Subham Malpani
Away from South Asia, I have had the privilege of reflecting from afar on the everyday banality that sustains caste, from my savarna location. The Cracked Mirror by Guru and Sundar Sarukkai has offered a language to think through the unknown, repressed violence I had internalized. This essay attempts to locate my place within the structures and the violence embedded in them. It does not speak for Dalit-Bahujan resistance, but tries to map Brahmanical logics I’ve witnessed and inherited.
Epistemic Denial and Brahmanatva
“A person who experiences is not an author of that experience like a person who theorizes about that experience.” (Guru and Sarukkai 2019: 38)
Brahmanatva, a supreme state, grants one the entitlement to ‘theorize’, to ‘know’ (the Brahmin’s caste duty). More importantly, it denies others these very rights – to theorize their experiences. The denial of epistemic agency comes with ridicule, humiliation, or other forms of moral debasement. (Guru and Sarukkai 2019: 16-18).
Given the moral dimensions of this dynamic of brahmanatva’s epistemic denial, I find Nietzsche’s understanding of morality valuable. In his study of the genealogy of ideas of ‘good’ in various languages, Nietzsche notes that the ‘bad’/ ‘evil’ develops only in contradistinction to the self-awarded ‘good’/ ‘noble’. The judgment of good itself not originating from among those to whom goodness was shown, but it’s been the good themselves, that is, the aristocracy, the nobility, the high-minded, who felt their privileges were because of their inherent virtue. (1989: 4-12).
Moral Capital and Denial of Dignity
When I landed in Philadelphia, I encountered an abundance of respect flowing in mundane daily interactions. In ‘the everyday social’, passing by, or when one’s gaze lands on somebody subconsciously, people nod, or even smile warmly in acknowledgment, offering a reserved but warm “hello” or “good morning”. Cars stopped for pedestrians at free intersections. The visual communication through windshields across the road conveyed a regard for a being, a citizen, a contributor. Taking a taxi, there was an unspoken expectation to have everyday conversations with the driver.
Even though I was initially vulnerable and scared in the foreign land, I felt comfortable here. The general baseline of respect and human acknowledgment felt radical, coming from a caste society, where dignity and respect are structurally withheld, only for the ‘worthy’. Here, respect was the default expectation for a being. I noted that the bus driver had more dignity than I had as an architect in India.
I was coming from the ever-grey, polluted Delhi, where one sees caste as “aukaat” – a performative hierarchy visible in every interaction. On every trip from the airport, I remember witnessing road rage, rage for rage’s sake. Once, while riding in an auto-rickshaw, an SUV threatened us by cornering our vehicle simply because the auto-rickshaw driver dared to assume the right-of-way around a tight corner.
Caste, through endogamy and social control, stands on ‘moral’ capital and fragile notions of honor, reputation, and pride. Caste pride demanded daily legitimization of humiliation and degrading labor, like sanitation work, domestic work, and construction work. The casual onlooker, in the sea of marginalized, themselves dehumanized, deified, and brahmanized.
In the U.S., as seen in Hollywood, marginalization is portrayed through screams and maladjustment. Structural humiliation existed, but often, their dignity seemed stripped abruptly; often, one heard screams. In India, one feels that the marginalized, while far greater in number, don’t ‘maladjust.’ Why? The collective generational trauma of caste in the family? A lack of agency in theorizing their condition? The denial of language to express their unfreedom? The structural epistemic violence and denial of education at large?
As an architect in India for half a decade, one straddled different conceptions of morality: the landed (caste) gentry, the white collar – the noble, good, pure people, who were indifferent to the horrors of their construction sites, and the workers they dehumanized.
Work once took me to rural/ tribal West Orissa. While it is among the poorest regions in India, comparable to sub-Saharan African countries, I also witnessed the unimaginably enormous scale of old money, mining money – the crony caste-bureaucracy nexus of the ‘good’ people wearing white.
There were clear, quiet signs of displacement and failed tribal unions everywhere. The red dust covered everything, the forest, the tribal habitats. The entire region’s life expectancy supposedly dropped by 5 years due to the dust in the air. This was an experience living close to wage slavery. Generations here appeared doomed to the same inescapable fate.
As an architect, one sells cultural capital. The aristocracy is wary of cultural capital that didn’t signify itself as intergenerational. One is expected to engage in the self-congratulatory behavior of the aristocracy. It was normal. One day, we had child labour on our construction site, but the virtue-hoarding of my white-collared colleagues continued the same, their goodness self-bestowed and untainted still.
I did come from segregated spaces, and here I witnessed untouchability close up. A cook was hired to prepare meals for the two architects stationed on the site. We all liked him and his cooking. He arrived by bicycle – amiable, proactive, diligent, resourceful, with an excellent work ethic. He hoped to become a waiter at the palace we were renovating into a hotel. One day, after the contractor ate food prepared by the cook, he consumed cow dung to “purify” himself. Though the cook returned to work the next day, he was visibly demoralized. The contractor himself was mediocre. I fled, but was glad to know that the cook went on to secure his job at the completed hotel.
Brahmanatva and Diaspora
Moving to the US, I have further segregated myself in the caste order. I mostly stay away, but one senses distilled Brahmin-energy from afar, that repulsive flinch of ‘purity’ when a homeless person enters their personal space on a bus, or a sidewalk. “Looking for pure veg roommates”. Though there’s hardly a need to segregate within the savarna communities abroad, segregational instincts persist. This idea of otherness is deeply and intricately woven into our individual conceptions of the social.
