After an interview I attended at a fintech company, my Indian team lead straight out said she was trying to figure out the interviewee's cast. I was not familiar with the concept -- so my expression was mostly blank -- but she immediately followed up with "oh, I shouldn't have said that".
I took no action, but wasn't sure what to do. After I learned more about it, I started to wonder where I was in this hierarchy.
If you ever overhear something like this, what would you do?
In an interview, it seems to me as highly unethical and likely discrimination. Although, not sure if there are legal ramifications to this sort of thing though.
In then OP's case most likely the person realized that she shouldnt have said it directly/to him as her mistake and needs to hide her discrimination better.
If you listen to the linked podcast you'll learn that it in fact may qualify as a protected class, and that there is currently a pending lawsuit that may rule on this.
Note that in many states, caste and other ancestry discrimination is unambiguously protected. There have been any number of suits claiming the Civil Rights Act prohibits caste-based discrimination; I don't think there are any high-level rulings about whether it does, but the basic argument doesn't seem implausible.
Desi caste really is ethnicity which is a protected class- it is thousands of endogamous communities that have been that way for a long time. They might not look as distinct from each other as say Tutsis and Hutus, but I don't think you could formulate a definition of ethnicity that excludes South Asian castes.
Perhaps not explicitly, but I could easily see courts ruling that it is. To me, it seems covered by the ethnicity portion, although I get they are not the exact same concept.
> caste isn't a protected class so they might be fine legally
Caste itself isn't explicitly protected (axes of discrimination that weren't widely recognized as actual things people cared about in the US when the law was written don't tend to be) but there are arguments that caste discrimination runs afoul of existing US protection regarding color, ethnicity, national origin, and religion, among others, and some of these are currently being actively litigated in federal court, IIRC by both private plaintiffs and state fair-employment authorities.
So “might be fine”, but very much might not. And HR is usually about avoiding risk of exposure, not steering the company into “might be fine” waters.
I've witnessed that and it works. You don't have to argue or make a big issue in some way. Just state that X is an equal person deserving same respect as all of you. Nobody's likely to call you out or complain about that statement.
In my case it was a manager who was slightly derogatory about the Indian division in the company. "That annoying uncle who tends to say the wrong thing" type. He stopped the comments afterwards and I do count that as "it works": others witnessed it was not ok, and new hires won't see this behaviour normalised in the future. Even if his internal view hasn't changed, it was progress and was worth the uncomfortable moment.
Even if it doesn’t entirely “work” for that one person it is still important to address the culture issue immediately and publicly, because it sets norms for everyone else in the room. Even if you are the only other one in the room. Perhaps especially if you are the only other one in the room.
I have zero tolerance for trying to evaluate candidates on things other than performance against what the interview is benchmarking against. Hearing something like that would have had me instantly report it to HR.
It makes me angry now even reading it. Why would this have any impact on the work the candidate would be able to perform?
I think someone who's not Indian could easially interpret that statement as completely neutral. Like if I said oh, $candidate is also from New Jersey, that's cool.
This is an extremely fraught topic, and I will give a very fraught answer:
I think you did the right thing in this situation. She did not express anything malicious and she corrected herself (at least partially).
It sounds like your colleague was doing something anyone would do (assessing someone by the social strictures they are familiar with) and did something wrong (devoted effort to it in a hiring context, said something aloud.) Yes, everyone does this sort of thing -- in American society overall we don't have good names for the subtle side of our class system, so we can't express the puzzle as clearly as some other societies, but we do see the world (consciously or unconsciously) along these lines.
When I hear people say inappropriate things -- usually less fraught ones like marital status -- I point out that they cannot say such things. It serves as a reminder of proper procedure. I do not escalate the situation if they seem to be acting without malice and, like the person in your story, seem to desire to do better.
I believe she did the exact opposite. (You could argue she meant "shouldn't have done that" - I guess you'd have to be there to know) Acknowledged that she wanted to do this, so it was conscious, not just a bad habit. And acknowledged that she shouldn't talk about it - not that she shouldn't have done it.
Well, imagine that you, a white-presenting man (what does _that_ mean) were on a phone interview with someone you couldn't see, and afterwards, you said something like, "I was trying to determine if they were Black."
I'm not going to make judgement on whether that's a fair statement or not - what I am curious about is whether you think that you'd get the same kind of defense - would there be someone saying that you weren't malicious?
> Well, imagine that you, a white-presenting man (what does _that_ mean)
If you met most of my family members, you would not think they were white, but if you met me personally, you probably would.
Only once in a long while does someone seem to read me as 'not white' (and unless I'm speaking my heritage language they usually guess wrong about what flavor.)
> were on a phone interview with someone you couldn't see, and afterwards, you said something like, "I was trying to determine if they were Black."
If I'm on the phone with someone, I am sure I am trying to figure that out. Folks who claim otherwise are most likely incorrect about what they are doing.
I would certainly know better than to say that aloud, since I grew up in a society where I know how it would be perceived, and have intuition around it. I don't have to think much to realize the implications.
> She did not express anything malicious and she corrected herself
If you were an Indian, this would immediately raise a red flag. The intent of bringing up caste in a professional setting is clear - to discriminate. There is no other practical use for it. And the system is a hideous one with the potential to seriously damage professional environment. Signs of its practice like this should be considered threatening.
I think the difference is that you're seeing it as akin to someone saying "I was trying to work out what religion they were."
Yes, it's illegal to discriminate based on religion, but in many parts of the country it's a big curiosity about other people (is he presbyterian?) and so many people may not be able to help privately trying to suss it out.
The difference is that cast is a rigid hierarchy, based on society-accepted discrimination, and there is no reason to try and figure it out other than to decide where they are in the pecking order.
I had an interim manager who did this subtly. It wasn't hard for us to catch on after some time, we brought it up to HR and he was disciplined as far as I know, and soon left the company, not sure on what terms.
It's absolutely not okay to discriminate candidates by something like caste, or social status. It's like if your lead said she was trying to determine if they were an inferior race.
It's absolutely not okay to discriminate candidates by something like caste, or social status
Caste no, social status? Absolutely, happens all the time. It’s very easy to proxy social status based on interests, hobbies, mannerisms, etc. Those that don’t pass the sniff test, are deemed “bad culture fits”.
Most companies look for "cultural fits"?
Isn't that a form of caste discrimination?
People from similar social background have similar taste hence fits well culturally.Isn't that obvious?
If racial discrimination doesn't exist why Blacks are economically poor across in west?
1. Ongoing discrimination
2. Different starting points + law of large numbers.
If you start one racial group off in a country with property and let them acquire wealth for a few hundred years, then free another racial group from slavery with absolutely nothing - even after a long while those wealth differences will persist.
I agree completely. The Question is what is being done to erase that difference?
IMHO trying to find cultural fit is a form of ongoing discrimination[1] and it strengthens the effect of different starting points[2].
India is countering [2] by enforcing a 50% quota in education, Jobs, and politics. AFAIK West on the other hand is wishing it to vanish without doing anything concrete.
India is taking right steps in the right direction and I am hopeful this will vanish as generation born with caste concepts die off slowly.
It's odd - often when I talk with international people, they seem to be under the impression that affirmative action doesn't exist outside of their own country.
I was recently talking with someone in China who claimed that the Uighurs could not be oppressed because they are given advantages in hiring/education, and that America would never do the same for black people.
Suffice to say, the US does engage in extensive aff action in education and hiring (although neither are directly legally mandated).
Comparing treament of Uighers to caste situation in India is unfair.
Yes there is discrimination but India is fighting it on policy and social level. Reserving 50% in education and jobs is one such big step. India's constitution was written by a a Dalit. Many people from the held high offices. Current prime minister and president are from the same community.
> Suffice to say, the US does engage in extensive aff action in education and hiring (although neither are directly legally mandated).
> Comparing treament of Uighers to caste situation in India is unfair.
Absolutely, not my intention by my comment - more just recounting a similar phenomenon in a different discussion.
> India is fighting it on policy and social level
I'm not contesting that either! But of course there is still more work to be done.
> Is it measured? If not than how you know?
Affirmative action is quite well known in the United States. You can see the documents from the SFFA v. Harvard lawsuit, for instance, to see how the SAT score cutoff differs by race & ethnicity.
> You can see the documents from the SFFA v. Harvard lawsuit, for instance, to see how the SAT score cutoff differs by race & ethnicity.
Thanks I didn't knew that. Having said that Harvard and Stanford is last rung. Those who are able to reach those places are already prevailed I would argue. Is there similar affirmitive action in place on lower levels as well?
India has it across the board which help more IMHO. Some communities have used it so much that now debate within the lower sections have started that reservation should be taken away after 3 generations.[1]
Yes, it occurs across the board. Rather than asking me about it, just google "affirmative action in the US."
Given that 90% of people from India in SWE seem to be from higher caste (I don't really know the exact statistic but it is something like that), then it seems like the reservation is still needed.
Caste system is not that simple for example Jats are under reservation in one state but considered upper caste in adjacent state and gets no reservation.
Yes Reservation is still needed. India is big and people who got oppressed under colonial rule would take a few generations more to come up.
Bigger issue is exploitation of caste lines for politics.
Yes it’s already common. Look at the concentration and over representation of Ivy League schools in industries like finance. It’s very unlikely those places would even bother interviewing someone with low social status (I.e. poor and grew up on food stamps).
I don’t think it’s great that this happens, it insulates elites from those with working class backgrounds and accelerates inequality.
This also has to do with the fact that, in consulting and finance, it is the perception of intelligence by the customer that is much more important than the actual intelligence. Managers would rather hire the team of consultants from the Ivy League and rich people would rather pay the management fees for the Ivy League team to manage their money.
In industries that are more directly merit based and less "customer perception" based, you don't have as large of an over-representation.
If you have racist clients, I'd expect that this would manifest more as assigning the "right" demographic of employee to the clients and keep the "wrong" ones far away from those meetings, as opposed to a straight-up hiring restriction.
I don't think GP was trying to justify the practice, but noting that this exists in domains like finance because the product is an image, not actual performance.
>> It's absolutely not okay to discriminate candidates by something like caste, or social status
> Caste no, social status? Absolutely, happens all the time. It’s very easy to proxy social status based on interests, hobbies, mannerisms, etc. Those that don’t pass the sniff test, are deemed “bad culture fits”.
Isn't that pretty much the definition of caste-based discrimination?
I don't ask about these in interviews, and don't use them to make decisions. You like My Little Pony or have a massive collection of guns? Or both? I literally could not care any less, it's none of my business.
> mannerisms
I'm not really sure what you'd see here in a regular interview beyond being literate and maybe nervous. The signal here is murky at best -- other than red flags, you shouldn't be measuring here.
So, to reiterate: it is absolutely not okay to discriminate candidates by social status.
Mannerisms could be anything from how articulate the candidate is and the depth of their vocabulary, to how they dress and the types of questions they ask.
I’m not saying it’s okay to discriminate candidates by it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Go to any finance firm on Wall Street and tell me how many people employed there grew up on food stamps.
- Mannerisms could be anything from how articulate the candidate is and the depth of their vocabulary, to how they dress and the types of questions they ask.
Those are all qualitative things that tell me about the person's intelligence, social acumen, experience, worldliness, etc. Those things usually matter for hiring. Has nothing to do with caste or race or gender or identity or age or sexual orientation any other protected status.
Or it tells you how much time they've put into trying to suppress their individual characteristics they developed as they grew to adulthood in favor of ones perceived as more palatable to those hiring.
You could say they're smarter because they're doing what's needed to game the system... but that's only needed because people are judging them on those aspects. Chicken or egg?
Does a thick German or Scandinavian accent count against them? What about Mexican/Spanish? What about Ebonics/Black English? That has well understood rules for how it's used, even though many people don't realize it.
Presumably what you actually care about when hiring is their ability to work well with their peers and managers, and how well they accomplish the work they are given. If so, you are using mannerisms to help inform about these attributes you actually care about because you think those mannerisms correlate in some way. But what do you have to go by to actually support this evidence? If it's from personal experience, how rigorous have you been in making sure you note the data, and didn't subconsciously discount or ignore instances counter to your expectations?
At my current company we're actively discouraged in training from making small talk during interviews for exactly this reason. Even asking how their weekend was can lead to something like "Oh you played a few rounds of golf? I play golf too!" and you'll end up subconsciously judging them differently.
"Where are you from?" "Where did your parents live?" "Where were you born?" "What do your parents do?"
I'm not Indian, but have heard these used in a derogatory setting. It's hard to disentangle from casual conversation, but if these questions arise suddenly and unprompted (like the first thing you're asked) it's a flag. Another is being asked a question in a specific dialect to see how you respond.
I think that term previous person used is Marathi (I am not a Marathi speaker though).
> Are there terms in English I should look out for?
Not really. But you have more of contexts and where the questioning is going whether it's in a professional or personal setting - the line of inquiry.
If the person is taking a very shallow interest (or a misplaced interest) in knowing where your roots are, who your ancestors were and possibly specifically asking names of your parents or grand parents (maybe profession as well) then you might want to treat it as at least suspicious on these lines.
Yes. Jaati, jaat. "Kul" as well. People often ask "kis kul se ho" - "what lineage you belong to" - it's supposedly a politer way to ask someone's caste.
And in the region, your last name (sorry, it's just a knowledge I picked up while growing up) is endemic to, it's called "jaayat" or "jaait".
> In Hindi I think
I assumed you are either not Indian or not from that region in the North.
