One of the thing that the Indian government can do to reduce this issue is to ban caste related surnames. Like you can literally tell the caste of a person from their surname. Its insane that no ruling part had the guts to ban that.
A large parts of population in South Indian states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala no longer have surnames that are tied to the caste. Mostly because of the people deciding to do that by themselves. But the issue is very very bad in Northern states which is where the majority of the population lives.
I’m against all forms of discrimination but it’s inhuman to force someone to change their name. That’s like saying certain unsavory last names need to be changed in the U.S. My last name is Cohen, some people in WWII-era Germany wanted to erase my name.
Indian anti-caste movements have a history of changing surnames to signify abandoning caste enjoying participation from both upper and lower castes. Those people and their children and grandchildren still exist today with their cultural and religious identity intact (and unfortunately even caste most of the time). A lot of people use their father's name as a surname too. It's not genocidal.
> it’s inhuman to force someone to change their name
I have very complicated feeling about black parents in the US giving their kids "black" names. On one hand, they're expressing themselves and honoring their culture. On the other, if society in 2040 looks anything like society in 2020, they're hurting their kid's future.
The parents are doing nothing but naming their child how they want to name them. Discriminatory people reacting badly to the name are the ones hurting the children, not the parents.
I assume your correspondent is referring to the studies in which the same resume, with different names, were sent out to help wanted ads and saw lower response rates for "black" names. Obviously the correct solution is that the people making those decisions shouldn't be, or should be otherwise relieved of their discriminatory behavior. But I think it's reasonable for someone to feel bad about society forcing parents into choosing between identity and financial well-being.
We don't necessarily have to change the name of existing people all at once. The rule can be applied to mostly new borns and figure out the rest from there.
That doesn’t make it any better. Your last name is a part of your identity and heritage. You are advocating for cultural genocide and trust me I know what comes after that.
Are we just talking about men? Most women are basically expected to change their last name upon marriage in many countries.
To me it's just a name. My wife kept her last name and and it seems the past generations simply can't accept that. My extended family still mails her letters using my last name.
That's a very privileged attitude. If your name alone forces your life to be that of a servant, no matter what you want, or do, or how smart you are, or how much potential you might have, maybe your family would not be that bothered giving up what is just some letters on an official document if it meant a way out from a life of systemic oppression.
Honestly India needs a fresh start at the moment. The baggage of caste system has deprived millions of people for centuries. Most people will prefer to live in a society where they are treated equal in favor of giving up their caste identity that have descriminted their community for centuries.
Actually it worked out pretty well for Kerala. It's #1 in India in terms of HDI and all most all human related metrics in India. The state with lowest income inequality. And nobody descriminates you on basis of caste in day to day life. Which I can't say is true for many northern states.
Yes. And Kerala was able to do that among all the castes. I am sure not being able to guess the caste of a person from their name should have defintely helped the cause. The fact that the students wont be descriminated by others students because of their surname. Not having to goto a hospital worrying about getting discriminated on basis of your name. All of these things add up and have a big impact in long term.
They had pretty serious land reform, too. Meaning that large estates were confiscated and given to the people working them. Doesn't always work out, but seems to have been an important part of what other success stories like Japan/Korea also did.
Kerala is a separate case study. Kerala had a feudal society and the Namboothri Brahmins and the warrior Nairs has a special arrangement. Nowhere else were the strict rules of society applied in India other than in Kerala. No where else was life fine and streamlined but also damn bloody unfair. But it functioned well as a monarchy. People were ok with it because with prosperity there was also security. This was necessary because it was the tip of the peninsula and there was also border security because the defense here was to protect the long coastline. Where they also enjoyed tremendous profitable trade.
The Namboothris distinguished themselves from other Brahmins by wearing the hair tuft on the front/side(Purvasikha) as opposed to the way Brahmins elsewhere wore their hair tufts which was at the back of their heads(aparasikhas).
This is why it makes no sense to make any generalities about Hindus or caste or even sub sects of Brahmins in India. They were all different with different habits and practices. Not to mention languages. There were thousands and thousands of small tight knit communities with the freedom to govern themselves socially as long as they adhered to the broader foundational principles. Note that by this time, Mughals and Islam and Buddhism and Jains and Christian missionaries were all gaining foothold. So it was not just a Hindu nation.
The British were fascinated and horrified and overwhelmed by the diversity of faiths and beliefs and cultural practices of this massive country which still operated as little kingdoms under larger kingdoms. No two Hindu groups are alike. Just like no two Brahmin communities are alike. The country had millions of people and get hundred people together in a room, they’d find something common only amongst themselves and form a separate community. And smaller communities were robust communities. It was great and working smoothly before the British came..from a colonist POV, homogenous country as a single profitable blob made more sense. Now instead of a multitude of string robust communities capable of working well by themselves, a very diverse population found themselves together and couldn’t work well as a group anymore. No one got along with each other. It was the diversity of individuals that weakened them. The diversity of different groups was their strength earlier.
