Caste Gaze and Mental Justice

(summary of a talk given in 2023)

Caste bias is not just in everyday behaviour and practices, but injected in our very minds. It is there in our memories, in the way we look at others and in the way we look at ourselves.

For example, let us take a simple quiz about the first name that occurs to us about achievers in different fields. What are the first names that come to your mind when we think of - an actor? A political leader? A social leader? An activist? An author? A poet? A journalist? An economic leader? A religious leader? A music composer? A film director? A sports person... Majority of the names that come to mind are men from privileged caste and class backgrounds, followed by women from similar privilege, and if we are fortunate, perhaps a few persons from Dalit or other marginalized communities who have done so much, that their names stuck in our memories despite everything. We can be sure to not think of names of trans persons, or of nomadic or Adivasi persons right at first. This is not only bias but language politics. It inevitably exists more in privileged minds; but is also internalized over generations of hearing casteist and biased messaging even in persons who belong to oppressed communities. This language politics of certain names being remembered and taken, and certain names forgotten and wiped out from memory - has extreme and real life consequences. Such as not being included in government benefits like food and disaster relief, not being considered when planning civic facilities like housing and toilets, and not having their names, contributions, leadership, cultures, and economies mentioned in History.

Caste-biased language politics creates historical loss of community guts and confidence, due to generations and generations of such memory manipulation.

I remember an incident from my childhood. My family lived in a tent on the outskirts of a slum in Mumbai. There was a high-rise building in front of us. There was a fire in this building one day. Everyone snapped into action immediately. Passersby stopped to offer sympathy and help, the fire brigade reached within minutes, and we from the basti rushed to help their people to get down from the windows and to douse the fire as best as we could. Everyone was concerned that they should be safe. After a few days, the rainy season arrived and as every year, there was heavy rains one day. The ground on which some of our houses stood, included my family's tent, was low-lying and all the water from around started collecting there. The land could only take so much, and it collapsed. Our tent also collapsed, all our meagre but hard-earned belongings swept away. I was a child and thought that like the people in the building received help, we too would get help. The fire brigade reached after we tent and slum dwellers had saved ourselves the best we could. Not only did no one come, the people in the building said that we had "come from all over the place" so we deserved it. And, we who had just lost everything except our lives, also thought that they were right and that we deserved it. This is the most painful, that we who are suffering so much pain, have internalized caste bias against ourselves to an extent, to justify inhuman behaviour and thought towards us.

Caste hierarchies are propagated through every institution; in today's age, the media has a major role in this. There is a poem in the Value Education textbook of school children in Maharashtra that goes something like this -

Ram, climb the tree

Shyam, take the fruit

Rama, wash them

Suma, cut them and distribute.

There is obvious gender bias in this poem - where the boys climb the tree and pick the fruits, while girls wash, cut and distribute them. It could have been one boy and one girl doing both the kinds of jobs. If we look more carefully, there is also caste bias in this poem. There is no Abdul, no Mary, and no names signifying Dalit, nomadic or Adivasi children in this poem. This kind of media messaging is not just teaching us bias since childhood, but providing the background, literature, and social sanctioning.

Like there is the male gaze, we also need to beware of the Caste Gaze.

The caste oppressed are blamed for their vulnerable situation. For eg., if a plant is not given anything - no sun, water, soil, or anything else, and then is blamed for stunted growth or for losing its life, it will be thought to be cruel. However, the same is done with humans - denied every basic resource, opportunity and dignity - and then blamed for their situation.

This is criminalization - a cruel injustice which can certainly impact one's mental health. This has been done systematically, where all mediums of narrative and records creation reflect negative aspects of oppressed communities - in administrative data, political language, police records, literature, news, media, films, mythological stories, religious texts, gossip, jokes, comments, social media, school and college text books, and even children's songs and poems.

Let us take the example of the 'birth' of different castes of men from the different parts of Brahma in Hindu mythological and religious texts and stories. It says that Brahmins were born from the mouth of Brahma, Kshatiryas from his arms, Vaishyas from his thighs and Shudras from his feet. Not only is such a myth of the original birth of men brazenly unscientific, but it ridicules and negates the reproductive capacity and labour of women. No man was born from another man called Brahma, but all men (and every human) were and continue to be born of women. Casteist myths are thus also anti-feminist. However, most of the country continues to believe in such myths as justification for discrimination and violence. In light of such beliefs, I often ask, is Caste a Superstition? Another example is the Manusmriti; I will delve into the cruelty of this text in another post, but such baseless, fact-less, unscientific beliefs have been created into the extremely inhuman superstitious system of Caste.

