Author – Anuradha Bele

According to Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, untouchability and slavery were linked in their hostility to democracy and blacks and untouchables were linked by a shared social status. “There is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables and the position of the Negroes of America,” he explained to W. E. B. Du Bois in a letter, “that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary.”[1]

However, the Indian upper caste which was the first mover to the United States continues to hold on to its roots of Brahminism and hence should not be looked upon as people of colour, they “have an innate conservatism and they have a religion, which is incompatible with liberty, equality and fraternity i.e. with democracy.“ [2] Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar has repeatedly warned that Hindu is caste conscious and class conscious both, depending on the caste with which they come in conflict. He has pointed out that there is no Hindu without a caste, cannot escape caste and be bounded by caste from birth to death he becomes subject to social regulations and traditions of the caste over which he has no control. [3]  

So it should be no surprise that the recent Vice President in running, Kamala Harris’s mother, Late Shyamal Gopalan, even after 40 years in America, and a single mother had said in an article that – “In Indian society, we go by birth,” Shyamala explains. “We are Brahmins, that is the top caste. Please do not confuse this with class, which is only about money. For Brahmins, the bloodline is the most important. My family, named Gopalan, goes back more than 1,000 years.”[4]

California Senator Kamala Harris has a special place in her heart for the Varasiddhi Vinayagar Temple at Besant Nagar in Chennai. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was in the committee when the temple was constructed. More importantly, according to her, nine years ago, when she was contesting the Attorney General election for California, she called her maternal aunt Sarala Gopalan with a request: “Chithi (aunt), please pray for me and break coconuts at the temple.” Gopalan broke 108 coconuts at the temple in a ritual that in Brahminism, symbolises overcoming all obstacles and breaking free. After her victory, Harris called her aunt to thank her. “Your coconuts worked, Chithi. For every coconut you broke, I got 1,000 votes,” she said happily. [5]

The earliest recorded Indian immigrant to the United States was from Madras, who travelled to Massachusetts in 1790. A number of Indians were brought to the United States by seafaring Captains who worked for the East India Company to serve in their households as servants. Only a trickle of other Indian merchants, seaman, travellers, and missionaries followed, amounting to a total population of less than 1000 by 1900. But mass immigration to the United States happened in three phases. The ‘early movers’ went there after the Immigration and Nationality Act, 1965, made skills and family relationships as criteria, as against national-origin quota system earlier. These 12,000 or so Indians per year were very well educated and most were doctors, engineers and scientists. The caste system thus created a tiny pool of upper caste, especially Brahmins, who were unusually well educated, and was urban. Looking just at the field of technology, it is probably not a coincidence that the first IIT was set up in 1951, in Kharagpur near Calcutta, followed by IIT Bombay (1958), IIT Madras (1959), IIT Kanpur (1959), and IIT Delhi (1961). These institutes were exempt from reservation policy till 1973. These IIT graduates, all upper caste, quickly immigrated to the United States after the country modified its immigration policy. This small group was the first wave of immigration. 

Phase two was during the 1980s and it was called the ‘family cohort’ of their 30,000 relatives a year, who now immigrated to America. In the third wave of ‘IT Generation’, about two-thirds of the India born Americans arrived there. This was around 100,000 computer specialists a year. Indians now form around 1% of the population in the United States and number around 3 million. One out of every three visas issued to India-born immigrants is for residents from the city of Hyderabad. For nearly two decades from 1997 till 2003, 62,500, which is half of the 125,000 H1-B visas were taken by Indians. [6]

So the Indians immigrating to the United States were not going as refugees. Indians immigrating to the US arrived there with jobs and steady sources of income, so they did not land up in ‘ghetto stage’, unlike the Blacks, Italians and other immigrants, who joined their refugee enclaves in urban areas, and had to struggle to find their way up the social hierarchy. Instead, the Indians lived in middle-class or costly neighbourhoods in New York-New Jersey area, Chicago and Washington D.C suburbs and in the periphery of cities like San Francisco and Dallas. 

The upper-caste Indian Americans are called a model minority by The Economist, at less than 1% but they are still entrenched in the caste system and that is the reason that they are natural allies of the White supremacists. 

References: 

1. https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b109-i132
2. Dr B. R. Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Volume 9, Page 429
3. Dr B. R. Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Volume 3, Page 145 and 146
4. https://www.sfweekly.com/news/kamalas-karma/
5. https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/candidate-kamala-harris-and-the-destiny-changing-coconuts-from-chennai/article32338332.ece
6. https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/articles/chazen-global-insights/singular-population-indian-immigrants-america