Do you have the right to be left alone where you live?
Do you have the right to tilt at the windmills and be a bit of a contrarion kook?
Do you have the right to, you know, march to the beat of your own drum?
Do you feel like the society you live in values that right?
The right to be an individual.
It creates your fair share of lone wolf crazies, occasionally dangerous ones. But it doesn’t create as many bloodthirsty mobs, which are far more dangerous than even your worst lone wolf terrorist.
Dangerous individuals are ultimately much, much easier to contain from doing gratuitous mass harm than dangerous mobs are; Especially dangerous mobs from that society’s majoritarian community.
No matter where you live, this is true.
I’m beginning to cherish individualism – with all of its drawbacks and problems – for creating a social soil that organically resists fascism.
(I think my next post should be titled “Confessions of an Ex-Communist”)
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#1 ENGLISH, ENGLISH, ENGLISH. Oh, and did I mention ENGLISH! The anglosphere (whether inside or outside the subcontinent) is your primary escape route. LEARN THE LANGUAGE AND TRY YOUR BEST TO MAKE IT ONE OF YOUR PRIMARY LANGUAGES.
#2 Have PLANS (from A all the way to Z if necessary). You have to plot and plan your way out. Is it as an international student or an international worker (really the two main legal routes)? Or do your circumstances mean you might have to utilize extra legal measures? Regardless, be prepared for missteps, corrections, hurdles, and obstacles.
#3 SAVE MONEY! Starting right now. You’re going to need money. There’s no way around it. Scrounge and save as much as possible.
#4 Utilize any and all resources at your disposal to leave and get settled. Aid, charity, grants, good samaritans, and more. Set aside your ego and keep your eyes on the prize.
#5 Pick up skills for jobs that have shortages right now in safer, wealthier countries. Tech, manufacturing, health (huge shortages!), education, and more…HUSTLE, HUSTLE, HUSTLE.
Finally… Once you successfully make it out and get settled in a safe foreign land, don’t forget to pay it forward and back.
Ghadar. Now.
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Comment threads, especially unmoderated ones, under articles, YouTube videos and so forth provide me with an unending source of sociological empirics to study.
And it feels to me like we’re seeing misogyny’s last stand.
It’ll be a while. Places like India are violently misogynistic with public spillover. Places like America are silently misogynistic with alienated spillover.
(And for the record, currently I’ll take America and the West any day, but it’s not as rosy as dumb white nationalists think it is… it’s just better in comparison to sexist hellholes like India.)
Regardless of differences in scale and severity, the porn-addled, sex-obsessed imbeciles of the global manosphere aren’t dying out any time soon…
But they will soon enough.
This inexplicable and hateful objectification of women that exists in so many men will slowly wither away.
Because it’s not who we are as a species. Forget the morons spouting alpha male gibberish. We are a thriving species because of nurture not conquer. We didn’t thrive by being rapey scum. We thrived by attaching importance to caring across blood lines and gender lines, giving a chance for us to have the longest childhoods of any species on the planet.
Misogyny is neither in our DNA nor is it a rational, intelligent way of being. It’s a multi-millennia aberration of humanity that I believe is down to it’s last few centuries of gasping madness.
Misogyny has no chance of surviving, but it will cause a lot of pain and anguish before finally withering away to nothing.
It would however be nice to mitigate the damage as much as possible before it dies out…or maybe accelerate its demise.
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This piece is great, desperately needed, and a rarity in the current cultural and intellectual landscape in India. When I compare a list like this to the plethora of white allieship works in the US, it’s sobering to realize just how entrenched casteism is in India vs racism in the US; 5000 years older in it’s historical structures, and thus far more entrenched in its current manifestations.
Ghadar.
Now.
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The above map was provided by a certain Allice Hunter. It is a map of the Indian diaspora, darker the place, the more there are of us, the largest diaspora in the world if anyone is wondering (no prizes for guessing where India is). These people are often referred to as NRIs or non-resident Indians. I am one such person, and I’m coming to terms with that identity.
The above map is also a map of global Indian privilege, which is (as most things Indian are) guided excruciatingly obviously by historical caste privilege.
Now, as I try to grapple with the overriding fact that randomness guides so much of where we exist, who we are, and what we do – as living beings from a galactic, cosmic perspective that is – it leads me to smaller reflections around the way class and privilege operate within the microcosm of our human societies.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that whatever I have in terms of material wellbeing and social security is in no small part because I had the random, dumb luck to be born a privileged as fuck brahmin boy, in a patriarchal Hindu society.
For instance, I just learnt at the age of 41 that the ethno-linguistic sub-community I come from (Tamil Brahmins) is less than 2 million. This is not a poor community globally and let me tell you, I thought the number would be much larger. My fellow Tam Brams have garnered a lot of economic, educational, and political clout all across the globe. Indeed, not unlike sections of the Jewish community, the Tamil Brahmin community could be thought of as the “Ashkenazim of India” – at least according to Sadanand Dhume in an article praising the community as an “overachieving” one akin to their Jewish comparatives.
This is praise that your average Tam Bram is, of course, happy to wallow in. Not unlike the self-praise any community profers on itself.