Such kind of narratives over centuries have been successful in wiping away the true histories of grassroot communities, and has instead inserted manipulated narratives and memories that criminalize us, and normalize and sanction discrimination and violence against us. This has mentally prepared us oppressed communities to readily give up our own intellectual property rights - our ideas, languages, words, concepts, practices, beliefs, resources, inventions, arts and crafts, skills and discoveries. Even more painful is that if we are to ask for justice, maximum decision-makers in justice systems - from police and courts to NGOs, education system and governments, belong to oppressor communities. Which means that we are forced to go for justice against oppression, to our oppressors. We have to put in hours and hours of thankless labour to educate our oppressors before we can even think of asking for justice. This is a skewed system from every angle we look at it.

Caste gaze and caste discrimination is ugly; but it has been honed to such an extent that much of it has been made to look glamorous, beautiful and desirable - to even the oppressed. There are many advertisements such as Sharing Wali Diwali - which shows a rich couple who keep back a woman (who works as their domestic help) and her young daughter on the night before Diwali by giving her extra work in their home, while they go to her home in the basti to decorate it, and when the woman and her daughter finally reach home very late, they find her employers inside her house wishing to give her a gift. This advertisement has been made to look visually appealing, pulls at our heartstrings, emotionally manipulates us to think about the 'compassion' and 'giving' nature of the employers. This kind of behaviour in real life too will be appreciated, condoned and even gratitude will be expected of the recipient of this 'compassion'. But if we apply a Rights-based perspective and clearly view the situation, we will soon realize the many problems and violation of rights:

• During Diwali (which is a major festival in India), officer goers expect a bonus and at least a holiday. Why was there no thought of a bonus and/or holiday for the domestic worker?

• There seems to be utter neglect for the Right to Safety during work and travel back home when the woman is expected to work late into the night, especially with her young daughter.

• Creating mental panic by asking her to stay back very late one day before the festival, and then implying that she will not get a holiday even on the actual day - simply to give pleasure to the employers and extract extra 'gratitude' when they were going to give her the holiday anyway, is simply cruel.

• The child being in the house where her mother is working open up many questions around child labour, POCSO Act and others.

• There is utter disregard for the woman's Right to Privacy when her employers enter her home, touch her things, make changes to her house without her permission or prior intimation.

• Lastly, there is no room left for the woman to maintain her dignity and agency. There is no room for her to reject their 'kindness' which she must accept - after having gone through the needless mental panic they created - to satisfy their need to feel like saviours.

All these are connected to the Brahmanical concepts of Paap-Punya (sin-blessing) which the employers seem to be following by trying to earn Punya at the expense of their employee. Even putting forward these thoughts will bring forward a barrage of support for the employers and their 'compassion'. However we must ask ourselves, who has the power to show compassion, and whose power has been taken away that they must receive this compassion whether they want it or not?

It is imperative therefore that we start our own campaign to unearth our true Dalit-Nomadic-Adivasi-Bahujan histories, to find the truth behind our experiences instead of believing in narratives that blame us, hold us responsible, pity us, and make us feel so small that we must take the help of our oppressors. It is important that we understand the systems of caste, Brahmanical patriarchy, texts and belief systems like Manusmriti that are responsible for our mental pain and trauma.

Another way that caste gaze plays out is viewing us only as vulnerable, but not as capable of intellectual leadership. I say that we should challenge this. We are more intellectual than the privileged, because we have much more richness of lived experiences, of solving very challenging problems, of not only surviving but thriving despite everything. How did we manage all this over generations, if we are not intellectuals? For eg., knowledge of Adivasi and Nomadic communities about the environment has been relegated as 'backward' for centuries. We are seeing the results of this today in rampant and devastating climate change. Ignoring indigenous knowledge about the environment has caused irreparable damage to the earth, and yet today, the climate change movement has given little to no space for notable leadership from these communities.

If we analyze any rules, laws, attitudes, thoughts of the 'mainstream', there is very less inclusion of nomadic, adivasi and other grassroot communities' knowledge in these. Such inclusion is imperative, and is only possible by the inclusion of not just their knowledge - but actual inclusion of the creators of this knowledge - that is community representatives - at every decision-making table and platform.

For this, more efforts have to be taken by those who come from privilege - who have benefited from social hierarchies. Those among them who are committed to dismantling discriminative systems need to put in the efforts for constant self reflection and critique - with Constitutional and Mental Justice lens. We all need to ask ourselves whether there is any hatred towards any community. And we need to constantly think about how we can keep moving towards Constitutional commitment.