“White people embrace narratives about forgiveness,” wrotethe essayist and author Roxane Gay after the massacre, “so they

It is the fixed nature of caste that distinguishes it from class,a term to which it is often compared. Class is an altogether sepa-rate measure of one’s standing in a society, marked by level ofeducation, income, and occupation, as well as the attendant char-acteristics, such as accent, taste, and manners, that flow from so-cioeconomic status. These can be acquired through hard work andingenuity or lost through poor decisions or calamity. If you can actyour way out of it, then it is class, not caste. Through the years,wealth and class may have insulated some people born to the sub-ordinate caste in America but not protected them from humiliat-ing attempts to put them in their place or to remind them of theircaste position.

Tied conveniently as it was to what one looked like, member-ship in either the upper or the lowest caste was deemed immuta-ble, primordial, fixed from birth to death, and thus regarded asinescapable. “He may neither earn nor wed his way out,” wrotethe scholars Allison Davis and Burleigh and Mary Gardner in DeepSouth, their seminal 1941 study of caste in America.

Bhimrao Ambedkar came to theUnited States to study economics as a graduate student at Colum-bia, focused on the differences between race, caste, and class.

These tenets, as interpreted by those who put themselves onhigh, would become the divine and spiritual foundation for thebelief in a human pyramid willed by God, a Great Chain of Being,that the founders would further sculpt in the centuries to follow,as circumstances required. And so we have what could be calledthe first pillar of caste, Divine Will and the Laws of Nature, thefirst of the organizing principles inherent in any caste system.Wilk_9780593230251_all_3p_r1.indd 104 20/6/5 8:28 AM

The surplus of life’s labor is not sufficient to con-tinue bearing the burden of a caste system devoted tocontrolling the many so a few can indulge in egotisti-cal displays of privilege on a dying Earth. The more ofhumanity’s labor we devote to maintaining the system ofdomination, the less that is available to secure life’s wellbe-ing and the more rapid the living system’s collapse.

This exclusionary argument has serious connotations for our times, where Indian cultural identity has been projected as Hindu from ancient times despite overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary, and hence cannot pass without criticism.

majorly married within their gotra

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