In this post, I’ll describe how caste and capitalism exist as closely related structures that reinforce each other in modern India. I begin by defining caste and capitalism. Then I describe how caste forms the bedrock for capitalism in India. And finally I talk about ways that capitalism reinforces caste, completing the loop that forms the nexus.
Some caveats
Firstly, it is important to note that any social theory has limitations. The society is vastly more complex than any single theory can explain. But individual theories are still useful as they explain some parts of the society, and can be combined with other theories to form a more comprehensive worldview. Therefore, while critically reading this post, try to think about the potential for it to explain and predict social phenomenon, and about the events or situations it cannot explain or will fail to predict, rather than trying to say how this is all stupid because something else can explain all of this. (I’m especially worried about you Marxists)
Secondly, the definitions used in this post are going to be entirely mine. Of course there’s no original idea and everything that I write will have been influenced by other people and their works (which I’ll try to quote wherever I remember exactly where I got an idea from). But, more importantly, there is a good chance these definitions are flawed and therefore do not really define the concepts that I am discussing. Accordingly, please apply your discretion when drawing conclusions.
Thirdly, my lived experiences are that of a very privileged person. This can often be seen as a hindrance to understand a topic like caste. But in this post I will try to rely majorly on my own insights from having lived inside savarna ecosystem, thereby not having to rely much on second hand lived experience. This is a valid approach that can be categorized under “critical savarna studies” as described by Ravikant Kisana.
Fourthly, please have patience with me as I go through thought exercises. Mine is a method that tries to arrive at the truth through generating multiple hypotheses and being very much unafraid of being judged for such hypotheses. It can be triggering to people on either side of the anti-caste — casteist spectrum.
Defining caste
Most savarna people deny caste by defining caste as “(merely a) category for the job you’re doing”. As per their definition someone who does knowledge work is a brahmin (and so on…), and it has nothing to do with birth. But this is not the reality of how caste is practiced and if you need explanation for how there is no flexibility in caste assignment and how it is entirely based on birth, this post is not for you.
Many definitions of caste among sane people then describe how caste looks externally. For example:
- caste is a fixed social hierarchy in which membership is through birth and birth alone
- the essence of caste is endogamy
- caste is a division of laborers, not a division of labor
The last one specifically is a response to people who claim that a society will need to have different people doing different jobs and that it is inevitable that there is a hierarchy and stratification like that based on job (division of labor). The division in reality is not that of labor, but that of who can do what labor. Certain sections of people are restricted to doing certain jobs — and this assignment is based on their birth — and that permanent assignment is what is called as caste.
| I was in the Scouts program in school. When we do a camp, we are divided into groups of 8 called a patrol. There are several roles in a patrol — leader, assistant leader, treasurer, cook, equipments handler, tent handler, and so on. The roles keep rotating every day in an elaborate ceremony. Imagine if a kid was forever stuck in a role like cook, they would never be able to go around and do the fun things in the camp. Every kid can understand how it is only the right thing to do to rotate the roles. While there is division of labor, there is no division of laborers in the scout patrol. Everyone gets to do every role. Nobody is forced to be stuck in any role. The caste system ensures that people are forever stuck in roles — whether they like it or not, whether they’re qualified for it or not. And that’s why it is a division of laborers, and not a division of labor. |
The savarna defense at this point is to claim that nobody forces anyone to do any job, at least in 2025. That there is upward mobility that has been made possible by capitalism and disappearance of caste. These are not true as we discuss later in this post. But the existence of this defense makes it important to define caste in a different way. And that is where I come up with an operational definition of caste which will both explain how caste continues to exist and also make it easier to understand the connection with capitalism.
I define caste as a person considering another person as a lesser human based on their (caste) identity. Unlike the earlier definitions, this definition is based on introspection of what goes inside a savarna person’s mind when they are being casteist. The parentheses around “caste” makes this definition have two forms. In the narrow form, caste is defined as: a person considering another person as a lesser human based on their caste identity, and in the broad form caste is defined as: a person considering another person as a lesser human based on their identity. In the broader definition of caste, therefore, it is possible to include gender, appearance, race, tribe, and several other forms of identity. We will try to use the broader definition sparingly.
