Caste has been a persistent and defining principle of inequality and discrimination in India. In recent decades this has become a more visible issue outside India. A 60-page report, Caste Discrimination: A Global Concern, focused on the Dalits or so-called untouchables of South Asia – including Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan.^[i] In recent years, human rights groups, including the Dalit Solidarity Network UK, have campaigned for a legal ban on caste discrimination. They argued that Dalits –‘ the lowest group in the caste hierarchy – lacked legal protection against discrimination from members of ‘upper castes’. The government acknowledged the existence of caste discrimination but initially preferred a community education programme to legislation. The reluctance to legislate may have been brought on by pressure from Hindu and Sikh groups in the UK.’^[ii]

The time has thus come to understand the caste beyond the borders. There are more than a dozen books published on the issue of caste, some of which I had read earlier: Ashwini Deshpande’s The Grammar of Caste, M.N. Srinivas’ Caste: Its Twenty-First Century Avtar, Surender S. Jodhka’s Caste, and Suraj Yengde’s Caste Matters. These books focused on the caste’s socio-economic-political perspective within the territory of India. Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Lies that Divide Us, published by Penguin Random House in 2020  touches upon caste from a global perspective. She writes this book in the form of a commentary on caste and its relation to race and class.

She describes some heinous incidents: how a white man killed an Indian engineer, which shows the white man’s psychology against immigrants around the world; another case is the related racial and anti-Muslim thoughts of a white man, who attacked two teenage girls, one of whom was wearing a hijab (p.8). The recent election campaigns of the President are based on conservative and liberal principles. Wilkerson explores the trajectory of slavery in light of caste prejudices. Throughout history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in America.  All versions of the caste have been protecting the hierarchy of human beings. It perpetuates inferiority and superiority among people, justifying it with some kind of irrational philosophies.

Wilkerson accepted that, after a deep study of the era of Jim Crow, I could say that racism is not a sufficient term to understand the pain of blacks. Instead, she argues that caste is an appropriate term. Racism is reflected in our skin, while casteism exists in our bones. Caste and race are not matters of feelings. It is a matter of power. The USA and India are profoundly different from each other in culture, technology, economics, ethnic makeup, and political systems, but both have adopted social hierarchies. Both kept their dominant caste separate, apart from and above those deemed lower. Both countries enacted a fretwork of laws to chain the lowest group—Dalits in India and African-Americans in America—to the bottom, using terror and force to keep them there. (p.74) She refers to the exploitation and torture of slaves in America in 1740, when South Carolina increased the working hours for slaves to fourteen/fifteen hours per day, while prisoners found guilty of actual crimes were kept to a maximum of ten hours per workday. Black men were never addressed as “Mr.,” and black women were never to be addressed as “Miss” or “Mrs.” But rather by their first name regardless of their age and marital status. She also writes of how a black man from Selma was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. and kept his daughter’s name “Miss” to get respect from society.

Wilkerson spoke about the origin of caste; the word caste, which has become synonymous with India. The word caste came from the Portuguese word casta, a Renaissance-era word for “race” or “breed.” The Portuguese, who were among the earliest European traders in South Asia, applied the term to the people of India upon observing Hindu divisions. Thus, a word we now ascribe to India arose from Europeans’ interpretations of what they saw; it sprang from the Western culture that created America. (p.67)

In the United States of America, which primarily uses physical presence to tell the races apart, in India, people’s surnames tell about their caste. Caste/race has been maintained by endogamy in both countries. A survey in 1958, found that 94 per cent of Americans disapproved of marriage across racial lines. There have been various pillars of caste: heritability, endogamy, purity versus pollution, occupational hierarchy, dehumanisation and stigma, narratives and interpretations of dominant castes, terror and control of means, and inherent superiority versus inherent inferiority. The Indian concept of rankings, however, is thousands of years older than the European concept of race. Martin Luther Jr. recalled his visit to  India when “one afternoon I went down to speak in the southern part of India in a school that was attended by large by young boys and girls who were children of former untouchables. And I remember that afternoon when the principal got up to introduce me. As he came to the end of his introduction he said I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America”. He then reflects “For the moment I was peeved, I was shocked that I would be introduced as an untouchable. But pretty soon my mind ran back across to America and I started thinking about the fact that there were so many places that I could not go because of the colour of my skin. I started thinking about the fact that my 20 million brothers and sisters in the Negro community of America, were still at the bottom of the economic ladder, deprived of adequate housing conditions, and unable to live in numerous neighbourhoods because of the colour of their skin. I started thinking about the fact that my little children were still judged based on the colour of their skin rather than the content of their character and I had to say to myself that I am an untouchable and every negro in the United States is an untouchable.”[iii]

Wilkerson’s work is a substantial and valuable addition that should be welcomed for two reasons. Firstly, it offers an astute perspective from someone who has a global perspective. on socio-political issues. Secondly,  caste has become a most important and complex component for discrimination, meanwhile, it has been recognized by the United States of America (USA), as the California state has banned caste-based discrimination.  California was the first USA state to add caste as a protected category in its anti-discrimination laws. Seattle had earlier become the first USA  city, which accepted that caste is also a factor for discrimination. Its local council passed a resolution (Times of India, 2023) The book offers us a sense of how caste-based hate has spread beyond national borders.

 It has been argued that in the USA, racism maintains only social hierarchy, for while blacks are in the minority in there, they were able to achieve the top position in politics when Barack Obama became the first black President of the USA. After the election, white Americans in both parties claimed that racism was a thing of the past in the USA. “We have a black President, for heaven’s sake”. They proclaimed a new post-racial world, but as per data, the majority of white Americans didn’t vote for the country’s first black President. An estimated 43 per cent went to him in 2008 and 39 per cent to him in 2012. Which shows caste is a big matter for Americans also. But, India is not yet able to have a Dalit Prime Minister. It could be observed that the dynamics of caste in India are shaped by religious affiliation, which makes the Indian caste system more and more rigid than the USA’s caste.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2001/08/29/global-caste-discrimination, accessed on 11^th December 2023.

https://idsn.org/wp-content/uploads/user_folder/pdf/New_files/UK/Caste_discrimination_in_the_United_Kingdom_-_web_version.pdf, accessed on 11th December 2023.

https://velivada.com/2020/04/30/martin-luther-king-untouchable-afro-american-usa/, accessed on 11^th December 2023.

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Krishan Kumar is an Assistant Professor at DAV College for Girls, Yamunanagar, Haryana.