(Visualize it like this. India was a basket of bundles of coloured matchsticks. Each bundle was the same colour but there were thousands and thousands of them. The basket was filled with bundles If multiple colours. And then the British came and removed the threads that kept each of the bundles together. As they came apart, all the individual match sticks got mixed and no one knew where to belong. So many different people got along only because they knew that they had the freedom to live and die on their own terms or rather the terms of their chosen group where everyone agreed to the rules. After the British came, no one agreed with anyone because suddenly it’s a blur of colour. What kept them together as neat little bundles was their sub religious beliefs and sub sub caste divisions and sub sub sub cultural beliefs etc. there were progressive Brahmins and orthodox Brahmins. It’s nuts to imagine that they all shared the same core belief system. Hinduism is not a monotheistic religion. The British knew Christianity but Christianity was designed as an evangelical faith and by definition cannot have drastic divisions and sub divisions and sub sub divisions even though they did have their denominations. We have thirty thousand gods vs one monotheistic god. Should have kicked out the British at first sight.)
Management, you see. Colonial MBA types with gunpowder found it easier to strip the country and ship off the resources back to an impoverished Britain. Not to mention the looting. But first, they had to play their hand with Divide and Rule strategy. To this end, shatter small kingdoms..off with the King’s head. And then destroy a rather woke and strangely also libertarian religious arrangement we called Hinduism.
The poor dears so far way from their dull and dreary little northern island. And unlike the Vikings, no one slaughtered them and rolled out the carpet instead. And 400 years to pay for that mistake and an eternity to fix it.
> Your last name is your identity and heritage. You are advocating for cultural genocide and trust me I know what comes after that.
It's okay if you want to speak for yourself, but if you want to apply such a statement globally then I think that's a little ethnocentric. The whole idea of last names and who has to take whose in marriage is steeped in a lot of history that plenty of folks had issue with even back then not to mention today.
Your identity and heritage is more than your name, and your identity is more than your heritage. By advocating for keeping last names for all societies, you may be unintentionally advocating for keeping an oppressive caste stratified authoritarian regime going which has been alive for over three thousand years which affects others even if it doesn't affect you personally. Is that really what you want to do? Why not accept that the cultural utilization of last names varies from society to society?
As a Jew I feel compelled to speak up as say that CyberRabbi does not speak for Jews, and that anti-caste is nothing like Holocaust or cultural genocide, and the insinuation of such is offensive to me.
I speak for myself, Elijah Cohen and I am a Jew whose grandparents survived the Holocaust. Is there a problem? Why are you bringing my religion into this?
Because apparently the use of the word ‘genocide’ cannot be appropriated by non Jewish people.
Bengal famine that was a man made famine by British wiped out 1/3 of the population of one state. That’s 10 million people. And there were many more. We were shipping cotton to England instead of growing grain for our people. Indians understand genocide.
[..] "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits." -Winston Churchill[..]
I am a descendant of holocaust survivors so please read the following with that in mind:
The caste system is part of a culture. It is also (IMHO) thoroughly odious, and it should be eliminated, along with patriarchy, theocracy, and a whole host of other human cultural norms with long and (some would say) venerable histories. There is no moral equivalence between a constructive suggestion for how to eliminate the caste system -- notwithstanding that it is in fact an effort to erase part of a culture -- and actual genocide. So please don't bandy that word about lightly.
When the "culture" is exactly equal to "the cast system"? Then yes for all that is good in the world let's do some "cultural genocide"! Some cultur must die for humans to suffer less.
A large portion of the population in south indian states don't have surnames. I think I'm the first person in my family line in what must be centuries that has the same second name as my father (so what you would consider a "surname") because I was born in the US where there is a cultural expectation to have a "family name." So my grandfather's first name, which was my fathers second name, is now my "surname." Otherwise, my fathers first name would have been my "last name," as is the case with my cousins that were born in India.
I actually disagree, I have worked in almost all parts of India. South India has a very strong "Brahmin" influence to an extent that families disown children if they marry in other caste.
They also have a very strong language bias with strong racism against non Tamil speakers. (Although People from Kerala and Andra Pradesh are much better than Tamil Nadu)
I am not saying South India is free of caste system. I am just saying it's better to live in a society where one can't tell your caste from your name. Especially if you are from one of the marginalized castes.
> South India has a very strong "Brahmin" influence ..
Oh dear! That notorious Tambram superiority shit. I agree it is still largely at play. However, considering how it is played in the North of India, South is light years better.
One of the things about Tamil Nadu at least is that a lot of people don't have surnames in the traditional sense.
My "surname" is actually my dad's given name, and my dad's "surname" is his dad's given name. So it changes every generation, unlike most of the rest of the world, where a single surname lasts through generations.
The point about caste differentiability by surname is still valid, though in a different sense, because the given names also have caste bias.
IMO the easiest way to break this cycle would be a widespread campaign to de-stigmatize inter-marriage between castes; that would solve the problem of correlation between name and caste within a generation or two.
For anyone who is interested: this type of name is called a patronymic, and besides Tamil Nadu exists in at least Iceland and Russia.
