The importance of being President

Posted on Categories Caste, Civilisation, Culture, India, Race, UncategorizedTags , , , , , , , , 29 Comments on The importance of being President

I’m writing this article because a) I feel quite strongly about it, b) it has been largely ignored in the foreign press.

Protocol in India is a hidebound affair, I would imagine the current system possibly has its origins in the Mughal courts, but it was the British who codified it to the extreme : designating the number of bows, whether one could sit or stand, who took order of precedence, what adornments were allowed. There are whole volumes dedicated to the subject, which I will happily continue to avoid.

The Indian state inherited a lot of this barely updated pageantry and continues to enforce these rules at every level of government. At the top of the protocol list, replacing the king is the President, the nominated monarch of the republic. This brings us to the slightly delayed point of the article, our current President. Droupadi Murmu.

Wikipedia will list her myriad achievements and milestone accomplishments, they speak for themselves. This isn’t about that (not to dismiss them, they’re just superfluous to the point I am trying to make). It is about the optics. A tribal woman is nominated the Queen. Protocol demands that every citizen gives her precedence over all others. In a country with a preference for fair skin above all else, for European features in their actresses, a tribal woman can never win a beauty contest. But she can far surpass it. She is the projected face of the country at foreign events, at international forums. It gives me great pride and joy to see her representing us everywhere, at royal events, at the Pope’s funeral.

Continue reading The importance of being President

🪙 What’s in a Name? Mukesh, Not Mukash.

Posted on Categories Caste, China, Civilisation, Culture, Geopolitics, India, Pakistan, X.T.MTags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 10 Comments on 🪙 What’s in a Name? Mukesh, Not Mukash.

While reading Brad DeLong’s fascinating newsletter on centi-billionaires and political power (I’m going to ignore Elon’s self-imploding stunt), I noticed something that jarred me more than it should have: Mukesh Ambani’s name was misspelled as “Mukash.” A minor slip, perhaps. But it was the only error in a list that included Bernard Arnault, Warren Buffett, and Michael Bloomberg—men whose names command a certain global familiarity.

What does it say that even after spending nearly half a billion dollars on a wedding for his son, India’s wealthiest man doesn’t merit a spellcheck? It says a lot.

🧠 The Chimera of Respect via Capital Continue reading 🪙 What’s in a Name? Mukesh, Not Mukash.

The eyes have it

Posted on Categories ancient india, Caste, Civilisation, Culture, Hinduism, History, India, ReligionTags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments on The eyes have it

Let me preface this with a disclaimer: these are the observations of a layman; feel free to criticise and disagree at will.

Back in boarding school, my roommate, a Tulu boy, used to have a picture of the gods local to his area. They were a pair of rough spheres containing gigantic eyes. He told me they are referred to as ‘Bhoot’ but were gods, definitely not ghosts. I suppose they had a connection to the Bhoot Kola made famous by the excellent movie Kantara.

The Bhoot Kola itself is a possession ritual performed by lower caste men and reminiscent of African tribal religions

Much later in life I saw these figures again – worshipped in Orissa as Lord Jagannath. The giant eyes placed in a circular setting was unmistakable. Jagannath however is wholly subsumed by the vedic/brahminical form of hinduism, surrounded by priests, bejewelled and receiving regular milk and ghee offerings.

Continue reading The eyes have it

Open Thread: From Murder to Mercy — The Midwives of Bihar

Posted on Categories Caste, History, India, X.T.MTags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 48 Comments on Open Thread: From Murder to Mercy — The Midwives of Bihar

In the 1990s, rural midwives in Bihar were quietly killing baby girls under pressure from families. Some confessed to dozens of infanticides. Dowry, caste, poverty — all conspired to make daughters disposable.

Thirty years later, one of those girls has returned — adopted, loved, and thriving — to meet the women who chose to save rather than kill.

This story, told through BBC Eye’s The Midwife’s Confession, is brutal, human, and profoundly moving.

What does it say about India’s gender imbalance, social reform, and the moral grey zones of survival?

This thread is open for reflection. Please engage with care.