Also, what I meant by saying there are not really terms one should look out for is in professional setups, at least these days, caste is not asked openly but indirectly.
2nd gen Indian American here. I've been working in Silicon Valley since 2004, and have never been quizzed about my caste. And my last name isn't a caste name or even caste associated name. And somewhere between a plurality or majority of my coworkers have been Indian born.
Same deal here (half), but my last name is noticeably associated (apparently - took me 27 years to learn that). I get someone bringing it up about twice a year I'd say.
The same thing you should do if your team leader says they don’t want to hire any other subgroup because of discriminatory reasons. Just to be clear, this is exactly equivalent to and just as bad as racism in every way.
How do you know if someone is fishing for someone's caste or the markers thereof? Sadly, I wouldn't necessarily even know if a colleague was doing this unless they were really direct about it.
There's quite a few examples of this in the article but it seems mainly things like neighborhood, names, "background", and other things of that nature.
I've witnessed coworkers asking "awkward questions" before. I take notes and report it to HR. YMMV, not all HR departments are created equally. If your employer doesn't take it seriously, you can send an anonymous note to the candidate, which could support a lawsuit or complaint to the labor board. They might change their tune
> If your employer doesn't take it seriously, you can send an anonymous note to the candidate, which could support a lawsuit or complaint to the labor board.
Unless your concern rises to whistle-blower levels with external agencies, that sounds like a quick way to be fired.
There's a couple ways to read this one, and no context for deciding between them.
Indians have a deeply engrained culture of noticing caste. This is true whether they are ok with discriminating on that basis, or staunchly against it, caste permeates the culture.
So either she was only interested in hiring Brahmins, and realized that she shouldn't have tipped her hand... or she was curious about it, and then realized that was a shitty thing to say during an interview, and decided not to make it worse by explaining that of course it wouldn't make a difference in her judgement.
She's right, though; she shouldn't have said that.
It may be because of my habit of blurting out whatever stupid thought I'm having, but believing that someone might blurt out whatever stupid thought they're having comes easy to me.
I have all sorts of thoughts that I don't act on, or actively work to counteract. Should I be judged on these thoughts that, to a first approximation, I cannot control[1] yet I don't let affect what I do?
I'm flawed, but I used to be more so. A big part of that improvement is thanks to the people that judged my actions and not every aberrant thought that entered my head.
[1] responsibility is there of course, and I work to reduce their future frequency. But that change takes time, and until then the best remedy to unwanted ingrained patterns is to not act on them.
Sometimes, people (at least in northern parts of India) tend to use the word as a synonym for "last name" in common parlance. It can be used without an intention to discriminate (though the consequences depend on the context, since you can figure out the community from a last name in most cases).
Was the interviewee of Indian origin?
Unless you are of Indian origin, it's not applicable to you.
If the interviewee was of Indian origin, and she didn't already know the interviewee's last name, I would probably give her the benefit of doubt, and ask to clarify what she meant.
That's reasonable if you've only ever come across castes in this context. When I think of American buses, I think of Rosa Parks and racism, because that's the only context I have - but that doesn't make that the only relevant characteristic of them.
We here in India hear the "caste as abhorrent discrimination" side from a very early age (and that's certainly important), but it's taken me years of experience to learn that in practice it's more than that. People think of caste as a form of extended family, or as shared culture, or of understanding someone's roots. That person might have said that just as someone might say "I can't figure out if their accent is from New York or New Jersey": that might be an intent to discriminate, but might also well be idle curiosity about the person.
To be honest, no, that just sounds like you're doubling down on preserving harmful social structures because it benefits your in group. White supremacist groups in the US also focus on the positives and shared culture of white America. Hating blacks isn't the core belief, it's just a side effect of wanting everyone to know that whites are the best.
I don't mean to say it's hateful to say you want social castes out on the table for identifying who you share connections with, but that obviously comes with the fact that you identify those who don't share that connection. It's a justification for extending social problems.
> After an interview I attended at a fintech company, my Indian team lead straight out said she was trying to figure out the interviewee's cast.
Discrimination has many forms.
Some are codified in law (age, race, religion, sex, etc.) and some are informally observed.
When in doubt, I prefer to address perceived discrimination directly with the person thought to be engaging in such nonconfrontationally and in the presence of at least one other coworker. If you choose to do same, document the encounter when it happens along with whom was present and be prepared to escalate to management.
fwiw - she shouldn't have said that or even thought that way. But I'm not sure why she was "trying to figure out his caste". The last name is a dead giveaway most of the times. Quite a few Indian last names and their castes are documented in wikipedia.
Yep. At least in my state (Tamilnadu), this is because people gave up caste names voluntarily as part of the anti-caste-discrimination movement, and became mononymous. Then, those of us who had to interact with people and entities that strictly assume a two-name structure started using Father's name as last name, simply because a lot of registration forms (and some people too) cannot cope with the idea that someone doesn't have a lastname.
It's not universal though, or even a majority - a lot of people still are mononymous, and many are confused when Facebook and the ilk ask for "Last name" (and sometimes fill in hilarious things).
Well I am from Karnataka where that's not as pervasive. But I can't tell which is father's name and which is given name, because some also use the <Father name> <Given name> pattern. And then some people have multiple names.
Is actor Vijay's first name Joseph, Vijay or Joseph Vijay? Just asking.. :)
Many odd dutch surnames date back to dutchies, who had previously been using patronymics, having fun with the first census, taken under Napoleon in 1811.
> I started to wonder where I was in this hierarchy
.
I guess you're not Indian, so as I understand it that actually makes you casteless - untouchable, by strict adherence to the rules but here
well, the page is on the wikipedia domain, it is a talk page regarding edits to the page (discussion among different Indians I presume.)
again as I understand it strictly speaking a foreigner should be casteless, and hence untouchable.
But that discussion implies that the actual behavior towards foreigners does not match that, which would seem reasonable to me. Indians will need to interact with foreigners, if they are without caste that would be a problem, so how to fit the foreign into the social system.
Caste system, on the surface, seems like hereditary fixing of labor roles. If applied universally, it should be easy to accept a member of a strong foreign army, or any army as a Kshatriya. So it makes no sense for every Englishman to assume a high caste, irrespective of profession.
But then, many “castes” are also, basically regional/ethnicities. In short, the rules which apply caste, are not uniform in any way and I would rather ridicule such an exercise than aid it.
A foreigner doesn’t need to have a caste, even if they wish to convert to Hinduism, when our argument is that we need to abolish caste in India in the first place.
looks like it is a page similar to this. a talk page.
I guess we are trying to eliminate caste hierarchy/oppression (though there are legal provisions that already do that in india) .
Yeah, I wouldn’t quote this page as evidence for anything either.
And I don’t know who are the “we” trying to eliminate caste oppression. Some claiming to do so are clearly demagogues using it to divide people and seize control. Like communists claiming to speak for the working class when in fact they just want all the power for themselves.
The existing laws don’t eliminate caste, instead they make some of them more desirable.
I am just a regular unhyphenated American at a FANG, and I've never gotten a job offer when any of my interviewers were Hindustani. Coincidence, maybe? I think this particular nepotism is not exclusively internecine.
Based on the language in this comment, I can't help but imagine you somehow let your internal biases affect your behavior and language during these interviews.
Based on the language in this comment, I can't help but imagine you judge everyone using similarly low amounts of information about their conduct and actions.
If someone told me they failed 10 interviews, and suspected that the race of the interviewers was a driver of that, and then extrapolated that to others of that race, I would guess that correlates to a number of other beliefs that I would care to avoid hiring for.
I think this is a controversial reality that often gets silenced. Even between different cultures and castes from the Indian subcontinent there appear to be clear and discriminate striations[1] that few people in my experience talk about. I think it's a serious issue with the millenial and younger generations of non-Indian American citizens.
Once I worked with a group that was run by a brahmin hindi speaker and a group of Tamils was under her. It was really weird to see them speak English to each other since neither spoke each others' native tongue. She was not very nice to the Tamils and spent most of her time planning for ostentatious Diwali celebrations in the office.
The US has no place for this kind of discrimination. We strive to be (I hope) a meritocracy.
I'll take this opportunity to state that the word "meritocracy" was originally a bit of a joke taking the piss out of the idea that an aristocracy would couch itself in the language of merit without actually changing much.
There has been a lot of outrage over the past week in India over the rape of a lower caste woman by upper castes. The police sided with the culprits and forced the family to cremate the victim to destroy evidence.
This is a common tactic by upper castes to spread terror and keep the lower castes in line. Goes to show how entrenched the system is especially outside the big cities.
FWIW, There were thee more incidents and in all the cases lower caste girl was raped by Muslim guys. So, much for unnecessary giving caste/communal angle to a case of corruption and power.
Caste exists among some Muslims too. Lower caste women bear the brunt of it because of their low social status. So no its not irrelevant. They suffer so much precisely because they are lower caste even in your examples.
(ph), a notation used in transcripts to indicate that the transcriber does not know the spelling, usually of a name, and has spelled it as it was pronounced (phonetically)
It so interesting, as a 3rd gen Singaporean Indian, no one mentions caste here. In fact most of my Indian friends and I don't even know our caste at all (Even those who are religious enough not to eat beef)
I have to admit it's somewhat amusing to see how surprised some people are to realize that people who aren't white can be racist too. Humans don't change much culture to culture once you get past a lot of the more superficial stuff.
Discrimination based on caste is different than discrimination based on race, though. There is probably race based discrimination in India too, and it might intersect with caste, but conflating both probably doesnt really make sense.
Also, I dont think people really ignore people of color being racist within their countries.
Most of the time when people bring up arguments stating that the people being racist are white people, its in the context of western countries with a colonial/slave trade past where systematic racism doesnt target white people.
Im curious about it, how is it the same? Is there a racial basis to caste?
My (superficial) undrerstandimg of it is that it's more of a discrimination based on social class (classism) rather than a discrimination based on race (racism). Were dalits, for example, part of a racial minority when this all started?
This interview seems one sided though. I know that for last two decades Brahmins and other so called upper caste Indians have been protesting India’s quota system which is basically affirmative action whereby certain percentages of college seats and job vacancies are reserved only for people who do not belong to the upper castes. So there have been numerous occasions where meritorious but poor upper caste youths did not get seats in colleges or were not selected in government or non government jobs and they went to the people from non Brahmin castes who were financially better off. Not trying to make a judgement here but just want to expose both sides of the argument. And even in California we are planning to do the same where a certain percentage of college seats will be reserved for people from only certain ethnicity or background.
Yeah. I can't say that I have experienced caste in same light as the article - in many jobs and across many hiring decisions it was never about caste but rather sometimes about language, geography and compatibility. It's also a matter of preferences as far as marriage goes - Brahmins for e.g. marrying within is not so much of a given today and whatever percentage of it is still happening is more about familiarity and preferences for culture and language than it is because of the belief that Brahmins are superior caste. They no longer are advantaged either.
Brahmins really are the new Dalits in India - nowhere to be seen in any power positions, have no affirmative action/reservations for college education or jobs, hold no lucrative jobs and thus if not already disadvantaged then certainly on the way to be so.
I say that as someone who grew up in a Brahmin family - my dad was discriminated against in his business ample times to cause him to give up early. Both me and my brother had to be academically score perfect grades without fail in order to get into an Engineering college when most disadvantaged cast folks got in for a lot less. The rob Peter to pay Paul thing hasn't quite done any net good for society except maybe in times of explosive growth/expansion which is to say not too often.
Do you have any data to back this up? What power and what wealth exactly? Granted they have managed to stay out of abject poverty largely without any help but it's not exactly a story of wealth and power for a really long time now but I don't think the point you're making is that they should be even more worse off?
Also even if we assume for a moment that they are slightly better off than the rest of the population could it not be due to their own merit - it's not hard to see that caste puts more emphasis on education and competence even when it's lot harder for them to get into it without reservations.
This is untrue, just survey the top earners, top media personalities, news network owners, etc - very few are Brahmins. Even look through past prime ministers.
This is the regular fallacy that is peddled by privileged upper class - denying casteism and promoting falsehoods supported by anecdotal evidences. Brahmins and other upper castes are over represented in power positions. The names of people at the helms of government institutions is a dead give away. Check this article for the demography of some of the top bureaucrats: https://theprint.in/india/governance/of-89-secretaries-in-mo.... The same goes about universities: https://www.chronicle.com/article/in-india-caste-discriminat....
The point missed by the narrative of marks scored by upper caste student vs dalit's is that role of privilege. The fact that dalits are discrimintated severely and denied opportunities before ever being able to ever reach college is something that's carefully neglected. Not to mention the fact that even meritorious dalits are breated in the name of reservation and subjected to organised harrassment all too commonly in universities and government services: https://theprint.in/opinion/brahmins-on-india-campuses-study...
That article with the data mentions nothing about Brahmins and it also mentions the below. Also do you have any idea how hard it is for a non SC/ST/OBC person to become an IAS officer? If despite that there aren't enough SC/ST/OBC IAS officers by what means do you think the upper castes prevented them from getting there? It's just unproductive to keep blaming everything on upper castes in the 50+ years of reservations while ignoring a whole lot of other issues that have nothing to do with discrimination.
“Selection of secretary, additional secretary and joint secretary-level officers is made from the pool of officers who are empanelled for that particular post. If there isn’t an adequate number of officers belonging to the SC/ST/OBC categories in the pool, their number is obviously going to be smaller,” said the retired civil servant who did not want to be named.
