Meet the Savarnas

Kisana, Ravikant. n.d. Meet the Savarnas.

Notes

What I liked about the book:

What I didn't like:

Broad reflections

I found many ideas in the book very similar to Brown saviors and their others - race, caste, labor, and the global politics of help in India. I also think cultural dimensions spoken about in the book result from the power dynamics of people within societies regardless of whether they are savarna or not. A broad idea that I have been coming across in multiple readings is that power gradations are inherent to human societies because of our human nature. Both Brown Saviors and this book highlights how elite Indians aspire to do social work to promote egalitarianism but they only end up reinforcing the existing power hierarchies through the help economies. Both books highlight how this becomes a social performance without resulting in any tangible impact on the masses. I might be very wrong in this but an view that I have been developing is that it might be futile to even strike for egalitarianism because as humans we always end up doing tasks that are self-serving in order to satisfy our egos. This is how the majority of the world works. But I am not painting a bleak picture here. The human need for community and our inherent capacity to look after others is also present along with the egoistic tendencies. Basically, the point is both egalitarian and egoistic tendencies can coexist. But what matters more is what our overall societal systems are more conducive to -- whether it encourages the egalitarian tendencies more or the egoistic tendencies more. It could be more productive to ask how we can set policies to ensure that one group doesn't get too powerful rather than asking how we can make everything egalitarian. How we can get groups to flourish while also keeping their power in check? This might sound abstract but I think more tangibly it translates into actions like -- standing for more fair wages than feeling good about oneself through donations, pushing for policies that don't nurture monopolies no matter which company that is and how good they are. Overall, I think we need to strive for a fairness-oriented society than a help-oriented society.

In-text annotations

"Like most introductory works on a subject, this is neither the first thought on this subject nor is my work original in its entirety. At best, this is an attempt at collating all the different threads of articulations, expressions, sighs and smiles and tears, and all manner of utterances—public and private—by a million lived realities all at once." (Page 7)

"The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of star dust. In every field, in studies, in streets, in politics, and in dying and living." (Page 8)

"What Is a Savarna?" (Page 10)

"Calcutta had many such tumours, and yet, somehow, even today, the city exists in the popular imagination as a cultured, colonial ruin with fish-loving, Bengali-speaking people who all sing Rabindra Sangeet and discuss Marx at the chai shop adda." (Page 12)

"Everyone had a plan. Everyone had a hustle. Education was also a hustle or it was nothing. It was not an idyllic pursuit or a personal exploration or journey. If—and this was always an ‘if’—you studied beyond basic schooling, you studied subjects that got you a job. You read books that ‘improved’ you—self-help books. Not serious books" (Page 13)

"The times may have changed. The vocabulary may have changed. But the law of the universe was the same. Keeping people in their place had just acquired a more subtle touch." (Page 17)

"The ‘dwij’, or twice-born, are the privileged savarnas who had the ritual right to spiritually purify themselves through ceremony. The men among them were allowed to wear a sacred thread—also known as janeu, poonol, etc.—on their bodies, signifying their higher attainment. The Shudras were not allowed to wear the thread, marking their debased bodies as fit only for servicing the needs of the ‘higher’ varna.3" (Page 19)

"The Glass Floor" (Page 23)

"What this means is that their worst imagination of what ‘poor’ is may not even be classified as ‘poor’ by the statistical modelling of the state. Such is the ghastly deprivation and scarcity in this society that one in four Indians live in a state of poverty that is beyond the imagination of savarna systems." (Page 25)

Even I am not sure what the author is referring to. While the conception of poverty is not always accurate, is the author painting a more bleak picture than it is?

"If you were forced to confront the existential terror of social inequality daily, then smiling for every selfie or buying expensive clothing or eating luxury food would become a torturous activity of macabre horror for the savarnas." (Page 25)

I think this is the kind of guilt tripping that puts people off. Is it easy to blame individuals for the system?

"Endurance gets romanticized and normalized to the point that ‘toughness’ becomes something that vulnerable individuals must constantly perform, both as a culture and out of a lack of options." (Page 27)

"Firstly, the overlap between class and caste is significant. A much higher percentage of Brahman or Bania families, for instance, are economically better off than those among scheduled caste or scheduled tribe (SC/ST) communities. The Oxfam ‘India Discrimination Report’ (2022) suggests that household heads of SC/ST families still earn less on average than others with comparable education and age. The report suggested that this deviation was due largely to discrimination" (Page 28)

"Neither are such instances of cultural supremacy limited to persons within the Hindu religious fold. Pasmanda Muslims, Ravidassia and Ramdassia Sikhs and tribal Christians, among others, have long waged movements against caste-based discrimination within non-Hindu religious spaces." (Page 31)

". The basti, the gullymoholla, the family and the community remain the only flimsy safeguards and safety nets tying people down to their islands of isolation, marooned within the networked world of savarna mobility. Success in such a context means removing oneself from one’s community and relocating within the savarna cultural system. It means re-learning social cues from Brahmans and others alike, repositioning one’s identity and internalizing forms of social hate to be more acceptable to the savarna gaze." (Page 31)

"Brahman and savarna success is built through kinship networks and amplifies community links, whereas ‘success’ especially in savarna domains for people from marginalized communities comes in the opposite form. It frequently breaks organic links, teaches mistrust and doubt towards one’s own community and almost always results in isolation." (Page 32)

What's an example?