It is important to be very critical about this definition before we proceed. Let us first see how we can practically apply this definition.
A very common form of caste discrimination is focused on what people eat. You see brahmins on social media calling people “rakshas” (demon) for eating meat. This demonization of people is built over a hierarchy applied to food, where certain food are considered the best and certain other food are considered the worst. And then this hierarchy is applied to the humans who eat those food too. And that’s used as an excuse not to be near those humans.
So, how does our definition hold against this? There is a person seeing another person as less human (as a demon). But is it based on caste identity? The savarna person reading this will be like “no it is not based on caste identity, it is based on the food they consume”.
But here’s where we need to distinguish between rationalizations and reasons. When a person says they’re discriminating against someone not based on what their caste is, but based on what they eat, they’re rationalizing. What is actually happening is that this person is discriminating based on caste identity. And then they retrofit the rationalization that it is based on food choices.
If the discrimination was indeed based on food choices, and not based on caste identity, then the brahmins would have to check lunch boxes before they discriminate. On the days a dalit person has fruits and nuts in their lunch box, the brahmin would have to embrace them. On the days a brahmin friend of his brings chicken, the brahmin would have to stay away from him. Even if the latter happens, the former doesn’t happen. Those who claim that they discriminate based on food choices, actually don’t check food choice every day. They just assign general food choices based on caste identity and follow the pattern of discrimination.
And so, seeing the other person as less human is actually based on caste identity.
And the proof of this is what happens when it comes to marriage. When it is time for a brahmin person to get an arranged marriage, the family will start looking at a matrimony website dedicated to their caste. Why? Some people will openly state that they’re casteist and that they will only approve marriages within their caste. But some others will mask their casteism in explanations like “see, people of other castes will have different culture and we can’t adjust to those. They will eat meat, for example”. But matrimony websites are not based on diet or culture. They’re based on caste. So, any explanation other than caste that they give is actually just a rationalization of their caste based choice.
Another advantage of defining caste this way is that it can be used to identify casteism on a day-to-day basis. A savarna-passing dalit (a dalit person who can speak like and mingle with the savarna crowd and can appear to a savarna person as another savarna person) will suddenly start getting discriminated against when the people they work with recognize they are dalit. This is why there is a concept of closeted dalit, and “coming out as dalit”. While everything else — job, location, name, appearance — remains the same, someone coming out as dalit, and consequently facing discrimination can be identified as caste through our definition.
The need for the broader definition
While the narrow definition works, why do we still need the broader definition? How is it that sometimes caste is not based on caste identity?
This is where things become a bit messy. Have you heard the story of the cat to be tied before pooja?
| There was a cat that lived in a temple. It used to run around a lot and eat the pooja items. Tired of this the poojari started tying the cat to a pole before starting pooja. He would do this every day. After a couple of years the poojari became sick and started having his son poojari as assistant. Since he couldn’t run behind the cat, he would ask his son to catch the cat and tie it to the pole. The son would do it every time before pooja. After a few months, the older poojari retired and the son took over as the main poojari. Every day poojari junior would come, tie the cat to the pole and do pooja. All was going well till one day when he was on the way to do the pooja, he found the cat dead. Without wasting time he caught another cat from the neighborhood, took it to the temple, and tied it to the pole before starting pooja. |
The story of the cat tied to the pole might seem like it is about the stupidity of rituals or brahmins. But it is a problem that all humans face. They do not operate objectively. They are slaves of habit.
The human brain isn’t rational. We have the ability to reason, but the reasons come after we have already made the choice. And the choices are made by using shorter circuits in our brain — habit, stereotypes, and patterns.
