'Brahmin Genes' | The Superiority-Victimhood Complex

Brahmin victimhood now comes in a new socio-political context where the Constitution and electoral politics matter.

While claims of being pure and innately meritorious, divinely ordained, and entitled to the highest social prestige and privileges have been a regular feature constituting the Brahmin figure over the centuries, victimhood has now come to strongly define this figure.

(Photo: Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

A recent X (formerly Twitter) post taking pride in Brahmin genes by a handle named Anuradha Tiwari has sparked controversy on social media, with close to eight million views and thousands of handles appreciating her.

On the other hand, many have strongly opposed this trend as casteist, pointing to the history of Brahmins in India with respect to their role in sanctioning caste practices and disenfranchising Dalits and those belonging to lower castes.

A Brief History of Brahmin Superiority

Brahmin superiority claims are not new.

Historian Anirudh Kanisetti, analysing the inscriptions in Tamil Nadu between the 10th to 12th centuries, writes that the Brahmins considered themselves to be, ritually, the purest caste and appropriated a substantial amount of land and labour. Historian Rosalind O’Hanlon mentions that in the 15th century, Brahmins in Western India occupied powerful positions as administrative and scribal elites, and wealth flowed from the courts to the temples in South India. Over the centuries, they decided the social status of different groups.

What made them acquire this position of authority and reverence was their twice-born status and claims to being the highest caste in the social order based on which they regulated the socio-economic life of lower castes and Dalits through punishments and prohibitions.

By the mid-18th century, Brahmins had started expanding their concepts of purity and impurity on a large scale. Historian Susan Bayly writes that they achieved this through the sponsorship of Brahmin-centred royal rituals, and the support of pan-Indian holy places and devotional traditions.

By the late 19th century, their claims to be Aryan, possessing pure blood as compared to others, featured regularly in public discourse and they came to occupy key positions in the colonial bureaucracy during the various presidencies. Quite frequently, the knowledge of Indian society acquired by the British colonial administrators was provided by Brahmins who, in the process, legitimised their superiority.

During the second half of the 19th century, anti-caste leaders like the Phules in Western India, and in the first half of the twentieth century, the non-Brahmin movement in Madras, challenged not only the Brahmin superiority claims but also demanded their share in the administration, as opposed to the disproportionate share of Brahmins.

In the Madras Presidency and Travancore, the distance pollution practice by Brahmins against the lower castes and Dalits was reported to be the strongest, so much so that leaders like Ayyankali from the Dalit community had to lead struggles for access to public roads, water sources, and schools, and let's not forget the landmark Mahad Satyagraha in Maharashtra (1927) led by Dr BR Ambedkar, when Brahmins poured cow dung to purify the tank from which Dalits drank water.

Challenges to Brahmin Superiority in Post-Colonial India

Throughout the first three decades after independence, Brahmins dominated the Nehruvian bureaucracy, the new industries, and also electoral politics through the Congress party. However, around the mid-1980s, political mobilisation by lower castes and Dalits started gaining ground, leading to the famous Mandal Commission agitation.

The dent in the Brahmin domination in electoral politics and the simultaneous growth of Dalit and OBC parties also meant that political narratives articulated by the latter had to be taken into account since their numbers are higher.

Some of these narratives include the caste census, the proper implementation of reservations and the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. These have been an eyesore mainly to a section of Brahmins whose dominance in public sector institutions, caste practices and their numerical minority position has been brought into question.

The challenge to their monopoly is then responded to through a victimhood narrative in order to galvanise upper caste opinion to undo processes of democratisation initiated through representational politics and access to public sector jobs for the Dalits, Adivasis, and OBCs in the last two decades.

The Many Meanings and Contexts of Brahmin Superiority and Victimhood

While claims of being pure and innately meritorious, divinely ordained, and entitled to the highest social prestige and privileges have been a regular feature constituting the Brahmin figure over the centuries, victimhood has now come to strongly define this figure.

Not that Brahmins have not claimed victimhood earlier, especially in opposition to the non-Brahmin movement in Tamil Nadu in the first half of the 20th century. But this new victimhood is layered with different meanings and comes in a new socio-political context where the Constitution, judiciary, and electoral politics have to be kept in mind. Earlier, only a claim to superior status would work as a pressure point for the colonial administration in matters of contention.

If one looks at the last few decades, Brahmin exclusivity has come under many challenges, especially the symbolic figures it has encompassed starting from the bureaucrat and the IT professional to the IIT-clearing student.

