Is caste a problem for America’s South Asian diaspora? Yes, says a Dalit rights activist’s book

I think my mom never expected to have to have The Talk in America. My parents’ generation was so naive. They thought they had left caste behind when they came to the United States. They were steeped in a desperate optimism, being among the first generation to benefit from affirmative action programs that enabled Dalits to access higher education and pursue professions abroad as part of a new wave of South Asian immigrants to the US in the 1970s.

After all they had endured to become educated, my parents genuinely believed caste was in the rearview mirror; in truth, they also needed to push down the demons that had terrorised them at home. When I asked my mom about our caste, however, she recognised that we had not left it behind. And that perhaps the demons of caste could never be escaped. Moreover, leaving the material and economic conditions of caste doesn’t mean you have healed from the trauma of caste. And importantly it’s not just trauma from the past: Everywhere South Asians go, they bring caste and trauma from caste apartheid.

Caste migrates and spreads, reestablishing itself in our new geographies as we arrive as settler colonials. Caste is embodied by all diasporic South Asians, regardless of our ethnic, national, linguistic, religious, sexual, or political affiliations. Although caste discrimination and caste-based violence in the United States are not as widespread and overt as in South Asia, they exist here as well.

In 2015 Equality Labs conducted the first-ever survey about caste in the US. I worked with the indefatigable Dr Maari Zwick-Maitreyi, who helmed this landmark contribution to Dalit feminist scholarship in North America. We decided to conduct this survey after repeatedly hearing Dalit Americans talk about the caste discrimination they had experienced, whereas dominant-caste South Asian Americans said caste wasn’t an issue. It’s hard now to recall a time when people didn’t acknowledge caste in the United States, but 2016 was a very different moment. Many academics did not support breaking the taboo of caste, and a culture of silence and denial ran rampant within the South Asian American community.

Dalits were also afraid to be publicly identified and spoke openly about their fears about being outed. Despite that fear, people trusted our team, and we were honored to reach out to hundreds of South Asian groups across caste, language, and political spectrums.

While we gathered data, interviewing people in front of South Asian markets, businesses, and religious centers, dominant-caste individuals hurled caste slurs at us. Our researchers in multiple states all experienced open bigotry and disgust. One South Asian organisation had an existential crisis over the survey and convened a board meeting to debate sharing the survey. We stood before that board with courage and explained that the community was already divided, so this data would create space for powerful conversations that would not only document the problem but also help everyone heal.

That organisation and many others eventually pushed the survey throughout the US. Our hard work helped shed light on caste bias and inspired a new generation of truth telling to dismantle caste supremacy.

Indeed, it is fascinating to look at American history through the lens of caste. Some of the very first records mentioning South Asian immigrants date from the 1700s. Reverend William Bentley, a minister in Salem, Massachusetts, wrote in his diaries about the first Indian who arrived in Salem: “I had the pleasure of seeing for the first time, a native of Indies, who was from Madras. He was of dark complexion, had long black hair and soft countenance. He was tall and well proportioned. He is said to be darker than Indians in general of his own cast.”

With (we can only assume) nearly no knowledge of India, the good reverend mentions caste. Likely the Indian he met wanted to emphasise that he was not lower-caste when he noted his complexion.
According to the records of the South Asian American Digital Archive, South Asians began immigrating to the United States in larger numbers in the late 1800s. These early immigrants were primarily Sikh men from the Punjab region of British India who settled in the western parts of the United States (California, Oregon, and Washington) and western Canada (British Columbia).

They fled the English’s brutal colonial regime that forced Indians to grow cash crops rather than food to benefit a booming industrial Britain. Affected by drought, famine, and back-breaking taxation, they looked abroad for better prospects. For the most part they worked in the US and Canada as labourers in fields, lumberyards, and mills.17 They helped build the railroads and, alongside Mexican and Filipino laborers, cleared the swamps in California’s Central Valley to create fertile farmland.

In the personal archives of Dalit Canadian Anita Lal’s family, we have an early account of harm done to Dalits by dominant-caste immigrants within the community of Punjabi Sikh laborers on the west coast. Anita’s family is one of the oldest Dalit families in North America, and the testimony of her great-grandfather Maiha Ram Mehmi on his experience of casteism in the lumber mills of British Columbia reveals just how long caste has been here in the Americas.

