Indians wondered how I, as an outsider from a completely different culture, was able to distinguish them so quickly. I spoke none of the Indian languages, knew nothing of the jatis, and was in no position to query anyone as to the section of village from which they came or recognize early the surnames that conveyed one’s place in the caste system.
I noticed, first, upper-caste people tended to be lighter in complexion and sharper in features, though that is not an ironclad indicator. Secondly, I noticed that they were more likely to speak English with British diction, although that could be a sign of education and class as much as caste hierarchy. More revealingly and more consistently, I began to be able to distinguish people from their bearing and demeanor, in accord with the universal script of caste. It was no accident that my caste radar worked more efficiently when there was a group of people interacting among themselves. Caste is, in a way, a performance, and I could detect the caste positions of people in a group but not necessarily a single Indian by himself or herself. “There is never caste,” the Dalit leader Ambedkar once said. “Only castes.”
And so, at gatherings of Indians of different castes, I could see that the upper-caste people took positions of authority, were forthright, at ease with being in charge, correcting and talking over the lower-caste people. It echoed a similar dynamic in the United States, an expectation that an upper-caste person must assert superiority of knowledge and intellect in all things, having been socialized to be first and to be central, a pressure to be right and the need to remind the lower-caste person, subtly or not, of their historic, cultural, spatial, and familial inferiority.
At a panel or seminar, they were often the ones leading the discussion or doing most of the talking. They tended to speak more formally, giving direction, heads held high. On the other hand, the Dalits, as if trained not to bring attention to themselves, sat in the shadows, on the periphery at a conference seminar, asking few questions, daring not, it seemed, to intrude upon an upper-caste domain or conversation even if the discussion was about them, which in fact it was.
Even in the rarefied space of a scholarly presentation, when an upper-caste person was correcting a lower-caste person, the Dalit listened and took their admonishment without questioning, head often down or nodding that, yes, you are correct, I will go back now and do what you have said. I winced as I watched people talk down to scholars from the subordinate caste in an open forum.
In India, it was Dalits who gravitated toward me like long-lost relatives, surrounding me and propping themselves on a sofa near me for an impromptu subordinate-caste tête-à-tête. I discovered that they wanted to hear from me, or, I should say, commune with someone they recognized as a kindred spirit who shared a common condition. “We read James Baldwin and Toni Morrison because they speak to our experiences,” a Dalit scholar said to me. “They help us in our plight.”
I was standing during a lunch break at a conference in Delhi. A Dalit scholar and I were communing about our kindred perspectives when an upper-caste woman walked up and broke into the conversation to tell the Dalit woman what she should have included in her presentation, a point that she missed and which she would do well to include the next time.
The upper-caste woman interrupted us with a sense of entitlement, without excusing herself for breaking in, disregarding the conversation in progress, disregarding me, the person with whom the Dalit woman was talking, as if whatever we were saying could wait. She chided the Dalit scholar with an air of condescension and superiority and proceeded to instruct the Dalit scholar on the Dalit behavior that the Dalit scholar had researched and written about. She castigated her in front of me, a complete stranger to both of them. I was there on a mission of my own, and an upper-caste woman was making herself the center of someone else’s conversation and was keeping me from my task.
It evoked a convention of the American caste system that often places the word of a dominant-caste person above the word of a subordinate-caste person even in matters that the subordinated person would be more likely to know about. For most of American history, African-Americans were not permitted to sit on juries, for example, or to testify against a white person. Even in more recent times, accusations of racial discrimination often carry more weight if a dominant-caste person vouches for it.
Now, on the other side of the world, a dominant-caste woman in India was presuming the same privilege in a parallel universe. In American social justice circles, her castigation of the Dalit woman would be seen as a kind of Brahmin-splaining, as with mansplaining and whitesplaining—a dominant-caste person lecturing a subordinate-caste person about something on which the subordinate-caste person may, in fact, be an authority.
When the upper-caste woman left after making her points, it was hard to get our footing again. She had jarred us from our parallel caste communing. I asked the Dalit woman if she knew the woman who had just interrupted us, because she had spoken with such familiarity and comfort. “No,” the Dalit scholar said. “You see, that is what happens. She just let me know that she was upper caste and above me.”
* * *
——
Though they may not recognize it on a conscious level, dominant-caste Americans often show nearly as much curiosity about the ethnic, and thus caste, origins of their fellow Americans as do people in India. When Americans seek to locate themselves in the hierarchy, the line of inquiry may be more subtle and may not have the same life-or-death consequences as in India. But it is there.
They will question a person whose race is ambiguous until they are satisfied of an origin. If descended from western Europe, they might query an Italian-American about their roots—what part of Italy, north or south, countryside or city—out of genuine interest or because they have visited or wish to, but also perhaps to locate them in the southern European hierarchy. If a person is part Irish and part Czech, they might emphasize, upon meeting someone, the Irish grandfather rather than the Czech grandmother. A white person might describe him- or herself as a mutt or as a “Heinz 57,” which handily obscures lineage outside of northwestern Europe.
