There’s an old saying in India: “If you move across oceans, you lose all caste.” The dictum is meant to be a presage, a warning to those who seek the riches and adventures of outside worlds and once there, lose their foothold in society, or when returning home, find themselves a stranger in a stranger’s land.
Cross the dark waters and lose all varṇa—lose all indication of status, wealth, social rank, prestige, privilege, and power. Lose the language of home, lose its logic, lose the understanding of supremacy and subordination, lose the sense of right action, lose wrong thought.
When my father moved to the United States in 1973 as a young graduate from engineering school and then married my mother in 1976 and brought her back to New York with him (thus, abruptly halting her graduate studies and what might have been a prosperous career in academia), I like to think, in some sort of unconscious, subversive, maybe even self-destructive way, what my parents were fleeing was not war or communism or difficult financial circumstances or a democracy trying to grow through the stinging shards of post-colonialism, but what they subconsciously were escaping was caste.
To be a Brahmin in India was to acknowledge (if one dared) both your great privilege as keepers of sacred knowledge (as conveyers of grammar, astronomy, mathematics, statecraft, social mores, philosophy, and theories of art and human behavior) across generations, and your incredible complicity in the social violence that is the Indian caste system.
The first acknowledgement celebrated high culture and the triumph of Brahmanism across millennia in the face of challenges from Buddhism, Jainism, Cārvāka materialism, and Bhaktism (all of which sought to dismantle caste), and in the face of Zoroastrianism, Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, and Judaism (which offered South Asians alternative models to achieve enlightenment). The second asked Brahmins to interrogate what was behind their lofty, aspirational, and supposedly innocuous ideal of “knowledge is power.”
* * *
In New Jersey during midsummer, when the sun danced through the trees and poured dappled light in through the windows catching on anything that would shine, including a pair of old disco boots that refracted a cosmos back onto the ceiling, my mother and I sat down to talk about caste and her current and earliest recollections of it.
“What do you think of American caste?” I had asked her as we passed by the light-speckled hallway of my childhood home to share a cup of tea together.
“Oh, I don’t know what to say about American caste,” she said, walking ahead of me in her floral block-printed cotton dress.
“What do you mean?” I asked her as she took the steaming teapot off the heat and began making her own homemade version of afternoon ginger-cha.
“I mean,” she said, shrugging her shoulders, “I was born in India and so I belong to and grew up with the Indian caste system. But I wasn’t born here.” My mother became an American citizen in the 80’s shortly after I was born. “So I’m not sure what I can say about the American caste system.”
In the ginger-black tea, she poured a pinch of sugar and some oat milk for me. She then grabbed her oven mitts and took out a tray of steaming hot siṅāṛās, and looked at me from above the open oven door. “You were born here,” she winked, “so you belong to the American caste system. It’s in your blood.”
When I asked my mother about her earliest memories of caste in India, she told me a story of when she was seven years old and attending the wedding of one of her paternal female cousin’s. My mother was the youngest daughter on her father’s side and the eldest child on her mother’s side (just like me a generation later). My grandfather Jagannath, who came from a large family of lawyers and whose father was a Bengali magistrate in Bihar, was the youngest son among seven siblings. As a result, my mother and her brothers were just infants when many of their much older cousins were teenagers. When my mother attended the wedding of her cousin, who was already in her twenties, the first thing she thought of as she entered the festival hall, which was decorated with garlands of marigolds and jasmine that mixed with the scent of sandalwood and incense in the air, was how lucky she was to be so young and have so many more years of life ahead of her than her much older cousins, many of whom were already off getting married.
The second thing she thought of was the food. In the wedding halls, friends, family, neighbors, acquaintances, shopkeepers, and colleagues from all around Ranchi had gathered to celebrate the newlywed couple and to, most of all, feast. This was the early 1960s and women, both young and middle-aged, sported heavy-kājal cat-eyes with their dark hair piled high in beehives and curled against their cheeks. They wore saris in baby pink taffeta, lime-green brocade silk, and gold-threaded cotton. Some of the cloth sparkled with tiny hand-sewn mirrors. The more modern relatives from Kolkata also sported mop-tops, pixie cuts, and smart salwar-kameez suits in floral pastels and vivid block prints. The young men tried their best to be cool and effortlessly stylish with bright silk shirts, paisley floral ties, and belled trousers with geometric designs sewn into them.
My mother, a young girl then, was just beginning to follow the styles of her older cousins that would later define their generation. The wedding festivities featured family members of all ages. Some of the eldest of those attending were already grandparents and great-grandparents and many of the elders had been born in the late 19th Century and had experienced both world wars, and the Partition of Bengal and Punjab first-hand.
At the wedding feast, on the verandah that wrapped around the outdoor courtyard of the wedding pavilion, the guests sat down on the floor in front of large, deep-green banana leaves. The guests faced one another in long rows that snaked around the large circular verandah. The older female guests in their billowy saris looked like iridescent pearls in a sea of blue suits and white pāñjābis. Young men, women, and children bobbed around them in bright, multi-colored attire. My mother sat near the other children as she watched the waiters come by and serve each guest row by row with a ladle of food. The first waiter gave a ladle full of bright, aromatic basmati rice and a steaming scoop of cholār- ḍāl on the banana leaf plate. Another came to place a slice of spicy mācher jhāl, mustard fish, and a dollop of posta, a Bengali favorite of potatoes and zucchini dressed with a sauce of poppy-seeds, onto the leaf. And yet another waiter came to place some śukto, a bitter-gourd vegetable dish, on the leaf. A variety of achars and sweet chutneys, raitas and oven-baked sweet yogurts, and hand-pressed sandesh decorated the banana leaves next.
With her hands freshly washed, my mother, along with the other children in her corner, dug in. She ate with relish and watched the servers, who wore clothes made of more simple cloth, much of which was turmeric-stained, go around and around the wedding festival hall as they bent to serve the guests seated comfortably on the ground. The specks of blue, green, red, and gray stones caught light on the terrazzo marble floors as the guests sat on beautifully colored tapestry rugs, rattan matts, and cushions that had been placed close to their banana-leaf plates.
Having finished her meal quickly so she could go join the other children in their play, my mother went up to wash her hands at the small gray water-pump covered by vines near the entrance of the courtyard. She washed her hands and looked up to notice a much older woman, in the wedding party, someone her grandmother’s age, shuffle towards her. The old woman wore a billowy white sari dotted with a red border and slightly hobbled as she made her way to the water pump to wash her hands. But just as she was about to reach my mother, a servant, a young woman in a yellow and black plaid sari, who had been clearing the dining area and collecting the used banana leaf plates, crossed paths with the woman as she headed towards the outdoor kitchen at the back of the courtyard.
“Get away from me,” the old woman said.
The young woman, carrying a large stack of wet and sticky used plates, froze.
“If your shadow crosses my path, it will taint me,” the old woman spat at the girl in the faded cotton sari. The young woman did not speak back to the other woman, who was not only older than her, but of a much higher caste and social stratum than her. Instead, she bowed her head as if ashamed and her shoulders hunched over the stack of used banana-leaf plates as she hurried away from the old woman.
