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On the Need for Caste Sensitization Modules as a Part of Technical Curricula

BHATTACHARYA ADRITA AMIT 2333119

Any professional or academic engagement in the Indian context is informed by an additional cultural factor unique to the country. More than three thousand years old currently, the Indian caste system is deeply rooted in the consciousness of the populace. Historically, the caste system was a mode of systematic occupational segregation of people on the basis of birth. The chaturvarnas or the four castes that typically form the hierarchy are Brahmins (priests and scholars), Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas (traders and merchants), and Shudras (labourers). At the bottom of this conventionally-legitimized hierarchy are communities that came to be known as “Dalits”, historically oppressed, and subject to various atrocities and social ostracization. This ancient practice has morphed and transformed into a cultural specter that continues to haunt the psyche of the nation, with Dalits and marginalised castes being grossly underrepresented in salient roles due to centuries-long apartheid and deprivation. Practices like untouchability are informed by notions of relative “purity” or “pollution”. Casteist imaginations continue to shape political and cultural realities to this day. 


A depiction of the Indian Caste Hierarchy.
Fig. 1 The Indian Caste System

However, most technological products, designed to cater to the needs and requirements of a largely Eurocentric consumer base, are not monitored or tested with caste in mind. Even caste elites within India, who form the larger part of the corporate workforce, have resorted to a convenient “caste-blindness” to try and counter affirmative action measures undertaken by public institutions to ensure equity and inclusion. This disparity in representation has resulted in technological infrastructure being thoroughly under-equipped to be able to address the social realities of caste in India, and among diasporic communities abroad. 


Class and caste elites in Indian educational spaces often tend to view caste as an evil of a bygone era or something that is limited solely to “rural” spaces. However, caste informs wealth disparity, the economy, institutions of significance like marriage, education, and religion, and access to and inclusion in spaces including but not limited to the internet. With most engagements moving to the digital realm, it becomes imperative, hence, to address and mitigate the workings of caste in these settings, and this will be possible not only through corrective caste-based reservation policies, but also through attempts at caste-sensitization in technical disciplines in higher education. 


Within the Academy


Most STEM aspirants in the nation are subjected to the mystical allure of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and extremely vocal general category communities (those who are not reserved categories) dismiss caste as an ancient non-issue and view reservations and caste-based affirmative action as violations of “merit”.  Upper caste resentment against reserved categories results in a culture of aggression and condescension that has caused challenges, dropouts, and even death. In fact, an IIT Delhi survey conducted in 2019-20 found that a majority of general-category students do not disagree with casteist remarks, which undermines the caste elites’ own claim of not being against caste-based equity but against affirmative action. 


These casteist sentiments are upheld not only by general-category students but also by faculty. Marginalised castes are underrepresented in both students and faculty in the top 5 IITs as per an article by The Print.


Mistaken ideals of merit beget harsh and unwarranted discrimination against students from marginalised castes. These prestigious institutions often drive these students to the brink and deaths by suicide are then framed as “accidental”. Preferential treatment on the basis of student rankings in entrance examinations, casteist slurs from peers as well as people in positions of authority, and diet-based segregation (since diet acts as a significant caste marker, with vegetarianism being associated with “purity”) in hostel messes, among other aspects contribute to a culture wherein casteist sentiments are celebrated, and students from marginalised castes have to keep justifying their right to be in an elite educational space beyond their enrollment.


The dire circumstances of DBAV (Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, Vimukta) communities, therefore, can be addressed not only through affirmative action during enrollment, but also through consistent efforts by the administration to understand their struggles within a university environment and dedicated efforts to counter casteist rhetoric peddled by those in power. 


In the Industry


Many industry professionals in charge of hiring profess their dedication to “Diversity and Inclusion”. It is claimed that an applicant’s caste does not factor into the decision-making process, at least in corporate settings. However, in an uneven playing field like India’s where inconspicuous elements shape the picture, reaching the stage where one’s resume is under consideration at all requires a significant caste advantage. An article from the Economic and Political Weekly deconstructs the widely used concern over “merit” in white-collar jobs across the country. Anti-reservation arguments often fall back upon a devotion to merit, but dismiss the role of sociocultural capital in the perceived detection of worthiness. Social and cultural assets (like connections in the industry, English language proficiency, access to administrative and economic spheres, etc.) that upper-caste individuals have amassed over centuries undoubtedly give them an edge over DBAV applicants.


The founder of the Self-Respect Movement, Periyar EV Ramasamy argued that, “For anything and everything, the Brahmins are insisting on Merit and Efficiency. It is an invention of the Brahmins as the "Mohini Avataram" in the epics. The only motive of the Brahmins is to spoil the prospects of the Non-Brahmin communities, who are now only at the threshold of progress.”

   

In a Routledge article from 2023, the author problematizes what is called “Corporate Brahminism”. In allegedly “casteless” corporate spaces, upper-caste identities are pronounced and celebrated. The paper cites the example of the CEO of Infosys in 2017, Vishal Sikka, who asserted his Kshatriya identity to claim that he was “here to stay and fight” when investors were concerned about company leadership. 


“Castelessness”, stemming from desensitization and normalisation of caste, in corporate workspaces, thus, is the facade behind which modern casteist attitudes operate.


Caste and Modern Technology


 The invisibilization of caste in digital spaces mostly controlled by Savarna imaginations can be illustrated by a simple Google search on “Quotes by BR Ambedkar”.


