the [upper] castes walked in the opposite direction, the Mahars (Dalits) had to leave the road, climb down into the shrubbery and walk through the thorny bushes on the roadside.”

Whether in the violent recoil that follows seeing the Unseeable on the road, or the quiet unseen-ness of being looked through and spoken over in a classroom, the injury of caste transcends material circumstances. It is relational and therefore spiritual.

In German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel’s theory of recognition, we gain self-consciousness only through mutual recognition. In other words, our identity is inevitably bound up in relationship to others. A Hegelian himself, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. famously wrote, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Barring people from public space tears into this garment, leading not only to social fragmentation but spiritual collapse.

Political scientist Gopal Garu poignantly describes the effects of exclusion: “Mahar’s (Dalit’s) body begins to undergo painful compression because the public sphere is occupied by the upper caste presence, both physical and metaphysical. The Mahar is possessed by the fear of the upper caste, who keeps scaring him even if the latter is not physically present in the public sphere.” But relational injury also goes both ways. By effacing others, Hegel argues, you destroy the necessary “mirror” needed to reflect your own humanity to yourself. You lose what it is to be you.

Caste constructs an entire social architecture designed to prevent any responsibility to each other; worse still, it commits us to antisocial dynamics, including slavery, hierarchy, and endogamy—the custom of in-group marriage.

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Loveless Weddings

Above all their cultural exports, Indians are iconic for their weddings. These multi-day, multi-colored, multi-ceremonial celebrations inspire awe and affection. My own wedding season was one of the most joyful periods of my life, marked by a level of collective generosity I had never before witnessed—from close family members to complete strangers.

But a shadow hangs over the festivities.

The India Human Development Survey reports that roughly 95 percent of marriages in India occur within the same caste. According to Pew Research Center, about 80% of all Indian men and women believe it is important to prevent inter-caste marriages. The American Journal of Human Genetics has traced patterns of caste endogamy back nearly 1,900 years. For almost two millennia—amidst the happenings of Christianity, Islam, Rome, antibiotics, the atomic bomb, and the internet—caste remained the most enduring regulator of intimacy.

Caste survives not only through ritual and occupation, but most potently through the institution of marriage.

There are few parts of life more tightly policed in India than marriage. Before their garlands dried, Murugesan and Kannagi, newlyweds who dared to trespass the caste boundary, were publicly murdered by their own families. They are but one of many thousands of couples harassed, brutalized, and murdered for the sin of love. What pathology steers a tight-knit, family-oriented people into grave atrocities against the people they once loved most? Anthropologist Veena Das notes that so-called honor killings are not spontaneous acts of rage but social performances—community efforts to restore a moral order believed to have been violated.

Caste turns marriage, the most intimate form of I–Thou, into a boundary line. The institution that should expand the circle of social belonging becomes a mechanism for keeping it closed. In Castes in India, Ambedkar plainly draws an equivalence between caste and endogamy—they are, effectively, the same thing. He adds in Annihilation of Caste: “The real remedy for breaking caste is inter-marriage. Nothing else will serve as the solvent of caste.”

Healing at The Table

If caste is reproduced through everyday separation, it must be challenged through everyday encounter.

In the mid-twentieth century, Punjabi Christian evangelist Bakht Singh confronted caste through the deliberate arrangement of encounters. He instituted what he called the Love Feast—a communal meal after worship where believers of every caste ate together, shared vessels, and drank from a common cup. Brahmins sat beside Dalits. Vegetarians and meat-eaters shared the same space. Every detail violated the logic of purity. “God wants oneness,” Singh writes in God’s Dwelling Place, “and that bond of unity should be peculiarly manifest at the Lord’s Table… Then only can true love prevail.”

The meal was appropriately titled. Writer James Baldwin famously observed: “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” Caste is a mandate of masks, undone by even the simplest gestures of love. For Singh’s congregants, the act of eating together destabilized caste more effectively than any legal reforms could.

In the Sikh tradition of Langar, the community kitchen found in every gurdwara, thousands eat together daily regardless of caste, religion, or status, seated in rows on the floor. Guru Amar Das, Sikhism’s third guru, envisioned shared meals as a prerequisite for participation: Pehlan Pangat, Pichhon Sangat (First eat in the row, then join the congregation and/or meet the Guru). Even the Mughal emperor Akbar submitted to this rule.

Of course, sharing entrees isn’t a panacea; it will take a multitude of political, economic, religious, and institutional interventions to weaken caste. But Ambedkar warned that political equality without social intimacy would remain fragile. Without fraternity—the daily habits of eating together, living together, and recognizing one another as equals—liberty and equality would be “no deeper than coats of paint.” Laws can prohibit discrimination, but they cannot manufacture encounter. Policies may open doors, but only relationships allow a person’s imago dei to appear.

It is perhaps harder than ever to overcome caste boundaries, due to the additional modern burden of social atomization. Scholar Anand Teltumbde observes that caste adapts to modernity’s infrastructure of isolation, shifting from ritual exclusion to social distance. But we can be sure that caste will not be undone purely through policies or rulings. It will be undone by the slow, radical work of proximity—shared meals, shared presence, and marriages that cross forbidden lines.

Fraternity, Ambedkar insisted, is not an optional sentiment. It is a chief virtue of a true democracy, and more than other virtues, it demands something of us. To see the Other’s face is to accept a claim upon one’s life.

After a decade of cultural ascendancy, identity politics is falling out of goodwill.

Spectators have called it a “vibe shift,” with moral concerns about race, gender, and historical injustice losing their grip on both individuals and corporations. The Trump Administration is busily dismantling any institutional remnant of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), fueled by yet another variety of white identity politics. Caught in the crossfire of these culture wars are everyday people—young people, especially—whose self-identities swell and shiver in lockstep with these trends.

We tend to underestimate how malleable our identities truly are. The dominant characteristics of one’s identity are likely to wax and wane over time, influenced in part by cultural trends and current affairs. In In the Name of Identity, Lebanese-born French writer Amin Maloouf writes of identity: “He is not himself from the outset; nor does he just ‘grow aware’ of what he is; he becomes what he is. He doesn’t merely ‘grow aware’ of his identity; he acquires it step by step.”

As the name Dalit Americana suggests, I write from a certain consciousness of my identity. But it wasn’t always like that. I came of age in a post-9/11, suburban, Northern Californian milieu flavored with American exceptionalism, color-blindness, and the boding symptoms of a progressive cultural reformation sprinkled about my liberal arts classes. This environment tended to discourage any focus on identity-based distinctions, but it didn’t protect me from suffering and internalizing racism.

I had no understanding of why I loathed my skin color before I learned to speak in full sentences, felt unusually intimidated by white people, or developed an uncanny ability to code-switch. That was, until I became “conscious” of my racial identity. Identity politics changed how I saw myself forever.

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Becoming Brown to Becoming Whole

In sociological terms, consciousness describes an awareness of membership in a particular group and the broader societal structures that shape group dynamics. I think it’s an apt term for the added reason that it feels something like actual consciousness—like turning on a lightbulb or seeing colors for the first time. Consciousness of group membership is typically brought on by experiences of belonging or exclusion, but more often the latter. That’s why people in dominant groups—like white people—rarely experience it (or they’re educated into it, which has mixed results). But minoritization isn’t always a sufficient prerequisite; while being Indian caused considerable cultural dissonance with my American context, no one in my Indian immigrant community seemed to understand their racial identity or role in racial dynamics.

Ten years ago, I was halfway through questioning a high-profile police killing of an unarmed Black man when a Christian mentor quieted my critique. He asked me to empathize, abandoning my preoccupation with “the facts.” I swallowed my cynicism and practiced the spiritual discipline of lament, joining my peers in mourning. I couldn’t have known it at the time, but that simple act of empathy cast a small, sputtering light into two decades of my own internalized racial trauma.

It was the following year that I learned about Jayesh Solanki, a Dalit man who was lynched for simply watching a Hindu dance. Another light buzzed awake: caste consciousness. In both cases, identity consciousness had the helpful effect of elucidating and integrating a host of previous experiences and sensitizing me to social realities that my color-blind climate obscured. Despite knowing and navigating caste and racial dynamics all my life, it was this evolution in self-identity that yielded clarity and meaning. Until it didn’t.

Throughout college, I began to conceive of my identity primarily in racial or cultural terms. A university culture of social justice rewarded this hyper-fixation on race, leading me to inflate the salience of race in my worldview and personal interactions. In a grand reversal from my childhood, segregation and grievance by non-white people against white people seemed to be encouraged. While initially freeing, this paradigm soon felt claustrophobic.

Throughout the entropic summer of 2020, I saw this brand of “third-wave antiracism” engender and enflame divisions across important institutions and society broadly. While I appreciated the necessary racial healing I underwent, I began to see holes in using race as a foundational paradigm for understanding the world. Reading Black thinkers who challenged the orthodoxy of racial essentialism—Chloe Valdary, Coleman Hughes, and Thomas Chatterton Williams, to name a few—I realized I was forcing myself to squeeze race into every interaction, event, or problem I encountered, even when it wasn’t warranted. Whereas race was earlier an illuminating lens to view the world, it now appeared to misrepresent reality.

My journey brought me to what what scholars John and Joy Hoffman call “integrative awareness,” the ability to affirm one’s racial group while recognizing that other elements (gender, talent, experience) contribute to one’s personhood. Proving Maloouf right, consciousness wasn’t the end-all of my identity—it was one of several steps in the journey of becoming.

While my journey is my own, I think it’s a vignette of many such journeys of racial identity development that occurred in this last decade. I know of many people stuck in earlier stages, gripped with cynicism or guilt and self-segregating whenever possible. I also know that the realities of race or caste make it so anger, forgiveness, guilt, and integration can be experienced simultaneously and even perpetually. Addressing Black identity, the renowned writer James Baldwin famously articulated: “To be a Negro in [America] and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”

Generally speaking, I think the cultural and psychological processes of identity politics help us recognize the immense importance of group identity in our past and present, in personal and public life. To use the Christian grammar I often think in: it can assist in our healing, restoration, and redemption.

However, it has a self-perpetuating effect. The more one focuses on their identity characteristics, the more salient those parts of themselves become. When it’s not governed by first-order, universal principles, we risk narrowing our self-perception and worldview, and on a social level, triggering tribalism and sectarianism. When identity consciousness begins to organize our sense of morality and truth itself, it loses its capacity to help us.

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Caste: What’s In a Name?

With an inherently problematic category like caste, there’s no shortage of ways to make sense and war with personal and group identity.

Generally speaking, caste is an aspect of identity that’s unspoken but obvious. In India’s urban centers and diaspora, it’s sussed out quietly by social symbols (surnames, occupations, religious artifacts), while represented brazenly in bureaucratic forums (caste certificates). Three thousand years in, caste is accepted as a social fact of Indian life. People don’t always associate with their broader caste (Brahmin, Vaishya, Kshatriya, Shudra or Dalit), but they do tend to favor their sub-castes.

Caste identity is like racial identity, in that instrumentalizing identity politics to discriminate against others is clearly wrong, but embracing caste identity to advance moral redress and political change can be noble. But like race, it’s hard to do both. As we witnessed in “peak woke” and the Trumpian backlash that followed, it’s plausible that dialing up the salience of race has the unfortunate consequence of encouraging, well, racists.

Like racial identity consciousness, I’m a believer in caste consciousness. I believe many prevailing caste issues could be solved with greater accountability and honesty, stemming first from one’s sense of identity. But there are political reasons to temper these expectations.

While India was still nurturing its nascent democratic institutions, it launched the complicated project of identifying and redressing disadvantage across the nation. In 1953, Nehru’s government convened the Backward Classes Commission to assess “backwardness” (yes, that’s an official term) of various groups in India. Independence activist Kaka Kalelkar was chosen to chair it.

A devout Gandhian, Kalelkar believed that caste would gradually dissolve as the nation developed. He lamented the commission’s role in breathing new life into caste, which he feared would fracture fragile national unity. “The result of our inquiry,” he writes in his closing letter, “is that caste consciousness, caste loyalties, and caste aspirations, have increased throughout the country.”

This, of course, was predictable. 30 years earlier, the British first entertained the notion of caste rights in debates about democratic rights and representation. Non-Brahmins quickly organized to dismantle the centuries-long monopoly on government jobs by Brahmins and other upper castes, and caste associations began to emerge for the expressed purpose of demanding quotas.

Kalelkar’s concerns reflect the tension at the heart of India’s primary social justice enterprise: to undo caste, you must name it. But by naming it, you risk renewing its permanence in unfortunate ways. When the State prescribes benefits—even well-intended, corrective ones—on the basis of characteristics like caste or race, it is impossible for people not to cling more tightly to such identities.

In a 2000 study on India’s affirmative action, scholar Frank de Zwart argued that affirmative action has done more to re-construct caste identities and conflict than colonial rule. The difference is, of course, the intention. But can intention outweigh this social externality? Could it be that the very political interventions aimed at redressing the legacy of caste are perpetuating it?

With a second (Mandal) commission in 1979, the project of social justice was again usurped by political interests. “The project of Mandal had expected them to further its ideological agenda of Dalit Bahujan unity,” scholar Satish Deshpande writes. “However, in practice, the project led to formation of single caste parties and encouraged political bargaining on behalf of each small caste.”

In the 2010s, a similar breakdown occurred when the Bahujan Samaj Party—a hub for Dalit politics—fragmented over a largely symbolic agenda. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party seized upon this opportunity by recruiting specific Dalit sub-castes with targeted promises. Time and time again, history shows that a muscular caste identity has been instrumentalized for partisan gain, instead of advancing reconciliation. With a thousand different fissures between sub-castes, caste blocs are simply too frail for the project of justice.

It’s also worth noting that similar experiences of oppression don’t always yield the same sense of identity consciousness. Many Dalits, for example, refuse to identify as such. Some reject the idea that “caste” can be reclaimed in any positive or liberatory sense. One ethnography of Dalits in Nepal found that Dalits resisted caste hierarchies through a “politics of anonymity,” as opposed to assertion. They masked their caste identity or adopted ambiguous or higher-caste surnames to survive. Some Dalits embrace the nomenclature of religious identity—Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or Sikh—and recast their struggle through that prism. Many of my family members, for instance, would attribute their oppression to their Christianness more so than their Dalitness.

Of course, “conscious” Dalits remain vocal and necessary actors in the struggle for dignity and justice. There is no doubt that caste consciousness can be a path to liberation—but it cannot bear the entire burden of one’s selfhood nor of a group’s politics.

Even as the cultural pendulum swings away from the progressive identity politics of the last decade, we should be cautious not to abandon its original insights. It is a lens, not a litmus test. It helps us name the unseen forces that shape our lives and societies, but when stretched beyond its epistemic limits, it will collapse under its own weight.

The failures of identity politics are proof that identity cannot do all the work. Identity is an unstable, unpredictable, partial, vulnerable category—unlike values or principles. But I still believe there is something sacred about that experience of identity consciousness; of turning the lights on, seeing color, and exhaling two decades of internalized suffering. I desire for more people to have it as a thread in their story—just not the whole.

“Racism and casteism are indistinguishable in the annals of man’s inhumanity to man.” - Gerald Berreman, 1972

Five years ago, the word “caste” had a global moment. The State of California levied the first ever U.S. lawsuit against caste-based discrimination, a world quarantined to online discourse grew rapidly conscious of global injustices, and writer Isabel Wilkerson published her celebrated Oprah’s Book Club title: Caste.

In Caste, Wilkerson braids historical vignettes, poetic metaphors, and hard scholarship to draw connections between the Indian caste system, Nazi Germany, and white supremacy. She outlines how the pillars of caste—religion, heritability, endogamy, purity, occupational hierarchy, dehumanization, terror, and inherent superiority—appear in America’s racial hierarchy, making caste an elucidating framework for understanding and mitigating racism. Her book was adapted in 2023 by director Ava DuVernay as the film “Origin.”

I never had the chance to comment on Wilkerson’s work, which did more to insert “caste” into the American lexicon than any other occasion or resource I can think of. It’s a well-reported contribution in a long lineage of caste-race discourse, but almost all of this discourse focuses on interpreting and reinterpreting race. I’m interested in the caste side of this dialectic. How do comparisons with race and racism resonate—or rub against—Dalits?

A Two-Way Mirror

Wilkerson aims to understand the Black struggle in the Dalit struggle, but Dalits have long invoked the Black struggle to understand their own. As early as 1837, anti-caste social reformer Jyotirao Phule dedicated his book Gulamgiri (Slavery) “to the good people of United States as a token of admiration for their sublime disinterested and self-sacrificing devotion in the cause of Negro Slavery; and with an earnest desire, that my countrymen may take their noble example as their guide in the emancipation of their Sudra Brethren from the trammels of Brahmin thralldom.”

One hundred years later, Phule’s successor and Dalit jurist Dr. B.R. Ambedkar wrote to Black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois: “There is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of the Negroes in America that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary.” There has always been a profound solidarity between Black and Dalit communities in their respective struggles.

In step with these movement leaders, Dalits continue to borrow language and concepts from Black revolutionary thought and culture—which have gained credibility across the Global Left and a certain staying power in popular consciousness. It’s not uncommon to see “Dalit Lives Matter” slogans follow a caste atrocity, just as Dalit Panthers took inspiration from their Black counterparts in the 70s.