My mother watched as the cold water ran over her fingers.
“How did it make you feel?” I asked her as she recounted the story over tea.
Hopeless. Surprised. Angry. Furious that she could not do anything to stop the old woman. Ashamed at being so young or so quiet? These were the answers I thought she would tell me. But my mother said:
“I felt like I had been born in the wrong place,” she paused, “that I did not fully belong here. I found myself not believing what others around me believed or what they took for granted. I kept questioning everything.”
* * *
In Genesis, when Adam and Eve wander unclothed and innocent through Eden, they are commanded not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for if they do, they shall surely die. When the inevitable happens and Adam and Eve taste the fruit of the tree of knowledge and become aware of both good and evil, their own nudity, desires, lust, disobedience, and mortality, they are banished from the idyllic Garden of Eden to toil on the earth, endure great hardship, and produce offspring. The taste of the apple and the subsequent banishment from Eden is thus often referred to as the “Original Sin of Man” and “The Fall” as both Adam and Even fall from innocence and divine grace as their curiosity leads them to the acquisition of knowledge.
Unlike Abrahamic religions, however, Indic philosophies have often gained their power and persuasion by centering the acquisition of knowledge and encouraging the pursuit of enlightenment for humanity while humans still roamed the earth. That is, with concepts and theories such as mokṣa, nirvāṇa, mukti, and samādhi, Indic philosophies such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Bhaktism seem to argue that one can become enlightened during one’s lifetime (i.e. become jīvanmukta or “liberated while alive”) rather than in death, and thus, the goal of one’s life is to break free of saṃsāra and be released from the endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth (Bronkhost 251). And in order to attain this level of spiritual release despite encountering endless and continuous suffering, one must seek to attain deep knowledge of oneself (including knowledge of one’s body, physicality, psychology, emotions, and imagination), deep knowledge of societal mores (including politics, statecraft, and their functions and manipulations), deep knowledge of history (and its affect on present-day governance and value-formation), deep knowledge of culture (and how stories, philosophies, and imaginations are created and sustained), deep knowledge of the environment (including an expansive knowledge of animals, plants, and inanimate things), deep knowledge of human learning (that is, the humanities and sciences, and their limitations), deep knowledge of language (that is, how one might articulate and express oneself), etc.
South Asian philosophies, thus, held the seductive allure of absolute enlightenment at their center and the possibility of obtaining the knowledge of the universe, or as Faust describes the seduction: “that [one] might behold the warp and the woof / of the world’s inmost fabric, of its essential strength and fount / and no longer dig about in words” (Goethe Night: 383-385).
* * *
When I ask my father about caste and his earliest memories of arriving in America, he is much more reticent.
“I grew up in West Bengal, which was a progressive state post-independence,” he says over the phone. “Caste didn’t matter so much. How much money you made or how much your family could live off of mattered much more. We didn’t believe in old taboos.” Although my father came from a Brahmin family, many of his family members including his eldest sister and close nieces and nephews married partners from different caste backgrounds. And the house where he grew up still had a painting of the hammer and sickle prominently displayed on a dividing wall across the street. While he was growing up, my father says, children from all different castes used to gather on the streets to play soccer or play in kite festivals together. In their neighborhood, one of his classmates came from the kṣatriya (royal class), and his family lived in the comfort of middle-class. They had a large, newly built two-story house in Bardhaman, and at that time, my father, as a young child, lived with his parents, sisters, and brother in a one-story bungalow.
Whenever my father visited his friend’s house, his friend’s parents would ply all the young children with sweets and food. And in mid-April when the cool winter mist gave way to lush river deltas and verdant rice paddies in West Bengal, my father’s friend would host the festival of kites at his house for Pahēlā Baiśākha, the Bengali New Year. The young boys and girls would gather on his rooftop and on others to fly their multi-colored kites and wrestle the best ones away from each other. To do this, many of the children laced their kite strings with glass they had melted onto the long white threads they had gathered in a spindle. My father’s friend, who had kites in the shape of dragons, butterflies, and tigers while the other children played with bright kites made of paper and newspaper ads featuring movie stars and popular soda drinks, never minded if his kite got cut.
“Whenever I would visit their house,” my father said on the phone, “I would always praṇāma to his parents.” (This was a typical Bengali custom of bowing to touch an elder’s feet in order to honor them.) “And his parents would give me their āśīrvād (blessings) in return, and then they would playfully say, ‘You shouldn’t do this. The scriptures don’t allow a Brahmin to bow down to a Kṣatriya.’”
On the phone screen, my father gave a wry laugh, “I don’t even know which scriptures they were talking about. The Manusmṛti?” He shrugged. “Who knows? It was the 1960s and we didn’t believe in those kinds of superstitions.”
Although my father doesn’t say it explicitly, his words imply that the culture of West Bengal was shot through with Marxist rhetoric post-partition. After independence, the local state government was skeptical of India’s ability to produce a non-hierarchal democracy and critical of the national government’s turn towards corruption and capitalism. Thus, in the late 60s and early 70s, when the Naxalite Revolution took over West Bengal and for a moment, allowed the Bengali bourgeoisie to join forces with poor rural farmers and demand fairer wages and worker’s rights, the discussion of caste seemed to fall by the wayside as everyone obsessed over class, income, and enthralling visions of equity.
* * *
In Caste Matters, Suraj Yengde writes, “caste should no longer be invisible” (35).
Caste, in its most basic form and intent, identifies, venerates, and calcifies social hierarchies. By capitalizing on the fear of the other, caste systems hinder social mobility and aim to prevent people from mixing across tribal, class, gender, religious, linguistic, and ability categories. By being encoded into social stigmas and taboos and being systemic in nature, caste often functions as an “invisible” force that makes us fear anyone who is unlike us. Caste makes us suspect anyone who exists outside of our spectrum of knowledge, culture, or kin. By consolidating socio-political power to those who have the most cultural capital or are perceived to be of the highest social rank, caste allows the few to benefit from the oppression, exploitation, and sacrifices of the many.
The original, most legendary, and perhaps one of the most detrimental caste systems in history belongs to India. The Brahmanical caste system is one that I and my family belong to, and one that has created millennia of social inequity, bias, and violence in the South Asian subcontinent.
The classical Indic caste system values Brahmanism and posits that the Brahmin class of priests, teachers, artists, and scholars are one step closer to the realization and understanding of brahman or absolute reality (according to classical Vedic and later modern Hindu philosophical systems), than the Kṣatriyas, or the kings, queens, warriors, and nobility, who stand one rank lower than the Brahmins but who often served as patrons for this scholarly class, and who most often gained spiritual enlightenment through their karmayoga or “duty through action” and proper government and rule of the people (e.g. see Arjuna’s conversation with Krishna in the Bhagavadgītā).