A serving IAS officer, who belongs to the general category, said: “At times, senior IAS officers do not want to come to the Centre on deputation or the state government does not relieve them, resulting in a lesser number of SC/ST category officers in the upper echelons of government.”
Why is this downvoted? Affirmative action carried out on caste basis without consideration about economic state of candidate is a real problem in India. It even harms genuine candidates even from reserved categories. But it is not fixed due to political reasons.
The "upper caste people are successful because they are wealthy" meme needs to die. Many upper caste people are poor as well.. It also doesn't explain why Tamil Brahmins (an upper caste) are seen more successful educationally despite being much less in number than North Indian Baniyas (Also an upper caste).
There are not two sides to this. The lower castes have been violently discriminated against for millenia and need protection to have any hope of not being viciously held in their place by the Brahmin hegemony.
No they haven’t been violently discriminated against for millennia. This is a common colonialist trope spread about India. Your language alone, using Western words like “caste” to describe a system that doesn’t fit that word, is influencing your perception. Caste based discrimination (and all the negative issues that come with it) is very recent, and was nudged into existence by British imperialism, which relied on divide and conquer to control large populations in countries they ruled. Historically Indian separation of these different groups was more like specialization of economic/cultural roles, and did not have the modern sheen of disrespect/classism/discrimination. Please don’t spread ignorant falsehoods like this.
A social system akin to brahminism and caste can only be created and held together by violence. That you can’t see this is because you are benefitting from it, either in the Indian version, or perhaps in the flavors of the same thing developed in the western world.
See, you can have discourses on caste, you can deliberate as you will, but endogamy - marrying within your caste - is still the norm across India, even in the states where people are not that finicky about caste.
Until this chain is broken, the shadow boxing on the sidelines will continue.
Interestingly the Caribbean communities have somehow managed to shed caste, while retaining the Hindu identity.
After one of my school friends remarked that his mother only watched movies with two people who love each other but can't marry because they have the wrong colour dots, I began to notice all the Hollywood wrong-colour-dot storylines.
I fail to understand how marriage is anything but a justifiably personal preference. Jobs are a different story - you can't prefer one race/ethnicity/caste over the other for obvious reasons. Marriage on the other hand is very personal - it would be ridiculous to expect people to marry into other races/castes/ethnicities as the norm - it never happens that way in any part of the world no matter how advanced - people generally prefer the partnership of people that they share most in common with.
The problem with Indian castes being that caste ends up triumphing over personal preference. I personally know a couple of friends who were deeply in love but couldn't marry each other due to caste constraints enforced by their families. And it wasn't an economic issue either. The guy in question lives in SF and the girl was married off to some poor bloke from her caste.
But you would think with the breaking / separation of family system to due immigration, opportunities and general cultural shift it would be a lot harder for a family to marry off their daughter to someone else against her preferences? I mean surely if she wanted she could go away to SF to live with him? Hopefully violence wasn't involved but the whole parental wish thing worked because of family system, lack of opportunities and culture - so I am sure plenty of things have changed for the good even if it didn't work out in this one case.
There is a lot of violent policing in India on who you are allowed to marry. Even if two consenting adults chose to marry, one of their families or both may not like it. These families then take it upon themselves to do everything in their power, starting from emotional blackmail and upto murder to stop the intermixing of castes.
> Marriage on the other hand is very personal - it would be ridiculous to expect people to marry into other races/castes/ethnicities as the norm - it never happens that way in any part of the world no matter how advanced - people generally prefer the partnership of people that they share most in common with.
This mentality is the exact point GP is trying to make. If your preference is for people of your own caste/race/etc. then those divisions will be reinforced. I don't think anyone here is saying that you shouldn't marry based on your own preferences. Just that people not considering caste as part of marriage decisions would be a good signal that caste is losing relevance.
One anecdote that struck me was that a cousin, someone a couple of decades older than I am and spent time in US since 1990s, openly admit to me that he was more open minded in India and became more caste conscious once he moved to the US.
I am not sure if he sounded regretful or just was sharing a fact of his life, but that really was weird.
What caste is your cousin? One possibility is that in India his status was more secure, while in the US as an immigrant it was not and he found he needed to exploit leverage like this over other people that was implicit back home.
Since most of us here are developers working across international teams, this provides helpful information to the non Indian managers to notice and stop discrimination of Brahaminical Patriarchy.
From Cynthia Tablot’s Precolonial India in Practice[0]
> One peculiarity of Andhra society is that many of the leading warrior families made no pretensions to ksatriya status but instead proudly proclaimed their descent from the creator Bramha’s feet. This is an allusion to the famous origin myth first found in the Rig Veda wherein the four varnas are said to have originated from different portions of the body of Purusha, the primordial man. It was from the creator’s feet that the fourth, or sudra, class sprang, and another way of expressing sudra status was to say that one belonged to the fourth order of society. The pride in sudra origin is especially prominent in two records from the fourteenth century, in which sudras are said to be the best of the four varnas because they are the bravest or the purest. Families in what was theoretically the lowest social category, and not the ksatriya lineages of the costal subregion, possessed the greatest degree of actual political power in medieval Andhra, despite their relatively humble ancestry.
India’s history of caste in society is far more complicated than what’s portrayed in popular depictions of India. Add to this, India’s insane cultural diversity. When Ibn Batuta was traveling through (presumably north) India recording how women were uneducated, forced into marriage and how Brahmins held the highest social status, the Bhakti movement (sort of similar to Europe’s protestant movement) was brewing in the south[1], the Virasaivas were trying to form a caste free society in what is now Karnataka[2] and you have sudra rulers over modern day Andhra Pradesh.
This complicated history has largely been forgotten, Indian textbooks do not come anywhere close to exploring the complexity of the origins of Caste.
I appreciate NPR taking an interest in talking about Caste in India, but this treatment is extremely disappointing. Indian society can not discuss caste freely - there is too much political baggage that gets in the way (notice how all the references below aren’t from Indian scholars). NPR has an incredible opportunity to be the swiss neutral ground when talking about caste and how it impacts every day life in India.
I really hope they don’t bring that baggage over to America and end all possibility for level headed discourse.
[0] Cynthia Talbot, “Precolonial India in Practice - Society, Region and Identity in Medieval Andhra”. Chapter 2, page 51.
[1] John Stratton Hawley, “A storm of songs”
[2] Gil Ben-Herut, “Silva’s saints - the origins of devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Ragalegalu”
Edit: I would truly appreciate a discourse. Simple downvoting provides no feedback.
India suffers from this colonial system and unfortunately media takes every single opportunity. Like recent rape cases. Only case with victim from lower class and culprits from higher class is getting all the media attention.
I am not saying it's unnecessary but having a dialog requires honest intentions. Just like BLM these media hype cases don't help.
In my 20 years of experience I have seen caste discrimination in villages but not in modern offices.
People from all creed and caste work together and progress together.
As far as marriages are concerned , how many Europeans marry outside their social class? I would guess not many.
To be fair, classes in Western societies, like lower, middle, upper middle, and upper, are essentially "fake" classes, and have no real definition as well as don't actually fit the generally accepted definition of class in sociology.
If you try to do a class analysis of Western capitalist societies, pretty much everyone is of the same class, which is the working class and comprises anyone from foodstore clerk to tech lead. There are at the margins different classes, like the owner class, the landlord class and the destitute class, but those account altogether for less than 10% of society, and actually see a lot of class mobility.
So while people tend not to marry in such a way that their income will be drastically reduced, it's not really fair to say that outclass marriage is rare, because it generally isn't, and because western societies are fully proletarized and dominated by the working class, which is actually a good thing in many ways.
> Only case with victim from lower class and culprits from higher class is getting all the media attention
Or maybe it was because of the exceptional brutality of the crime itself, and the shocking behaviour of the police - cremating the body at 2:30AM without the family's approval.
Why police decides to cremated the body should be investigated for sure. But
Equally brutal cases have happenned recently with no outrage at all.[1] Sharing it here for argument's sake. Personally I don't like to share these shitty stories usually.
Rapes are a tragedy and need to be deal above the level of politics.
> Just because there was no outrage for X doesn't meant here shouldn't be outrage for Y.
Yes it is. What would be your thoughts if you are consistently fined but your neighbor is simply ignored for the same offense.
> I hope that, if nothing else, it leads to law and order becoming a major election issue
Ofcourse that is the entire story. There is no desire to change the system. For argument sake this will lead to the change in Government, what will change with that? Bringing back SP and Congress will improve the system? UP under SP was a horrible place.
These 2 parties have destroy UP over the years. Land of poets is now land of petty criminals.
And if this is the intention why spare Rajasthan and Kerala? Change their government also for the same reason. We will be changing Government every other day.
Once again I am not against outrage I am against using rape for political gain. But seems like you are ok with it.
As you seem knowledgeable in this subject, are there any books you’d recommend that provide something closer to a “Swiss neutral” take, that captures more of the nuance found lacking here?
I have Indian heritage but it’s not a topic that my relatives enjoy talking about, and I have also observed the myopia you note, in the most readily-available material on the subject. I’d love to read something more scholarly and impassive that you might recommend.
The dialogue here seems foreign to me. Playing a coy game where you realize someone is trying to infer something about you so you dodge the question. It's weird to imagine that people engage in a cultural dance where you need certainty of arbitrary facts before you decide to act like a dick (oversimplified).
But it's really weird to see that there's not overt cultural movements to shed this stuff. Trying to hide the fact that you're a lower caste, in a way, seems to embody the fact that you're a lower caste, shifting it from an outward identity to a hidden identity. Seems like the obvious thing to do is to get ahead of the issue and state that you don't have a caste. Or make up a post modern American one. I get this is hard to do when you're in a position of weakness relative to the other party (like manager's as described). But like, this is clearly a social movement waiting to happen. If someone of equal social standing starts probing you for your caste, you should confront them on it and say you don't subscribe to it, because otherwise you do, on some level, subscribe to it.
I won't pretend it's not much, much easier said than done, but geez. Is there really such a collective power by upper indian castes that you can't bring the issue to the table if you're reasonably well established? Say, a second generation citizen, with a multi racial network?
Racial discrimination between people of color and whites is a frustratingly stupid problem to deal with. Caste discrimination seems, somehow, even dumber, because based on non-obvious, made up facts.
> weird to see that there's not overt cultural movements to shed this stuff
It takes energy. It brings out aggressive opposition. It may impact people's lives. There needs to be a bigger shift and it can get messy. You can declare yourself free of the stupid discrimination, but then you have to be prepared to be even more publicly discussed and face backlash in private. Most people want to live their lives, not become martyrs.
Also if you say "system X is bad" it's close to certain you're not the person who is at the top of system X. By not identifying yourself, you identify yourself as close to the bottom.
> Also if you say "system X is bad" it's close to certain you're not the person who is at the top of system X. By not identifying yourself, you identify yourself as close to the bottom.
I don't disagree, but it seems like that would happen if you just dodged the questions like the interviewee too. I guess it just sounds to me like getting in the front of the issue would be an effective strategy because a lot of the social stigma around it means the discrimination is supposed to be subtle and unacknowledged.
> The dialogue here seems foreign to me. Playing a coy game where you realize someone is trying to infer something about you so you dodge the question. It's weird to imagine that people engage in a cultural dance where you need certainty of arbitrary facts before you decide to act like a dick (oversimplified).
I'm not sure what you mean to imply here. If you're implying you think I'm Indian and pretending I'm not, well I'm not Indian and I don't follow why you would think that.
I’ll stick my neck out here and say that my assumption is that you’re a white guy like myself.
If you don’t know, many non-white people get asked that question all the time. That dance you say you can’t imagine, well, it happens quite frequently.
I don't think that's the same thing. Yes, people do pester others to determine their country of origin, but it's already plainly obvious that the answer is "foreign", or more realistically, "not white". India or Pakistan? Probably doesn't matter for the purposes of internal bias forming.
The dialogue being discussed here is about a trait which is not externally evident. It's also a direct question. Where are you really from is more or less directly asking country of origin pre-family immigration however far back that is, which would equate to outright asking someone what their caste is.
The strict social hierarchical dynamics of Indian culture is damaging to a lot of workplaces. 2nd generation Indians are great. The Indians that are from lower casts or from oppressed groups like Christians or Muslims are really great. But the higher castes are extremely insular, and treat anyone of any race poorly.
This might be taboo, but every time I see a situation where there are multiple Indians in a reporting chain, I run. If you have an Indian above and below, you will be bypassed on work, undermined, and given absurd directions, almost designed to drive you out. Then there is the case where if an Indian gets into management, they will start filling everything with their friends. Other management positions, they will start fighting to bring in some contractors from some place like Infosys. Its the death knell of the IT division at the company.
Being on a team where you are the only non-Indian means you will be an outcast. You'll not be invited to meetings, they'll talk in their native tongue to exclude you. I've been the only white guy working with Chinese, and they don't do that. I've been in similar situations with Africans / and African Americans and they will welcome you right along.
This is the truth, no matter how politically incorrect it is, and every time you walk into an IT office and there are 80% Indians, that's the reason.
So many ethnic stereotypes, personal samples only (I doubt this person kept diligent notes) then classified as truth. Sad to read when the topic is ethnic bias.
There's entire ecosystem of chat groups of higher-caste Indians in American firms who systematically hire based on it and even go as far as to expose others.
