The Touchiest Subject
A deeply personal view of untouchability, the worst of oppressions.
RECAP OF PARTS ONE AND TWO
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, stating an irrefutable 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.”
“Dharma refers to the moral and ethical duties and responsibilities that govern an individual's conduct. It is a key concept in Hinduism, encompassing duties, rights, laws, conduct, virtues, and the right way of living.”
“Adherence to one's dharma influences one's karma, determining how actions in one lifetime have consequences in the next.”
— ChatGPT
HIS TALL IMPERIAL HIGHNESS’ DISCIPLE
For thirty years, my epilogue for the dinner-table version of the Miss India Pageant saga has been, “I waited for the lights to cut, threw down the mic, stormed off the stage, and said to Deepak, ‘I want cash. And you’re paying the tax.’ Then I hopped on the 1 AM Air India flight back to Delhi, packed my things, and hightailed it to the Himalayas.”
It didn’t happen quite that fast.
I was farm-sitting for Italian friends outside Delhi. In those days, it was hard to get to — now, it’s near an elevated train stop. Few knew where I was, but I still needed to move on: Delhi was about to get unimaginably hot, triggering rolling blackouts, hours on end with no air conditioning or even a punkah ceiling fan, a level of discomfort I wasn’t genetically engineered to deal with.
I put the word out among the household staff that I was hiring a houseman to accompany me to Mussoorie, the hill station the Dalai Lama first settled in after fleeing Tibet, eight hours away by Ambassador car. The British even moved their regional government centers to hill stations because, as my genomic peers, they weren’t equipped to deal with the Indian hot season, either.
I needed “a man” in the domestic help sense because I would be living in Landour Cantonment, perched higher up than Mussoorie along a ridge. I’d spent two winters living in the Himalayas with 7 hours of electricity a day, using local means of keeping warm: wood bukhari stoves and ember-filled kangri pots kept under a heavy-wool pheran ponch. I slept under three heavy cotton-stuffed duvets with my pet mongoose, Wali.
There would be none of the basics Westerners take for granted, namely refrigeration. Foreigners are far more susceptible to waterborne diseases than Indians. I would need my water boiled for ten minutes, then cooled and bottled. With sporadic electricity, I couldn’t rely on boilers; more water would need to be boiled and carried to the bathroom for a “bucket bath,” which I’d grown over the years to prefer to showers. The nearest grocery bazaar would be an hour by foot each way down and up a glute-bustlingly steep, winding hill appropriately called Camel Back Road.
In other words, in India thirty years ago in such a remote area, I would’ve spent most of the day looking after myself. I had a book to scribble and Hindi to learn at the language school.
I’d run out of the mild charas hash that I stocked up on in the tourist area of Central Delhi every couple of weeks. Getting more would mean sending someone to get me a rickshaw on the main road, which could be as long as 45 minutes, which would take me to a taxi into town, then other inconveniences like being swarmed and pawed by professional beggars and touts. Pondering all of this, I remembered that the farm was rumored to have a cannabis indica patch somewhere on the property.
It wasn’t difficult to find. As I was trying to remember which sex got you high and which was mere hemp, a farmhand named Jamuna emerged from the plants with a machete.
He dropped to his knees in full charan sparsh, touched my feet before I could step back with appropriate Anglo-American horror, and rose again, hands clasped together in pranam, or what Westerners call “namaste” when they salute themselves and the luminous being they are in the mirror after an American yoga class, which is weird if you’re aware that part of the bedrock of Indian culture, yoga included, is polite passivity, striving for egoless self-abnegation, the opposite of self-worship.
I’ve always found charan sparsh charming, moving and elegant to watch among Indians — my brothers- and sisters-in-law do it to their parents every morning or when they see them again after even a short absence — but having it done to me has always rattled my resolutely egalitarian Yankee doodle-dandies.
From the handful of occasions I’d seen him over the months I lived at the farm in Mehrauli, I knew Jamuna to be uncommonly bold and funny. He once teased the cook after dropping off groceries outside the kitchen with, “It’s okay, I’ll do your work for you,” a great insult in India, where work is the source of sustenance, a matter of life and death, therefore sacred.