Given the outsized impact of African American scholarship, activism, and culture, our world intuitively understands race and racism far more than caste. That’s why Dalit activists have spent the last two decades advocating for understanding casteism as a type of racism, most famously at the 2011 Durban Review Conference. It’s not only a matter of solidarity, but also strategy.

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Scholar Shiv Visvanathan explains: “Race was the most universal language of condemnation. Race moved mountains like the UN, the foundations and the corporations. If caste were defined as ‘race in India,’ one retained local turfs but could use international forums to embarrass the official Indian image.” This explains India’s resistance to analogizing caste as race, which allows them to shirk international rules against racism.

Wilkerson uses “caste” to interrupt the normalized language of “race,” so that we might take racism more seriously. She isn’t the first. Abolitionists in the 1800s like Frederick Douglas, Thomas Dalton, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charles Sumner compared chattel slavery to the Hindu caste system to demonstrate it was antithetical to American principles of equality.

Dalits also do the opposite, using the language of race to elicit appropriate responses to caste discrimination—because their own language isn’t enough. In a sadly roundabout way, it is the analogy of race that makes caste salient enough for recognition—even to Indians living in India. Responding to the 2020 murder of George Floyd, high-profile Indian entertainers announced their condemnation of racism. Not one of the nearly daily lynchings of Dalits has garnered any such response.

In an interview, Oxford scholar Suraj Yengde explains this: “Dalit perspectives lie beneath the dignity of even recognition. Their cries and pains do not summon anyone’s mind to think, let alone engage with the victim. That is how Black literature comes to rescue the dying Dalit response… an exposition of a cruel system in another society across the Atlantic, may help the oppressor [castes] realize their participation in dehumanization of their lower-made citizens.”

I’ll confess: as an American, I didn’t give serious credence to my own family’s experiences of caste until I was first taught to engage with issues of race. It was an awakening of racial consciousness and a fateful visit to India with my new lens that eventually enabled my sense of Dalit consciousness.

The Black community’s voice has been called America’s conscience—and by hegemonic association, the world’s conscience. Black people are often creating the blueprint for how the oppressed articulate themselves and how the powerful ought to reckon with historic harms. Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundarajan addressed this in our conversation—it isn’t typically other South Asians that give language to Dalit suffering; it is Black people.

All that said, there is one glaring imbalance in the Wilkerson’s conflation of caste and race: the conditions of caste are far more grave. When I liken caste to race, I tend to clarify that caste in modern India is comparable to Jim Crow-era racism in the American South. Indeed, many of the connections Wilkerson draws occur in this historical frame. Things like legally sanctioned segregation, endogamy, social purity, occupational hierarchy, and lynchings can be seen in harrowing vignettes of American history. Across India, they remain an ongoing, twenty-first century reality. Ambedkar parsed similar distinctions in his own comparative analysis of untouchability and slavery.

Caste is not merely a quiet, veiled set of arrangements puppeteering society—as Wilkerson tends to convey—it is a bloody, brutal contract of rampant sexual violence, public lynching, honor killings, discrimination, and untouchability—all happening by the hour. It’s a crisis. Wilkerson is unfortunately quiet about such distinctions today, making a book titled “Caste” feel dubious to readers for whom caste contorts reality.

Put differently, progress on race has far outpaced progress on caste. That’s precisely why anti-caste activists constantly appeal to race, hoping to invoke our interpersonal and institutional defenses against racism in service of the caste-oppressed.

While Wilkerson is singularly focused on race, she has simultaneously raised far more attention to caste than nearly any Indian of her stature. It remains incumbent on us—South Asians—to fight for truthful, consistent and compassionate attention to caste and its subjects.

When I first mentioned colonialism to my relatives, they didn’t react as I’d hoped. Wielding my trusty academic doctrine of “decolonization,” I assumed they would welcome my disdain for the British. At the very least, I thought, we might bond over this new history of struggle I’d come to learn about. We didn’t.

Instead, they reflected fondly on India’s colonial past. Praising railway development and access to education, they seemed to primarily remember the British Raj (rule) as a time of freedom for their people—India’s Untouchables. In other words, a reality appearing plainly to me as exploitation was experienced by some of its most vulnerable subjects as emancipation. How could this be?

In postcolonial discourse today, 15th to 19th-century European colonialism is thought of as a kind of “original sin.” It represents a time period of genocide, enslavement, exploitation, and extreme racism—really, one of the clearest examples of evil we can reference with certainty. It’s a root cause of countless downstream problems. Western colonialism has shaped our planetary existence so profoundly that we continue to wrestle with its psychological, cultural, economic, and global effects centuries later. To redress this, many people seek alternatives to a world forged by empire. That’s what’s called decolonization.

Decolonization generally refers to political independence by a formerly colonized state, either through nonviolent or violent means. But it’s also an umbrella term for cultural reclamation, redressing economic injustice, dismantling institutionalized oppression, and re-centering the colonized and indigenous in our decision-making. In American cultural speak, to “decolonize” something means to reject colonial artifacts or reimagine them using non-colonial sources—from Excel sheets to entire epistemologies.

Decolonization is perhaps most passionately practiced by communities that have suffered colonialism, so it behooved me to encounter my family’s ambivalence—including those literally born under British rule. How could a historically oppressed community develop a sharply different relationship with something so unambiguously bad?

The answer: when we map a conventional American understanding of colonialism onto the rest of the world, we miss important differences that yield an alternative story. For Dalits, the story is that colonialism—however egregious—was itself a respite from a yet crueler system of oppression and exploitation: Brahmanism.

Dalits and Their Colonizers

On the very first day of 1818, a British colonial army of 800 Mahar (Dalit) soldiers fought and triumphed over a Peshwa (Brahmin) army of 2,000 in the Battle of Koreagon. The battle played a pivotal role in giving Britain decisive and expansive rule over most of India. Dalit jurist B.R. Ambedkar records this bluntly in The Untouchables and Pax Brittanica: “It was the Untouchables who fought on the side of the British and helped them to conquer India… Treason or no treason, this act of the Untouchables was quite natural. History abounds with illustrations showing how one section of people in a Country have shown sympathy with an invader, in the hope that the newcomer will release them from the oppressions of their countrymen.”

In the way that some Black Americans fought with the British against their American oppressors, or that South Sudanese Nilotic peoples allied with the British against their northern Arab enslavers, or the Karen—a historically marginalized Burmese ethnic minority—fought with the British against the dominant Bamar majority, the Dalits’ choice was predictable. Perhaps this was always part of the British recruitment strategy, but the oppressed were not unwilling agents.

Though Dalits helped Britain win—and retain—its domination of India, the British Raj later banned them from being recruited to their army, apparently realizing that they didn’t belong to the “warrior” caste of Indians. This is just one example of Britain’s bizarre relationship with the Hindu caste order. They simultaneously overlooked it, institutionalized it, and utilized it toward their own ends. Conversely, the caste-oppressed had an equally strange relationship with their British overlords—in a way, leveraging them for their own interests.

In Dalit Studies, scholar Ramnarayan Rawat writes, “Dalit history demonstrates that the colonial legal regime provided Dalits with mechanisms to claim political and constitutional rights previously denied to them. The colonial state’s legal apparatus, consisting of judicial courts and the police system, allowed Dalit activists and groups to demand access to public spaces and gain employment in new professions, such as the army and state bureaucracy.” Being able to independently engage with a separate system of powers, Dalits finally had room to breathe beyond Brahmanical (Hindu) social, political, and legal systems. The British curbed the totalizing power that upper-caste landlords and priests once held. In 1859, for example, when a Dalit boy was refused admission to a government school in Mysore, the British ruled that public schools ought to be open for all, regardless of caste.

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The British Raj also coincided with the arrival of Western Christian missionaries. Unlike colonists, missionaries were not motivated by greed but compassion. They promoted literacy and social reform, campaigning against Sati (widow-burning) and certain forms of caste-based violence. They built schools, orphanages, and hospitals—the very institutions that gave my grandparents the gift of literacy. As colonists and missionaries are often conflated, it’s plausible that Dalits are actually celebrating the legacy of Christian missionaries when they reflect on British rule.

However, a program’s impact and intent are quite different things. In an interview, scholar Chinnaiah Jangan said, “Dalit emancipation comes as an unintended consequence of colonialism… Colonialism is not driven by any emancipatory agendas. Colonialism is driven by profit. Colonialism is driven by power.”

Ambedkar himself clarified, “Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system.” If Dalits experienced colonists as emancipators, it wasn’t because of British goodwill—it was in contrast to the abject misery and oppression they suffered prior, at the hands of the Indian Brahmanical elite. Once they got their heads around caste, the British didn’t destroy it—they thoroughly manipulated it toward their own exploitative ends.

With their 1871 caste census, the British calcified caste into legal and political classifications that persist to this day—like designations of Dalits as “Scheduled Castes” and Adivasis as “Scheduled Tribes.” They consulted Brahmins in shaping colonial policies, ranked government jobs by caste, and reintroduced a feudal zamindari system, which concentrated land ownership in the hands of upper-caste landlords. In classic “divide-and-conquer” style, they enflamed caste distinctions to quash any potential coalition-building.

Historian Ananya Chakravarti writes: “The horrific immiseration of the Indian countryside by British colonialism—which wiped out rural wealth, laid waste to millions of lives in famine after famine, and destroyed artisanal economies that had driven global trade for centuries—affected the lower castes in particular. Simultaneously, British education created both the upper-caste elites who became their successors, and nurtured lower-caste thinkers like Mahatma Phule and Dr B.R. Ambedkar, who articulated devastating critiques of varna ideology. Colonialism, like all forms of rule, had complex effects on caste.”

The Myth of Pre-Colonial Utopia

When ideas like decolonization go mainstream, they naturally mold to our primal, binary, and often falsely dichotomous heuristics. The assumption is: colonial, bad; pre-colonial, good. It’s fair to interpret colonialism as bad, but to romanticize the pre-colonial world as a utopian past is dishonest. The purveyors of post-colonial discourse appeal to this idyllic portrayal of lost history, but the subjects of pre-colonial oppression possess a longer ethical memory.

As early as 1500 BCE, when iron was first smelted and alphabets first inscribed, caste began its assault on the Indian subcontinent. The Rigveda, a collection of Indo-Aryan hymns, imagines humanity created in the caste-ordered body of a cosmic being: Brahmins emerging from the head, Kshatriyas from the arms, Vaishyas from the thighs, and Shudras from the feet. The Brahmanical legal text Manusmriti followed in 200 BCE, institutionalizing caste discrimination and violence, untouchability, and all manner of caste-specific duties and obligations. Brahmanism (proto-Hinduism) proliferated doctrines of purity and pollution and spun mythologies of Aryan gods (upper-castes) warring against dark-skinned demons (lower-castes and indigenous people).

That didn’t end in antiquity. Today, genetic studies reveal that caste distinctions have persisted for over two thousand years, evidenced through endogamy (intra-group marriage). Across India’s changing empires, caste remained the defining social arrangement. By the medieval era, the Hindu caste order had become entrenched into land ownership, forms of employment, and social norms. Empires like the Gupta (319-550 CE) and Chola (848-1279 CE) promoted and reinforced caste. Even the Muslim Sultanates (1206-1526 CE) and Mughals (1526-1857 CE) did little to alleviate the caste problem, developing their own, parallel social hierarchies.

For Dalits, premodern existence meant untouchability—being regarded as subhuman, excluded from public space, enslaved in exploitative and menial labor, and subjected to gratuitous violence. That is the status quo that British colonists stepped foot into. The time horizon of Dalit consciousness doesn’t just count the last two hundred years; it considers the last three thousand.

It's worth noting that some anti-caste thinkers have taken the decolonization paradigm to imply de-Brahmanization. This, I can appreciate. Brahmanism has been considered by many as the original colonizing force, erasing and appropriating indigenous traditions and oppressing the original peoples of India.

But just as cruelty is native to India, so is profound courage, resistance, and revolution. In the 6th century, the Buddha challenged Brahmanical orthodoxy and led millions to follow in his footsteps. The Bhakti movement of the medieval period convened poets and saints like Kabir and Ravidas to openly critique caste and social injustice. In the 19th century, social reformer Jyotirao Phule fused Bhakti philosophy with a global critique of oppression, drawing solidarity with enslaved African Americans.

Referencing these, philosopher Meena Dhanda observes that “equality stirred the minds of Indians well before the colonial encounter.” She critiques what she calls “misplaced nativism” for “underestimating the cultural resources of the Indic civilization—whilst spawning inequality it also produced elements of an antidote.” The broad brush of the postcolonial binary neglects to acknowledge this profound complexity of both the pre-colonial and colonial periods.

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Who Profits from “Decolonization?”

My intention here is not to argue in defense of colonialism but to highlight that colonized peoples have varied experiences. And that, in fact, ideas like decolonization can be manipulated by bad actors. Economist Thomas Sowell rightly identified that we don’t give academic “ideas” their requisite scrutiny, despite the significance of their downstream consequences.

Though colonization is bad, it doesn’t necessarily follow that all forms of decolonization are good. Among the most viral takes following Hamas’ October 7th attack on Israel was this one: “what did y'all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.” The implication being, whatever the act—in this case, the butchery of innocent families—the fact of it being done in service to “decolonization” made it worthwhile. That logic is the product of unchecked ideology—not truth.

Ramnarayan Rawat argues that the Hindu-dominated telling of Indian history posits its primary moral struggle as being between colonialism and nationalism. Beyond being inaccurate, he says, “this framework has helped the Hindu nationalist elite to appropriate both history and power in modern India.” By foregrounding this particular struggle, Hindu nationalists collapse Indian history into a simplistic fairytale and position themselves as “freedom fighters” or “indigenous,” like the many other colonized people around the world. They perpetuate this myth at the expense of truth and Dalit suffering. Some take it a step further—they claim, explicitly or implicitly, that caste is a British invention.

Ananya Chakravarti writes, “I was shocked at the longevity of this particular idea, that caste as we know it is an artefact of British colonialism. For any historian of pre-colonial India, the idea is absurd.” I’d add that any common-sense reading of the facts, by anyone, reveals plainly that caste predates colonialism.

Chakrvarti argues that this thesis allows upper-caste intellectuals to maintain privilege in both Indian and U.S. educational systems, which uplift works of “postcolonial studies” that critique white elites. Doing so allows them to absolve themselves of their own complicity in caste apartheid. “No wonder that Hindutvadis in both countries are now quoting their works to claim that caste was never a Hindu phenomenon,” she writes. “As Dalits are lynched across India and upper-caste South Asian-Americans lobby to erase the history of their lower-caste compatriots from US textbooks, to traffic in this self-serving theory is unconscionable.”

For Dalits, British rule was not simply a matter of conquest, but of contrast. It was neither emancipation nor subjugation, but interruption. That paradox doesn’t redeem colonialism, but it does complicate the idea of decolonization. In everyday use, decolonization can be selective, self-serving, and even appropriated in service of nationalist revisionism. If we are to take history seriously, we must be willing to hold its contradictions. And as I learned with my relatives, history doesn’t always behave how we want it to.

How do you evaluate the morality of a society? Novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky argued we can judge societies by the quality of their prisons. Echoing the prophetic tradition, philosopher Cornel West references the biblical text of Matthew in his answer: its concern for ‘the least of these.’ Dalit leader Bhimrao Ambedkar joins this choir: “I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved.”

In my last article, I explored the strange and remarkable arc of moral progress throughout history. I believe the moral arc of India is best understood in the life and legacy of a single person: Ambedkar.

Born in 1891 to an “Untouchable” Mahar community in western India, Ambedkar quickly learned about his caste. In school, he was forced to sit in a corner by himself on a burlap cloth so as to not pollute the ground or other students. The school cleaner wouldn’t even touch the cloth. While other students drank openly from the water fountain, he was not allowed to drink unless a “touchable” person—one particular peon, or attendant—would open the fountain for him. “No peon, no water,” he remembers.

Yet it was from this classroom that emerged one of the brightest minds in human history. Ambedkar went on to earn multiple degrees and work as an economist, professor, lawyer, sociologist, founder of multiple political parties, India’s first law minister, and most significantly, chief architect of the Indian Constitution. He led mass movements for Dalit education, Dalit access to public water tanks and temples, worker’s rights, women’s rights, and religious conversion from Hinduism. Across domains of religion, law, politics, media, and economics, Ambedkar restlessly fought for the freedom of the caste-oppressed. His life’s work was to redeem India’s morality from the scourge of caste.

Did he succeed?

Rethinking Dharma

As is appropriate when evaluating political changes, it’s important to measure moral progress relative to a status quo. For much of its history, the status quo of Indian morality was shaped by Brahmanism—an early form of Hinduism that institutionalized the oppression of its lower-made castes.

In this “moral dark age,” as scholar S.S. Raghavachar calls it, the Buddha (5th-4th century BCE) emerged as one of the earliest critics of caste. He reimagined the Brahmanical concept of karma: “Not by birth is one a Brahmin or an outcaste, but by deeds.” He redefined caste categories like “Brahmin” and “outcaste” not as hereditary identities but characteristics one can assume based on their good or bad deeds, respectively. (This seems to me a weak reframing of fundamentally immoral categories—but notions of caste were already deep-rooted in Indian consciousness, and moral alternatives weren’t as accessible.)