I do not doubt that these things happen, and it sounds like you have some interesting anecdotes. I do take exception to the assertions that this always happens, you will be an outcast, that’s the reason, etc. Ties of language and culture are certainly very strong.
Not my experience at all. They invited me to parties and insisted that I eat with them. Like if I was late to some mini-celebration, they'd ask me why I did not come earlier. They always spoke english at the meetings I attended. I did find them extremely political and manipulative, also browbeating me in work tasks. They did the same to my Indian colleague. But they didn't try to exclude me.
Some of what you are saying is true but I had a good experience with Indians maybe because I knew how to react to it. But Indians are extremely diverse. My wife is Brahmin, and I am white, and I've been around Brahmins as a result. I have found Brahmins who come to the US often are not particularly religious but still practice some of old customs. They complain about a lot of Brahmin hate in India and like escaping from it in the US. There are some subtleties though.
* Indians from India like old ways of addressing superiors. They appreciate if you call a manager Sir. Address him as Dear Sir.
* Religious Brahmins would not tolerate being around a Dalit because it will adversely effect their purity. There are terms for all this. Aversion to Dalits is deeper than culture, it's a religious belief. This might even be protected by religious freedom. Less religious ones I don't think care as much. Very religious Brahmins in general do not get high paying jobs and do not have a lot of power but also would hold the most discriminatory views.
* Indians have a culture of going the extra mile at work. So I think in general they don't appreciate the American view of work.
* Indians from India prefer being around other Indians but I think they also don't understand Americans well and think the American work environment is strange.
* There are a lot of horrible things that happen in India and it's not just one group that does it. There isn't really any one universally accepted victim group there. There are billionaire Dalits.
> Indians have a culture of going the extra mile at work.
No more or less than any other group. I’ve seen, and promoted, hard working Indians. I had to fire an Indian that thought his freshly minted MS degree made him too good for any actual work other than spending his 2 hours of non-nap time per day telling others what to do. And I have worked with everything in between. Law of large numbers should come to mind here.
> This might even be protected by religious freedom.
It's not. Religious practices in violation of social duties or subversive of good order are not protected under free exercise of religion (Reynolds v. United States).
In particular, it's a nigh-certainty that discrimination in matters of employment based on caste will be ruled illegal under Title VII (a fortiori, even employer or customer's preference for individuals of a particular _religion_ cannot be taken into account; a fortiori intra-religious preferences will not be taken into account either. This is almost certainly what will happen in California v. Cisco).
We usually ban people for less than this. I'm going to cut you some slack because you've also posted some good comments recently, but please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules from now on.
The solution to the caste system in India is actually very simple. Religious conversion. Ambedkar was a visionary who himself converted out of Hindu religion and gave up his 'caste'.
Caste is essentially the same as feudalism, but unlike other regions of the world where feudalism was a societal concept, it became a religious one in India. Buddhism for example is an Indian religion but Buddha was explicitly against the concept of caste-by-birth. Abrahamic religions are also devoid of the concept of caste.
So whenever there are any caste issues, it's always two Hindus involved. Upper caste hindus don't probe the caste of a person if they hear a Christian/Muslim/Buddhist name because they know that it won't exist.
Because of how easy it is to give up caste, lower castes have been doing religious conversions in India in large numbers. The so called upper caste , only make up 30% of Hindu population and if all lower castes were to convert then Hinduism would become a minority in India. To prevent this mass exodus, various states of India have been coming up with anti-conversion laws which make it really hard for people to convert. Though I really don't understand why lower caste dalits in the US continue to stay Hindu, when they could just change their religion and avoid the whole caste discussion altogether.
> Though I really don't understand why lower caste dalits in the US continue to stay Hindu, when they could just change their religion and avoid the whole caste discussion altogether.
Perhaps it's just they have strong religious belief in Hinduism? I don't have more than a surface understanding of the religion or how devoted people tend to be, but if I think about the various sects of Christianity, many people of certain sects wouldn't even consider switching to a different sect because they are so invested in their particular flavor of Christianity. And I'd think being Hindu and considering converting to Christianity or Islam would be an even larger jump in belief systems. It's not like switching brands of car.
I guess in my experience (in US culture at least), "just change your religion" is actually a super big deal and is a huge decision that takes an extraordinary reason. Even discrimination doesn't pass that bar for many people.
This is correct. “Hinduism” is convenient colonialist/reductionist way of framing a culture the British colonists wanted to control and depict in certain tones. Calling “Hinduism” a religion is like inventing a term like “Americanism” and using it to refer to everything that America entails (its history, its inventions, its culture, its people) a religion.
While I agree with you factually that the term hasn't been officially around since before 16th century but it definitely was used before the British arrived and colonised India for good https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hinduism#ref261605.
Besides, let's just be honest - today Hinduism/Hindu is a religion - there is no two way about it - practically and technically! This reasoning, that "oh, it's just a way of life", is often provided by people who try to deflect the argument away from Hindu nationalism, extremism, and fanaticism - especially of today. (This might not be your intention though).
In Eastern religions don't really work the same way as Christianity. If you believe in multiple gods, there is much more room for adopting different believes and practices.
> Abrahamic religions are also devoid of the concept of caste.
While the Indian concept of "caste" (varna/jati/etc) isn't a native part of Christianity, Christians have varied in their attitude to it – some Christians have insisted that the caste system is incompatible with Christianity and that in becoming a Christian you have to give up your caste identity; other Christians have been accepting of the caste system, leading to the establishment of Christian castes such as the "Roman Catholic Brahmins" or "Bammons" – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic_Brahmin
This isn’t limited to some Christians and Muslims of India. They have wholesale adopted the caste system. To see evidence of this, just pick up any English paper (for Christians) or any Urdu paper (for Muslim) and see the marriage, real estate listings. Sometimes the caste criteria may be kept down low, but is exposed by activists from those communities.
The reason this system persists, may be that it’s acceptance facilitates proselytisation.
You might argue that at least there is reduced toxicity in daily interactions at least, but it’s easy to find instances of abusive interactions as well.
As such, this whole topic is becoming a flaming pile of shit with bigoted descriptions of all Brahmins and “upper castes”. Also, I wonder if any here realise that there is no similarity between left-right divisions that you see in the west and whatever it is that exists in India.
The left-liberals in India seek to emphasise caste differences among Hindus in order to uphold, what they call “secular” values. An Indian leftist will never let caste differences, and consequently the discrimination, die. Only by dividing Hindus by caste can the theological leaders of the significant religious minorities of India remain politically relevant.
The non-left-nationalists on the other hand are spending huge amounts of resources to court middle and lower castes, while seeking to isolate and “otherise” and demonise the Muslims and Christians (to some extent).
Then there are the “gurus” who also seek to exploit caste, namely the fact that a significant subset of the population - both lower and upper castes - are fed up of this system, in order to set up cults.
The Dalits, over time, have adopted different approaches to fight discrimination. Initially they tried to give up their Hindu identity completely and move into other religions like Islam and Christianity. Seeing that this approach has largely failed, because caste is too strong in India and the bigotry just follows them. Proponents of this approach are failing in India and are now emigrating to advanced countries.
So Where is the discussion of this complexity in this topic here? All I see are braid-dead, uneducated direct substitution of the western anti-racist struggle/movement onto the Indian context.
Frankly, this is just immigrants from India, who feel left out by BLM, saying “this looks great, and we want in”. In conclusion Americans and westerners will always be ill equipped about caste in India and can only worsen the conditions here. You should realise that this issue is coming up as a reaction to the existing social movements in the US, and only ignore the possibility that cases are being slapped by people trying to hide their own incompetence and inability to do the job, at your own cost.
While there is a necessity to stamp out toxicity, the way forward is to investigate all claims and not just be pressurised to virtue signal.
You seem to be conflating "secularism" with "religious diversity". They aren't the same. For example, France and a lot of north/west Europe is largely secular. USA has religious diversity but is not secular.
This doesn’t seem relevant to what I said. Indian “secularism“, as defined by our intellectual class, is very different from the western idea. That’s not a core part of what I’m saying though.
From what I've read people will still try to figure out your native cast even if you convert, but by converting you lose the official status and lose access to India's government programs intended to help members of disadvantaged castes. I'm not Indian and have never been to India, but this exact concept has come up in multiple unrelated things I've read so I'm inclined to believe that "convert and your caste association disappears" is not so simple.
So here's the thing. I have no doubt that stuff like this does happen. An Indian friend (Brahmin, Indian citizen, has lived in the US for over a decade) has also seen this happen sometimes, and tries to avoid reporting chains with too many Indians down the line, even though it's unlikely he himself would experience discrimination (he just has no patience for ultra-political, back-stabby environments).
But labeling all Indians of a particular caste this way and asserting "this is the truth" is just flat out bigotry, no matter how intellectual and self-effacing your comment sounds. Are there people like this? Sure. Are there a lot of them? Maybe? Even probably? There are also people of other races who act in similar discriminatory ways against other groups, often in much more insidious ways. Is it the same? Maybe not, but it doesn't matter: painting an entire ethnic group with the same broad (negative) brush based on your limited anecdotal experience is just not okay.
It's definitely true that outright dismissing all high-caste Indians is no better than doing the same for low-caste or any other race of people.
I have to say, though, if I saw an org chart with a disproportionate number of Indians (relative to nearby & similar companies, or other parts of the same company) I would take that as a warning sign. As you say, in my experience, less political and more open-minded Indian tech workers will tend to be drawn to more diverse workplaces. It just seems unlikely that a whole bunch of cool, modern, forward-thinking Indians just coincidentally happened to fill a whole management chain.
Frankly, I'd think the same thing if a management chain were overly-dominated by any particular group, be they Chinese, white, or, I dunno, UC Berkeley grads. It's a sort of organizational smell. It just seems to happen more often, anecdotally, with Indian management, either just because there are proportionally more of them or because they're used to a more old-school corporate culture.
It turns out that when a woman sees an org chart with almost no women, or a Black person sees an org chart with almost no Black people, they have similar concerns.
The language issue is slightly separate factor, of course. Still, insisting that English be the language of business is a pretty huge privilege in favor of native speakers, which can be detrimental to the business when people are forced to communicate in their second language which is slower and less accurate than their native ability.
My entire organisation speaks English because of one person who does not speak our native tongue. Or at least when he is in the office, and in all our online communication/documentation.
I worked for an Indian manager in a game studio. I don't know what caste, except that he wasn't Christian or Muslim, probably because he didn't think it worth mentioning. He hired based on demonstrated skill, so we had a diverse group of coworkers. He actively encouraged the group to eat together, arranging meals out with careful consideration for the group's preferences. He was approachable, personable, considerate, friendly and kind.
People are people and stereotypes do not always fit.
I think you are right. I had this part of the comment in mind:
> Then there is the case where if an Indian gets into management, they will start
> filling everything with their friends. Other management positions, they will start
> fighting to bring in some contractors from some place like Infosys.
This was not my experience. I also felt that the overall tone of the comment was negative, so I wanted to share that not everyone has had a negative experience with Indians in management.
But no one ever calls it out when a white manager reports to another white manager who reports to another white manager and so on. That has an effect on the group dynamic as well, where an Indian employee or those of other backgrounds may not feel included. Another example is the comments here calling out Indian managers’ nepotism, which feels like an assumption without basis. Referrals and leveraging employees’ personal networks are a key hiring strategy for every tech company. And yet when Indians do it, an ugly label of “nepotism” gets affixed to it, with accusations of racial or religious discrimination.
I’m very disappointed in how HN views Indians - it seems like they are not treated as other minorities in America, and aren’t afforded the advantages of being white in America either. Instead a different standard is used against them, labeling standard professional practices with ugly terms. I wonder if the HN crowd also regards other Asian coworkers similarly.
When two members of the same underrepresented group are a reporting pair, they tend to get disproportionately more suspicion of nepotism than when two members of the majority/plurality do.
> This might be taboo, but every time I see a situation where there are multiple Indians in a reporting chain, I run.
I'm glad these topics are brought up to the surface and being discussed, because the strategy of voting with your feet is no longer an effective one, given the proliferation of Indian management across the industry.
It never quite made sense to me why non-American Indians (or any other foreigners, for that matter) are allowed to manage Americans, unless of course company itself is Indian or foreign to begin with.
Managing people is an inherently cultural and people-oriented job (and it's NOT an easy job, with consequences cascading well beyond one's tenure). Foreigners are very unlikely to hold enough of the same values as their team as to be qualified to be the manager. The exception here are folks who have already become fully Americanized, in which case there wouldn't be the kind of problematic behaviors you described above.
It's the same reason why new immigrants to a country don't go straight into becoming MPs and Presidents, regardless of their backgrounds and qualifications.
To a large extent it's because the ruling class in America and Western nations is trying to create a managerial class of English-speaking "global men" (and women) for who things like religion, culture and traditions are kept out of the office at best, if not completely eliminated.
I don't think it's a good idea in the first place, but it doesn't even work, because it tends to crush weaker cultures while only preserving the more resistant ones: Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, the current form of Han-centric ethno-nationalism promoted by the Chinese Communist Party, etc.
I really think we need to do globalization in a different way: free trade between nations, but mostly ethnically homogeneous nations, as it used to be until the 1970s/1980s.
I always wonder, when purple express these sorts of views, how they propose to get rid of the ethnic minorities that already exist in various countries. Do you have some sort of nonviolent way that might be done?
If the employer chose them to manage, then the employer found them to be qualified. I doubt that your silly ideas on racial profiling would improve their hiring process.