When he first came to work in the lumber mill, the dominant castes would not allow him to eat with them; he had to eat alone in his room. He was also forbidden to take shifts in the cookhouse, due to the fact that he was considered impure and dirty. Interestingly enough, a dominant-caste Hindu foreman, Kapoor Singh, noticed this dynamic. When he discovered the cause of the exclusion, he insisted that all workers eat in the same place. This account is one of the first known examples of untouchability in North America; we can only imagine how many more went unrecorded. Here is a brutal reminder that caste-based discrimination in the workplace was happening as soon as South Asians arrived in North America – and it has never stopped.

Many white workers of this time were unhappy with immigrants from China and South Asia who were competition for their jobs. Their dissatisfaction spilled into the press with race-baiting coverage like this bigoted article in the Puget Sound American: “Have we a Dusky Peril? Hindu hordes invading the state . . .prove a worse menace to the working classes than the ‘yellow peril’ that has so long threatened the Pacific Coast.”

These articles also coded their racism with caste; most South Asian laborers were described in the US press as “low-caste Hindoos.” Significant focus was given to the different traits of “low-caste” and “high-caste” South Asian immigrants. Those perceived to be low-caste were described as of “poor class physically as well as mentally,” “more treacherous, if possible” than Japanese immigrants, with brains that do “not readily grasp even the elementary problems of this country.” They are “a dark mystic race” living in “tumble-down ‘shacks’ which a white man, even from southern Europe, would have spurned.” High-caste Hindus were orientalised for their spiritual and intellectual contributions; some were even noted for their exotic genius, and their descriptions frequently named them as “high-caste brahmins.” These distinctions did not last long as the tide of racism soon turned all South Asian immigrants into the criminal other.

This bigotry led to a wave of xenophobic protests and in one tragic documented instance led to the Bellingham riots in 1907, in which white mobs went door to door to locate and evict hundreds of Indian immigrants, resulting in many leaving the region forever. In response to the mass violence and political pressure from white workers American politicians passed the exclusionary Naturalization Act of 1906, which notoriously established racial criteria limiting the qualifications for naturalisation so that only white persons and persons of African descent were eligible for US citizenship.

The first challenges to this act were from dominant-caste South Asians in the immigration cases of AK Mozumdar and Bhagat Singh Thind. Neither of them challenged the racial stipulation itself but rather made the argument that they were essentially white, given their dominant-caste identity. AK Mozumdar asserted that as a high-caste Hindu, he belonged to the “Aryan” race; therefore, he was a brown “white” person, given the shared Aryan-racial histories of white Europeans and dominant-caste people in South Asia.

Bhagat Singh Thind made the same argument, adding even more severe anti-Black and anti-Indigenous statements. He spoke with pride of the Indian caste system and celebrated his dominant-caste back-ground. He compared the Aryan invaders of India to the European invaders of North America, arguing Aryans were like “the Caucasian people of this country who have taken possession and driven out the native red men.” He also asserted that “the high Caste Hindu regards the aboriginal Indian Mongoloid in the same manner as the American regards the Negro, speaking from a matrimonial standpoint”. Thind even insisted he would support the vicious anti-miscegenation laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

Despite these arguments both Mozumdar and Thind lost their cases. In US v. Thind, the court found that people of East Indian origin were ineligible for US citizenship because they did not meet the “common-sense” understanding of “white.” Pervading the decision is racist and casteist commentary like this: “In Punjab and Rajputana, while the invaders seem to have met with more success in the effort to preserve their racial purity, intermarriages did occur producing an intermingling of the two and destroying to a greater or less degree the purity of the ‘Aryan’ blood. The rules of caste, while calculated to prevent this intermixture, seem not to have been entirely successful.”

In the Thind decision, Justice Sutherland also references the Immigration Act of 1917 that banned Asian immigration as further evidence that Indians, as Asians, were excluded from the American polity and that Hindus were not “free born whites.” In the wake of this decision, Mozumdar and up to fifty other Indian Americans had their citizenship revoked.

Excerpted with permission from ‘The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition’, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, North Atlantic Books.