Below the Kṣatriyas come the Vaiśyas, the merchants, lenders, and farmers or the petite bourgeoisie. The Vaiśyas, like the Kṣatriyas, have the capability to gain incredible wealth and political influence through their enterprising labor, but are two spiritual notches down on the caste system than the Brahmins. Below the Vaiśyas, are the Śūdras, who were traditionally the farmhands, laborers, servants, and artisans responsible for making crafts and everyday goods. They were at the bottom of the traditional Indic caste system, but because they still held a rank in the caste system, the promise of enlightenment in this life or the next seemed potentially possible unlike those who were denied those rights altogether and called avarṇa or “having no outward appearance” and thus no social standing (Monier-Williams). The traditional Hindu caste system can thus be described as:
Indic Caste System
- Brahmins – teachers, priests, scholars, counselors, and the keepers of sacred knowledge
- Kṣatriyas – warriors, royalty, nobility, administrators, governors
- Vaiśyas – merchants, agriculturalists, bankers
- Śūdras – artisans, serfs, servants
- Dalits – lit. “broken down;” avarṇa, the untouchables, the scheduled castes
On August 29, 1947, after India and Pakistan had gained independence from the British Raj, B.R. Ambedkar, who was a Dalit lawyer and social reformer educated at Columbia University, became appointed as the chair of the Indian Constitution Drafting Committee. Under B.R. Ambedkar’s leadership, Suraj Yengde notes, “the Constitution of India [was] regarded as the foremost document for Dalit hope” (23). Yet, while the Indian caste system was legally abolished through the ratification of the Indian Constitution in 1950, caste continues to have dire consequences for South Asians and the South Asian diaspora today, and parallels many other kinds of social caste systems across the world, including the various caste systems which calcify social mobility and reinforce the fear of the other in the United States.
* * *
In 1973, when my father first arrived in the United States, persuaded to take a bet on a new land called America after his mentor and best friend from home, Subir Mukherjee, said he might have a better life there than in England, he found the sights and sounds of New York City to be both exotic and uncannily familiar. With seven or nine dollars to his name, and a one-way flight into JFK, when my father arrived in Manhattan, he was surprisingly nonplussed. The clamor and traffic of the city reminded him of the roads of Kolkata. In New York, the buildings were much taller though with skyscrapers made of glass and art deco facades and elevators and lobbies gilded in gold-leaf, with motifs he had only seen before in Hollywood movies.
“The streets of New York were so clean then,” he laughed on the phone as he recalled his first impressions of the city. “A lot cleaner than they are now, and a lot less busy, too. I mean New York was full of people but didn’t seem as busy as Kolkata was in the 1970s.” My father had been an engineer in a town just 45 minutes outside of Kolkata after he had graduated with his Master of Engineering back home.
When he arrived in New York, with only eight dollars in his pocket and to his name, the first job he landed was as an usher at a movie theatre in Manhattan. And his friend Pranab found him a small studio apartment to rent at the Clinton Arms Hotel in New York City. The rooms were simply furnished with the bathroom and kitchen at either ends of the hall. And there, my dad would cook community meals with his Bengali friends and floormates from around the world as they gathered around the kitchen, sharing family recipes made from whatever spices and groceries they could find across the city, and discussing where they had been and where they’d like to be.
* * *
In How the Brahmins Won: From Alexander to the Guptas, Johannes Bronkhorst notes how “India has a tradition of rational inquiry” as exemplified by long histories of scholarly, philosophical, and religious debate, and “the most important debates took place in the royal court” (257, 369).
That is, even prior to their arrival in royal courts as pundits, priests, teachers, poets, and advisors, “Brahmins presented themselves not only as preserves of the past but also as guardians of the eternal present” through stories, hymns, performances, and rituals (113). Through oral and transcribed hymns, literature, and performances, Brahmins helped to create a “Sanskrit cosmopolis” and texts such as the Artharvaveda, which purported to include magical formulas, seemed to proclaim to readers and listeners alike that “Brahmins had supernatural powers” (4, 225). These forms of literature helped to cement the reputation of the Brahmins to the far corners of South Asia and “must have preceded their arrival” at new royal courts and kingdoms (Bronkhorst 409). That is, from hymns of the Vedas to the philosophical debates of the Upaniṣads to the epic tales of adventure and wisdom in the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, “stories imprinted (and ‘rendered invisible’), in the minds of those who heard them, ideas about Brahmins even if they had never met any. And the fact that great powers were imputed to Brahmins would not be lost on rulers, who understood that supporting Brahmins could only be to their advantage” (410). Thus, as the debates between Brahmins and Buddhists raged on in early India over key differences such as caste and the nature of absolute reality, both Brahmins and Buddhists seemed to have earned their place in the royal court with “Brahmins there to advise [the king] in the world of political reality, to keep him in power, and to allow him to extend his sovereignty” and with Buddhists there to “[play] on the spiritual sentiments of the rule, his fear of death, [or] his concern about future lives” (Bronkhost 370).
Or as J. Gottschall notes, in The Storytelling Animal, “The worlds priests and shamans knew what psychology would later confirm: if you want a message to burrow into a human mind, work it into a story…Shelley seemed to have it right: poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’” (Bronkhorst 411).
* * *
My father’s first job in the United States is something he does not like to talk about. While he moonlit finance classes in Brooklyn, my father continued to work as an usher in Manhattan on weeknights and weekends as he tried to make his way through grad school. He was still searching for his first engineering gig, and in the meanwhile, he had gotten into the MBA programs at NYU and the Brooklyn Polytechnic University. The cost of the two-year program at NYU was over $7,000 and the Brooklyn Polytechnic was just half the cost. My father, who was living with his friend Manoj and another roommate in New Jersey now, couldn’t afford to pay the higher tuition for the degree. As he studied and saved, he went to the movie theatre each evening after school to work.
Like in an Edward Hopper painting, I imagine my father in a red cap and red-pantaloon-ed suit. It’s the early 1970s and he’s leaning against the movie theatre wall near entrance for the guests. His arms are crossed with a flashlight ready. He uses his usher’s hat to keep a lid of his curly black hair with only the sideburns, a fashion casualty of the day, sticking out.
When the lights go out in the theatre, he brings the latecomers to their seats with the flashlight dimly lighting the way. Half of the time, at work when the movie reels have spun to a stop, he has to clean up popcorn, soda bottles, and candy wrappers between seats and from the floor. Sometimes he sneaks into the projector room when there are no latecomers and watches how the movie reels are magically synched and changed. Once in a while, the projectionist allows him to put on the next, large metallic film reel onto a parallel projector before the flashing light on the upper right-hand corner of the film fades to black.
But on most evenings and Saturday afternoons when he’s forced to work rather than to study, he becomes acquainted with America through old Hollywood classics: Arsenic and Old Lace, which teaches him about a Brooklyn he never knew; The Thin Man, which teaches him about a Manhattan that seems loftily out of reach. He watches musicals, Westerns, film noir, popular Kung Fu action films—some American films that made it to India, some that he never knew while growing up. The movies teach him what’s invisible about America. He realizes that in America, cowboys are worth more than Indians, that women are often femme fatales and a danger to even the most practiced detective, and that Bruce Lee can be both a master actor and martial artist but his white counterparts on screen don’t always treat him that way.
