Ajantha Subramanian is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at Harvard University. Her research interests include political economy, political ecology, colonialism and postcoloniality, space, citizenship, South Asia, and the South Asian diaspora.
Her first book “Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India,” chronicles the struggles for resource rights by Catholic fishers on India’s southwestern coast, with a focus on how they have used spatial imaginaries and practices to constitute themselves as political subjects. Her second book, “The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India,” tracks the relationship between meritocracy and democracy in India in order to understand the production of merit as a form of caste property and its implications for democratic transformation.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
HPR: As many individuals of the South Asian diaspora find themselves growing up in Western countries with colonial legacies, what are your thoughts on approaching decolonization at an individual, micro-level? And how do you engage with this process?
Professor Ajantha Subramanian: I think the first issue to contend with is interconnected colonial legacies. The United States certainly is a settler colonial country. South Asia has its own history of colonialism. And for South Asians in the United States, their lives, access to opportunity, and experiences of both privilege and disadvantage have been shaped by both of these histories. I think it’s important to think about decolonization as a structural political process. It’s certainly important for individuals to grapple with their own privileges and disadvantages. But given that colonialism was a structural political phenomenon, decolonization also has to occur at a comparable scale.
So what does that mean for South Asian Americans? I think one of the things that means is that we have to think about ourselves in transnational terms. In the United States, South Asians are a racial minority. And often that’s the framing that is most foregrounded. And in some ways, this makes sense — South Asians experience racial discrimination. They’re part of a society in which whiteness still constitutes the predominant form of privilege. But South Asians are not just racial minorities — they are also members of classes, castes, and genders. Sometimes it’s far more convenient to think in terms of one’s own disadvantage than it is to contend with advantage. And this is where I think caste is especially important. Because even compared to other nodes of the South Asian diaspora, South Asians in the United States are the most highly educated and affluent node of the diaspora. And this is largely because the vast majority of South Asians in the U.S. come from privileged caste backgrounds, and caste has been a form of capital that they’ve been able to leverage both in their taking advantage of opportunities for migration and also in achieving certain economic and professional successes in the U.S.. So, if we want to think about decolonization more broadly, I think we have to think about all of the different aspects of our complex identities.
HPR: How did you begin to criticize the institution of caste, when it is often something that is taken as a given in many circles? How was the awakening of your political consciousness on this subject prompted?
AS: My family is from Tamil Nadu, which is a very caste conscious region. And I don’t mean that simply in terms of collective affiliation. There have been long standing forms of caste rights and politics dating back to the 19th century and even earlier, but the early 20th century political ferment in the region because of the rise of Non-Brahmanism and Dravidianism really made caste a key factor in political life. And so having grown up partly there, and coming from a family that is pretty politically engaged, my education in the history of caste came pretty early, but I think that that’s different from being able to understand one’s own structural location properly. That most profoundly happened for me when I was doing my research.
My first research project was on a lower caste Catholic fishing community in southwestern India. And this was a population that was highly organized politically, so there was a movement in the mid to late 90s against economic globalization. And in the fishery sector, it took the form of opposition to certain World Trade Organization dictates, so I felt a political kinship with this population, because I too subscribe to this critique of economic globalization. But in other respects, I was so out of place, coming from an urban area, coming from a privileged caste and class background. I really had to grapple with my own structural privileges while doing that research. So I think that was the first time that I had to navigate the kind of landscape of caste and class most personally. And then, that continued into my second project, which is on engineering education and the role of caste in advancing certain arguments about meritocracy.
There too, it became very personal, in no small part because I’m at Harvard, where meritocracy is the name of the game. We often all believe, or want to believe that we’re here simply by virtue of our own innate talent. And during that second book about a set of elite engineering colleges in India, I had to really think about whether the forms of assessment, the sort of inbuilt assumptions about who’s intelligent and who’s not, are pervasive at an institution like Harvard. Our sense of who is an obvious fit at Harvard smuggles in assumptions about intelligence. We are constantly trading in these forms of evaluation that hierarchically order people according to intelligence, and all sorts of other things. So I would say that the two book projects were really important for my own kind of awakening to cast privilege particularly.
HPR: You have written about the intersection of caste and meritocracy in India, specifically regarding the IITs. In particular, you have mentioned that the JEE exam favors those with a family background of education, which is a similar critique of the SAT exam in the United States. Do you see any parallels between the push to make college admissions more equitable in the U.S. and criticisms of the JEE-IIT process in India?
AS: Mass examinations are interesting, because they were initially introduced as a way of allowing equal opportunity. They were a departure from earlier forms of assessment, which very explicitly favored a high born elite. But when you look at the outcomes of these mass exams… there are social patterns to these outcomes — certain groups that tend to do well. And they tend to be groups who come from histories of education. Clearly they’re not the corrected metrics that they’re supposed to be.
I think that an admissions process needs to be equitable, not fair. Often people say that these are fair mechanisms, because they bracket history, identity, etc. But I think if you want the admissions processes to be truly equitable, you can’t bracket history and identity like that. Those have to be front and center. You have to be able to think of the applicant as a whole, as somebody who comes from a particular set of circumstances to make the application process equitable. It is difficult, so how does one go about this? And in some ways to make something truly equitable, you have to move away from a notion of all the things that Harvard prizes, like excellence, relativity ranking, and the brand recognition. All of these things which Harvard invests in heavily end up reproducing inequity. So for example, a lottery system could have a pretty radical effect of kind of leveling out. At least the social composition of the student body would look very different. But that would never fly. Because it seems it sort of takes away discretion in some ways. The other possibility is proportional representation — why shouldn’t every institution be a mirror of society? I think one has to be able to imagine radical transformation.
