HOWDY! my primarily non-Indian audience who may not fully understand caste apartheid in India...if there are Indians in ur country u best believe casteism follows them, so it's good to be informed:
...imagine being on Tumblr on a fine day, and you see the most absurd bio on a blog:
"25 M, Leftist, White and from KKK family, but not a practicing Christian!"
or even better:
"30s, Marxist, anti-racist, descendant of Confederate generals and plantation owners, love antebellum aesthetics"
ya well the Indian diaspora and urban elites, on here and elsewhere, claim to be "leftist/Marxist/anti-caste" but proudly (shamelessly) state in their bios that they're a "Savarna" ~ to the un-initiated, that's not just a benign cultural descriptor but a claim to supremacy by virtue of birth; the term literally means "with varna" or "with caste" which distinguishes them from Dalits and Adivasis who were and still are violently, forcibly placed outside and beneath this feudal system
and WORSE: some openly state their specific feudal subcastes like iyer/iyengar etc in their BIOS (meaning that's among the first things they want u to know about them) while also smugly quoting anti-caste icons and leaders like Babasaheb Ambedkar, Phule, Periyar and so on
...It’s basically like quoting Malcolm X’s most radical speeches while having "Son of a Klansman" in your bio...you CANNOT make it make sense!
I mean, what exactly is the point of identifying yourself as uppercaste anyways?
asking about or telling anyone your upper caste status in a general context is in EXTREMELY poor taste at best, and a violent exclusionary practice at worst!
...you are essentially telling any Dalit or Bahujan person reading ur bio that your "politics" are a game/aesthetic, and you’ll never truly give up the cozy safety and status of your supremacist identity
When a dominant group makes a habit of explicitly declaring their caste status to "acknowledge my privilege and avoid appropriating the struggle of Dalits, Bahujans and Adivasis 🥺" they're shifting the baseline of default safety...
Let's be real about who actually gets to feel safe dropping their caste background into a bio: while a Dalit or Bahujan person might list their identity out of pride and reclamation of dignity, risking dehumanizing stigma, systemic trolling, and digital lynching, a savarna does it casually, shielded entirely by the baseline hegemony
Also something most "savarnas" themselves often don't know: uppercastes are a minority population in India, with only 3-5% of whom are brahmins, yet they're EXTREMELY overrepresented in positions of power and media by design
also, oh my goodness! stating you're iyer/iyengar/rajput/gujrati brahmin etc is next level pathetic and disgusting! it's soooo much worse than saying ur from a KKK/confederate family because the KKK etc simply did not have the persistent millennia-old structural hegemony that Indian caste systems have!
like, the KKK etc are a relatively modern, overt hate groups, and most people recognise them as such. Caste apartheid on the other hand is a deeply normalised, entrenched, systemic, and religiously sanctioned hierarchy that has brutalized people for thousands of years, and continues to do so to this very day!
Putting "Iyengar" or "Savarna" in your bio while aesthetics-shopping for leftist politics is peak cognitive dissonance, one cannot "reclaim" a label that inherently denotes ritual purity and supremacy over other human beings
they do this because, to the "desi" diaspora and urban elites, caste has been repackaged as "quirky cultural heritage" ~ they want the cultural capital of being a "traditional, intellectual" brahmin (the food, music, aesthetics) and they also want the social capital of being a "radical leftist" who reads anti-caste and communist literature..
please be real and humble yourselves y'all! you simply cannot dismantle a system while proudly flashing its highest badge of privilege! If you're quoting Ambedkar or Periyar, the very first thing you should learn is that the annihilation of caste requires shedding caste identity not flaunting it like some vintage accessory
if your "leftism" doesn't include active, uncomfortable renunciation of your own inherited supremacy, your "leftism and anti-casteism" is merely a pathetic shameful cosplay
....BYEEE!