Many months later, he’ll finally leave that film theatre to get his first engineering job at Chemico. A few years later, when he’ll marry my mom, he’ll take her out to see campy and wry Diane Keaton films and black and white tear-jerkers by Satyajit Ray. They’ll go to the theatre and watch films with subtitles—this is how they’ll visit Kyoto and Rome together.
When my father will get his next big break, and an engineering job in San Francisco, they’ll fly to the West Coast and have their first meal in Chinatown, and for a moment, feel like they’re both back at a hip restaurant in Kolkata. My dad will take the job on the West Coast there even though my mom will be finishing her degree at NYU by then. He’ll take the job and leave his graduate program in Brooklyn behind, he tells me, because he had to support his young and growing family.
* * *
In English, the word “caste” derives from the Spanish and Portuguese use of the term “casta,” which delineates a tribe, ethnicity, group, clan, or class of peoples. The Spanish and Portuguese term, which was a popular way of describing and demonstrating the subaltern rank of people from different ethnicities, countries, and cultures during the colonial era, eventually made its way into English by 1555 and became a way to group and describe peoples by social ranks and higher and lower status by 1624.
In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson writes, “caste is the underlying grammar we encode as children… Caste, like grammar, becomes an invisible guide not only to how we speak but how we process information, the automatic calculations that figure into a sentence without our having to think about it” (18). By studying the history of American slavery, segregation, and colonialism, Wilkerson notes that the primary and most dangerous caste in America is that of race, which pits Blacks against whites in a hierarchical, binary opposition to each other. As James Baldwin notes, “No one was white before she / he came to America” and as a Nigerian-born playwright tells Wilkerson “You know there are no black people in Africa” (49, 52). Definitions of white vs. black vs. brown are particularly American social constructions and part of the American imaginaire as they are central to one of the core and most insidious caste systems in this country. In the United States, “whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste” and in comparison, Blacks occupied the “subordinate caste, lowest caste, bottom caste, disfavored caste, historically stigmatized,” and those in-between, the Asians or Latinos, for example, occupied the “Middle Castes” and frequently served as sentinels and gatekeepers of the American caste system (19, 29). That is, as Wilkerson notes, “to gain acceptance [in the United States], each fresh infusion of immigrants had to enter into a silent, unspoken pact of separating and distancing themselves from the established lowest caste. Becoming white meant defining themselves as furthest from the opposite—black” (50). Here Wilkerson observes how generations of immigrants, refugees, and visitors in the United States oriented their social aspirations and mobility towards the fantasy of the American dream, which mythologized that social status and economic capital could be within one’s reach if only one aligned oneself with the power, supremacy, institutions, and cultural values of whites, the highest social caste in American society. By doing so, these new groups of people, “could establish their new status by observing how the lowest caste was regarded and imitating or one-upping the disdain and contempt, learning the epithets, joining in on violence against [the lowest caste] to prove themselves worthy of admittance to the dominant caste” (Wilkerson 50). Or to put it in another way, in order to survive in the United States, one had to obey the seemingly invisible caste hierarchies, rules, and taboos of the dominant caste or risk becoming a victim of institutional racism and caste-based violence themselves.
That is, as Wilkerson argues, in the United States and across the world, “caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy” (70). In order to understand the unraveling of the American project and the country’s rapid slide into fascism, perhaps “caste” should become part of our common language.
* * *
My parents got married in February 1976 in India, and my mother flew to New York for the first time to reunite with my father that June. For their honeymoon, they decided to go on a road trip with a group of friends to Montreal. It was mid-July and the 1976 Summer Olympics had already begun in Montreal. My father had his first real job as an engineer by then and had found a nice place in New Jersey where he and my mother could live. My mother, just married, was already antsy. She had had to leave her Ph.D. program in Chemistry behind earlier that year because her father insisted that she get married. She was just a year or two out from finishing her Ph.D. and had been promised a professorship back home. But my father said she could continue her studies in the US if she married him. And since he looked nice enough and seemed kind enough, she did.
On the highway into the city when all-of-a-sudden all of the road signs turned into French and the gas station attendees they met started speaking a foreign language, my father broke the news to my mom.
“‘I only bought two tickets’, he said.” My mother shook her head as she recounted the story. “To the volleyball game and the soccer game.”
“Okay,” she nodded as he filled up the gas in their white Toyota Corona station wagon with the red velvet seats. The couple they were traveling with sat in the back of the car munching on some home-made nimki snacks.
“So I only have a ticket for each of the games,” my dad repeated, putting the gasoline nozzle back and closing the tank.
“Yes, a ticket for each game sounds right,” my mother nodded, not fully understanding what he meant.
But she finally understood 30 minutes later when my father and his best friend parked their wives on the green lawn outside of the Olympic stadium.
“Look she brought home-made snacks,” my father said, as he tried to cheer up my mother who sat directly on the damp green grass in her mauve-colored blouse and rose-colored sari with no picnic towel in sight. Her bespeckled girlfriend offered her snacks, but my mother was miffed.
“Besides, you wouldn’t like soccer so much anyway,” my father had said to her reassuringly. A few moments later, the men high-tailed out of there. And my mother was sure she was going to divorce him.
“He stayed in the stadium watching East Germany beat Poland three to one in the final Olympics game. They watched a volleyball game with Poland, too. They went to the game on two separate days and stayed inside the stadium for hours. I was livid.”
Even now, decades later, my mother wrings her hands when she tells the story. “I only got to see the still photos afterwards. I would have watched the football game. All the kids in my neighborhood back home played football on the streets,” she sighed.
Later after our tea, I’ll look at the old family album of my parent’s first years of marriage. In the 70s, before I was born, they traveled by car everywhere—to Montreal, Niagara Falls, and Disney World. In Orlando, there will be photos of rows of young women, dressed in bright color-guard uniforms, holding pom-poms made of glittering tinsel as they dance in front of a marching band going down Main Street. Somewhere near Epcot Center, my parents will find a cut-out of Poseidon and Amphitrite and stick their heads inside to strike a pose for the camera. Whatever hard-feelings or intrigue was caused by the Montreal Olympic Games will fade over time.
But my mom will learn that in North America, despite all of its promise of modernity, women are still treated differently than men. In not-so-subtle ways at work and at home, they are often put in their place. But it’s the mid-70s and the bras have already been burnt. Women across the US now have the right to open a bank account in their name, have control over their bodies and go on the pill or get an abortion, hold a professional job, pursue higher education, and demand equal pay if they want to, right?
* * *
While the Indian caste system gains its social value and allure through the seductive promise of enlightenment and knowledge, the American caste system is equally seductive and invisible because it veils itself with the allure of social mobility.