🎥 Watch on YouTube

📖 Read the full story

Rajaji: Our forgotten hero

Posted on Categories Caste, Economics, History, India, Politics, UncategorizedTags , , , , ,

In the run up to Indian parliamentary elections in 2024, there is excitement in some sections of social media about “freemarket”  ideas espoused by C Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) and the Swantantra Party he helped found in 1959.

Sharing a piece here I wrote on Rajaji’s ideological relevance in contemporary politics. This was written after visiting and reporting from the many institutions he built pre and post 1947 for the now defunct Pragati Magazine in 2018.

You can follow me here.

And the food-and-agriculture-focussed independent media platform called the ThePlate.in I run.

Here goes…

Rajaji: Our Forgotten Hero

Among the leaders in the front ranks of the freedom movement, and those counted as the makers of modern India, Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) is perhaps the man most forgotten. Gandhi is the ‘Father of the nation’; the very existence of India as a modern democracy, and lately all its faults—from clogged drains to currency fluctuation—are credited to Jawaharlal Nehru’s side of the ledger; the race to usurp Vallabhbhai Patel’s legacy has given India a Guinness record for the world’s tallest statue; Bhimrao Ambedkar is not only a Moses-like lawgiver who framed the constitution but also the messiah of marginalized; Maulana Azad, now firmly located in Indian-Muslim politics, finds an occasional ode to his prescience about the fallacy of Pakistan and subsequent fate of subcontinental Muslims. Rajaji is less lucky than Azad. Continue reading Rajaji: Our forgotten hero

The creation of Homo General Category

Posted on Categories CasteTags 3 Comments on The creation of Homo General Category

This Politic piece on caste in America is pretty balanced. But one thing that this “Indian Americans are so casteist” discourse misses is that 85% of Indian American Hindus are “General Category”, with a few percent being Dalits or Scheduled Tribes (the remainder are OBC). There aren’t many low caste people to discriminate against, but secondarily, America is a caste shredder.

The latest surveys suggest that for Indian Americans born in the USA, 30% of their spouses are non-Indian, 30% of their spouses are US-born Indians, and 40% of their spouses are Indian-born Indians. I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of the the 30% who marry other US-born Indians are marrying outside of their jati-varna. I suspect that perhaps a majority of the remaining 40% who have Indian-born Indian spouses are jati-varna endogamous because of arranged marriages, but I know a substantial number of US-born Indian Americans, men and women, who met and married Indian-born Indian immigrants, usually meeting them through work or social contexts. I am pretty sure that the majority of US-born Indians are marrying outside of their jati, often outside of their region.

You can test this proposition at the high socioeconomic status groups by looking at the NY Times Wedding Announcements.

Look under some very distinctive names, and look who they are marrying.

– Mukerhjee
– Iyer
– Sen
– Mehta
– Patel
– Arora
– Reddy
– Singh
– Deshmukh
– Kulkarni

Jatitva: When Caste Becomes a Cancer

Posted on Categories Caste, India2 Comments on Jatitva: When Caste Becomes a Cancer

Caste is the basic building block of Indian society and democracy. It decentralizes India and creates a fractal overlay across society enveloping every facet of life. Much can be said about its origins and heterodoxies, but today I want to explore how it influences politics and modern society. While caste’s impact on Indian society is mixed, I believe caste politics is the single most corrosive and destructive element in Indian democracy today. So many policy problems can be traced to the dizzying devilry that results from the lunacy of caste tribalism.

But why is caste so important to Indians in the first place? Caste serves multiple functions. Caste is a community. A sense of belonging and asabiyyah when times get tough. When the riots hit, it is your caste kin who will take and throw punches for you. It gives you your rituals, your traditions, your ways of worship, and so much more. Many castes have a divine origin story or a tale where their caste bravely overcame injustices from that caste. Caste is a polity. When election time comes, the candidate from your caste ensures your castemen will occupy government positions, be forgiven of crimes, and have a seat at the roundtable of power, perhaps even the throne itself. Caste is an economy. It can be a financial safety net, a business network, or a source of credit and capital. It can be the cornering of a market or government seats. Caste is all-encompassing, as real and essential as air and water for so many Indians.