Even when being casteist, human beings sometimes stop using the “logic” of caste identity, and fall back to proxy indicators — appearance, language, attitude, etc. Even though the rational thing (for casteist people) is to think of another person as a lesser human based on their caste identity, sometimes people can use other identifying factors to base this on.
In other words, for someone to be casteist, they don’t need a birth certificate of the other person’s caste, and they don’t even need a self-declaration of their caste, but mere markers of caste background is enough.
“While it may be possible for an educated, middle-class Dalit to pass for upper caste, it is never easy. If someone is curious about your caste, they can sniff you out in a thousand ways—your name, manners, dress, diet, family customs, ritual practices. The very fact this person is curious means they have some doubt.”
If we take that argument another step forward, we could also question whether caste identity is really relevant in being casteist. We could wonder whether caste is at its core about treating some people (any people) as inferior and thinking of oneself belonging to a superior group. We could argue that as long as people get a target to feel superior over, it doesn’t matter to them what identity they use to ascertain that superiority. We could even say that this is the basis of competition between castes among brahmins themselves, for example.
But I do not want to make such an extreme analysis as it doesn’t really contribute to our discussion. Also, it could be easily seen as erasure of caste, and equation of caste with other forms of discrimination like gender, and so on. It is sufficient for me to demonstrate that the broader definition of caste as treating another person as a lesser human based on their identity is useful to explain some forms of casteism where caste might not directly be obvious. And with that we can end this section.
Defining capitalism
Most definitions of capitalism operate around private property and profit. If you get the drift of this post, you should be expecting me to define it in my own way. And I will. After all, as I quoted from NCERT textbook in my last post, defining things for ourselves is a very important aspect of critical thinking.
Unfortunately, a lot of people use this freedom unconsciously and define capitalism in strange ways. To them I would suggest that sometimes it is useful to read social science textbooks to learn about a topic too.
Many, for example, see capitalism as equivalent to industries (big machines in factories and the like). They equate capitalism with economic growth. Subconsciously they’re operating on something they’ve heard in their childhood as “socialism = bad, capitalism = good”. In discussions when someone blames capitalism for something, they jump to its defense saying “had it not been for capitalism, you would all be so poor now”.
The problem is not just that they see capitalism as the right answer, it is also that they define capitalism in a way where there’s no space for anything else to even be competing. They define capitalism as everything good, and they define everything else as everything bad. So, even before I define capitalism myself, I’m forced to create room for alternatives.
Firstly, consider whether there are different flavors of state control of the market possible. The answer is yes. It is possible for the state to have a low touch (less regulations), or a high touch approach (lots of regulations). And before anyone says “oh, in true capitalism the market decides everything”, I’ll say without the state’s role in mediating there wouldn’t be any capitalism. The state ensures, at a minimum, law & order situations that allow the “free market” to start operating. If finance wasn’t so tightly regulated an industry, it would be impossible to operate any capitalistic system. Whether the state should tightly regulate prices and get embroiled in external trade using things like tariff (reference indeed to what’s happening in the capital of capitalism right now) is of course “optional” add-on. Whether high or low, there is always the state’s involvement in the so-called “free” market.
Secondly, consider whether innovation has anything to do with private ownership and profit. Do human beings innovate only when the incentive is money in their bank account? Is there any role for incentives like fame, love, belonging, companionship, purpose, or joy in human desire for innovation?
Thirdly, be conscious of the truism that human beings are selfish. Selfishness is a necessary element of capitalism and since capitalism is everywhere it’s been hammered into our minds that human beings are, by nature, selfish. Question this earnestly. Think about how much altruism could also be part of human nature. Think also about the conditions which will make people act selfish or altruistic.
Hopefully now, you can begin to at least see capitalism as a spectrum, if not see alternatives to capitalism. And in that spectrum, I have the space to define the ugly version of capitalism that is all around us. I define that capitalism as a system in which “my profit” is considered a justifiable reason for doing whatever the fuck.