Ironically, you, with your wish that foreigners would just be straight-up banned from management, have very different values to the average American.
> But the higher castes are extremely insular, and treat anyone of any race poorly.
This is also bigotry.
But I should agree that the people who come to become managers are likely to have the attitude that favours nepotism. These people are not interested in what they are doing. They just want to be a manager.
I get nervous when I see too many of one ethnic group in a reporting structure in a large tech company - no matter what the ethnic group is. It's a red flag if a manager is primarily hiring people from his/her ethic group. And yes, if you end up being the only white person in the group you definitely can end up being the odd person out (and I wouldn't exempt Chinese from this as you have). It's uncomfortable, but you can see this as a cultural learning experience - the opportunity to see how it feels to be a minority. It's not often that we white people experience this in the US.
First of all I am limiting this argument to white collar professional setups. Your comment is way off the mark about Christians in India and to a great extant about Muslims as well.
Your first paragraph is very poorly put generalisation. As a resident non-upper caste Hindu Indian I couldn't disagree more. While lower caste and Muslim oppression has skyrocketed in India since 2014 (esp. among low income groups of society), this is far from true in professional setups especially in the generalised way you've put it.
> But the higher castes are extremely insular, and treat anyone of any race poorly.
This is just untrue!
> This might be taboo, but every time I see a situation where there are multiple Indians in a reporting chain, I run.
I have never worked abroad/in the west (other than short stints in SK/JP) so I can't comment on what you've said directly. But coincidentally most of my friends (different caste groups) who work in the USA (or even EU) avoid this as well - but because of some other reason. Work culture - as in timings, out of work hour calls and forced unreasonable expectations. They know that (and I agree) work-life balance will be shitty in a team full of Indians up, down, and around.
Hell, years ago I got an MS accept from MSU but I ran away seeing pretty much the entire CS department manufactured in India and China - PhD scholars, profs - all of them (I had applied w/o checking that). Yes, is this another generalisation but to be honest that's how I felt at that time. Apologies if it came across as offensive.
Born in a remote Indian village, studied in towns, worked for a decade in the US and now living in a tier-1 Indian city for the last 6-7 years. Never in my life I observed any kind of bias against christians or muslims at workplace.
Coming to the cast issues, there was a post here last week on the same topic. I extended the discussion to a WhatsApp group of 70+ colleagues/friends who come from different backgrounds. I wanted to validate if I am the odd one, who has almost never observed cast based issues either. After two days of long discussion, we came to a conclusion that we tend to show more affinity to the people who speak our native language or/and come from same regional roots, than our cast and religion.
Not denying that that the later doesn't exist at all, I feel this whole topic is too exaggerated.
Disclaimer: My experience is limited to 20 years of while collar profession (only).
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I am quite surprised! I am not saying it doesn’t happen, but I am plain surprised. I have been in US for 8 years and reported to Indians most of the time (I am Indian too), and thought of happening something like this here never occurred to me. I believed like minded, educated Indians who mostly comes from Middle class would never do this.
You cannot cure sick people. Caste is just an excuse they would use, if it were not caste they would use some other means to be an ass. In 10 years of office environment, I never faced any caste based issues in India. Outside of office is a slightly different story, but even then as a north Indian I only faced issues from north Indians and mostly ignorable.
Because this is done very subtly, you would not even realize. It took me a very long time to find about this. Once my manager asked me if i was a vegetarian. My brahmin friend educated on this. The test is to ask if a person is a vegetarian. If no then ask if their family were a vegetarian. If no then don't proceed further. You now know he is a non-brahmin, else you now know he is a brahmin and you freely discuss about caste.
Whenever you are very surprised during promotions the reason is always the manager is a brahmin. No matter how friendly, i never want my manager to be brahmin, but it not possible always.
<Edit>
I have structured the post better and would appreciate if people can let me know what's wrong with this comment.
</Edit>
India is struggling hard to get rid of this menace introduced during colonial era. We have reservation in education, government jobs, and politics to bring backwards at par. Almost 50% of seats in education and government jobs falls under this category. Seat are also reserved into politics.
But the the irony of India is that caste as a system was introduced by European. Word caste itself is of Portuguese origin. Here is a quick read.[1]
All mature societies need skill based division of labour. India had Varna based system which meant society needs four classes of people to run smoothly. These weren't hard classes you were enforced in. People changes their classes as they changes profession. For example Rishi Vishmamitra was a born warrior but later on he turned into a academic. Here is a famous shloka from [2]
Meaning: In Vedic culture by birth everyone is Sudra(lower caste), by accepting Samskara (Purificatory process) one becomes a Dvija(Twice Born), By study of Veda one becomes Vipra, Knower of Brahman is Brahmana. It means a true brahmin has the divine vision, knowledge and powers.
Sloka means everybody is born a Sudrah. One who follows the right samskaras has a second birth, one who reads the vedas and understands them becomes a wise man and one who realises the brahma or the source of creation becomes a Brahman. Those seven mind born Rishis of Brahma are real Brahmins ancestors- parents of humen.
</quote>
In brief, all knowledge work was supposed to be handled by academic class Brahmins. Being born in a Brahmins family wasn't enough to get you into academics though. If you became a warrior you will be called kshatriya. Similary business class vaishya, and Shudras class existed to take care of rest of the social functions and creative endeavours. Profession like engineering, arts, temple building, city planning were all done by the 4th class.
I would argue this isn't any different from today. In order to become professor or researcher(Brahmin) you need a qualification. In order to become a soldier you need to join army. Entrepreneurs and business people drive the world of commerce. Similarly rest of the professions exist too.
Colonial Europeans turned this system into rigid caste based system. which slowly changed over to rigid system as society went into preservation mode as noted by dilippkumar in a comment.
India was the only society without slavery as noted by various travellers. Until English colonial forces destroyed it systematically, India had an education system in which major beneficiary were the so called lower caste of today. Here is another short summary with further references.[3]
The problem in discussions like this is that hordes of gullible/uninformed commenters filled with cynicism and essentially colonial senses of superiority are willing to make gross generalizations about other cultures like India without knowing any of the history, culture, precolonial way of living, etc. They eat up skin deep coverage of complicated topics like the article linked here, with stories pushed by certain groups and largely written by white American, anti-India/Hindu activists, and pro-Pakistan/Islam activists.
“Caste” is an English pejorative used to describe a system in India that was largely in place for economic division of labor, stable passage of knowledge/skills generationally, and other cultural reasons. It wasn’t made for discrimination or classist reasons, but ignorant casual racists (many of whom are posting here) are painting that picture based on very recent history. It’s important to remember that India was the victim of divide and conquer colonialism. “Caste” as a discriminatory concept is a very modern issue, against a background of thousands of years of history.
Understanding this topic in depth and with clarity, rather than in typical Western tones, is exactly what is demanded when people fight for “decolonization” in Western academia. And yet no one here seems to want to decolonize their own perceptions and comments.
Please don't assume motives for downvotes, it's a fruitless endeavor that only makes you look bitter.
You were not "merely stating the origins of [the] caste system." You justified it, by stating that "all mature societies need division of labor." Firstly, that is a very vague claim, and secondly, you neglected to explain why on Earth that "division of labor" should be hereditary.
I didn't say division of labour should be hereditary.
I said India had division of labour but people were allowed to move up and down as per their skill and abilities. The hard caste boundaries were enforced by British colonial rule.
My other comment quotes shloka from Hindu text clearly saying everyone is born lower class unless they earn their place.
Sorry, I totally misinterpreted your comment before you edited it. I still don't understand a few things though.
> Profession like engineering, arts, temple building, city planning were all done by the 4th class.
What's the use of this "class system" if one class covers such a broad area? Isn't it so broad as to be useless?
> clearly saying everyone is born lower class unless they earn their place.
Was this ever true in practice? It's definitely not true in the present, and I find it hard to believe that parents were ever so enlightened as to compel their children to "earn their place" through such struggle.
> What's the use of this "class system" if one class covers such a broad area? Isn't it so broad as to be useless?
Hinduism is evolutionary in nature. It anticipated emergence of new profession as society progressed ahead with time . Having said that first three classes were fixed in terms of duties of education, defence , and business. They were responsible for providing stable environment for rest of the professions to bloom and evolve. That why last class wasn't fixed. It is impossible to predict emerging professions anyways.
Moreover The Varna system was merely a loose way of classifying the society. These weren't categories you have to live your entire life. Many people moved up and down. Vishwamitra was a king who turned into a sage as an example. There is a long list of such cases.[1]
> Was this ever true in practice?
Yes to a large extent. Please read comment of dilippkumar quoting from the books describing practices of pre-conial India.
If you have time please read Bhagwad Gita for an introduction to Hindu philosophical system. Many Westerns like Bethovan, Robert Oppenheimer, Thoreau have drawn inspiration from it. Remember this book was written 5000 or perhaps before that. Only a stable and developed society would've thought about these ideas in such details I would argue.
BBC confuses caste with division of labour bases on skills.Entire article is based on superficial reading of Indian culture. Please read the comment from this very post.
This is a normal screw up by the West. The Vedas mention castes in that of division of labour, not division of importance.
I don't believe the British introduced the caste system in its current form (division of importance) to India - more likely it was a very normal evolution during the phase just before the Mughals took India over. Having huge inequality weakens countries and allows people to target oppressed demographics.
The sadness of India being unable to get rid of the system now is that it leaves us open to being attacked again for such a stupid reason when Vedic/Hindu scripture doesn't condone this.
And this is what is happening in the West and especially in the US now. We don't have the caste system in the West per-se, but we've left many people behind. This has become our weakness as they can be easily provoked and guided elsewhere, away from our founding principles. I can only imagine how gleeful enemies of the West feel when they see what we've done to ourselves and how easy we've become to manipulate.
> I would appreciate if people can let me know what's wrong with this comment.
I didn't downvote your comment but I will venture a guess.
It sounds like you are condoning and/or possibly endorsing the caste system. If you say "all mature societies need division of labor" does that mean you believe that everybody should be pigeonholed into a particular occupation forever?
It seems like there is a bigger point you are trying to makie but you need to write a little more to make it clear. Some of your spelling and formatting could be improved as well. It is strange but you can make a really excellent point but if it is poorly formatted or you have spelling mistakes, people will downvote you.
The solution to the caste system in India is actually very simple. Religious conversion. Ambedkar was a visionary who himself converted out of Hindu religion and gave up his 'caste'.
Caste is essentially the same as feudalism, but unlike other regions of the world where feudalism was a societal concept, it became a religious one in India. Buddhism for example is an Indian religion but Buddha was explicitly against the concept of caste-by-birth. Abrahamic religions are also devoid of the concept of caste.
So whenever there are any caste issues, it's always two Hindus involved. Upper caste hindus don't probe the caste of a person if they hear a Christian/Muslim/Buddhist name because they know that it won't exist.
Because of how easy it is to give up caste, lower castes have been doing religious conversions in India in large numbers. The so called upper caste , only make up 30% of Hindu population and if all lower castes were to convert then Hinduism would become a minority in India. To prevent this mass exodus, various states of India have been coming up with anti-conversion laws which make it really hard for people to convert. Though I really don't understand why lower caste dalits in the US continue to stay Hindu, when they could just change their religion and avoid the whole caste discussion altogether.
I beg to differ on one point. I am a Christian from Kerala ( a Southern state). On most North Indian encounters, after a while, I start getting quizzed on what my ancestor's caste was. I eventually have to reveal that I have no clue, but we are General Category (not eligible for affirmative action - or reservation) and that sort of ends it usually. If they do not probe, may be they have already made up their mind, and have imagined the worst.
(I am not calling out North Indians. Keralites can make out my caste/denomination from my name)
Or you could just say that you have no caste and don't believe in it. Upper caste Hindus would like you to believe that you HAVE to disclose caste. I am also a convert and straight up tell them that my religion doesn't have the concept of a caste and end the matter there. It also helps that I changed my last name.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadI took no action, but wasn't sure what to do. After I learned more about it, I started to wonder where I was in this hierarchy.
If you ever overhear something like this, what would you do?
Although, the OP's case, the person did quickly realize her mistake, but bias might still be present.
Perhaps not explicitly, but I could easily see courts ruling that it is. To me, it seems covered by the ethnicity portion, although I get they are not the exact same concept.
Caste itself isn't explicitly protected (axes of discrimination that weren't widely recognized as actual things people cared about in the US when the law was written don't tend to be) but there are arguments that caste discrimination runs afoul of existing US protection regarding color, ethnicity, national origin, and religion, among others, and some of these are currently being actively litigated in federal court, IIRC by both private plaintiffs and state fair-employment authorities.
So “might be fine”, but very much might not. And HR is usually about avoiding risk of exposure, not steering the company into “might be fine” waters.
It makes me angry now even reading it. Why would this have any impact on the work the candidate would be able to perform?
I think you did the right thing in this situation. She did not express anything malicious and she corrected herself (at least partially).
It sounds like your colleague was doing something anyone would do (assessing someone by the social strictures they are familiar with) and did something wrong (devoted effort to it in a hiring context, said something aloud.) Yes, everyone does this sort of thing -- in American society overall we don't have good names for the subtle side of our class system, so we can't express the puzzle as clearly as some other societies, but we do see the world (consciously or unconsciously) along these lines.
