“My daughter will never marry a shippie,” said an acquaintance many decades ago, in conversation after we had sung together in the Christmas midnight Mass choir. The daughter in question was perhaps only three or four, hardly at the cusp of matrimony. I don’t know who she has married, but I think it is safe to assume that he is not a ‘shippie’ (someone employed on a ship).
The terminology evolves, but the prejudices depressingly linger. In earlier generations, the epithets were ‘pescadores’ (fishermen) or ‘tarvotti’ (boatmen).
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But a verbal sleight of hand can elevate ‘lowly’ professions to ‘respectable’ ones, when ‘upper’ castes take them up. So, a ‘shippie’ can be sanitised to ‘Merchant Navy’ officer; a tailor becomes ‘fashion designer’; a barber is a ‘hair stylist’, a cook becomes a ‘chef’.
This came to the fore some years ago when an acquaintance (who is able to trace his ancestry centuries back to his Brahmin ‘roots’ before conversion to Roman Catholicism), when he couldn’t think of any other way to hit out at Goa’s most famous fashion icon, the late Wendell Rodricks, publicly called him ‘just a tailor.’ As if being a tailor (or a shippie or any profession) should ever be something to be ashamed of.
Some years ago, the manager of a youth orchestra (not in Goa, I must hasten to add), also Christian, when upset with a young musician for some petty reason, later told the rest of us quite contemptuously, that the youth was ‘the son of a carpenter’! A gentle reminder that our Lord Jesus whom she professed to worship (and she made many social media posts about this), was also ‘the son of a carpenter’ was not well received.
The notion of ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’, ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ stems from caste divisions, and underline so many unconscious biases people have, irrespective of their faith or the lack thereof, even among those who noisily profess their atheism. Whether they admit it to themselves or not, all worship at the altar of caste.
During my brief involvement with the Goa University in setting up its university choir (until the project was hijacked by people neither University staff nor students, but that’s a matter for another column), I remember a conversation with a senior staffer there. The topic was sexual harassment of women, probably triggered by another incident in the news. She recounted an incident in Mumbai where she intervened to stop a woman being molested on a local train. However, what was interesting was what outraged her even more than the act of molestation itself. “Just imagine the audacity of the creep! He touched one of our women!” She must have a sensitive antenna for detecting the caste location of random strangers on a train.
It gives the lie to so many, especially in cities, who assert that caste becomes irrelevant because people are thrust together in public transport and other common urban spaces.
I came across an interesting passage in, of all things, a book ‘The Man who knew Infinity’ about India’s mathematical luminary Srinivasa Ramanujan. An unnamed Englishman from the early 1900s wrote about the railways being ‘the great leveller.’ “When you get to the third-class railway carriage, you overcome even such tough obstacles as caste. Into it are huddled Brahmin and Pariah; they sit on the same seat; they rub shoulders who might not mingle shadows. You must drop your caste if you want to travel at a farthing a mile; and it is dropped – to be resumed again outside the station.”
Similar instances of casual casteism are too many to relate: a friend wanting me to undertake a trip to Mumbai just to donate blood for a parent’s operation because “God knows whose blood they’ll transfuse into him otherwise.”
At the children’s party, a parent lamented that the new priest in his parish church was an Adivasi. “Then he can’t be good!” said another parent vehemently.
An acquaintance, a government employee grumbled about her workplace, saying “there are too many OBCs (Other Backward Classes).” Casual casteism can surface anywhere, anytime.
When a snickering Facebook thread on the Goan traditional loincloth attire (caxtti) was called out for its insensitivity, the predictable defence was to label whistle-blowers as ‘not having a sense of humour.’
I am deeply sceptical of the sincerity of so many friends and acquaintances who hotly protest that they ‘shun caste’ or ‘don’t have a casteist bone in their family’, when their own ancestral lineage going back many generations in time to the present and extending to their progeny are fastidiously, hermetically endogamous. Endogamy ensures the continuity of caste.
The compartmentalisation achieved by endogamy effectively seals communities in figurative silos from one another. It fosters a lack of empathy for the other’s problems and collective erosion of self-esteem, and encourages stereotyping: “They’re all lazy, don’t like to work.” “They breed like monkeys,” was what one devout Christian senior citizen said about the underprivileged.
One big stick used to hit out at ‘lower’ castes is the issue of reservations. I too bought into the flawed ‘merit’ logic in my younger years until I began to read more on the issue. A teacher recently, worryingly spoke to a classroom of young minds against reservations, which shows that ‘reservations’ (if you will parson the pun) against reservations still persist.
The recent Bihar caste census results are quite illuminating, as is Yogendra Yadav’s analysis of those results in ‘The Print’ last month. The most revealing facet to me was that the misleadingly-labelled ‘General’ category was in fact the minority. What would the results of a similar census in Goa reveal?
Indeed, Yadav concludes, “Dr Ambedkar’s goal of annihilation of caste cannot be achieved by closing our eyes to the existence of caste and caste-based inequalities. Elimination of caste-based inequalities cannot begin without recognising, counting and measuring the effects of caste. Now that we know it is possible, useful and desirable, the entire country must follow Bihar’s lead.”
(Dr Luis Dias is a physician, musician, writer and founder of Child’s Play India Foundation)