"All social problems are contextual, and every experience is understood in personal and comparative ways, not in absolute terms." (Page 32)

"The people below the floor are only a mob, a bheed, a crowd—a lump without nuance or cultural granularity. Such spectacular capacity for mass dehumanization has an interesting effect on the savarna perspective. It seems to shrink their world view to just their own selves and their immediate communities. This self-absorbed gaze breeds an innate, consuming and collective narcissism." (Page 33)

"Many English-speaking savarnas who had lived overseas returned soaked in American popular cultural imagination. By the early 2010s, in posher neighbourhoods of Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, fans of rap, spoken poetry, beatboxing and stand-up comedy had begun creating tiny rooms where they could cosplay these hobbies. These ‘scenes’ were uniformly mediocre, hosting a medley of hyper-privileged individuals determined to fit into the role of the ‘struggling artist’ they had fantasized themselves to be. Neither did any great artistic oeuvre emerge from these spaces, nor was there any major reinvention of the form. Instead, these spaces existedcontinue to exist—as a venue for untalented, uncritical consumption of personal vanity, tolerated by mutual agreement and passed off as artistic niche." (Page 35)

"Poverty was unidimensional, often a secondary aspect in sketches based on so-called middle-class savarna lives. I say ‘so-called" (Page 35)

"middle-class’ because by every yardstick—including that of the Healthify founderadventurers—these characters would be called somewhat rich." (Page 36)

"The salaries and lifestyles of most wealthy savarnas are directly connected to this economy of ‘corruption’ that they rail and rant against. Not to mention, their very housing—often built on land seized or (il)legally torn away from the marginalized castes living on it—is developed by real estate developers whose business and finance are inextricably linked to the murky worlds of political financing and municipal as well as state cooperation." (Page 36)

"In their self-lore, savarnas are incapable of accepting that their success is a function of historical networks—both cultural and material—which assisted their rise while simultaneously limiting and breaking communities below the glass floor. In their selflore, every savarna has struggled and is ‘self-made’. Struggle is only understood in very personal terms—not in comparative terms. To succeed in an entrance exam or in setting up a business, for instance, one must work hard and devote many hours. However, to see that labour alone as proof of ‘struggle’ is a disingenuous understanding of privilege. To ignore all the structural advantages they have over millions of other hard-working and intelligent people—who never got to fulfil their potential because a social order kept them locked below the glass floor—creates a strange culture of mythologizing one’s success and divorces one from a sense of accountability and giving back to the collective. It diminishes temperance and maturity that would come from acknowledging a role in gatekeeping avenues of success for a vast majority of one’s fellow citizens." (Page 37)

"Karlo Duniya Mutthi Mein: Corporate SavarnaCapital Complex" (Page 39)

"The current BJP regime in its early years was animated by buzzwords like Make in India, start-ups, entrepreneurship and innovation, was itself erected upon the preceding decade of non-BJP rule, where the savarna middle class was given a free hand in shaping socio-economic narratives. They were instrumental in selectively transforming certain posh neighbourhoods in metropolitan areas while wrecking larger urban systems within the cities. Many of today’s environmental inequities, especially in Bengaluru, Gurgaon and Mumbai, have been fuelled by aggressive, rampant urbanization of premium real estate, driven by this cohort. Yet, they bear no critical burden for the cost imposed on the larger citizenry. Even now, the dominant discourse celebrates the merit, talent and hard work of this overwhelmingly savarna cohort instead of holding them accountable for the bottlenecks in India’s growth story." (Page 40)

"Till 1967, the Indian government was unwilling to issue passports to anyone except the ‘best kinds’ of citizens. Till 2000, even the process of acquiring a passport was largely inaccessible to most Indians. Even now, less than 10 per cent of Indians own a passport." (Page 41)

"For individuals such as Shantanu and Radhika to claim that young people lack a work ethic because they dream of foreign holidays, while overlooking their own privilege, is a classic case of the distorted savarna ‘photochromic gaze’ (mentioned in Chapter 2)—where any struggle apart from their own appears frivolous." (Page 42)