Over twenty centuries later, when Ambedkar exhausted nearly every possible legal, political, and social intervention to the problem of caste, he turned eventually to Buddhism. He saw the Buddha’s morality as the lynchpin of moral progress in Indian history—which he summarized as “a mortal conflict between Brahmanism and Buddhism.”

In The Buddha and His Dhamma, Ambedkar writes, “Inequality is the official doctrine of Brahminism. The Buddha opposed it root and branch… [The Buddha’s] Dhamma is morality.” Dhamma, or dharma, is a concept representing cosmic order and moral duty. In the Hindu framework, dharma refers to many moral obligations—including the immoral maintenance of caste distinctions and duties. This contradiction makes it fundamentally unreasonable. Ambedkar calls it an “anti-social morality,” designed to protect narrow group interests at the expense of universal rights.

Conversely, Buddha, Ambedkar, and their followers reimagine the same idea of dharma to uphold alternate virtues—self-cultivation, ethical action, and personal liberation. Ambedkar writes, “Morality [is] to be made sacred and universal. It is to safeguard the growth of the individual.” Similar to how the Christian redefinition of sin was necessary to abolish slavery, this change allowed Indians to retain their beloved, foundational principle of dharma while changing its core obligations.

From Bhakti traditions and Sikhism to Dalit liberation theology and Periyar’s atheism, countless other religious formations and reformations were aimed at redefining social morality. But while conversion and reformation were popular means of moral progress, they had little consequence on a country where nearly 80 percent of people are still Hindu. Moreover, conversion’s mixed record was laid bare by persisting casteism across other religions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, and more.

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Constitutional Morality

While celebrated for his religious revelations, Ambedkar’s first attempts at moral progress were grafted into India’s founding document and supreme law: the Constitution. In it, he enshrined his beloved ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. He banned untouchability, articulated the equality of all people, prohibited gender discrimination, secured affirmative action and labor rights, and protected freedom of religion—among several other civilizational changes.

These ideals comprised what he called “constitutional morality,” which he argued needed to be embodied in nation-building and culture. Ambedkar writes in Annihilation of Caste: “Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.” Constitutional morality was not only meant as a set of political interventions, but an antidote for India’s heart.

Law has ‘expressive’ power, in addition to its instrumental functions. It changes the way people think. In the U.S., for example, laws banning discrimination based on sexual orientation were successful not because people feared punishment, but because they authoritatively set the moral and social norms of American society. Laws banning child labor, sexual harassment, and racial discrimination not only penalized once-common behaviors, but fostered broader cultural change to make them seem unthinkable.

Ambedkar seized on this potential for legally induced moral change with a series of 1948 “Hindu code bills” to end the religion’s antiquated treatment of women. The bills were eventually implemented—but only after he resigned in frustration over the government's reluctance in passing them. These bills introduced legal divorce and banned child marriages, granted daughters equal rights to inherit property, gave widows and unmarried daughters equal legal standing in family property, recognized mothers as natural guardians of their children, allowed women to adopt children independently, and required husbands to provide financial maintenance to wives after divorce. In the span of two years, these laws shattered centuries of patriarchal tradition and catalyzed legal reforms in other religious communities, like Islam.

Ambedkar clarifies, however, “rights are not protected by law alone, but by the social and moral conscience of society.” The law influences—but is also subject to—social practice. Despite untouchability’s ban, Dalits continued to face exclusion and segregation in temples, schools, and housing. As recently as 2014, one study found that one in four Indians still practices some form of untouchability in their homes.

Enforcement of the law itself is hardly effective, and even results in its own atrocities. Only a third of reported caste atrocities and rape cases result in convictions. In 2019, the National Campaign Against Torture found that 76 percent of recorded deaths in police custody in India were due to alleged torture or foul play—with 60 percent of victims being from poor and marginalized communities. Similarly, Ambedkar’s legal measures for gender justice have had limited effect, as India still sees some of the highest rates of gender-based violence, including acid attacks, dowry-related murders, and sexual violence. Most tellingly, Dalit women face the disproportionate brunt of this violence.

Ambedkar’s constitutional morality remains articulated, but arrested in development.

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The Economics of Dignity

Before he was a guru or jurist, Ambedkar was an economist. Trained in the ivory halls of Colombia University and the London School of Economics, yet fiercely concerned with Dalit misery and the reimagining of Indian society, his economics were, to say the least, complex. He studied under American philosopher and pragmatist John Dewey, who taught him that democracy wasn’t just a form of government, but a form of “associated living”—the opposite of a caste-fractured society.

Today, Ambedkar is claimed by capitalists, socialists, Marxists, communists—and everyone in between. He plants his flag most clearly in States and Minorities, where he argues for state socialism—a planned economy, nationalized industry, and robust labor rights. Ambedkar was principally concerned with the landlessness of Dalits, who were entirely dependent on the employment and wages of upper-caste Hindus. He proposed that all land should be publicly owned and distributed equitably among groups. India’s 1950s and 60s land reforms did abolish the feudal zamindari system in word, but they simply reintroduced loopholes for upper-caste landlords to retain their landholdings.

Today, Dalits constitute 25% of India’s population but own less than 9% of its agricultural land. Dalit scholar Suraj Yengde writes, “This landlessness takes away their legal, official and constitutional validity as the Indian. The [Dalit] community is desperately in need of a second freedom—which must be material freedom, and not merely on paper.” Yengde articulates that moral virtue is not sufficiently inscribed in a nation’s law, but reflected in the material conditions of its people.

As India’s first Labor Minister, Ambedkar championed minimum wages, maternity benefits, and collective bargaining rights. He pioneered the reservation system of affirmative action, which provided Dalits with access to education and government jobs and eventually enabled the emergence of a Dalit middle class. Though these long overdue interventions empowered everyday Indians, they were implemented alongside a suite of Soviet-style socialist policies that slowed India’s economic growth to a staggering halt. In 1991, with just two weeks of foreign reserves left, India embraced capitalism.

In India Calling, writer Anand Giridharadas describes how the American Dream is waning in the States—but remains alive and well in India. Capitalism and its subsequent social changes have ushered in new possibilities for Indians, including Dalits. Journalist Chandra Bhan Prasad writes, “Capitalism is changing caste much faster than any human being… Dalits don’t succeed in villages. Dalits don’t succeed in traditional trades (monopolized by upper castes).” Neoliberal economic policies pushed the needle further in eroding feudal and semi-feudal societies in India, giving Dalits an option to succeed in urban centers.

Ambedkar was wary of free markets, however, noting their record of inequality in the West. His concerns were well-founded. Economic liberalization may have helped some Dalits, but it also helped the source of their agony. A 2017 study found that caste inequality was unimproved—and sometimes worsened—by greater wealth or faster economic growth. Today, Dalits are still relegated to informal, low-wage jobs or marginalized within trades, discriminated against in hiring processes and credit loans, and exploited in a private sector bereft of robust labor laws.

“Caste [is] simultaneously weakened and revived by current economic and political forces,” writes anthropologist David Mosse. Unlike religion or law, markets don’t have intentions. They simply facilitate transactions, however benevolent or harmful the consequences are. Moreover, the centrality of self-interest and money is an unsustainable model for robust, sustainable moral change. Just like his proposal for constitutional morality, Ambedkar rightly predicted that India’s unjust soil would be quicksand for free markets.

As should be quite evident by now, moral progress is neither linear nor guaranteed. Constitutional morality remains codified but incomplete; religious conversion initiates freedom but often reincarnates caste; economic growth begets new opportunities but reifies domination. If the morality of a society is indeed seen in the lives of ‘the least of these,’ India still has far to go.

But Ambedkar’s struggle is not a failure. Today, one and a half billion people inhabit the world of his Constitution, 200 million Dalits walk through doors once closed to them, and over 600 million women enjoy rights he helped secure. Such is the work of a boy once forced to sit on a burlap cloth and only permitted to drink from touchable hands.

The moral arc of history may be long, but as Bhimrao showed, it can be bent.

When I was growing up, President Barack Obama would not endorse gay marriage, possession of marijuana meant a felony charge, to be racially “color blind” was a virtue, and the federal government tortured suspected criminals with impunity. In a few swift decades, public opinion across these issues—especially among “polite society”—has completely shifted.

Moral change is fascinating—the sudden or gradual redrawing of our moral preferences, norms, and practices in novel or even opposite ways. Nowhere is this more stark than on the issue of slavery.

Slavery is as old as humanity. Institutionalized by warfare, markets, religion, and cultural practice for 11,000 years, slavery was perpetuated and suffered by nearly every people group across every time period, rendered as normal a practice as paying taxes. We last know of slavery in one of its worst forms—the 400-year-long transatlantic slave trade that abducted, subjugated, and exploited Africans throughout the Americas. At the time of this enterprise—like every other time in human history—pro-slavery sentiments were widespread, usually justified with brazen racism.

Yet in the span of just 100 years, this millennia-long moral norm was upended. The practice was banned across most of the world, both through abolitionist movements and legal decrees. Consider the magnitude of that change: 11,000 years of social practice and moral consensus obliterated, relegated to a tale of premodern savagery, all in 100 effective years. That’s as groundbreaking as the invention of electricity or the internet.

From women’s suffrage to civil rights revolutions, history is written with many such bizarre examples of moral awakening. Moral philosophers theorize it as evolutionary, teleological, economic, cultural, or religious, but no one can truly ascertain how, why, or when it might happen. Still, we are all working to influence society’s conscience in one direction or another.

“Moral progress” means different things to different people. I’m a moral objectivist, meaning I believe in a universal good and evil independent of our preferences, and that it’s incumbent on us to discover and adhere to it. Some institutions and practices align us with moral good, and others—like slavery—do the opposite. I think humanity has made impressive gains towards “goodness,” but I don’t think all our moral changes necessarily indicate “progress.” While I celebrate gains in human rights and the general decline of violence, I’m less than pleased with the fruits of the sexual revolution or radical individualism. Most will agree that human morality has seasons of progress and regress, even if we disagree on what.

Watching numerous waves of moral change on the problem of American racism, I’ve long wondered if and when Indian society will similarly shame the practice of caste out of public life. The great Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous words, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” promise hope for the afflicted—but was he right? And how do we know when the “bending” is happening?

The Power of New Ideas

Moral revolutions are almost always precipitated by novel moral ideas. It’s when a few thoughtful people derive new concepts about what we ought to value differently, and persuade the rest of us. The now banal idea that “all men are created equal,” for example, was hardly self-evident, as America’s Founders alleged. It had to first be presented as an idea and agreed upon—and further refined and worked out for centuries to come.

The most significant instance of moral innovation may have happened during the Age of Enlightenment, when notions of autonomy, justice, freedom, and dignity were redefined and popularized. These replaced prior honor codes and religious dictates, laying the foundation for an entirely new, rights-based order that spelled inclusion and dignity for many groups in centuries to come. The effects didn’t sink in immediately, however; the savagery of slavery, for example, paradoxically expanded and intensified alongside these changes.

The promulgation of new ideas is probably the most popular approach to moral change, even today. Many of the novel concerns of our era—racial equity, gender identity, environmental concern—are premised by academics and activists as moral convictions for us to adopt. And reliably, they encounter pushback. New moral demands elicit an “ugh” response from many, being perceived as obnoxious, unreasonable, or judgmental (consider the average PETA demonstration, for example). That’s hard to overcome, but social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues people can be persuaded of moral change by appealing to their “moral foundations”—the deep instincts of conscience, like fairness, liberty, and sanctity. This tends to happen within another key lever of moral change: religion.

Sin, Salvation, and Slavery

The 17th century abolition of slavery was largely brought about by the religious convictions of Quakers and other Christians, who saw all human beings as being created in the image of God. The irony: their moral imperatives departed from mainstream Western Christianity at the time, which read the Bible as condoning and promoting slavery.

In his magisterial account of Western slavery, historian David Brion Davis argues that the religious idea of sin—both individual and collective, even national—was central to slavery’s justification and ultimate abolition: “Men could not fully perceive the moral contradictions of slavery until a major religious transformation had changed their ideas of sin and spiritual freedom; they would not feel it a duty to combat slavery as a positive evil until its existence seemed to threaten the moral security provided by a system of values that harmonized individual desires with socially defined goals and sanctions.” The blessing and curse of religion is that it possesses unparalleled authority to define good and evil, and motivate the requisite behaviors towards both.

This capacity to affect moral changes is why political agendas often latch onto religion or utilize religious themes. Anti-slavery advocates like William Wilberforce regularly invoked Britain’s national “Christian” identity—along with Christian theology about God, sin, and dignity—to argue for abolition. Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes that Christian doctrine on murder was pivotal in eliminating the honor code-era practice of dueling to settle disputes. Tracing the second-order consequences of religious dictates, philosopher Joseph Heinrich goes as far as to argue that the church’s ban on cousin marriage is the reason for both economic and moral progress in the West: incest prohibitions forced families to mix more, leading to greater social mobility, leading to greater economic development, leading to greater moral impartiality and universalism. In this butterfly effect, though, it’s actually economic development that begets the largest ripples of moral change.

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The Invisible Hand

To that end, some philosophers argue that moral inclusivity only flourishes in societies with favorable economic and social conditions. I’m less convinced of this theory; to once again take the example of slavery, it’s obvious that economic prosperity can coincide with moral depravity and evil. Philosophers like Peter Singer argue that modern wealth blinds people to their duty to reduce suffering.

But through what economist Adam Smith called "the invisible hand," markets also have the subversive capacity to achieve morally ideal outcomes at scale—even if by means of self-interest. Some historians even view the abolition of slavery as more plausibly motivated by economic incentives than virtue. Many American Northerners—including, potentially, President Abraham Lincoln—opposed slavery for fear that “slave power” enjoyed by slave owners gave them a disproportionate advantage over free white farmers using free labor. This concern may have trumped any sympathy for the slaves themselves. This isn’t universally true, however—Great Britain stood to gain nothing from abolishing one of its most profitable enterprises.

In another case, the sexual revolution of the 1960s—which indicated all sorts of moral changes (some for better, some for worse) in gender roles, sexual norms, the institution of marriage, family structure, and so on—was itself catalyzed largely by oral contraceptives, invented in the 1950s. In this case, it was scientific advancement and commodification that catalyzed the rapid liberalization of society—not moral or spiritual claims.

New ideas, religious reformations, and markets are just a few tested levers for moral change, but how well do they stack up against the monstrosity of caste?

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Caste Eludes The Arc

On paper, India checks many of modernity’s moral boxes. It’s a democracy. It is, in theory, secular. But this ancient moral pathology—caste—has not only survived modernity, but adapted to it. Even as Indian corporations embrace progressive protections around race, gender, sexuality, and disability, caste is conspicuously absent. Many young Indians express outrage over racism, imperialism, and patriarchy—but remain silent on caste. Caste has remarkably evaded every wave of moral renovation in its path.

The prophets of the anti-caste tradition all advanced new or renewed ideas of morality—from Buddhist reclamations of dharma and karma to Enlightenment-style principles like liberty, equality, and fraternity. Dalit jurist B.R. Ambedkar inscribed these very ideals into India’s supreme law: the Constitution. Yet, the fruits of caste—untouchability, discrimination, and even grave atrocities—continue to circumvent the law. Religious conversion from Hinduism is celebrated by most Dalits as the ultimate anti-caste intervention, but the reincarnation of caste in Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, and Sikh communities proves spiritual rebirth isn’t caste-proof. And while capitalism eroded the old feudal world dominated by caste elites, it simultaneously reproduced new forms of inequity and discrimination. These interventions have no doubt weakened caste, but the parasite has proved durable, adaptable, and unrelenting.

Researcher Alexey Guzey explains, “the moral arc has not been monotonic.” It ebbs and flows in a myriad of ways, usually at unpredictable paces. It indicates rapid progress and immediate regress, even simultaneously. World hunger might plummet while genocides rage, or mass violence declines while social polarization skyrockets. The perceived moral ideals of a population may shift for the better, while its systems behave as amorally or immorally as ever.

Amidst this chaotic set of trends, it remains incumbent on us to pull the moral arc towards justice. Few individuals were more committed to this project than B.R. Ambedkar, who tirelessly worked across domains to redeem Indian society. His work serves as a case study for what is possible—and isn’t—in forging a future free of caste. I explore this in Part 2: One Man’s Moral War.

“We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgment of the intellect is only part of the truth.” - Carl Jung

On my childhood summers, I made a game of running about my grandparents’ pink Guntur apartment, pretending to flee the images of Hindu gods plastered on their neighbors’ doors. They terrified me.

At that point, all I knew about caste was its connection to Hinduism. As devout Christians, my family expressed a deep aversion to anything “Hindu”—yoga, Diwali, Bollywood, etc. They spoke often about Hindu repression and persecution of religious minorities. As I grew older, those colorful idols appeared increasingly to me as the symbolic overseers of a caste regime.

When I began reading Dalit writers, I saw similar reactions. Revered Dalit leader B.R. Ambedkar condemned Hinduism for caste, going as far as to publicly burn the Hindu text Manusmriti for its spiritual sanction of caste violence. His words, “Even though I was born in the Hindu religion, I will not die in the Hindu religion,” continue inspiring his followers to reject Hinduism and Hindu traditions en masse.