One notices subtle cues as people make subconscious decisions about belonging in cities they’ve barely oriented themselves to. A young Ashraf friend casually ruled out neighborhoods in Philadelphia as “kallu” (Hindi derogatory term for Black people), advising me to leave “critical race studies” in the classroom.
Brahmanatva’s internalized virtue finds great resonance in liberal spaces of academia. While it protests against any affirmative action in India, it becomes the (model) subaltern here. It engages in detached post-colonial theory, or the casual virtue-affording stigmatization of the ‘racist sexist white trash’, which lands well in racialized liberal spaces that avoid a structural lens. Caste and brahmanical patriarchy are OK.
Identity Crises and (Un)Belonging
“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.” – Zizek (2001: 2)
My location as a bania-savarna enabled cultural capital and mobility. My grandfather was an orphaned construction worker and truck driver. My parents, migrating from Rajasthani villages to southern cities, gave up Marwari for Hindi. They moved a few times, carrying the village with them. Like circular migrants, we initially returned to the village every year. We lacked generational knowledge. An identity crisis ran in the family.
I took my identity crisis to the aspirational IITs. Unlike my Dakhni convent school in Secunderabad, people here were a different cool. They carried an aura, a space, commanded prestige, took offence, and had (caste) pride. The epistemic smugness is not only felt, but also informs the collective self-congratulatory belonging.
My Pink Floyd connoisseur cool friends, one day, almost visited me in my uncouth “reservation/ sports wing” in my hostel. I was expecting them to judge, hesitate, think, and maybe even join us out of courtesy or reciprocity. It played out much quicker. As soon as we emerged in their sight, a friend sneered – “Inn logon ke saath hangout karna hai?” (You wanna hang out with these people?). The others waited for the first sign and turned away, walking back. This remained a core memory. People and spaces were reduced to casual sneers.
IIT belongingness faded soon, as I diverged from this social environment, and went on to work in offices, or largely among their kind. As an architect, I was myself an agent between the gentry, the state, the old money, the construction industry, and the construction workers – the casteless, the casteists, and the outcasts.
In a conversation on Hindi imposition, a bilingual North-Indian friend was making a case for Hindi, on an universalist/ logical rigor of linguistics. There was no regard for empiricism or the people he was theorizing about. In passing, I was told why I struggled with three languages growing up. My unarticulated skepticism to accept this theorizing was met with seething, pent-up aggression that came before I even spoke. I merely expressed my skepticism as felt by a South-Indian. By now, I had seen this dynamic play out enough to recognize it. Criticism can never be constructive in this framework.
These are mundane examples of banal interactions, in every conversation, everyday forms of epistemic violence, people live with, without question. Naive skepticism offends Brahmantva’s pride. To not nod with the aristocracy also risks rendering one an idiot in the eyes of the framework of ‘worth’ in the caste-society. In broken brahmanical frameworks of knowledge, communication, and morality, ‘truth’ can’t be known, and therefore, their status quo might be right. The (casteist) norm is enforced, which feels weird when it is the sublime/ fluid/ radical liberal friends enforcing it.
Epistemic Dominance and Liberal Fluidity
“Ambedkarism is an umbrella inclusive theory that naturally has the capacity to accommodate every excluded individual.” – Dr. Y. S. Rao (2017)
Over five years ago, a friend casually called me a ‘colonizer’ (or suggested I was in those ranks). The fleeting remark disrupted everything. There were both questions and answers to be found in Ambedkarism. What followed was learning and unlearning, engaging, and disengaging.
Today, Ambedkar has become a liberal currency. The aristocracy that ridiculed Ambedkarism not too long ago is now eager to co-opt. They were casteless earlier, but now they were also Ambedkarites all along. They haven’t read Ambedkar yet, but they agree with him. They keep up with the current political correctness of the aristocratic consensus, so they’re good. This opportunistic fluidity is a marker of their inherent goodness.
Epistemic violence was banal and then forgotten, but it recurs. This time, it asks me if I’ve stopped seeing people without caste. The rhetorical question is again not remotely meant to inquire or engage, but to debase – neecha dikhana (showing one down), imposing its morality. Material contradictions aside (!), to them, caste is still a side-issue, one among other concerns. To others, it’s the grammar of belonging, the core of dukkha (suffering). Caste operates not just in names, classifications, or rituals, but in the banalities of the everyday social, in the daily denial of dignity and epistemic agency. In humiliations that permeate the everyday. Caste is not out there, but in us.
References
Ambedkar, B. R. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches (BAWS). Ambedkar International Center, USA. https://baws.in/
Disha. “The Weight of Many Selves”. Round Table India. 2025. https://www.roundtableindia.co.in/the-weight-of-many-selves/
Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai. The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory. Oxford University Press. 2012.
Guru, Gopal. “Liberal Democracy in India and the Dalit Critique.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 78, no. 1, p. 99–122. The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2011.
Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai. Experience, Everyday Social, and Caste. Oxford University Press. 2019.
Liu, Catherine. Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. University of Minnesota Press. 2021. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/82543
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, Vintage Books. 1989.
Pant, Bhavesh. “Review of The Cracked Mirror”. Round Table India. 2020. https://www.roundtableindia.co.in/episteme-based-on-experience-review-of-the-cracked-mirror-by-gopal-guru-and-sundar-sarukkai/
Piketty, Thomas : “Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020”. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 137, Issue 1, Pages 1–48. https://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/GMP2022QJE.pdf. February 2022.
Rao, Y. S. “Problematic Dalit Middle Class”. Round Table India. 2017.
Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. Verso. 2002.
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Subham Malpani is an Architect working in the USA. He has a keen interest in society, culture, and politics
