How To Be An Anti-Casteist

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 pattern. And then some people have multiple names.

Is actor Vijay's first name Joseph, Vijay or Joseph Vijay? Just asking.. :)

"felt like" Of course, you'll never know for sure if they meant to find out your caste. That's the point. If they wanted to be explicit about their objective, they could've asked for their caste.

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.

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.

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).