The Science of Seeing Caste in Everything

There are topics where caste is traditionally invisibilized/erased. Thanks to social change, people are able to stand up and assert and call out caste in many such topics these days. When that happens, the typical savarna response is to call it “unscientific”.

I’ll give two examples.

Example 1

Shilpa wrote “Mahishasura: The Demonized Hero of the Dalits” last week. In it Shilpa talks about how there are alternative narratives that reclaim Mahishasura as a martyred leader of a marginalized community.

One of the responses I got when I shared this article in my WA status was that there were “loose unscientific assertions” in it and that “Seeing caste angle in everything is why we’re divided as a society.”

Example 2

Saumya Barmate had written “Inherited Pain: How sickle cell reveals the intergenerational violence of caste” a while back. In it SB talks about how Sickle Cell Disease’s evolution, linked with Malaria, intersects with structural abandonment faced by Adivasi and Dalit communities who were forced to make Malaria endemic regions their homelands.

When Rahul Sonpimple shared this on twitter, one troll account said “Science doesn’t support any inheritance or genetic deformation due to caste oppression.”

Are these good faith arguments?

Before we even think about what is scientific/unscientific, it would be useful to think about whether these arguments are even made in good faith.

Commenter 1 is clearly articulating their discomfort. According to them, seeing caste in everything is dividing the society. They are uncomfortable with Dalit assertions. They would rather have caste not be called out. And this is not a fringe idea. The most vocal proponent of such a “united” approach to social change was Mohandas K Gandhi.

Mohandas wanted those from dominant caste to undergo a spiritual transformation and stop being casteist. While this idea by itself is reasonable, it never stops there. When it came to matters like separate electorate for Dalits, Mohandas vetoed it out of existence claiming that it will divide society. This insistence that social change should happen only through internal transformation of the minds and hearts of oppressors is what makes this idea harmful.

Commenter 1 therefore starts from the premise that calling out caste itself is wrong. And it is after already establishing the “wrongness” of the article in their mind that they start looking for technicalities on how it is wrong. They pick on specific parts of the article and read it in the weakest form, and find an argument based on the dominantly accepted stream of science to “prove” it wrong.

Commenter 2 does the same, and also gives us a more straightforward articulation of their understanding of science. To them, science is not an often contested, continuously evolving, nuanced matter. To them science is a simple frozen set of scriptures. They think of science like a religion. They do not understand that science has (or is) a way of thinking that is incompatible with religious thinking.

In either case, what we can observe is that this is not a simple debate on technicality or logic. This is a political debate. And consequently arguing these on technicalities is not going to yield any change in opinions.

Is it wrong to point out technicality?

As a person who enjoys getting things technically right to the maximum extent possible, I believe that pointing out technicality is useful.

But as I discuss above, when people have already concluded that an article is wrong before even trying to understand it, or even read it correctly, they often end up misreading it or pointing out wrong things without checking for themselves.

In the article about Mahishasura, the author makes an assertion that the dominant narrative of navratri is being challenged by other narratives that frame Mahishasura as a powerful and just king, or as an ethical and spiritual follower of Buddha. The author then questions the propriety of celebrating a murder and calls out the patriarchy in the dominant conceptualization of Durga. And the author also questions the hypocrisy in worshiping cow while ghosting buffalo, and tells us that this is caste-coded.

Note that this is a discussion of myth. It is a re-imagination and curative reading of, literally, stories. It is a discussion about culture and tradition. Where does science enter here?

There are some sciences relevant here, indeed. Social sciences like political science can be used to critique this article. One can ask questions like, “Does the author make a coherent political argument?” And if one indeed questions the scientific validity of this article through social science lens, one can see complete coherence with not just Ambedkarite social movement and politics, but also with feminism and queer politics as well.

Corrective reading of history and culture is a well established political tool widely employed by feminists and queer folks. The movement of postmodernism is based on rejecting established understandings and dominant ways of thinking about topics. For fuck’s sake, even Mohandas K Gandhi had a habit of reading Gita in corrective ways!

In the article about the caste of sickle cell disease, the author starts with description of grief and pain following the death of their cousin due to sickle cell disease, and more importantly that of betrayal — by “public health” refusing to talk about the epidemiology of SCD and the role for geographical/spatial exclusion in it. The author argues for the recognition of settlement of Adivasi/Dalit populations in malaria-endemic regions as not a choice, but a result of force and exclusion. The author then problematizes the lack of political will in addressing SCD as continuing violence on top of the biologically inherited pain. Following this the author points out how caste is “an organising principle of the Indian social order” and caste denialism is a deliberate political act and wilful epistemic violence. Based on these the author demands of public health a radical political project.

In 2,330 words the author here draws the connection from caste, to geography, from geography to malaria, from malaria to sickle cell disease, and from sickle cell disease to genetics (and much more). One requires a critical and deep perspective about science, society, and politics to be able to understand articles like this. When people lack those pre-requisites, they latch on to simplistic understandings of the arguments being made. And this misreading causes them to point out irrelevant technicalities.

If one really wants to be pedantic about this article, one has to argue that at least one or more of those connections are wrong or weak. Merely demonstrating one’s superficiality by refusing to see the connections does not make for a technicality.