I might have known that Jamuna was an Untouchable, then known as ‘Harijan,’ now called ‘Dalit,’ but that meant nothing to me. Having tried to interfere with India’s social order to disastrous effect in the past, I knew better than to object to the fact he wasn’t allowed into the kitchen, the domain of household staff, who might’ve been of the lower Shudra Laborer Caste, I can’t be sure.
Harijans were only allowed into the house to sweep and remove the garbage, one of the professions that was exclusively the purview of Harijans, still my preferred term for Untouchables/Dalits.
Jamuna hacked down a couple of female cannabis plants and pruned them as a cover activity for daring to approach and talk to me directly in front of his fellow farmhands. Given that this was a foreign household, he knew he could approach an angrez directly, but it would have shocked the others and caused him problems if he’d done so without a good reason. I was impressed that he understood us so well from remote observation.
While bundling my new stash, Jamuna stated the actual reason for his swift diligence in cannabis harvesting: he wanted to come with me to Mussoorie.
“Aapka khana banaata hoon,” he said — “I can make your food” — a critical job requirement. Having been raised in Italy, I needed pasta a few times a week as a break from Indian fare, if only for the pleasure of the taste of tomatoes and garlic that hadn’t been shot beyond recognition by a jinn-conjuring alchemist’s compound of spices that were an exotic language unto themselves.
The farm’s generous and hyper-gregarious Milanese owners, away chasing business opportunities in Goa, kept a legendary kitchen: wheels of real Parmesan; hocks of prosciutto; two types of pasta every dinner, followed by meat and fish dishes, and salads made with produce grown on the farm, all treated with liberal splashings of premium Italian olive oil, which Indians only used for their hair, never to cook.
Their extravagance was notable: a 300% tax was levied on those few foreign luxury goods allowed to be imported. On top of that, the rupee was a nonconvertible blocked currency. As a result, the Indian hawala black market accounted for over half the nation’s GDP, used by everyone, government officials included.
Like most foreigners, they didn’t keep strict caste separation between house and field; that was left to the dynamics between Indian staff. It was best for everyone if you ignored it; the only decent thing you could do as an angrez was to leave Indian things to Indians and not embarrass them with biased judgments framed by contexts that didn’t apply.
When they had large parties, the entire staff was put to work in the kitchen, including the half-dozen farmhands. It made sense that Jamuna was telling the truth about knowing how to banaana Whitey khana.
A lower-caste houseman presented himself for the job the following day. Having been raised in a straightjacket of correctness and protocols particular to my own caste, I couldn’t send away the person I’d been told would be showing up any day now, “Indian standard time,” and replace him with a farmhand whose past-life karma had doomed him to be born as a non-person forbidden to linger longer than necessary in any kitchen lest he contaminate the food. Actually cooking for buda sahibs? Yeah, no. I couldn’t go there.
(Note the more accurate, traditional use of ‘karma.’ It’s not “what goes around, comes around” in this life but what’s accrued in past incarnations being paid forward to future lives, another essential component of the caste system.)
The houseman accompanied me to Mussoorie. It was a miserable relationship from the start: he had zero experience with foreigners, and we’re terrifying, especially a big, grumpy writer who just stormed off the stage after hosting a rigged beauty contest of enormous national importance, for which I was likely being blamed for trying to sabotage.
Worse, I didn’t like the work at hand. A little over a year earlier, art photographer Marcus Leatherdale and I had toured the Subcontinent in a rickety diesel van for three months taking portraits of characters from my India, from princes to movie stars I’d worked with to the Adivasi in the lead image of this piece.
When we returned to New York, Marcus changed the project’s concept and format as laid out in the book proposal, which I’d put together over a year and a half and a dozen test shoots I’d produced and art directed. Rather than being a Peter Beard-type photographic diary, a blend of text and images, I was now writing the forward for a coffee-table book featuring his images.
Marcus maintained that I was his “assistant”; he later changed the title to “production coordinator.” It was still an insult, both unfair and untrue, not to mention that I was never paid or reimbursed for my expenses.
