That Unmentionable Taboo Practiced Everywhere
Almost 80 years after WWII, it's time to reconsider the E-word.
“They tell me India is an underdeveloped country…. I tell them that, in fact, everything in India is over-developed, particularly the social structure.”
— Shashi Tharoor, ‘The Great Indian Novel’
RECAP OF PART ONE
Over pillow talk with a longtime lover belonging to my Anglo-American business varna (caste) and Highlander jati (subcaste), but as a Californian not from my Northeastern Establishment Protestant gotra (lineage), he mentions finding a YouTube clip of when I emceed the first televised Miss India Pageant in 1993. I use the remembrance of that insane, glorious event as a portal to India’s misunderstood, complex social system.
BRAVE ANCIENT WORLD
Let me state an irrefutable, senselessly inconvenient truth: The Indian caste system is a highly successful, millennia-old eugenics program originally based on professional and temperamental aptitude that governs the lives of 1.2 billion people and uses “arranged marriage,” or endogamy, as a euphemism for selective breeding.
I say “irrefutable” because the only way to dispute my statement that I would consider a proper rebuttal would mean producing evidence-based proof that the caste system isn’t a Brave New World type of social organization, one that makes up a significant portion of the bedrock of South Asian social groups, not just Hindus.
Let me spare my fellow nuance-parsing quibblers their time: they will never produce that proof; on the contrary, the further they dig into a reality that the West cannot bear to think about, much less name properly, the more they’ll understand why I feel confident enough to make such an unequivocal statement.
The caste system can’t be dismantled, either. Why should it be? Eugenics is practiced in virtually all human social groups to a larger or lesser extent, depending on population size and cultural complexity.
South Asians are merely honest about it, in the same way they have tried over the millennia — in diametric opposition to Nazi intentions with their eugenics program — to compassionately find a place in society for all manner of natural human tendencies. The reason for that compassion and dedication to true, selfless inclusivity is that in Hinduism and its precursor, animism/shamanism, every aspect of Existence is sacred.
I fully acknowledge that untouchability tarnishes that assessment. I’ll try to address it as best I can in the third part of this series, without seeking to excuse it.
Even transsexuality has a place and a function in South Asia. During my first years in India, I began research for a book about hijra eunuchs, who make a living blessing newborn boys, performing goofy reenactments of childbirth to cheer up new mothers saddled with shock, post-partum depression, and the classic disapproving mother-in-law constantly reminding them who knows best. As someone deeply married into North Indian Brahmin families, I aggro-affectionately call that behavior “clucking.” Even the men do it.
Hijras are feared, but sacred nonetheless; it’s better to give them a few rupees on that day of the week the local government has designated for them to beg for alms publicly than risk their vulgar curses coming true, or them lifting their saris to show the scar of where their genitals were removed with one slice, no anesthesia, no cauterization.
There are plenty of other examples of India’s embrace of everything human. I once art-directed a photo session with an aghori sadhu cannibal I met in the burning ghats of Varanasi. Aghoris drink from skulls and eat flesh from bodies burning on the pyres to prove they’re above all taboos and social constructs. When I tried to pay him at the end of the session, he asked how much I would charge to let him fuck me.
In my experience, most extreme ascetics of that ilk — the Muslim version are called fakirs — are somewhere on the schizophrenia and Cluster-A spectrum of personality types. They have all the symptoms and behaviors: delusions, hallucinations, excessive religiosity, jumbled speech, paranoia and quick rage.
However, insanity is human nature. Sadhus and fakirs not only have a place in South Asian societies, they’re the holiest people of all, living saints, treated with enormous respect, much the way Judeo-Christianty treated its saints and prophets until the relatively recent integration of psychological disciplines into the Global North’s social framework.
Nowadays, Joan of Arc would be treated like Girl, Interrupted, strapped into ice packs, pumped full of antipsychotics and her brain zapped with volts until she stopped hearing God’s voice. Moses would be trying to persuade a court-mandated psychiatrist that he really did speak to a burning bush. Both would likely be living in tents on the street.