Here are some things that capitalists do without any worry to protect or increase their profit:
- destroy the planet
- destroy the planet and claim that they’re going green
- destroy democracies
- kill competition
- bribe decision makers to get decisions in their favor
- forge accounts
- hire people and exploit them, fire people whenever
- set different salaries for different workers doing the same job
- pay people as low as one can get away with
- lie, mislead, and manipulate
- not care about equity or justice (unless it is profitable to do so)
- grab power and abuse power
- intimidate, threaten, and kill people
- abuse law to silence people
While this list can go on and on, there are two patterns to recognize. One, that profit is the only value in capitalism and no other values exist. Two, that a lot of people in the society believe that capitalists are justified in prioritizing only profit and that there is nothing wrong with it.
And with that let us get back to caste and look at what it does in the society such that it prepares a fertile soil for capitalism.
Caste and its manifestations
When savarna people try to erase caste, they restrict caste to physically violent forms of caste-based discrimination. They say things like “oh, but it is only in rural India that caste exists”, “oh, but among the educated there is no caste”.
Their imagination of caste is exemplified by Bollywood movies portraying caste as the dalit family in a village facing ostracization and violence. Bollywood hasn’t shown caste as vegetarianism, as anti-reservation sentiments, or as various forms of sophisticated favoritism. In the limited savarna imagination, caste can exist only if there is a well and some people are prevented from taking water out of it.
So much so that when literally that shit happens within their households they don’t see it as casteism. Domestic workers not being allowed to use glass or toilet. Workers being forced to use different lift in apartments. Not shaking hands with or sitting next to certain colleagues. Literally untouchability.
I’ll repeat. Untouchability exists today. In various ways and forms. In the most elite places.
If you follow any social media accounts of anti-caste people, you will also know that caste-based violence is a day to day reality for many people too. Rape, murder, dishonor killings. I will not document a lot of that in this post because the savarna urge would be to define caste as just all of the gruesome things that caste does and to shut their mind.
What I’m interested in this section is to discuss the indirect manifestations of caste in our lives — the casteist assumptions that guide elite decision making that perpetuate systems of injustice.
Let us start with education.
Caste makes teachers treat students differently. Caste creates in teachers a judgement of how much one can learn, and they calibrate their effort accordingly. Their patience and their love is rationed and those at the lower end of caste hierarchy receive less affection and attention from teachers.
This starts at very young ages. And kids grow up internalizing what they’ve been told they can and cannot do. Some are given wings. Others get their dreams killed.
The higher in education you go, the gap widens considerably. Especially when the opportunities for education start becoming competitive.
Notice that I haven’t mentioned anything about the compounding effects of overlapping issues above. For example, generations of caste based marginalization lead to many students being the first generation of learners in their family. This means they wouldn’t have had their parents schooling them at home. And this makes it extra difficult for them in the classroom. Similarly, wealth differences correlated with caste makes it difficult for students to get access to various things that help in learning — including even the prohibitive cost of applying for various competitive exams.
The reason I mention compounding effects in a separate paragraph is to be clear that “oh, but this is not actually caste, it is class” is a false argument. It is caste compounded by class, gender, and other factors. And often the class difference is the result of caste.
Now, let us look at opportunities.
How are opportunities distributed in our society? Take job opportunities. Most jobs are fulfilled through personal networks. Even when there is a job advertisement, it is circulated through WhatsApp channels that mirror personal networks. Take funding opportunities. The call for a grant or scholarship might be on a public website. But the URL to that is distributed through email groups and twitter channels that are all again mirrors of personal networks. My point is that most opportunities in our society are distributed through personal networks. There is no central notice board where all opportunities are equally accessible to everyone.
And how are personal networks formed? For a lot of savarna people I’ve seen this starts with family circles. “Oh, I found this chartered accountant through my uncle and he helped me with formation of my company when I was 22”, “Oh, so <famous person XYZ> is my aunt”. Some savarna folks recognize this as a nepotism allegation and claim that there is nothing they can do about it. But most of them are blind to such privileges. To them it feels natural to have a chacha who’s helping them get their break.
