Excerpt:
We pulled the consultant roster of a leading Indian hospital, well-known, charitable, multiple metros, decades old, and ran the surnames against caste. The institution does not publish anything beyond name, sub-specialty and city. We have anonymised the hospital because the point is structural, not gossip. The pattern here is the pattern at twenty others. What we found will not surprise anyone who has sat in an Indian waiting room, but the numbers are worth tabulating.
The Methodology
This is not a census. It is surname sociology. Indian surnames are imperfect caste signals, especially in Tamil Nadu where initials often suppress jati markers altogether, and elsewhere where regional surnames detach from their origin communities through migration and intermarriage. We are not building a genealogical claim about any individual on the list. We are reading the aggregate. Elite institutional patterns in India are often visible precisely through these imperfect signals: when the noise floor is what it is, a strong signal still tells you something. The exercise is probabilistic, not deterministic, and we have tried to keep the language commensurate with that.
The Numbers
Continue reading Who Sees? A Caste Audit of an Anonymous Elite Indian Hospital