The project fell apart. To prove a point, I turned the text portion into a proposal for a memoir that alternated between the road trip and my year of living dangerously in Kashmir in 1989 until the troubles broke out in January 1990 and I was ordered to leave the Valley by the U.N. and our embassy.
Within a couple of weeks, I had an offer from Viking Penguin. Marcus waited 25 years to publish his portion of our collaboration.
It was still too raw to write about, and scribbling a book was proving a lot more difficult than a screenplay.
After three days of trying to stomach inedible roadside dhaba mush cooked only in mustard oil — I’m still puzzling over that detail — I sent the houseman back to Delhi with a chitti note.
A few days later, Jamuna sauntered down the road to my splendid pre-Raj bungalow overlooking terraces of rice paddies and Himalayan peaks, his possessions in a few plastic bags. The bus depot was miles away further down the mountain; he’d found the house by describing me to people along the way.
Again, he dropped to his knees in charan sprash. This time I was ready: I stepped back to remove my feet from his hands, bent and gently touched his shoulders to prompt him to stand.
In rudimentary Hindi, I said, “You this never again do. You, me, both same are.”*
“Achcha, sahib,” Jamuna replied, doubtful but happy.
He’d only ever seen forests like Mussoorie’s in movies. It was heaven. When he wasn’t working, he spent hours perfectly still, looking at a view that had never been appreciated as much.
“WHO YOU ARE, HE IS”
Jamuna was a confident, natural cook as well as a sweetheart, honest, hardworking, able to handle the seclusion and friendlessness of being the lone Dalit in an area with only upper-caste staff; as a former army cantonment, Landour’s household staff tended to be from the Rajput Warrior Caste. He refused to take a day off; there was nobody to talk to much less go to the movies with.
All Indians instantly knew what Jamuna was when they saw him. Small, slender, and far darker-skinned than average, he looked like the Adivasi tribal in the lead image of this piece, whom Marcus Leatherdale and I had photographed a year earlier in Chhota Udaipur.
Were Dalits those fabled original inhabitants of the Subcontinent who perhaps stayed or got stuck in the North rather than pushed South by putative “Aryan” invasions to become Dravidians?
According to testing conducted in 2009 that broke down biallelic autosomal markers in genes, Indians have a mix of two groups termed “Ancestral South Indians” (ASI) and “Ancestral North Indians” (ANI). It seems that both Adivasis and Dalits tend to have a greater amount of ASI markers than upper-caste “Aryans.”
Jamuna imposed an even stricter protocol and separation between sahib and naukar than I was used to; having been brought to India by a Muslim nobleman of Oudh, the princely state where Urdu was invented, made famous in the New York Times feature, ‘The Jungle Prince of Delhi,’ I was used to graceful adab etiquette but far more interpersonal parity with household staff than Jamuna was comfortable with.
I’d long learned that insisting on social parity with Indian staff members was generally too upsetting to be worth making a statement like insisting a driver sit with me for lunch at a roadside dhaba — he would barely be able to swallow his food.
Jamuna did a deep pranam to me every morning when I stumbled into the kitchen for breakfast. After I finished, he asked what I would be having for lunch and dinner, and if there would be any guests. He never sat if I was within sight; if I caught him off guard, he immediately bolted up and bowed apologetically. He never ate in front of me, but rather on the kitchen floor hidden between the table and the sink. I had to take my meals regularly because he wouldn’t eat until after me.
On the few occasions when, lost in a writer’s alternate reality, I forgot that he would be eating and wandered into the kitchen, there would be a clatter of his thali on the floor as he pushed it away, and the sound of him coughing out food as he jumped to his feet. I would immediately spin around and exit with, “Sorry, ji! Sorry!”
I used the daily grocery list as a way of practicing both my Hindi spelling and Devanagari script. I was having dinner one night with Mehraj, a Kashmiri Muslim kid I’d yanked from the maws of Islamic militantism by paying for his education at the American Woodstock School down the hill, when Jamuna came in followed by the groundskeeper, who’d just returned from the bazaar with my child’s scrawl of a grocery list. They were both quite agitated, enough to interrupt the sahibs’ dinner.
