Category Archives: Caste

This Politic piece on caste in America is pretty balanced. But one thing that this “Indian Americans are so casteist” discourse misses is that 85% of Indian American Hindus are “General Category”, with a few percent being Dalits or Scheduled Tribes (the remainder are OBC). There aren’t many low caste people to discriminate against, but … Continue reading The creation of Homo General Category

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Making the Elite: Top Jobs, Disparities, and Solutions: How do socioeconomically unequal screening practices impact access to elite firms and what policies might reduce inequality? Using personnel data from elite U.S. and European multinational corporations recruiting from an elite Indian college, I show that caste disparities in hiring do not arise in many job search … Continue reading People of lower castes have bad personalities

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Seattle may become the first U.S. city to outlaw caste: One of Kshama Sawant’s earliest memories of the caste system was hearing her grandfather — a man she “otherwise loved […]

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A new post on caste at my Substack. I don’t think I have much more to say on this topic on the high level; the DNA data is now what it is. More details will come in, but we have the general outline. It is now up to social historians to make sense of it. … Continue reading Caste in the Indian subcontinent: the wages of Manu

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My personal belief is that jati-varna was one of the major reasons that India did not Islamicize more than it did. These sub-elite solidities “absorbed” external shocks and mediated individual relationships with the world. Collective entities like this are common across the world, but the genetic distinctiveness of these groups is like nothing you see … Continue reading A vision for solving India’s caste social crises

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Caste discrimination in the US, again…Brown University bans caste discrimination throughout campus in a first for the Ivy League. These stories are strange and silly on some level. But they are serious on another level. Multiple young brown American men have told me that they have been asked about their caste by white colleagues, usually … Continue reading The the origins of the false moral panic about caste in the USA

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Cal State banned caste discrimination. Two Hindu professors sued: Two Hindu professors are suing the head of their university system to oppose the addition of caste to an anti-discrimination policy amid a broader battle over whether colleges should explicitly call out caste-based bias. The California State University System professors argue that naming caste as a … Continue reading Caste and California: the lawsuits are in!

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A casual comment…most Indo-European societies seem to have originally had some sort of occupational caste system. I’m talking here of Dumezil’s trifunctional hypothesis, warrior, priest and commoner. But only the Indian subcontinent has jati. I was thinking about it when reflecting on work to come out soon from David Reich’s lab on ancient Pontic steppe ancestry … Continue reading Varna is Indo-European and jati is Indian

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The reaction to my piece on caste by the Indian and Indian American Left has been interesting, and fraught with confusion. First, the reaction by this Indian (now in America) Leftist is to accuse me of being an upper-caste Muslim. This is not that far from how Hindu nationalists react to me, which illustrates that … Continue reading If you have a hammer, everything is a nail

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It’s out, America’s fake caste war. Quick thoughts – The piece is illustrated with a photo of Aziz Ansari, an atheist from a Tamil Muslim background. This shows you that caste-in-the-West is a racial issue, and non-subcontinental people will view it as such. – Some people of Caribbean and other Diasporic backgrounds are complaining that … Continue reading Reactions to caste piece in UnHerd

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The media is confecting racial division

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Google’s plan to talk about caste bias led to ‘division and rancor’: In April, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the founder and executive director of Equality Labs — a nonprofit that advocates for Dalits, or members of the lowest-ranked caste — was scheduled to give a talk to Google News employees for Dalit History Month. But Google employees … Continue reading Stop trying to make ‘caste happen’

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Colleges and universities across the US are moving to ban caste discrimination: Another time, Pariyar brought up his experiences with caste discrimination during a classroom discussion about the trauma of racism and sexism. Some South Asian students in the class, he said, reacted as though caste discrimination was completely foreign to them. He felt they … Continue reading The brown immigrant vs. the brown American

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UC Davis quietly added caste to its anti-discrimination policy. Will it cause others to do the same?
Yes, it will. American liberals will now start talking incessantly about caste. Some notes
– <1% of Indian Americans are Dalits from surveys I…

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Everyone is talking about this piece from Bloomberg, How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley Graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology are highly sought after by employers. They can also bring problems from home. If you are not a Bloomberg subscriber using “incognito mode” in your browser should allow you …

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When perusing Twitter I occasionally see arguments between the troll Araingang and contributors to this weblog on various topics. Many times I don’t really what the argument is about because I feel it’s deeply semantic. So, for example, caste, varna, and jati. I know the dictionary definition of all this stuff and the various arguments. …

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I found the above map from Alice Evans. It’s from a paper, The Continuing Practice of Untouchability in India. The regional patterns turn out to be the most striking. More than education, income, or caste status. You can even see the outline of states, which is indicative of the impact of regional governments on policy …

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In the 2000s I read a fair number of books such as Nicholas Dirks’ Castes of Mind. The impression one gets from these books is that jati-varna status and stratification are protean. Much of it a recent function of jockeying during the colonial and liminal colonial era. The “uplift” of groups such as Patidars and …

Continue reading “Long long with caste be a bar? Perhaps more than three centuries!”

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Kushal Mehra and I had a discussion on the Brown Pundits podcast about caste. I will post for Patrons today and push it live tomorrow. I want to review a few things from my perspective on this issue related to what we talked about. – The paper The promise of disease gene discovery in South …

Continue reading “Caste – bred to the bone!”

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Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States as brown was different than now. The Indian Americans I knew were a heterodox bunch who, like me, grew up around white people, and habituated themselves to American culture. Though most were Hindu, a fair number enjoyed beef hamburgers, just like other kids. This …

Continue reading “Dalit in Silicon Valley”

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20/28
Razib Khan