So what separates run-of-the-mill 1990s Mandal-type caste politics from Jatitva? Jatitva is the political expression of Critical Caste Theory. Jatitva is Mandalism taken to its logical conclusions. It is the view that the Indian state should exist to be beholden to one’s caste. If Hindutva means a Hindu Rashtra, Jatitva means Jati Rashtras, where one’s caste must be the most powerful demographic group in their locale; if this isn’t achieved, then India must be decentralized heavily or even break. Jatitva means caste should define India. It claims one’s caste is more important than an overarching Hinduism, if not the rejection of mainstream Hinduism itself. Jatitva presents Hinduism as a societal ruse of ruin, Hindutva as a political conspiracy, and the Indian state as an economic oppressor.

Continue reading Jatitva: When Caste Becomes a Cancer

People of lower castes have bad personalities

Posted on Categories CasteTags 7 Comments on People of lower castes have bad personalities

Making the Elite: Top Jobs, Disparities, and Solutions:

How do socioeconomically unequal screening practices impact access to elite firms and what policies might reduce inequality? Using personnel data from elite U.S. and European multinational corporations recruiting from an elite Indian college, I show that caste disparities in hiring do not arise in many job search stages, including: applications, application reading, written aptitude tests, large group debates that assess socio-emotional skills, and job choices. Rather, disparities arise in the final round, comprising non-technical personal interviews that screen on family background, neighborhood, and “cultural fit.” These characteristics are plausibly weakly correlated with productivity (at the interview round) but strongly correlated with caste. Employer willingness to pay for an advantaged caste is as large as that for a full standard deviation increase in college GPA. A hiring subsidy that eliminates the caste penalty would be more cost-effective in diversifying elite hiring than equalizing the caste distribution of pre-college test scores or enforcing hiring quotas.

No big surprise.

Critical Caste Theory: A Dubious Discourse

Posted on Categories Caste32 Comments on Critical Caste Theory: A Dubious Discourse

As a tsunami of social justice sweeps across the world today, the roots of traditions are uprooted in an unrelenting furor. In India, the axe of modernity grinds against the caste system as caste, the primary identity of many Indians, now faces pressure from more cosmopolitan identities such as political ideology and class. While many see this as a positive development, some seek not only to entrench these age-old divisions but also enflame the trenches with the kerosene of hate. Building upon and going beyond colonial caste activists such as Ambedkar and the Phules, modern sociologists devise a theory designed to shatter Indian society and grant deliverance to the lower castes of India. While much of this theory is plagiarized from the infamous Critical Race Theory of America, caste is not race and race is not caste. You cannot tell someone’s caste by the color of their complexion or the features of their face. With the rise of Hindutva attracting a rainbow coalition of castes granting a decisive mandate to the BJP in India, the opposition seeks to break this coalition by inciting caste tensions, and it is in Critical Caste Theory that they find a prophetic message to part the saffron sea.

Critical Caste Theory does not seek the annihilation of caste no matter how much it harps on this talking point. Rather, it seeks the annihilation of Brahminism, a polemic and deceptive term for Hinduism originally used by Jesuit missionaries and colonial scholars. It is in the rigid contours of caste that CCT activists see the opportunity to exploit and shatter the cultural and religious body of India and Hinduism. Upper castes must be made aware of their ancestral penalties of the past, privilege of the present, and penance of the future. The lower castes must be made aware of the oppression of the past, discrimination of the present, and revolution of the future. The cloak of caste must smother all discourse surrounding politics, economics, and culture. And most of all – caste must be framed as a simple, homogenous concept that conquers time and space; heterogeneity is heresy.

Continue reading Critical Caste Theory: A Dubious Discourse

Caste in the Indian subcontinent: the wages of Manu

Posted on Categories CasteTags 80 Comments on Caste in the Indian subcontinent: the wages of Manu


A new post on caste at my Substack. I don’t think I have much more to say on this topic on the high level; the DNA data is now what it is. More details will come in, but we have the general outline.

It is now up to social historians to make sense of it.

(also, a new phrase for Pakistanis: “Allah in the streets, Manu in the sheets”)

Brown Pundits