Isabel Wilkerson rightfully identifies one of the foundational and deeply rooted caste systems in America: that based on race. However, some critics of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, have noted that racial caste in America, though intertwined with the country’s history of settler colonialism, slavery, forced segregation, housing and banking laws, colonialism abroad, etc., was originally deeply connected to class, and thus, class, itself, is an American caste system that is becoming harder to ignore. That is, by emphasizing the social and economic status of whites over BIPOC communities and individuals, the racial caste system in the United States has historically functioned to disguise an equally insidious and malicious American class system.
Or as Matthew Desmond writes in Poverty, by America: “this is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy. If America’s poor founded a country, that country would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela. Almost one in nine Americans—including one in eight children—live in poverty. There are more than 38 million people living in the United States who cannot afford basic necessities, and more than 108 million get by on $55,000 a year or less, many stuck in the space between poverty and security” (6).
Alongside American racism, another fissure which creates deep caste divides in the United States is that of American classism. That is, “more than a million of our public schoolchildren are homeless, living in motels, cars, shelters, and abandoned buildings… More than 2 million Americans don’t have running water or a flushing toilet at home… The United States produces $5.3 trillion more in goods and services than China. Our gross domestic product is larger than the combined economies of Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Italy, which are the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth richest countries in the world. California alone has a bigger economy than Canada does; New York State’s economy surpasses South Korea’s. America’s poverty is not for lack of resources. We lack something else” (Desmond 6).
Desmond’s research demonstrates that there are several invisible castes at play in the United States. Similarly, in India, there are actually many different castes at work. In India, in addition to the Brahmanical caste, there is an almost unbending gendered caste at play which values the agency, livelihood, and desires of heteronormative men over the right to the livelihood, agency, and desire of women, both cis and trans, and the queer community. In many South Asian countries, which have comparable poverty rates to the United States, class has become one of the primary forms of caste demarcation since the beginning of the modern era and the rise of colonialism and capitalism. In this class-based caste, the well-to-do are valued over the impoverished. And in India, religion also functions as a caste system with Hindus and their religious values and stories being honored and favored over those who are Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Jewish, Zoroastrian, or Christian, for example. In India, citizens often find themselves with more social and economic capital than undocumented indigenous communities within the country. Caste in South Asia can also find itself in language and regional politics with some languages like English and Hindi dominating education, media, and administrative fields over other regional languages like Tamil, Telegu, Kannada, Malayalam, Assamese, Bengali, Urdu, Farsi, Gujarati, and Punjabi, for example.
And in the United States, all residents, whether they be American citizens or not, find themselves pulled apart, reconstituted, and diminished by a number of distinct but equally dangerous caste systems. Isabel Wilkerson notes how the racial caste system, as one of the primary American caste systems, gains its power by pitting Blacks against whites and forcing those in between to uphold the values of the highest caste—the whites—in order to survive. Likewise, as Roe vs. Wade has been repealed and American women find themselves not only losing legal rights over the sovereignty of their own bodies and denied life-saving healthcare but also victims of large-scale sexual violence as noted by the #MeToo movement and the devastatingly slow release of the Epstein files, gendered caste in America, which values and recognizes the livelihood, agency, and desires of men over women, asserts itself as a dominant and disturbing form of caste.
Moreover, as Matthew Desmond notes, the invisible caste system of calcifying class hierarchies and divisions in the United States must be addressed. In the US, the billionaire class, soon to be trillionaire class, shoots themselves off into outer space while hundreds of millions of Americans struggle to make a living wage and feed, house, and clothe themselves and their families in the country. The billionaire class, however, is tolerated in the United States because so many everyday Americans find the promise of a billionaire lifestyle and the cultural capital it brings to be aspirational. That is, for a country that has still not processed the collective trauma of the September 11 attacks, the economic fall-out of the 2008 Stock Market Crash, and the devastating loss of life during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is a lot easier to blame someone of a lower caste and label them as an outsider or other, e.g. the immigrant, the person of color, a queer person, a woman, a person who is disabled, someone on welfare, etc. for the false promises of the American economy and the fleecing of the middle class, than it is to critique the rising class and technological inequality caused by the billionaire class and the cannibalizing A.I. systems they promote.
Similarly, if anyone has ever worked inside a university system, they have undoubtedly encountered Academic Caste which values and pays a higher wage to senior administrators, lawyers, and financial consultants than it does to full professors, never mind the tenure-track junior faculty who struggle to keep up, or the adjunct faculty, who find themselves at the bottom of the barrel, barely able to survive. The system of Academic Caste keeps running as even adjuncts and those in the most subaltern academic positions are plied with the promise that they, too, could on day enjoy the spoils of the victors, if they only strive hard enough for their upward mobility.
On November 25, 2002, the Homeland Security Act was established and ratified by Congress in the aftermath of 9/11. The Homeland Security Act established the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which took over many of the offices, policies, and functions of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). INS had been previously housed under the United States Department of Labor from 1933-1940 and under the United States Department of Justice from 1940-2003. While the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished national origin quotas and incentivized highly skilled immigrants to come to the United States, and the Refugee Act of 1980 further supported the resettlement of refugees and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 offered legal protections and amnesty to undocumented immigrants, by moving the legalization processes of immigration and naturalization into the Department of Homeland Security and under the auspices of ICE in 2002, a dangerous caste system between American citizens and newly arrived immigrants in the 21st Century was re-established and inflamed. By housing immigration services under the Homeland Security Act as a response to the collective trauma of the September 11 attacks, the newly arrived immigrant, visitor, or undocumented resident in the United States was automatically conflated with being a threat to the livelihood and sanctity of the American dream. And by January 2026, over 68,440 people, which included immigrants, refugees, undocumented citizens as well as American citizens, were held in ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) with nearly 75% of all detainees having no criminal record (Singh, Marcos, and Simmonds; Ludwig). Thus, when caste-based violence exploded in the United States from January 2025 onwards as ICE killed over 53 people in the United States including American citizens, the violently drawn caste demarcation between recent immigrants and citizens led to the basic human rights of all peoples in the United States, whether they were American citizens or not, to actively be at risk (Thompson).
Caste demarcations can be found in the way Americans value one dominant language (e.g. English) over another (e.g. Spanish), one religion (e.g. Christianity) over another (e.g. Islam), one region (i.e. the Heartland) over another (e.g. the City), one ability (i.e. able-bodied) over another (e.g. disabled), one livelihood (e.g. the human world) over another (e.g. the natural world), one lifestyle (e.g. capitalist) over another (e.g. socialist), one art (e.g. A.I.-generated) over another (i.e. human created), and one goal (e.g. product-oriented) over another (e.g. process-oriented). Even progressive and more liberal spaces in America can be prone to social rankings and caste. For example, caste can be found in the LGBTQIA+ community, where individuals who identify as cis or trans male (though not heteronormative) might find themselves with more power and cultural cachet than those who identify as cis or trans female, who might find themselves in a higher rank than those who are nonbinary. Thus, caste demarcations affect how we design our cities and homes, what we teach in our schools, and how we approach industry, labor, the environment, and each other.