"For the last five centuries, Bania communities have dominated the economy and have had a tremendous impact on political fortunes. It was the Bania Jagat Seth family of Murshidabad—possibly the richest bankers and traders in extended India at the time—who invited the British to intervene against the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah. The historian William Dalrymple notes that without the financial backing of Jagat Seth Mehtab Chand, the deal between the British Governor of Bengal, Robert Clive and the main general of the Bengal Army Mir Jafar would not have been possible.17 This deal sealed the outcome of the Battle of Plassey (1757) as Mir Jafar betrayed his nawab and handed the victory to Clive, which in turn established the British as a political power in India, setting in motion a series of events that led to nearly two centuries of colonial rule." (Page 43)

"This parochialism of Bania mercantilism—wherein they had no scruples about wheeling and dealing with and behind the backs of their patrons in pursuit of profit but gladly forfeited greater fortunes to avoid caste censure—has been very understudied. The commonly held maxim that the Bania community is good in business cannot be universally accepted as they have routinely demonstrated a willingness to forego profit rather than risk caste pollution." (Page 44)

"Noted anti-caste author and activist, Professor Kancha Ilaiah, refers to the Banias as ‘social smugglers’.19 It seems they have smuggled their way beyond their varnamandated hierarchy by making themselves more useful to Brahmanism, which, in the age of corporate wealth, has far greater use for Banias than the largely rural power of landholding feudal Kshatriya/Rajputs or adjacent communities." (Page 46)

"By shifting the locus of power to the corporate sector and bestowing upon it the sheen of cultural aspiration and validation, the savarnas bought themselves more time. They paved the way for almost twenty years of a strong savarna–corporate state under the ruling government—a set-up that is now facing a strong backlash from the marginalized groups demanding the return of ‘big welfare’ from the state as evidenced by election results in the general elections of 2024 and subsequent state elections of Haryana, Maharashtra and Delhi" (Page 46)

"As business schools expanded their batch sizes and new ones popped up, the conversation on reservation and diversity in admissions and hiring was silenced. In fact, many savarna ‘intellectuals’ gleefully claimed that India’s ‘MBA revolution’ was possible only because it was merit-based and free of reservation. How far that is true remains open to question, as this ‘revolution’ seems to have been driven more by global capital shifts and neoliberal state policy than by any unique pedagogical innovation in these MBA programmes—and certainly not by the diktats of a caste-exclusionary admission policy. The MBA entrance exam typifies this." (Page 47)

"Many predictions from that era—regarding an imminent airline boom, real estate development, Tata Nano transforming the automobile sector and growth in tier-two cities and the unlocking of the rural ‘masses’ via the powers of mobile telephony—have not materialized. Yet, there has been no course correction or introspection within India Inc., which continues to hold all its assumptions, predictions, wisdom, habits and expectations, norms and ideologies as axiomatic truths. This has created a major fracture between the market and its potential consumers, an overwhelming section of whom live beneath the glass floor. After almost three decades of liberal market reforms, despite all the self-proclaimed industry geniuses and gurus, India remains a five- to sixcity market for a vast majority of premium products." (Page 51)

"When the Supreme Court, in a landmark judgement, forced the State Bank of India to reveal the details of electoral bond purchasers—a scheme initiated by the BJP government that allowed corporations to anonymously donate huge sums of money to political parties—it exposed an enormous parallel economy of corporate donations.20 Journalists and activists of all hues were quick to analyse the data and uncovered clear patterns of quid pro quo relations between donors and state policy. Often, the donations were also linked to relief from investigative agencies looking into corporate fraud. Interestingly, almost none of the major Indian business school programmes looked into these revelations or reacted in an official capacity. No major conferences or seminars were organized to unpack the issue or what it meant in the context of doing business in India. It is unlikely that any of this will be part of the curriculum or training for young students—apart from some professors who may include select readings on their own initiative. This begs the question: does a finance MBA truly not require indepth knowledge on this?" (Page 52)

"In most societies plagued by the ills of late capitalism-induced globalization, there is usually a strong parallel discourse led by either right- or left-wing mobilization. In India, however, both the liberal left and conservative right discourses are led by Brahman, Kayastha and other such savarna interlocutors. This results in a bizarre alchemy of narratives, wherein the diagnosis of social issues and their proposed solutions are never relevant to vast sections of caste-marginalized populations. Indeed, both the right and left exhibit a major tendency to import discursive points from the West, even as the same Brahman–Kayastha academic complex regurgitates the mantra of decolonizing knowledge epistemology ad nauseam." (Page 55)

"And so it is that today, when global consumer faith in MNCs is at an all-time low, when their billionaire owners are no longer seen as role models but as out-of-touch elites responsible for destabilizing economies and wrecking the planet, the savarna MBA still walks into the room like it is 2007. For an academic discipline that is so obsessed with ‘staying ahead of the curve’, management pedagogy in India has remained strangely static, bereft of imagination and utterly deaf to the rapidly changing socioeconomic climate." (Page 56)