AI Overview of Search Results for "Quotes by BR Ambedkar"
Fig 2. AI Overview of Search Results for “Quotes by BR Ambedkar” as of December 10, 2024

The AI overview of the search results mentions that BR Ambedkar was a “strong advocate for the rights and upliftment of marginalized communities, especially the Dalits”. However, none of the featured quotes represent his vast body of anti-caste works. Ambedkar was vehemently against caste, and his works are considered canonical in anti-caste scholarship. The representative quotations proffered by Google Search Engine’s AI tool dilute his anti-caste advocacy. 


Generative models parse and produce content based on a probabilistic approach. It is therefore unsurprising that the results they yield will be derived from the most popular data points rather than the most accurate ones. A study on caste depiction in AI-generated images released in August 2024 finds that Stable Diffusion equates “Indian” and “Upper-Caste” identities and perpetuates historically-held notions of caste-based labour. The paper uses cosine similarity to find that the images generated for “Indian person” and “Indian Brahmin person”, “Indian Kshatriya person”, and “Indian Vaishya person” have a similarity of above 0.7, whereas images generated given the prompt “Indian person” and “Indian Shudra person”, “Indian Adivasi person”, and “Indian Dalit person” have a CLIP-cosine similarity score of anywhere between 0.37-0.63. Therefore, there seems to be a conflation of Indian identity with upper-caste Hindu identity. Moreover, prompts like “Indian person at work” and “Indian high-caste / low-caste / Brahmin / Kshatriya / Vaishya / Shudra / Dalit / Adivasi person at work” yield extremely telling results.


Images Generated by Stable Diffusion Given Certain Prompts
Fig. 3 Images Generated by Stable Diffusion Given Certain Prompts (Source: arxiv.org)

Where upper-caste individuals are depicted as doing white-collar work and desk jobs with extremely high cosine similarity scores between these images and the images generated for “Indian person at work”, individuals from marginalised castes are profiled into largely blue-collar occupations and manual labour. 


The study also talks about various issues that might arise while trying to ensure “algorithmic fairness”. Data on caste is not very easily available. Marginalised caste individuals may not want to disclose their caste for fear of oppression and caste-based discrimination. Additionally, even if this data is somehow procured, in a context where privileged-caste employers/institutional authorities take great umbrage at caste-based reservations, algorithms that use caste-related data and are capable of labeling caste can be nefariously used to systematically exclude caste-oppressed communities from professional spaces. 


Caste-based hate speech on the internet is another issue that social media platforms have not been able to completely eradicate, given the cultural specificity and untransleability of casteist slurs and insults. One of the many aspects obfuscating this question further is the fact that a lot of terminologies which have casteist connotations are not considered explicitly casteist because of the aforementioned notion of “castelessness” or “caste-blindness”, but their pejorative associations are directly informed by caste. Moreover, insults and hate speech that reference reservations rather than marginalised caste communities often pass as benign in social media spaces. 


Caste-markers like name, diet, occupation, etc become significant aspects that enable identification and discrimination. The criticism of Zomato’s seemingly innocuous “Pure Veg” fleet to ensure segregation of food (which is considered to be susceptible to “pollution” in the Brahmanical understanding) as casteist is based on this very rationale. Caste manifests in ways that a strictly mechanical understanding of the historical varna system does not quite comprehend. 


An Indian Express Article about Zomato’s “Pure Veg” scheme
Fig. 4 An Indian Express Article about Zomato’s “Pure Veg” scheme

Matrimonial sites in India also give primacy to caste and offer to find matches within caste groups. As per Ambedkar’s observations, caste-based endogamy is one of the main reasons why caste continues to be perpetuated. Unfortunately, services that have come up in the twenty-first century in a supposedly casteless digital space also enable casteist thought and caste-based discrimination, which proves that we are a long way from being truly “casteless”.

Fig. 5 The Landing Page of one of the many community sites of shaadi.com, a leading matrimonial website
Fig. 5 The Landing Page of one of the many community sites of shaadi.com, a leading matrimonial website

In light of this, where “castelessness” is an ideal that is not only inaccurate with respect to social realities, but is also instrumental in propagating and maintaining caste as a potent yet regressive force, future technologists need to be sensitized to the workings of caste now more than ever. These issues are further exacerbated by a neoliberal conception of “merit” as an unadulterated and uncontestable arbiter of deservedness that is all too common in the Savarna imaginations of the current technological workforce.


Higher education has a crucial role in addressing and undoing the conditioning that individuals carry, regardless of their background or upbringing. A humanitarian bent of mind, hence, is the need of the hour in technical education to address the challenges that diversity, equity, and inclusion pose in the Indian context.


Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy, authors of No Hard Feelings, say “Diversity is having a seat at the table, inclusion is having a voice, and belonging is having that voice be heard.” Without perspectives from the concerned communities, technological infrastructure threatens to inherit the prejudices of Brahmanical practices that go unchecked and unmitigated. As India navigates its digital and cultural evolution, ensuring justice and equity for its marginalized communities is both a moral imperative and a societal necessity. Only then can we aspire to a future where caste truly ceases to define identity, opportunity, and access.


Note: The author of this article belongs to a privileged caste and therefore acknowledges the inherent limitations in fully grasping the lived experiences of caste-based marginalisation. Feedback, corrections, and additional insights, especially from members of the communities in question are highly appreciated. 

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