HPR: Do you believe that the “model minority” myth of Asian-American exceptionalism, when it pertains to South Asians, is tied to the same rhetoric of the “IIT brand” that you reference in your work? And if so, how?
AS: The branding project of the IITs was launched in the diaspora, but it definitely has its Indian variant. For the U.S. side of this project, it certainly was a way of underscoring the unique abilities of South Asians. And it was important because it allowed South Asians to stand apart from other racial minorities as a uniquely skilled constituency that was more suited to a certain kind of highly coveted and valued profession. So yes, it was a kind of racial and a class project, in a sense. But I would say it’s also a way of advancing a transnational project.
A lot of the people in the United States who are really committed to elevating the IIT brand and creating this myth of the technological Indian are also involved in politics in India. They’re trying to push certain forms of entrepreneurialism in India, sometimes through the IITs, but often in other ways, as well. Some of them are consultants to the Indian government. And they’re really invested in certain forms of economic and legal transformation that allow for more unfettered foreign investment and more deregulation of public sector industries. It’s both a project with a U.S. specific focus, but it also has a transnational dimension. What does it mean to be a model minority? It means that you are exceptional and that you can be held up as a model for other less successful minorities. And often, your success is pitted against those other minorities in a way that completely obscures the forms of caste and class capital that most of Asian Americans enjoy. Most of us in the United States come from a very different history than Black and Latinx populations. So it’s really important to understand how this category of model minority is being used politically.
HPR: The “model minority” myth often contributes to reticence within South Asian communities on expressing solidarity with various social justice movements. How do you envision we can increase South Asian activism in social justice spaces?
AS: I think there are real generational differences between the migrant generation and the U.S. born generation of South Asians. And there are lots of South Asians of the younger generation that do make common cause with other social justice movements. I think there is a reluctance to think about privilege. There’s an ignorance of caste in particular among U.S. born South Asians, because they haven’t been told about the structural conditions that allowed for their families to migrate and succeed. I think lots of South Asians are aware of their own class privilege and grapple with how to think about that intersection of racial minority status and upper middle class status. But the caste dimension of the story is often invisible. One thing that is really important to do is not to conflate non-whiteness with a lack of structural privilege. This is really important for South Asian Americans, if they want to be productive allies in the fight for social justice.
I think a second is to be willing to recognize the operations of caste in the United States and the parallels between racial and caste privilege. It’s really important to think about what it means to be a minority in the United States in comparison with what it means to be a minority in South Asian countries. India right now has an authoritarian, some would say fascist government, and it’s one that enjoys a huge amount of support among South Asians in the diaspora. So if you want to be allied with social justice movements, it’s important to do that not just here but transnationally, about the scapegoating of minorities and oppressed castes in the subcontinent. And to not fall into the trap of supporting a majoritarian project in an ancestral homeland as an extension of your own racial, national, or religious identity here.
HPR: You recently co-authored an article in The New York Times advocating for making caste a protected legal category in the U.S.. However, this struggle has often been obstructed by an argument that mentioning caste in U.S. law increases consciousness of it and stereotypes South Asians. How do you respond to this?
AS: So this is a very common argument, that drawing attention to casteism or racism reproduces caste and race. This is a kind of spurious argument. One can sort of argue that one is caste blind or race blind, but that doesn’t negate the history of caste and race. In fact, the claim to caste blindness or race blindness is itself an expression of privilege. So this notion that somehow addressing caste discrimination in the United States introduces caste into a society where it doesn’t exist is absurd. And you only have to look at patterns of migration to know how critically important caste is to facilitating transnational mobility. It’s not an accident that the vast majority of South Asian-Americans are from privileged caste backgrounds. So, right there, you see that even if one doesn’t subscribe to a caste identity, one is still a beneficiary of caste privilege. So caste is here, it has been here, and it will stay here. So one has to actually contend with it and not pretend that it doesn’t exist.
And, you know, the idea that somehow people who don’t think of themselves in caste terms will be forced to and that it will lead to a scapegoating of an entire population is also a peculiar argument. The protected category provides a legal basis to address experiences of discrimination. It will also allow for more comprehensive data collection on caste as it’s not a well understood category in the United States. And this is not going to lead to a sense that South Asians are somehow backwards or non modern. The U.S. is a race society. It’s a society that is segmented along all kinds of lines. And caste is yet another of those forms of segmentation. And it’s not one that is reducible to race or class. It has its own logic and sort of patterns that need to be attended to. I think that part of this comes from the view that caste is an embarrassment. But caste is no more of an embarrassment than race is. These are both forms of descent based structures of discrimination that are thoroughly modern. There’s nothing archaic about either of these categories, when they’re not just holdovers from a pre modern or a pre colonial or colonial past. These are institutions that are reproduced through everyday forms of affiliation through marriage, schooling, and more.
So we need to deal with it. Caste is here. It’s obvious from the two legal cases that are making their way through the courts — the case against Cisco and the case against the Hindu trust BAPS. Those are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s clear that there is caste discrimination in the tech sector and caste exploitation in the construction industry. Caste is not something that South Asians left behind in the subcontinent when they migrated.
Photo: Ajantha Subramanian
