Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent

Abstract

For my entire adult life, I have been engaged in study of the Hindu traditions: most of my writing has been perched on the border between my own Catholic tradition and Hindu traditions, and so too my thirty-eight years of teaching have been almost entirely given over to Hindu-Christian themes or simply to the close reading of Hindu texts. As a Jesuit—baptized Francis Xavier, in honor of the first Jesuit to arrive in India in 1542—I also have been mindful of the long history of my religious order in India (hence my recent collection of essays, Western Jesuit Scholars in India) and the mixed history of our efforts to convert Hindus, refute Hindu beliefs, shape a truly Indian Christianity, and, of course, educate India's Hindu and Muslim populations in our many institutions of higher and secondary education. Implicated in this history as well are Catholic and Jesuit uncertainties toward caste. The question of whether to denounce the caste system or to accommodate structures that we cannot do much to change has roiled the Jesuit order in India since the sixteenth century.I am a scholar of Hindu traditions, of Sanskrit- and Tamil-language traditions of ritual, theology, and poetry, and I admire so very much of what I have learned. I have many Hindu friends and consider myself a better Catholic and Jesuit because of my indebtedness to Hindu wisdom, practice, and piety. I have always been disposed to make the case for learning from Hinduism, encouraging students and colleagues and the wider audience of readers of my books and blogs to be open to what can be learned, receptive to accepting these elements into their lives, and ready to re-view their own faith traditions in light of Hinduism. Sometimes people ask me why I am not more critical: after all, I have traveled frequently to India and am in a position to know the faults, blindnesses, and dead ends of its religions. But I usually plead that my vocation has been to open doors and facilitate learning. Let others take upon themselves the work of criticism, though, one hopes, bearing in mind as well the sins of Western religions and civilization.Hence my ambivalence in reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, another best-selling book by Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Warmth of Other Suns, which recounted the migration of millions of Black Americans from the South to the North in the early and middle twentieth century. Wilkerson is a thoughtful and perceptive writer, gifted with an accessible style that invites the reader into her reflections on racism in American society. Her new book deploys India's millennia-old caste system as a paradigm for American racism, passed down from generation to generation. Wilkerson recounts Martin Luther King's shock, when visiting India in 1959, at being welcomed in a poor and marginalized community as a brother, an “American untouchable.” She then goes on to tell us stories of suffering fueled by the appalling cruelty, but also enabled by the ignorance and indifference, of American whites. She attempts to get American whites to realize just how privileged we are, and just how ignorant and naive we are about the systemic cruelties that infuse our ways of life. Caste is a timely book to have read during Lent, in the shadow of recent violence against George Floyd and a host of other Black Americans, their suffering now accentuated in solidarity with the sufferings of Dalits in India.Despite the book's title, caste is not really at its heart, and we do not really learn much about caste here. Wilkerson is by no means the first to draw the parallel between castism and racism. As I write this reflection, I have on my desk John Dollard's Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937), Oliver Cromwell Cox's Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948), and Gyanendra Pandey's A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States (2013). My friend Anantanand Rambachan, a prominent Hindu theologian and a leader in the Hindu community in the United States, addresses the sin of castism in the final chapter of A Hindu Theology of Liberation (2015). It seems to me that all these earlier works are more informative about caste than Caste, which is a fresh opportunity for returning to the issues more complexly presented by these and other authors.But my worries go deeper. Other religions have been made foils to Christian and American virtue for a very long time, and Hinduism has been characterized by many in the West as flawed on natural, moral, and religious grounds. While Wilkerson does not intend any crude reductionism, many people who read her book may come away with a sense both that “caste = racism” and that “caste = Hinduism.” There is no denying that Hinduism is soiled by castism as America is by racism and Christianity by anti-Semitism. But there is much more than that to be said about all three. The Hindu traditions of over a billion people, now flourishing everywhere in the world and affecting us all, still have much to teach us by their intelligent, imaginative, and deeply moral and spiritual ways of life. Caste, that complex mix of structure (varna) and birth status (jati), is part of a larger cultural and religious whole that we should not neglect when pointing out flaws. What if Caste merely cements the little that most readers will ever know about India and Hinduism? Is there not a danger of yet again using India, Hinduism, and caste as props in a drama about ourselves in the United States?I cannot pretend innocence regarding the problems raised by Wilkerson; none among us is innocent of the woes of the societies where we live or visit. Nor can I plead scholarly neutrality as an excuse for honoring the brilliant complexity and depth of Hindu classical traditions while blithely ignoring human suffering. So the issues raised in Caste thankfully do not go easily away. But neither can I forget what I have learned over the past fifty years of the wisdom and beauty, goodness and piety, of Hindu traditions. There is much to hold in balance: concerns about the true and concerns about the good go together, neither negating the other.