The old eugenics hierarchy of presumed value still lurks beneath the surface. A woman whose grandparents immigrated from Poland might say to an Irish-American—whose status is perceived as higher than hers—that they came from Austria (justifying it to herself by recalling the shifting borders in the twentieth century). But the same woman might “admit” that they came from Poland to an African-American of presumed lower rank, whom she had no need to impress, her higher status secure and understood.
Not long ago, in Boston and Chicago and Cleveland, people spoke of “white ethnics” from southern and eastern Europe as political voting blocs. They distinguished the “lace-curtain Irish” from the “shanty Irish.” Once, at the end of a meeting in the Northeast a few years ago, a young white assistant in a room with black professionals was asked the routine question of how her name was spelled, which could have been Kathryn, Catherine, Katherine, or maybe Katharine. She straightened her back and answered pertly, “The English spelling,” which seemed no answer at all and a curious bid to set herself apart from everyone else in the room, to pull rank with Anglo-Saxony, which no actual Anglo-Saxon would need to do. I thought to myself, And exactly what spelling would that be?
Three white women were once catching up over dinner about people they had known for years, their conversation flowing along caste lines beyond conscious awareness. One woman, of Irish descent, brought up someone whose family, she pointed out, had arrived from Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. This prompted a second woman to chime in that her family had come from Germany earlier. They arrived in the 1860s. The third woman brought up someone who had an unusual last name. The other two immediately asked its origin. “Is it German?” “No, Danish,” came the answer. They moved on to another acquaintance. “Isn’t his wife Spanish?” one woman asked another. “Oh, she’s from a country in South America,�
� another said, “like Colombia or Venezuela.”
The conversation turned to the third woman and the strawberry-colored hair of some of her relatives. The German-American woman said they looked Irish.
“No,” the third woman said. “We’re Nordic.”
The other two, the Irish-American and the German-American, fell silent. The conversation paused. Somehow everyone in the room realized the power of the word Nordic in all of its ambiguous specificity, ambiguous because it’s not a country, specific in that it is language inherited from early twentieth-century eugenics, passed down through culture and lore. No one asked which country her family had come from—Sweden? Norway? Finland? Iceland?—or when they had arrived. If one was Nordic, it did not matter.
Nordic was the kind of label that in earlier decades preceded the word stock, as with Alpine stock or Iberic stock, on a now-debunked scale of European “races.” Nordics and Anglo-Saxons were the two groups that had always been welcome in America. Nordic was what the drafters of the 1924 immigration law coveted. Nordic had inspired an entire ideology, Nordicism, which declared Nordics the most superior of all the Aryans. Nordic was the region of Europe on which the forty-fifth president of the United States seemed fixated nearly a century after the eugenics movement and whose people he wished would immigrate to America instead of Mexicans, Muslims, or Haitians.
The word shut down conversation momentarily. Nordic has long been at the top of the hierarchy. And after all these decades, it still trumped everyone in the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The German Girl with the Dark, Wavy Hair
There came a time during World War II that most every Jewish resident had vanished from German life. They were abducted or forced underground, and their absence left a vacuum and a paranoia among the Aryans who remained. Without a scapegoat to look down upon, the people had only themselves to regard and to distinguish, one from the other, and they scanned their countrymen for someone else to be better than.
The fixation on purity had put everyone on high alert, and, in the north of the country, in a village near Hanover, someone made a passing remark to a young German girl, raising suspicions about her appearance and, by extension, her lineage, and thus her worth.
The air was dense with nervous surveillance, a hunting hyperawareness of the least sign of difference. People had noticed that the girl’s hair was darker than most, closer to that of Iberians to the south of them than to many Germans. Of course, the Führer himself had pitch-dark hair, and, for this, dark-haired Germans could console themselves if they happened to have this trait in common with their leader. But his hair was bristle straight, and on this score, too, the German girl near Hanover strayed from Aryan convention.
People thought it curious that this girl from a solid German family looked, to them, as if she could be from the Middle East, that she looked, as best they could tell from their limited knowledge, Persian. It was not clear that villagers had actually known any Persians, but the idea somehow got embedded in their minds. Did the family have any Persian blood or the blood of people from that part of the world in their background? More ominously, and implied if not said outright, any Jewish blood?
People noticed, and took the time to comment, that her hair curved in waves, fell in dark ripples rather than the flaxen silk that flowed straight down the backs of many Aryan girls. Not only that, people noticed that her skin was perceptibly if ever so slightly darker than that of many Germans, leaning golden and olive, one might say, rather than ivory and alabaster like the people around her, even those in her own family, as if a buried trait had somehow surfaced in her.
These are the minute distinctions that can take on greater significance when there are fewer distinctions to make. Under the Nazis, these distinctions carried graver consequences than idle chatter. This was an explosive observation at a time when Reich citizens were under threat to live up to Aryan ideals in order to survive.