Not so in India, where individual realities and eccentricities are tolerated almost without limit. These true yogis — a world away from hot yoga classes in Beverly Hills — can find food and shelter at temples and ashrams, treated with respect unto being asked for blessings, and wander in the company of others like them untethered by any earthly constraints, truly free, freer than the entire Constitution.
According to ChatGPT, until now nobody has written about the caste system being a eugenics program, a social contract on a scale and timespan that dwarfs America’s great experiment with liberal democracy. Unlike democracy, it cannot be usurped or abolished in favor of another system; genetic engineering has woven the DNA of almost every South Asian, regardless of religion, barring smaller recent arrivals like the highly inbred, fire-worshipping Parsis, who leave their dead in the Towers of Silence to be devoured by vultures.
The eugenics of the caste system have been in effect for so long that it’s simply too late to change. How would you go about that, anyway, and for what purpose? Surely not because of residual morality that has arisen after the atrocities of the Nazis, a German political party that lasted twelve years but has left enough scars for a dozen generations.
More significantly, it triggered the birth of a nation and the reestablishment of a warrior caste within the Jewish social system after millennia of not having one, a phenomenon to which I’m hard-pressed to find an equivalent in any other major social group; brahmins, merchants and laborers, however, are all clearly represented.
Hindus have been shamed into believing that the staggering achievement of their ancestors is something never to be discussed with outsiders, an undemocratic iniquity that must be thrown on the pyre along with presentist Critical Social Justice self-serving delusions.
Eradicating the caste system isn’t the same as abolishing slavery; we’re talking genetic engineering over millennia, not correcting the injustices of a pre-Industrial Revolution large-scale farming model.
Indian diaspora kids in America — mostly upper caste, unlike the UK — halfheartedly shake their talking sticks at the caste system. In my experience as someone with diaspora kids in my extended family and social network, they prefer to ignore what they don’t properly understand, yet know they can’t avoid. They toss it into the general rubric of “India’s a shithole,” as an upper-caste social-justice activist once called it as a way of backing down after I pulled him up for hypocrisy during the online free-for-all after June 2020.
In my view, the fact that the caste system is so obviously a version of Aldous Huxley’s “dystopia” hiding in plain sight, studiously ignored even by academics and other specialists whose field of expertise is South Asia, is a testament to the tyranny that the association between the word ‘eugenics’ and Nazism still has over honest, open discussion, especially considering that it is commonly practiced under other names in the West and throughout mankind.
There’s also another hitherto unexamined reality: America in particular has been benefitting enormously from the results of the caste system’s eugenics program, enhancing it via the visa system’s highly selective sorting process.
THE GREAT DEBATERS
India cleverly distanced herself from Hitler’s version of the swastik — I drop the Sanskritized ‘a’ at the end as they do in India to bring it back to its origins — with the spurious assertion that it’s flipped, hoping that nobody would point out that Hindus use both versions frequently; most of the time, it’s the same direction the Nazis used, facing right — the design queen in Goebbels’ art department tilted it 45 degrees and no doubt Hitler screamed, “Fabulous!”
The swastik was meant to symbolize the Aryan race, itself not a German invention, adopted as another element in an elaborate, nationwide roleplaying game implemented by Hitler and his band of shouty-cracker meth heads.
Nazis appropriated far more than just the swastik. India has also mesmerized the rest of the world into ignoring the fact that the word ‘Aryan’ was the 19th-century ethnocultural designation for Indo-Iranians — ‘Iran’ derives from ‘Arya.’
Since then, with the notable exception of quibbling academics whose predecessors introduced the notion of ‘Aryan’ as a race, generally Northern Indians have thought of themselves as Aryans — e.g., Nikki Haley — a distinct race from Dravidians — Kamala Harris and Vivek Ramaswami — who are considered the original inhabitants of the Subcontinent, pushed to the south beyond the Deccan Plateau by invasions of the paler-skinned. These events are hard to pin down as having happened with what Western academics consider anything remotely like historical accuracy, another concept the English and their German cousins introduced to Indian culture. Before that, the history of the Subcontinent was largely hagiographies of kings and mythologies that make Marvels look unimaginative.