The anti-caste intelligentsia, however, is of another opinion—one that sees caste as a social problem bereft of spiritual attachments. To many leading scholars—whom I'll address later in this piece—any analysis that grounds it in the Hindu religious tradition is considered colonial at worst, and naïve at best. I too have put forth a “banal” explanation of caste, but to repeat psychologist Carl Jung’s words, this is “only part of the truth.”

Caste is a spiritual construct fashioned in sacred texts and animated by spiritual powers that make it particularly pervasive, savage, and resilient. To overly secularize caste is to misunderstand it. It’s a postcolonial overcorrection that’s out of step with how Dalits live and understand liberation.

Powers and Principalities

I worked for several years alongside those who writer Scott Bessenecker called “the new friars”—Christian leaders working for social transformation in urban poor communities. They lived and labored in many of the most destitute places in the world, and often described the forces they saw—racism, violence, poverty, inequality, displacement, pollution—as material manifestations of “powers and principalities,” which is biblical language for spiritual evil operating in our world. To them, community organizing, protest, and ministry were fundamentally spiritual interventions, and pushback from demonically possessed individuals, gang members, or powerful lobbyists were experiences of “spiritual warfare.” Oppression and poverty were material realities enchanted with spiritual evil.

By “spiritual,” I’m referring to that which is immaterial, metaphysical, and transcendental of earthly realities. While the relationship between the two domains may feel ambiguous or imperceptible to many in the American context, it is strikingly plain in the land of my birth.

India is known for its spiritual obsessions. Pew reports that 97% of Indians believe in God. Lower-caste Indians are more likely to hold a variety of religious beliefs (Multiple Religious Belonging). Like in the U.S.—and throughout much of the world—those facing financial hardship are more often believers than other Indians.

The experiences of caste and class also affect perceptions of evil—specifically, the influence of “powers and principalities” on material life. According to Pew, 43% of lower-caste Hindus believe that magic, sorcery or witchcraft affect their lives. Indian Christians demonstrate the widest disparities—51% of lower-caste Christians believe in demons or evil spirits, while just 12% of upper-caste Christians do. Even among my own family members, I’ve noticed that witchcraft or demonic influence is occasionally blamed for sudden disaster, illness, or hardship.

Dalits—Dalit women, specifically—are constantly using the spiritual realm to process and overcome their burden of caste. As their suffering is one of profound ontological brokenness, it is only the spiritual domain that could inspire such evil—and resolve it. A 2014 ethnography on Dalit women in Chennai’s Pentecostal movement found that participation in prayer groups gave them profound, kinship-like bonds, empowered them with moral authority, and seemed to usher divine power into everyday reality. Through prayer, they “make the suffering of the other person one’s own.” One woman explained, “If a woman is penniless and needs money, we pray very strongly together with her, and the money will come to her—she might even find it lying on the ground! If she cries and prays to God on her own, it might not work out as successfully.”

Some Hindu Dalits, like the Paraiyars of Tamil Nadu, are known to experience regular “divine possessions,” when the spirit of a goddess inhabits the body of an ordinary woman. Some interpret this as an act of divine benevolence, as a deity channels its power to otherwise disempowered humans. To others, it’s a short-lived, manipulative ritual that provides little relief to everyday suffering. Dalit writer Baby Kamble writes about spiritual possessions of local women as often as ten days every month, as if scheduled. “Generations after generations, our people rotted and perished by following such a superstitious way of life. Yet, we kept believing in your Hindu religion and serving you faithfully.”

The spiritual texture of Indian life—and Dalit life, specifically—is undeniable. That’s why Ambedkar advocated the primacy of religious conversion as the ultimate anti-caste intervention. Dalit scholar Suraj Yengde even argues that every spiritual tradition and reformation occurring in India for the last two thousand years was intended largely as an anti-caste enterprise. In this vein, any epistemology of caste must account for its spiritual contents, whether you believe in such things or not. Unfortunately, our leading voices on the subject neglect this.

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Secular Overcorrections

In the world of caste politics, the most engaged critics of caste are most often academics. And academia is dominated by a select array of philosophies: postmodernism, empiricism, and secularism, to name a few. By secularism, I’m referring to a worldview that emphasizes the nonreligious, naturalistic aspects of life and rejects religion as a way of understanding the world. While I think this is a helpful ideology to organize public life and secure universal rights, it doesn’t affect all societies equally.

Sociologist José Casanova argues that secularism is essentially a Western idea, as the West has seen a significant loss of power among religious institutions and a sweeping decline in religious beliefs and practice. That doesn’t make it inevitable for the rest of the world, or even for the West’s future. Between the Iranian revolution, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Poland’s Solidarity Movement, and other trends, it’s apparent that religion remains key to how people live, understand the world, and seek to influence change. Moreover, thinkers like Jonathan Haidt and John McWhorter have effectively outlined how nonreligious political ideologies—like third-wave antiracism—increasingly adopt a religious “shape” to fill the spiritual void of a secular world.

For societies steeped in religion for millennia—take, India—spirituality can’t easily be divorced from empirical reality. Scholar Sushmitha Nath notes that secularism is premised on the privatization of religion, but religious practice is anything but “private” to Indians. It is an inexorable variable shaping sociopolitical life, and deserves the requisite weight in any engagement with caste.

In The Oxford Handbook of Caste (2023)—a volume titled with unusual prestige—editors Surinder Jodhka and Jules Naudet write extensively about the need to secularize our understanding of caste. The book itself is rich with relevant analysis, but its premise—as detailed in the introduction—is flawed. Jodhka and Naudet aim rightly to update our global understanding of caste as a pervasive, multidimensional social reality surpassing religious, political, and economic boundaries, but their reasoning rests on several fallacies.

For one, they suggest that viewing caste as exclusively Hindu rids it of material significance: “Orientalist and colonial narratives simplified [caste] as a pan-Indian ‘system’ and caste came to be imagined as being devoid of any materiality, constructed simply as a feature of the Hindu mind, shaped and structured by the dialectics of ‘purity’ and ‘pollution,’ with which it has presumably been forever obsessed.” They argue that we’re trained to see caste as a set of ideological convictions and ritual traditions, as opposed to a system of domination and power. Why the distinction?

Jodhka and Naudet narrowly define power in the context of political power, missing that power can be mapped across cultural, religious, and social domains—better yet, the confluence of these. They discount the relevance of millennia-long Brahmanical religious conditioning in constructing social architecture. This approach departs from our most esteemed anti-caste radicals like Jyotirao Phule, Periyar, and Ambedkar, who, in the words of scholar Anupama Rao, “argued that distinctions between social practice and political power, and between religious and secular domains was an artificial distinction, which masked the complex and totalizing character of caste exploitation.” Caste is as much a form of spiritual bondage as it is a physical reality constraining the bodies, movements, and futures of the caste-oppressed. That nexus is precisely what gives it such longevity and strength.

To that end, Jodhka and Naudet also argue, “Caste is much more than simply an ideological system of a specific religion.” This is technically true—caste has reproduced itself across many other religious and cultural domains, but as Ambedkar argues, the animating ideology of caste can never be divorced from its practice. “Hindus cannot destroy their castes without destroying their religion,” he writes, as the annihilation of caste requires a fundamental shift in the notions of life, values, humanity, and God. “[Change] means new life. But new life cannot enter a body that is dead. New life can enter only in a new body.”

Later in the handbook, scholar Mathieu Claveyrolas actually makes Ambedkar’s point. While he acknowledges that caste has reemerged in many forms, he argues that “all the new avatars of caste have indeed perpetuated the core principle of Hindu ritual ideology: the distinction between the pure and the impure.” It is the same religious logic undergirding every manifestation of caste, however secular it appears.

Lastly, Jodhka and Naudet alleges the religious characterization of caste is residual colonialism. “This is an outdated and, dare we say, deceptive or misleading view of India’s past,” they write. They blame the religious analysis of caste on colonial administrators, who used a “biased imperial lens, which perpetuated stereotypes of making caste appear as part of the Hindus’ religious ideology.” This view is uncomfortably similar to that purported by Hindu nationalists, in an attempt to revise history and abdicate responsibility for the caste system. The opposite is true.

Dalit leaders and the masses of Dalit people have always addressed caste as a primarily religious enterprise. By secularizing caste to “decolonize” it, these academics are effectively reimagining it from a Eurocentric perspective. Given the disproportionate influence of religion on Indian public life and psychology, one can discern that the average Indian perspective would conceptualize caste in both material and spiritual terms. To impose a (Western) secularist framework on such a society, paradoxically, is an orientalist move.

I wrote in “The Paradox of the White Gaze” that we can’t let problems like colonialism short-circuit an honest engagement with the problem of caste. As Rao points out, Phule, Periyar, and Ambedkar all employed “colonial,” Western-born ideas to advocate against caste. Even if the religious critique of caste once came from Westerners, that doesn’t render it false. After all, it comes also from Dalits—the primary subjects of caste apartheid.

If we can’t see caste as both spiritual and material, we are only seeing part of it. Seeing it as merely demonic—as I once did as a child—begets an unhelpful paranoia and paralysis, but seeing it as a depersonalized, material phenomenon limits our engagement with the issue. Jung feared that we discount the spiritual dimensions of evil to our peril: “We have never really come to grips with it and consequently it has remained in its original savage state.”

In the same way it’s unlikely to find mainstream, well-respected voices advocating openly for racial discrimination, it’s rare to find self-declared proponents of caste. Caste is an evil idea on its face, so few intelligent people are willing to stand by it publicly. Despite this, the caste system seems to retain total power over India and its people.

India’s National Crimes Records Bureau (NCRB) reports that atrocities against Dalits and Adivasis (India’s indigenous people) continue to grow in number every year. In 2000, NCRB reported 25,455 recorded crimes—finding that every day, three Dalit women were raped, two Dalits were murdered, and two Dalit homes were burned down. Today, the number of recorded crimes is a ghastly 57,582.

I’m always reluctant to detail these, but for the sake of awareness: just the most recent examples include the rape of Dalit minors and women, Dalits being forced to drink urine (and cow urine being used to “cleanse” water tanks used by Dalits), Dalits being beaten to death, Dalits forced to perform humiliating labor, and so on. Not captured in crime reports are the ubiquitous experiences of caste in everyday life, like workplace discrimination, religious abuse, untouchability, endogamy, and so on.

How can a system with such few avowed supporters still manipulate masses of people towards its evil ends—and for thousands of years, at that? There are many explanations, but I will suggest one not often applied to this topic: the banality of evil. A simmering mix of religious conditioning, social architecture, and moral failure have rendered caste an everyday practice for everyday people.

“Terrifyingly Normal”

When philosopher Hannah Arendt reported on the 1961 war crimes trials of Adolph Eichmann, a Nazi official responsible for helping implement the genocide of millions of Jews, she penned four words that altered the trajectory of global ethics: “the banality of evil.” Arendt observed that Eichmann was not psychopathic or sadistic, but “terrifyingly normal.” As she put it, “The deeds were monstrous, but the doer—at least the very effective one now on trial—was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.”

Arendt concluded that the doing of great evil did not always require malicious intent, but could emerge from somewhere outside the human heart—in this case, the bureaucratic machinery of a totalitarian government. Eichmann was not an exception; rather, any ordinary, even well-meaning person could serve as a blind instrument for immense harm. The past and present are littered with examples of everyday citizens and employees quietly, mindlessly perpetuating systems of unimaginable evil. Caste is one such problem.

Unlike other engagements with the problem of evil, Arendt addresses evil specific to an age of totalitarianism. A totalitarian state forbids individual freedom, subordinating its citizens and controlling every aspect of their lives. In Nazi Germany, this meant individual conscience was subject to political authority, enemies were dehumanized with propaganda and bigotry, independent thought and dissent was squashed, and the masses were manipulated with misinformation and pseudoscience. Such an environment is intentionally designed to coerce people to do evil, whether or not they intend to. The caste system is not the same as Nazi Germany, for obvious reasons, but it does exhibit many of these features.

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Contaminated Water

Novelist David Foster Wallace famously imagined a fish’s response to a question about water: “What the hell is water?” Our environment, however perceptible and empirical, is often the thing we notice the least. We rarely observe how our habits, thoughts, and behaviors are subconsciously influenced by the environments we inhabit—like the order and number of choices we face, the technologies we use, our language, diet, culture, and so on. If the contaminant of caste lies upstream of such things, we are swimming in foul water—and we don’t recognize it.

Scholar Balmurli Natrajan calls caste both “brutal and banal.” In the anthology Caste is Life, he describes how caste is gently instantiated in non-dramatic features of life, including the procurement, preparation, and consumption of food, geographic demarcations between caste-segregated neighborhoods, and even colloquial distinctions between ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ objects or behaviors. Natrajan even takes aim at India’s hallmark greeting: “the namaste with folded palms, serves our caste system by not requiring people to touch as is normal in other parts of the world.”

By design, the practice of caste requires constant, everyday reminders. That’s why surnames, occupations, diets, entry, participation in religious traditions, etc., are all coded to indicate caste. These norms reinforce the caste order while requiring little thought, initiative, or deliberation. They represent a social architecture of routinized, ritualized norms that are not neutral but deliberate nudges towards a fundamentally evil practice. What makes these norms so pervasive, however, is that they first emerged as religious doctrines.

The Design of Moral Backwardness

Whenever evil is propagated in the language of morality or law, it possesses a unique staying power. In theocracies, religious dogma or the threat of punishment can trump individual discernment, moral progress, and free thought. India represents a society and culture conditioned by millennia of religious influence—namely, that of Brahmanism (proto-Hinduism).

In the Hindu text Manusmriti, the four castes—Brahmins, Vaishyas, Kshatriyas, and Shudras—are prescribed rules for almost every part of their waking life, including names, housing, education, marriage, sex, property rights, clothing, diet, and so on. Here is one such command concerning Dalits and Shudras (Note: Shudras are the lowest of the four-caste order—yet are still positioned above Dalits):

“Near worshipped trees and cremation-grounds, on hills and in groves, these shall dwell, duly marked [by caste], subsisting by their respective occupations. The dwelling of [Dalits] and Śvapacas shall be outside the village; they shall be made ‘Apapātra,’ [untouchable] and their wealth shall consist of dogs and donkeys. The dress of the Shudra shall be the garments of the dead; they should eat their food from broken dishes, black iron shall be their ornaments and they always should wander from place to place.” (Manusmriti 10.50-52)

These exact edicts have informed—to this day—where Dalits and Shudras live, what they do for work, what they wear, and even which dishes they are served food on.

The Manusmriti also dictates that people must only marry within their own castes; for Brahmins, marrying a Shudra would irreparably pollute their bloodline. In fact, India’s 2,000-year-old moratorium on genetic mixing can be traced to the publication of this very text. With an inter-caste marriage rate of just 5% in 2016, this obsession with caste endogamy continues today.

Caste draws strength by addressing concepts of purity and pollution, framed as touchable and untouchable. If all evil systems share a tendency to dehumanize, one can understand how people might easily commit gratuitous violence against a group of people divinely ordained as Untouchable—subhuman, impure to the touch, sight, or sound, disgusting.

Caste attacks these base instincts of judgment, like disgust, which inevitably trump reason. Evil doesn’t require one to think—just act. That’s why Arendt called evil “thought-defying.” In fact, the Manusmriti literally bars certain castes from thinking vis-à-vis learning and teaching. It gives the three upper castes the ability to study but only offers Brahmins the ability to teach, instruct, and rule. Conversely, Shudras and Dalits are considered unfit for learning, and anyone found guilty of advising them is threatened with hell.

Even if one questions such norms, caste employs widely held beliefs like dharma and karma to fortify its social imaginary. For comparison, these ideas are as fundamental and banal to India as first-order principles like individualism and liberty are to the West. Dharma, the cosmic law governing individual behavior and social order, dictates that one follow their caste-specific roles, duties, rituals, and vocations. By following one’s dharma, one earns good karma, which might advance them up the caste ladder in their next life (or conversely, lower). According to the Manusmriti, if a Shudra even issues a correction against a Brahmin concerning his dharma, he risks having hot oil dropped in his mouth or “a red hot iron pin tenches long” thrust in his mouth. He is, after all, “created by Brahma to serve the Brahmins,” and “can be slain at the pleasure of his master.”

Many of these religious edicts are not necessarily “non-dramatic” in the way that Natrajan details earlier. They represent a level of cruelty and sadism that would violate every universal law of conscience. Still, they are effective. In our twenty-first, morally progressive century, this sort of spiritually sanctioned savagery still appears in headlines, written first on Dalit bodies. In the way that a totalitarian Nazi regime usurped the conscience of ordinary Germans, centuries of Brahmanical religious conditioning and social architecture have overtaken our moral norms in subtle yet reliable ways.

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A Failure to Think

In his magnum opus Annihilation of Caste, Dalit intellectual and architect of the Indian Constitution B.R. Ambedkar writes, “The effect of caste on the ethics of the Hindus is simply deplorable. Caste has killed the public spirit. Caste has destroyed the sense of public charity. Caste has made public opinion impossible.”

