8 - Emigration Against Caste and The Globalization of Castelessness

Summary

The understanding of caste or casteism and resistance against it beyond South Asia remains rudimentary. Popular subfields such as South Asian studies, postcolonial studies, Indian Ocean studies and Indian diaspora studies have been woefully deficient in engaging with caste as a foundational problem in the history of the Indian subcontinent. Likewise, such disciplines have not given much-needed focus to the caste-free (and anti-caste) culture, politics, economy and history of caste-oppressed communities in the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial periods. This has led to a lopsided understanding of, for instance, the re-establishment of caste through colonial apparatuses and how the privileged-caste groups, such as Brahmins, re-entrenched themselves to turn the British Raj into a British–Brahmin Raj. Significantly, however, we have now begun to learn about the multiple movements and discursive and non-discursive practices of the marginalized communities who challenged the domination of self-privileging-caste groups in colonial and postcolonial India. In this chapter, I examine how immigration, emigration and transmigration were part and parcel of the repertoire of resistance of caste-oppressed Indians, taking particular examples from the experiences of Indian migrants who settled in the Caribbean.

The institutionalized structures and violent practices of race, caste and gender have always been crucial push factors of migration in the modern period. Recent philosophical and interdisciplinary studies have engaged with how aspects of race, gender and nationality intersect with migration. However, thus far, theories of migration and philosophies of immigration have inadequately engaged with the emigration of caste-oppressed communities during European colonialism in South Asia or with the postcolonial transmigration of such communities between the Global South and the Global North. The hitherto unexamined interrelationship between colonial policies and the emigration of Indians against caste, on the one hand, and the reconstruction of a caste-free life overseas by oppressed Indians, on the other, provide critical philosophical, cultural, political, economic and historical dimensions to migration.

Colonial racial capitalism depended upon comprador privilegedcaste groups for its success (and stability). A large majority of Indians were, as a result, culturally othered, spatially segregated and economically underprivileged as lower castes and untouchables through the colonial state's legitimization of precolonial privileged-caste identities and practices. The Brahmins – who constituted not even 5 per cent of India's population, then and now – reaped maximum benefits through the propagation of their castepower and by utilizing British colonial apparatuses.