TUESDAY, MAY 07, 2024
My ‘caste awakening’ experience happened to me indirectly, when I was fifteen. I say indirectly, because it happened to my brother.
He and his school friend were at the Dhempe College office, euphoric about tasting the sweet freedom of being college students. They began filling the enrolment forms together. Almost reflexly, my brother filled his form the way his friend did. Apart from name and birth-date, all the details were identical.
At the blank for ‘Religion’, the friend wrote ‘Roman Catholic Brahmin’. My brother had never come across these words strung together before and was about to write likewise, when his friend scoffed: “Heh! Na Na! You’re not a Brahmin!”
I remember the awkward conversation at home later that day. Was the friend deluded? Surely such a thing as Roman Catholic Brahmin didn’t exist? Nowhere in our Bible is caste division mentioned.
Obviously this friend, also a teenager, had picked this up from his upbringing. He had been brought up by his family not only with a sense of pride about his own “Brahmin” heritage, but had been schooled about who else in society were (or weren’t) his caste brethren. This is why he felt sufficiently outraged when someone else, however innocently, staked what he felt was a spurious claim to that title he valued so much. If this is how he felt, how many others in our circle and their families also harboured such delusional pride?
In retrospect, I think the ground shifted a little for me that day. Suddenly things were not quite the way they appeared. I realized for the first time that so many people I trusted as friends and even authority figures actually had secret prejudices lurking beneath the façade. I felt a sense of betrayal, unsure whether I could believe what people said they stood for.
I don’t use the term ‘delusion’ lightly. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR), “a delusional disorder is an illness characterized by at least one month of delusions but no other psychotic symptoms.” And what is a delusion? “Delusions are false beliefs based on incorrect inference about external reality that persist despite the evidence to the contrary.” Because cognitive organization and reality testing are otherwise intact in delusional disorder, it has been described in the literature as "partial psychosis."
So caste pride, which is essentially a false feeling of superiority despite all evidence to the contrary, is actually a delusional disorder, a “partial psychosis”, basically a mental illness.
But if the delusion is ‘suffered’ (or wallowed in) by a sizeable cross-section of a society, does that somehow ‘normalize’ it? Or does it just mean that the prevalence of this mental illness is alarmingly high?
There’s a profound quote by Ernest Hemingway: “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
After that ‘awakening’ moment, many things began to make more sense, however perversely, to me. I used to only half-listen to our family history tales until then. When you are young, anything that happened before you were born seems like the ‘distant’ past. But now I began to pay more attention to the tales of discrimination against my ancestors in the Escola Médica (whose praises Goa loves to sing today but which was a cesspit of caste prejudice) and elsewhere in society.
During the height of the pandemic lockdown, I came by the e-book ‘The Wise Fools of Moira… and other Goan Folk Tales: A collection by Prof. Lucio Rodrigues’, a reprint of an earlier edition.
I was familiar with just the Moira story, and thought this would be a great way to keep my then-eleven year old son busy, and also learn some ‘Goan’ folklore. I was about to hand it to him, but then thought I should do a quick read myself first. I’m glad I did.
The stories are riddled with overt or tangential caste references. ‘Jesus is not ours! Jesus is theirs!’ describes caste segregation within Guirim church. Other stories portray ‘lower’ castes as ‘ugly’, dark-skinned’, scheming, unscrupulous or evil; and seem to promote the idea of only marrying one’s caste peer, never ‘below’.
Did I really want my son to read such prejudiced tales dressed up as ‘heritage’? Given that the ‘dominant’ castes constitute but a fragment of our population and the stories aggrandize them and ridicule the rest, how representative are they to really be called ‘Goan’?
If you haven’t had your ‘caste awakening’ moment, it almost certainly means you belong to a ‘privileged’ caste. Shashi Tharoor (whom I greatly admire as a politician and intellectual) at a festival here recently said he grew up “unaware about caste.” It took a blog post by a Dalit teenager (in 2017, when Tharoor was 61!) replying to an article he wrote about caste, to “open his eyes” to his caste blindness. But how could someone as intelligent and perceptive as he, with his finger on the pulse of the people, not have realized this sooner? It is the mind-anaesthetising bubble of privilege.
That same privilege caused a heritage enthusiast (incidentally also Christian) to state recently: “Being Indian, the caste system is an inseparable part of our culture and we shouldn’t be ashamed about it but rather take pride in it.” Despite repeatedly being called out for his bigotry, he wouldn’t budge.
It is what makes so many Goan writers exult that they “shun”, “reject”, or “abhor” caste while simultaneously, proudly flashing their ‘upper-caste ‘location.
The choice of “rejecting” caste is itself an ‘upper’-caste privilege not afforded to ‘lower’ castes, who are reminded by society at every turn in subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways of their position on the perverse caste totem pole.
Maybe this column will be an ‘eye-opener’ for someone reading it. The ‘elephant in the room’ may have been born from delusional thinking, but the vast, needless hurt and trauma it inflicts, the evil it spreads, are very real.
(Dr. Luis Dias is a physician, musician, writer and founder of Child’s Play India Foundation. He blogs at
luisdias.wordpress.com)
