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- [00:01]
Ajanta Subramanian
Hi, I'm Jane Wakefield and I host the Human in the Loop in partnership with Gravity. That's Gravity with two E's helping organizations innovate with AI securely. We explore the rise of AI agents, their history, their potential, and the risks organizations must navigate as they scale Search
- [00:20]
Ravikanth Kisana
for Human in the Loop.
- [00:21]
Ajanta Subramanian
Wherever you get your podcasts, Welcome to the CAST Pod, where we assemble scholars, activists, community organizers, artists, and others to make sense of what caste is, how it works, how it's experienced, and how it has traveled and taken root inside and outside of South Asia. What have people done to perpetuate, transform, and even attempt to abolish caste? I'm your host, Ajanta Subramanian, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York. And joining me today is Ravikanth Kisana, dean of the School of Liberal Education and Languages at Dalgotias University in India. His areas of academic expertise are cultural studies and ethnographic research grounded in critical caste studies. He's also closely associated with grassroots organizations that work with students from oppressed caste and tribal backgrounds. He's the author of the acerbic and beautifully written book Meet the Savannas. Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything. In addition to academic research and publications, Ravikant also writes for various online platforms. You can find his latest work through his Instagram handle, which is Buffalo Intellectual. Welcome, welcome, welcome to the podcast.
- [01:48]
Ravikanth Kisana
Thank you for having me.
- [01:50]
Ajanta Subramanian
So congrats on the publication of Meet the Savannahs, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. The book I think is really striking, both in its sort of wry, unsparing language and in its ethnographic focus on savannas, which is still pretty unusual. And you say that with this book you want to introduce Savarnas to themselves. And of course, most of us could use more self awareness, both individually and as members of social groups. But there's something particular to the ignorance cultivated by savannas that you capture so well. And this is a theme that actually runs throughout the book. But its first mention is in the kind of opening portrait of a woman, Kulkarni, who's a Savannah woman, who, when she's told about your book, says, what is a savannah? So let's start with a grounding question. What is a savannah? And why is it important to make savannahs the object of critical scrutiny in the way that you have.
- [02:55]
Ravikanth Kisana
Okay, excellent question, but those are two different questions, so I will work my way through them. So what is a Savarna? First of all, I think, like, if I hope, like listeners of the podcast already have some Basic grounding in terms of what the caste system is. And the fact that it is, like, sort of organized in this hierarchical manner in the sense. So I'm assuming that basic grounding exists.
- [03:24]
Ajanta Subramanian
Yes.
- [03:25]
Ravikanth Kisana
Having that. Basically, what it does is like in Indian textbooks since time immemorial. I'm being dramatic in Indian textbooks. Like, caste system emerges in the shape of this triangle with very neatly equidistant lines. So it's a triangle with, like, four partitions into it. And they're all equally proportioned. Right at the top it says Brahmins. Then it says Kshatriyas below them. Then it says Vaishyas below them. And then it says Shudras below them, which are the lowest tier. So Brahmins are supposed to be the priestly class, the knowledge class. The Kshatriyas are supposed to be the warriors. So it's like priests. Below them lie the warriors. Below them lie the trades groups. Below them lie like menial labor or, you know, the class which is in servitude to everyone above them. Now, these are groups, including the fourth tier, the Shudras. They are within the Varna pyramid. This is called the Varna pyramid, hence savarna, like with a varna. Now, this arrangement is kind of incomplete, but because it does not show that below the Shudras there is another sort of layer which is outside the Varna pyramid, which would historically include tribal or remote communities which are away from the group or what we now understand as historically untouchable groups who were kept outside the geographical periphery of settlements in that sense. So these are called a varna. Groups like without a warna. So in its most simplistic form, caste is savarna and awarna, like people who have awarna. Awarna is a broad categorization of the kind of labor that you're allowed to kind of carry out. And people who don't have one, which means they are. They are going to literally undertake the most surplus, the most heinous, the most violent, you know, capacities of making a life that are within the economy or within the social structure. Now, by that yardstick, a savannah would include even the Shudras.
- [05:48]
Ajanta Subramanian
Right?
- [05:48]
Ravikanth Kisana
Now, Shudras are within the Varna pyramid. A class of broken people with maybe slightly more privilege, or I shouldn't say slightly. Maybe a little more privileged because they're still within Varna society than the ones outside it. But they're in servitude of the groups above them.
- [06:06]
Ajanta Subramanian
Right?
- [06:06]
Ravikanth Kisana
Right. So even within the four groups with a Varna, you have a tier which is at the bottom. Right. So the three groups above them can be technically called dwij savarna. Dwij is means born again.
- [06:24]
Ajanta Subramanian
Right.
- [06:24]
Ravikanth Kisana
So Brahmins are born again. You know, Brahmin men are allowed to wear like, you know, you call it Janayu pongal, like different, like basically the sacred trek. Right below them are the Kshatriya warrior castes. Under circle certain circumstances they can also be considered born again. Beneath them are considered a trading caste, rare, but they are also in certain circumstances and through certain things a lot. Shudras can never have that. So when I say, and I've elaborated this in the book, Dujavana is a bit of a mouthful, especially, you know, then you go into all of these things. So when we say Savanna, we are broadly talking about these three varnas of the priests, the warriors, the trading. Now that it's important to understand because I'm assuming some of the audience may not have the deep dive on caste. These are not three castes. These are broad umbrella categories. There are hundreds of castes within each of them. So there'll be hundreds of Brahmin castes. A lot of different communities which are Kshatriya communities. There are a lot of different people who are the Vaishya community, which is why you're unlikely to meet people whose last name is, let's say, Ravi Vaishya. Like I'm not saying there isn't, but it's very unlikely. You're likely to meet Ravi Agarwal, you're likely to meet Ravi Gupta, for instance. So these are different sub castes or castes or Jatis. So without going too deep into the woods, into the grass for this, broadly speaking, what I'm trying to write about is this cohort of Brahmins and the Kshatriyas and the Vaishyas, the Duj Savarnas, who I'm simplifying as Savannas. And I'm writing about them at a particular moment in time. I'm not writing about a 2000 year history of these communities, which would be a fascinating project. That's not what I set out to do. Right. I am also not tracing their adaptation and primacy during the era of colonial modernity or actually even post colonial Indian state. I'm tracing a very specific period, post 2000s India. So even the. So although like every time to explain a lot of these, I have to go back a few decades. So although there are references from the 60s and 70s and 80s, fundamentally it is a contemporary history of the last two and a half, three decades of our of India and of these particular groups. So that's the project and that's what the Savannas. That's who the Savannas are. And I think your second question was why we should meet the Savannas, or was that.
- [09:26]
Ajanta Subramanian
Yeah, what is it? What, why is it so important to make this sort of particular subset of castes an object of critical scrutiny in the way that you have.
- [09:36]
Ravikanth Kisana
Right, so just taking off from where I was saying, why I've chosen this particular group at this particular point in time. You see, when I was younger, around the turn of the century, around 2000, there was an optimism in India among Indians. There was this whole feeling that India is slowly being beginning to pull herself out of this, you know, this great rut of centuries where we've been struggling. Poverty, the great, you know, dream which the post colonial state was supposed to solve. And actually what had happened was in the early 90s, you know, through a series of catastrophes in state planning and all of that, the Indian state starts neoliberalizing. It starts opening some of these closely gated sections of its economy and big capital starts coming in and we start seeing its transforming capacity in our big cities. This is also the period where the Indian tech industry first starts to emerge. So if you're a person on the street, if you're like a man or a woman walking down the street of Bombay or Delhi or Bangalore in this era that I'm Talking about early 2000s, you're suddenly seeing, for the first time, shopping malls open up, you're suddenly seeing cafes open up. You're suddenly seeing a certain kind of prosperity come in. You're suddenly seeing cable television come in and we are seeing all these sitcoms. Friends enters our discourse. My entire generation got its personality. I joke about this from TV shows like Friends because it's about young people living a life by themselves, right? So there is a very palpable optimism in the air in the early 2000s. Right. In fact, there's a political slogan also. It's called India Shining. Although it didn't do the ruling regime at that time a lot of good because they lost the election.