"The arrogant dismissal of the social sciences by management professionals and professors alike has resulted in a discipline that increasingly bears no real-world relevance to the ‘job market’ it is ‘farming’ its students out to. At a time when management professors should be grappling with the aftershocks of three decades of unrestrained neoliberal accumulation globally—leading to massive social unrest, economic precarity, environmental devastation and widespread disillusionment with ‘pro-big-business’ political elites—the savarna MBA still pretends these variables are simply not relevant to their day-to-day operations." (Page 56)

I think the same will happen with the AI degrees that are proliferating in India

"Twenty years from now, how will this current crop of MBAs be seen in retrospect? Will they be remembered as a generation of loud-mouthed, technobabble-spouting, Allen Solly formal-wear-flaunting MBAs—who were ultimately utterly timid, totally subservient and unimaginatively boring in their roles? Will they be seen as the true successors to the sarkari clerk of the 1970s? Or will the millennial MBA be considered not even worthy of that? At least the clerk was often shown to not be taking his job seriously, aware of its meaninglessness. Unlike the millennial savarna MBAs, whose all-in commitment to their roles is comical to anyone outside their bubble—the only reason people are not openly laughing at them is because they have managed to convince the world that they are ‘successful’. But as the cracks grow, as the bubble collapses, the laughter will become louder. A generation that started out to ‘karlo duniya mutthi mein’, is winding down, falling on their faces and becoming the subject of thousands of memes mocking their fundamentally limited and unimaginative world view." (Page 57)

"Student of the Year" (Page 58)

"These institutional experiences were unimaginable to a vast majority of Indians. Perhaps it was these exclusive experiences that fostered a belief within this cohort that India, too, needed to develop similar great institutions. Thus emerged a bizarre project of fostering ‘islands of excellence’—such as the mighty IITs and IIMs—in a country where the overall literacy rate at the end of colonial rule was a mere 18 per cent in 1951. This rate was even lower among the marginalized communities—where it was in the single digits. Defenders of such initiatives often applaud the boldness of the imagination for ‘daring to dream’ of excellence in a society that was mired in the clutches of poverty. This is precisely the kind of logic that only someone above the glass floor could have. For if you were shaped below the glass floor, such a vision does not sound daring, it sounds irresponsible and even dangerous." (Page 63)

"The IITs, though larger in scope than the IIMs, demonstrated a similar academic culture of inward-looking gatekeepers who zealously guarded access to their spaces. Any attempt to decentralize or expand the IIT network was resisted. The faculty and administrators were all savarna, predominantly Brahman. Ajantha Subramanian, in The Caste of Merit, demonstrates that in the 1960s, these institutions were overwhelmingly occupied by elite savarnas, who often denied that caste was a major factor influencing social exchange and learning in such spaces, even as many had arrived at these institutions from elite schools of the day and upon graduation, would routinely migrate to the US." (Page 64)

"Being part of any of these institutions was unthinkable for the vast majority of Indians. For the small hyper-minority who had the access, ambition and support to walk into these spaces, the institutional ‘label’ was for life. It was a small community, often hand-picked, groomed and set up to be future leaders. Thus, within a few decades of Independence, the savarna Indian state had successfully created a new layer of ‘prestigious’ spaces where one’s ‘potential’ was determined by where one graduated from and who recommended them afterwards." (Page 64)

"Having risen to the position of advocate general of Bengal under British rule, it is perhaps safe to assume that his social priorities, aesthetics and imagination were not too threatening to colonial interests. Hence, after decades of lobbying, he was permitted to establish the school he so deeply desired—and in due course, it succeeded in producing exactly the kind of wards he wanted—out of touch, ruling savarna elites who came to symbolize power, narcissism and being above the law. This was not a circle you could simply study your way into (even as a savarna yourself). You had to be born into the very top tier of society to get in." (Page 65)

"A lesser-understood and under-researched aspect of the massive churn caused by the subaltern electoral political revolution of the 1970s and 1980s is the role played by the popular revulsion towards such elites and their fundamentally flawed (and often violent) methods of resolving endemic social issues such as poverty. The massive slum removal programmes and forced sterilization of marginalized communities for population control during the Emergency were among the most egregious, though certainly not isolated, instances of these perverse autocratic fantasies." (Page 65)

"However, the growing insignificance of the old model of hand-picked elites did not lead to a market-driven utopia of opportunities for the marginalized. In the previous chapter, I discussed the proliferation of business schools and how the lack of knowledge, access and capital needed to prepare for and crack entrance exams as well as a myriad of other factors ensured that these new opportunities remained largely confined to urban India and within the reach of a certain savarna ‘middle class’. I use the term ‘middle class’ with caution, because they appear so only in the selectively myopic gaze of savarnas themselves—yet, compared to the collective national average of the era, they would be classified as rich both in wealth and in caste and kinship capital. This cohort led the ‘revolution’." (Page 68)

