E10: Caste: A Global Story

How do you define, I think most people listening to this understand caste in the Indian context, but I know you think of it more broadly.

How do you think of caste beyond the Indian context?

That's right.

See, I mean, this is again a theory that really needs to be refined and understood.

Unfortunately, caste, the way it has been presented, is often within the canon of a religion.

And we understand it's the Hindu caste system, which is true.

But also the character of caste changes.

Like, how do you appreciate the caste existing among Muslims or Sikhs? So in this book in particular, the focus was on immigrants or heritage, people with the heritage of South Asian descent.

So as you know, subtitles always have their own funny way to do it.

So the kind of thing was to say, it's a global story, which it is, which is to look at the kind of major part of the world, Anglophone, Francophone kind of diaspora.

But the global story also I am kind of thinking about is a parallel project, which is called GlobalCast.

which is itself understanding caste as a secular term that organizes a society based on birth-based hierarchies.

And it's almost semi-fixed.

The vocation you do, the relations and marriage, commerciality, determines based on the caste you come from.

And this is across the world.

We may not see it as caste, but there exist hierarchies, and there are certain regulated forms of this kind of animated hierarchy thinking.

And that's the kind of framework, which will be not the next book, but the book after, which condenses the world to look through this lens.

Because my intention is, why do I left out a person, a group of groups who are marginalized in their own societies, but they are not recognized as such? Because what do we do? We call them ethnic groups because for the lack of term, we call them something else or tribal and stuff like that.

So caste, in a way, is trying to invite us to think of it like as a hierarchy.

And that idea was very prevalent in the 19th century, in the 20th century.

In fact, American society was appreciated as a caste-based society because, as you would know, the earlier people who were brought to America to tend on the plantations were not slaves.

They were actually people from Europe.

These were what you call today white people.

The idea of whiteness didn't exist then.

They were called indentured laborers.