- [11:49]
Ajanta Subramanian
But.
- [11:50]
Ravikanth Kisana
But the slogan stuck. People definitely thought, okay, India is finally shining. And that first decade of the 2000s, like, you know, I remember everybody was very bullish in India. Even international publications were saying, 21st century is a century of India and China. They were calling us the elephant and the dragon. You know, like, Europe's had its day, the US Empire is on the decline, and now it's this, right? And believe it, yeah, it's India's turn. And we even had a date for it because we had a president back then, APJ Abdul Kalam, who had written a book which had put the date India 2020 or something of that sort. So by the year 2020, India was supposed to have emerged as a superpower or a great power, if not a superpower. And when we were young, we all believed it. I remember, like, that was the decade I was going through formal education, I went to business school, I was doing my mba. Like great salaries happening at that point, point in time. And everybody was very bullish. There are all these predictions that there'll be an aviation revolution. Tier 2 towns will become tier 1. Jaipur will become the next Gurgaon, you know, and all you know, Pune will become the next Bombay and all of those things. Now fast forward 2020. When it to came comes is not the year when India becomes a great power. It actually is one of the worst years of the republic. Because what happens is the year 2020 opens with Shaheen Bagh and CNRC protests in over 50 Indian cities over citizenship. And those debates. India is threatening to, at that point, literally fall apart. Like we, you know, it's street protest. And I often say this, I feel great restraint by the state as well as the protesters, because nobody wants to really cross this line of civility. Because if the state sends in troops, it's going to fall apart. If the protesters become even a little more violent, it falls apart. But it's threatening northeast Delhi. There are riots happening, all manners of things every day. It's moving at a very, very rapid pace. And then as it's peaking, suddenly Covid hits, right? So you go from one catastrophe to another. And in Covid, it's for the first time that the mask falls off in 25 years. Because as India goes into lockdown, we abandon our poorest people. What started at this is this has been world news. It's nothing new. Hundreds of, if not thousands of hundreds of thousands of people walk home their villages from the big cities where they'd come for, like, small jobs as migrant labor because the state can't help them, right? They literally carry their belongings for hundreds of kilometers and, you know, go home. And what strikes me very interesting about this whole great migration is while this is playing out, the elites in India are actually quite comfortable in their housing complexes, in their gated communities, and they're curating themselves on their social media. It's a time of great art projects. People are baking things and, like making dalgona coffee while the poorest of the country are walking home. And interestingly, there's no writing on the way home. Like all of these hundreds of deprived people who've lost their life savings, who have been left alone by the state. Nobody robs. Like, I don't think there's any serious report at a massive level. There's no pattern of widespread looting or arson. Nothing. They quietly go home and that's it. There is no political avalanche. There's no nothing. The poor in India take stock and they realize the problems of India are too big and cannot be solved by the rhetoric that they have been sold for the last 20, 25 years. And on the other side of COVID when we emerged, that's when I started writing the book, the narrative. It's like nothing happened and everybody just picked up like it was a pre Covid thing, like India's rising $5 trillion economy. And there's great bullishness. But to me, it struck like if there was an opportunity for India to emerge as a great power. The last 20 years is a story of squandering that little demographic and market opportunity which had opened up. And the section which was in the driving seat, which had the wheel in its hand, not only squandered, this is in a great generational delusion and denial because they're talking about the plan is still going on. They just quietly changed the deadline from 2020 to 2047, which is the new deadline, by the way, because it coincides with the 100 years of the Indian republic. So I was very interested in what could have realistically happened that explains in a structural way this complete loss of vision. If you look at India now, our Indian cities, which were supposed to become the Great Megalopolis early 2000s, there are all these fantasies. Bombay will become Shanghai and like, you know, London will become this, and Hyderabad will become the next, I don't know, New York or something. And those were the fantasies. Instead, what we have is the air in our national capital is unfit to breathe, right? And there's no political solution to it because the problem seems too big. Our cities are unlivable. They are flooding every year. The traffic is insufferable. Even, like the elites are now struggling and there's a quiet exodus happening. So the class which was supposed to take India into the great power or superpower status squandered this for 20, 25 years and is now quietly leaving India. They're all sending this. It's. It's now not a secret large number of Indian students who go abroad for higher education, masters in Lax every year, right? That's it. You have to call it an exodus. A large section of even the Bombay's, you know, creative industry, Bollywood stars have all quietly moved to Dubai or London or wherever our great cricketers are moving out. Right, right. So I, I was seeing all of this and that became like an impetus for me to understand like, you know, it's easy in India to kind of say the political class doesn't have the answers.
- [18:37]
Ajanta Subramanian
Right.
- [18:38]
Ravikanth Kisana
But for me it was not, it's not the political class because the politician win selection. The politicians started realizing in the late 90s that development is a electorally powerful narrative that they could sell. But once they won those elections, once they got the vote from the India's poor and they won the election, the politician does not know what development means. They will turned the keys over to a completely different class of people. These were the technocrats, these were the elites, these were the so called educated consultants. And for 20 years a lot of these companies and individuals and think tanks have amassed great wealth. You know, like they've done quite well for themselves. Like, you know, they've bought cars, they bought properties, they've created these little spaces for themselves. And what they did not do was actually what we were led to believe they will achieve. That this was India's best generation. They're like entrepreneurs and they'll, you know, startup economy and none of those things delivered. So I was trying to figure out is there a sort of a structural or cultural anthropological pattern? I can read into this because this class of people is actually sociologically quite homogenous. This is largely coming from the savannas or what I call DUIT savannas that I'm calling. And it is because of historical patterns of caste and privilege. The huge majority of people who entered these spaces of tech and engineering jobs and MBAs, the class which was creating Indian urban cosmopolitanism in the early 2000 is primarily coming from these groups. And fundamentally the broader argument which is like the base of this book, which I hope to at some point build on, is that savannah modernity is actually a cosplaying of modernity. It's not modernity in itself and in many which ways that's what this period was. So what, what you know, a lot of caste and a lot of Brahminism and people have made this argument before. It's not in knowledge producing culture, it is fundamentally a knowledge performing culture. So you don't actually have to do innovation as long as you create the visual cues of what innovation are. So you don't actually solve the problem, as long as you're seen as people who can solve the problem. So there's a lot of cosplaying which happened. And these gaps kept getting reproduced over and over and over again. And one final quick point, because I opened that thread about the migrant workers, and I'll just tie it up together. I want to tie it in because, like, some years ago, this is pre Covid, I was teaching in class and, you know, I do this fun exercise where I go to, because it was one of these elite universities with no social diversity. And I was asking my students, like, do you know how many people in India are poor? And they've had, like, this really elite education, very expensive, and they have no idea. And at one point, like, we were talking about poverty indices and structures and, like, you know, just how big social inequality is. And one of the students in my class, like, this was completely savannah class, he said, well, the problem is, professor, we have way too many people. So I just joke, like, I like, yeah, so, like, aren't you supposed to be creative and think out of the box? Like, solve the problem? No, no, we have too many people. We can't solve it. So I was like, what do we do? Throw them in the Arabian Sea? And he didn't say no. And I was like, oh, all right, I get it. So it's almost like this cohort, which was in the driving driver's seat, had the driving wheel, doesn't understand or recognize or even see that 80% or 90% of India is coexisting with them. So it's like they've been locked away in the basement and they're there. They know that there are huge groups of people, but they don't know who they are and what exactly they represent. And the irony of the tragedy, I shouldn't say irony, the tragedy of the setup is it's the affluence and the wealth of this elite class. These elite sovereigners has been bankrolled off the backs of the marginalized people in the basement. Because the dream was, if Bangalore gets built, eventually this prosperity and these jobs will come down on. And 2020 is when they realized that's not happening. So now the electoral contract in India has changed, and we have, I think, entered a different phase of the republic. So that's broadly the. So that what that new phase is, is a different thesis altogether. My book tries to take us from that India Shining to this moment where the contract is changing. That's what the project is.