Caste represents moral rot at the heart of Indian society, tainting any and every thing that grows on it. When caste reproduces itself through generations of society, its people are not free. There is no free will nor goodwill, no free thought nor discerning conscience. The machine moves us along, and we are subsumed towards its ends. Social indifference, apathy, and silence among the upper castes normalize evil as much as the active presence of caste does. To Arendt, “Evil comes from a failure to think.”

It appears Arendt and Ambedkar had similar ideas about freedom, which begin with thinking. “Caste is a notion; it is a state of the mind,” Ambedkar writes. Free thinking can potentially shatter the banality of caste by compelling us to question inherited beliefs, reject the passive acceptance of tradition, and reimagine and implement alternatives. It involves a reclaiming of agency. Thinking isn’t merely an intellectual exercise but, as philosopher Immanuel Kant put it, an act of courage.

Minister Peter Marshall famously said, “A different world cannot be built by indifferent people.” If there is no moral agency, then the banality of evil triumphs. It is only when we can exercise our reason and consent amidst a social context that we act freely. That is why so much of the Dalit liberation movement prizes religious conversion—whether it induces a sudden material change or not, it is always a declaration of independence from an evil status quo.

In environments of evil, thinking is a duty. Arendt writes, “If the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ’demand’ its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be.”

All this said, there’s something that Arendt’s analysis doesn’t quite account for. In framing evil as banal, she writes that evil “possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension.” I reject the distinction. Caste is both banal and spiritual, both ordinary and demonic. As I explain in my next piece, Evil Has a Face, the animating spirit behind caste must be taken seriously if we are to have any enduring solution.

Senate Bill 403—a historic proposal to add “caste” to California’s civil rights protections—was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom on October 7th. This was an unlikely and unfortunate end, as the bill previously passed the California Legislature with flying colors. On the ground, a coalition spanning advocacy groups, legal organizations, and religious and cultural associations united in support. When the bill opposition smeared SB 403 as “divisive” and “Hinduphobic,” legislators made “caste” less prominent in the bill, diffusing some of the controversy. After all this, why didn’t the Governor sign it?

Longtime Democratic Party fundraiser Ramesh Kapur proudly claimed responsibility for lobbying Newsom against SB 403, promising financial loyalty and the support of Indian Americans—in a future presidential bid, probably—in exchange. Considering the merits of the bill, tireless advocacy by supporters, and the promise of democratic processes, Kapur’s interference is extremely disappointing. Newsom’s own record appears confused of late, with simultaneous support and neglect concerning workers’ rights.

In his veto notice, Newsom gave a one-sentence explanation: “Because discrimination based on caste is already prohibited under existing [civil rights] categories, this bill is unnecessary.” It is and always was true that caste discrimination is implicitly prohibited by existing civil rights protections in California and the U.S. But as Wahab clarified in her response to the veto, SB 403 was introduced precisely because this was insufficient.

The explicit inclusion of caste as a noteworthy social reality would have updated the law to fully protect caste-oppressed Californians by raising awareness about this problem, shattering ambiguity, acutely empowering civil rights administrators, and setting a moral precedent. If “anti-discrimination” is enough, why specify any of these categories (sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, gender identity, and sexual orientation) at all? Newsom’s outright rejection comes as a sting, furthermore, because he added no additional alternatives, recommendations, or even affirmation about the struggle endured by those oppressed by caste. Despite his veto, there are still meaningful actions the State can take.

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Strengthen Civil Rights Enforcement

Even absent a law expressly banning caste discrimination, it is still possible to improve civil rights protections for those impacted by it. Ironically, the Governor’s veto message actually added clarity to the litany of evidence that caste quietly violates U.S. antidiscrimination norms. Given this precedent, the Civil Rights Department (CRD)—California’s civil rights enforcement agency—could take steps to prosecute caste discrimination under existing civil rights laws. They began this in their 2020 lawsuit against Cisco, but there remains much to be done.

CRD’s strategic plan states: “Because discrimination can cross every economic, social, cultural and geographic barrier, it also means developing a scope to our efforts that serves the diverse needs of the public.” CRD’s public education is an ideal mechanism of amplifying critical information about caste to relevant communities across California. The new and heightened awareness about caste discrimination sparked by SB 403 should inspire CRD and other civil rights agents to develop literacy about caste, conduct relevant research, and produce materials and strategies addressing it.

Additionally, SB 403 provoked the important question of how caste discrimination would be arbitrated by civil rights administrators. All prosecution of discrimination relies on similar processes, but given the unique symptoms of caste discrimination, CRD would be wise to develop a rubric for assessing it. International protocols for this already exist, like the “Ambedkar Principles” or “Dalit Discrimination Check” created by the International Dalit Solidarity Network. With or without a new law, there is sufficient legal and moral imperative for CRD to act in defense of the caste-oppressed.

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Establish a Research Commission

Much of the debate surrounding SB 403 hinged on the issue of research. Bill proponents found that existing data painted a grim, urgent reality of caste discrimination in the U.S., but opponents called this research dubious. For reasons I describe here, I believe the existing research is quite reliable, but there remain important data gaps about the scope, nature, and prevalence of caste discrimination. A state-authorized, independent research commission could help bridge those gaps. In addition to producing empirical data and analysis, a research commission has the salutary effect of promoting the issue and the state’s own commitment to antidiscrimination.

In 2010, the United Kingdom conducted a nationwide research effort about caste. The study helped clarify definitions of caste, estimate the size of Britain’s caste-oppressed population, gather public opinion and testimony on caste discrimination, and identify cases of caste discrimination occurring. These data points would be very useful for addressing this issue in the U.S., as well. It’s worth noting, though, that research can only take you so far. Despite finding evidence of direct and indirect caste-based discrimination, the UK ultimately decided against expressly prohibiting caste discrimination, calling it “difficult to define” and encountering pushback from Hindu groups. The political dynamics around this issue will continue to make any legitimate change a rocky climb.

Educate, Agitate, and Organize

Civil rights law is meant to prevent grave discrimination, particularly in the areas of employment, education, and housing. There are many documented instances of caste discrimination in these areas, but caste is virtually ubiquitous in many South Asian American cultural associations, marital practices, and religious traditions. It follows that the problem of caste warrants grassroots interventions—not only political ones.

Awaiting Newsom’s signature on SB 403, I protested shoulder-to-shoulder with members of California’s Ravidassia Sikh community—many of whom made the daily drive from Fresno to Sacramento to sing songs of freedom at the capitol. They exemplified how religious communities are vital vessels for advancing justice. Echoing Dalit icon B.R. Ambedkar, we must “educate, agitate, and organize” across our cultural and religious institutions to heal from caste.

In many ways, SB 403 remains a victory. It won in the California Legislature, raised an unprecedented degree of awareness about caste in the U.S., and ignited conversation across South Asian American communities about an otherwise unspoken topic. This anti-caste tide will continue to wash across American universities and cities. The City of Fresno recently banned caste, and the State of New Jersey is stirring to do the same. It will not be long before the next version of SB 403 turns up elsewhere, or back in the halls of the California Senate. What matters is that we do not let the momentum of SB 403 die. Caste must be dragged out into public, kicking and screaming, for us to see it for what it is—a moral stain worth disinfecting from our way of life.

In Intellectuals and Society, the prolific economist Thomas Sowell argued that we don’t hold intellectuals accountable for the results of their ideas—as we do engineers or military commanders. If an engineer’s building plans for a footbridge are faulty, for example, the consequences are dire. Scientific theories can be updated by experimentation. But few ideas are regulated with such scrutiny. Worse—the intelligentsia is insulated from the political consequences of their ideas, which fall disproportionately on vulnerable groups. From free market fables to “wokeness,” many popular social ideas are religiously accepted and transmuted well beyond their original intent. Analysis meant for one use is taken as gospel, coloring parts of reality it was never meant to touch. As a participant in progressive spaces, I often see one such idea taken to irrational extremes: the white gaze.

Novelist Toni Morrison famously conceptualized the white gaze as the reliable assumption that the reader or observer is white—forcing people of color to constantly articulate themselves within a paradigm of whiteness. This observation is profound and often true, but by defending against the “little white man that sits on your shoulder” Morrison described, I worry we’ve recast him into an omnipresent boogeyman haunting all of public life. While critiquing the white gaze, we can’t seem to see ourselves without it. It remains a yardstick for political priorities, a barometer for identity, and a compass for truth. It’s produced illogical and illiberal outcomes—including a shroud for caste apartheid.

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“Don’t Fight in Front of White People!”

Marriage counsel, management literature, and street codes share a common proverb: “Defend in public, correct in private.” Politics is no different. Most opinions we encounter are primarily asserted in relation to a broader context, public, or status quo. It’s why minorities avoid airing their own dirty laundry in public—a supposed white audience. Comedian Chris Rock closed his recent special with this idea, which gave him caution during the infamous Oscars slap: “Don’t fight in front of white people!” In progressive politics, this means that as long as the white gaze is present, there are bigger fish to fry (i.e. white supremacy) than alternative issues facing minorities. Intra-group issues are meant to be adjudicated in private, regardless of their scale and severity. But for minorities (often, minorities within minorities) facing entirely non-white problems, this skews the public conversation against us.

When ex-Muslim human rights activists like Yasmine Mohammed or Ayan Hirsi Ali raised genuine concerns about rape culture and patriarchal abuse in their religious communities, progressives slammed them—and by extension, those they advocate for—as Islamophobic. In an interview, Mohammed said: “[Western feminists] consider Muslim women to be of some other species, that they are so different from them. For themselves, they will recognize victim blaming, slut shaming… under Sharia, it’s very, very easy to see a perfect example of rape culture, but for some reason, for ‘those women over there,’ it’s empowering?” Given the white gaze, any critique of minorities is seen as punching down—and we don’t want to punch down, especially in public (in front of white people). But this correction merely gives power back to the white gaze, which retains influence over how people are seen and problems are judged. Herein lies the paradox: the white gaze—whether blindly obeyed or religiously critiqued—constrains people of color to a white paradigm.

Political scientist Yascha Mounk considers this an overuse of an otherwise corrective ‘prism’ of race, gender, and sexual orientation. While avoiding the phrase “cultural Marxism,” he compares this prism to the Marxist tendency to squeeze every historical event into the lens of class—even when alternative variables are more appropriate. Legal scholar Amy Chua confronts similar shortsightedness in the Western export of free market democracy, tracing how the supposed panacea of capitalism and democracy can inadvertently breed ethnic conflict elsewhere. All of this represents Maslow’s law of the instrument: to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Likewise, this prism projects white/non-white power struggles onto every political interaction everywhere, including where white people aren’t involved. In the Indian context, this prism glosses over an immensely significant axis of power: caste.

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Overusing Orientalism

When scholar Edward Said wrote Orientalism, he elucidated centuries of contempt and exploitation. The term described the Western (white) gaze of Eastern societies and cultures, which blindly interpreted and depicted them as barbaric and exotic. Consider something as mainstream as Disney’s 1992 Aladdin, the opening tune of which represents the Middle East as “where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face, it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.” Like Morrison, Said’s coinage was profound—until it became inflated into a theory of everything. So long as any critique of the Eastern world can be attributed to an ambient force of orientalism, then our understanding of facts is woefully constrained.

When the state of California sued Cisco in defense of a Dalit employee in 2020, the Hindu American Foundation argued it was peddling “racist European theories about caste” and enabling “Hinduphobia.” In response to SB 403, a California bill to ban caste discrimination statewide, Republican senators (lobbied by Hindu donors), repeated these complaints, calling the bill language “racist” and “anti-Indian.” When a similar effort commenced in the United Kingdom, one prestigious lawyer alleged that anti-caste policies would perpetuate orientalism. He argued that caste was a Christian myth to malign India, and that reinvigorating the conversation of caste would simply cause further stereotyping and racism towards Indians. In a stellar response, philosopher Meena Dhanda called this “misplaced nativism.”

“Caste or Jati was never benign. It was felt as a burden to be overthrown. A precursor of Ambedkar, Jotiba Phule (1826–1890), decried the caste system as ‘the code of crude and inhuman laws to which we can find no parallel among other nations’… This part of our pre-colonial history also shows that ideas of equality stirred the minds of Indians well before the colonial encounter and did not spring for the first time from Christian missionary activities… The [lawyer’s] nativism is misplaced for the further reason that he underestimates the cultural resources of the Indic civilization—whilst spawning inequality it also produced elements of an antidote.”

Those crying racism when addressing caste are purporting a patently false, manipulated history—one that does not engage realistically with our checkered past. And it’s a story that is easily accepted by Western liberals, because of our ideological heuristics. We presume that critique of the East is probably orientalist, that terrible social arrangements like caste are functions of colonialism, and that the factor of race remains more salient than any other. I actually think the postmodernist intellectuals behind these assumptions— Foucault, Spivak, Said, and others—were quite careful and clear-eyed in their analysis. It’s the downstream exaggeration of their ideas that makes them powerfully misleading. While the idea of the white gaze is useful in many arenas, it can hinder our ethical convictions from scaling with the true nature and magnitude of problems.

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The Limits of Brownness

When Savarnas (upper castes or dominant castes) appeal to the white gaze to obscure or minimize the realities of caste, they cite their racial location of “brownness,” which situates them closer to the bottom of America’s racial caste hierarchy and awards them progressive sympathies. By foregrounding the issue of caste, I’ve been personally accused of depicting a barbaric, backwards image of India, which Savarnas fear feeds into an orientalist, white gaze. But the problem of the white gaze is surely less important than the slow genocide of Dalits and Indian Muslims and Christians—isn’t it?

In her book The Trauma of Caste, Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundarajan levies a scathing critique to the South Asian American embrace of a “brown” identity: “It is a false mono-narrative of South Asianness that serves only to perpetuate the violence of caste and other historic traumas while providing new terrain for exploitation and discrimination for us as South Asian Americans… In embracing brownness as the key identity, they make their privileged positions of caste, class, immigration, and race—which would situate them in a position of not only oppression but also privilege—much harder to interrogate.”

Race and racialization is a deeply pervasive social fiction, and South Asian Americans aren’t spared under it. But it’s merely one way to understand their experience—and increasingly, a less salient one. By furiously accounting for the white gaze, we actually become captive to it. This is why the popular “brown” cause aims no further than to make white people say “Chai,” instead of “Chai tea.” That’s our trademark ‘struggle.’ There’s much to say here—at the risk of ranting—but this is an understated fact: the Dalit struggle, in truth, has little to do with white people. Caste was not created by white people and caste is not perpetuated by white people. It is the primary social power struggle of Indian communities everywhere. For the American Left, these are uncomfortable facts. But unless we are willing to peer beyond our ideological blinders, we will never experience an honest engagement with many important issues. Worse—we will forsake many who suffer in the dark.

I first met Thenmozhi at one of her “Unlearning Caste Supremacy” workshops in San Francisco, California, four years ago. That eight-hour training exploded my awareness of caste into new frontiers. Expertly weaving through history, politics, religion, and language, Thenmozhi facilitated a group of mostly Savarna (upper or dominant caste) South Asian Americans into “unlearning caste.”

Thenmozhi is probably the most prolific Dalit-American activist in history. She has contributed, along with other Dalit feminists, to much of how American society is currently discovering and engaging with caste. She helped coordinate the groundbreaking 2018 “Caste in the U.S.” survey, leads Dalit rights organization Equality Labs, and has organized across groups and decades to forge a formidable political coalition against caste—which she’s currently spearheading to win caste protections across the state of California.

Her new and first book The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition is a memoir of these experiences—and much more. It invites readers into a thorough, personal, poignant, and inspiring engagement with caste apartheid. And it does all this while speaking directly and tenderly to its Dalit readers—a welcome literary contribution on such an embattled issue. I sat down to speak with Thenmozhi about her new book. Topics include: the notion of caste as a ‘soul wound,’ religious conversion, the diasporic Dalit experience, and addressing caste across varying contexts.

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Daniel: You have experience advocating for many different kinds of interventions—political, educational, social—but this book addresses caste as a “soul wound.” For your first book on this topic, why focus on the soul as the primary site of intervention?

Thenmozhi: We have many, many books that talk about the political and economic materiality about caste. We have very few that look at caste through the lens of trauma, and none looking at caste as a form of intergenerational harm. When we look to our colleagues and collaborators from Black, Indigenous, and other brown movements, this is where the discussion is at with systems of oppression. It’s not a game of logic and facts.

Reza Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands brought it home for me—if we were going to end racism with books, workshops, and seminars, we already would have done it, because how many brilliant pages have been written? That really rang a bell for me, because isn’t that true for the the caste abolition movement? How much writing, movement, and transformation have we put on the line, and yet caste persists? And that’s not our fault. The insight that the conditioning of our nervous systems contributes to the pervasiveness and resilience of these systems was a new one, coming from the innovations of Black, Indigenous, and Brown thinkers.

The idea of the ‘soul wound’ comes from Eduardo Duran. He wrote about it first when examining the pain of his clients who were indigenous, who were coming in with substance abuse issues, aggression, depression, or suicidal ideation. And when he would work with members of the indigenous community, he [observed] this is a pain that doesn’t logically exist because of one person’s lifetime. It’s because of pain across a lineage—huge, cataclysmic situations, like that of settler colonialism for Indigenous peoples, and the genocide that followed. For Black folks, the tragedy of enslavement, and what it meant to be brought here, racialized, and dehumanized by White supremacy.

