Author – Thaiyaan

This article is called a love letter was written to a high caste woman from an Indian-American mother of black children. Now the title is changed from what it was

First, let’s deconstruct the title.

The article is basically written in solidarity of racial discrimination and how the ‘high’ caste Indian woman can do so. Firstly, who are they? Within the article, she mentions that she is a Brahmin, and the article basically talks about how tolerant and “merited” her brahmin ancestors and relatives are. Yet in the title, the author has chosen to address ‘high caste’ Indians while deleting herself from that group and referring to herself only as Indian-American, an amorphous identity. She could have simply referred to herself as a brahmin, right? Why didn’t she? To answer that, let’s dive into the article.

Author’s father was laughing about how he wasn’t allowed to attend a party with this sentence

“Didn’t these ridiculous whites know who he was? The grandson of Sir S. Vardachariar, an interim first chief justice “

See the pride here, which was built on top of the denial of education to the masses, which her father didn’t see, even the author didn’t call out that. For me, it looks like a Nazi complaining that European colonizers don’t allow him to be a part of their party. The article is about racial oppression, what’s caste? There is Iyengar as the last name. 🙂

“What do you call a n***er…” He was the only brown man in the pool. He could barely swim, so he stood there, listening, a strange grin on his face.”

A peek into the mind of an educated brahmin, who have internalized the caste hierarchy and had exactly done that to oppressed castes back in India, his religion in fact demonized and criminalized the black color, so no wonder he had stood there with a grin on his face, probably thinking that, dei, we are doing much worse to those oppressed castes da, you guys are just kids in this. We, the brahmins are legends when it comes to the discrimination, we didn’t even allow people to wear clothes or allow them to eat what they want, even today we impose the food choices on minorities in India. [food fascism]

“where his host mother inappropriately flirted with him and drove him around the chilly damp countryside with the top down”

Demonized the white woman as a sexual predator, basically to score a brownie point here so that the article is about racism is justified. The author wrote this from a brahmin narrative, a dogmatic view that women’s sexuality should be under control, like how they called certain caste women as sexual predators, some of ‘Hindu’ women were subjugated by the brahmins as Devadasis, to serve the brahmin men, even today the oppressed caste, women in movies portrayed as one. But that doesn’t matter, here the article is about racism, so it’s better to show the white woman flirting with a brown man, a brahmin.

“brother pressed a red button on a crematorium, reciting his last rites, instead of laying a torch of fire to his head, his Hindu ways compromised in death as in life in this country.”

Here is the best part, a brahmin even after moving to a country considered as advanced in science and technology, still holding onto the belief of regressive dogmas. Then the author’s ignorance in play, let’s give the benefit of the doubt, to say that cremating the body is a Hindu way instead of brahmins way.

“My father’s experiences of racism did not bond him to the Black folk in his new homeland. He’d pay lip service to his lack of ties with Black people, saying he’d come here in the 70s, when “the soul brothers” didn’t want outsiders around, didn’t want him making a play for the sisters. His real friends were Indians, and not just any Indians: they were Tamil-speaking, educated professionals, and mostly from upper-caste backgrounds. On weekends we’d drive hours through the Carolina hills to gather with our people, the women stirring yogurt rice and lemon rice and sambar in the kitchen, the men sitting around the television with their arms flung in triangles over their heads, loudly arguing over politics in a country where none of them could vote. The “north Indians,” anyone from Maharastra up to the tip of Punjab, were different and suspect, not really “like us,” people without true classical Hindu culture, their rituals diluted with “foreign” influence, their arts “folk arts,” not like our ancient Carnatic and Bharatanatyam traditions.”

This paragraph is the best of the whole article showing brahmin ‘pride’ and a confession of brahmin casteist mind.

Just how casually she had bypassed gender oppression. Next how casually those appropriated arts as ‘theirs’, hey the article about racism, so keep the focus.

“He had superimposed the caste system – that he accepted as fact – onto the map of oppressions here, and his daughter was choosing a spot on what he saw as the lowest rung of the American social ladder.”

When Hindus moved to the other part of the world, casteism would become a world problem. The above one is the best example of that. Actually he was just black, if he had been an oppressed caste, says a Dalit, her father would have just murdered her for the ‘honor’ of the caste purity.

“When I fell in love with a Black man in 2002, when I was 25, my father told me that I wasn’t Indian. Not that I was misbehaving or a disappointment “

What is meant by misbehaving? Or disappointment? I don’t want to interpret this, which would be worse. Why does she have to write that after she states that she fell in love with a Black man?

“I read My Experiments with Truth or The Discovery of India,”

Hehe, India and Indian history can actually be seen ONLY through Gandhi and Nehru, ok, but her partner would read one of the black revolutionary Malcolm X. That just shows how contradictory their culture is, and how the author whitewashes and does a false equivalency.

“Chennai’s first malls in the early 90s only to experience to pleasant dissonance” “he visited a Black barbershop in his father’s native Baltimore and experienced the unpleasant syncope”

Shows her ‘pure’ racist mind in those statements and how casually she stereotypes the Blacks. She could visit a mall in India, a 3rd world country, but her Black partner had to visit a Barbershop to realize that he had the disconnect. See how it’s a `pleasant dissonance` for the brahmin woman and the `unpleasant syncope` for the Black man.

“We went to the same college, we had the same friends, we liked the same music, we ate at the same Mongolian barbecue spot near campus. We were so similar, I told my father. We were more alike than different. Ours was the same culture.”

How easy for her to normalize both cultures, just because they both went to the same school and their interests. The history of brahmin privilege built on oppressing huge population, appropriation, social capital built using denial of opportunities and history of slavery, brutalization, are SAME. Oh! The brahmin merit, sigh!