I’d put the amount of an item, one kilo, but hadn’t written what it was. I slapped my forehead Italian-style as if punishing myself for my own stupidity.
“I what an owl am,” I said in Hindi, because, Alice, in the land of everything we know turned upside down through the rabbit hole of a looking-glass, the owl is a symbol of stupidity, not wisdom. “I not writing… no… I ‘milk’ not wrote.” And laughed heartily at myself.
“Achcha, sahib,” Jamuna said, dropping his gaze to the floor as if I’d belted him across the back of his head. The chowkidar was only slightly less mortified. Mehraj dismissed them both without looking from his plate.
“That went over like a lead balloon,” I said. “Did it come out all wrong?”
“You made perfect sense, unfortunately,” Mehraj said. “You should’ve said that you forgot, that they can get it tomorrow. Or you decided we didn’t need it. Whatever. But you are never, ever stupid. If you are stupid, so is Jamuna. Who you are, he is. You are the greatest pride of his life, trust me.”
It’s a normal human emotion to borrow prestige from people or institutions that elevate our social position by association. I was no exception, especially when I was younger and crippled by low self-esteem and other thorny insecurities, nor was Jamuna.
Mehraj was spot-on, as usual. One afternoon shortly after the owl incident, Jamuna returned from the bazaar, where I kept our accounts with relatively casteless Sikhs. He was giddy with delight, chattering away so quickly I had to ask him to slow down.
He said the shopkeepers had given him a new nickname, “Lambu Shehzada ka Chela.”
Broken down that meant:
‘Lambu’ is to ‘lamba’ (tall) what ‘shorty’ is to ‘short,’ an affectionate form of the adjective used across the country as a nickname for Bollywood’s biggest star at the time, Amitabh Bachchan, who was very tall.
‘Shehzada’ was the title given to sons of the Great Mughal, princes styled as “imperial highness,” as lofty as you can go without calling me “king” or “emperor,” which would’ve been silly: I was in my late 20s, clean-shaven, my beard still too patchy for manly authority.
‘ka Chela’ means “disciple of,” in other words, Jamuna wasn’t my servant (naukar) but someone fulfilling his dharmic duty by attending to me in a guru-chela relationship.
Unlike what it meant for Jamuna, the Prince Thing had always been onerous for me, not something I was proud of. A combination of my physicality, performativities learned at a British school in Rome, arguably the most classist of European capitals, my absentminded-professor aloofness when lost in my self-protective interior world, and my place in the American social order was an irritant that caused my staunch, anti-aristocratic Yankee father to assault me regularly on Christmas Eve when he was black-out drunk and sentimental, the sort of abuse that had created my interior world in the first place.
Any excuse worked for attacking the family scapegoat, but “Who do you think you are, the fucking Prince of Wales?” happened to be a favorite of Dad’s once I hit adolescence.
It extended beyond Dad’s impression. A Hapsburg I dated briefly before falling in love with India once said, “When you speak French, you’re more like a prince than I am.” We only spoke French; if he’d been as fluent in American English, he would’ve known it was even worse. When I lived in Puerto Rico at the end of the 90s, I was known as “el principe” in my boyfriend’s social group. And on and on.
It bothered me as a blossoming staunch Yankee that I wore my class so obviously. In my late 30s, as I lost my hair and gained tattoos, I successfully stripped the Prince Thing off and traded him for an unseen character out of Sons of Anarchy. People don’t know my origins unless I tell them.
That’s just superficial appearance, however. Interpersonal dynamics with people from outside my natal world are difficult to maintain over the long term — it’s not for want of trying.
That sameness of experience, behaviors, expectations and customs is another reason for caste endogamy; if you share the same culture and ethnicity, there’s less adjustment to the stranger your parents have stitched you to for life.
As the heat on the plains became intolerable, and word of my splendid lodge in the hills spread among my friends in Delhi, I found myself entertaining most weekends. Jamuna would dazzle with his Italian food and subtly spiced Indian dishes.
