Last year, I wrote a column in this paper (‘The Origin of our Discontents’, 27 May 2023) about a groundbreaking book: ‘Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents’ (2020) by Isabel Wilkerson. In it, she describes racism in the United States as an aspect of a caste system – a society-wide system of social stratification characterised by notions such as hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, and purity. She does this by comparing aspects of the experience of American people of colour to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany.
The book has inspired a 2023 biographical drama film ‘Origin’ written and directed by Ava DuVernay and available on Netflix. It is based on Wilkerson’s personal life and her travels through the US, Germany and India while researching the book.
‘Origin’ demonstrates how Wilkerson (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) found similarities, “connective tissue” between India’s centuries-old oppressive caste system, the United States’ bloody history of slavery, the Jim Crow segregation laws after official abolition of slavery and its modern-day avatar of police brutality; and the purity laws in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
Wilkerson refers to the seminal 1941 book ‘Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class’ by Allison Davis and others.
She writes, “It is the fixed nature of caste that distinguishes it from class, a term to which it is often compared. Class is an altogether separate measure of one’s standing in a society, marked by level of education, income, and occupation, as well as the attendant characteristics, such as accent, taste, and manners that flow from socioeconomic status. These can be acquired through hard work and ingenuity or lost through poor decisions or calamity. If you act your way out of it, then it is class, not caste. Through the years, wealth and class may have insulated some people born in the subordinate caste in America, but not protected them from humiliating attempts to put them in their place or to remind them of their caste position.”
Wilkerson reveals how the US Jim Crow laws were the legal prototype for the Nazis’ 1935 Nuremberg ‘Blood’ or ‘Purity’ laws.
Wilkerson was invited to speak at an international conference on caste at the University of Massachusetts Amherst following her research trip to Delhi. There, “faced with translating the Jim Crow caste system for an audience focused on India,” she began to draft the earliest outlines of what she would call the Eight Pillars of Caste: 1. Divine will: the belief that social stratification is beyond human control, either divinely ordained or a natural law; 2. Heritability: the belief that social status is acquired at birth and immutable, as codified; 3. Endogamy: the discouragement or prohibition of sex and marriage between castes; 4. Purity and pollution: the belief that the dominant caste is “pure” and must be protected against pollution by the inferior castes, as shown in the segregation of facilities for bathing, eating, education, etc; 5. Occupational hierarchy: the reservation of the more desirable occupations for the superior castes; 6. Dehumanisation and stigma: the denial of individuality and human dignity of lower-caste individuals; 7. Terror and cruelty: as means of enforcement of the caste system and control of lower-caste people; 8. Inherent superiority and inferiority of castes: the belief that people of one caste are inherently superior to those of other castes, expressed e.g. in restrictions on clothing or displays of status by lower-caste people.
Hitler especially marvelled, she writes, at the American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass deaths.” That line in quotes captures the current attitude of the state of Israel and much of the wider world towards the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Wilkerson’s eight Pillars of Caste also hold true in the treatment of Palestinians.
Researcher, human-rights and social activist, lawyer and author Dr Suraj Yengde is quoted by Wilkerson in her book and is featured as himself in ‘Origin.’ He explains to her that the maintenance of caste in India happens through “the unending violence in the form of rape, mutilation and murder. In India, a Dalit is attacked every 15 minutes. Every day, ten Dalit women are raped. And these are only the reported cases.”
‘Origin also discusses the institutional murder of Rohith Vemula. The dramatisation of formative moments in Dr Ambedkar’s life was quite moving. His observations of the similarities between the plight of the African-Americans when he visited Harlem and that of India’s Dalits, also noted by Martin Luther King Jr many decades later on his trip to India underscore the “connective tissue” Wilkerson alludes to. The dehumanizing horrors of manual scavenging in India are shown in graphic detail.
Of the flawed conflation of race with caste, Wilkerson writes: “Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.”
“The tyranny of caste is that we are judged by the very things we cannot change: a chemical in the epidermis, the shape of one’s facial features, the signposts on our bodies of gender and ancestry – superficial differences that have nothing to do with who we are inside.”
“Caste is everywhere, yet invisible”, Wilkerson says toward the end of the film. “No one avoids exposure to its message. And the message is simple: One kind of person is more deserving of freedom than another kind.”
Caste is still everywhere yet invisible in India. And on the global stage, nowhere is the message of “one kind of person being more deserving of freedom than another kind” more blatant and grotesque than in Gaza today.
(Dr Luis Dias is a physician, musician, writer and founder of Child’s Play India Foundation. He blogs at luisdias.wordpress.com)