"However, missing from these favourable savarna reviews of this period is the fact that it was entirely inadequate in either skilling or employing enough youth to make a serious dent in the absolute numbers of unemployment and poverty in the country. A giant IT campus sprawling over hundreds of acres, employing tens of thousands of software engineers, does not add much in a society where unemployment figures are in the tens of crores." (Page 69)

"By the time the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government implemented 27 per cent reservation for OBCs in higher education in 2006, applicable to IITs, IIMs, and other elite state and central universities, this cultural cohort of newly wealthy, educated savarnas was at the forefront of opposing social justice reform as fundamentally antimarket and anti-merit. The English-language media, the newly active social media platforms such as Orkut, civil society and academia were dominated by supposedly liberal savarnas who led this psychologically scarring campaign." (Page 69)

"Had one surveyed the representation of these communities in visible civic life in 2006—in the judiciary, in the media, in elite private jobs, in luxury real estate enclaves, in share of wealth, in leadership positions in Bollywood or sports like cricket, in academia, etc.—one would have found hardly any meaningful numbers. In fact, if one were to repeat this exercise nearly eighteen years later, in 2024, the results would have remained virtually unchanged." (Page 70)

"Without adequate demographic opportunity or participation, large parts of Indian society remained blind spots, much like they had under the earlier system. The Indian growth story, which stalled in the early 2020s, is a culmination of these processeswhich excluded the people below the glass floor from becoming equal and legitimate stakeholders in development. This not only centralized power in the hands of BJP’s opaque regime but also accelerated the backslide of almost all democratic institutions of accountability. This has been a two-decade-long hijacking of India’s resources and planning prerogatives by a small section of savarnas, who have profited immensely at the cost of excluding millions." (Page 70)

"This creates a schizophrenic campus reality—even for savarna students—where classroom discussions often pertain to radical themes of critical thought, emancipation, feminist and queer theory, social inclusion and empathetic pedagogy, yet the lived student experience is isolating, alienating and traumatic. Students are often subjected to very intrusive policies of surveillance, their body and baggage scanned, their clothes policed, habits scrutinized and intimacies moralized upon. Ultimately, we end up with students who can write great essays on Foucault and Gramsci while subjecting their self and mind to deep mental and physical policing." (Page 72)

"This weaponization of English as a powerful filter works because fluency in the language is often directly linked to intergenerational literacy and access to the ‘best kind of schools’ and curricula. Even schools offering the Indian curricula of ICSE or CBSE have a distinct advantage over small-town, zila parishad and rural schools offering state board curricula. Students who graduate from the latter may be able to read the English alphabet but are stunned into silence and intimidated by the fluency of socalled ‘elite’ students. The lack of diversity in social experiences is not something the elite schooling system tries to address; instead, it actively cocoons students from any exposure to life below the glass floor. These levels of insulation are now so extreme and so deeply entrenched that an entirely new generation of wealthy Gen Z students has appeared in elite classrooms, oblivious to material realities or social discourse beyond the vaguest and most superficial terms." (Page 73)

"Kuch Kuch Savarna Hai: Love, Sex and Romance in a Caste Society" (Page 75)

"It is such lines of questioning that make elite savarnas very uncomfortable. In their own self-concocted mythology, the educated, English-speaking, urban elites are fond of seeing themselves as rational and balanced individuals, with some liberal leanings but never straying too far from ‘traditional’ virtues. However, any critical interrogation of the politics of desire and power in sexually intimate couples across caste lines tends to shatter this savarna self-perception." (Page 77)

"Because of this strong correlation, there has been a counter response where curating a more grunge, nihilistic savarna persona is now marked as ‘cooler’. While appearing to be a rejection of wealth-based coolness, such personas are actually an even more privileged form of cultural archetyping. They rely heavily on drug-hippie, anarchist tropes sourced from niche social media subcultures—a ‘vibe’ or practice that only someone immersed in deep cultural mining would understand well. As particularly landed Shudra elites began accruing enough wealth to match the ‘clothes and cars’ aesthetics of sophisticated savarnas, the ‘woke/anti-capitalist’ savarna trope has become ‘cooler’ in the last decade or so." (Page 82)

"In truth, whether it was The Beatles or biking or baking or whatever elite savarnas were busy making their entire personality, each could be traced back to some form of social awareness and refinement—all originating from a variation of West-facing, intergenerational alignment, exposure and the privilege of education and wealth. It’s what old-timers used to call ‘polish’ in everyday parlance—you were either born with it or you weren’t. A privileged aesthetic culture by any name would smell just as clichéd. Shakespeare and Manu would both approve." (Page 83)

