'Brahmin Genes' and Claims to Structural Oppression While Being the Oppressor

The only true winner here is Anuradha Tiwari whose tweets gather traction and she becomes the point of discourse.

Virality and provocation have a significant correlation, and this is a reality that Tiwari is most likely well aware of.

(Photo: Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

All events that have happened will continue to happen again and again, ad infinitum. That is the gist of Nietzsche’s construct of the ‘eternal return’. It is a philosophical burden, a heaviness, that ties a person down because you are never to be free from this eternal cosmic cycle of returning to where you started.

Czech writer Milan Kundera tries to flip this construct in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and asks what if there is no eternal return? What if every life and every event is exactly what it is, just that, an isolated event and an isolated life? Then a person's personhood is free from the heaviness of any cyclical torment. Life becomes light. So light that it floats and frees the person so that their thoughts, actions, and ‘movements are as free as they are insignificant’. Kundera asks if such a lightness is always positive when contrasted against the ‘mad myth’ of eternal recurring lives and events.

I am reminded of Kundera, Nietzsche, and Heidegger as I look at Twitter buzzing around the ‘Brahmin genes’ image tweeted by one Anuradha Tiwari.

The image itself is an innocent one. A young woman casually flexing her arm muscles. In a different context with a different hashtag (#womenwholift #womenwhogym), the image may have even been a site for feminist celebration. But Tiwari has a reputation on Twitter for caste-baiting. She routinely posts anti-reservation takes and bats for Brahmins, who she says are routinely persecuted in contemporary cultural discourse. Thus, it is not surprising that the caption she went with for her image was “Brahmin genes”.

Tiwari's Tweet is a Provocation

Tiwari’s muscles surely are a product of gym discipline, eating right and to an extent, her genetic disposition. But to what extent that genetic dispensation is due to her being a ‘Brahmin’, remains to be unpacked. For sure, the caption ‘Brahmin genes’ is not a scientific assertion that somehow Brahmin women have a better genetic proclivity for building muscle. If there is any empirical study on the matter, I am not yet aware of it and would be happy if Tiwari shares it in her next barrage of caste-baiting tweets.

What the image-caption more likely is a provocation. In her professional life, she works in digital content marketing. Virality and provocation have a significant correlation, and this is a reality that Tiwari is most likely well aware of. A cursory rundown on her timeline shows a clever use of provocative language which triggers and invites challenges from anti-caste and Ambedkarite handles. As that gathers momentum, caste-supremacist Savarna handles gather in her defence.

As this churn intensifies, the only true winner is Tiwari whose tweets gather traction and she becomes the point of social media discourse. This article and many more that get written around her current and previous tweets are testimony to this. She gets invited to talk shows where she gives more ‘quotable’ bait which gets circulated again and the cycle begins afresh.

Tiwari is not new or unique in this. Savarna social media grifters have used this tactic before. She is just the latest but will certainly not be the last. And thus the torment of eternal return to the same content and the same virality and the same backlash and the same summary commentaries will continue. It begins to get heavy.

It is 2024 now. Rohith Vemula committed suicide in 2016. Dr Payal Tadvi in 2019. In 2020, the Hathras gangrape mainstreamed ‘Dalit Lives Matter’ in media discourse. Last year, over 25 suicides happened in the top IITs alone. There is no semblance of justice in any of these cases or the tens of thousands of other cases in between. In the last week alone, multiple reports across states have emerged of the rapes and murders of Dalit women.

This is not an uptick in caste crime. In the aftermath of the Kolkata doctor’s rape and murder, Savarna media has just started to highlight more stories of sexual assault and violence. In a typical media cycle, this will subside soon. Only to eternally return again when some barbarism coincides with a slow news cycle and Savarna editors decide enough time has passed to return to the ‘gender-caste angle’.

The eternal return to these stories is a heaviness that breaks the soul. It is 2016, and a Dalit boy is killed for having Bhim geet on his mobile phone. It is 2023, another Dalit man is killed for celebrating Babasaheb Ambedkar Jayanti. It is 2018, an eight-year-old Asifa is subjected to unspeakable barbarism at a temple in Kathua. It is one week ago, two Dalit girls were found hanging from a tree in Farrukhabad, UP. It is 2014, two girls were found hanging from a tree in Badaun, UP.

Brazen Claims to Structural Oppression While Structurally Being the Oppressor

The endless recurring of violent sexual assault, inane caste rage over the most minor caste assertion from the marginalised, the daily dehumanising in labour, in education, in policy and in media– the same stories, the same characters, the same excuses and outrage, and the same forgetting, all returning continuously. The ghost of Nietzsche haunts the mind.

In the light of this cosmic torment, when one hears Tiwari suggest that Brahmins are the ‘new victims’-- the only possible reaction is to laugh. Laugh maniacally. She and handles like her and their supporters/amplifiers are untethered from history. They are exempt from eternal return. They are living in lightness. As Kundera would say ‘like a shadow, without weight’. They can unironically and with a straight face claim victimhood.

The caste-marginalised Ambedkarites can tear themselves to shreds screaming facts, data, reports, lived testimonies and a thousand other artefacts of social evidence but it makes no difference. It is a losing endeavour. You cannot argue with reason against such unreasoning. Theirs is an epistemology of unreason and unhistorical-ness that is divorced from any continuity.

Thus Brahmins and Savarnas live in independent moments, from day to day, from instant to instant, tweet to tweet — no past recurring, no future affected. They can, thus, be the aggrieved, the sufferers and great champions of their own great suffering which they have built and narrativised in complete disconnect from anything that was before or is now. They stand as immaculate beings. Like infants who respond only to instinct, who demand attention and cry when denied. And feel totally self-righteously justified and even offended if anyone tries to link them to any structural or historical continuity.

I am not sure if such cultural constructionism is genetically transmitted or if (more likely) it is a function of the social anthropology among such Savarna communities, but this is what I understand when I hear ‘Brahmin genes’. In that sense, I find no issue with Tiwari’s image-tweet. It is not about muscle mass, it is more about the epistemic out-of-touch with any reality.

It is about brazen claims to structural oppression while structurally being the oppressor. It is about absolutely misrecognising concrete privileges and posing with the assertion-vocabulary of the disenfranchised. It is about mindlessly resorting to any and every possible whatabouttery to evade and deflect any structural critique while framing such questions of accountability as proof of persecution.

This is the peak lightness of Brahminism. This is the peak lightness of Savarna culture to which Twitter will endlessly return because Tiwari or Chaturvedi or Sharma or Bannerjee or Iyer or someone similar will flex their ‘genes’ again. And claim victimhood when they are questioned over it. We shall return to this article again then.

(Ravikant Kisana is a professor of Cultural Studies and his research looks at the intersections of caste with structures of privilege and popular culture. He is available on Twitter/Instagram as 'Buffalo Intellectual'. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect or represent his institution. Further, The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the author's views.)