* * *
My father, who had lived with my mother in their first house in Fort Lee, NJ since the start of their marriage, had been offered a job in San Francisco by the early 80’s. This was his second big break. The engineering company courting my father had invited my mother to come along with him to see California. It was during their tour of Chinatown, in particular, that my mother fell in love with San Francisco. The outdoor markets selling red cheongsams and dozens of varieties of fish, a deliciously spicy lunch of egg noodles and walnut shrimp, the gorgeously-lit tea houses that looked like scenes from a film noir, and the bustle of locals and tourists in Chinatown reminded her of the one back home in Kolkata where the locals spoke Bengali, Cantonese, Hindi, and Mandarin all together. You have to take the job there, my mother told my dad as they stood by the piers of Fisherman’s Wharf and watched the afternoon light catch over the Bay. Later, back from the enchantment of California and back in grad school, she would regret finding herself alone in Manhattan until the day she found Flora.
My parents were in the process of selling their house, and although my father was leaving his young wife behind to finish her doctoral studies in chemistry at NYU, he agreed that moving to California was for the best.
As they packed up their home in New Jersey, my mom would go to NYU when she had to take a class, attend a laboratory, or teach. Through wit and sheer grit, she had gotten a full teaching fellowship into the Ph.D. program in Chemistry at New York University, where she would go on to study organic chemistry, even though later, she would end up working in inorganic chemistry and precious metals.
During her time off, she would walk by the student dormitories and read over their bulletin boards to see if anyone had an apartment available or was looking for a roommate. She asked the dean’s office and the library staff for help, too.
One day as she was walking into a dorm, she overheard a lilting Bengali voice and then riotous laughter. My mom looked up and saw Flora, who was chatting with her friends from Bangladesh in the hallway. Flora caught her eye and smiled at her. My mom went over to introduce herself and said that she was looking for a room and apartment in the building. Flora grabbed her hand in a move that could have been straight out of a sitcom and said, “You don’t have to look any further, you can live with me!”
As my mother tells me this story for the umpteenth time over tea, I can even imagine the twinkle in Flora’s eye. Flora was married but her husband lived across the Hudson in Princeton, NJ, where he was studying for his doctorate in Theoretical Physics. He would come over when he could on the weekends to visit her. But the commute was long and arduous, and so Flora stayed in New York so she could save the time.
“Besides,” she told my mom, “Princeton wouldn’t have me.” Flora was also a doctoral candidate in Physics, but she was studying at NYU.
Together, the young women, both in their early 20s at that time, would cook “heavy nostalgic” food from home like my mother’s go-to-favorite chili chicken, and Flora’s favorite morag polāo.
They cooked and gossiped and laughed and discovered New York together. In order to qualify for her Ph.D., my mother had to pass a language proficiency test in German, a language she picked up at NYU. And when the test came around, she seemed to do so with ease.
And Flora had chosen French as her research language for her Ph.D. in Physics, but when she tested for the qualifying exam, she bombed, not just once, each of the three times she took it. Desperate after taking and failing the test over the course of two years, Flora finally wrote to her parents in Bangladesh, who shipped a large stack of Physics textbooks written in Bengali to her. She then took the stack to her chair’s office smartly and said, “see Bengali is a research language for Physics.” And then over the course of several hours, convinced him that she should sit down to take a qualifying exam in Bengali, which she eventually did and passed with glee.
Having grown up in Bangladesh, Flora was Muslim, and my mother was a Hindu girl from Bihar. Both were Bengali but both had different accents, and Bengali was a language my mother had only learned to write and read on her own since she grew-up in a primarily Hindi-speaking state. Although my mother had gone to Catholic school where many of her classmates came from different religious backgrounds such as Islam and Christianity in addition to Hinduism, she had never had a chance to have such a close bond or friendship with someone from a different religion back home.
One afternoon as they crossed Washington Square Park on their way to get groceries for dinner, they talked about all the wonderful and strange things they had seen in New York. In this third-culture space, West Bengal and Bangladesh were living together as if the partition had never happened.
“I saw Cybill Shepherd filming in the park the other day,” my mother laughed and pointed to the Washington Square Arch, “right over there.”
“Really?” Flora spun to look behind them as if she could catch a glimpse of the actress if she turned around fast enough.
They both laughed at Flora’s reaction. My mom clasped her hand and tucked it in her elbow.
“Gargi, you can’t do that!” Flora laughed.
“What do you mean?” My mom giggled, short of breath. “I did see her shooting a film here the other day. I even asked a crew member who she was since I didn’t know her name.”
“No, silly,” Flora pulled her hand away. “If you hold my hand, they’ll think we’re gay.”
“Hmm.” My mother looked confused.
“That we’re lesbians,” Flora whispered.
“Oh,” my mother looked more confused. “Why?”
“Because we’re holding hands.”
“Oh, I do that all the time in India.”
“Yeah, me, too, in Bangladesh,” Flora nodded as they walked along.
“Then why does it matter?” My mom laughed and grabbed Flora’s hand as they raced down the street in search of the nearest bodega.
* * *
American caste is a matrix pinned in place by binary oppositions.
Binary formations tend to reinforce and create caste systems as everyone in between two polarized extremes finds themselves flocking to one pole or the other. But frequently, those caught between binary caste oppositions find themselves re-oriented towards the pole that is perceived as the center of power. Moreover, as American caste is also intersectional, each individual finds themselves existing within a matrix of supremacy and disempowerment. For example, a white, queer cis-woman in America may find herself disempowered because of the gendered caste she is in but empowered because of the racial caste she belongs to.
In recognizing how caste works, Dwight Turner argues, “supremacy, therefore, is not just whiteness. Supremacy is a system of oppression which overrides all others. It is a system of valuing oneself and devaluing the other, that has existed for thousands of years…Supremacy is universal, it is archetypal” (35). As the Indian caste system demonstrates, caste oppression can very well exist without white supremacy.
Supremacy can thus be systemic, institutional, and individual and “the idea that supremacy is just about whiteness is hugely flawed and incredibly reductionist and does not recognise that when there are socially constructed ideas of identity…that these social constructions come with them a hierarchy of who is better or worse than the other” (Turner 53). In addition to white supremacy, Turner identifies patriarchy, capitalism, religious supremacy, fascism, and thingification as some of the pillars of conscious supremacy (38). Fascism, he notes, “is very much built upon the supremacy of one cultural group over another” (39).