As I heard those stories and saw the experiences of those practitioners, a bell rung in my own soul. As a Dalit person, there are certainly moments when you know the grief you carry is beyond you. You grieve for everything that has been stolen from your ancestors, for the conditions of your people now, that there has never been enough, and we have always been forced to do with so little, and it’s led to us being tortured, traumatized, and toxic even amongst ourselves. And in looking at that great turmoil, the lens of the caste soul wound was so appropriate. It gave us a word, and when you have vocabulary and language, you can find pathways of healing. It was very profound to see that you could transform those processes through an understanding of intergenerational harm.

That idea of the caste soul wound is that both the caste-privileged and oppressed are connected by this wound, going back centuries, and it really requires us to do our own work of healing and mapping our own nervous systems’ conditioning, related to caste stress. And when we are self-aware, we can basically [create] a little bit more distance and detachment, and be more nimble as we unlearn caste supremacy together. The soul, however you want to define it, is that piece of us that is eternal and connected to our ancestors, and to those who we will be ancestors for. It was important for me to see healing as the way that we address caste. How many books are there that look at caste through the lens of healing? Zero. And that’s why I wrote this book.

Daniel: I recently referenced your book in an article on Dr. Ambedkar’s “What Path To Salvation” speech, where he directly condemns Hinduism and advocates for conversion as the primary solution for Dalits being crushed by the caste order. This has been the most influential intervention for many Dalits. You diagnose caste similarly—as a problem arising in the spiritual domain—but you write that you’re not condemning a particular religion nor arguing for caste abolition through religious reform. What do you think of Ambedkar’s policy of conversion from Hinduism? Is your ‘soul wound’ intervention an evolution of it?

Thenmozhi: You have to slow the pace down of strategy-making when you’re working from a lens of trauma, so you can be really aware of the choices you’re making. Because religion is one of the domains where caste operates in, when people hear about caste, one of [their first responses is]: “If we talk about this, am I going to lose my faith? Is this going to attack my way of life?” And there’s already a jump to a million other places—that’s the nervous system’s conditioning. This is a big reason why we need to take it really slowly, down to basics.

What we’re talking about with caste equity is implementation of the rule of law and the prevention of grave discrimination. This is a civil rights issue, a human rights issue, a gender issue. When we start to then couple that with the religions we’re practicing, it becomes too big of a container for just Dalit people to hold, because now we’re responsible for freeing ourselves and doing religious reformation—and that’s too much.

The way that Brahmanism, the ideology that animates and started the caste system, works, is that it removes consent in all the domains. One of the biggest truths for me, that I had to hold and name in writing this book, was that being a Dalit means you are a survivor of religious abuse. It’s not just that you were told that you are a spiritual criminal who did bad things in your past life, but your life here, the conditions you face, are a punishment for things you did in another life, and therefore, you deserve it. You can’t organize around your conditions. For me, that’s an untenable situation and sentence. But in being a survivor of religious abuse, one of the ways to heal from that is you reassert consent in all domains—particularly in that of religious choice.

For me, it’s less about “is conversion the answer?” I just want every human being to have a choice to choose their path and be able to explore, existentially, their place in the universe, without being told what the right way is, without being told they are not worthy, without being told that choosing can cost them their families, their freedom, their relationships in society. It should just be a choice made out of an open and willing heart. And that’s what I hope caste-oppressed people will give to themselves, so that every decision doesn’t have to be held with such high stakes. “If you have this religion, that’s the only way to be free”—those are really high stakes for folks, and everything around our freedom is always driven by these very high stakes.

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Daniel: I chose to call this blog “Dalit Americana,” because there are ways we as Dalit Americans fuse these dual and multiple identity experiences to make sense of caste, religion, politics, etc. in a unique way. I see you do that throughout the book, including in the kinds of solidarities you invoke, comparisons with race, and recycling policy proposals popular in America into the Indian caste context—like reparations. What are ways that your American nationality and experience has informed or connected with your perspective as a Dalit person?

Thenmozhi: The intersectionality of my Dalit feminist politics is directly related to being a Dalit American. At every step, I was seeking language for what had happened to our people. It wasn’t other South Asians that were like, “Here’s the path, here’s what happened.” It was other BIPOC women leaders who introduced me to intersectional thought, like bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Through their writings and mentorship, I could see the path of where Dalit American people need to build power.

As someone who was seeking justice, I was hungry to also learn about how other communities learned of justice. In my own pursuit, I would go to meetings by Black organizers, Brown organizers, AAPI organizers—I saw my struggle in their struggles. I spent at least five or six years of my 20’s just building and working with other movements, because I wanted to know about the human condition and how other people talked about their lives and struggles. As I heard that, I also gained such a deep, graded vocabulary of what it was to be caste-oppressed, but also caste-oppressed American, because we are racialized under South Asianness—we are settler colonials, we are part of the flow of history here, and we are caste-oppressed. What does that mean?

These are not transactional solidarities. They are lived, material alliances that come from years of friendship, breaking bread, and carrying each other’s water—and that really lays the framework for the work that we do in Equality Labs. It was really important for me to be in touch with everybody that could help me find myself, and I think that’s true for many Dalit Americans. As soon as we’re in touch with our own experiences and we connect with other movements and struggles, we find welcome collaborators. They see us in their struggle, and we see them in our struggle.

It is also the necessary next step for our people to do the work that we want to do. This is not a movement where we can just sit around. Because our community has been closeted for a long time, we’ve been hesitant to be out and make collaborations across our different communities, and we cannot afford that siloing. On our own, we have a tremendous opponent that very few people understand, but every global civil rights movement has won because of their stakeholders. I saw that over and over again, when I’d travel both in the United States and around the world.

Daniel: This book is huge—not necessarily in size, but topically, you cover caste as it affects religion, gender, the environment, psychology, geopolitics, etc. A common reaction to caste by genuine listeners is a kind of paralysis. It is impossible to comprehend the scope, brutality, the constancy of caste, to rethink so much about the nature of our world and society, and to take responsible action. What would you say to someone reading this book or coming into contact with this issue, who finds it overwhelming?

Thenmozhi: I think unlearning caste is a lifetime process. It’s okay to be overwhelmed, and you don’t have to solve it in one day. It really helps to dial in on the [particular] manifestation of caste that you’re seeing, or that you’re working on on. Maybe you’re a worker and you’re seeing caste-based discrimination in your workplace. You can find other workers to work on that, or joining worker collaboratives like the Alphabet Workers Union or Tech Workers for Caste Equity. Maybe you’re someone working on this in gendered contexts. As a Dalit feminist organization, we were seeing a lot of the practical, tactical manifestations of caste showing up amongst restaurant workers, people who were trafficked, domestic laborers, the building trades. It’s not just one single profession, there are many professions.

I want to help people find pathways to building those relationships, because a lot of people feel, “I’m not enough of an expert to speak on this.” If you’re not someone that’s South Asian, you’re often told by opponents of caste equity that you’re being racist by bringing up these issues. I wanted to empower people to say, “No, this is a human rights issue,” you have a stake in it, and to find your caste-oppressed allies. And I also wanted to empower South Asians and caste-oppressed peoples to say we can work on this issue. It can start with the psychosocial, the somatic, working on a bill, or transforming a yoga studio or place of worship. Whatever it is, caste abolition has acts both big and small.

It took a long time to build caste, and it will take a period to dismantle it. However, our commitment to it should be invigorated every day with big and small acts to reclaim and heal ourselves. And having one act towards healing yourself from caste everyday is not a large ask. We’re not asking people to be in extended struggle, but extended inquiry, and to put forward the path towards healing, empathy, and care.

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Daniel: What’s the response to the book been like?

Thenmozhi: I think about this book as a little, odd artifact. It’s written in a way that’s multidimensional. It’s like a prism. If you hold it up to a light, it speaks to one audience. If you hold it up another way, another light comes through. If you’re a socially engaged Buddhist, you’ll find something in this book. If you’re a survivor, if you’re a Dalit that’s reckoning with religious abuse, if you’re South Asian, or if you’re reckoning with your own grief and healing, you’ll find something in this book. I found that my consciousness was fractured by the violence of caste and racism and gender-based violence, and this book was about integration, reclaiming all those broken pieces myself, bringing my whole attention to everything that was a result of that violence, and then beginning to heal it. It gave me strength to speak to these different contexts.

To me, the most surprising thing about this book was how emotional the response has been. I’ve not heard from anybody that hates the book. What I’ve heard is how much this book means to them. People have written me and told me they were suicidal, and reading the book made them get help. People have told it me it helped finally give them words about things going on in their family and organizations. The book provided both a container for grief for these different audiences, but also for hope and healing. I think I knew, logically, that would happen, but I didn’t know what it would be like for me to be a conduit of that healing.

Because of the way Brahmanism works, how often do we see Dalit leaders lead with the spirit, with healing? We’re not allowed to have any commentary in those domains. That belongs to Brahmin Ayurvedic doctors, Brahmin yoga teachers, and Brahmin priests. When is it that a humble Dalit person, let alone a Dalit woman from the diaspora who isn’t a part of any of those lineages, gets to be an expert on it? But aren’t we all experts on the human experience? This book was a license for me to have a position, and to say things. In writing this book, I found that I created a pathway for many more people to democratize their pathway to the divine, their access to the right to heal, and their access to political agency.

The fact that people are meeting me on the field of discourse is pretty shocking! As a Dalit person, you always suffer a little bit with imposter syndrome. Will people really listen to us? Dominant caste people are trained to be the supermen of our society. They’re trained to dominate, lead, control, and we’re not given those same tools and powers of divinely sanctioned leadership. So we often question ourselves, and wonder if we have a place at the table—but we always were at the table. It was a social fiction to say that we don’t. I feel really inspired by the vehicle of love that the book has become, and the way it keeps giving back to the community.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

You can find and read Thenmozhi’s book The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition, published by Penguin Random House, here or at major book retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram (@dalitdiva) and learn more about her work with Equality Labs here.

Caste benefits from invisibility, unlike its siblings of race and gender-based discrimination. In the States, you usually can’t see it. This is a stark contrast from its virulent counterpart in India, which involves brazen, gratuitous violence and constant reinforcement. To non-South Asians, Dalits are indistinguishable from other South Asians. Within the coethnic community, though, roaring divisions create complex power dynamics and negotiations. To reveal this otherwise hidden tragedy, the need for empirical data on caste discrimination has become increasingly important. Researching caste in the U.S., however, proves complicated.

The Survey Wars

To date, there have only been two major studies on caste discrimination in the U.S.—a survey by Dalit civil rights group Equality Labs (2016), and a survey by think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (2020). Both are continuously invoked in high-stakes settings, like antidiscrimination policies and legislative proposals, and usually pitted against each other for their contradictory findings.

Equality Labs’ survey paints a damning portrait of caste in the U.S., reporting findings like: 25% of Dalits in the U.S. faced verbal of physical assault based on caste, one out of two Dalits feared their caste being “outed,” and two out of three Dalits reported unfair workplace treatment. This groundbreaking survey has been referenced across antidiscrimination reforms, from universities to the state of California. It boasts a robust sample size and revealing testimonies, but its ‘snowball sampling’ technique—when survey respondents recruit other respondents—and failure to include those who did not disclose a caste identity, creates potential for a sampling error. Opponents like the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) have seized upon this footnote to discredit the entire survey. Snowball sampling is widely accepted as a legitimate research practice, particularly with populations that difficult to find. While it might create some concern around probability, HAF’s concerns are hardly genuine. Equality Labs’ findings are in no way irrelevant nor moot; they remain a valuable window into the Dalit American experience. The aggregation of these otherwise disparate, invisible realities is to be applauded and taken seriously—warts and all.

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Carnegie’s survey is much less pointed, but found that only 5% of Hindu Indian Americans reported experiencing caste discrimination—a nearly opposite statistic to Equality Labs’ findings. Regrettably, all its data on caste identity was restricted to Hindu respondents, so caste-oppressed members of other faiths were not considered. With 75% of Muslim converts and Christian converts being caste-oppressed, Carnegie’s data is also colored by their methodological constraints.

Within its Hindu sample, though, the survey found that half of all Hindu Indian Americans identify with a caste group, with 80% identifying as upper-caste. This is congruent with a 2003 study by the University of Pennsylvania’s South Asia Center, which found 90% of the U.S. population belonged to upper castes, whereas just 1.5% were caste-oppressed. Like the other two surveys, both sides of the caste controversy wield this data to make opposite claims. Opponents of anti-caste reforms claim this 90-to-1 disparity diminishes the importance of anti-caste reforms, which only affect a sliver of the American population. Anti-caste advocates cite them to reveal the severe marginalization Dalits face across migration, and as evidence for spotlighting their cause.

Survey findings are easily coopted by competing narratives, so there remains a vital need for ongoing, sharper research. Surveys suffer from preference falsification, social acceptability bias, and reluctance from impacted participants. Worse—those to whom caste is visible are least likely to study it, for a myriad of reasons.

Experiments are the superior means of assessing discrimination. I’d suggest an experiment like those used to assess racism: a researcher targets South Asian American managers and recruiters who are identified by caste, and has them evaluate applicants covertly identified by similar and different castes, and observes disparities in treatment. One could also measure how these managers reward caste-identified employees, or how they respond to caste-related questions, like: catering non-vegetarian or vegetarian food for workplace celebrations, celebrating Hindu and non-Hindu religious occasions, and responding to casteist slurs or statements. The project would avoid common survey trappings and clarify the nuanced way that caste operates. Of course, these exact interactions have already been widely cited by Dalit employees as locations of grave discrimination. But do we listen?

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Locating Caste in the Weeds

I tend to think that scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality is being exaggerated and misapplied these days, but it can be extremely helpful for understanding issues like caste. Traditional research logic would have us isolate variables of caste, religion, language, region, and more, but these very factors defy isolation. We must consider the interplay or intersection of such closely tied factors in evaluating discrimination. For example, the managers I suggested researching earlier may favor applicants with their family surname—which is simultaneously a caste surname. Is this caste discrimination, a kinship partiality, or both? The same paradox could occur with religion. They might promote vegetarian-only luncheons for events for their South Asian employees, but this could simultaneously mean unwelcome to non-Hindu South Asians whose diets are oriented primarily around meat. Are they being inclusive, exclusive, or both? Stepping deeper into caste or religious groupings, these variables atomize into highly specific and subtle differences. It’s in these weeds that suffering happens.

The best judge of discrimination, tends to be the one suffering it. In an interview conducted by The Washington Post, Dalit employee Benjamin Kaila recounted facing personal questions that sussed out his caste during panel interview. “They don’t bring up caste, but they can easily identify us,” he said. These caste locator questions can involve one’s last name, hometown, diet, religion, and more (see this list of caste locator questions and answers).

The Post also published a statement from 30 Dalit women engineers in Silicon Valley, who describe casteist insults, caste locator questions, and even caste-based sexual harassment. They write, “We have seen casteist bias dominate the hiring, referrals, and peer review processes in our respective workplaces,” and “We did not have a lot of options to report these incidents to our respective HR departments because caste was not a protected category.” The volume and nature of these allegations indicates that grave discrimination can run rampant while remaining completely invisible to authorities. From Slack threads to construction sites, caste preys in the dark.

With anti-caste reforms spilling over from American universities to cities and states, empirical research can help support civil rights enforcement and data gathering. At the same time, there is really no further case to make. To refuse the historic, bloody, ubiquitous, well-documented tyranny of caste is to bury one’s head in the ground—and yet, many Indians are busily doing just this. Ultimately, data is not all that useful in persuading the anti-Dalit critic, because he behaves in bad faith. He does not speak with reason, but with anxiety, dogma, and a deeply engrained belief of caste superiority. Dalit scholar Suraj Yengde describes this poignantly:

“Dalit perspectives lie beneath the dignity of even recognition, [or] acknowledging the presence of a dignified human being. Their cries and pains do not summon anyone’s mind to think, let alone engage with the victim… The oppressor caste cannot empathize with the Dalit condition, because they do not think of Dalit as a victim. They assume [a] pretense of a vile, disgusting, lazy Dalit body that is loudly clamoring against nonexistent injustice. In this condition, to put across the rational Dalit viewpoint is an impossibility.”

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Christianity is widely seen as an opposite to Hinduism for many reasons—monotheistic to polytheistic, Abrahamic to Indic, sin and salvation to karma and enlightenment—but among these is their stark difference in body politic.

The body politic is a metaphor that organizes society or institutions as a physical body. The very first depiction of a body politic is the Brahmanical story of caste. The idea prominently reemerged nine centuries later in one of Aesop’s Fables, and later in Plato’s philosophy of the state. The Christian body politic arrived in the Roman era and was eventually instituted in papacy and monarchy. Today, we hear semblances of the body politic in statements like, “We all belong to one another” or “We are all interconnected.” It describes why and how we relate to one another, as a society. If society was architecture, the body politic would be the blueprint.

Religious narratives don’t have a one-to-one effect on social processes, but they are nonetheless meaningful influences. I admit my obvious bias here as a Christian. I think both Hindu and Christian body politics are hugely consequential, between their religious roots and applications, but I believe one liberates us from the other.