Caste is “just a variable”

Even when it becomes impossible to deny caste, there are several more defense mechanisms savarnas employ to minimize the impact of acknowledging caste. One that I’m particularly triggered by at the moment is treating caste as a variable, as one of many factors that are relevant.

In a recent event at a so-called public health institution, there was a panel discussion titled “Nurturing Public Health Leaders in India in Uncertain Times: Balancing Equity, Technology, and Local Self-Reliance”. Thankfully, the organization has put a summary of the discussion on its social media. One of the panelist, Muttaiah, an Adivasi activist, spoke about land rights, health rights, organizing and politics. The four other panelists focused on pedagogy, skills, etc giving at best a cursory mention of “social determinants”.

Luckily there was a question-answer section and I gave the panelists a chance to speak directly about caste by asking the following:

We have tried problematizing pedagogy, or systems, design, all of that for many years. Isn’t it also time to problematize perhaps things like caste… and question things in terms of… are we getting into the same problems because our methods are wrong, or because the people who are doing it are wrong, the representation and things like that.

The first response to that is a good example of reducing caste to a variable:

Maybe I can start with the first question that was asked that “But what about caste?”

Right. So uh you know public health is you know it’s a it’s a mixture of lot of things you know it’s a it’s a kitchdi of things. So you know everything sort of comes in and uh and it’s such a complex and you know as was mentioned by Nachiket and professor [Reddy?] it’s a complex adaptive system so it keeps on changing. New variables will come in some variables will disappear but then another get added. So we will have to include that also in in public health education typically public health education we don’t talk about it unless it comes from a more sociology perspective. So I guess we’ll have to address those issues and those are very important issues.

Notice the difference between Saumya Barmate’s assertion that caste is an organizing principle of Indian society and this panelist’s ‘affirmation’ that caste is indeed a “variable” that “will have to be included” in public health education.

Another panelist jumped in with a better response.

I’ll answer it differently, right, on the question of caste. I don’t think we can discuss public health uh without understanding society per se right and an understanding of society definitely would you need to confront and really have an informed understanding of caste

and then they immediately went on to make caste one among many variables by saying

…not only caste; caste, class, gender uh you know ethnicity, religion, everything I mean otherwise how are we going to talk about equity to begin with? So it is not “also” caste, it is centrally all these things that we need to talk about when we are talking about public health.

While this response is miles ahead of the previous panelist’s response, you cannot unsee the irresistible urge to take the spotlight away from caste.

And you’ll not often see that urge to make it one among several factors when there’s a discussion about class, gender, or religion. Caste has a special effect on savarna panelists. It can never be given center stage. It can never be given too much visibility.

They are talking about caste, but not really talking about it. This is also a form of erasure and invisibilization. And this is not a theoretical issue. Aazhi recently wrote about how this practically translates to gender being considered a “bigger” issue than caste. It is also what plays out when Marxists/communists ask people to forget caste and focus on class/capitalism.

But is it really caste in everything?

In the context where caste is invisibilized and erased in everything, even where caste is the most important factor to be considered, isn’t it important to see caste in everything?

If people can see that the whole world is gendered and can understand how gender plays a crucial role in our day-to-day life, doesn’t caste deserve at least that much visibility?

If you are connected to India in any way, your whole life has been shaped by caste in all imaginable (and unimaginable) ways. Let us take something that is completely out of this world and came billions of years before humans. Let’s take the Sun. Let’s say you’re talking about the Sun. Is there caste in Sun? Yes indeed! The Sun is not equal to all of us.

Addendum

Yesterday I overheard a conversation where someone was saying “I don’t talk about caste, because I’ve heard Dalit people say they can advocate for themselves and that there’s no need for others to talk on behalf of them”.

This is yet another form of caste invisibilization. By equating “caste” with “Dalit”, the savarnas are constantly deforming what caste means. That panel discussion I mentioned earlier was followed by a talk by a government official. In it they bring up a reference to the question of caste:

[…] and I’d like to take it back to the question of caste. Before we involved and uh asked SHG women to to do this end to end we found that only the dirtiest work of segregating mixed waste was being done by the poorest women uh from uh oppressed caste who had no other option of a livelihood. So we said we’ll change this uh we will ask SHG women’s groups to do end-to-end solid waste management including the fancier work or the more empowered work of driving the vehicles, of collecting the user fees, of picking up the waste, of doing the behavior change communication, of becoming influencers, of selling the waste, right, and of also refusing to pick up any mixed waste that was not segregated at source. So this is an example of that. […]

The question of caste is always reduced to be about oppressed castes. And then that is always reduced to be about waste management.

Perhaps if that’s all you can speak about caste, don’t speak about it. Fine.

Science of Caste

To see the science of calling out caste, it is not enough to live in a caste-based society and/or have scientific degrees. It is also necessary to adopt interdisciplinary thinking, have a philosophy of science that’s compatible with humanity and a moral compass that makes one act with integrity. It is necessary to read and synthesize political science, anthropology, history, economics, psychology, neuroscience, genetics, and so on along with a realist understanding of the world in a crucible of equity and justice. It is not easy.

And if you don’t want to struggle, here’s a thumb rule: It is scientific to see caste in everything.