When I hear people say inappropriate things -- usually less fraught ones like marital status -- I point out that they cannot say such things. It serves as a reminder of proper procedure. I do not escalate the situation if they seem to be acting without malice and, like the person in your story, seem to desire to do better.
(Full disclosure, I am a white-presenting man.)
I believe she did the exact opposite. (You could argue she meant "shouldn't have done that" - I guess you'd have to be there to know) Acknowledged that she wanted to do this, so it was conscious, not just a bad habit. And acknowledged that she shouldn't talk about it - not that she shouldn't have done it.
Well, imagine that you, a white-presenting man (what does _that_ mean) were on a phone interview with someone you couldn't see, and afterwards, you said something like, "I was trying to determine if they were Black."
I'm not going to make judgement on whether that's a fair statement or not - what I am curious about is whether you think that you'd get the same kind of defense - would there be someone saying that you weren't malicious?
If you met most of my family members, you would not think they were white, but if you met me personally, you probably would.
Only once in a long while does someone seem to read me as 'not white' (and unless I'm speaking my heritage language they usually guess wrong about what flavor.)
> were on a phone interview with someone you couldn't see, and afterwards, you said something like, "I was trying to determine if they were Black."
If I'm on the phone with someone, I am sure I am trying to figure that out. Folks who claim otherwise are most likely incorrect about what they are doing.
I would certainly know better than to say that aloud, since I grew up in a society where I know how it would be perceived, and have intuition around it. I don't have to think much to realize the implications.
If you were an Indian, this would immediately raise a red flag. The intent of bringing up caste in a professional setting is clear - to discriminate. There is no other practical use for it. And the system is a hideous one with the potential to seriously damage professional environment. Signs of its practice like this should be considered threatening.
Yes, it's illegal to discriminate based on religion, but in many parts of the country it's a big curiosity about other people (is he presbyterian?) and so many people may not be able to help privately trying to suss it out.
The difference is that cast is a rigid hierarchy, based on society-accepted discrimination, and there is no reason to try and figure it out other than to decide where they are in the pecking order.
It's absolutely not okay to discriminate candidates by something like caste, or social status. It's like if your lead said she was trying to determine if they were an inferior race.
Yes, it is.
Caste no, social status? Absolutely, happens all the time. It’s very easy to proxy social status based on interests, hobbies, mannerisms, etc. Those that don’t pass the sniff test, are deemed “bad culture fits”.
If racial discrimination doesn't exist why Blacks are economically poor across in west?
1. Ongoing discrimination 2. Different starting points + law of large numbers.
If you start one racial group off in a country with property and let them acquire wealth for a few hundred years, then free another racial group from slavery with absolutely nothing - even after a long while those wealth differences will persist.
IMHO trying to find cultural fit is a form of ongoing discrimination[1] and it strengthens the effect of different starting points[2].
India is countering [2] by enforcing a 50% quota in education, Jobs, and politics. AFAIK West on the other hand is wishing it to vanish without doing anything concrete.
India is taking right steps in the right direction and I am hopeful this will vanish as generation born with caste concepts die off slowly.
I was recently talking with someone in China who claimed that the Uighurs could not be oppressed because they are given advantages in hiring/education, and that America would never do the same for black people.
Suffice to say, the US does engage in extensive aff action in education and hiring (although neither are directly legally mandated).
Yes there is discrimination but India is fighting it on policy and social level. Reserving 50% in education and jobs is one such big step. India's constitution was written by a a Dalit. Many people from the held high offices. Current prime minister and president are from the same community.
> Suffice to say, the US does engage in extensive aff action in education and hiring (although neither are directly legally mandated).
Is it measured? If not than how you know?
Absolutely, not my intention by my comment - more just recounting a similar phenomenon in a different discussion.
> India is fighting it on policy and social level
I'm not contesting that either! But of course there is still more work to be done.
> Is it measured? If not than how you know?
Affirmative action is quite well known in the United States. You can see the documents from the SFFA v. Harvard lawsuit, for instance, to see how the SAT score cutoff differs by race & ethnicity.
Thanks I didn't knew that. Having said that Harvard and Stanford is last rung. Those who are able to reach those places are already prevailed I would argue. Is there similar affirmitive action in place on lower levels as well?
India has it across the board which help more IMHO. Some communities have used it so much that now debate within the lower sections have started that reservation should be taken away after 3 generations.[1]
[1] https://youtu.be/spm5k5IrRDw
Given that 90% of people from India in SWE seem to be from higher caste (I don't really know the exact statistic but it is something like that), then it seems like the reservation is still needed.
Yes Reservation is still needed. India is big and people who got oppressed under colonial rule would take a few generations more to come up.
Bigger issue is exploitation of caste lines for politics.
I don’t think it’s great that this happens, it insulates elites from those with working class backgrounds and accelerates inequality.
This also has to do with the fact that, in consulting and finance, it is the perception of intelligence by the customer that is much more important than the actual intelligence. Managers would rather hire the team of consultants from the Ivy League and rich people would rather pay the management fees for the Ivy League team to manage their money.
In industries that are more directly merit based and less "customer perception" based, you don't have as large of an over-representation.
I don't think GP was trying to justify the practice, but noting that this exists in domains like finance because the product is an image, not actual performance.
> Caste no, social status? Absolutely, happens all the time. It’s very easy to proxy social status based on interests, hobbies, mannerisms, etc. Those that don’t pass the sniff test, are deemed “bad culture fits”.
Isn't that pretty much the definition of caste-based discrimination?
I don't ask about these in interviews, and don't use them to make decisions. You like My Little Pony or have a massive collection of guns? Or both? I literally could not care any less, it's none of my business.
> mannerisms
I'm not really sure what you'd see here in a regular interview beyond being literate and maybe nervous. The signal here is murky at best -- other than red flags, you shouldn't be measuring here.
So, to reiterate: it is absolutely not okay to discriminate candidates by social status.
I’m not saying it’s okay to discriminate candidates by it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Go to any finance firm on Wall Street and tell me how many people employed there grew up on food stamps.
Those are all qualitative things that tell me about the person's intelligence, social acumen, experience, worldliness, etc. Those things usually matter for hiring. Has nothing to do with caste or race or gender or identity or age or sexual orientation any other protected status.
You could say they're smarter because they're doing what's needed to game the system... but that's only needed because people are judging them on those aspects. Chicken or egg?
Does a thick German or Scandinavian accent count against them? What about Mexican/Spanish? What about Ebonics/Black English? That has well understood rules for how it's used, even though many people don't realize it.
Presumably what you actually care about when hiring is their ability to work well with their peers and managers, and how well they accomplish the work they are given. If so, you are using mannerisms to help inform about these attributes you actually care about because you think those mannerisms correlate in some way. But what do you have to go by to actually support this evidence? If it's from personal experience, how rigorous have you been in making sure you note the data, and didn't subconsciously discount or ignore instances counter to your expectations?
I was born in India and moved here when I was in school. It was shocking to me as well when I heard stuff like this.
I'm not Indian, but have heard these used in a derogatory setting. It's hard to disentangle from casual conversation, but if these questions arise suddenly and unprompted (like the first thing you're asked) it's a flag. Another is being asked a question in a specific dialect to see how you respond.
> Are there terms in English I should look out for?
Not really. But you have more of contexts and where the questioning is going whether it's in a professional or personal setting - the line of inquiry.
If the person is taking a very shallow interest (or a misplaced interest) in knowing where your roots are, who your ancestors were and possibly specifically asking names of your parents or grand parents (maybe profession as well) then you might want to treat it as at least suspicious on these lines.
And in the region, your last name (sorry, it's just a knowledge I picked up while growing up) is endemic to, it's called "jaayat" or "jaait".
> In Hindi I think
I assumed you are either not Indian or not from that region in the North.
Also, what I meant by saying there are not really terms one should look out for is in professional setups, at least these days, caste is not asked openly but indirectly.
Unless your concern rises to whistle-blower levels with external agencies, that sounds like a quick way to be fired.
Indians have a deeply engrained culture of noticing caste. This is true whether they are ok with discriminating on that basis, or staunchly against it, caste permeates the culture.
So either she was only interested in hiring Brahmins, and realized that she shouldn't have tipped her hand... or she was curious about it, and then realized that was a shitty thing to say during an interview, and decided not to make it worse by explaining that of course it wouldn't make a difference in her judgement.
She's right, though; she shouldn't have said that.
The fact that it would be top of mind at all
Could be curiosity or it could be a status play. Are there castes she would/would not hire from, would it be a problem to getting work done?
Edit: I’ve worked with indians my whole career and only recently learned via HN that caste system “carried over” to the US
I'm flawed, but I used to be more so. A big part of that improvement is thanks to the people that judged my actions and not every aberrant thought that entered my head.
[1] responsibility is there of course, and I work to reduce their future frequency. But that change takes time, and until then the best remedy to unwanted ingrained patterns is to not act on them.
Was the interviewee of Indian origin? Unless you are of Indian origin, it's not applicable to you.
If the interviewee was of Indian origin, and she didn't already know the interviewee's last name, I would probably give her the benefit of doubt, and ask to clarify what she meant.
We here in India hear the "caste as abhorrent discrimination" side from a very early age (and that's certainly important), but it's taken me years of experience to learn that in practice it's more than that. People think of caste as a form of extended family, or as shared culture, or of understanding someone's roots. That person might have said that just as someone might say "I can't figure out if their accent is from New York or New Jersey": that might be an intent to discriminate, but might also well be idle curiosity about the person.
I don't mean to say it's hateful to say you want social castes out on the table for identifying who you share connections with, but that obviously comes with the fact that you identify those who don't share that connection. It's a justification for extending social problems.
Discrimination has many forms.
Some are codified in law (age, race, religion, sex, etc.) and some are informally observed.
When in doubt, I prefer to address perceived discrimination directly with the person thought to be engaging in such nonconfrontationally and in the presence of at least one other coworker. If you choose to do same, document the encounter when it happens along with whom was present and be prepared to escalate to management.
It's not universal though, or even a majority - a lot of people still are mononymous, and many are confused when Facebook and the ilk ask for "Last name" (and sometimes fill in hilarious things).
Is actor Vijay's first name Joseph, Vijay or Joseph Vijay? Just asking.. :)
Many odd dutch surnames date back to dutchies, who had previously been using patronymics, having fun with the first census, taken under Napoleon in 1811.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ACaste%2FArchive_1#Forei...
there is the quote: "if memory serves, Westerners (particularly English) are held to be Brahmin, "
To be honest.. I can see it working as a scam of some sort. As long as the “white man” has money you might as well be of the highest caste right?
Here we’re trying to eliminate caste, but some geniuses want to give a caste to all sorts. You might as well give gold a caste...
again as I understand it strictly speaking a foreigner should be casteless, and hence untouchable.
But that discussion implies that the actual behavior towards foreigners does not match that, which would seem reasonable to me. Indians will need to interact with foreigners, if they are without caste that would be a problem, so how to fit the foreign into the social system.
Caste system, on the surface, seems like hereditary fixing of labor roles. If applied universally, it should be easy to accept a member of a strong foreign army, or any army as a Kshatriya. So it makes no sense for every Englishman to assume a high caste, irrespective of profession.
But then, many “castes” are also, basically regional/ethnicities. In short, the rules which apply caste, are not uniform in any way and I would rather ridicule such an exercise than aid it.
A foreigner doesn’t need to have a caste, even if they wish to convert to Hinduism, when our argument is that we need to abolish caste in India in the first place.
And I don’t know who are the “we” trying to eliminate caste oppression. Some claiming to do so are clearly demagogues using it to divide people and seize control. Like communists claiming to speak for the working class when in fact they just want all the power for themselves.
The existing laws don’t eliminate caste, instead they make some of them more desirable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697827
Once I worked with a group that was run by a brahmin hindi speaker and a group of Tamils was under her. It was really weird to see them speak English to each other since neither spoke each others' native tongue. She was not very nice to the Tamils and spent most of her time planning for ostentatious Diwali celebrations in the office.
The US has no place for this kind of discrimination. We strive to be (I hope) a meritocracy.
1: https://www.brightworkresearch.com/enterprisesoftwarepolicy/...
No such thing, though Anglo-Americans are the most likely to arrogate themselves to this status.
> When Sam Cornelius (ph) first arrived...
(ph), a notation used in transcripts to indicate that the transcriber does not know the spelling, usually of a name, and has spelled it as it was pronounced (phonetically)
Also, I dont think people really ignore people of color being racist within their countries. Most of the time when people bring up arguments stating that the people being racist are white people, its in the context of western countries with a colonial/slave trade past where systematic racism doesnt target white people.
I say that as someone who grew up in a Brahmin family - my dad was discriminated against in his business ample times to cause him to give up early. Both me and my brother had to be academically score perfect grades without fail in order to get into an Engineering college when most disadvantaged cast folks got in for a lot less. The rob Peter to pay Paul thing hasn't quite done any net good for society except maybe in times of explosive growth/expansion which is to say not too often.
The fraction of wealth and power Brahmins hold is still disproportionately high when compared to population.
Also even if we assume for a moment that they are slightly better off than the rest of the population could it not be due to their own merit - it's not hard to see that caste puts more emphasis on education and competence even when it's lot harder for them to get into it without reservations.
The point missed by the narrative of marks scored by upper caste student vs dalit's is that role of privilege. The fact that dalits are discrimintated severely and denied opportunities before ever being able to ever reach college is something that's carefully neglected. Not to mention the fact that even meritorious dalits are breated in the name of reservation and subjected to organised harrassment all too commonly in universities and government services: https://theprint.in/opinion/brahmins-on-india-campuses-study...