The Primordial Warden & His Human Tower

In 1500 BCE, a composition of sūktas, Indo-Aryan hymns, took shape in the early Vedic period of the Indian subcontinent: the Rigveda. One of its hymns, Purusha Sukta, describes Purusha, an omnipresent cosmic being. Purusha is also known commonly as Brahma or Brahman, the Hindu god(s) of creation. In the story, Brahma sacrifices himself to create life, including plants, animals, and humans. From his mouth comes the Brahmin; from his arms the Kshatriya, from his thighs the Vaishya, and from his feet the Shudra. These are the four human varnas, or castes. His body also gives rise to the moon, sun, air, and other elements.

This isn’t an unusual tale. Across early civilizations, many cosmogonic myths involved the sacrifice and dismemberment of a primordial deity to create the world. The Mesopotamian epic Enuma elish tells of the god Marduk dividing the body of Tiamat, the primeval mother, into the heavens and earth. In Norse prose Edda, the cosmos is formed from the body of dismembered giant Ymir. But Brahma’s sacrifice is unique in that his body inaugurates a social hierarchy—one that survived millennia to thrive even today.

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Brahma’s mouth-arms-thighs-feet distinctions represent the duties and roles of their castes. Brahmins, emerging from his head, are the intellectuals, priests, and teachers. Kshatriyas, children of his arms, are warriors and merchants. Vaishyas derive from his thighs, and are farmers. And Shudras, born of his feet, are servants and laborers. Society was therefore classified, from head-to-toe, with clear dharmic (divine duty) protocol for each caste.

Some Hindus hope to vindicate this cosmogony by interpreting caste as “separate but equal,” but the ranking is clear. The head has universally been regarded as more important, valuable, and pure, and the feet unimportant, less valuable, and impure. This gradient stained the members of these castes with varying, immutable levels of purity and value. Most fatally, it was deterministic. Humans did not have any choice over their caste, and caste boundaries were enforced through endogamy. Years after, a new “out-caste” category was formed for a class of people regarded as subhumans—not shaped out of Brahma’s body but of another, ungodly origin. These were Chandalas, the people we now know as Dalits. As the body politic implies, these people were situated below the feet of God and denied all the privileges enjoyed by those above them.

It isn’t clear how caste operated in this Vedic society, but it’s apparent that caste remained a social ideal across India’s changing civilizations. In the four thousand years that followed this ancient song, caste durably permeated all of South Asian society—often in violent ways. People were locked into caste-specific professions for generations on end. Knowledge-creation and literacy was the sole domain of Brahmins, with others barred from participating. Castes were forbidden from inter-marrying, constraining genetic distribution and reifying caste lines. Wealth, health, and virtually every other socioeconomic outcome was staggered along this pyramid—and remains this way today. The privileged castes enjoy disproportionate power and access, and the marginalized castes endure humiliation and violence.

The irony of the body politic is that it, in turn, politicizes bodies. It affects how human bodies live and move throughout society. The Dharmasutra of Gautama, a Hindu text of laws and codes, describes bodily punishments for a caste-oppressed person that listens, recites, or remembers Hindu scriptures: “If a Shudra has criminal intercourse with an Āryan woman, his organ shall be cut off, and all his property be confiscated… If he listens intentionally to (a recitation of) the Veda, his ears shall be filled with (molten) tin or lac… If he recites (Vedic texts), his tongue shall be cut out… If he remembers them, his body shall be split in twain.”

In line with these religiously sanctioned crimes against humanity, the privileged castes take liberty to punish those who trespass the boundaries of the caste body politic. Just last July, when nine-year-old Indra Meghwal reached for a clay pot of water that apparently belonged to his upper-caste teacher Chail Singh, Chail responded by beating him to death. The Brahmanical body politic is not only projected across South Asian society, but enforced onto South Asian bodies. It’s constantly reproducing and performing itself in our brains, behaviors, and bodies.

In his inaugural newspaper Mooknayak, Dalit polymath Dr. B.R. Ambedkar described caste as a tower without stairs—the inhabitants of each floor can never escape to another, effectively being incarcerated. That is what Brahma’s body created: a society shaped like a tower, operating like a prison. It meshed so well with the human tendency to dominate that it enjoyed continued prevalence into modernity. Across India’s changing empires and eras, Brahma’s thick-skinned body politic remained unbothered. Its bodies belong to it, unless they are liberated from their prison.

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The Dying Dalit & His Upside-Down Kingdom

In 5 BCE, a Jewish baby was born to a teenage mother in a stable: Jesus of Nazareth. He called himself the Son of God, preached about a certain “Kingdom of God,” and was ultimately killed by the Roman government—before resurrecting three days later, catalyzing a religious movement that transformed the world. The Christian body politic is primarily explained in the body of Jesus Christ, but like the Rigveda, it also has roots in a creation story.

In the Book of Genesis, God creates humanity in his image—male and female. There is no sacrifice or dismembering here. God is said to form man out of dirt and breathe into him. This phrase imago dei or “image of God” is a bedrock of the Christian body politic. It describes that humanity is a reflection of God’s own image, and is therefore imbued with equal, divine value. Dalit scholar Ram Surat remarked, “When a Dalit hears [Genesis 1:27], it is the first time in their entire life that they feel like a human.”

In Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, he describes what has come to be known as an “Upside-Down Kingdom.” Those cast as vulnerable, marginalized, and other-ed are empowered, centered, and welcomed in this kingdom. Conventional directions of status, importance, and power are reversed, and participants in this kingdom are called to adopt entirely countercultural attitudes towards lifestyle, money, morality, and one another. Throughout his life and ministry, Jesus embodied this ethic: “The last will be first, and the first will be last.”

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Like Brahma, Jesus undergoes a sacrifice—though his is simultaneously a murder. The Roman government, emboldened by the Jewish religious elite, sentence the innocent Jesus to death by crucifixion—a criminal’s death. Jesus complies without complaint, intending to fulfill his mission of saving humanity through the cross. The torture device on which he dies became the defining symbol of Christianity—a paradox that the Apostle Paul describes as “foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

Black liberation theologian James Cone compares the cross with America’s lynching of Black people: “The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other. Both were public spectacles, shameful events, instruments of punishment reserved for the most despised people in society… Jesus did not die a gentle death like Socrates, with his cup of hemlock... Rather, he died like a [lynched black victim] or a common [black] criminal in torment, on the tree of shame.”

This is precisely what makes Jesus ‘the prototypical Dalit,’ according to Dalit theologian Arvind P. Nirmal. His death was one of humiliation, persecution, and injustice by a religiopolitical elite—the exact features of Dalit suffering. In an Easter poem, Daniel Sukumar writes: “Did you die a Dalit’s death? Where you were stripped and flogged, tied to a pole like a thief… Did you die a Dalit’s death when the state washed its hands after touching you?”

The physical sufferings of Christ situate him at the feet of society, among the oppressed. Those who embrace his sufferings as a sacrifice on their on behalf, along with his resurrection as an invitation into a new life, become part of “The Body of Christ,” known also as “the church.” There are many instructions given to this body—namely, Paul’s writings in 1 Corinthians:

“Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many… But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”

Paul gives special care to those dishonored and suffering, claiming that if one part of this body politic suffers, the entire body should suffer along with it. In an earlier chapter, he says that to eat while some members of the body go hungry is to “despise the church of God… Anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself.” While the body described here is the church, the church is meant as a model to wider society—a reflection of the Upside-Down Kingdom.

The Christian body has taken various shapes and iterations across history, yet its calling is always the same: a body intentionally forged across racial, social, and economic divides, a body that privileges those otherwise disempowered, and a body that shares in the joys and sufferings of its members. But despite its egalitarian anatomy, the Christian body politic has been consistently misinterpreted to promote hierarchies and subordination—just in a different skin. In a sense, the originating body politic of caste remained too influential over the body politic of Christ. It is only by embracing the latter, that we discover freedom from the former.

Wounded To Heal

“God is broken, crushed, and torn asunder on the cross for a ‘re-membering,’ or putting together of the body in Christ,” Dalit theologian Joseph Prabhakar Dayam explained to me. “Neither Jew nor Gentile. Neither female nor male. That’s what the gospel vision is: Jesus, the Dalit, re-members the otherwise broken body politic.” Jesus The Dalit was torn apart on a lynching tree so that a world torn apart by caste could be restored to unity.

The prophet Isaiah foretold this about Jesus: “by His wounds we are healed.” If the Brahmanical body politic is a pyramid of power, Christ’s body politic is an upside-down pyramid. If Brahma’s broken body breaks society across caste boundaries, Christ’s body is broken so the formerly broken society can be repaired. If Brahma’s body politic dismembers itself, Christ’s body politic re-members itself. And indeed, the central Christian tradition of The Eucharist, or Communion, is a practice of remembering this re-member-ing through the death of Jesus Christ with all the members of the body of Christ.

Brahma’s body represents a cosmic hierarchy designed to divide and dominate humanity. Christ’s body represents an upside-down kingdom that privileges the least of society. Though the Christian body politic makes a lofty promise, its church routinely fails at achieving it. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “11a.m. Sunday is our most segregated hour,” describing profound racial divisions across Christian society. Its tradition is full of bigotry, abuses of power, and oppression of the vulnerable—even by caste. But these are all failures to achieve the religion’s “ideal” body politic of Christ, whereas the Brahmanical ideal itself is one decorated with caste violence.

Ambedkar articulated this distinction in 1936, writing: “Though castes exist among Christians and Muslims, it is not the chief characteristic of their body social… The caste system among the Hindus has the foundation of religion. The castes in other religions have no sanction of their religion… Muslims and Christians need not destroy their religion for eradication of the castes. Rather, their religion will support such movements to a great extent.” While we should urgently reform traditions like Christianity towards the ideal they profess, there is no reason to sanitize or adopt ideals like that of the Brahmanical caste politic. Our efforts should be squarely focused on liberating ourselves from it.

To me, the cross of Christ is the solution to the spiritual and social catastrophe of the Brahmanical body politic. By turning to the cross, “in repentance to broken communities,” Dayam says, we can discover healing in the wounded-yet-healing body of Christ.

As long as I can remember, to be an Indian Christian is defined by a fierce distinction from and suspicion of all Hindu norms. I’ve watched Christians battle over cultural traditions with apparent Hindu origins or ties—like the classical Indian dance Bharatanatyam or tying of the mangala sutra (auspicious thread) at weddings. At one Indian wedding I attended, a pastor had a public outburst over the wedding tradition of wearing toe rings, arguing it was a vestige of Hindu scripture and tradition.

This is a kind of moral panic, though it’s not unwarranted. On one hand, religious communities always tend towards conservatism. On the other, India’s centuries-old religio-cultural force of Brahminism (I call it HinduWorld) makes it so alternate religious movements are often countercultural forces, and thus hyper-resistant to Hinduism in order to survive. This is also true of Dalit Christians and others marginalized under the Hindu caste order, who feel a political conviction—in addition to a moral one—to “purify” their religious practice from the traumatic residue of HinduWorld.

Like other Dalit Americans piecing together cultural identity, I’ve often wondered which Indian cultural artifacts are “polluted” in relation to Brahminism, which aren’t, and which might be “redeemed.” Contrary to what I’ve been told, it’s not a clear calculus.

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Moral Panic & Purity

Even the “loosest” cultures can’t shake their pursuit of mural purity. Older, conservative types are the usual purists about values and traditions—but obsessions over moral purity have also migrated leftwards, as progressives moralize language and behavior by novel standards of political correctness. In her new podcast “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling,” activist Megan Phelps-Roper argues the Harry Potter author is a marked example of this—Rowling’s words spurred countless conservative Christians into a moral hysteria throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but more recently, her words have triggered a moral panic among leftist trans activists. She’s been cancelled.

‘Cancel culture’ stands on the popular moral assumption that certain people, ideas, or things are irredeemable and even capable of polluting other things. It’s led to public reappraisals of everything from Dr. Seuss to master bedrooms. As this kind of moral logic resurges, I’m left to wonder how it applies to South Asia. Is it morally appropriate, for example, to cancel yoga, which might be “polluted” by casteist principles like karma and dharma? What about quasi-cultural religious festivals with casteist origin myths, like Diwali and Holi? What justifies writing these off as casteist, as opposed to merely neutral, with some baggage? This is doubly difficult to discern in the diaspora, where cultural artifacts feel scarce and precious. For South Asians, religious practice is anything but simple.

A Religious Multiverse

“Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat wearing Muslims.” - Pi, Life of Pi (Martel)

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is one of my favorite novels. In it, Indian protagonist Piscine “Pi” Molitor Patel is an admirer of Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. He represents the phenomenon of multiple religious belonging (MRB), “the belief that it is possible, or even necessary, to practice the rites, rituals, and beliefs of as many religions as one can muster.” As religions like Buddhism and Hinduism are compatible with MRB, South Asia has seen a complex, dynamic religious multiverse evolve over time.

Syncretism involves the blending of various different religions or schools of thought. This has produced entirely distinct religious traditions, like Sikhism and Sufism, but there are also milder examples. While walking a pilgrimage in India last year, I saw Catholics shave their heads and offer fruits to worship the Virgin Mary—residual rituals from their Hindu background. Idol worship is conventional religious behavior in Hinduism, so converts either subtly reappropriate it in their new context (like adorning the statue of Mary) or vehemently reject it. I was both awed by the pilgrims’ piety and disturbed by the persistence of Hindu practices, which I believe have unhealthy implications.

But Hinduism has seen its own prosocial syncretic reformations, like the 15th century Bhakti movement, which favored devotion to a personal god and rejection of caste distinctions. This was largely shaped by poets, gurus, and singer-songwriters who democratized “religious” practices like reading and writing. In the case of Sikhism, founder Guru Nanak and his contemporary Ravidas aimed to fuse the tenets of Hinduism and Islam—with a concerted resistance to caste. During British colonial rule, scholar Gail Omvedt writes, India made the switch from syncretic and complex to stark, oppositional, religiopolitical identities of “Hindu” and “Muslim.” These two became vortexes that fractured India’s diverse, fluid religious landscape across dogmatic boundaries. And it didn’t end with independence.

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Strategic Syncretism

Religious nationalism can also be understood as a kind of syncretism, though it rarely is. Writer Tyler Huckabee calls the phenomenon of Christian nationalism, “The business of merging Christian and American identities, liberally mixing biblical teaching with the principles of constitutional democracy until the line between them is blurred or even erased altogether.” When Christianity attaches itself to culturally “American” values like individualism, guns, and capitalism, the result is a political identity buttressed with the strength of spiritual stories and convictions. This union can prove very difficult to decouple, and is easily manipulated to political ends.

In India, the invention of Hindu nationalism involves what political scientist Christopher Jefferlot calls “strategic syncretism”—a deliberate attempt to assimilate Hindu identity into the systems of other groups. This flattens India’s otherwise diverse religious community in service to caste elites. Researcher Rida Fatima writes: “Hindu nationalism born out of strategic syncretism is not purely Hindu but elitist. [Assimilation] instrumentalises syncretic norms to maintain the power and cultural equilibrium, and a mirage of development appears for the strategic aim of establishing a Hindu ‘Rashtra’ [Nation].” This critique is also relevant in the diaspora, where South Asians compete to define their culture for the world’s gaze.

Given that syncretism can range from organic to devised, populist to elitist, inclusive to oppressive, and fundamental to cosmetic, how should religious adherents reckon with the imperfect milieu that shapes our spiritual traditions?

Should We De-Syncretize?

“[In] a Western culture, the sacred and secular are clearly defined, and the bulk of cultural artifacts (work, leisure, food, art, etc.) occupy the secular realm,” writes pastor Michael VandenEnden. “But what about highly sacralized cultures in which almost all cultural artifacts are deemed sacred?” South Asia is perhaps the most glaring example of this. Hindu, Buddhism, and indigenous spirituality is so baked into Indian history, society, and norms, it’s nearly impossible to isolate any nonreligious cultural artifacts. So, does it make sense to parse out parts we should cancel by guilty association?

One response is to simply observe which practices transcend religion to become culturally conventional, and accept them as such. Take the mangala sutra I described earlier—a yellow necklace worn by a bride at her wedding. While having origins in Hindu mythology, the practice has become commonplace across groups. Syrian Christians have also reappropriated this practice by placing a cross on the necklace. Historian Usha Balakrishnan argues that the practice has been sustained largely through marketing efforts by jewelers, not cultural processes. So, the mangala sutra has become culturally ordinary, been repurposed for alternate religious purposes, and lost some of its religious valence as a consumer good. This scores it as merely cultural for some, but to others, it remains an enduring symbol of problematic religious and social traditions.

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Arvind P. Nirmal, widely regarded as “the father of Dalit theology,” felt that syncretism steered us in the wrong way. He argued that a syncretic Indian Christianity actually perpetuated caste and marginalized Dalits. He called conventional Indian Christian theology “Brahminical Christianity”—a faith fundamentally corrupted by caste society. He wasn’t wrong. The same Syrian Christians who contextualized their Christian faith into “Indian” models were known for their “upper-caste” pride and perpetuating caste discrimination against Dalit neighbors. It was, perhaps, an example of strategic syncretism that preserved caste power.