Castes are built out of binary oppositions where one attribute or in-group is valued over an other or an out-group. Much like the concept of uchi-soto from Japanese or ghare-bāire from Indian languages, the in-group within a caste system frequently finds themselves as the center of power, attention, and social value. At the periphery of this exchange is the out-group or other, or subordinate caste that has been ostracized and shunned from acquiring their own meaning and power. And in order to be a proper caste system, this new master-slave dialectic needs both witnesses (i.e. bystanders) and participants. That is, anyone who does not belong to the in-group or the out-group soon either becomes an active participant, who upholds the source of power, or an acolyte as Turner calls them, or becomes an outlier, who witnesses the atrocities of the caste system but does little about them (68). Or if one were to try to unpack the psychology of supremacy in terms of the language of Freud and Jung, “supremacy as a construct…is very much driven by the superego need to maintain control over the ego, its defences, and the social constructionist aspects of its identity. The superego, therefore, believes it is very much in control, it holds power and sways over its own domain but it also needs the other, an externalized other, who, as Jung and von Franz would have said, play the part of the shadow for the ego” (100). Through the lens of psychology, supremacy can thus be defined as the collective means, methods, and behaviors that bind, maintain and keep in place the values and prejudices of the superego. That is, supremacy cannot exist if the individual cultivates an imagination, self-expression, and value system that is wholly their own and that questions the blanket wisdom of the superego and its collective prejudices and ideals.
Supremacy, which can be both internalized by the individual and also be a super-ego-driven collective experience, thus thrives on certainty, what is ordinary and banal, as well as an all-knowing ignorance in order to assert itself (100, 107). Quoting Hannah Arendt, Turner writes, “evil, by its very nature, is perfectly ordinary and resides within the super egoic, ego connection. It sits within the willful ignorance of all of us, myself included, who deny the fact that we have a moral responsibility for the other” (101). Afterall, without our individual and collective drive for supremacy, how could wars or genocide exist? How could gender violence or gun violence exist? How could body-shaming or hostile design exist? How could the billionaire class and A.I. exploitation and theft of the arts and intellectual property exist? How could American fascism and the targeted killing of immigrants and citizens in the United States exist? How could American caste exist?
Perhaps, the Superiority Complex and the supremacy drive appear to be the outward expressions and reactions to the very uncertainty, dislocation, devaluation, and lack we each may feel inside ourselves. Or as my mentor David Shields frequently likes to say, “we take what we can’t abide in ourselves and project it onto an imaginary other.”
If we cannot acknowledge, define, and talk about American caste, we risk the danger of keeping these systems of social hierarchy and oppression invisible and firmly in place. Interrogating caste means letting go of our own systems of education and assimilation which have formed the values and meanings that we are asked to abide by. Perhaps, American universities could create a Department of Caste Studies if it would then allow the left and the right in America to finally talk to each other and acknowledge their own internalized supremacy. We could thus acknowledge that we are all upholders of supremacy because we have all internalized notions of superior and inferior castes. And in doing so, perhaps we could pass through uncertainty and the unknown to create new systems and meanings that value community and collaboration over blind obedience to hierarchy.
* * *
The house of my ancestors does not exist. To arrive at its imprint on the earth, you have to travel far. Let go of all comfort.
We embark on the trail an hour before sunrise from my father’s dusty hometown road in Natunpally, Bardhaman. The houses here are mid-century modern, concrete, and in a state of decay. The two-story house that my father grew up in with his two older sisters and younger brother looks like a mod-version of an old Indic extended-family bungalow with a courtyard.
On the second story, each bedroom has latticed windows and radiant green shutters that open out into the living room. The rooms garland the living room like a half-moon. At any given time, a sibling could open a window from a comic-book-covered room and yell across the living-room courtyard to a child in another.
The echoes of childhood, 70s disco, 80s marriages, and old age haunts each bedroom where the walls are green and orange and the exterior windows that open onto the street and the swamp-yard next door are hardly ever opened.
But the street makes itself known anyway through the honking of speeding mopeds and rickshaws, old couples bickering at each other, children playing chase, stray dogs barking in unison, and neighborhood political protests marching by.
Across the street, the delineating walls are etched with slogans of the Communist Party in Bengali and showcase faded images of the hammer and sickle.
It’s 2005. Summer. I am still in grad school, earning my MFA and wondering if I’ll ever be a writer. Bush is still President. America marches towards apathy, social violence, and totalitarianism day by day. And the Left Front Communist Party of India (Marxist) will lose its foothold and rule over West Bengal in just a few more years.
The future has not been written yet. But what will come to be in 20 years is already fomenting and is already here.
Today we are traveling the long distance to the village my grandfather, Dada, partially grew up in—where he spent his youth before being driven to Bardhaman to find a job—one in pharmaceuticals to eke out a living and raise his family as a young man.
Listening to my father tell the tale, I don’t fully understand.
But a year later, tucked safely away in Bangalore with my maternal grandmother, Nani, I will learn more about what happened to my grandfather’s family.
“Your grandfather came from a family of landowners. They were like zamindars and owned a large portion of the country in rural West Bengal.”
My eyes light up with interest.
Nani, always ready to spin a good tale, continues:
“But they lost their fortunes when the British came. They became too entangled with them. Went on hunting trips with the Brits, gambled in their dens, drank wine at their country clubs. But the parties and the acquaintanceship were more costly than they expected. You could say your great-great-grandfather’s generation gathered their wealth and two generations later, by the time your grandfather was a young man, the family had gambled away their fortunes. That’s why your grandfather had to leave his ancestral home, get a job and raise a family elsewhere. His family could no longer afford to be gentlemen of leisure.”
But I know so little about my family’s history as I sit in the hot, dusty car with my aunts, cousin, and dad as our driver takes us towards my grandfather’s ancestral village on that day. My uncle, other cousin, and extended family trail behind us in a second jeep. The village is in Bankura, West Bengal and named after Ayodhya, the place of Prince Rāma’s birth and banishment in the Rāmāyaṇa. Later when I’ll look up the town on Wikipedia to verify if my family had any actual claim to the place, I’ll find out that the village temples were part of the Bandyopadhyay family’s estate as was the nearby Girigōvardhana temple—a testament to the Brahmin claim over spirituality and knowledge. But when we’ll arrive at the village, several hours later, my uncle, the tall one with the woolen vest and thinning hair who is married to my eldest paternal aunt, will take a look at the muddied streets and impoverished villagers inside and say that the village should be called Rāmer Kādā or “Ram’s Mudpit,” instead.
But for now we continue our journey through the dusty road. We stop at a golden-yellow town near the village called Sonamukhi. It is a small principality a few dozen kilometers away from Dada’s village. There we have a late morning tiffin with my father’s cousin, whose neck is in a cast following a roofing accident. He lives in the family home with his aging mother. He’s chatty but has a far off look. I don’t know it then but that will be the last time I will see him.
After our late morning meal and tea, we continue on in our journey. At a certain point, we have to leave our jeeps behind and hop on two local oxcarts that travel on the dirt road of a mountain beside a dried-up glittering riverbed. After almost an hour on the bumpy, unpaved road, we arrive at the entrance of my grandfather’s village.
The gates to the village are slate-gray and are surprisingly ornate. Our guide to the village is one of my grandfather’s best childhood friends. He wears a maroon beret, black boxy glasses, and an oversized rust-colored scarf over a white Nehru-style pāẏajāmā set.
