How caste discrimination permeates the language of meritocracy on campus  Premium

a list of books which talk about caste discrimination and meritocracy in Indian college campuses

“People think casteism only comes in the form of beatings or open abuse, but nowadays, it also comes in the form of subtle gestures,” Dr. Lakshmanan, an associate professor at the Madras Institute for Development Studies, tells me while discussing the nature of caste discrimination in higher education institutions. N. Sukumar too writes about the diverse manifestations of caste discrimination in his book, Caste Discrimination and Exclusion in Indian Universities: A Critical Reflection.

He documents how professors threaten to cut Dalit students’ attendance and coerce them into doing domestic chores, among many other practices that cannot always be proven to be caste discrimination. This invisibility frequently creates silos of suffering, in which Dalit students are gaslit into thinking that their struggles are unreal, and that these institutions are too modern for something as regressive as casteism to exist within their walls. Collectivity is snatched, and caste-based structural inequalities are disguised as individual, subjective experiences.

Higher education institutions are frequently portrayed as being immune to caste. Upper-caste students and faculty are assumed to be casteless by virtue of their modernity. But casteism has also reinvented itself, in large part through the language of meritocracy. The social logic of merit is arranged in a way that the same groups of people benefit from it that are already empowered by the caste system. In her book The Caste of Merit, an ethnographic study of IIT Madras, Ajantha Subramanian writes that the relationship between individual merit and caste networks often go unnoticed.

In this context, she writes, opening up institutions such as IITs is met with opposition not in the name of caste, but in the name of preserving merit. Merit offers caste a new path, because of which caste is only seen through reservations while the privilege that dominant castes possess is unrecognised as capital.

In his recently published These Seats are Reserved, advocate Abhinav Chandrachud describes reservations as unique legal provisions that emerged out of India’s social context. He traces the history of the need for reservations and the social life of these legal provisions.

He notes that the opposition to reservations in the Indian Constituent Assembly was primarily on two grounds: first, that it works against efficiency, and second, that it was regressive to claim that caste still exists in a free, modern nation. These arguments are not relics of the past and are still used to contest the use and need of reservations. Avatthi Ramaiah, a professor at the Centre for Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), says that without reservations these so-called progressive spaces would be filled solely by upper caste students.

Even today, much of the attention around reservation continues to be around the notion of a ‘deserving’ candidate rather than the historical wrongs perpetuated by the caste system. As a professor who has taught at TISS for over two decades, Dr. Ramaiah has seen generations of Dalit students come and go with a range of experiences. He says children from upper caste backgrounds come with severely casteist notions that their families instill in them, which they try to impose on their Dalit classmates. This is a complex social problem that reservations alone cannot cure; however, reservations are the bare minimum.