- [23:58]
Ajanta Subramanian
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- [24:27]
Ravikanth Kisana
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- [24:47]
Ajanta Subramanian
Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com great. That's. You put a lot on the table. I wanted to pick up on two things. One is the cost plane, right? Because you use the. Use the term performance a lot in the book, right? To talk about this kind of enactment of certain forms of knowledge, of cultural competence, even boredom, right? A kind of. And you also say that you yourself try to try to model yourself after your savanna peers only to find that your own performance invariably falls short of expectations, right? So I, So I guess one question is who's the performance for? Like who's the audience of these performances, right? Is it. Is it one another, Is it the, the unimagined West? Like who's. Who is the audience for these performances? And then the second thing is about the insularity of this group, right? You know, you use this notion of the glass floor as a sort of counter to the glass ceiling, right? And you say that there's a glass floor beneath which the vast majority of the Indian population exists. And the interesting thing about the savannas is that they rarely look down, right? The people beneath the glass floor have no option but to look up. And in fact, the sort of. The awareness is acute. The awareness of people above the glass floor of what they're doing is acute. But there's a kind of. There's a lot of ignorance on the part of those above the glass floor. So I guess I'm wondering what you make of the fact that there is all of this sort of Almost willed ignorance that comes out of this social insularity and that. That. That exists at the same time as, you know, a huge amount of literature produced by savannas, right. About non savannahs. I mean, one of the reasons your book is kind of a breakthrough is because you do turn the lens around, right. You're somebody who is subjecting savannahs to critical scrutiny. So can you, can you talk about these two things? One is the cosplaying and who the audience is for these cosplays. And the second is given the amount of scholarship, journalistic work, et cetera, produced by savannahs about non savannahs. What do you make of the insularity? What do you make of this willed ignorance of people below the glass floor?
- [27:45]
Ravikanth Kisana
Right. I think very excellent kind of talking points. I'll try to respond to both in, in a meaningful way. So first is about the aesthetics and the performance, right? So the, the idea of aesthetics is the. To understand why the aesthetics become important. It's because in. We have to look at the shape postcolonial India takes, right? As soon as India starts making itself, it is pulled together through this constitutional consensus. Now, a constitutional consensus is not a caste consensus because caste is fundamentally a system of creating an unequal society. A constitutional consensus has to be based on the modality of at least normative equality that you have to kind of assume. So what we do see immediately is once the constitution comes into effect, this sort of contradiction within the state where. Because the transfer of power, what it does is it puts a power from the hands of the British colonial machinery into the hands of sovereigners, right? And it is a sovereign as who must now run this machinery apparently through constitutional consensus, which is not compatible with a caste. You know, caste morality. Right. Okay, so you have, you, you, you see this contradiction in India even today. How do you create fundament? How do you maintain caste fundamentally when you have a constitutional consensus, right? So one of the ways in which you do it is the laws mean certain things, the constitution says certain things. But social practice then becomes a sphere where you perform caste, right? So you have a strange double speak emerging in the public sphere where everyone who is really strongly ritualistically reproducing caste is also doing so while claiming caste is not there or whatever, which sort of explains this sentiment. Like you'll run into very educated, elite, progressive talking savannas who will simply say, oh, caste doesn't exist, or we don't see it, or things of that nature. And that is not them being facetious. It is actually something which is, I Wish it was cynically mouthed. You know, it's like somebody who's racist and saying, no, no, racism is bad. I wish. Because that, that means that there has been some thinking through in this reproduction here. The performance of reproduction has very neatly gone into this construction. So what it means fundamentally is that they have created pipelines of generationally building this savannah modernity. You can't do it like this South African apartheid regime. You can't say keep these people out because then you are using the constitutional line, which in this day and age will immediately run into all kinds of trouble. So there is no legal barrier to it, but you find other barriers which filter these spaces out. And what can these other barriers be? Capital is one. So, you know, it's not surprising that so called India's biggest progressive liberal universities are also extremely expensive and are also absolute savannah havens. From the teaching staff to the students, it is completely savannah. And the only place you will find non savannah or people below the glass floor are actually in the cleaning staff and things of that nature. And that is not a contradiction to anybody involved. That is how it is designed and it reproduces. Right. So the performance then becomes vital in the system. Because here's the other thing. For a lot of the audience who may not understand the dynamics of it, these groups that I was talking about, all the Brahmin castes, all the Kshatriya castes, all the Vaishya castes, all these different communities across the length and breadth of this country geography, you combine them and they're not even 20% of the population. Right. They're actually probably less than 15, less than 10, depending on how you figure this out at which part of India you're standing in saying this. So you have this hyper minority. Yes, right. Which is completely overrepresented in every, you know, every apparatus of statecraft and modernity. Right. Which also wants to perpetuate its, its control over the thing. But if it goes by constitutional consensus and just starts opening the doors by just sheer law of numbers, they will get swept out. So every generation, it's like a dance. You have to keep finding ways in which you keep the filtering going without actually tampering with the constitutional line. In the recent elections, 2024, I think one of the mistakes the ruling regime of BJP did was they started asking for 400 seats in our house of like, you know, Lok Sabha, which is the elected parliament body. And that large number was basically the number they needed to kind of carry out constitutional amendments. So once that message got interpreted by large section of the voters oh, you don't just want to win, you want to sweep into power so you can make these constitutional changes. It had a huge electoral backlash, so even the BJP even currently would steer clear of talking, tampering with constitutional consensus. So you are forced to then go into the performative space. The other question you asked is, who is this performance for? Right. The performance is, I would imagine, not so much for an audience, a Western one, or even each other. The performance itself is like a way of filtering. So when I was younger, so I grew up in like these really low income slum areas of Calcutta. Now the way Calcutta as a city is also talked about is, you know, it's a city of intellectuals of Tagore and Satyajit Ray and, you know, the left and so on. I must tell you, the part of Calcutta I grew up in, none of these were the defining features. Like, it was a lot of like working class labor, low income labor, most of them coming from marginalized caste backgrounds, Muslims and Christians coming from tribal backgrounds and things of that nature. So in those spaces, it was a completely different experience of the city. Right. So when I encountered like, you know, young people like myself, like, you know, who not like myself, young people my age, age, who were like, you know, who just looked larger than life because, you know, they were talking in English. It's just language that I now at 40, speak quite well. When I was 16, I didn't like, you know, I didn't have the vocabulary, I didn't have the spontaneity, the articulation, the wit, none of these things. Right. So I was completely like, you know, enamored and I wanted to escape like this because that's the other thing about if you're living in one of those low income slum sort of spaces, it has a gravity of itself. A lot of people that I grew up with are still there. You don't escape it. So I was trying to find a way out of it. I was very determined. I did not want to be, I did not want to become a version of my father. And to me, when I first encountered this cohort around 16, 17ish, I was like, wow, their lives are so big, you know, they're like, you know, they're just talking about, you know, art and cinema. And also I was enamored and I wanted to fit into that world. And you know, it took me a very painful process to understand that. Actually the more I tried to internalize that vocabulary, the more I was exposing myself. Because it's not about talking about cinema or art. Or whatever it is queuing a certain sort of cultural capital which is sort of filtering things out. Right. So leisure becomes a cultural capital in that sense. So that's what the performance is for. And just to kind of like tie the loop with something more contemporary is. If you look at. Now we are in the social media era, and a lot of my work is looking at social media discourses. So I see a lot of these young Indian gen Z, you know, meme formats and all that. One of the meme, like, you know, common things that, like, they pick on and they use this term chapri, you know, basically they are. It's. It's. It's aimed at a specific kind of cringe content. That specific cringe content is basically a margin, like, let's say a poor person trying to dress up or fashionable or be cool, you know, but doesn't probably have the clothes or the swag for swagger for it. Right. So it must be shamed. How dare you? Yeah, right. So. So that becomes a slur in and of itself. The fact that chapri itself is a term that many scholars have said, like, is cast coded, like. I'm not going into that. But. But what that is a signifier of. Even if you change that word, another word would just emerge, which is, oh, you're trying to cross your line. Right, Right. So go back into your space. Your space is that one. And these idioms also change. When I was younger, Bollywood was considered vastly uncool because all the cool kids, all the savannas, they were saying, oh, we watch English films. Right. And I was a big Shah Rukh Khan fan when I was young. That's when Shahrukh Khan was Shahrukh Khan. You know, he was. You know, we were growing up in that era, and nobody would watch Shah Rukh Khan movies. They would not be caught dead saying they like Shahrukh Khan. Rukh Khan was seen as the other side of the thing. And now, strangely, in the last five or six years, there's been a great revival of Shah Rukh Khan, ironically, by the same people who I bet when they were 15 or 20 years old, they would be not like saying that, oh, we like Shahrukh Khan movies. Right. So the idioms change.
