Our Caste System

Thinking about Ambedkar by thinking beyond Ambedkar.

By Maya Lerman

Illustration by Truman Dickerson

In May of 1916, a 25-year-old Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar wrote and presented a paper, entitled “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development,” for a Columbia anthropology seminar. “Subtler minds and abler pens than mine have been brought to the task of unravelling the mysteries of Caste,” Ambedkar remarked, “but unfortunately it still remains in the domain of the ‘unexplained,’ not to say of the ‘un-understood.’ I am quite alive to the complex intricacies of a hoary institution like Caste, but I am not so pessimistic as to relegate it to the region of the unknowable, for I believe it can be known.”

In the story of Ambedkar and Columbia, this is where one might begin: with an act of definition. For Ambedkar, and the millions of caste-oppressed South Asians of all religious, ethnic, and geographical origins, the experience of caste was never a mystery. Yet an epistemic gap persisted—unsurpisingly, as Ambedkar was one of relatively few Dalits to receive higher education, much less a Master’s degree abroad. Ambedkar’s initial project was making caste “knowable” to the American academic sphere. Then, from the walls of his graduate seminar, to the pages of the Constitution of a newly independent India, Ambedkar’s explanation of caste would present a legal and textual basis for its dismantling. 

Ambedkar’s memory reverberates into the present, echoing in the halls of his alma mater. Visit the Lehman Library in Columbia’s School of International and Political Affairs, and his bust will greet you as you enter. On the anniversary of Ambedkar’s birthday, you might see his admirers visiting the statue to pay tribute to India’s intellectual and political giant, laying garlands around his neck and adorning the base of the statue with flowers. 

Like many Columbia sophomores, my path to Ambedkar came in seminar form, packaged in the Contemporary Civilization curriculum. It was something of an odd introduction. Looped into the “Anti-Colonialism and Resistance” unit, and paired with Gandhi—Ambedkar’s more famous, and more straightforwardly “anti-colonial” interlocutor—Ambedkar’s “Annihilation of Caste” felt out of place. In a series of texts addressing familiar civil rights issues (American chattel slavery, Jim Crow, women’s suffrage, decolonial independence movements, etc.), the caste question initially stands out as geographically, culturally, and religiously removed from the “Western” lineage of Columbia’s Core Curriculum. To my thoroughly Americanized half-Indian self, the experience of caste was just as alien. What, I wondered, was caste supposed to mean to me? What should the Columbians of today learn from Ambedkar?

Spring 2023 marked an update in Ambedkar’s relevance at Columbia. After lobbying from students from the Journalism School, a unanimous University Senate resolution officially named “caste” as a protected status. Later that year, Barnard followed suit, adding “caste” to the text of its Non-Discrimination Policy. 

The 2023 decision was the culmination of decades of Dalit activism reckoning with the unique manifestations of caste in the Indian diaspora—a movement which, in the United States, has primarily coalesced around a push for added protections against casteism. Alongside student advocates, such reforms have been backed by Columbia’s continuous legacy of Ambedkar scholars; most prominently, the Institute for Comparative Literature’s Ambedkar Initiative, led by Professor Anupama Rao. Their work is expansive, including public events, lectures, and workshops; a podcast showcasing student research; and even a dedicated class on Ambedkar at Columbia. “The Initiative,” Rao explains, “is trying to recover the memory of someone that we should all know much, much better.” Despite his influence in South Asian studies and renowned importance for Indians globally, Ambedkar is too often overlooked in the broader Columbia story, in part because his major political work was most visible overseas. But Rao and her students are firm believers in his continued relevance, here in particular. 

“This institution really ought to have Ambedkar fellows, and commit to using that name to create a critical space of discourse,” Rao tells me. This aspiration defines the comparative ethos of the Initiative: Student researchers share their work on the intersections of casteism with gender, sexuality, and race, putting Ambedkar’s scholarship in conversation with American civil rights struggles. As Rao puts it, “We have to think about Ambedkar by thinking beyond Ambedkar.” 

The comparisons were not lost on Ambedkar himself. The first link on the Ambedkar Initiative’s website takes you to Ambedkar’s brief letter to W.E.B. DuBois. “There is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of the Negroes in America that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary,” Ambedkar wrote. In America today, caste as a point of reference for understanding our own systemic inequalities has increased in popularity—look no further than Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 bestseller, titled “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” which argues for looking at American racial discrimination through the more expansive lens of caste.

Indeed, it is the broader context of racial reckoning that spurred the movement for recognizing caste as a protected status in the United States. According to Rao, the momentum for formalizing caste-based protections coincided with the post-2020 Black Lives Matter movement, as Black activists created discursive space for thinking about solidarity and resistance to marginalization. 

