In a case filed in June 2020, the State of California alleged that two managers at Cisco Systems harassed a fellow Indian American employee for being a Dalit, or of a perceived lower-caste status. The case may help to recognise caste as new grounds for discrimination in the United States – a much needed intervention since Dalit Americans routinely face discrimination, including in the form of verbal and physical assault. While such developments demonstrate progress in recognising, if not addressing, caste-based discrimination, there is much work left to do. This includes unpacking how structures of caste privilege are sustained in Southasian institutions – including in establishments for higher education thought to be nurturing the region's most gifted students.
In this interview we speak to Ajantha Subramanian, a Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at Harvard University and the Chair of Harvard University's Department of Anthropology. Her recent book The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India chronicles the rise of engineering education in India and tracks the relationship between meritocracy and democracy. Subramanian talks to Himal Southasian about how caste privilege is sustained through engineering education, how it migrates to the diaspora, how technical knowledge became integral to state power and nationalism in India, and how mass coaching and reservations challenge caste hierarchies.
Himal Southasian: In The Caste of Merit you argue that merit is a form of caste property. Can you expand on what that means and describe how caste privilege became merit in India? How does the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and engineering education contribute to caste privilege?
Ajantha Subramanian: The book narrates the process by which castes who historically enjoyed privileged access to land, labour, education and professional employment were able to transform these forms of inherited capital into a claim to merit. While there were many mechanisms through which privileged castes refashioned themselves as meritocratic, modern subjects, I look at the role of engineering education – and the IITs in particular – in mediating this process. Part of this story is about the ideology of technical science as an objective, politically neutral form of knowledge in which social identities play no part. I show how, in the Indian context, this ideology of objectivity and social disembeddedness obscures the role of caste stratification and caste distinction in shaping access to and experiences of engineering education. But I also look more closely at the role of three technologies of caste formation – affirmative action, mass examinations, and diasporic mobility – to show how each contributed to reinforcing the association between being upper caste and having merit.