The comments, or rather, in that era, accusations, rattled the German teenager. And so she went to a mirror with a measuring tape and measured the width and length of her eyes, her forehead and nose to see if they were within some standard that people spoke of in the era of eugenics and Aryan conformity. She had pictures taken of herself gauging the features of her face to find some reassurance beyond her hair and skin.
The mere mention of perceived deviations from the Aryan standard brought unwanted, potentially dangerous scrutiny. As it was, Germans knew to have a “racial passport” on hand in the event that their Aryan status came into question. Even priests and nuns were arrested after a Jewish ancestor was uncovered.
The family grew concerned enough to make a discreet search into their family tree. Genealogists did brisk business in the Third Reich. Germans combed family Bibles and church records and government offices in case they were called upon to defend their origins. So, before they could be further accused, the family went back three generations to see for themselves if something other than Aryan blood had somehow slipped into their veins, some unwelcome intruder that a forebear might have adored but whose presence was now cause for shame.
The family happened to have found themselves in the clear and maintained their status as good Germans. The girl with the dark, wavy hair survived the war. She married and had children and grandchildren but spoke little of the Reich or the war that had defined her adolescence.
Decades later, a granddaughter would find a photograph of her. It shows a teenage girl holding a measuring tape to her face, a relic of the paranoia of the dominant caste. Even the favored ones were diminished and driven to fear in the shadow of supposed perfection.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Stockholm Syndrome and the Survival of the Subordinate Caste
Over the centuries, people at the margins have had to study those at the center of power, learn their invisible codes and boundaries, commit to memory the protocols and idiosyncrasies, because their survival depends upon knowing them as well as if not better than their own dreams and wishes. From the sidelines, they learn to be watchful of the needs and tempers of the dominant caste. They decode how those in power are getting along with one another or not, who is gaining or losing favor, as women historically have watched their men, or as a child watches for signs of discord in their parents’ marriage, intertwined as they are with those who are in charge of the household.
They must develop powers of perception if they are to navigate from below.
“Knowledge without wisdom is adequate for the powerful,” wrote the sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, “but wisdom is essential to the survival of the subordinate.”
To thrive, they must somehow adjust themselves to the expectations of the dominant caste, to play out their role upon the stage, and, while they may choose not to fully submit, they find that things go easier for them if they default to the script handed down through the ages, if they accept their assignment of serving and entertaining, comforting and consoling, forgiving any trespass without expectation of atonement from their trespassers.
“The first moral duty is resignation and acceptance,” wrote the social anthropologist Edmund Leach of the expected behavior of the lowest caste in India. “The individual gains personal merit by fulfilling the tasks which are proper to the station into which he has been born….The rewards for virtue will come in the next life.”
The ancient code for the subordinate caste calls upon them to see the world not with their own eyes but as the dominant caste sees it, demands that they extend compassion even when none is forthcoming in exchange, a fusion of dominant and subordinate that brings to mind the Stockholm Syndrome.
Though the syndrome has no universally accepted definition or diagnosis, it is generally seen as a phenomenon of people bonding with those who abuse or hold them hostage. It takes its name from a 1973 bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, where the hostages came to feel empathy for the men who held them captive
during the six-day siege. It is regarded as a survival mechanism in which people must become attuned to the people with power over them and learn to adjust themselves to their expectations to please them.
* * *
——
In the fall of 2019, a Dallas courtroom became a set piece for the display of the interlocking roles and power imbalances of caste. In a rare case in American history, a white former police officer was convicted of killing a black man who had been having ice cream and watching television in his own apartment, an apartment the officer argued she had mistaken for her own. The conviction carried a sentence of up to ninety years. The prosecutor recommended twenty-eight years, the age the victim would have been at the time had the defendant not killed him. In the end, the former officer was sentenced to ten years, with eligibility for parole in five.
The brother of the slain man extended his forgiveness to the dominant-caste woman who had killed his brother, and he hugged her in a scene that went all over the world. As the dominant-caste woman was sobbing over her conviction, the bailiff, a black woman, went over to her and began stroking the blond hair of a woman who had killed an innocent man of the bailiff’s own caste. Had the inverse occurred and a black man taken the life of a white woman under similar circumstances, it is inconceivable that the murder sentence would have been ten years or the felon been hugged and his hair stroked, nor would it be remotely expected.
Many observers in the dominant caste were comforted by the bailiff’s gesture, which they saw as an act of loving, maternal compassion. Many in the subordinate caste saw it as a demeaning fetishization of a dominant-caste woman who was being extended comfort and leniency that are denied African-Americans, who are treated more harshly in an era of mass incarceration and in society over all. Was the bailiff showing empathy for a fellow officer? Was she patting her down, as some thought, and if so, why did she not wear gloves or have the convict stand, and why stroke only her hair? Was the bailiff channeling the convict’s pain, responding to ancient cues to protect the upper caste at all times, thus fulfilling the unspoken role assigned the subordinate caste for generations?
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