The distinction between Aryan and Dravidian is the same as between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. It’s colorism-based racism: fairer-skinned Ashkenazis and Aryans consider themselves more worldly and superior; the swarthier Dravidians and Levantine/North African Sephardim are unattractive rubes. Except for the much-ignored fact that the Dravidian states of India are considerably more prosperous and better educated than the North on average.
The racism is so pervasive that the last time I was in India it was as normal to put “No Dravidians” in Grindr dating preferences in the Delhi region. Critical Social Justice has since taken hold in Indian urban areas; I imagine that sort of stipulation has gone the way of “no fats, no fems” in American gay dating profiles. That doesn’t mean the practice has ceased; the shaming about expressing preferences has merely made everyone more fearful and dishonest.
Germans believed all Europeans were descended from North Indian Aryans, an appeal to antiquity that bolstered their cause as being righteous among the majority, those who were “just following orders.” It was also a well-timed appeal to superiority for a people whose collective self-esteem had been pulverized by economic hardships brought on by the Great Depression and having to pay reparations for World War I.
Despite many deep dives with AI and JSTOR searches, other than publications like the International Journal of Hindu Studies I can’t find much in academe to bolster my assumption that the Nazis also based their eugenics program on the caste system, updating it according to the thinking of the American eugenics movement in the first half of the 20th century.
The American eugenics movement was the belief that the population could be controlled and improved by applying Greger Mendel’s principles of biological inheritance. It was a persuasive pseudoscience during a time when science and technology were advancing faster than they could be tested and assimilated by culture.
Eugenics wasn’t only embraced by White men like Charles Lindbergh, nor was it specifically racist, although it did target nonwhites disproportionately. It was the basis of proto-feminist Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood, one of the many branding euphemisms for “selective breeding.” Pan-African activist W.E.B. DuBois believed that “only fit blacks should procreate to eradicate the race's heritage of moral iniquity.”
Nazi atrocities put an end to the use of the word ‘eugenics,’ but not its practice. Modern evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman called out the many hypocrisies of various organizations and social groups who practice eugenics without acknowledging it in a Substack piece from February 2023, ‘You're Probably a Eugenicist.’
It’s now a suitably breathless, rapid-fire 25-minute audio clip of examples. She states:
Unlike eugenics, every conversation about democracy, foster care, psychiatry or contraception does not devolve into how they are slippery slopes into genocide, mutilation and racism. We ought to be capable of decoupling the history of a concept from its intention if the potential outcomes are good enough.
Notably missing from Diana’s list is the caste system and the Chinese Confucian social order, which also practiced selective breeding with arranged marriages, although not quite as starkly and with as much gusto among clucking matchmakers as Hinduism.
I asked Diana why she omitted the splendidly caparisoned hathi in the room, “Is the obfuscation of the reality of the caste system the reason you didn't include it?”
She replied, “I'm friends with Razib Khan and he mentioned something to this effect, and also he has said that the thing he gets in the most trouble for talking about is caste endogamy. I really didn't know much if anything about the caste system and I wanted to make sure my eugenics essay was perfectly evidence-based.”
Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American specialist in population genetics whose Subtack newsletter is one of the few I follow. I schooled Diana in the probable reality that as a Muslim, Khan likely had little practical knowledge about the caste system.
“They worship rocks,” is the usual response about Hindus from Pakistanis and Bangladeshis; ironically, Muslims bow five times a day to the Black Stone set into the Kaaba in Mecca, a pre-Islamic pagan relic that the iconography-loathing Mohammed couldn’t let go of.
There’s also the rarely spoken understanding in South Asia that many converts to both Islam and Christianity were low-caste Shudras (laborers) or Untouchables/Dalits seeking to escape the cycles of karma in this lifetime. Both religions abjure the caste system and use that scorn to elevate their own religion.
