Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents - Isabel Wilkerson - ★★★★★

AUTHOR: Isabel Wilkerson

GENRE: Nonfiction

PUBLICATION DATE: August 4, 2020

RATING: 5 stars.

When my daughter asked me what book I was reading and I replied "Caste", her next question was "Is it by an Indian author?" We all have this idea that India alone grapples with caste-based problems, that the US and other countries primarily face racial or religious issues. This book convincingly proves that idea a delusion.

Let me borrow the introductory paragraph from an article published on "The Print" website on 23rd August 2020, the article that first introduced me to this book.

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Oprah Winfrey’s book clubs are legendary. So, when Oprah sent out a new book to 100 American CEOs and 400 leaders soon after the transformative #BlackLivesMatters protest and called it the most important book club selection ever, the world had to pay attention. And when that book mentions ‘India’ 136 times, it becomes mandatory reading for us. And yet Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American author Isabel Wilkerson, a book that The New York Times calls an ‘Instant American Classic’ is not stirring up Indian public debate or hitting our bookshelves.

/unquote/

When I read this article from The Print, I knew that I had to get my hands on this book. And what a ride it has been!

Isabel Wilkerson deftly uncovers the many layers that caste masquerades under. Right in the first chapter, she declares, "Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States."

Using her personal examples as well as historical publishings, Wilkerson builds up a firm case to support her hypothesis that America is a casteist nation. As she writes, "Most people don't look at America as having a caste system but it has all the hallmarks of one." She is scathing about the resurgence of the casteist ideas under the current president of the US. All those sections are a pleasure to read! Every argument is put up by sheer logic and not by any emotional parameters. Wilkerson has established a new benchmark in my mind for journalistic integrity in writing nonfiction.

While she focuses primarily on America for obvious reasons, she does cover the Indian system to a great extent. Historical statements on caste by Ambedkar, Manu and Jyotiba Phule, as well as contemporary insights by Yashica Dutt, Suraj Yengde and VT Rajshekhar, all find a mention in her research. I found it amazing to see how an outsider to our culture has so incisively figured out our complicated social hierarchy. A great part of me feels that she has done a better job of pinpointing our imbalanced framework because of her nonpartisan viewpoint. I now want to continue this journey of discovery by getting an insider perspective into Indian caste problems and will hence pick up "Caste Matters" by Suraj Yengde.

Wilkerson's handling of the topic of the Holocaust and Hitler's twisted idealogies that current Germans are doing their best to erase, deserves special mention.

This year, while I've read a great number of books, the quantity unfortunately hasn't been balanced with quality. Only a few books have stirred me enough while most have been underwhelming. This book is one of my best reads of 2020, if not the best. It isn't just an enlightening book, it must be made mandatory reading, and not just in America or India, in the entire world. Go for it without any doubt.

Leaving you with just a few of the many thought-provoking quotes from the book:

🎯 Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old social order. Looking at caste is like holding the country’s X-ray up to the light.

🎯 The elevation of others amounts to a demotion of oneself, thus equality feels like a demotion.

🎯 People can come to disregard the predicaments facing people deemed beneath them, seeing their misfortunes as having no bearing on their own lives, seeing whatever is happening to them as, say, a black problem, rather than a human problem, unwittingly endangering everyone.

🎯 In Germany, restitution has rightly been paid, and continues to be paid, to survivors of the Holocaust. In America, it was the slaveholders who got restitution, not the people whose lives and wages were stolen from them for twelve generations.

🎯 It was in the process of ranking that we were all cast into assigned roles to meet the needs of the larger production. None of us are ourselves.