In both of those countries, a particular grammatical ending is added to the name, whereas in Tamil culture the bare name is used.
In Russia, people also have family surnames, in addition to patronymics. For example: “Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev”, whose father was presumably named “Anatoliy [something] Medvedev”.
Or: “Katrín Jakobsdóttir”, whose father was presumably named “Jakob [something]”.
The option for immigrants to change their name at Ellis Island long ago existed in large part to combat bringing 'old world' prejudices into the then new USA, nothing has changed...
Nobody made a better life in America? I'm certainly aware of at least a handful of people who have gone from poverty to at least comfortable living after coming to America.
Almost all of the major surnames can be linked to the caste. Nowadays many people of all the castes have started using caste neutral surnames. Banning the use of any caste related surnames is too much I guess. But people should be allowed to use any surnames.
Somewhat tangential but in Korea people used to buy in to higher prestige surnames which has resulted in the great majority of people sharing a couple handful of surnames.
Non-Indian here, I've always wondered how does this work in practice? Is there some giant book with a surnames-to-caste look-up table that Indian children memorize so they can recall later when they hear someone's name? That seems to be a lot of to pack into each of 1 billion people's heads. How many distinct surname "keys" in this table are we talking about?
> The comment I replied to implies "why didn't the lower castes just always change their surnames"
Not implied. I was outright asking.
> I pointed out why.
By adding a non-existent condition that doesn't follow and using it as a reason.
That's unless you're saying that if the remaining lower-caste also used these neutral names, that would cause the upper-caste that had chosen to also adopt these neutral names to return to using the upper-caste names.
What's wrong with having these neutral names be used by many of the upper-caste (as they apparently are) and also all of the lower-caste? Am I not making sense? Because that's the scenario I was asking about.
I was thinking it was the parents that assigned the different surname when naming their newborns, not the children that threw the name away. The former sounds legally easier than the latter.
My question was, why assign a lower-caste name to one's child if they have the option not to? But I suppose even then not all people with these lower-caste names see their surname as bad or harmful to their children, if I understood you correctly.
No. Caste based reservation is not tied to your surname. Major chunk of population of Kerala and Tamil Nadu don't have a caste related surname. It doesn't make them ineligible for caste based reservation. Because the point of the reservation is to level up these communities from the descrimation they faced for hundreds of years. Just changing the caste name doesn't automatically level the playing field. It helps. But they need more support as well.
I could guarantee you, People with supposedly lower castes would be against this. It would be giving up benefits such as easier access to best education and jobs.
Caste based reservation is not tied to your surname. Major chunk of population of Kerala and Tamil Nadu don't have a caste related surname. It doesn't make them ineligible for caste based reservation. Because the point of the reservation is to level up these communities from the descrimation they faced for hundreds of years. Just changing the caste name doesn't automatically level the playing field. It helps. But they need more support as well.
So, that's creating new systemic biases. Here, you are talking about creating a fresh start. The only thing reservations do is actually create divide. During Independence, it was compulsory move where caste discrimination was serious. But today, due to industrialisation it holds no meaning. Now, there is only worker class and ruling class. New Generations(majority) are not taught about castes and discrimination around it, the only time they came in contact with such nonsense is during college entrances. I would also point the superior mentality taught in top colleges is also a reason. The way they are indoctrinated in these colleges creates a superior mentality in students and if your classmate scored less than you and got into college, you would also extend that superior mentality to him/her as well.
Sucess in today's society depends mostly on how well you are educated. And how well you are educated depends upon how you well educated your parents are, your accessibility to education and your financial status. And the marginalized communities are behind in these factors because of hundreds of years of descrimation. And it makes total sense to give them additional support. You should also keep in mind that marginalized communities make the major chunk of population. And I think the reservation % is also similar to their population %. Probably even lesser. I don't see the issue then? Students in general category get to compete with other students in general category who had a similar upbringing compared to marginalized communities( of course, there are a lot of exceptions). And students in marginalized communities compete with students with other marginalized students. And the top percentile students make it to college from each section. Sounds reasonable to me. I don't think anyone who are reasonable and knows history would have any issue with this system.
> The way they are indoctrinated in these colleges creates a superior mentality in students and if your classmate scored less than you and got into college, you would also extend that superior mentality to him/her as well.
That's just a sign of our poor education system. I don't think anyone who is well educated would have superior mentality over someone else. So we should work on improving our education system.
> Its insane that no ruling part had the guts to ban that.
This is not even remotely popular. That essentially guarantees that the party will not get voted to power again. People, regardless of their caste, always have the option to drop/change their surname.
> large parts of population in South Indian states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala no longer have surnames that are tied to the caste.
I agree with that general conclusion. I have roots in Kerala and my family purposefully didn't add the caste part in my name. My father has it but not anyone in my family in my generation. That being said, don't forget that the Tamil Brahmin(Tambram) superiority shit is still present at large everywhere.
A large parts of population in South Indian states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala no longer have surnames that are tied to the caste. Mostly because of the people deciding to do that by themselves. But the issue is very very bad in Northern states which is where the majority of the population lives.