MY EARLIEST MEMORY of witnessing the invisibilisation of Dalits in the social science classroom took place in Delhi’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2017. We were introduced to the concept of Sanskritisation, first elaborated by the anthropologist M N Srinivas, which describes how marginalised caste groups adopt dominant-caste customs and lifestyles in the hope of social mobility. From my perspective as a Dalit student, I found the concept problematic for two reasons. First, the concept drew on the iconic Dalit leader and intellectual B R Ambedkar’s argument that caste formation involved imitation of the higher by the lower castes, yet Ambedkar was not cited or credited. Second, it seemed irrelevant to the discussion that Srinivas, himself a Brahmin, had stayed only in dominant-caste households during his research on caste in a South Indian village, out of which the concept was born – and this in a context where social distance is a defining feature of caste inequality, where privileged castes maintain everyday separation from oppressed communities. Instead, the classroom discussion focused on the supposed social distance between the anthropologist and the field participant, on whether the researcher had been sufficiently immersed in the community he had studied.
What unsettled me most was the ease with which ethics and credibility were uncoupled for Savarna, or dominant-caste, researchers. In Indian academia, Dalit researchers are routinely expected to unlearn their supposed “bias” of seeing caste everywhere. Savarna scholars, meanwhile, rarely face comparable demands to address the biases inherent to dominant-caste habits and perspectives, or even to acknowledge caste at all, let alone approach their research through the lens of those at the bottom of the caste hierarchy.
Many Savarnas are glorified for the barest of gestures: for saying they once stayed in a Dalit household for a day, or for confessing their discomfort when a Dalit person sat on the floor while they remained in a chair. Such performance of Savarna guilt runs through the work of celebrated figures across disciplines. Ravikant Kisana’s Meet the Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything challenges the notion that such guilt is meaningful or transformative, that it leads to genuine unlearning of dominant-caste bias or the humanising of the Savarnised self. Kisana shows how such performances quickly unravel when marginalised communities raise demands for socio-economic transformation, thus becoming active political subjects rather than just passive subjects of study.
The sociologist Erving Goffman, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, uses the metaphor of theatre to distinguish between the selves we present in public and those that emerge in private. Social life, for Goffman, unfolds across “frontstage” and “backstage” spaces. The frontstage is where individuals manage impressions for an audience; the backstage is where the performance stops and more unguarded attitudes surface.