A couple of months ago, in response to a piece Khan wrote about natural selection, I scribbled a rambling direct message about the efficacy of the caste system that I assume left him too stunned to reply. Rereading the message, I sound like a lunatic tangled up in tangential thinking, texting on my phone from a padded cell. That’s not far from the truth: It was 1 AM and I was lying on my luxuriously padded Temur-Pedic bed; my dissipated daily Adderall had unleashed my ADHD to its full-steam garble; sleep meds were kicking in.
Some of the more coherent thoughts:
“Marriage in most societies is a form of selective breeding, often confined to class strata, which creates a type of Brave New World in most social groups throughout mankind, with the exception of the few remaining Stone Age tribes.
“Even non-Hindus in South Asia have been practicing a strict form of eugenics for many centuries; with non-Hindus, it's often based on colorism or social position.
The caste system has been wildly successful, especially when taken out of context and reframed in the West; for instance, the Republican primary debates began with two upper-caste Indians out of eight, or 1/4 of the candidates, despite the fact that South Asians are 2.5% of the US population. It ended with 50% of the candidates being of South Asian descent.”
I was referring to Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy. Haley was born a Sikh, a relatively new hybrid religion bridging Hinduism and Islam established by Rajputs, as the warrior caste of the Northwest is called — elsewhere they’re called ‘Kshatriyas.’ The first-born sons of Rajput families were given to the new religion; a sizable portion of the officer class of the Indian military is Sikh.
Born into a military family, Nikki is tall, fair-skinned, fearless, eloquent, combative. If I met her for the first time without even hearing her name, I would assume she was a Punjabi Sikhni.
When I emceed the Miss India Pageant, most contestants were Punjabi. The rules have changed in recent years to be more inclusive of candidates representing each state, not just the ideals of Indian female pulchritude, meaning young women who could be models for Fair & Lovely skin-whitening products, which since July 2020 have been renamed the more dishonest ‘Glow & Lovely’ — darker skins don’t glow as much, I guess.
One of the few positive outcomes of the modern American antiracism movement’s many excesses and untruths has been the effect it has had on Indian colorism-based social ranking. Still, that’s largely concentrated among the urban, elite who speak English as their natal language, or 0.1% of the population; it’s unlikely to affect the selective-breeding process of the nation as a whole for a long time to come, if ever.
The second runner-up in 1993 Miss India Pageant, Karminder Kaur-Virk, was a Punjabi Sikhni like Haley. The third runner-up, Pooja Batra, was also a Punjabi, likely a Hindu Rajput because of her first name — Sikh names tend to end in “inder.” Her father was a colonel in the Indian Army. Priyanka Chopra Jonas, winner of Miss World 2000 and the most famous desi Indian outside India, is also a Punjabi Rajput; her parents were doctors in, yes, the Indian Army.
Given the time the Miss India pageant I emceed took place, when marriage ads in newspapers were so flagrantly colorist they stung my pale blue eyes, the subtext about the pageant’s rigging was that Namratha Shirodkar, from a newly wealthy low-caste Marathi family, was nothing like the upper-caste thoroughbred fillies who normally placed in the final round, forget winning the crown.
The 1992 winner, Madhu Sapre, is a Marathi Brahmin then engaged to my friend Milind Soman, India’s top male model, who was with me in my hotel room catching up when I received the anonymous call with a death threat. Milind is also a Marathi Brahmin more or less my height, six-foot-three.
The height differential between Namratha and the other finalists (top photo), as well as Madhu (bottom), is my final comment on the rigging:
Vivek Ramaswamy is a Brahmin from Kerala, on the other side of the southernmost region of the Subcontinent from Tamil Nadu, where Vice President Kamala Harris’ Brahmin mother was born and raised. Government administration, law, philosophy, education, literature and religion are the purviews of Brahmins everywhere in India.
When Liberals began clucking about Ramaswamy in the weeks before the first debate, miffed by his eloquence, unctuous charm and opportunistic ability to hustle Republicans like a shell game, I posted on Twitter something to the effect that, “Haley is the only one who can take out Ramaswamy. Just watch.”
