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One day in New Delhi there was a commotion outside a shopping mall. A student from the nearby Jawaharlal Nehru University was not being let in. This young man, Sumeet Samos, was from a Dalit Christian family in rural Odisha and his darker skin colour had caught the critical eye of a security guard. During his education Samos had traversed worlds, from the deep poverty of his home state to the modernity of JNU. For now, though, this journey had stopped at the threshold of a mall.

The next evening, after fuming all day, Samos vlogged about this humiliating experience and he uploaded the footage to Facebook. He then went to bed and during the night something faintly magical occurred. On awakening he found that friends and acquaintances were congratulating him on his rapping.   

He hadn’t been rapping – it was more ranting – but he soon would be. Samos was in the process of becoming an anticaste activist and this would occur through a series of bravura manoeuvres, sideways into rapping and next diagonally into an MSc programme at Oxford University. He crowdfunded his Oxford scholarship, taking in around £36,000 in three hours. Caste follows that famous law of physics in which the personal is the political and Samos’s Affairs of Caste (2022) is a memoir that is total politics. It is published by Panther’s Paw, a publishing house in Nagpur that is run single-handedly by the Dalit activist Yogesh Maitreya.

I want to review Samos’s book from the perspective of the left in the UK. From such a perspective, casteism often seems like a silly, archaic item, rather like the House of Lords, which modernity hasn’t gotten around to tidying away yet. If a black man was not let into a shopping mall somewhere, there would be a lavish and almost celebratory horror across social media. With caste, though, there is still so much groundwork to put in, still the Civil Rights movement to live through all over again. Of course, this work has to be done but the repetition is fatiguing, as when there is yet another Star Wars movie for the world to watch.

This was originally my opinion. Indeed a Marxism that is cruising on autopilot might deem anticasteism to be perfectly sensible in itself but, if pushed too far, a distraction from class struggle. Marxism can be always justified on the basis that the majority is the greatest available source of rational understanding. Yet Affairs of Caste suggests that during our current period of history anticasteism might serve as a handy container for progressive politics, or even for the ideals of the Enlightenment.

There is a wholesomeness to anticaste activism that is today missing from much of the UK left. Anticasteism is focused on progress and on providing wealth, education and cultural fulfilment to the poorest people. Even when non-secular worldviews such as Buddhism or Christianity are chosen as escape routes out of caste, the public irrationality of casteism is always what is being broken out from.

By contrast, the UK left is generally fronted by ignominiously privileged people, who are these days more likely to be campaigning for the poorest people to have lower standards of living. For such an intellectual leadership, “reaching Net Zero” is more of a priority than providing cheap energy to millions of people. Respecting green spaces is more of a priority than mass housebuilding programmes. It is quite commonplace today to see left-wing activists campaigning the one minute to give nurses pay increases and the next to price nurses out of driving their cars and heating their homes.

 Affairs of Caste can be exhilarating when it attacks the hypocrisy of self-styled “radicals” who are too close to privilege, and too distant from the realities of poverty, to be anything other than conservative. Samos observes this at JNU:

Only a certain privileged group can afford to do that kind of activism with either their parents’ support or networks… I began to feel distant with the grand angry rhetoric and jargonized conversations in academic and activism circles.               

This might not be a description of Just Stop Oil but since the hat fits…

Perhaps the boon of anticasteism is that it can be never invaded and colonised by privileged recreational activists. For today’s left, anticastism might almost serve as a twenty-first-century memento mori. Just as a medieval love scene might include a skeleton grinning out of the rosebushes, as a reminder that death is always waiting, the modern left-wing political meeting should welcome the Dalit activist, as their reminder that the world of privilege isn’t the be all and end all. That it is temporary, even.

There is, of course, an uncomfortable irony to celebrating anticasteism or to assigning it the role that I have put forward. The thing is surely to abolish caste, rather than to preserve the lower castes as a special part of the left that can be never contaminated with privilege and creeping conservativism. And it should be noted that Affairs of Caste is far more of a scorcher when it is attacking the Indian left, and writing most of it off as Brahminical, than when it is trying to organise an alternative.