- [39:14]
Ajanta Subramanian
Right, right, right.
- [39:17]
Ravikanth Kisana
So the performance is also not static. The performance also changes and adapts and it weaves and creaks and goes on in that sense. The other part that you were talking about, the ignorance and insularity, I'm assuming in the context of scholarship. Right. So social sciences, I mean, just Generally
- [39:39]
Ajanta Subramanian
there's this curious contradiction between the hyper focus on non savannahs within both scholarship and journalism and the, the reproduction of a kind of ignorance about how people below the glass floor actually live. So how, what do you make of that strange contradiction of like hyper focus and ignorance?
- [40:05]
Ravikanth Kisana
So I will go back to the point of cosplaying knowledge production, right? So one of the things that I think you were also like earlier, I was taking some notes when you were asking me like how come there's so many books which have been written and how come there's so much ignorance, right? And by no means are the scholars like not good like people who are writing these books. Like they're very talented people and they think they're doing their best. But my yardstick if you look at it to assess scholars, savannah scholars is slightly different. I don't go by only what they have written because what they write, they write really, really well, right? So you know, because, because that's, that's the forte, right? They, their scholarship. If you read their books, if you read their research papers, they're incredibly well argued. They're like, you know, like they will, they will, they have this great capacity for empathy and like inclusivity and even very radical explosiveness at times in a way that I would think five times before saying, right, right. But here's, here's the catch. When I have to make an estimate of a savannah scholar, right, no matter how famous or how, you know, how regular in everyday life one meets, I look at not just a written word, I look at their practice. By praxis, I mean in your day to day life as an academic, what do you do, right? When you go to faculty council meetings, what positions do you take, right. When there are all these savannah festivals, brahminical practices on your campus, what is your position on that? When it comes to Even today in 2026, admissions into PhD programs in India, for instance of marginalized caste scholars, very contested, especially in the sciences streams like IIT Bombay. And some of these institutions like you would obviously know with your work on IIT Madras, extremely difficult to get in, right? There are faculty in these universities. What are you doing? What are your positions on it, right? In the national law universities, in the institutes of management, right? How many of these SC schedule cast scheduled tribe, other backward classes, these marginalized scholars have you worked with? How many of your PhD students in a career of 15, 20 years have come from these communities, right? And to say nothing about the pipeline of fellowships and postdoctoral opportunities and conferences and research papers. What's your co authorship. Like so I have this dream project, like someday if I get the time in the space and the, the, you know, just the absolute madness required to pull it off, I would, I would want to create like a publicly accessible sort of an audit report card of scholars. You worked in South Asian studies for the last 30 years or 25 years. Here's your audit publications. Fantastic. How many scholars have you taken? Like you get what I'm saying? Like maybe, maybe. And there are people who've done great work there. Hats off to them. Right. But I feel a large section of savannah academia who actually deals with caste missed this part. I'm not saying they did it like out of some cunning, you know, sort of commitment to malfeasance or something of that nature. Again, I wish it was that because that would mean you saw it and you decided to not engage with it.
- [43:52]
Ajanta Subramanian
Right, right.
- [43:53]
Ravikanth Kisana
Because the commitment to knowledge production is so performance oriented that once you write it, you think the job is done right. Not knowing that there is a larger praxis around it. So which I think is why it also explains why there's so much mediocrity in this scholarship. You're using the word ignorance. I prefer the word mediocrity because ignorance. I think they're semantically slightly different in what they connote. You know, so and, and that same mediocrity can also be extended argument can also be extended with the Indian corporate space or the Indian tech. Like why like you know, your, your so called entrepreneurs are so terrible at actually producing even the kind of wealth and employment opportunities that they set, they themselves set out to achieve by their own yardsticks, they have failed so miserably. Right. Why you have to completely rely on crony capitalism and political alliances eventually to make wealth. Right. So in that sense this is where it comes down to
- [45:04]
Ajanta Subramanian
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Ravikanth Kisana
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Ajanta Subramanian
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Ravikanth Kisana
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- [45:56]
Ajanta Subramanian
But do you really think that the reliance on cost networks, right, to facilitate certain forms of wealth accumulation, the sort of, the, the absence of cast critique, for instance, within kind of MBA curricula, I mean, these are not things that are particular to India, right? I mean, in some ways this is, this is the, this is the nature of capitalism. Everywhere that there's a kind of, there's a claim to, to novelty, there's a claim to a kind of disjuncture between, you know, old world feudal organization of the economy and the kind of new world, you know, or, but everywhere you see that whether it's racial or ethnic or, or in India's case, caste. I mean these older forms of social difference, of social stratification, right. Persist and not just persist, but they're sort of fundamental structuring features, right. Of capitalist economies. So I just, I wonder whether there is something so particular to India or whether this is just, this is not a bug, it's a feature, right? But I also wanted to ask about social reproduction more pointedly. I mean, I think one of the most provocative arguments in your book is about how sort of youthful rebellion is, is a life stage that's kind of built into the process of elite reproduction, right? And you've got all of these stories of Tavarna youth who engage in radical politics, even in inter caste romances, et cetera, only to come back to the family fold, right? And usually that return is through marriage. So marriage becomes this kind of ritual reincorporation of youthful rebellion into caste structure, right? And okay, and you put it this way, you say this is because when individuality and choice are pitted against the vast network of tangible and intangible family caste privileges, the latter proves too intimidating and even lucrative to give up, right? So ultimately rebellion gives way to marriages approved by family elders, et cetera, et cetera. So I, so I have two questions about that. One is, I mean, are you referring more to a kind of subset of savannah who, you know, to use your own language, who cosplay liberalism, Right, right. And who do accommodate these forms of youthful rebellion? Or is it all savannahs? Right, so that's one thing. And then I'm just wondering about endogamy, right? Like has had the, have the, have the sort of Terms of endogamy remained static or have they changed over time? So in other words, has the circle of acceptable marriage partners remain static or, or do you see a kind of flexibility in that? And then I guess a third question is, I mean, is marriage really the only basis of caste reproduction? I mean, like, aren't there other networks, not just networks of blood and kinship, but other networks through which caste privileges reproduce? So, you know, in my book on the IITs, I sort of, I argued that IITian as an identity, right. Index is a form of institutional kinship. Right. That, that the iit, simply by virtue of being an iitn, you gain access to a set of social connection that operates similarly to blood kinship. Right. So it's not just marriage, it can be a pedigree, right? A kind of institutional pedigree that gives you access to these kinds of networks. Right. So yeah, I mean, I just, I wonder if you can speak to all of this. So one, is this kind of space provided for youthful rebellion only? Does that only sort of pertain to like elite liberal families? Or is it all savannah families? And then is. Are like have the, have the sort of parameters of marriage alliances shifted over time? Right? Like, does the sub caste matter as much as it used to? Or is it, you know, all savannas can marry each other. Right. But you can't go outside of that larger umbrella category. So has that changed? And then, you know, what about this? Why. Why this kind of hyper focus on marriage? Marriage? Aren't there other forms of caste sociality. Right. That are important to reproduction?