"Fanon’s work, along with that of others from the period, notably the charismatic Malcolm X, drew attention to the racialized imaginary and unpacked how racial ‘selfhate’ was epistemically seeded by colonial social structures, language and cultural norms. It spoke to the fact that the more a black person transcended their ‘blackness’, the more successful they felt, and the transcendence was always understood as becoming everything that was not ‘black’, in other words, becoming ‘white’." (Page 84)

"For much of post-colonial Indian history, the mechanisms of mental colonial servitude that Fanon described have been neatly replicated as cultural anxieties among Brahman and other savarna social circles. There has been a great emphasis on ‘not embarrassing ourselves’ in front of white people. This anxiety has manifested in everything from public policy to popular culture, where there exists a deep desire to be accepted by the whites as ‘equals’" (Page 84)

"I reflect on my own dating past because, for sure, I am not, as I write these words, sitting antiseptically removed and detached. I am writing with the passion and precision that comes from being in the heart of the furnace. And when you are in the furnace, you burn too. So I look at my own charred self, think and investigate. Do I curate my identity for sex? Maybe I do. Who doesn’t?" (Page 92)

"I go back to this moment often. There was no particular woman I was looking at or attracted to. It was the vague promise of a certain kind of confident, assertive woman that I found alluring. The savarna cultural machinery had taught us that an independent woman was one who fit the image I saw on that campus. The quiet resolve, the overcoming of great odds and the fierce independence of our caste-marginalized women had always been framed as meekness, subservience and undesirable. It has been a great aesthetic disservice to caste-marginalized women whose entire journey of ascendance is framed as ‘timid introvertness’ in comparison to the transcendence narrative of the savarna woman." (Page 93)

"Looking back, it is clear to me that young Ravikant had a type. The girls with short hair and difficult personalities, who smoked, who had eccentric habits, drank with the boys, talked about sex and politics, had tattoos and skull pendants, and independent dreams that were not limited to getting married and having kids, girls who were crazy and not ‘cautious’. They represented everything my life was not. They represented a world I could enter—one that was otherwise impossible to reach from where I came. A final testament of ascendance." (Page 94)

"Made in Heaven: Marriage and Savarna Family Shifts" (Page 97)

"They have never lived below the glass floor, but they know a ‘below’ exists. So, the suffering of the ‘below world’ is fetishized. Even now, many savarnas cement their credentials by how much time they have spent in the ‘below world’. The horrors they claim to have seen and understood serve as a badge of legitimacy and, sometimes, a tool of seduction. Many intergenerationally wealthy and comfortable savarna men and women have gotten laid by talking about their time ‘in the field’ during their careers as journalists, social workers, academic researchers, teachers or some other such role." (Page 100)

"The reason this pivot back to savarna systems is so predictable is that any path leading out of the savarna fold is a scary prospect. South Asia is a society of terrifying scarcities. It is not a place where individuality, in the neo-capitalist, consumerist sense, can take root in any meaningful way. The individual is vulnerable, exposed and perennially under siege. The state is largely absent except in an abstract way. The only insurance and assurance that an individual can somewhat legitimately summon is that of their kin, caste and community." (Page 101)

"Thus, most savarna liberals will cultivate a deliberate ignorance. They internalize it and emerge as innocent beings—oblivious and naïve individuals who express shock only when something truly gory unfolds, such as a caste lynching, rape or student suicide. Otherwise, they are happy with the status quo, which is built on the exploitation of the bodies and labour of the marginalized castes." (Page 103)

"more extravagant these weddings become, the more they appear the same." (Page 108)

"Savarna Spiritual Gharwapasi from the ‘Development’ Valhalla" (Page 113)

"While these communities were somewhat successful in pushing back against epistemic caste oppression by leveraging their landed material power, they also emerged as immediate flashpoints for inflicting (often literal) violence upon castes ‘below’ them, primarily SCs and STs, but also weaker sections of OBCs and DNT communities." (Page 115)

"The technical education institutions established in the 1990s and 2000s made a killing financially, while the entrance exam coaching industry has grown so big that it will soon be worth more than the entire education budget of the Indian nation. Yet, more and more people every year have started abandoning this pathway, as engineering, management and tech job salaries have been stagnating while course fees have been skyrocketing. And so the great Indian dream of the 1990s—of educating your child and catapulting them within a single generation from poverty into affluence—has started to lose its sheen." (Page 121)

"With no meaningful pathways for upward mobility, vast sections of people beneath the glass floor began to expect welfare state intervention once again. Post-COVID-19 electoral politics signalled a return to the ‘big’ state, with major policy shifts centred around welfare schemes such as Ladli Behna Yojana, farm loan waivers, old pension schemes, free bus rides for women and similar interventions." (Page 121)

"However, the sycophantic, almost cult-like ‘kill or be killed for the leader’ political culture was not innovated by Modi. It in fact comes from the earlier generation of leaders like Nehru, and more particularly, Indira Gandhi, who are still held in high regard by the same savarna liberal elites who denounce Modi’s ‘bhakts’." (Page 127)

