How I saw my upper caste privilege

Raghuraj Hegde
Jul 10, 2017 · 4 min read

We often believe that our achievements are the results of our own hard work. We are taught from our childhood that we own our destiny and no one else can stake claim to it. I’ll tell you a story of privilege through my own family story. Stay with me on this. It is a very interesting one!

I had an insightful conversation with my grandfather recently. He is a matter of fact man nearing 90 years of age and not one to enjoy reminiscing nostalgic memories from the past. His age is catching up with him and he hardly holds on to new information now. He spoke about his younger days and I realized how little I knew about my grandfather’s struggles.

My great- grandfather (my grandpa’s father) was a farmer and rice mill owner in the coastal belt of Karnataka, India. My grandfather was second born among 6 children and the eldest son.Not surprisingly for a man of that era (1920s) his father was not educated and the importance of education was not really apparent to him. Grandpa or Ajja as we call him went to school only because the village teacher was enthusiastic to teach small children. Ajja ended up completing his matriculation (class 10) which would ensure that he was eligible for a job as the school teacher which paid less than being a farmer. To his good luck the nearest town had opened a college which was offering a bachelor’s course in arts and humanities. Ajja enrolled in it or he would be herding cows if he did not. He ended up being the first graduate of his family.He then went on to pursue law and again not due to choice but because there were no other options. He told me how he waited for nearly a year for the construction of that law college to be completed before he could join it.

In 1966, Indira Gandhi the then prime minister enacted land reforms all over India with the Tenant’s Act[1] where the the ownership of the land went to the tiller and not the the landlord. The community I belong to- Bunt[2]- a land owning farming caste (formerly a warrior caste) went into squalor overnight. All the lands our family owned was lost. This had far reaching consequences which is why you find the people of the Bunt community all over the world. They eventually got concentrated in Bangalore and Mumbai. Bunts who could just about hold on to their land stayed back in the coastal belt. When this occurred, my grandfather was already established in his career as a magistrate.

Ajja went on to have a stellar judicial career retiring as a judge.His education meant that his 4 children became banker, physician, entrepreneur and dentist respectively and they got educated spouses. All of my cousins lived in cities and now have successful careers as doctors and engineers in different parts of the world. I went to one of the best private schools in Bangalore proud of my legacy of being the grandson of a judge and the son of a doctor. Today I’m a doctor who is practicing in a big city like Bangalore. I would be lying if I said I don’t enjoy the benefits of having doctors in the family. I have a distinct advantage over other doctors who don’t have any doctors in their families.

The privilege that I enjoy today is not as superficial as having doctors in the family. It runs quite deep. If my grandfather was not a high caste son of a land owner, he would never be permitted to the village school. If he had not struggled to aquire a degree and get through law school he would never have become a judge. If he had never become a judge, the possibility of his children and grandchildren having successful careers would just be a remote possibility. If he had not got out of that village because of education he and his family would have been consumed by the tenant’s act in 1966 and fallen into poverty. Today if I can follow my passions and do the work that I love to do, I owe much of it to Ajja who got an education and then my father who struggled hard to provide me the best available resources to succeed in life. None of these privileges I earned for myself, I inherited it.

The thing is when people discuss about caste and discrimination today, the high castes compare their present problems to that of people of lower castes discounting all the oppression, discrimination and disadvantages suffered by their ancestors. I too was one among them during my younger days. The high castes fail to see the legacy that they have inherited which I too had failed to grasp initially until I heard this story and several such stories.

I have several criticisms of the reservation system in India, especially in how it’s enforced and the concept of unlimited reservation for generations without an endpoint. It’s not a perfect system but a necessary one. Some of my doctor friends and colleagues wouldn’t have the opportunity to become great doctors who serve their own communities if not for the reservation.

I realize my privilege and that is the first step in understanding our world. Today I have the privilege of not needing to remember or mention my caste and little do we realize how important that small fact is.

No one says it better than Illustrator, Toby Morris in the the short story-comic, The Pencilsword: On a plate

No one says it better than Toby Morris in the the short story-comic, “On a Plate”

Footnotes

[1] Bunts Sangha Uk

[2] Bunt (community)


Originally published at www.quora.com.

Raghuraj Hegde

Written by

Consultant, Orbit, Ophthalmic Plastic Surgery and Ocular Oncology Practicing in Bangalore, India

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