- [51:10]
Ravikanth Kisana
Right. Excellent questions. I will just kind of start with the last thing first because I think it's a little simpler to kind of respond to without setting up a very big argument. So you're talking about like, why marriage and why not like, for instance, other network of caste reproduction, for instance, not lineage legacy, like, you know, an IIT, for instance, right? Now the IITs also have reservation, which means schedule cast and Sheridan tribe folks have also been, and more recently OBC people have also been going to the IITs. One can look into it more closely, but the branding, the legacy, the capital that one sources out of it is not for those IITs. So basically what that means is if I come from a marginalized caste background and if I somehow get into a IIT or get into one of these spaces, like even, even like elite colleges, like Ashoka for instance, will have some, some, you know, Dalit students here and there. And you know, they will, they will get, there'll be some OBC students, some whatever Right. The legacy that the, the. The polish that comes with brand Ashoka or a brand Iit is not for those students.
- [52:40]
Ajanta Subramanian
Right.
- [52:41]
Ravikanth Kisana
It is for the other ones. So if there was a, in and of itself value in this sort of an institutional space, it could sort of technically, theoretically transcend this. The other element of this is Iitian is second to the identity of the person as a Brahmin. It's not the other way around. So you're an iit, but you're a gramin, Right. Or you're a Banyam. Right. So IIT is an additional layer to it. It's not the core layer. So that's how the identity gets imagined and conceptualized within this framework. Now, why marriage? I think that is a very fundamental question to the reproduction of caste, for instance, because ultimately, and I think Baba Sahib has written about it, and many scholars have also kind of figured that caste fundamentally is a system which sort of emerges out of this concern, this endogamous concern, and is basically a reproduction of that. So I would imagine that marriage and endogamy within your community is one of the core, core anxieties and driving motivations behind the perpetuation of caste. Right. Which also leads me to your earlier question about has the sort of circle of acceptable partners expanded? I. I am saying this based off my understanding and based, like, I obviously don't have an empirical data in a survey or whatever. I absolutely don't think it has. It seems to have, like, sort of expanded that. Okay, if you reach a certain social class or if you reach a certain kind of institutional space, then these things, quote, unquote, do not matter. I think they matter extremely, if not more. The more you climb up in cultural capital, where they are likely to be slightly more diluted, is when the scrutiny is not that heavy. So what that means is the more you go into a culturally elite space, right, in terms of wealth and affluence and cultural capital, the forms of exclusion become subtler and subtler. So when you go to, like a semi rural small town, almost a feudal space, then it's simple. They'll just come, they'll beat you up, there'll be an honor. Like, the forms of violence are very visceral and very on your face, right? So it's more visible. But when you're at a very different level, the forms of exclusion are more graceful, are more nuanced, are more sophisticated like that. Violence doesn't have to be brutal and on your face, but it doesn't really open up these things. And you can look within the social circles of India's cultural elites, right? The great like you. You know, I think just yesterday or day before Jaipur Literature Festival went go there, just see the people who come there, right? And just as a innocent survey, check the cast of their partners and see how neatly they align. These are artists, these are writers, these are academics, these are intellectuals, civil society workers, media professionals. It's a fairly diverse bunch, right? Very progressive people by and large, by most of it. And yet they self select in extremely clear ways. Every now and then you'll find like, you know, okay, you know, here is a Hindu and a Muslim couple, right? And then you go by caste and then you realize, okay, they're different religions, but caste is actually quite compatible in that framework also. So I don't think that circle has sort of increased. And it's like for instance, if you now see the Gen Z, like, you know, social media is like a beautiful space to do this sort of ethnographic, you know, I would not say fieldwork, but like sort of an ethnographic inquiry because like you can just go over art. They're making caste reels, right? About caste pride reels, Srivastava pride, you know, kayasta pride and like banya pride. And like, you know, you have these young boys and young girls making these videos about like, oh, I'm a Brahmin, I only want to marry a Brahmin, right? So even like, you know, my generation, which is like this, in this, this sort of middle 2000, like there was a bit of a hesitation in sort of talking about caste. Like it was, it was something that we didn't see or, but even that hesitation has sort of gone away, you know, or is going away in a big way. So I don't think this emergence of this cosmopolitanism and cafes and dating apps has sort of created a more equitable space where you're like, okay, I'll meet somebody and this will create. I've had, you know, I've gone to IIMs as a visiting faculty. I've, you know, I meet students from all over the country in like these big elite institutions also. And very often like, you know, students from marginalized caste backgrounds will come and tell me that, you know, the reality of settling, like hooking up is different but like settling, you know, there's a very clear politics to this, right? So I don't think the circle of partners has grown, but within sound. But here's the other dimension to this. Caste is also very fluid, right?
- [58:42]
Ajanta Subramanian
That was going to be the next question, right? Is, is is how do you, how do you build in the dynamism while accounting for social reproduction?
- [58:50]
Ravikanth Kisana
Right, yeah. So one of the things that tends to happen is, and I haven't yet theorized it properly, so my articulation may be a little rough around the edges. What I think happens is it's more instructive to look at it through, through power rather than stratifying it from caste. Because castes rise and fall in power over centuries. It becomes very visible. But even within decades you can see this, equations rise and fall. For instance, I remember being told this by, you know, this, my friend was from up, like activist Anup Kumar from Nalanda. Like, he was telling me how in the early 2000s the Yadav power in Uttar Pradesh had almost acquired sort of like this Kshatriya ness in its thing. So it, you could see the relations, like, you know, marriages happening between Yadav and, you know, Kshatriya family. So I think Akhilesh Yadav's wife, Dimple, I think she's. She come. I could be wrong, but she, I think she comes from a Thakur or some kind of a family like that. And a more recent example is like take the example between Rajputs and, you know, community like Gujars, right? You know, like I come from Gujars. But Gujars vary heavily by way, by geography. So the Gujars who live around the Delhi NCR belt, who've been settled for three, four generations, have got some wealth because land was acquired by the state. And they have some bargaining power now in these spaces. They are laying claims to icons like Prithviraj and you know, who are for as long as we know, been claimed by Rajput as a Rajput king. And they're saying, no, no, he's not a Rajput king, he's our king. And you can see the Rajput capacity, right? These are Kshatriya groups and those are Shudra groups. But they're unable to kind of really put it down. So you see these very interesting visible fissures where powers fluctuate over in time. So I think the circle, the acceptable circle of endogamous relation has to be seen at that moment in time between communities who are contiguous in power relations within the state. So if now suddenly we start saying that, oh, look, within these communities like Rajputs and Gujars are for instance, like intermarrying, for instance, you know, then that doesn't mean that, oh, the caste, no, no, they've just become in this geography at this point in time, they are power Contiguous. So this is acceptable. Right. I think the one kind of pairing which despite no matter how much this fluctuation, which is resistant to this, is right at the top and right at the bottom. So that those are I think the only two axises where that level of flexibility is not good. So the, the distance between the different castes and they're, you're saying within this
- [62:11]
Ajanta Subramanian
umbrella category of the savanna there might be more flexibility. Right. But between savanna and non savannah there's far less possibility of, of either kind of a shift in the power geometry or in sort of enhanced forms of sociality.