“Selection of secretary, additional secretary and joint secretary-level officers is made from the pool of officers who are empanelled for that particular post. If there isn’t an adequate number of officers belonging to the SC/ST/OBC categories in the pool, their number is obviously going to be smaller,” said the retired civil servant who did not want to be named.
A serving IAS officer, who belongs to the general category, said: “At times, senior IAS officers do not want to come to the Centre on deputation or the state government does not relieve them, resulting in a lesser number of SC/ST category officers in the upper echelons of government.”
The "upper caste people are successful because they are wealthy" meme needs to die. Many upper caste people are poor as well.. It also doesn't explain why Tamil Brahmins (an upper caste) are seen more successful educationally despite being much less in number than North Indian Baniyas (Also an upper caste).
Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF6W1XD25Dc
But you would think with the breaking / separation of family system to due immigration, opportunities and general cultural shift it would be a lot harder for a family to marry off their daughter to someone else against her preferences? I mean surely if she wanted she could go away to SF to live with him? Hopefully violence wasn't involved but the whole parental wish thing worked because of family system, lack of opportunities and culture - so I am sure plenty of things have changed for the good even if it didn't work out in this one case.
This mentality is the exact point GP is trying to make. If your preference is for people of your own caste/race/etc. then those divisions will be reinforced. I don't think anyone here is saying that you shouldn't marry based on your own preferences. Just that people not considering caste as part of marriage decisions would be a good signal that caste is losing relevance.
I am not sure if he sounded regretful or just was sharing a fact of his life, but that really was weird.
> One peculiarity of Andhra society is that many of the leading warrior families made no pretensions to ksatriya status but instead proudly proclaimed their descent from the creator Bramha’s feet. This is an allusion to the famous origin myth first found in the Rig Veda wherein the four varnas are said to have originated from different portions of the body of Purusha, the primordial man. It was from the creator’s feet that the fourth, or sudra, class sprang, and another way of expressing sudra status was to say that one belonged to the fourth order of society. The pride in sudra origin is especially prominent in two records from the fourteenth century, in which sudras are said to be the best of the four varnas because they are the bravest or the purest. Families in what was theoretically the lowest social category, and not the ksatriya lineages of the costal subregion, possessed the greatest degree of actual political power in medieval Andhra, despite their relatively humble ancestry.
India’s history of caste in society is far more complicated than what’s portrayed in popular depictions of India. Add to this, India’s insane cultural diversity. When Ibn Batuta was traveling through (presumably north) India recording how women were uneducated, forced into marriage and how Brahmins held the highest social status, the Bhakti movement (sort of similar to Europe’s protestant movement) was brewing in the south[1], the Virasaivas were trying to form a caste free society in what is now Karnataka[2] and you have sudra rulers over modern day Andhra Pradesh.
This complicated history has largely been forgotten, Indian textbooks do not come anywhere close to exploring the complexity of the origins of Caste.
I appreciate NPR taking an interest in talking about Caste in India, but this treatment is extremely disappointing. Indian society can not discuss caste freely - there is too much political baggage that gets in the way (notice how all the references below aren’t from Indian scholars). NPR has an incredible opportunity to be the swiss neutral ground when talking about caste and how it impacts every day life in India.
I really hope they don’t bring that baggage over to America and end all possibility for level headed discourse.
[0] Cynthia Talbot, “Precolonial India in Practice - Society, Region and Identity in Medieval Andhra”. Chapter 2, page 51. [1] John Stratton Hawley, “A storm of songs” [2] Gil Ben-Herut, “Silva’s saints - the origins of devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Ragalegalu”
India suffers from this colonial system and unfortunately media takes every single opportunity. Like recent rape cases. Only case with victim from lower class and culprits from higher class is getting all the media attention.
I am not saying it's unnecessary but having a dialog requires honest intentions. Just like BLM these media hype cases don't help.
In my 20 years of experience I have seen caste discrimination in villages but not in modern offices. People from all creed and caste work together and progress together.
As far as marriages are concerned , how many Europeans marry outside their social class? I would guess not many.
If you try to do a class analysis of Western capitalist societies, pretty much everyone is of the same class, which is the working class and comprises anyone from foodstore clerk to tech lead. There are at the margins different classes, like the owner class, the landlord class and the destitute class, but those account altogether for less than 10% of society, and actually see a lot of class mobility.
So while people tend not to marry in such a way that their income will be drastically reduced, it's not really fair to say that outclass marriage is rare, because it generally isn't, and because western societies are fully proletarized and dominated by the working class, which is actually a good thing in many ways.
Or maybe it was because of the exceptional brutality of the crime itself, and the shocking behaviour of the police - cremating the body at 2:30AM without the family's approval.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/indianexpress.com/article/india...
You can say that the crime has now been politicized, but in a democracy, crimes are always a political matter.
I hope that, if nothing else, it leads to law and order becoming a major election issue.
> Just because there was no outrage for X doesn't meant here shouldn't be outrage for Y.
Yes it is. What would be your thoughts if you are consistently fined but your neighbor is simply ignored for the same offense.
> I hope that, if nothing else, it leads to law and order becoming a major election issue
Ofcourse that is the entire story. There is no desire to change the system. For argument sake this will lead to the change in Government, what will change with that? Bringing back SP and Congress will improve the system? UP under SP was a horrible place. These 2 parties have destroy UP over the years. Land of poets is now land of petty criminals.
And if this is the intention why spare Rajasthan and Kerala? Change their government also for the same reason. We will be changing Government every other day.
Once again I am not against outrage I am against using rape for political gain. But seems like you are ok with it.
I have Indian heritage but it’s not a topic that my relatives enjoy talking about, and I have also observed the myopia you note, in the most readily-available material on the subject. I’d love to read something more scholarly and impassive that you might recommend.
He addresses caste more directly in a later book “Castes of Mind” - but I haven’t read that one either.
But it's really weird to see that there's not overt cultural movements to shed this stuff. Trying to hide the fact that you're a lower caste, in a way, seems to embody the fact that you're a lower caste, shifting it from an outward identity to a hidden identity. Seems like the obvious thing to do is to get ahead of the issue and state that you don't have a caste. Or make up a post modern American one. I get this is hard to do when you're in a position of weakness relative to the other party (like manager's as described). But like, this is clearly a social movement waiting to happen. If someone of equal social standing starts probing you for your caste, you should confront them on it and say you don't subscribe to it, because otherwise you do, on some level, subscribe to it.
I won't pretend it's not much, much easier said than done, but geez. Is there really such a collective power by upper indian castes that you can't bring the issue to the table if you're reasonably well established? Say, a second generation citizen, with a multi racial network?
Racial discrimination between people of color and whites is a frustratingly stupid problem to deal with. Caste discrimination seems, somehow, even dumber, because based on non-obvious, made up facts.
What am I missing?
It takes energy. It brings out aggressive opposition. It may impact people's lives. There needs to be a bigger shift and it can get messy. You can declare yourself free of the stupid discrimination, but then you have to be prepared to be even more publicly discussed and face backlash in private. Most people want to live their lives, not become martyrs.
Also if you say "system X is bad" it's close to certain you're not the person who is at the top of system X. By not identifying yourself, you identify yourself as close to the bottom.
I don't disagree, but it seems like that would happen if you just dodged the questions like the interviewee too. I guess it just sounds to me like getting in the front of the issue would be an effective strategy because a lot of the social stigma around it means the discrimination is supposed to be subtle and unacknowledged.
Okay but where are you really from?
If you don’t know, many non-white people get asked that question all the time. That dance you say you can’t imagine, well, it happens quite frequently.
The dialogue being discussed here is about a trait which is not externally evident. It's also a direct question. Where are you really from is more or less directly asking country of origin pre-family immigration however far back that is, which would equate to outright asking someone what their caste is.
This might be taboo, but every time I see a situation where there are multiple Indians in a reporting chain, I run. If you have an Indian above and below, you will be bypassed on work, undermined, and given absurd directions, almost designed to drive you out. Then there is the case where if an Indian gets into management, they will start filling everything with their friends. Other management positions, they will start fighting to bring in some contractors from some place like Infosys. Its the death knell of the IT division at the company.
Being on a team where you are the only non-Indian means you will be an outcast. You'll not be invited to meetings, they'll talk in their native tongue to exclude you. I've been the only white guy working with Chinese, and they don't do that. I've been in similar situations with Africans / and African Americans and they will welcome you right along.
This is the truth, no matter how politically incorrect it is, and every time you walk into an IT office and there are 80% Indians, that's the reason.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There's entire ecosystem of chat groups of higher-caste Indians in American firms who systematically hire based on it and even go as far as to expose others.
* Indians from India like old ways of addressing superiors. They appreciate if you call a manager Sir. Address him as Dear Sir.
* Religious Brahmins would not tolerate being around a Dalit because it will adversely effect their purity. There are terms for all this. Aversion to Dalits is deeper than culture, it's a religious belief. This might even be protected by religious freedom. Less religious ones I don't think care as much. Very religious Brahmins in general do not get high paying jobs and do not have a lot of power but also would hold the most discriminatory views.
* Indians have a culture of going the extra mile at work. So I think in general they don't appreciate the American view of work.
* Indians from India prefer being around other Indians but I think they also don't understand Americans well and think the American work environment is strange.
* There are a lot of horrible things that happen in India and it's not just one group that does it. There isn't really any one universally accepted victim group there. There are billionaire Dalits.
No more or less than any other group. I’ve seen, and promoted, hard working Indians. I had to fire an Indian that thought his freshly minted MS degree made him too good for any actual work other than spending his 2 hours of non-nap time per day telling others what to do. And I have worked with everything in between. Law of large numbers should come to mind here.
It's not. Religious practices in violation of social duties or subversive of good order are not protected under free exercise of religion (Reynolds v. United States).
In particular, it's a nigh-certainty that discrimination in matters of employment based on caste will be ruled illegal under Title VII (a fortiori, even employer or customer's preference for individuals of a particular _religion_ cannot be taken into account; a fortiori intra-religious preferences will not be taken into account either. This is almost certainly what will happen in California v. Cisco).
lol fuck off. Indian work culture is toxic, nothing more. Most Indians in America think so.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
Edit: this has been a problem for a long time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22643316
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831073
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21794777
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21480287
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21460158
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17434075
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16599066
We usually ban people for less than this. I'm going to cut you some slack because you've also posted some good comments recently, but please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules from now on.
So whenever there are any caste issues, it's always two Hindus involved. Upper caste hindus don't probe the caste of a person if they hear a Christian/Muslim/Buddhist name because they know that it won't exist.
Because of how easy it is to give up caste, lower castes have been doing religious conversions in India in large numbers. The so called upper caste , only make up 30% of Hindu population and if all lower castes were to convert then Hinduism would become a minority in India. To prevent this mass exodus, various states of India have been coming up with anti-conversion laws which make it really hard for people to convert. Though I really don't understand why lower caste dalits in the US continue to stay Hindu, when they could just change their religion and avoid the whole caste discussion altogether.
Perhaps it's just they have strong religious belief in Hinduism? I don't have more than a surface understanding of the religion or how devoted people tend to be, but if I think about the various sects of Christianity, many people of certain sects wouldn't even consider switching to a different sect because they are so invested in their particular flavor of Christianity. And I'd think being Hindu and considering converting to Christianity or Islam would be an even larger jump in belief systems. It's not like switching brands of car.
I guess in my experience (in US culture at least), "just change your religion" is actually a super big deal and is a huge decision that takes an extraordinary reason. Even discrimination doesn't pass that bar for many people.
Besides, let's just be honest - today Hinduism/Hindu is a religion - there is no two way about it - practically and technically! This reasoning, that "oh, it's just a way of life", is often provided by people who try to deflect the argument away from Hindu nationalism, extremism, and fanaticism - especially of today. (This might not be your intention though).
So caste discrimination, while it's not a simple as, say, preferring Christians or opposing Muslims, is inherently religious discrimination?
Link to first random thing I could find
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-last-unt...
While the Indian concept of "caste" (varna/jati/etc) isn't a native part of Christianity, Christians have varied in their attitude to it – some Christians have insisted that the caste system is incompatible with Christianity and that in becoming a Christian you have to give up your caste identity; other Christians have been accepting of the caste system, leading to the establishment of Christian castes such as the "Roman Catholic Brahmins" or "Bammons" – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic_Brahmin
Likewise, regarding Islam, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_among_South_Asian...
The reason this system persists, may be that it’s acceptance facilitates proselytisation.
You might argue that at least there is reduced toxicity in daily interactions at least, but it’s easy to find instances of abusive interactions as well.
As such, this whole topic is becoming a flaming pile of shit with bigoted descriptions of all Brahmins and “upper castes”. Also, I wonder if any here realise that there is no similarity between left-right divisions that you see in the west and whatever it is that exists in India.
The left-liberals in India seek to emphasise caste differences among Hindus in order to uphold, what they call “secular” values. An Indian leftist will never let caste differences, and consequently the discrimination, die. Only by dividing Hindus by caste can the theological leaders of the significant religious minorities of India remain politically relevant.
The non-left-nationalists on the other hand are spending huge amounts of resources to court middle and lower castes, while seeking to isolate and “otherise” and demonise the Muslims and Christians (to some extent).
Then there are the “gurus” who also seek to exploit caste, namely the fact that a significant subset of the population - both lower and upper castes - are fed up of this system, in order to set up cults.
