Question
Why do Indians rarely talk about the caste system to outsiders, even though it appears to affect even their interactions and attitudes towards each other outside of India? Is there a shame or unspoken code about talking about this?
Answer
There is no unwritten secret code of silence or shame or taboo. There is tons written about it in the Indian media, and everybody talks about it all the time. It is just an extremely complicated, extremely messy phenomenon with several thousand years of murky history behind it. Most of us (correctly) assume that few outsiders are actually interested in this stuff at more than a casually-curious level, and since the subject is too sensitive for flippant answers, unlike other classic India questions like "is it true there are cows on the streets?" we simply avoid the topic rather than entering into long lectures.
Most Indians, even if they know a lot, would simply be unable to articulate what they know. The few who ARE capable of articulating what they know, mostly don't see why they should take the trouble.
There is a huge amount of relevant local cultural/religious/political detail that foreigners quite simply cannot hope to understand without serious study and time in the field to even get up to the intuitive level of knowledge that the average Indian has by age 18.
It doesn't help that Hinduism is easily the most illegible major world religion to outsiders. On a scale of 1 to 10, most people in the world would be able to describe Christianity, Islam and Buddhism at say a Level 6 of clarity, whether or not they are part of that religion. My estimate is that non-Hindus are able to characterize Hinduism at maybe a 2 or 3. It's just a fundamentally murky religion.
So basically, forgive me if I sound arrogant, but my default assumption is that unless they've made a special study of it, foreigners generally will not be able to engage me meaningfully on the subject of caste at all. It feels like trying to talk calculus to an ordinary 5-year old.
If it is important to me that they DO understand, I'd first have to give them a tedious 1 hour tutorial. So far, this "important to me" situation has never come up, and I imagine it hasn't for other Indians as well. Which is why it may seem like we are all part of a conspiracy of silence about it.
The few non-Indians I've personally met who HAVE studied it, or even research it as academics, are simply woefully clueless about the subject, and often do a great deal of harm in well-intentioned ways, and end up reinforcing the very attitudes that they hope to combat. In a way modern non-Indian academics who study the subject are far worse than the 18th and 19th century colonialists, because they had a real problem (governance) that they HAD to solve properly, and they couldn't afford to be casual about their study. They still messed up, but did a better job than most modern non-Indian academics involved in things like teaching a basic South Asian Studies course. Modern Western academics are often far less meticulous than their ancestors, and in their haste to help in well-intentioned ways, they blunder about.
I do accept that outsider views can bring value insider views cannot, but that's only after a basic amount of study and travel in India that allows them to even comprehend what they are looking at without making all sorts of simplistic mistakes. I am not chauvinistic enough to believe in the "leave our internal problems to us" line; I am simply applying a standard of competence.
And this problem is not unique to the study of caste. I didn't really understand Europe until I'd visited and studied European culture in some depth, and even now I don't "get" it the way scholars of Greek/Roman antiquity do. America is somewhat easier because it is a younger country with a shorter, clearer history, but even here, I really didn't "get" major American issues till I came here. So I imagine American and European expats in India remain equally silent about complicated topics in their home cultures.
That said, some of the smartest thinking on caste has been done by foreigners: Nicholas Dirks (Castes of Mind), Bernard Cohn (Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge) and Louis Dumont (Homo Hierarchicus).
Curious. That's the second caste-related question I've answered today, and cited the same 3 books.
If you REALLY don't believe that there isn't a conspiracy going on here, I am perfectly willing to hold forth for you as long as you like. You'll just have to pay me by the hour.
Most Indians, even if they know a lot, would simply be unable to articulate what they know. The few who ARE capable of articulating what they know, mostly don't see why they should take the trouble.
There is a huge amount of relevant local cultural/religious/political detail that foreigners quite simply cannot hope to understand without serious study and time in the field to even get up to the intuitive level of knowledge that the average Indian has by age 18.
It doesn't help that Hinduism is easily the most illegible major world religion to outsiders. On a scale of 1 to 10, most people in the world would be able to describe Christianity, Islam and Buddhism at say a Level 6 of clarity, whether or not they are part of that religion. My estimate is that non-Hindus are able to characterize Hinduism at maybe a 2 or 3. It's just a fundamentally murky religion.
So basically, forgive me if I sound arrogant, but my default assumption is that unless they've made a special study of it, foreigners generally will not be able to engage me meaningfully on the subject of caste at all. It feels like trying to talk calculus to an ordinary 5-year old.
If it is important to me that they DO understand, I'd first have to give them a tedious 1 hour tutorial. So far, this "important to me" situation has never come up, and I imagine it hasn't for other Indians as well. Which is why it may seem like we are all part of a conspiracy of silence about it.
The few non-Indians I've personally met who HAVE studied it, or even research it as academics, are simply woefully clueless about the subject, and often do a great deal of harm in well-intentioned ways, and end up reinforcing the very attitudes that they hope to combat. In a way modern non-Indian academics who study the subject are far worse than the 18th and 19th century colonialists, because they had a real problem (governance) that they HAD to solve properly, and they couldn't afford to be casual about their study. They still messed up, but did a better job than most modern non-Indian academics involved in things like teaching a basic South Asian Studies course. Modern Western academics are often far less meticulous than their ancestors, and in their haste to help in well-intentioned ways, they blunder about.
I do accept that outsider views can bring value insider views cannot, but that's only after a basic amount of study and travel in India that allows them to even comprehend what they are looking at without making all sorts of simplistic mistakes. I am not chauvinistic enough to believe in the "leave our internal problems to us" line; I am simply applying a standard of competence.
And this problem is not unique to the study of caste. I didn't really understand Europe until I'd visited and studied European culture in some depth, and even now I don't "get" it the way scholars of Greek/Roman antiquity do. America is somewhat easier because it is a younger country with a shorter, clearer history, but even here, I really didn't "get" major American issues till I came here. So I imagine American and European expats in India remain equally silent about complicated topics in their home cultures.
That said, some of the smartest thinking on caste has been done by foreigners: Nicholas Dirks (Castes of Mind), Bernard Cohn (Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge) and Louis Dumont (Homo Hierarchicus).
Curious. That's the second caste-related question I've answered today, and cited the same 3 books.
If you REALLY don't believe that there isn't a conspiracy going on here, I am perfectly willing to hold forth for you as long as you like. You'll just have to pay me by the hour.