- [62:31]
Ravikanth Kisana
Right, right. Also like it also, it also like adds to for instance, in the more contemporary moment you look at, let's say banyas, like banias in post colonial India, post 90s, have actually in the last three decades really sort of risen in social and cultural power. So now you're seeing Bunya writers, you know, they're doing children's literature and they're doing sports and they're doing hobbies. They weren't doing that even three or four decades ago. Right. So you know, along with that rise comes this sort of acquisition. So it will not be now very surprising to see this almost fluidity between certain kind of bania families and a certain kind of liberal Brahmin family. But. Right, but in their more conservative. Even those families will have conservative factions who will not approve of that.
- [63:26]
Ajanta Subramanian
Right.
- [63:27]
Ravikanth Kisana
So that's how I visualize this actually.
- [63:31]
Ajanta Subramanian
Yeah. I mean, I'm curious about this sort of. You know, you said even between your generation and the Gen Zs there's been a shift in the sort of open embrace of caste identity. Right. That whereas your generation there was a little more kind of effort to, to claim castelessness. Right. That's no longer the case. And I, I wonder if you could speak to that. I mean you earlier you had talked about this contradiction between a constitutional morality and a caste morality. Right. And how that has been a kind of governing contradiction to, to sort of the post colonial period. I mean, are you seeing a sort of more effective subordination of a constitutional morality right to a caste morality in the contemporary moment? And is that perhaps connected to the rise of the Hindu right? I mean, I'm just wondering about the fracturing of this, of, of, of even a performance of cathlessness. Right. I mean it was always a fiction, you know, and I think you show that very clearly in your book. But, but even that performance of castelessness seems to be giving way. Right. To a kind of full throated, you know, acknowledgement that, you know, past matters, that we're proud of it. Right. So what do you make of that? I mean, you, you use this term Manu modernity, you know, to talk about this kind of curation of past commitments and liberal principles. Right. That these two things are kind of brought together, but is that giving way? Like, is Manu now completely trumping. Right.
- [65:35]
Ravikanth Kisana
So Manu modernity is not my term.
- [65:38]
Ajanta Subramanian
Yes.
- [65:39]
Ravikanth Kisana
I'm just blanking out. She was this very famous professor from Pune University. She died young. Like, I'm just blanking out with her name. You know who I'm talking? Sharmila Rege.
- [65:49]
Ajanta Subramanian
Right, yeah.
- [65:51]
Ravikanth Kisana
So I think Sharmila Rege has used that in her writing somewhere. So, like I cited from there. So I thought that was a fascinating kind of. I think she, she uses mill and Manu, you know, as, as a kind of thing. And like, so the Manu modernity is kind of an articulation which comes from basically that thing. But coming to what you're saying, why this shift happens in a generation from castelessness to caste and whether we can map it to the Hindu right? So could be. But my thesis is slightly different on this given my reading of the Hindu right project. Right. And their political project and so on. So, and I've written, I think in the book there's like one whole chapter which I call like, you know, the Gharbhapsi and of that sort, which is like this generation which in its youth was, you know, seemingly very progressive and radical, and they've now turned the 180 degree into their 40s, into being very caste conservative and, you know, spiritual and religious. So I think one of the two things has happened, I think early 2000s, you know, in the beginning of the podcast, I was talking about how India was at a different moment, right? And there was a lot of capital coming in and there was a lot of like, sort of interest in India by the west, which mattered a lot to the Savannah elites. I think at some point you were talking also asking me earlier about which savannas I'm talking about. So let me quickly address that and also build into this. I'm talking about elite sovereigners. By elite, I mean urban situated, intergenerationally educated, cosmopolitan, you know, performing, pretending, assuming broadly liberal values, consider themselves to be the guardians of this idea of a pluralistic India. And, you know, like have cast themselves as the natural opposition to this, you know, very conservative right wing, which is rising, right, which to me is like a very funny kind of a thing, because the person that or the Ideological movement which is supposedly fighting is inside your own family WhatsApp group. So it's the same branches of the family which is kind of contesting. But coming back to what I was saying is it is this cohort of elite, urban situated, liberal, cosmopolitan, sort of like a vestige of the old Nehruvian apparatus and like, you know, which morphed during the Indira years again got excited when Rajiv Gandhi was talking about computers and things of that nature, you know. And this, this cohort absolutely hated, hated the rise of marginalized caste political parties, which is what defines the politics of the late 80s and 90s and even till the mid 2000s, the rise of, you know, people like Mayavati or the Baujal Simaj party or even OBC parties, social justice OBC parties, they vilified them in English media. I remember growing up seeing these, you know, American talk show, late night talk show theme, borrowed shows in India which were making fun of, you know, the accent of some of these Boer politicians or like, you know, and things of that nature. So there was at that point of time a great interest in being accepted by the west by, by the usa, by the west of Europe. And there was a great desire for the west to look upon them and say that, oh, you know, you're, you're cool or you're one of us or something of that nature. Because I think that also adds to that caste capital filtering somewhere. So a lot of the talking points of this urban elite, liberal situated Savannah cohort, English speaking Savannah cohort, took its talking points from the liberal politics of maybe New York and Brooklyn or what have you, right? So I've even written about it how in the early 2010, 11, 1210, you know, those years just before the rise of Modi, you know, and emergence as a Prime minister, this cohort was maybe like, you know, looking at SNL sketches and like trying to talk truths to power and like there was a whole performance of that criticality. Now Veer Das has a new book, right? These are all remnants of that era. Now he considers himself like some kind of a, you know, survivor because BJP went after him. This. He used to make jokes about Mayavati and you know, things of that nature, like, because he is a product of that privilege, right? So, and I don't mean to go after Virdas, like, I mean just like that section. So that was a section which was very eager to demonstrate like they were very upset when I think Slumdog Millionaire came out because they would be like, oh, like India is not just poor, you guys you know, like that was the anxiety that the west will see this again. And like whenever they would get like, you know, white friends, you know, coming to India, they would be like, okay, we'll show you. Like here's Dil Chatha Hai. You know, it's a movie about rich Indians. This is also India. You know, that was the whole anxiety. And I think it comes also from the fact because this, this moment in time, they actually believed India was on the rise, that India was going to become a great power, if not a superpower and they'll be part of this transformation. And everything looked positive. I think even amidst their great denial and delusion as the years passed, they realized that transformation is not happening. None of the things that they thought would happen, like, took place. And there is a great retreat back to the only space where they last felt comfortable. Ultimately it goes back to your spirituality, your religion, ancient tradition, this sort of a victim complex. The west doesn't want us to succeed. From wanting to constantly audition on the stage for white Western approval. It's come now a full circle. Oh, the west doesn't want us to succeed. They're jealous of us, they're scared of us. Which becomes then the sort of a narrative and also a great like, you know, retreat back into Shahrukh Khan and Sachin Tendulkar. Because the last time you felt good about India, right? So you know, because that was reassuring, right. Also these things are slightly back in time. So there's a nostalgia, there's a retreat like so I see all of these trends sort of converging in the shift from castlessness to sort of an open acceptance, conservative caste pride. Like people who are talking about scientific rationality and Marx in college are now in their 40s talking about, you know, about how the veds are so, you know, divine and so on. So that shift doesn't just happen like that much larger I would imagine impulse, anthropological impulses, just more than the individual which is, which is taking shape. So that's a larger thing. Your question about the role of the Hindu right in this. I'm sure they have a big role to play. But I see the Hindu right as another branch of the same formation that I'm talking about, right. It is the other cousin of the family, right? So this cousin, the first cousin, like you know, look towards you West English speaking, invest in modernity. And a lot of what you're seeing within the RSS and the BJP four like this kind of spaces where from Modi and a lot of these politicians emerge, they were looked down upon by these English speaking elites. I think Modi himself carries that personal. He's quite vindictive like that. Like he remembers how when he was a politician in Gujarat, how the Delhi intelligentsia and the journalists treated him and she has never let them back into his space again. Right? So I think that whole dispensation knows that they were being framed as like these lumpen and they are brutish and all of that. So they also have a claim on driving the wheel. But theirs is a squabble between cousins, right? So that's their project. And I think part of the attempt is also as the elite fantasy did not take shape. So there is also sort of a reconciliation with the more successful cousin and like, okay, we'll start taking idioms from you. So I think that's what is going on in this space.
