The situation of African-Americans in the us: the condition of ‘untouchables’ in India—are they comparable, as forms of oppression? For many, the answer would be, frankly, no.footnote¹ True, both groups encounter deep-rooted social prejudice, at odds with the proclaimed liberal-democratic values of their societies and roundly condemned by mainstream opinion. In both cases, intensive exploitation of labour has historically been coupled with social segregation and separate housing (with the exception of household menials). In both countries, discrimination on grounds of caste or race has been outlawed—in India’s 1950 Constitution and America’s 1964 Civil Rights Act—and affirmative-action measures introduced, yet inequalities persist. Per capita incarceration rates for both populations are disproportionately high, as are levels of state and civil violence meted out against them. One might even match their respective sets of political prisoners, for all their differences: for every Mumia Abu-Jamal in a us jail there is an Anand Teltumbde, a leading Dalit Studies scholar, locked up under the notorious Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in a stifling Indian prison.footnote²

Nevertheless, the differences are glaring. First, there is history. The story of African-Americans as a people has been short but dramatic, packed with jarring shifts every two generations between different political-economic regimes: from slave labour to sharecropping to urban-proletarian life, and thence to the present class bifurcation between educated professionals and low-paid work or joblessness. The guardians of India’s caste system would date it back two thousand years, when the first-century ad Laws of Manu divided the twice-born varnas from the low-caste shudra and, lower still, the non-varna outsiders and untouchables, of whom 80 per cent are still stuck in the countryside; for them, change has been molecular at best.

Second, there is the radically different location of the two countries within the world market—the richest, most technologically developed, compared to one of the poorest. Per capita income in the us is ten times higher; the depths of poverty and illiteracy in India, the tens of millions of households without sanitation or mains electricity, are unknown even in the most deprived districts of America. Third, structure. Caste in India forms the world’s most elaborate, hierarchical and fetishized system of social stratification, with many thousands of regional jati (birth communities) ranked in order of holiness and purity, from the highest brahmins to the lowest untouchables. While the us racial order is also sui generis, nothing like this religiously sanctioned pyramid prevails. Social mobility in the us is low, for an advanced-capitalist country; it ranks 27th on the wef’s global mobility index. But India ranks 76th, virtually rock-bottom, among the world’s most rigidly stratified societies.

Fourth, the signs and meanings of us racism and Indian caste/untouchability are quite distinct. In the American case, the marker is ethnic: presumed ancestral descent from the African slave population. In India, it may be surname, neighbourhood, job or even bearing and demeanour—anything that signals birth into an endogamous regional jati, once linked to hereditary occupation, or origin. Fifth, and relatedly, culture and society. A few years ago, at the height of the Movement for Black Lives, an orange bus packed with safai karmachari activists set out across India on a Bhim Yatra—a pilgrimage in the name of Bhimrao Ambedkar, the great Dalit leader—with the slogan, ‘Stop Killing Us’. The safai karmachari are ‘manual scavengers’, their hereditary task to clean up human excrement. Technically the ‘hazardous’ cleaning of sewers and septic tanks is banned, but many can’t afford not to take the work, if they are pressurized to do so—‘the manifestation of caste and untouchability’, they protest.footnote³ The socio-economic conditions that could give rise to such a situation simply do not exist in the us.

On all these measures, there are few obvious points of contact between the two systems. As former New World slave societies, Brazil and Cuba are more illuminating comparators for the us, as Robin Blackburn has shown in his panoramic, indispensable studies, The Making of New World Slavery and The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, complemented by the more thematic and us-centred analysis in The American Crucible.footnote⁴ And yet, the notion of us society as a racialized caste system—the category taken directly from the Indian Subcontinent, as we shall see—does keep recurring. For the most part it has been used in a spirit of solidarity, and there is a long history of mutual recognition between the two groups. In 1849, Charles Sumner thundered against the segregation of Massachusetts schools as constituting ‘a system of Caste odious as that of the Hindoos’. But the term was also appropriated approvingly by spokesmen of the slaveocracy. ‘Free negroes belong to a degraded caste of society’, decreed a South Carolina judge in 1832. ‘According to their condition, they ought by law be compelled to demean themselves as inferiors, from whom submission and respect to the whites, in all their intercourse in society, is demanded’.footnote⁵

Its critics replied in kind. Frederick Douglass wrote scathingly of ‘the spirit of caste’ fostered by segregated railroad carriages in My Bondage and My Freedom. Du Bois historicized the term, distinguishing between a ‘caste of condition’ under the Slave Code and a ‘caste of race’ under Jim Crow. ‘Yes, I am an untouchable’, declared mlk in 1965, ‘and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.’footnote⁶ The identification was reciprocated. Jotirao Phule’s 1873 anti-brahminical polemic was titled Slavery and dedicated to ‘the good people of the United States’ who had accomplished Abolition. Ambedkar too made the connection in his essay ‘Slaves and Untouchables’, envying the former.footnote⁷

More recently, Loïc Wacquant has provided perhaps the most systematic account to date of the American racial order as a caste system. Wacquant’s essay in nlr analysed four ‘genealogically linked’ regimes—chattel slavery, Jim Crow, the ghetto and the carceral system—that he saw as functionally analogous instruments for the conjoint ‘extraction of labour and social ostracization’ of an outcast group, deemed unassimilable by virtue of a three-fold stigma: descendants of slaves in the land of the free, disenfranchised in the cradle of democracy, lacking an identifiable nation of origin in the country of immigrants.footnote⁸ Michelle Alexander drew explicitly on Wacquant’s caste framework in her eloquent indictment of mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow (2010). Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste (2020), setting out to discover the basis for continuing elite-level racism in the age of Obama, identifies eight common features shared by the us and the Indian varna-jati system, to which she adds—raising a few eyebrows—the condition of the Jews in Nazi Germany.