I made my prediction based on another dynamic at play: in theory, and in my observance, Haley and Ramaswamy see themselves as two distinct races. Toss the strict endogamy of the caste system into the salad of cultural norms along with colorism, and you have a staggering purity maintained between Aryans and Dravidians. With that comes a level of racism that is so ingrained it’s a given, even in the rebranding era of Glow & Lovely.
"Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber,” Nikki-ji said at the first debate, not even looking at Ramaswamy. In the subsequent debate she said, "No, it's not worth my time to respond to him." He withered and crumbled.
An example of this dynamic happened about a year ago when I was referred by a desi Punjabi hip surgeon — my height, fair-skinned, first language English — to an American-born Tamil Brahmin. When he asked me why the Punjabi wasn’t doing it as planned, I replied, “No idea. First, he was doing it, then he said he’s not doing hip replacements anymore, which isn’t true. What can I say: North Indians, ya know?”
“Oh, my God, the worst,” he snapped back reflexively, then looked at me sharply when he realized that wasn’t supposed to be a dynamic I should understand.
As I mentioned in my rambling DM to Razib Khan, 2.5% of the American population is of South Asian descent. According to ChatGPT’s calculations, 27% of tech workers in Silicon Valley are either desi or Indian Americans from the recent diaspora, over double their counterparts of Chinese descent. According to the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, Indians are ~9% of all doctors in the country. 4% of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are Indian, which might seem unremarkable until you consider that the real percentage of the population of Indian descent exclusive of other South Asian countries is 1.7%.
Like so much else about Asia, population numbers seem so absurd to Westerners as to be almost meaningless. The fact is that there are millions more highly skilled tech workers, medical professionals, and scientists in India who can’t get visas. I get hit up at least once a week when I’m there for sponsorship; it’s like being the cliché of the rich kid from a famous family who can never be sure if people befriend him for who he is as a person or what he represents.
It’s by now an established “racist trope” about the most recent ethnic group to come in a wave to America that they happen to be good at math and science. But why, if not because of a eugenics program that was without doubt set up millennia ago to match people with similar professional aptitudes and physical attributes? Almost all Indians describe their jati, or subcaste of the four main varnas, according to their traditional professions.
As I said in the first paragraph of this piece, the Indian caste system is “highly successful.” Given the above numbers of overrepresentation accrued through pure merit as well as what we’ve just seen in the Republican primary, America has been benefitting enormously from India’s caste system. We will continue to do so in defiance of disapproving Progressive aunties clattering their teacups and gasping in shock at the use of the E-word.
But, ladies, eugenics is what it is. It powers Silicon Valley, other tech and engineering, the medical sector, and other industries that require high levels of a certain kind of intellectual aptitude. To justify it as being something South Asians tend to be good at naturally is to plunge into the possibility of genetic differences between the races, an even more forbidden thought than the E-word.
As for you, India, meri jaan-e jaan, heart of my heart, you don’t need to keep apologizing for who you are to people who only know you through the dark, fractured prisms of their first-world prejudices, especially when selective breeding is so ubiquitous, even among most other mammals, that it would seem to be human nature.
The same applies to colorism among nonwhite social groups; it would appear to be a natural human tendency. American antiracists can bang on all they want about colorism being a product of White settler-colonialism, a tool of oppression that insists that White beauty is the only beauty, but in my experience that’s more racist demonization from the likes of Spike Lee. My standard response is, “We didn’t force geishas to paint their faces white.”
As with Israel and its war with Hamas, a dynamic most Westerners cannot understand fully, what should matter to us most is that India is a true democracy; six weeks to carry out and deliver relatively impartial election results that didn’t favor Modi, a man habitually called some version of “populist despot,” was a staggering accomplishment.
The American antiracism movement is so desperate to keep narratives of oppression that are by and large no longer valid alive that recently they have been equating the experience of Dalits — formerly known as Untouchables or Harijans — with that of Black Americans, thanks to Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents and its film adaptation by Ava Duvernay.