Caste mythography of Dalits and lower castes has proliferated over the last three decades. The social media boom, access to a variety of cultural production, large-scale migration, and the shrinking public sector have provided alternative reference points to choose from, thereby reducing the symbolic appeal of being a Brahmin.

At the same time, the rise of alternative religiosities has impacted the significance of the Brahmin as the sole religious authority, and for political exigencies, the Hindutva project has been trying to articulate a broad Hindu identity. All these factors have brought in multiple claim makings, reference points, aspirations, and political narratives by a range of subaltern caste groups, leading to a crisis of the many symbolic Brahmin figures in social media, civil society, workplaces and higher educational institutions.

The undermining of Brahmin exclusivity in popular cultural representation and political narrative-making, combined with the increasing demands of Dalit and OBC sections for social justice, has produced a moment of crisis where the revered past becomes a refuge for sections of Brahmins in which they can uninhibitedly live with their "superior" status.

At the same time, the anxiety about greater representation of Dalits and OBCs in institutions produces a sense of victimhood. Anuradha Tiwari’s tweet about the fear of private sector reservations for SC/ST and OBCs reveals this anxiety about their future, where the latter too could equally participate in the same space alongside Brahmins.

However, none of the depictions of Brahmin victimhood stand the test of any numbers or reality. Their presence both in white-collar employment and in reputed higher educational institutions continues to be extremely high.

Their comparison to being persecuted like the Jews is fallacious. In fact, it is the Dalits and Adivasis of the country who continue to be victims of caste-based atrocities and Brahmins are the perpetrators on many of these occasions (for example, the infamous Ranveer Sena in Bihar, a caste militia led by Brahmins in the 1990s).

The overwhelming presence and decision-making positions in the media, judiciary, police, corporate boards, IT companies, state machinery, various civil society, cultural organisations etc, endow them with authority and control rather than making them vulnerable because of their caste identity. Brahmins are also a substantial number in the diaspora including the Silicon Valley in the US and Western academic spaces which makes them a powerful global class.

Brahmin Pride is not Harmless

Brahmin identity is not a harmless cultural symbol or heritage, it has been constituted through centuries of exclusion, disenfranchisement and deprivation of the Dalits and lower castes in social and economic domains. To take pride in such a history or claim it as part of one's genes is a mockery of the struggles of those great anti-caste leaders and people who laboured to mitigate the implications of Brahmin supremacy on marginalised caste groups.

The pure Brahmin as a figure and idea has historically been laden with contempt, distancing, and dehumanisation of the impure Dalit figure. Furthermore, members of stigmatised caste groups when they encounter dominant caste pride like that of the Brahmins in any workspace or educational institution, are made to feel isolated, ashamed, and inferior for their caste position.

Brahmin pride leads to the denial of houses in urban spaces, restrictions of food choices in higher educational institutions for members from subaltern caste groups, and discrimination in interview processes for job recruitment. In spaces of knowledge production, policy-making, and cultural representation, Brahmin pride has been quite detrimental to the diversity of needs and perspectives of the Dalit-Bahujan sections.

The imposition of vegetarian food preferences in primary schools and religious myths believed by Brahmins as the representation of everyone’s beliefs are just a few examples of how this takes place. Such processes lead to an erasure of people’s culture and practices as well as subsume and distort their histories. Many classical art forms touted to be Brahmin heritage have been appropriated and distorted from the practices of marginalised caste hereditary performing communities like the Isai Vellalars.

Conclusion

Overall, the Brahmin gene paranoia is a contradictory complex of superiority victimhood where misrepresentation of history, glorification of an oppressive social order, and contemporary political upheavals interplay in a complex manner.

This paranoia brings out resentment against people from marginalised caste groups who attempt to progress in life through their constitutionally given rights, and in the process, it dehumanises them as inherently incapable and meant to do harsh menial labor. These outbursts play out in workplaces, educational institutions and in popular TV debates from time to time leading to isolation and hostility against many.

And in a country where a vast section of people do harsh, low paying jobs and toil everyday to make their livelihood, to take pride in studying and scoring marks and claim superiority over them as Brahmins is a cruel joke.

(Sumeet Samos hails from south Odisha. He recently completed MSc in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford. He is a young researcher and anti-caste activist and his research interests are Dalit Christians, cosmopolitan elites, student politics, and society and culture in Odisha.)