‘Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement”, the Pulitzer winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson says in her well-researched book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”.

We tend to think that America has a racial divide, which is substantially different from our own caste system. But Ms Wilkerson, who has herself suffered and continues to suffer from discrimination in her own country because of the colour of her skin, despite being one of the most brilliant journalists of her times, asserts it is one and the same, going by the common characteristics that define any caste system. Going further, she says that even the annihilation of the Jews attempted by Nazi Germany belonged to the same genre. It is not easy to dispel the arguments that she proffers. She has spent time in India as well as Germany, interacted with Dalit and German scholars, and drawn extensive inferences from the daily humiliations and discriminations the black people are subjected to in the USA each day in their lives, even more than one-and-a-half century after the 13th Amendment had abolished slavery in the USA in 1865.

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As she says, “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theatre, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power ~ which groups have it and which do not.” This reality is extremely disturbing which is why most of us pretend to ignore it, knowing fully well that ignoring it will never make the problem go away. Caste is not a term we associate with the USA or Europe; the world knows caste as a typical Indian invention, a human construct of social stratification based on one’s birth. But the word ‘Caste’ is not Indian in origin; it came from the Portuguese word “Casta” for breed or race, after they had seen its form in India.

The USA is supposed to have race prejudices based purportedly on a biological construct, and hence seemingly not as evil as caste. Early anthropologists believed race as a fundamental trait for classification of humanity, following the discovery of a skull in the Caucasus mountains in Russia by the German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1795, whi ch he thought was the most beautiful among all skulls that he owned. Ever since, the term ‘Caucasian’ has been applied to people descended from Europe ~ in other words, whites, based on skin colour. This division is as arbitrary and man-made as caste. As the Human Genome Project conclusively established, all humanity is biologically one and indivisible, with 99.9 per cent of our DNAs being shaed. We are all part of a six-millionyear history of adaptation and survival which is written in the language of our genes in every cell of our body, evolving in East Africa and then migrating in different directions to colonise the world.

Africans are not black ~ they see themselves as Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele, etc. ~ they became black only after coming to America or Europe. Gunnar Myrdal was one of the scholars who realised that it was not race but caste that accurately describes the colour-based system of discrimination and prejudice that America has perfected over the 246 years of slavery and thereafter to keep the ‘Negro in his place.’ “The caste system,” he wrote, “is up – held by its own inertia and by the superior caste’s interest in upholding it.” In 1913, well after the abolition of slavery, a southern American scholar, Thomas Pearce Bailey, had proclaimed, “Let the lowest white man count for more than the highest negro.” It was the same year that Dr. B R Ambedkar, born at the bottom of India’s caste system as an untouchable, went to New York to study economics at Columbia where he would focus on studying the differences between race, caste and class.

“There is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of the Negroes in America,” Ambedkar wrote to the African-American intellectual Du Bois, “that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary.” Years later, while visiting India, Dr. Martin Luther King came to a high school in Trivandrum that taught untouchable students, where the principal introduced him as “a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.” Dr. King was stunned but immediately realised that the so-called “Land of the Free” and the “beacon of democracy” had imposed an unshakable caste system very much like India’s that he had lived under all his life. “Yes, I am an un touchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” The superiority of whites was encoded in their psyche, and shows up, of ten even unconsciously, in their interaction with the black people they are conditioned to think as unequal and unworthy, just like in India.

Ms. Wilkerson tried to identify the common features of any caste syst – em, which she cal – ls the eight pillars of caste, the first of which is the existence of a Divine Will ~ the so-called Laws of Nature ~ which ordain that lower castes will always be consigned to the bottom, seen as deserving of their debasement owing to their past sins. In the case of India, this Divine Will is the law of Karma, in the case of America, it is the Biblical story of Canaan, the son of Ham, cursed by Noah to be the “lowest of slaves”, whose descendants are interpreted to be the Negroes, the black people. The second pillar is heritability, which confines the lowly born permanently within their cages, never allowing anyone to escape. Thus, occupations for the lower caste people became tied to their birth in India, and children of slaves automatically became the properties of their masters in the USA. Unlike Class which allows free entry depending on the socio-economic status of individuals, caste is fixed and unchangeable throughout one’s life, regardless of qualities or achievements of an individual.

The rules of society made always by the dominant castes have prescribed ingenious ways not only to keep the subordinate castes separated from them forever, but also to keep resources secure within each tier of the system. This constitutes the third pillar of caste, endogamy, i.e. restricting marriage within the same caste, an ironclad foundation of the system that is enforced brutally and can be violated only at a great peril, even today. Inter-caste marriages are legal in both countries, but by and large, remain socially unacceptable in both, and raise more than an eyebrow even now. The fourth pillar is what Ms Wilkerson calls “Purity versus Pollution”, which branded the lower caste people as impure and polluting, and hence untouchable to others. Thus, to save others from their polluting presence, the untouchables were made to prostrate themselves on the ground whenever an upper caste man walked on the road so that their profane shadows wouldn’t defile them, or to wear bells to warn them of their presence.

They were not allowed to drink water from the same wells that the upper caste drank from, and not only in India. In Nazi Germany, Jews couldn’t step on the beaches where the Aryan Germans bathed, and in America blacks were banned from white beaches and lakes and pools. Many had paid the price with their lives for violation and even in the 1960s, if a black accidentally touched the waters of a “white” pool, the entire pool would be drained of water and refilled with fresh water. There was a poignant story Ms Wilkerson relates that took place in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1951. A baseball team won the city championship and decided to celebrate it with a team picnic at a municipal pool. A kid named Al Bright was the only black member of the winning team.

But when the team arrived at the pool, a guard stopped the boy, disregarding all the pleas of his teammates and coaches. So, while all the other boys frolicked in the pool, the poor boy was made to sit outside the fence and watch helplessly. When the coaches insisted that he should be allowed into the pool at least once, the guards made everyone else get out of the water, and then Al was led to the pool on a small rubber raft, not allowing him to touch the water. A guard got into the water and pushed the raft with the boy in it for a single turn around the pool, as a hundred or so teammates, coaches, parents, and onlookers watched from the sidelines. “Just don’t touch the water,” the lifeguard said, as he pushed the rubber float. “Whatever you do, don’t touch the water.” As Ms Wilkerson writes, “The life guard managed to keep the water pure that day, but a part of that little boy died that afternoon.” After such humiliation, it was natural that the boy would never be the same again. Just like many of our own people here.

(The writer is a commentator, author and academic. Opinions expressed are persona)