- [75:03]
Ajanta Subramanian
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- [75:33]
Ravikanth Kisana
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- [76:03]
Ajanta Subramanian
I mean, it's interesting because it sounded like you were heading in the direction of a kind of fracturing of the Savannah category, right? That with an older liberal intelligentsia being cut out of the corridors of power, that some of these contradictions internal to this category of the Savannah are perhaps coming to the surface. But you actually ended in a very different way. You said that there's, there's a, that there's a kind of renewed embrace of conservatism or a sort of abandonment of liberal principles in favor of what the Hindu right represents because it is seen as a kind of, as the sort of dominant logic, right? So There's a sort of assimilation into this dominant logic. And you're seeing that with the turn to cast pride, the, the kind of Brahmanization of some of these hyper elite spaces like the universities that you've taught in, right. Where you, on the one hand you have radical pedagogy, so you've got like queer studies and all of this stuff that's part of the curriculum at the same time that you have Brahmanization. Right.
- [77:27]
Ravikanth Kisana
But Professor Ajanta, this was never a contradiction. This is not a reconciliation. I want to make this very clear in my understanding, see that the, the sort of. The idea of a two different thing comes from. Here's what the savannas probably wanted to distance themselves from it. They don't like the elite sovereigners. They don't like the mob violence. Right? They don't like the mob violence because the mob violence is also inherently threatening to them. Because who is the mob threatening? They're threatening like idioms of conspicuous consumption and spaces and lifestyles which are in like, let's say if I am one of those people, it's my backyard. I don't want this. I don't want these people to run amok. But the same people that you're talking about who are going to these liberal universities and talking about queer rights and environment, but they're also doing Havan and Pooja in their homes. Yeah, Right. So there is no contradiction in, in that they just, they'll just tone down that critical rhetoric a little bit and they. It just, it just fits right in in that sense.
- [78:43]
Ajanta Subramanian
But I guess, you know, any, any social category, it's hard to find a social category that is internally cohesive, right? Yep. It's always an alignment, right. That is, that is stable, more stable at some moments and less stable at others. What I'm asking you is how cohesive and stable is this category of the savanna? And are there moments where, and I grant you your point, that these are internal contradictions, right? That these are. That within this larger sort of collective you may have different cultural and political orientations. So how much does this category hold? I mean, and are there moments when it doesn't hold, right. Where it does fracture and there are other kinds of alliances that become possible. I mean, I think I'd like us to end on a slightly different note, not about social reproduction, but the possibility of social transformation. Right. So where does the possibility of social transformation lie? Does it require a fracturing of this category of the savannah and the emergence of alliances, solidarities across the savannah, non savannah divide or is it only through a kind of shattering of the glass floor, through a sort of uprising from below? Like, what. What do you see as potential openings for. For. For substantive social transformation?
- [80:21]
Ravikanth Kisana
Okay, so the second part I'll address I'll get to. Because I have very bleak ideas of where this is going. But I'll first talk about the thing that you asked about. Does the Savannah cohort hold? And I think that's an excellent question because one of the reasons for writing this book. Yes, right. Although the title of the book says Meet the Savannah, so sort of lumps them. They're definitely not one cohort. And there are great, like, tug of war and push and pull within these groups. And I've written about some of these main ones, for instance, as recently, like, even in the political sphere, right, where the, Where a lot of these savannah groups vote cohesively because their numbers are small, they tend to vote very cohesively and aggregate behind parties like the bjp. But in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections, there was a group of Kshatriyas, basically Kshatriyakas, Thakurs and Rajputs, who were actually very unhappy with the bjp because what they said was. What they were saying was like, it's almost like you are taking our vote for granted. You think that you are our party, you're our formation, so you feel that you will get our vote irrespective because we are not going to vote for parties which are giving space to, let's say, Muslim candidates or other castes. You get that? So you take a vote for granted and then you want to add on to this vote by giving her ticket, the actual candidate, to some other caste community. So, like, you can do it once or twice, but we are actually not even getting our candidates. So you're our party, but very few of your candidates are actually from our community, so you're taking a vote for granted. So you can see these fractures there. And like, you know, one of the reasons or one of the theories behind BJP's poor performance in Uttar Pradesh, a state which should be its fort, was this sort of a tension within the Savarna communities where they were like, no, this is not okay. Right? So even like on a, On a, like, forget politics, even the social circle, like, I grew up in Calcutta. I'm not, I'm not Bengali. So. But I grew up in that city. And while growing up, I could see these clear tensions between the Bengali Bhadra Lope, which is very Kayasta Brahmin, intergenerationally educated in academia, in professional, you know, Spaces and all of those kind of things. And their tensions with the Marwadi traders who had come, Bania traders who had come during the British era and like, you know, set up base in some of the wholesale markets and over three or four generations have built like their own little place. And if you go to the city even today, it's almost like you can see separate schools, right? So a lot of Marwadi and Jain and Bania kids go to certain kind of schools. And a lot of Bengali Bhadra Lok children go to a certain kind of school. I'm not saying this is very neat or enforced legally. No, you'll find both in both. But they're very neatly defined in this set colleges. Like, you know, there are certain Bania colleges. Like there used to be a college when I was young. I think it's still there. Bhavanipur Education society, you know, it was predominantly full of Marwali Jain kids who were coming to do BCom, right? And then you had like the presidencies and all of those places where all of these more serious mind. So the Bengalis and the Kayas and the Brahmins, they look at the Marwadis and they're like, oh, you're like money minded, not intellectual and vice versa. So you can take a filmmaker like Satyajit Ray makes I think over 30, 34 films and just check how many of those films have Marwadi characters? Do they ever have a Marwadi protagonist? Right. If they emerge in the film, are they negative characters? So it's like in Ray's gaze, which falls over Calcutta for about three and a half decades, they don't exist. Right? So you see these tensions and I feel that when Savannah academia studies caste and studies caste only below the glass floor, they miss out on this very rich complexity within their own spheres, right. You know, what are the ethnographic differences between Marwadi baniyas and Gujarati baniyas, for instance? Right. What are the tensions between Kayest groups and Brahmin groups? Right. Both communities with like scribe and literary traditions built it to it. Right. How does that play out in, in, in the contemporary setup? Right. Your work, your book was so fascinating because it locates within IIT Madras this idea of Brahminical merit, right. How does that play out with Banya groups who have this claim on, let's say chartered accountancy, Right. This idea that like we have that. So these are all very, very promising spaces, right. Which have completely been sort of overlooked or you know, in, in Jat communities, for instance, right. This, this sort of, you know, this, this mixing of masculinity, sports, violence and hip hop, why this formation fits so well here, right? Another thing. So a lot of those things have completely been missed out. So I think there's a lot of fracture, a lot of push and pull between that. But it holds. To answer your question, it holds because there is a vast majority which is out there, right? The 80, 85% is out there. So if you are going to survive the tide in a democratic setup, which we still have, right, within the constitutional consensus, you have to pull together so all these differences can coexist, all these tensions and even bitter rancor can coexist. But when it comes to the question of political unity, policy unity, social sort of praxis, these, these, these sort of things, then they all sort of come together. So like, you know, I'm, I'm right now living currently in Noida. So Noida, Gurgaon, these places, they have these huge, huge luxury housing complexes, right? So it's not by one caste group, it's not only Brahmins living here, right? There'll be all kinds of different families and all kinds of different savannah groups which are mostly living in these spaces. But when it comes to, let's say Muslim and Dalit ownership of flats within these renting, right, rules of the. Then suddenly that consensus comes together, right? So rwas residential welfare associations in these spaces, you see this consensus playing out where they make the numbers felt. So these are bastions of that kind of thing. So I think it would be very, very cool to look at these elite housing complexes as a formation where how this, despite all the differences, savannah groups come together. And unfortunately you can't research these places because there'll be no access given to a researcher like myself, whereas my homes and my communities is all open to the savannah researcher to come in. So there is that question of access and power.