Even when people don’t rely on their family circles for growing their personal networks, their caste identity helps them. It is easier for a savarna person to strike up a conversation and build a relationship with a random savarna person. Sometimes they bond over their shared caste identity. Regardless, they find it easier to trust each other and open doors for each other.
And remember how it is not always the literal caste identity. Often it is about proxy markers like appearance, confidence, accent, or relatable cultural references. Many people don’t realize how they’re judging some people as more capable merely by how they present themselves.
That brings us to wealth.
If you limit someone’s education and opportunities, can you expect them to grow wealthy? No.
But even in isolation wealth has a compounding effect by itself. Rich becomes richer. That also means that those who start with assets will find it easier to grow wealthy.
| My parents are both alive and in government service in Kerala. They both make lots of money for themselves and savings and investments. I stopped taking money from them about 10 years ago when I finished MBBS. But, I’ve never had to worry too much about making money. I could take risks because I know that if something goes horribly wrong, I will likely get help from my parents. Also I could save whatever I earned. I didn’t have to send it anywhere. I also had financial literacy. And all of this financial freedom allowed me to have an unconventional career that allowed me to become a programmer, a public health activist, and so on. That unlocked many revenue streams for me. In turn, I become even more free to take even bigger risks. |
Many savarna folks start businesses by getting investment from family & friends. This investment can even come in forms of people working for free, because their needs are met in other ways. And once things get going, you can erase all the investments and attribute everything to your hard work. The same is true for folks in academia, or non-profits.
All of this is why it is said ad nauseum by anti-caste folks that savarnas have social capital and that is the biggest form of caste privilege.
Aside: At this point it would be unfair for me to not calm the agitated savarna reader who’s going “Hey, but I grew up in poverty and nobody helped me become who I am.” Yes, buddy, I hear you. You are totally aathmanirbhar self-made. This post doesn’t apply to you.
The problem isn’t social capital per se. The problem is that there is no acknowledgement of social capital. Those with social capital go about their lives and build concepts of what is “just” without the acknowledgement of how privilege is distributed in the society.
They therefore find it completely acceptable that there is piss-poor standards in most schools, colleges, and training centers across India. There is no push for better education. They find it simply alright to have very few elite institutions that provide reasonable quality of education. They consider it fair that the opportunity to reach these are gatekept by entrance examinations. They don’t even see a connection between these entrance examinations and the worsening quality of education that prioritizes examination focused rote learning.
When it comes to reservation they oppose it tooth and nail. One of their arguments is “well, instead of having reservation in higher education there should be universal schooling that creates a level playing ground”. Yes, savarna folks care about universal education exactly for the five seconds it takes them to say that sentence.
If only they cared for it a few minutes more, they would have begun to realize the enormity of the task that lies ahead of us in creating a level playing ground, or even a fighting chance for millions of Indians.
And that’s the finest of savarna qualities. They talk about huge problems with a graceful smile. They speak about things with a calmness that can only be achieved by someone whose ass is permanently placed in comfort. They do not ever see the need for radical change. If you speak to them about radical change they will gaslight you into thinking that you’re an impractical and arrogant activist who’s not interested in change. They will convince you that incremental, slow change as part of the status quo is the only way to do anything. And then they will continue to do nothing.
And in that inaction, they enable the perpetuation of a harmful and violent status quo. They normalize all of the violence, all of the discrimination, and all of the resistance to change. They empower the mindset that there are lesser humans and their lives don’t matter, at least not in this generation. They delay change long enough for this generation to disappear and another generation to start fighting the same battles.
What caste, therefore, creates is not just a hierarchy, but also a resistance to change. Caste through its intricate string-pulling ensures that the hierarchy is seen as acceptable and inevitable. It legitimizes suffering and gives people an excuse to be violent.