Samos claims to have first approached the skillset of rap when reciting monologues in village theatre. Yet he ultimately seizes upon rap because it is something clean and new, a phenomenon that is expressly modern. Perhaps this is also why he did not gravitate to preaching or to a formal position within one of Christianity’s many hierarchies. Of course, there will be Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Indian and diasporic Dalits. If anticasteism ever emerges as a single, powerful political force, it would be very difficult for any leader to get their hands on a corner from which to steer its bulk.

Later Samos is at Oxford. One here begins to worry about his physical distance from the “questions about economy, land, resources and labour markets” that he had previously contended were “sidelined” within activism and academia. There nonetheless remains a strong and important sense throughout Affairs of Caste that the lower castes and their suffering are the home of political realism. Samos always sounds awestruck by his own mother, a community health worker who had dedicated her life to serving “around fifteen to twenty villages.” Her work continues to stand as a living ideal in Samos’s memoir rather than as merely a previous generational stage.

Samos has no apparent relationship with the Maoist movements in rural India. There is a still small ghostly flame burning, of that old Maoist prescription in which bourgeois activists have to be bussed out to “learn from the peasantry”:

Let the autonomous struggle of Adivasis, Dalits, and other oppressed sections flow and evolve in accordance with their circumstances, micro-histories, convictions, dilemmas, and not according to the diktats of higher caste/class leaderships.

Although today’s recreational activists seem to be increasingly excited by minor faux pas on social media, Samos reminds us that for the poor in Odisha, digital illiteracy and inequality can cut them off from modernity altogether. He remembers “Devika, a young Dalit girl who was pushed to take her own life for not being able to access virtual classes in Kerala.”

This consciousness of the base means that Affairs of Caste is never in fact a misery memoir. Odisha is always behind us in Affairs of Caste, with Samos only remembering it over his shoulder and in fragments. A reader in the UK will find these fascinating, or like thrilling little dips into hell:

I used to go to the NALCO township to teach history to a brahmin classmate of mine for free, and we would always sit outside his home while I taught him… Somewhere deep down, you feel that you were made inferior and untouchable, but to avoid the unease of bringing it up, you keep quiet.

Yet Samos occasionally remembers the mango-fragranced poverty longingly, with a nostalgia that is as sharp and as brilliant as a diamond. When this occurs we might uneasily wonder whether the real periphery was all along at the JNU. At one point Samos observes that “in my seven years in Delhi, I have never been to any upper caste family household.”

Generally in Affairs of Caste the upper castes feature as parasitical, politically useless, and little more than a kind of monstrous Masonic network. Samos’s eerie description of their shape-shifting might once again fathom that nightmare within George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which “anything could be true” and power alone determines any given political reality:

They are communists in Bengal, postcolonial brown immigrants in the US, the seculars in Congress, the radical Hindutva in the BJP, liberals in Khan Market, farming specialists with no background in farming, and sarvajans in Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).

However sinister this flexibility sounds, it should be remembered that Orwell himself had been privileged at Eton, an imperialist in Burma, a Republican in Catalonia and a tramp in the East End of London. So there are routes leading down from the commanding heights.

Is simply achieving an accurate description of the upper castes all that is needed, to rumble their hypocrisy and embarrass them into meekness? Perhaps anticasteism should be akin to the dew that makes the lines of the spider’s web visible at dawn. When applied to the UK’s class politics, though, such an approach has been rarely consequential. However middle-class and privileged the “Corbynista” left is endlessly shown to be, this seldom leads to any soul searching or to an openness to actually listening to working-class people.

Class politics might not be the same the world over but the nature of casteism is unlikely to be lost on a reader in the UK. In the UK, the left sometimes forgets to factor in the full humanity of the working class. As to India, Samos is demanding “basic decency towards fellow human beings.” Casteists “consider the majority of the Dalits as subhuman bodies meant for providing services, and that is where the battle begins.”

[Previously on Tychy: “On Three Leaders (Ambedkar, Gandhi and Modi).“]