- [88:20]
Ajanta Subramanian
Inequity, inequity of access,
- [88:24]
Ravikanth Kisana
inequity of access. So that's about the different fractures and stabilities within the savannah cohort. To your question, which came from this, which is about the other kind of possibilities, right? So I want to go back to 2007 because something very unique happens in 2007 in the state of Uttar Pradesh, which is the biggest state of India. I think the population of Uttar Pradesh is combined population of uk, Germany and France, like, or something absurd like that. It's massive, right? So it is a largest state and the Bahujan Samaj Party, which is a Ambedkarite party, which is trying to build a coalition which was this project of all the non elite, non savannah cohorts. So the 80, 85%. Right. And that is a big challenge also because OBC groups have historical shameful, historically shameful record of sort of allying with Dalit politics and schedule caste politics and Buddhist politics or however you want to frame this. But BSP is doing that project and 2007 is a speak year. It has since declined. But in 2007 one thing very interesting happens in Uttar Pradesh. Yadavs who are OBCs or Shudras were seen as strong men, right? And the Brahmins who are above the OBCs were kind of fed up with that. So they politically allied themselves with the Dalit leadership of Mayavati and bsp. So Dalits and Brahmins sort of voted together and came into power. So that I thought was a fantastic political moment where Dalits and Brahmins, they have voted together in the past also for a party like Congress or something like that. They even do it till day. But Brahmins coming together under Dalit leadership, right? Bahujan under the umbrella of Bahujan Ambedkarat politics and sweeping BSP into power. But unfortunately we are now in 2026. We know 20 years from that point that consensus does not hold almost immediately within a couple of years the Brahmin word sort of starts shifting. BSV and Mayavati for the last 15 years has been searching for that missing vote. Like how do I. Because I have this vote and what do I add to win power? She's not been successful, right? And that vote eventually went to the bjp. The reason why Brahmins voted for the Dalits in that particular election was neither the BJP nor the Congress was a viable option for them. So it was like a one off which happened where we stand today. And this was just electoral math I was describing. But from a socio cultural position I don't see these kind of possibilities emerging at all. Instead what we are kind of going towards and this is the bleak part and picking up a thread that I opened earlier about how the democratic contract in India has changed all those poor people remember who walked home. They understood developments not coming to their village. So they didn't punish BJP or Congress by voting because they understood the crisis is so big. It's not that the person in charge is incompetent and somebody else would have done a better job. Crisis is too big. So now their demand is slightly different. Don't come and tell me there'll be development, give me welfare, give it to me right now, give me money in my hand, give me loan waivers. So now the cost of winning elections in India is going incredibly up because the state has to promise direct cash welfare or loan waivers. So a poor state is bankrupting itself in order to win the election. Right. So one of two things will happen, like either the state runs out of money, in which case it's a regime which does not know or want to lose elections. Right? So how does this, how, how does it keep spending the money it doesn't own? So it'll keep shutting down the existing welfare schemes. We've already seen Mandrega and some of these schemes being wound down, so we'll see more of that. The other thing is it will eventually probably have to innovate a way of maintaining political control without legitimacy from elections. There's a reason why fiscally insecure post colonial countries often collapse into some form of military rule or authoritarian rule. Right. So for me, and I hope I'm very, very wrong, but for me that's the kind of bleakness it kind of goes into because this is also playing out, remember simultaneously against the backdrop of savannas leaving India. And we've seen that exodus play out of sovereigners in Pakistan, sovereigners in Bangladesh leave the country. They physically move to Europe and Middle East, Dubai and wherever, but they have big properties and commercial interest still back home. So that exit also doesn't create new social spaces or economic spaces. So it just becomes some sort of an absentee lord feudal, corporate military complex that takes its shape. So what that means for a society like India, I don't know. But to wrap it up, I often joke with my friends, you think things are bad now. We will look back on this and these are probably the good old days. It might get really, really bad really quickly. But like I said, I hope I'm very, very wrong. But nobody has ever accused me of being an optimist. So that is.
- [94:26]
Ajanta Subramanian
Well, thank you for that. I hope, I hope your predictions don't come to pass.
- [94:34]
Ravikanth Kisana
I hope so too, absolutely. Adam?
- [94:37]
Ajanta Subramanian
Yes. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a firm believer in contingency. So I think the, I don't think the future is, is easily predictable. Right. You know, and I, we are in a very bleak moment, there's no question about that. But, but yeah, I, I think, I think your book gives us a, an incredibly sort of incisive account of a kind of elite subjectivity, right. That, that comes together with a political economy of rapid accumulation, Right. And really throws into crisis like that convergence really throws into crisis the, what you call the constitutional consensus. Right, Right. So that and I. But again, this is, this is a hyper minority. It's a hyper minority that I think has turned to solutions like rampant privatization to sort of hold off the challenge of the majority.
- [95:59]
Ravikanth Kisana
Right.
- [95:59]
Ajanta Subramanian
And I think that that dialectic is not one that is easy to play out. Right. I mean, it has to play itself out. So let's see how it plays out. But thank you. This was super fascinating. Again, I loved your book. I laughed out loud at moments and I groaned at other moments. And it was just a really absorbing read. It was wonderful.
- [96:27]
Ravikanth Kisana
Thank you so much for saying that. And thank you for having me over. It was a delight to talk to you and this was a great conversation. I really enjoyed this.
- [96:35]
Ajanta Subramanian
All right, Bye, Ravikanth.
- [96:37]
Ravikanth Kisana
All right. Have a nice day. Bye. Bye.
- [96:49]
Ajanta Subramanian
Thanks to all our listeners for joining us. The cast pod can be accessed through our website, thecastpod.org and through our partner, the New Books Network. Sound editing and website design are managed by Siddharth Ravi. And the opening and closing theme music is from the song Combat Breathing written by Vijay Iyer and performed by Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han oh and Tishan Sori. If you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to share it on social media and send us your suggestions for Future episodes@thecastpodmail.com this is Ajantha Subramanian signing off. Until next time, this episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing Company.
- [97:30]
Ravikanth Kisana
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