‘Caste: A Global Story’ by Suraj Milind Yengde: Multiple manifestations of caste

While caste is talked about in whispers even in India, ‘Suraj Yengde’s Caste: A Global Story’ insists on its global mutation and how it has embedded itself into diverse geographies.

The author writes that caste is not merely India’s parochial wound but an evolving structure that travelled and survived across the world, intersecting with other systems of oppression. In doing that, the book is able to expand the geographical scope of the studies of caste. It transports the reader from Marathwada to Trinidad, from Dalit Panthers to Black rights movements, emphasising on its multiple manifestations. The work in itself is interdisciplinary, drawing on personal reflections, ethnographic encounters, history, anthropology, sociology, literary studies and archival resources. The book constantly shifts between personal narratives and scholarly analysis, making it both accessible and rigorous.

The book succeeds in several ways. It navigates its readers through the various ways in which caste has been understood and outlined. Whether caste is a colonial construct, a theological order, or a manifestation of class society, Yengde asserts that all these approaches treated Dalit merely as an object of analysis. He emphasises on Dalit subjectivity, how these frameworks fail to accommodate the lived experiences of Dalits, the ways in which they encountered and resisted the structures of caste.

Yengde acknowledges the role of literature in ‘ontological mapping’, shaping struggles and building solidarities. He embraced Dalit sahitya (literature) as a vehicle for defiance. He also sees it as a site of solidarity by referring to the engagement of Dalit writers with Black literature and Black rights movements, at the same time acknowledging it as a one-sided love affair and highlighting on the disconnect between the Dalit and Black American literary worlds.

He argues that the primary reason for the same is possibly the paucity of resources and cultural barriers and the fact that Dalit literature was largely written in regional languages and not English. However, scholars like BR Ambedkar, MN Wankhede and, subsequently, Janardhan Waghmare, in their literary and critical undertakings, educated the Dalit masses about the undertakings and the struggles of Black Americans during slavery and post slavery and the civil rights movement era.

He insists on the need to find connections between separate yet closely linked enemies and driving action through the “intimacy of capital, networks and the geographical necessity of being in transit”. The chapter ‘Affairs of Letters’ opens new avenues to relook at Dalit-Black literary exchanges through closer textual analysis and explore intellectual and political resources and responses to grapple with the oppressive structures of caste both locally and globally.

The most significant insight of the book lies in his case study of Trinidad. What emerges is a portrait of caste both as adaptable and enduring. He shows how with Indian indentured labourers migrating to the Caribbean, caste also travelled and persisted in the marital customs, and through memory and rituals, even when it is publicly disavowed. The assumptions that caste system is weakening in the contemporary society is further complicated by how these communities are negotiating with new identities and sustain caste in newer forms.

The book offers reflections on the need to understand caste globally and encourage Dalit voices to engage in theorising caste. It necessitates building anti-caste solidarities globally and cautions against token representation.

— The writer teaches at Punjabi University