Invariably, at some point I would overhear them chatting up Jamuna in the kitchen, “He’s a foreigner who won’t be here for long. Come, work for me.”
Those overtures became a shared joke; they were also a reminder of the considerable change in Jamuna’s social status.
“I will never work for Indians,” he said, namely because of prejudices from other household staff. I didn’t blame him.
My friends were right about my time in India being limited. Six months later, the end of my first phase in India, came to a close after seven years. Without the sort of sanyukt parivar extended-family connections that are also an essential part of the caste system, which established bonds of trust to conduct business in India, or a fortune of my own to tide me through the normal feast-or-famine cycles of filmi-wallahs worldwide, I couldn’t sustain a life there.
The family-connections problem was almost overly resolved six years later when I married an Indian woman; my sister came to the wedding, met my flatmate, and married him nine months later.
When we parted in Delhi, I handed Jamuna several copies of a letter of recommendation with my full name, including its embarrassingly regal numeral suffix, a major contradiction in my natal world. I never used it except for legal documents. My New York address and phone number at the top added further importance. The salutation, “To whom it may concern,” was really “Dearest Fellow Whitey…” The rest of the text was so glowing it would’ve gotten a cat burglar a job guarding the Crown Jewels.
That letter was what Jamuna had taken a punt on that day among the cannabis plants — he’d successfully hacked his way out of the social prison he was born into. He would have work for the rest of his life in the households of Delhi’s extensive foreign community, respected for who he was, not how he was born. Foreigners habitually paid three times the Indian rate.
When I handed him the letter, he didn’t try to hide his emotions. He dropped to his knees and touched my feet. This time I allowed it: it wasn’t about my American prejudices, but rather his need to express his gratitude in the deepest way he knew.
I’m told that Jamuna has never looked back. He no doubt built his family a fine house back in his goan, where his wife, whom he was married to when they were both eleven years old, lived with their two children. He was barely twenty-one when he worked for me.
I’d finally scored a goal in the unwinnable slo-mo match of His Tall Imperial Highness Yankee Doodle Dandy IV vs. the Indian caste system.
I’ve never felt compelled to write Jamuna’s story; in our collective Western view, it’s a fraught White-savior tale of untouchability and being born impure; of real casteism, not theoretical; of rare, extreme privilege that is hard for some Americans of a Progressive persuasion who have no context to stomach.
However, the Lambu Shehzada ka Chela’s point of view is the only lensing on untouchability permitted in this discussion, per critical theory’s rules. I’m fairly confident that if Jamuna knew that I’ve written about him and our time together, that you as a sahib whether you like it or not are reading this, he would blush, look at the floor, and turn away to hide his emotions. They would be the opposite of the outrages of social-justice activists and their childish demonizations.
What has forced my hands to the keyboard with this story is the appropriation of untouchability and Jamuna’s experience in Pulitzer-winner Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, which Oprah called “the most important book I’ve ever chosen for my book club,” and its film adaptation, Origin, by Ava DuVernay.
I’ll break that down into so much kindling in the next part of this series, and toss it on the bonfire of the American antiracism movement’s vanities.
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* The goofy translations of what I said to Jamuna in Hindi are actually word-for-word from correct Hindi. I thought arranging words in the syntax of Indic idiom might impressionistically convey my struggle to master such a different form of language, as well as Jamuna’s ability to understand me despite awkward grammar and phrasing — he was a very bright guy.
Here’s a link to the fourth installment of this five-part series, with more on untouchability and a takedown of Wilkerson’s false equivalency:
THE MALCONTENTS
Nobody has a right to appropriate untouchability, especially Americans.
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“Giving liberates the soul of the giver.” — Maya Angelou
Or support this project by acquiring something tangible at my concept store:
My house in Landour has been turned into a “cultural center,” likely for tax purposes. These clips are from a video by Landour Plein-Air:
Fascinating. It is easy to be critical of what we do not understand. It is far better to gain understanding of a thing and then consider its merits.