"This sub-cohort of savarnas—the elite liberals who did not reinvent themselves and refuse to kowtow to Modi, and who continue to vaguely oppose his rustic, rough and unsophisticated persona—is perhaps the saddest group of them all. These are the savarnas who see themselves as social justice warriors (tapping into Western woke discourses), still clinging to some version of the liberal performance that once defined them as intellectual visionary leaders in the early 2010s. Many of their own peers have, in their own ways, embraced the India that Modi started building in 2014—some in a transparently sycophantic manner (like much of the news media), others through compliant self-discovery (like Ranveer), and still others through grudging silence (like most of Bollywood)." (Page 128)

"The only remaining holdouts are this sub-cohort, who still imagine themselves as fighting, as the keepers of the ‘soul of India’. They hold on to this notion even though most of their own families are now largely aligned with Modi’s vision. These are the same families that have historically been deeply casteist and communal, and like the liberal warriors themselves, are not averse to gatekeeping material advantages and access for themselves, defeating any sense of commonwealth with the fellow citizens they claim to speak for—whom they typically view through a lens of condescending paternalism for being poor, or Muslim or ‘lower’ caste. By redefining the ‘resistance’ as an individual performance rather than linked to a larger family kinship network, and by repeatedly proclaiming their hatred for their own families’ ‘problematic views’, this sub-cohort of elite savarnas has kept alive for itself this strange role as the moral custodians of the ‘idea of India’." (Page 128)

"While public universities like JNU, Jamia Milia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University had already been flashpoints of violence, student protests and marches erupted in many other similar public institutions. Yet, elite savarna private universities remained disquietingly silent. Except for a handful of students or faculty here and there, all the radical talk, all the posturing about dissent and critical resistance disappeared into thin air. The overseas-educated savarna PhDs who were now professors in such private universities, went silent. These were the same folks who would earlier posture in classrooms as woke, social justice warriors, talking of the importance of resistance. Their savarna students, who had made their bodies a canvas for curating Tumblr-themed social justice and revolutionary artwork through piercings, tattoos and hairstyles, also disappeared." (Page 129)

"Instead, they went back to curating the issue of the month, flitting from environmental catastrophes to global geopolitical conflicts—always speaking in a shrill, preachy tone, never committing to a single cause, never raising stakes for themselves, but always walking tall like the moral custodians they imagined themselves to be." (Page 131)

"The same folks who once mocked festivals, rituals and even native languages as backward in their teenage years are now overcompensating as havan-compliant traditionalists. They spend exorbitant amounts on vaastu consultants and pundits to advise on auspicious dates for every major event. In the era of IT and tech, they have even used these tools to create products and apps that facilitate these rituals. They send their children to expensive schools and universities that exclude caste-based affirmative action, and conduct courses and seminars on yoga, vegetarianism and culturally reassuring epics like the Ramayan and Mahabharat, reframing them as decolonizing pedagogical exercises." (Page 132)

"Now as the walls close in, the elite savarna millennials appear without any imagination, vision or intellectual revival to respond in any meaningful way. They appear caught out. They appear lost and out of sync." (Page 133)

"It is almost as if Babasaheb" (Page 137)

"was correct—every caste is a nation unto itself—and for the dwij nations, only their own interests and icons are ‘visible’ for inspiration and creative imagination." (Page 138)

"This was happening in parallel to the Ambedkarite movements springing forth after Rohith Vemula’s institutional murder at the University of Hyderabad. Every year, India loses hundreds, if not thousands, of its talented youth to suicides in educational institutions or while preparing for entrance exams in coaching concentration camps like those in Kota, Rajasthan. Activist Anoop Kheri and the Insight Foundation team made a documentary series, Death of Merit (still available for free on YouTube), detailing the cold-blooded murder of gifted SC and ST students in India’s premier educational institutions in 2011. Yet, there was no elite savarna outrage, introspection or even interest in the matter." (Page 138)

"The focus was on performatively role-playing cultural wars. Elite savarna youth in elite universities saw themselves as the vanguard of resistance against the fascist aggression of the RSS. In their heads, perhaps they were role-playing fantasies of fighting Nazis during campus elections and on comment threads online. But after graduation, this edge disappeared quickly. Most settled for regular jobs within the savarna corporate set-up, including the increasingly privatized and corporatized higher education and social work sectors." (Page 138)

"Many of his own savarna peers have completed their PhDs and are now professors in India and overseas, with seemingly far more influence and agency—yet, in a familiar pattern, no action seems forthcoming from the elite savarna collective." (Page 138)

"In the aftermath of the ‘Dalit Lives Matter’ moment, the CAA–NRC movement and the COVID-19 crisis, many elite savarnas began, for the first time, to see themselves as mediocre, selfserving elites—not just incapable of being part of the solution, but rather the problem itself." (Page 139)

