Ravikant Kisana Talks Privilege & Uncomfortable Truths | India News
Q: What made you write ‘Meet the Savarnas’? A: It comes out of partly my life’s experiences also because I did not grow up in a Savarna family. I come from an intercaste marriage between a Scheduled Caste mother and an OBC father. And neither of those two sides of the family had a tradition for intergenerational literacy and what you would call high culture. But they were immigrants from Punjab. They were raising their kids in Kolkata. So I got exposed to a world which was not native to mine. And as I grew up, I realised that there was a world which was very much all around me, but I didn’t have access to it. And that world always seemed so much bigger than my own. It seemed full of very interesting people who were talking about books, culture, art, a ‘higher order of things’. When I looked at my own family and the people around me, the concerns were very mundane, were very existential. And as a young person…, I really wanted to escape the orbit of that world. And I, in time, started realising that a lot of that world was coded around the politics and the performance of caste. It was the world of Savarnas. It was a world where they decided what was legitimate, what was to be talked about, what was authentic and what was fake. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t fit into that world… I eventually got into academia and got into cultural studies and did a fair amount of cultural anthropology as a method. I understood that when it comes to caste, the sociology and anthropology departments in India are full of these books and researches which centre Dalit communities, tribal communities, even OBC communities. There are lots of very interesting works which have been done on that. But the world of Savarnas... there’s not a lot of anthropological work which has happened there. And part of it is because it is very inaccessible. Like, it’s easier to go down to a slum in a city and do research, do field work there, interview people. You can’t walk into a gated community in Gurgaon or Bangalore and try to do that…. But more importantly, it was like this academic blind spot where you have all these great writers, thinkers, intellectuals in civil society, in media, academia, and they are all writing about caste, but they’re not writing about their own caste and communities. And it’s almost like their gaze is always facing outwards and never to their own. And I think it is a culmination of a lot of these different strands which put me in this space where I started writing and theorising about Savarnas. And it started out with articles for various digital media platforms where I was trying to do a series very loosely called ‘Like a Savarna’… And one of the articles there, ‘Dating like a Savarna’, I thought I had written a very non-controversial piece. It’s just a little bit about how caste and dating and intimacy overlap. And I got a tremendous backlash. There was a huge campaign on social media. I was called all sorts of names. And it had an impact on my professional life, my university where I was working. I had to pay some consequences because of that. And part of that backlash also made me realise that this is actually a very loaded conversation. It kind of made me a little more determined to write this. Q: You’re now carrying this book around in your domain space. How do you navigate it? A: It’s extremely challenging. The book begins very much grounded in closer to a memoir because I was grounding myself and my gaze into the book. As you go deeper into it, it becomes more of the social. It’s not just a book about caste. It is also a book about this period in time… from the late 90s, early 2000s till about Covid, 2020, 2022 because this was the period where the larger consensus was that India as a story is doing well, that we are on the rise, that this was our ascent towards superstar superpowerdom. And everywhere there was almost like you couldn’t say anything negative or you couldn’t say that the emperor had no clothes. Because then they would shout you down and say you’re being a naysayer. I have tried to theorize about it in the book through the idea of a glass floor. So if I am below the glass floor and what you’re calling the shining India story is happening above the glass floor in the world of Savarnas, well, that world looks very different to us… But it has a cost almost built into it. My career as an academic takes a hit. It’s almost like you’re always walking with a target on your back. Any right-wing reactionary group can just take the title of the book itself and create all sorts of discourse around it. So there is definitely a challenging, loaded responsibility that comes with it… I also want to point out there’s been a lot of understanding and love also from Savarnas. A lot of people have read the book and then come back to me, not through anger or bitterness, but through some kind of an idea that, okay, I am now going to be soul-searching and I’m going to be looking at myself. Q: It’s a great moment in history that you capture from modern India, but you also make visible to a young and modern audience using their lingo. A: When I was in college in the early 2000s, we were told that 21st century is a century of Asia, India and China… There were jobs, the tech sector was booming, real estate was booming. Hollywood was taking note of us. By every conceivable popular narrative. It seemed like we were on the rise. And we were supposed to reach the superpower status by 2020, because that’s what APJ Abdul Kalam had kind of told us. Now that date has been shifted back to 2047... When 2020 comes, forget being a superpower, it’s one of the most challenging years of the republic. It opens with the Shaheen Bagh protests, it goes into Covid. There’s a total breakdown of that positivity. And on the other side of it, it’s like we’ve emerged and we are beginning to ask ourselves this question, where did we go wrong? And I feel where we went wrong is that in this 20-25 year period, the steering wheel of this story was given into the hands of a very specific group of elite Savarnas who don’t even understand very much their own blind spots. So I’m trying to explain through this book why the Indian story didn’t work, why it ended up reproducing these pocket enclaves of hyper privilege while creating this system where our cities are unliveable, our policies are unworkable, there’s a political and existential crisis, the climate change crisis, all of these things have intensified and all the fruits of this great success story that we thought we will get, we haven’t received. And I’ve tried to answer some of those questions without trying to pathologise it into ‘this is how it is in India. The system is broken.’ A lot of times analysis hides behind these sweeping statements — ‘everything is broken, everything is corrupt’. No, what does broken mean? Who is in charge? Who are the people who are benefiting from these sort of systems? What are their politics? What is their social and cultural inner life? And I think in this book I’ve tried to connect both of these things. It’s not just a description of Savarnas, it’s not just a book on caste. It’s about both of those things and also how they intersect with policymaking and the larger trajectory of this moment that we had in India and we seem to have sort of squandered it. So in many which ways it’s also a book about a tragedy of a post-colonial state which had all the pieces in play and promised to itself that it was going to transcend itself and reach a higher level and couldn’t do it. Q: There’s so much being said which should be said in classrooms, in drawing room conversations, in public opinion pieces. A: Wherever there is knowledge production and wherever there is knowledge distribution in these spaces, there is near absence of any sort of caste diversity. As a result, what has happened is the structure becomes unaware of its own self. A lot of well-meaning Savarna intellectuals, thinkers, progressives often end up misdiagnosing and misunderstanding what they themselves are reproducing. So the critique then becomes just right versus left, progressive versus conservative. Whereas if you look at it from a caste formation, in a lot of these cases, the conservative and the progressive are often people within the same family WhatsApp group… The way we think of caste is fundamentally through oppression narratives, through the idea of suffering and exclusion. And don’t get me wrong, those need to be documented and talked about over and over again endlessly. But the system through which it mediates, through which it operates, is a Savarna system. And there is a sort of pathos in that. There is a sort of absurdity in that… One way of dealing with the pathos and the tragedy of caste and the absurdity of it is to also lean on humour a little bit because otherwise it just becomes too heavy and too intense and you can’t deal with it. So it is also an ode to a certain dysfunctionality in society. It is the code gone wrong on which the system operates. And you see all these attempts to try and write it and correct it and do the right thing in xyz, but the code is elsewhere. The system is operating on a different level… And my attempt in writing this book is that hopefully Savarnas see themselves a little bit, meet themselves a little bit, so they understand themselves a little bit and therefore they understand the systems they’ve created a little bit better.