He looks a bit like Dev Anand and a pastiche of French and Bengali style with his large, hipster glasses and dark hair peppered with just a bit of gray. At the gate, he gives us a welcoming smile and a warm embrace.
He guides us through the village, which turns out to really be an ancient mercantile town. We pass by a row of thatched huts first where a few of the remaining villagers still live. The village is sparsely populated but my aunt Shika notes two rag-tag girls playing in a muddy patch on the road anyway. “Look how they’re dressed,” she whispers in my ear, “with only one cappala between them.” The girls’ knit clothes are pockmarked with holes and only one of them wears a single shoe. Shika Aunty continues:
“If your family stayed in the village, one of the girls would be called Rai,” she smiles and nods to her daughter, Rai, my cousin up ahead of us,” and the other would be called Rita.”
I look at her and Shika Aunty bursts out laughing. Her laughter contains a sense of surprise at how impoverished the village has become, and a sense of relief at having escaped a similar fate somehow. I try to hold back, knowing that I shouldn’t laugh and that we should feel guilt, not relief in this moment, but I end up giving into her smile anyway.
Leaving the girls behind, my grandfather’s friend guides us to the temples lining the main road of the village.
Inside they are full of terracotta statues in angular shapes of horses, deer, and snakes. Each animal as a vermillion mark across its forehead as a sign of respect and worship.
When I stare at the snake statues painted with orange sindhur, my aunt Shika giggles behind me, saying that the villagers worship the nāgas, the snake gods, here.
I find the rows and rows of animal figurines in the temples to be intriguing. There are no human images or idols to be worshipped here.
My grandfather’s friend guides us to an open-air two-story, thatched bungalow. From the red-painted, mud-walled second floor, we peek out at the village dwellings below. Everything is calm, green, and in birdsong. Magnolia, jasmine, and gardenia blossom alongside the huts. Looking at the lush green earthen scene, I think this is what a true ashram must feel like.
But my grandfather’s friend pulls us on. He takes us beyond the huts and individual temples to the large, pink sandstone gate that marks the entrance to the town’s market square. The inscription at the top of the gate’s archway reads “1635 A.D.” I stand back and study the gate. Did my family really live here for nearly four hundred years—maybe even longer before this gate was built? And why does the village have this Western-style architecture and date? What kind of dealings were they doing with the Portuguese and British back then?
When I catch up with my family next, they have walked far into the interior of the town, past its market square to where a dozen Shiva temples are lined up one against the other.
Each temple is made from white marble and opens up into two large, connected village squares. You have to go up and down a short set of marble staircases to get to the other. The first square features mostly white, stone temples with open gates and the abstract statue of the black Shiva-liṅgam surrounded by the stone yoni within them.
In the second square are larger buildings. Some former temples, some old, cream-colored brick buildings, perhaps used once long ago for administrative or financial purposes.
Near one of the seemingly abandoned but well-maintained buildings, I spy an ornate pastel-colored castle made from tin. It’s a European-styled Schloss, something akin to Neuschwanstein and it looks to be over a century old. The castle sits on a wooden cart in the middle of the temple square. It’s the size of a very large doll house but is too big to wrap your hands fully around.
Each floor has an open window. And the gold-threaded fabric of hand-held puppets peaks out from within the toy castle’s enclave.
I stand and stare at the antique object. How did it get here? How long has it been here? Why a castle with pointed Gothic turrets and mythological figures carved in gold and not a miniature Rajasthani-style palace here in the middle of an abandoned village in rural West Bengal?
I am still photographing the toy castle, which sits in the middle of the white-marbled square, undisturbed, when my grandfather’s friend calls out to me.
“Do you want to see the house?”
“My grandfather’s?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says.
I nod in agreement and follow him and my family with camera in tow.
When he finally takes us back beyond the town’s pink stone gate, back beyond the thatched huts and cozy bungalows and country temples to where the tall, slate-grey gates of the village stand, I am startled.
Next to the entrance of the village, next to its white boundary walls that seem to stretch out and run into the forest in both directions, is a large, empty plot of grass.
“Where’s the house?” I ask, puzzled, thinking we’re going to exit the village and peek at the other side of the boundary wall.
“It’s right here,” my grandfather’s friend points to the empty ground.
I look at the flat green meadow by the white wall and filigree metal gate and at first, I do not see anything.
But then slowly the imprints of a house emerge. There’s a few abandoned bricks that form the corner of a house’s foundation over there. A few flat, white stones are placed together in the formation of an entrance staircase. Another series of bricks in the back are blackened as if a kitchen fire once existed there.
“What happened?” I ask him,
And my grandfather’s friend gives me an uneven smile and says:
“When your grandfather and his family left this town, the villagers slowly, over the years, took their house apart brick by brick. They used the bricks to build new homes and footpaths and furnaces. After sometime, your family’s house no longer existed. And in those years since, no one from your family has come back to claim it.”
My father and my family move on. They don’t dwell on the words of Dada’s friend and instead talk about getting back on the road to Sonamukhi in time for tea.
I pause and let the words sink in as I look longer at my ancestral house disappeared into the earth.
There is so much left unsaid in that summary of what happened. My family were landowners and ruled this square of rural land deep in the heart of West Bengal for centuries. They were zamindars and Brahmins, and part of the town square was funded by or set-up with the help of the Portuguese or British in 1635. My ancestors dined, hunted, and gambled with the British while their villagers paid taxes and paid for their livelihood through the crops they harvested and the goods they made.
And when my family left the province, they themselves bankrupted by economic plight, they left those villagers behind to fend for themselves. And then over the course of a few years or a decade or two, those villagers took apart their house brick by brick.
* * *
I want to leave this story on that final image of the green meadow and the lonely bricks that marked the corners and imprints of the zamindar’s house that no longer exists.
I want to point to that act of rebellion and say—see we all have agency even in our darkest hours, even when the clock, the culture, the tide, the taboo, the evil eye is turned against us.
I want to say—look how I noticed that subversion, how those villagers banded together and wiped out the substance and symbol of their oppression.
But does pointing to someone else’s resistance make me feel better? There’s something self-satisfying about seeing the ways in which my ancestors may have suppressed others marked clean. A silent cheer of solidarity given to those they oppressed. A sigh of relief for the severance of responsibility.
But does that act of erasure absolve me of my guilt or history? Does it negate my sense of supremacy in any real way?
If we are all supremacists and continue to be, how do we recognize and stop the harm we cause to each other?
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About the Author:
Rita Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is author of Disobedient Futures, CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, Echo in Four Beats, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps, and Cracklers at Night. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA from the University of Washington. She serves as Senior Editor of the South Asian Avant-Garde and Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, and her work appears in Sign & Breath: Voice and the Literary Tradition, Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, PANK, Nat. Brut., Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books, VIDA, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer of Burning Down the Louvre, a forthcoming documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the opening chapters of this new memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays, and another chapter from her new memoir, “The Female Gaze,” was a Notable Essay in the 2023 Best American Essays.
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