"Much of the ‘Nerhuvian’ culture carried over into the nature of institutions and influence the party built in the new republic. Within the next few decades, this culture had atrophied into a crony-savarna-kinship network of gatekeeping." (Page 140)

"All academic, media, civil society, judicial, policy, artistic, literary and cultural institutions and spaces were occupied by elite savarnas who knew each other—and whose next of kin were also slotted into the system through requests, references and adjustments. This virtually closed off avenues for original ideas, fresh thinking or different points of view based on differing lived realities. India’s intellectual and cultural apparatus began rotting from the inside. Innovation was not visible unless it came from those hand-picked by the elite savarna coteries. Ambition was not rewarded, and only a tiny section of elite savarnas were regarded as the allknowing, all-intelligent patrons of society." (Page 140)

"Contrary to this Nehruvian formation—which depended on regional political satraps to deliver electoral power—the RSS had, over decades, built a more grounded movement. This was a movement of caste-conservative Brahman idealists who were prepared to play the long game of grassroots realpolitik. Unlike the elite savarna cohort, this section did not inherit or occupy the institutions left behind by the British or created during the years of Nehruvian earnestness. Instead, they operated outside this framework. Much of the RSS footprint spread via hyperlocal outreach that connected regional Brahman, Bania, Thakur and other savarna fiefs not aligned with the Congress." (Page 140)

"Aggressive vegetarianism is increasingly becoming state policy, the othering of Muslims from social, cultural and economic activities has gained pace and the robust political mobilization of marginalized castes (derisively called ‘Mandal politics’) has been co-opted and defeated. Yoga has been mainstreamed, the ‘ashramization’ of education is underway and tribal and oppressed caste groups are increasingly being folded under the Sanatan Dharma umbrella. Meanwhile, cinema and literature have swung back strongly towards Brahmanical mythologies and ultra-nationalism" (Page 141)

"The material scarcity has caught up with the patience of the masses below the glass floor. The very group that elite savarnas in the 2000s called ‘risk averse’ and ‘sceptical’ has shown political pragmatism, calling the bluff on three decades of development dreams that have benefited no one except elite savarnas, who have since locked themselves away behind the high walls of their gated communities and institutions while frantically trying to escape India by emigrating." (Page 143)

"This generation was shaped during the peak churn between two savarna cultural systems—one pulling towards Modi’s vision, the other positioning itself as deeply critical of it. The kids learned both languages while committing to neither." (Page 144)

"Cut off from the material mainstream of Indian society, this youth has never encountered the people below the glass floor. They did not play with them in parks or streets, sit with them in classrooms or go to their homes for festivals and celebrations. By and large, they stayed indoors, learning culture from the insipid, milquetoast banalities of their parents’ preoccupations." (Page 144)

"Raised as ‘English-speakers’ from birth by their status-conscious, educated elite savarna parents, they also inherited the savarna fixation with internalizing and mirroring white cultural vocabulary. At the time Gen Z was learning this vocabulary, white American culture was going through a period where performative identity politics was peaking. The polarizing nature of that politics has since wrecked the US social fabric. Even in that sphere, the defeat of Kamala Harris in the presidential elections, paving the way for an ominous second Trump presidency, signals a fatigue with performative political posturing." (Page 144)

"It is a generation that has truly checked out of India—mentally and metaphysically. They remain here only in physical, corporeal form—isolating themselves in bubbles, bouncing from international-curriculum schools, to private liberal arts universities, to dating apps, to social media, to cafés and clubs, to ‘flea markets’ for thrifting fashion looks, till ultimately they can exit the borders of this nation, and come home to whichever ‘First World’ country will accept them. They do not live here—perhaps they never truly did. They have left our country. Only the immigration visa remains to be stamped." (Page 146)

"The future looks bleak. Beyond the savarna bubble, the masses beneath the glass floor are growing impatient. The ever-shrinking public sector recruitments—especially in railways, defence and paramilitary forces, once a crucial social safety net—have already resulted in mass unrest among non-elite youth. This unrest will only intensify unless economic solutions are found. That requires a form of social engineering that elite savarnas have shown themselves either incapable of or unwilling to undertake (or both)." (Page 148)

"As the collective looks beyond elite savarnas for answers, maybe a return to the caste-marginalized politics of the 1970s–1990s lies ahead. As both the liberal and conservative factions of savarna political mobilizations run out of steam, as the elites flee India, the country’s future may, by default, fall into the hands of those below the glass floor. Maybe that is what ‘Viksit Bharat’ in 2047 looks like." (Page 148)

"Some second-generation savarna graduate from a Sonipat liberal arts college will eventually write a book about the tragic endeavour of the ‘lost generation that tried to reshape India against its own will and failed gloriously’. That book will be circulated as the truth and discussed in such Diwali parties." (Page 149)