“I saw how the legacy of colonization and the legacy of slavery imprinted and scarred and wounded and formed us in very different and sometimes incompatible ways.”

Repeat this after me, who are brahmins? Brahmins are the one who are oppressed by British colonization in India. Only a true privileged brahmin mind can claim victimhood like this without even mention about the oppression and brutality they unleashed. And the irony is that they have actually aided colonizers by closely working with them, in fact, they had asked the British to relax the ICS exam score so they could get employed by colonizer govt. But still Blacks slavery and colonization had left a similar wound, ok. [Army of 3rd classes]

“My elderly aunt perched on the arm of his throne and pinched his cheek and teased him affectionately.”

Hey, that’s my brahmin aunt, she is not flirting, and can’t be a sexual predator, definitely not like the white women “host mother” in Europe, ok, so stop perverts. And remember this article is about racism, so focus.

“they showered their love and affection on him. But inside their acceptance hid erasure. He’s so Indian”

Come on folks, he is not from a backward or oppressed caste, he is Black and that too an American, so better than those non-brahmin castes.

And do remember brahmins are oppressed by colonization too.

“I connected to my Indian-ness through my parents’ sense of history, of their sense of greatness – the mythology, perhaps the delusion, of an ancient and glorious past.”

The sudden wokeness still doesn’t realize the oppression done by her ilks though, but good progress, at least she realizes that it’s a delusion.
“my mother could not laugh or shrug off the ways in which white racism excluded her. Her obstetrician invited his white patients but not her into his office to talk after examinations. “

Very sad that her mother had to face it. There are several such cases in India, where the brahmin doctors don’t even touch the patients from oppressed castes, so just reminding the author.[ref]

“I laughed out loud, and she looked at me confused, and I held my tongue and said nothing because she was a nice lady and a liberal and not the “real” problem.”

Same feeling here ma’am, but I can’t let the brahmin woman whitewash the caste privilege earned by the denial of basic things to the oppressed in the name of caste.

The next 2 paragraphs about white kids as bullies and how the system basically aids that is the reality for all the Black kids. At least the author accepts that, sort of.

“Their opinion of me has no bearing on my understanding of myself, because I feel deeply connected to my Indian-ness and my heritage. If they see me as less, that’s their problem.“

Agree, if someone looks down it’s their sickness. So where does the brahmin stand in this? Just wait, the author reveals that. Between, what’s that Indian-ness & heritage?

“It’s an akshaya pathra, that always generates more, and the faster you give it away, the more you have to give.”

There you go, “akshaya pathra” is the heritage & mythology, which she was accepting as a delusion earlier and passing that to her kid, so that kid can connect to that delusional Indian-ness?? And continue to perpetuate this caste pride on othering the people from a young age.

“The presence of Blackness doesn’t make their Indian-ness less, and the presence of their Indian-ness does not preclude them from belonging to the diverse and vast global Black family.”

The problem is Brahminism as Indian-ness, which is rooted in oppressive and discriminatory hierarchical structure unleashed on others and with constant othering, but the Black history is the experience of that oppression and brutality, so looks to me a dangerous combination. Hope the kids survive that torture.

“I want them to know and love their own heritage, to see the roots and branches of the neem and magnolia alike.”

Ok, the root might look the same, but the land on which that root is grounded is completely opposite, the brahmin Indian-ness is basically a denial of basic things to the oppressed castes, dehumanisation, oppression & exploitation using caste, stigmatization of physical labor, etc., but the blackness had endured all those. So how does the root grown on these grounds can be the same? And we can see that one, the author, a brahmin woman, has been writing about caste pride and whitewashing the oppression by her ancestors here in the name of solidarity and completely erased her Black partner’s history as “unpleasant syncope” nowhere to be found.

“I see that she was the survivor of great suffering – and the survivor of Brahminic violence. That her daughters too carried this suffering”
Believe me, the ‘brahminic violence’ is for just brahmin women, the brahmins didn’t play any role in the subjugation of oppressed castes, especially the women as Devadasis, those oppressed caste women voluntarily did that to themselves as a service to god, the typical whitewashing brahmins do to justify the Brahmanism. Really glad that she didn’t write about Slavery.

“my mother learned how to make gelatinous casseroles and “dump” cake from the endless parade of “nice” wives who did not understand her music or her heritage”

Her mother did not tie it to the cooking though, because it’s in an apartment, not in a poor dungeon-like her Grandmother.
“in the utility of garlic (otherwise taboo for Brahmin women) “

Again the ‘meritorious’ brahmin mind unconsciously expresses it’s a regressive dogma which treats food with contempt based on purity which controls the sexuality of the woman.

“Brahmin and high-caste Indian women have not only found protection behind the false mythology of our greatness, we have suffered under it.“
Again only the brahmin women suffered under the Brahmanic violence folks. The oppressed caste women had just found a way to oppress themselves, so does the oppressed castes.

“And when our hands are no longer bound, we can join hands with our Dalit, Muslim and Black sisters.”

The author looks at the whole article, f**k it’s all full of brahmin caste pride, how do I make it appropriate, ok let’s add “Dalit and Muslims” oh! It’s about racism, so add “Black sisters”

An important point is how this so-called progressive platform is so blind that it can publish this pure casteist article which just not only normalized the brahmin-ness as Indian-ness, it does false equivalency of systematic discrimination of what Blacks faces with browns here.

It’s really high time the South Asians, who identify as PoC’s should look at the Indian diaspora using caste lenses and call out these brahmin savarnas who are pretty much casteist(follow caste as a cultural thing, sanctified racism) to their bones.

References for further reading:

From Devadasis to Bhattathirippads
Sanskritization or Appropriation: Caste and Gender in “Indian” Music and Dance
Brahmins obstruct India’s development
Food fascism