The Dalits, over time, have adopted different approaches to fight discrimination. Initially they tried to give up their Hindu identity completely and move into other religions like Islam and Christianity. Seeing that this approach has largely failed, because caste is too strong in India and the bigotry just follows them. Proponents of this approach are failing in India and are now emigrating to advanced countries.
So Where is the discussion of this complexity in this topic here? All I see are braid-dead, uneducated direct substitution of the western anti-racist struggle/movement onto the Indian context.
Frankly, this is just immigrants from India, who feel left out by BLM, saying “this looks great, and we want in”. In conclusion Americans and westerners will always be ill equipped about caste in India and can only worsen the conditions here. You should realise that this issue is coming up as a reaction to the existing social movements in the US, and only ignore the possibility that cases are being slapped by people trying to hide their own incompetence and inability to do the job, at your own cost.
While there is a necessity to stamp out toxicity, the way forward is to investigate all claims and not just be pressurised to virtue signal.
But labeling all Indians of a particular caste this way and asserting "this is the truth" is just flat out bigotry, no matter how intellectual and self-effacing your comment sounds. Are there people like this? Sure. Are there a lot of them? Maybe? Even probably? There are also people of other races who act in similar discriminatory ways against other groups, often in much more insidious ways. Is it the same? Maybe not, but it doesn't matter: painting an entire ethnic group with the same broad (negative) brush based on your limited anecdotal experience is just not okay.
I have to say, though, if I saw an org chart with a disproportionate number of Indians (relative to nearby & similar companies, or other parts of the same company) I would take that as a warning sign. As you say, in my experience, less political and more open-minded Indian tech workers will tend to be drawn to more diverse workplaces. It just seems unlikely that a whole bunch of cool, modern, forward-thinking Indians just coincidentally happened to fill a whole management chain.
Frankly, I'd think the same thing if a management chain were overly-dominated by any particular group, be they Chinese, white, or, I dunno, UC Berkeley grads. It's a sort of organizational smell. It just seems to happen more often, anecdotally, with Indian management, either just because there are proportionally more of them or because they're used to a more old-school corporate culture.
The language issue is slightly separate factor, of course. Still, insisting that English be the language of business is a pretty huge privilege in favor of native speakers, which can be detrimental to the business when people are forced to communicate in their second language which is slower and less accurate than their native ability.
I worked for an Indian manager in a game studio. I don't know what caste, except that he wasn't Christian or Muslim, probably because he didn't think it worth mentioning. He hired based on demonstrated skill, so we had a diverse group of coworkers. He actively encouraged the group to eat together, arranging meals out with careful consideration for the group's preferences. He was approachable, personable, considerate, friendly and kind.
People are people and stereotypes do not always fit.
> Then there is the case where if an Indian gets into management, they will start > filling everything with their friends. Other management positions, they will start > fighting to bring in some contractors from some place like Infosys.
This was not my experience. I also felt that the overall tone of the comment was negative, so I wanted to share that not everyone has had a negative experience with Indians in management.
I’m very disappointed in how HN views Indians - it seems like they are not treated as other minorities in America, and aren’t afforded the advantages of being white in America either. Instead a different standard is used against them, labeling standard professional practices with ugly terms. I wonder if the HN crowd also regards other Asian coworkers similarly.
I'm glad these topics are brought up to the surface and being discussed, because the strategy of voting with your feet is no longer an effective one, given the proliferation of Indian management across the industry.
It never quite made sense to me why non-American Indians (or any other foreigners, for that matter) are allowed to manage Americans, unless of course company itself is Indian or foreign to begin with.
Managing people is an inherently cultural and people-oriented job (and it's NOT an easy job, with consequences cascading well beyond one's tenure). Foreigners are very unlikely to hold enough of the same values as their team as to be qualified to be the manager. The exception here are folks who have already become fully Americanized, in which case there wouldn't be the kind of problematic behaviors you described above.
It's the same reason why new immigrants to a country don't go straight into becoming MPs and Presidents, regardless of their backgrounds and qualifications.
I don't think it's a good idea in the first place, but it doesn't even work, because it tends to crush weaker cultures while only preserving the more resistant ones: Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, the current form of Han-centric ethno-nationalism promoted by the Chinese Communist Party, etc.
I really think we need to do globalization in a different way: free trade between nations, but mostly ethnically homogeneous nations, as it used to be until the 1970s/1980s.
Ironically, you, with your wish that foreigners would just be straight-up banned from management, have very different values to the average American.
This is also bigotry.
But I should agree that the people who come to become managers are likely to have the attitude that favours nepotism. These people are not interested in what they are doing. They just want to be a manager.
Your first paragraph is very poorly put generalisation. As a resident non-upper caste Hindu Indian I couldn't disagree more. While lower caste and Muslim oppression has skyrocketed in India since 2014 (esp. among low income groups of society), this is far from true in professional setups especially in the generalised way you've put it.
> But the higher castes are extremely insular, and treat anyone of any race poorly.
This is just untrue!
> This might be taboo, but every time I see a situation where there are multiple Indians in a reporting chain, I run.
I have never worked abroad/in the west (other than short stints in SK/JP) so I can't comment on what you've said directly. But coincidentally most of my friends (different caste groups) who work in the USA (or even EU) avoid this as well - but because of some other reason. Work culture - as in timings, out of work hour calls and forced unreasonable expectations. They know that (and I agree) work-life balance will be shitty in a team full of Indians up, down, and around.
Hell, years ago I got an MS accept from MSU but I ran away seeing pretty much the entire CS department manufactured in India and China - PhD scholars, profs - all of them (I had applied w/o checking that). Yes, is this another generalisation but to be honest that's how I felt at that time. Apologies if it came across as offensive.
Coming to the cast issues, there was a post here last week on the same topic. I extended the discussion to a WhatsApp group of 70+ colleagues/friends who come from different backgrounds. I wanted to validate if I am the odd one, who has almost never observed cast based issues either. After two days of long discussion, we came to a conclusion that we tend to show more affinity to the people who speak our native language or/and come from same regional roots, than our cast and religion.
Not denying that that the later doesn't exist at all, I feel this whole topic is too exaggerated.
Disclaimer: My experience is limited to 20 years of while collar profession (only).
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Whenever you are very surprised during promotions the reason is always the manager is a brahmin. No matter how friendly, i never want my manager to be brahmin, but it not possible always.
India is struggling hard to get rid of this menace introduced during colonial era. We have reservation in education, government jobs, and politics to bring backwards at par. Almost 50% of seats in education and government jobs falls under this category. Seat are also reserved into politics.
But the the irony of India is that caste as a system was introduced by European. Word caste itself is of Portuguese origin. Here is a quick read.[1]
All mature societies need skill based division of labour. India had Varna based system which meant society needs four classes of people to run smoothly. These weren't hard classes you were enforced in. People changes their classes as they changes profession. For example Rishi Vishmamitra was a born warrior but later on he turned into a academic. Here is a famous shloka from [2]
<quote>
Meaning: In Vedic culture by birth everyone is Sudra(lower caste), by accepting Samskara (Purificatory process) one becomes a Dvija(Twice Born), By study of Veda one becomes Vipra, Knower of Brahman is Brahmana. It means a true brahmin has the divine vision, knowledge and powers.Sloka means everybody is born a Sudrah. One who follows the right samskaras has a second birth, one who reads the vedas and understands them becomes a wise man and one who realises the brahma or the source of creation becomes a Brahman. Those seven mind born Rishis of Brahma are real Brahmins ancestors- parents of humen.
</quote>
In brief, all knowledge work was supposed to be handled by academic class Brahmins. Being born in a Brahmins family wasn't enough to get you into academics though. If you became a warrior you will be called kshatriya. Similary business class vaishya, and Shudras class existed to take care of rest of the social functions and creative endeavours. Profession like engineering, arts, temple building, city planning were all done by the 4th class.
I would argue this isn't any different from today. In order to become professor or researcher(Brahmin) you need a qualification. In order to become a soldier you need to join army. Entrepreneurs and business people drive the world of commerce. Similarly rest of the professions exist too.
Colonial Europeans turned this system into rigid caste based system. which slowly changed over to rigid system as society went into preservation mode as noted by dilippkumar in a comment.
India was the only society without slavery as noted by various travellers. Until English colonial forces destroyed it systematically, India had an education system in which major beneficiary were the so called lower caste of today. Here is another short summary with further references.[3]
[1] https://scroll.in/article/882736/caste-system-in-india-has-i...
[2] https://qr.ae/pN4tBC (Skanda Purana Vol.18 Book VI , Nagar Kanda , Chapter 239 , Verse 31-34)
[3] http://www.indianscience.org/essays/DHARAMPALINTRODUCTION(Pa...
“Caste” is an English pejorative used to describe a system in India that was largely in place for economic division of labor, stable passage of knowledge/skills generationally, and other cultural reasons. It wasn’t made for discrimination or classist reasons, but ignorant casual racists (many of whom are posting here) are painting that picture based on very recent history. It’s important to remember that India was the victim of divide and conquer colonialism. “Caste” as a discriminatory concept is a very modern issue, against a background of thousands of years of history.
Understanding this topic in depth and with clarity, rather than in typical Western tones, is exactly what is demanded when people fight for “decolonization” in Western academia. And yet no one here seems to want to decolonize their own perceptions and comments.
You were not "merely stating the origins of [the] caste system." You justified it, by stating that "all mature societies need division of labor." Firstly, that is a very vague claim, and secondly, you neglected to explain why on Earth that "division of labor" should be hereditary.
My other comment quotes shloka from Hindu text clearly saying everyone is born lower class unless they earn their place.
How is that unfair?
> Profession like engineering, arts, temple building, city planning were all done by the 4th class.
What's the use of this "class system" if one class covers such a broad area? Isn't it so broad as to be useless?
> clearly saying everyone is born lower class unless they earn their place.
Was this ever true in practice? It's definitely not true in the present, and I find it hard to believe that parents were ever so enlightened as to compel their children to "earn their place" through such struggle.
Hinduism is evolutionary in nature. It anticipated emergence of new profession as society progressed ahead with time . Having said that first three classes were fixed in terms of duties of education, defence , and business. They were responsible for providing stable environment for rest of the professions to bloom and evolve. That why last class wasn't fixed. It is impossible to predict emerging professions anyways.
Moreover The Varna system was merely a loose way of classifying the society. These weren't categories you have to live your entire life. Many people moved up and down. Vishwamitra was a king who turned into a sage as an example. There is a long list of such cases.[1]
> Was this ever true in practice?
Yes to a large extent. Please read comment of dilippkumar quoting from the books describing practices of pre-conial India.
If you have time please read Bhagwad Gita for an introduction to Hindu philosophical system. Many Westerns like Bethovan, Robert Oppenheimer, Thoreau have drawn inspiration from it. Remember this book was written 5000 or perhaps before that. Only a stable and developed society would've thought about these ideas in such details I would argue.
[1] http://www.hindupedia.com/en/%C5%9Audra_Hindu_saints
The BBC seems to believe that the caste system is 3000 years old.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-35650616
https://news.ycombinator.com/upvoted?id=drieddust&comments=t
I don't believe the British introduced the caste system in its current form (division of importance) to India - more likely it was a very normal evolution during the phase just before the Mughals took India over. Having huge inequality weakens countries and allows people to target oppressed demographics.
The sadness of India being unable to get rid of the system now is that it leaves us open to being attacked again for such a stupid reason when Vedic/Hindu scripture doesn't condone this.
And this is what is happening in the West and especially in the US now. We don't have the caste system in the West per-se, but we've left many people behind. This has become our weakness as they can be easily provoked and guided elsewhere, away from our founding principles. I can only imagine how gleeful enemies of the West feel when they see what we've done to ourselves and how easy we've become to manipulate.
I didn't downvote your comment but I will venture a guess.
It sounds like you are condoning and/or possibly endorsing the caste system. If you say "all mature societies need division of labor" does that mean you believe that everybody should be pigeonholed into a particular occupation forever?
It seems like there is a bigger point you are trying to makie but you need to write a little more to make it clear. Some of your spelling and formatting could be improved as well. It is strange but you can make a really excellent point but if it is poorly formatted or you have spelling mistakes, people will downvote you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24552047
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083
Also these, which have dozens of comments but not hundreds:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24555492
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23798922
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24065132
If Brahmins can be identified by wearing a white-thread – do any non-Brahmins ever try to pass as Brahmin by donning a white thread for themselves?
Caste is essentially the same as feudalism, but unlike other regions of the world where feudalism was a societal concept, it became a religious one in India. Buddhism for example is an Indian religion but Buddha was explicitly against the concept of caste-by-birth. Abrahamic religions are also devoid of the concept of caste.
So whenever there are any caste issues, it's always two Hindus involved. Upper caste hindus don't probe the caste of a person if they hear a Christian/Muslim/Buddhist name because they know that it won't exist.
Because of how easy it is to give up caste, lower castes have been doing religious conversions in India in large numbers. The so called upper caste , only make up 30% of Hindu population and if all lower castes were to convert then Hinduism would become a minority in India. To prevent this mass exodus, various states of India have been coming up with anti-conversion laws which make it really hard for people to convert. Though I really don't understand why lower caste dalits in the US continue to stay Hindu, when they could just change their religion and avoid the whole caste discussion altogether.
(I am not calling out North Indians. Keralites can make out my caste/denomination from my name)