Instead, Nirmal and others advocated for a distinct Dalit liberation theology, which would not blindly absorb culture, but subject it to the perspective of the oppressed. Whether Dalit Christians specifically practice liberation theology or not, they are often critical of Christianity’s inculturation or indigenization into a Hindu society, which inevitably infects Christian traditions with caste. This may even lead them to take refuge in more Eurocentric expressions of Christianity—though these aren’t immune to their own versions of syncretism, either.

Culture is never a blank slate. And there is no one way to ethically deal with its history. Some Indians are busy sorting and reclaiming cultural artifacts from their baggage. Others are happy to throw out the cultural baby with the casteist bathwater. Some Dalits lose no sleep over participating in Hindu observances. And other Dalits consider Hinduism antithetical to their very existence. As cancel culture popularizes the prospect of novel moral absolutes, concerns about syncretism are given new energy. Regardless of how one reconciles them, it is crucial that we expose the many shades to “Indian culture.” As The Big Fat Bao depicts above, there is perhaps no such thing after all.

Last month, the City of Seattle became the first municipality in the U.S. to ban caste discrimination. The crowd erupted in chants of “Jai Bhim” as councilmembers read out their 6-1 vote, making history. This triumph follows the adoption of caste protections by several universities and workers unions, representing how popular the movement to extend U.S. civil rights to caste has become. It’s also seen significant controversy. Last year, I did a policy analysis on the prospect of caste protections in U.S. law, how they might function, and any consequences they could cause. Diving to the most basic assumptions of this policy, I encountered two truths and a lie.

Truth: Specificity Helps

Though caste is absent from U.S. civil rights legislation, there is plenty of evidence that the U.S. is legally and morally opposed to caste-based discrimination. The problem of “caste” (as an analogy to race) was historically invoked in abolitionist and anti-segregation efforts—including 1849 case Roberts v. Boston, the first school segregation case in U.S. history, and congressional arguments for the Civil Rights Act of 1866. In 2007, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution expressing they are, “committed to eliminating [caste discrimination], ensuring that qualified Dalits are not discouraged from working with the U.S. government.”

Additionally, a number of legal scholars concluded that caste-based discrimination qualified as racial discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by analyzing the 2020 Supreme Court case of Bostock v. Clayton County. Based on the ruling that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is only protected because it is inextricably intertwined with the protected category of “sex,” caste is similarly intertwined and protected by “race, national origin, or ancestry.” This is the same logic that California’s Civil Rights Department (CRD) used when they sued Cisco Systems, Inc. on the basis of caste-based discrimination. If all this is true, why add “caste” expressly to our laws? There’s a significant benefit to being specific.

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When the California State University system moved to add “caste” to their nondiscrimination policy, one Dalit professor admitted to VICE News: “Since we did not [previously] have caste as a protected category, many of us were not open about sharing.” Dalit employees in Silicon Valley expressed similar reluctance to report discrimination due to the void of caste protections. Without clear, specific legislation, individuals are obstructed from understanding their rights and how to seek redress if those rights are violated. Bostock’s precedent might be understood by lawyers, but the layperson’s concept of Title VII doesn’t stretch that far. And it shouldn’t have to.

Explicit legislation also helps prosecutorial bodies use the full force of the law to eliminate discrimination, which are stated goals by many state agencies, like CRD. California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) specifies categories like gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation for this same reason—though they aren’t expressly protected under Title VII. The only reason not to adopt laws banning caste-based discrimination is to assume it’s preferential to keep these protections implicit. This only constrains civil rights agencies from administering the law and keeps more South Asians in the dark about their rights. It’s worth noting that ambiguity has been misused before. While caste is internationally protected under antidiscrimination law, the specific language used is usually more neutral and Eurocentric, so the Indian government has seized on this ambiguity to oppose extending anti-discrimination efforts to caste.

Truth: The Law Sets a Moral Benchmark

Most American political disputes can be solved through consequentialist, “Coasian" problem-solving (basically, bargaining between stakeholders), but certain issues—especially ones concerning power—warrant deontological interventions. Deontology is a moral philosophy that uses rules to distinguish between what’s right or wrong. Whereas a consequentialist policy might aim to reduce drug trafficking by legalizing and regulating drug sales, a deontologist policy would simply ban drug trafficking as a crime. Deontology defines the kind of society we aim to live in, which matters for issues like discrimination.

A series of 2013 studies found that U.S. antidiscrimination laws decreased discrimination based on sexual orientation not because people feared punishment, but because those laws authoritatively set the moral and social norms of a community. Civil rights legislation of the 1960s had the same effect. The law makes normative claims about morality, dictates state duties, and shapes social attitudes—all of which sets society’s moral benchmark. This is no panacea, but the signaling effect of the law reminds us about the kind of society we live in—or hope to live in. Given the weight of U.S. law, it’s also likely that this signal could influence workplace policies or laws in South Asia to rigorously address caste-based discrimination on their own turf.

Dalits, like other disenfranchised groups, should have the most skepticism about the utility of such laws; untouchability was legally abolished in 1950 in India, but persists in a countless covert and overt ways. Yet the joy exuding from Seattle’s City Hall upon the passage of the caste ban speaks of hope. The law still matters as a social contract that upsets social fictions imposed by the powerful, like caste.

The strength of a “ban” cannot be underwritten. When a colleague of mine helped organize to ban no-knock warrants in Pomona, California (no-knock warrants authorize law enforcement officers to forcibly enter a premise without knocking and announcing their presence, and often result in injury and harm), she informed a young girl from her neighborhood who previously suffered from a no-knock raid: “This will never happen again.” Not “mostly never happen” or “except for certain circumstances,” but never. If you can imagine what that girl might feel—that is what protection looks like.

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Lie: Banning Caste Discrimination Discriminates

As uncontroversial as a bill banning discrimination might seem, it has its opposition. The primary argument leveraged by opponents of caste protections is this: by banning caste—a social reality occurring only among South Asians—U.S. law effectively paints a target on all South Asian Americans, and particularly Hindu Americans. This means that a law banning caste discrimination, in turn, discriminates against South Asians. Groups like the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) and Vishwa Hindu Parishad have advanced this idea to resist the adoption of caste into U.S. law, workplace nondiscrimination policies, and more. But it’s a lie.

HAF is right to note that “caste” is prevalent primarily among South Asians, but caste can also broadly characterize other forms of intra-group or descent-based discrimination. It can be understood as a generally occurring descriptor (like ancestry or race), or a more specific version of these categories (like FEHA specifies gender identity and gender expression as related to sex). But even if only South Asian Americans identify with castes, it’s still an objectively meaningful enough category to be protected in the event of discrimination.

It’s also unlikely that Hindus would be singled out in the administration of such a law, which HAF alleges. In cases like Employment Division v. Smith and Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, the U.S. Supreme Court has expressed that while religious practice cannot be singled out for adverse treatment, formally neutral laws of general applicability can regulate religious conduct—regardless of any adverse effects on a religious exercise. In other words, Hindus would be required to abide by a law banning caste, but not singled out among other groups during a prosecutorial process. Prosecuting discrimination involves discerning motive and cause, and it is only then that one’s caste identity or religion would be called into question—not at any point before. Just as one needn’t disclose their religion at any point prior to prosecution of religious discrimination, one needn’t disclose their caste either.

Hindu groups cannot claim that caste discrimination is virtually nonexistent in their communities and that they would be unfairly policed under this law. If caste-based discrimination is not prevalent, then declaring it unlawful should do little harm. While caste protections benefit Dalits and other caste-oppressed individuals, all members of the caste hierarchy technically benefit from this policy—even those who are caste-privileged! To be protected against discrimination based on caste is to have a right to recourse when it happens, regardless of what caste or religion one is.

In his autobiography Waiting for a Visa, B.R. Ambedkar wrote, “My five years of staying in Europe and America had completely wiped out of my mind any consciousness that I was an untouchable.” Over a century later, Dalits in the U.S. don’t have the same experience. They are reminded in their workplaces, classrooms, places of worship, and social groups, that they could still fall victim to caste hate and discrimination. In the same way that Ambedkar did, Dalits around the world still await a visa—a ticket to a land where they are full citizens, free from caste. Caste protections could be that ticket.

“Even though I was born in the Hindu religion, I will not die in the Hindu religion.” - B.R. Ambedkar, 1956

Few non-deities are as highly venerated as Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. It’s not uncommon to meet people identifying as “Ambedkarite,” boasting his images in their altars, cars, and bedrooms, or declaring “Jai Bhim!” (Long live Bhimrao) as a salutation. His statues cover countless streets in India. He’s a jurist, economist, and social reformer who authored the Indian Constitution, and his name is synonymous with the movement against caste. To Americans, he’s often compared with Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X—for their renown and virtue, probably—but it’s difficult to capture the ethos and sainthood that Ambedkar represents to his people.

Ambedkar’s politics had a soul. Like Gospel-inspired civil rights leaders of the 1960s, Ambedkar advocated a theory of liberation that advanced the primacy of spiritual change along with social change. He’s known for brazenly critiquing Hinduism, publicly burning the Manusmriti (a Hindu text sanctioning untouchability), and facilitating mass conversions to Buddhism. Conversion, as Ambedkar famously described in What Path to Salvation?, was the heart of social change in India. It represented a holistic, free, and dignifying rejection of Hinduism and proclamation of new morality and identity.

Today, fewer leaders champion the nexus of social and spiritual change in pursuit of progress. Yet the spiritual dimensions of change—like trauma and healing—have only become more obvious. In The Trauma of Caste, Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundarajan describes caste as a “soul wound” that stubbornly escapes our intellectual interventions. Taking Ambedkar’s model of change seriously begs the question: does conversion still matter for social change in a caste society?

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HinduWorld

As a general principle, it’s important to remember that all interventions—religious, political, and otherwise—react to the status quo. In India, the status quo is broadly Hindu. Hinduism—or Brahmanism, the foundational religious tradition behind Hinduism—has enjoyed a lengthy, ubiquitous influence over much of Indian society, institutions, culture, and psychology. Let’s call it HinduWorld. To Ambedkar, HinduWorld is far from neutral. He calls it a domain of enslavement over mind, body, and society. All of Ambedkar’s proposed interventions respond to HinduWorld. (It’s important for us of the diaspora to consider how our religious and ideological choices, too, react to the centuries-old influence of HinduWorld.)

Given the tricky terrain of religion, concerned onlookers often analyze and address caste as a merely material phenomenon. Caste has a million material markers, but the theological origin and sanction of caste is indispensable to its survival. Dalit Christian theologian Joseph Prabhakar told me, “Caste survived for 3,000 years on theological grounds.” Ambedkar is among the only voices raising a full-throated critique of the Hindu religion as a root cause of the caste problem.

Ambedkar understands caste as an edifice erected with Hindu theology and tradition. In his view, ‘Untouchables’ never voluntarily chose to be Hindu, but were enslaved into it. In a recent interview, Dalit scholar Suraj Yengde paraphrased Ambedkar: “If somebody’s not [allowed] in your house, how can you claim that person belongs to your house?” Even upper-caste Hindus underwent their own process of Sanskritization, abandoning traditional beliefs, values, and customs in allegiance to Brahmanism.

In a book titled Why I Am Not a Hindu, political theorist Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd calls Hinduization a process of conversion in itself, where pre-Hindu, indigenous Indian spiritualities, economics, and imaginaries have been deliberately “converted” into Hindu versions of themselves. To Ambedkar, Hinduism is irreparably corrupted, and there is only one way out of untouchability: “to throw away the Hindu religion and Hindu society in which you are groaning.” He writes, “For annihilating castes and untouchability from among the Untouchables, change of religion is the only antidote.”

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The Primacy of Conversion in Social Change

In the West, religious conversion is usually considered an individual expression of faith. While this is also true elsewhere, conversion additionally represents a more complex social and cultural signal. To Hindu nationalists, conversion from Hinduism indicates rebellion against the Hindu order; conversion has even been criminalized in at least nine Indian states. On political, communal, and interpersonal fronts, converts endure violence and shame. While Hindu religious intolerance thrives on irrational fears about social upheaval, there is something to say about the social consequences of conversion.

In 1956, Ambedkar famously led nearly a half million Dalits to renounce Hinduism and convert to Navayana Buddhism—a reinterpretation of Buddhist philosophy focused on social equality. Year after year, similar mass conversations have taken place. As recently as last October, 250 Dalits in Rajasthan protested caste violence by renouncing Hinduism, publicly throwing Hindu idols into the Bethli river and accepting Buddhism. In 2020, close to 3,000 Dalits in Coimbatore converted en masse to Islam after a “wall of discrimination” fell and killed 17 of their community. Conversion is a common reaction among Dalit communities in the wake of caste atrocity or injustice.

One 2020 survey found that Dalits were more likely to convert than upper castes, often in order to enhance their social status, to be freed of the clutches of Hinduism, and to inculcate the principles of other religions in their lives. Ambedkar’s intervention of conversion continues to resonate with Dalit communities decades later. More than any other group—perhaps ever—Dalits understand conversion as an act of liberation. But does conversion, indeed, provoke positive change for the Dalit condition?

In psychological terms, there are many ways to interpret conversion, but nearly all have to do with a change in identity. Conversion, almost always, involves a reconstruction of one’s internal identity from contact with a religious truth, experience, or narrative. Ambedkar posits the root of liberation within religious conversion, because it induces a change in one’s self-identity—which is the primary scourge of those declared Untouchable, Unseeable, and Unapproachable (sub-categories of untouchability). He doesn’t mince his words:

“Why do you remain in a religion which does not treat you as human beings? Why do you remain in a religion which prohibits you from entering temples? Why do you remain in a religion which prohibits you from securing drinking water from the public well? Why do you remain in a religion which comes in your way for getting a job? Why do you remain in a religion which insults you at every step?”

By converting, Dalits declare to themselves and others a new identity: they are whole persons and not Untouchable, rejecting their placement in HinduWorld. This new self-concept is liberating—but also dynamic in how it takes shape. In researching Dalit Christians, theologian Anderson Jeremiah finds that they often switch between Dalit and Christian identities: “As Dalits they continue to conceive their status in terms of their local norms, but challenge it with their Christian identity as and when required… Thus with their religiously predetermined outcaste status Dalit Christians negotiate their livelihood using multiple religious belonging without capitulating to either of them.”

This self-perception is reaffirmed, in part, by the religious community that Dalit converts inhabit. In Tamil Nadu, some Dalit Christians practice a version of Communion called Oorulai, where congregants bring food in pots to church and pour them into a single vessel to remember Christ’s sacrifice and unity as one Church body. To promote this concept of unity, Christian evangelist Bakht Singh famously held ‘Love Feasts’ that “smashed through caste, religious, and ethnic barriers.”

Among Dalit Buddhists in Chhattisgarh, converts are “creating a new religious tradition” that replaces Hindu recitation of the Ramayana with poetry, song, and storytelling about the Buddha (Buddhayana) and Ambedkar (Bhimayana). Dalits also gather under the mantle of Buddhism to protest caste violence and train for social activism. Across these collective experiences and identity shifts, Dalits use religious conversion to forge a post-caste world.

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The Palm Leaf Is (Still) Torn

Yet—as much as these post-conversion communities inculcate ways of being free, they share their own caste ceilings. Caste has reliably permeated the practices of Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, and Buddhism. Dalits in these groups endure segregation of worship centers, toilets, and burial grounds, barriers to leadership, and verbal and physical harm. One 2000 study found that caste-oppressed Christians constituted 70 percent of churchgoers but only 25 percent of clergy—compared to the 10 percent of dominant caste Christians, who comprised of 42% of clergy. Though Buddhism was popularized as an ideological challenge to HinduWorld, it’s been largely constrained to particular [Mahar] castes and even reappropriated by Hindu Nationalists as a political tool. In anthology Dalit Theology in the Twenty First Century, this inevitability of caste is captured in a proverb: “The palm leaf is torn, whether it falls on a thorn or a thorn falls on it.”

Still, Ambedkar acknowledges the distinction between caste among Hindus and others, arguing, “it is not the chief characteristic of their body social” and “castes in other religions have no sanction of their religion.” He goes on, “Hindus cannot destroy their castes without destroying their religion.” Muslims and Christians, he says, can—and can even find substantial religious support for such reformations. Expressed in movements like Dalit liberation theology, Dalit adherents labor within their religious communities for justice.

Dalits also face some economic penalties for conversion. India’s reservations (affirmative action) program allocates professional and educational opportunities for “Scheduled Castes and Tribes” (Dalits are included in these), but Christians and Muslims do not qualify. Consequently, many Dalit Christians and Muslims face the fraught choice of identifying themselves by faith or by caste. Ambedkar acknowledged the costs of losing such political safeguards, but argued these were never meant to last anyway. Rather, he argues that conversion precedes economic and social progress, because the curse of untouchability follows the educated and affluent.

For all his stress on religious conversion, Ambedkar didn’t fancy the typical character of religion all that much. He judged religions on their social consequences rather than professed ideals, and his own brand of Buddhism was largely interested in class struggle—scholar Martin Fuchs calls it a “post-religious religion.” But Ambedkar’s primary objective in conversion is freedom. He argues that the essential Dalit responsibility is to free oneself from HinduWorld, and he finds religious conversion to be best chance at doing so. So long as HinduWorld and other such hegemonies exist, there ought to be a theological and moral intervention—not merely a political one.