It took me years of full immersion in Indian society, shot through with too many embarrassing Western-centric blunders, to arrive at the understanding and acceptance I have for my adopted country. I feel secure enough to state categorically that Wilkerson and Duvernay — backed by Oprah, of course — have created yet another outrageous false equivalency that above all is disrespectful to Dalits.
More on that and my experiences with untouchability in part three, The Touchiest Subject.
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* Regarding the Marcus Leatherdale photo, this is one of two photos he took of similar-looking sadhus in Varanasi. I can’t be sure this is the aghori: Marcus and I had a falling out after the project was complete in 1992 and never spoke again. He committed suicide in India in 2022.
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FURTHER READING:
Diana Fleischman’s piece on eugenics:
This piece kicks off with the worst of my aforementioned “Western-centric blunders.” It still makes me squirm… see, I just squirmed.
The New Ugly Americans and Their World Series Syndrome — Part Two
With a title like that, who needs an explanatory sub?
Coleman Hughes, the hero we need right now, calmly takes apart the damaging doctrines of the American antiracism movement, supporting my statement about them keeping “narratives of oppression that are by and large no longer valid alive…”
Hello James,
This was an increasingly rare eye-opening read for me. As an American living in Japan for nearly 42 years now, it has taken me awhile to begin seeing through the unspoken cultural conceit that many if not most Japanese have, until recently, seen themselves as part of a relatively egalitarian 'socialist' democratic society not so different from their former image of the Scandinavian countries.
In retrospect, pre-war, industrial Japan was never a worker's paradise, but a carefully propagandized Victorian-era facade created by a ruling class descended from pre-industrial feudal Japan ... and well, we know the Scandinavian 'progressive paradise' of society is now a controlled demolition falling apart before our eyes.
But until reading this article, I could only view the caste machinery through what I thought were the somewhat enlightened eyes of a working class American who had become black pilled at the faux meritocracy I had seen in my own country as mirroring what I was seeing here in Japan through many citizens' unspoken assumptions about Ryukyu islanders (Okinawans), Ainu, Zainichi (Korean heritage), burakumin, 'convenience store foreigners', half, and so on.
I was born in Germany to a German mom who still remembers the war, and an American dad ... but moved to the rural South of the U.S. at age 2, and still remember gasping at white robed klansmen as a youth ... and saw myself as the opposite of my overtly racist dad ... whose ancestry ironically came from Norwegian stock, as well as Irish ("the blacks of Europe").
On the recommendation of a Japanese friend, I had bought a kindle version of Isobel Wilkerson's "Caste", but am backlogged with so many other books, that I have not gotten around to it. Now that I have read your essay, I WILL read Wilkerson, but thanks to you, with a more critical eye than I would have.
Looking only at the 'developed' Western countries (and Japan), I still believe the hubris of a ruling class and their Cluster B / Dark-Triad conceits and tactics of walking the razor's edge of having it all will result in yet another fall of "Tower of Babel" proportions, and coupled with increasingly sophisticated weaponry and psychological - institutional means of control, may eventually lead to species extinction.
But more importantly, thanks to this read, I am going to have to return to the foundations of my understanding of what it means to be a human, a 'social' (family / small community) primate that through the blessing and curse of our capacity to rationalize, are also a "herding" primate, and sometimes a "swarming" one.
I will be reading this article again, probably several times ... looking for where I might disagree with your analysis, but I think I will more often be respectfully deferring to you. If I find myself twisting and squirming, I suspect it will be because of the gap between my ideals of the "should" of human nature bumping up against the historically and scientifically demonstrated "is" ... but even that will be at a superficial layer of the huge elephant in the room you've pointed to.
Upon reading your article, so much of what you say appears so obvious, and yet so much has been under my radar as to make me feel like a school child just learning the world is round. Thank you again for something that is going to tilt and spin a world that I had previously thought I'd figured out.
Cheers from Japan,
Steve
Very excellent dive into a culture most of cannot begin to comprehend. Ignorance is not bliss and you pulled the curtain back, if only just a bit. However, it isn't American so it must be bad.