Opinion California caste law controversy: The model minority myth needs caste blindness

The Indian American population is now the most highly educated and affluent group in the US, what some have called “the other one percent.” The biggest increases in Indian migration to the United States followed the 1965 US Immigration Act and the 1990s Information Technology boom. Approximately 60 per cent of the current Indian American population came after 2000, mostly to work in tech. Indian migrants represent a small slice of the homeland population that has benefited from caste inheritances, especially access to higher education. A 2016 study found that 68 per cent of Indians in the US have a college degree, as compared to 7.8 per cent of Indians in India and 20 per cent of the US population.

Until recently, that meant an absence of the kinds of democratic challenges that we see in India. The invisibility of caste and hypervisibility of race in the American public sphere allowed Indian Americans to frame their economic and professional achievements as self-made successes unrelated to caste. From the 1990s, Indian engineer-entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley spearheaded projects of image-making that perpetuate two linked myths — of themselves as a model minority, and of America as a land of opportunity. In this preferred narrative of humble, middle-class origins, histories of caste are strikingly absent. By disavowing education as a lucrative, mobile form of caste capital, it reframes inherited privilege as middle-class merit, and parlays racial minority status into a fable of hard work and innate talent.

Those resisting the introduction of caste as a protected category in US anti-discrimination law generally offer two arguments. First, it would force Indian Americans who left caste behind in the homeland to think of themselves in caste terms. This claim to castelessness disregards caste’s underlying role in reproducing collective advantages and disadvantages, instead reducing it to individual sentiment and interpersonal animus. Moreover, it sidesteps the proliferation of caste-based civil society organisations and role of caste networks in shaping university and corporate recruitment in the US. That caste is alive and well in the diaspora has become more difficult to deny after a high-profile caste discrimination case against Cisco Systems in 2020, followed by a public statement by 30 Dalit women engineers, and testimonies at public hearings on caste protections.

For many second-generation Indian Americans, such events shed new light on how caste underwrites their family histories of education, employment and migration, a dawning consciousness of inherited privilege that disrupts the narrative of India as a land of adversity that their parents fled before succeeding in the US. For the migrant generation, conversely, the claim to castelessness has deep transnational roots, drawing from the strident opposition to reservations in India. In voicing the fear that legal measures against caste discrimination form a slippery slope to quotas, Indian immigrants transpose a misplaced sense of victimhood directly from India to the US.

The second argument against caste protections — that they are “Hinduphobic” — expresses a seemingly legitimate fear of religious minority discrimination in the US. The rhetoric, however, far outweighs actual examples of such discrimination. Instead, the perplexing equation between legislation to prevent caste discrimination and “Hinduphobia” makes sense only when we consider a longer history of mobilisation by groups with ties to Indian Hindutva formations.

The 2005 controversy around California textbooks offers a telling example. The Vedic Foundation and Hindu Education Foundation complained to the California Curriculum Commission that sixth grade history textbooks, which included caste oppression in their account of Hinduism, were “neocolonial” efforts to denigrate a US minority religion. Transnational resonances with the rise of Hindu nationalism in India are striking — after all, the BJP’s Ram Janmabhoomi movement emerged largely to counter the threat of the Mandal Commission. In mobilising a narrative of Hindu victimisation at the hands of Muslims, the movement shifted attention away from caste hierarchies within Hinduism. This strategy, of pitting Mandir against Mandal, or religion against caste, finds an echo in Indian American attempts to pit “Hinduphobia” against the recognition of caste discrimination.

The affinity between minority claims in the US and a majoritarian movement in India might appear contradictory. But while some Indian Americans do make common cause with minorities in India, many others have become avid backers of Hindu nationalism. Indian American support for Hindutva expresses forms of caste entitlement carried over from India. As with other long-distance nationalisms, it also expresses the desire for a country where they are an unchallenged majority. Paradoxically, the experience of being a minority in the United States feeds the appetite for majoritarian nationalism in India.

Clearly, the model minority myth that so many Indian Americans propagate requires shutting down conversations about caste. The sustained efforts of anti-caste activists keep them alive. As I write, activists are staging a hunger strike in support of SB 403. The three lead strikers — Nirmal  Singh from California’s Sikh Ravidassia community; Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the executive director of the Dalit civil rights organisation, Equality Labs; and Sana Qutbuddin, director of Advocacy of the Indian American Muslim Council — together embody a spirit of coalition-building. In turn, these diasporic activists offer a model of emancipatory solidarities that may well resonate for progressive politics in the homeland.

The writer is Professor of Anthropology at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York