Now, Tam Brams are about 0.15% of the Indian population (not fifteen percent, but a fifteenth of a fucking percentage point). Hell, the entire caste of brahmins constitute less than 4% of India’s population, distributed all over India. And yet, they are sensationally over-represented among the most privileged sections of the NRI community, which in and of itself can count itself lucky to be “NR” compared to the hundreds of millions who sweat and toil in the motherland – whose backs we have spring boarded off to foreign lands for opportunity and fortune; Foreign lands where we can conveniently erase the oppression from which we have benefited, and continue to benefit, from. And make no mistake about it, the only reason we are in these foreign lands, leading materially better lives than 99% of India, is because we come from families that managed to hoard land, education, or both, in order to get us there. We do the same for our kids so they can become elected leaders and captains of industry in those foreign lands that we happily integrate into, while trumpeting the great “culture” and “spirituality” of the land we just escaped. (Just so everyone is clear I ain’t knocking the rationale, just the inequality of access to a better life, is all.)
In any case, as a way of dealing with the self-hatred I’m finding myself mired in, I’ve decided to become a fifth column windmill tilter, the anti-brahmin brahmin, invoking my fifteen year old self who flushed his poonal down the toilet (I only did the fucking ceremony to make my parents happy and I wish I had the spine at that time to say no).
This blog will have to do for now, until some other platform makes itself available.
To that end, beyond ranting and raving, I wish to deconstruct a fascinating piece by mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik, where he lays out the history and origins of caste hierarchies.
He starts with this pointed observation (and this really should be read in full by any outsider who has interacted with Indians describing their understanding of the caste system):
“Many people say that India’s caste system is simply a rational division of labour to promote efficiency and effectiveness. Those who say this usually associate themselves with the top two tiers (Brahmin and Kshatriya), less commonly with the third tier (Vaishya) and hardly any with the fourth tier (Shudra). If anyone says I am proud to be a Shudra, it is more from a sense of rebellion than wisdom or affection. And if people are proud to be Brahmin and Kshatriya, it has more to do with the desire to be dominant and less to do with wisdom or affection.”
Word for word, this is true. The Brahmin-Baniya-Kshatriya (i.e. Savarna) classes of India and the diaspora replicate this behavior.
Indeed, these same people, while abroad and gleefully wallowing in model minority status, will benevolently stand in solidarity with minorities in those countries or even far out struggles like Palestine (as was my, ultimately hypocritical, coping mechanism); All while fully cognizant that their own privileges were granted through millennia upon millennia of caste oppression.
And those privileges are very real, mind you.
As Pattanaik says:
“Vedas do speak of a diverse society. The dominant members of society, the Brahmins, the land-owners, the rich and the powerful, turned this concept of diversity into a hierarchical society. They did it using the Dharmashastras. In the Dharmashastras, including Manusmriti, the Brahmin jatis mapped themselves to Brahmin varna. They were not interested in mapping the thousands of other jatis.“
This is older than any other current structure of classism and racism mind you. Older than any of the various Abrahamic religions’ hierarchies of generational, indentured labor.
Vedic casteism might just be one of the original forms of patriarchy and social hierarchies. The following two paragraphs where Pattanaik deconstructs the system, highlight just how ancient these practices are:
“The chatur-varna system or the four-fold division of society was the hallmark of Vedic society. But it is completely theoretical, probably based on “aptitude” rather than “birth” but one is not entirely sure. The four tiers were – transmitters of Vedic lore (the Brahmins), those who controlled the land (the Kshatriyas), those who controlled the markets (the Vaishyas) and the service-providers (the Shudras).
In practice, Indian society has long been divided into jatis. There are thousands of jatis, as against four varnas. When people say caste, they are referring to a European term used to explain jati, not varna. We often confuse the two. Jati was an economic-political unit, based on vocation. You inherited your jati from your father. Jati was established by a relatively simple idea called “roti-beti”: you ate with members of your own jati, and you married a boy or girl from your own jati. A jati functioned like a tribe. Just as inter-tribe marriage is not permitted, inter-jati marriage was not permitted. Crossing jati lines could lead to violence.“
This continues to this day. Do not ever let any members of the hitherto ruling castes in India or the diaspora fool you into thinking otherwise.
But here’s the kicker. They genuinely think they’re better than you. The same way fundamentalist Muslims, Christians, Jews, Sikhs, or adherents of any other religious ideology think they’re better than everyone else, these fundamentalist Hindus think they’re better than everyone. As someone with deep insider knowledge, I can assert this to be true and then some. The stories, lifestyles, and narratives I grew up with as a member of one of the most privileged castes in India should make any genuinely progressive, thinking human being shudder with indignation.
Pattanaik explains why:
“Every society in the world has economic and political hierarchies. What makes the jati system unique is the hierarchy of purity. Some service-providers were deemed “dirty” and denied access to the village well and even human dignity. This is the worst aspect of the caste system, something that is often denied by apologists.“
This is the kicker. The function of purity (with patriarchal guardrails).
All religious ideologies have it.
But it takes on a whole new sense of geographic contiguity and temporal scale with Hinduism in India.
It must be dismantled and rendered to the trash heap of history.
love liberation struggle 