And that is where it meets its closest friend.
Capitalism cements all injustice in place
To undo violent hierarchies in the society, we have to actively intervene with humanity and humane values. Capitalism through its single-mindedness on profit leaves no space for values. Therefore, capitalism acts as a cement that solidifies hierarchies in place leaving no wiggle room.
This could be surprising. The promise was that capitalism doesn’t care about your caste, and therefore anyone can rise up in class through capitalism. The promise was that of upward mobility. But here I am, claiming that capitalism does the exact opposite.
The claim that capitalism doesn’t care about caste comes from the idea that everyone in the capitalistic system is paid based on market value. And therefore if a dalit can gain enough skills they will be well paid and can rise up in class. The if in that sentence needs a big stress. We already saw above how caste creates systemic barriers for people to gain education and opportunities. The market does not see those barriers. The market only sees how much profit the person in front of you can generate. Therefore, the capitalist indirectly uses caste based logic to hire.
It is not just indifference. Caste-based hiring allows the capitalist to make more profit than what caste-blind hiring allows him to do. You can exploit someone more if they are already seen by the society as less of a human! You can pay them lesser than other humans. You can make them work extra hours. And you can make them do jobs that other humans would refuse to do.
Vice versa, you hire charming savarnas for the good jobs. Regardless of how mediocre they’re in their work, they can operate smoothly in the system. They are low-risk hires because they are allowed by everyone to make unlimited mistakes.
Capitalism’s far greater contribution towards caste is in building and maintaining larger structures that perpetuate caste.
The biggest of such structures is the state. Capitalism operates governments. The most recent example is Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Every politician in power is a representative of capitalism. Narendra Modi is himself a capitalist who operates through a puppet named Adani. Everyone bows to the pressure of money that capitalism puts on them.
The influence is not just on political leaders at the top. It falls on all leaders at all levels, and bureaucrats too. Through such tight control of the state, capitalism then determines what gets state’s assent and what gets state’s dissent.
The state in turn allocates less budget to education, health, livelihood, etc, and makes that money available for the capitalistic needs. With lesser budget to those sectors, there’s further degradation of schools, hospitals, and jobs. People become even more poorly skilled, sicker, and get trapped in jobs that barely allow them to survive.
Capitalism also silences the civil society, including academicians and non-profits. It does this in two ways. Firstly, it makes invalid all logic other than economic logic. Any research has to be centered around economic growth. All NGOs have to work towards scalable, sustainable models. Secondly, it puts people in dilemmas where they have to choose to retain their income or give it up to pursue relevant problems. It does this by controlling how activities are funded. Civil society is funded eventually by capitalists directly or by capitalistic logic operating through state or citizens. Therefore, these people are always held accountable by the capitalistic system to itself. And capitalism doesn’t like to fund trouble makers.
One might say, but it is not all about money, the civil society can decide to operate without money. Yes, but capitalism is making it increasingly impossible to do that. It makes more and more people think about work and life only in terms of transactions. It destroys safety nets like free healthcare and that in turn puts the fear of death in activists. These days capitalism also tightly controls everyone’s attention, thereby depriving activists and civil society ways to organize effectively.
| Q: How do you kill the most radical organization? A: You fund it. You can easily destroy an organization by putting money into it. When money flows into an organization everyone’s thinking gets distorted. All radicalism gets defused into market logic. The latter part of the organization’s life will revolve around how to keep money coming in. People will start distrusting each other. Work will start getting quantified and values will vanish. It will very rapidly adopt capitalistic thinking and become part of the status quo. |
Capitalism puts every person in a hamster wheel where they are constantly running without reaching anywhere. While caste normalizes social hierarchies, capitalism gives people a permanent distraction, a permanent excuse to not care about social hierarchies.
Conclusion
Caste and capitalism are intricately tied with each other, especially in 21st century. Seeing them together can give us deeper insights into both of them.