In comparison to ample studies on American racial inequality, data on the Dalit experience in the United States is hard to come by. Of Indian Americans, only about one percent self-identifies with scheduled caste or scheduled tribe. According to Equality Labs, a major American Dalit advocacy group, 67% of Dalits in the U.S. report experiencing workplace harassment on the basis of caste. In 2020, a major lawsuit was filed against Cisco Systems for discrimination against a Dalit employee, bringing attention to the presence of caste dynamics in Silicon Valley and other professional spaces with high South Asian representation. In 2023, the California state legislature passed a bill adding caste as a protected category under their Civil Rights Act. The bill was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom after backlash from Hindu lobbying groups—the counter-argument being that naming caste singles-out South Asians and contributes to “Hindu-phobia.”

The Columbia analog to the California bill was met with minimal pushback. This is not the case across higher education. According to Rao, the Dalit student movement was spearheaded by large public universities, notably Cal State. On the east coast this was exemplified at Rutgers, which published the most comprehensive survey on caste-based discrimination in the American university. Ironically, despite institutionally-backed research, Rutgers has not formally named caste protections in its university statutes.

Columbia, as a private, Ivy-League institution, has a unique student dynamic to contend with. “My sense,” Rao tells me, “is that there’s few Dalit students, betwixt and between.” Rao herself comes from an upper-caste background, and laments that among Columbia faculty, there are no permanent Dalit scholars. Rao urges us to grapple with this lacuna as we tackle the caste question from a scholarly and activist lens. “Who is that conversation for?” she asks. 

This is a feature of our national conversation—it is estimated that 90% of Indian immigrants to the United States are of upper-caste status—but Columbia must confront its uniquely exclusionary nature. Elite higher-education attracts wealthier, more privileged students from across the globe, rendering our campus conversation markedly different from the parallel debate at institutions like Rutgers. Despite our international representation, Columbia’s diversity is paradoxically limited by its prestige. 

In my interviews with South Asian students, a common thread emerged: Caste in the diaspora is elusive, even invisible. American-raised children of Indian immigrants lack the cultural knowledge to discriminate based on caste—divorced from the Indian context, markers like skin color, class, profession, and religion don’t hold the same caste-implicated significations they do in India. Those involved in South Asian student groups have heard stories through the grapevine—of probing questions into last name and family background, or even explicit inquiries into one’s caste back in India—but for most, caste is not salient to their self-identity. Across the board, those I spoke to were supportive of efforts to name and bring attention to caste-based discrimination. All were open about descending from a Brahminical or similarly upper-caste background. No one knew a fellow student who was out as Dalit.

The disappearance of caste in the diaspora makes sense: For Dalit immigrants, leaving India is often a means of escape from caste oppression. For many, caste is seen as an antiquated, shameful episode in India’s past; something to be swept under the rug once assimilated into the American melting pot. In Professor Rao’s experience, “So many students in the classroom of diasporic background will say, ‘I had no idea who I was. I don't know what my caste background is. It was not something that we ever talked about at home.’”

For these Indian immigrants, the race-based oppression of the fabric of American life is more prominent than casteism. Rao explains that a generation of Indian immigrants raising children in suburban America have been the targets of racism, even as a “model minority.” From the perspective of American white supremacy, the difference between a Brahmin and a Dalit is meaningless. When the University measures diversity, statistics on caste representation are not even considered. Still, Indians of upper-caste status cannot divorce themselves from their background of privilege. Rao asks: “Can I historicize myself as both victim and perpetrator?”

This is a necessary question: By all metrics, caste-based discrimination persists in the United States, through incidents of bigotry and enduring structural inequities. A centuries-old system of hierarchy does not vanish across borders and generations. The startling lack of Dalit visibility at Columbia is evidence of this.

When we re-visit Ambedkar at Columbia—as Indians, as children of Indians, or simply as students of history—we must not lose sight of who has been barred from this discourse. The rigorous and diverse scholarship of caste that has thrived within the walls of the University has, no doubt, honored the legacy of Ambedkar. But in some sense, what we’ve gained in explicability, we have yet to make up for in terms of lived experience. A framework of protection is limited if Dalit students still do not make it into University gates. 

Caste is not as remote as it may seem. The university is limited in its ability to define and remedy stratification. Whether it’s the Indian caste system and its diasporic manifestations, the caste systems of other diasporas represented in our international community, or our own, homegrown recreations of caste-adjacent dynamics, the university is complicit. A TA of mine made a remark that stuck with me, as he complained that our whole section scored A’s on the last exam. At Columbia, he tells us, he’s not supposed to give out B’s or C’s. It’s different for his colleagues at Rutgers; apparently, “Columbia students are employers, and Rutgers students are employees.” With an eye-roll, he muses: “Talk about a caste system.” 

Navigating the ethics of institutional representation is no easy task, but Professor Rao offers some advice. She explains to me that one must take personal responsibility for their scholarship, to make space for the vibrant and living sphere of Dalit-led activism where it exists. Whether or not we are South Asian scholars, I think this is a principle we all could benefit from.