Notes of Nagesh

Manusmriti was supposedly buried decades ago. India keeps digging it back up A DALIT speaker of a state legislature is insulted. Public outrage, rightly, follows. Then, almost reflexively, comes a second wave of commentary — not about the insult itself, but about the caste of the man who delivered the rebuke. Was he Dalit enough? Should the retaliation have come from a fellow Dalit, an upper-caste ally, a woman, a Brahmin, a Backward Class leader? The question is absurd on its face. An insult against dignity does not require a caste-matched avenger. Yet in modern India, even movements built to dismantle caste hierarchy find themselves, again and again, reaching for caste as the measuring stick of legitimacy. That reflex is worth examining, because it says less about the insult than about how deeply the logic of an ancient text has lodged itself in the modern mind. That text is the Manusmriti, a Sanskrit law code compiled roughly two millennia ago, and its intellectual scaffolding p...

BBC World Service  The Documentary Sam, Harsha and Siddhant are tech workers of Indian descent, who all say they have experienced discrimination in corporate America. They are not being singled out on the basis of race, gender, religion or nationality, but by an invisible factor; one they were born into, and one that others like them come to the US to try to escape. They say they have faced discrimination because of their caste. A recent court case highlighted the issue. In 2020, California regulators sued the tech giant Cisco, claiming it discriminated against a worker on the basis of his caste. He was Dalit, the most oppressed caste, and his manager was from a dominant caste. Soon afterwards, a US Dalit civil rights group received more than 250 claims of caste discrimination from workers at numerous other tech companies. But what is it? How does it affect workers with Dalit heritage? And why do some people say legislating against caste discrimination in the US would be 'Hinduphob...