Blog Post | Seeing and Unseeing Caste in Diplomacy
The Hague Journal of Diplomacy's most recent special issue focuses on Caste and Diplomacy. As one of its editors, it is only appropriate that I take the opportunity in this blog to describe how I was introduced to this theme.
A few years ago, I published a book on the Indian politician and diplomat V.S. Srinivasa Sastri. The book starts with a vignette about Sastri’s arrival in Canada in early 1922 as India’s roving ambassador. The Indian diplomat’s landing in Canada evoked contrasting responses from his hosts: his gentle and sagely disposition was celebrated and feted, but his message that called for doing away with racial discrimination against Indians was suspiciously received.
This Canadian setting for my opening story in the book was a deliberate choice: I was keen to assert that Sastri was an international figure, who challenged a global racial regime, in his own right and not just a provincial Indian politician. My point was that someone like Sastri was a protagonist, not a subordinate, in the making of, what we call, the liberal international order.
In the two years that it took me to write the book; I would often come back to the introduction – fiddling with the sentence structure, polishing it, re-reading the same newspaper clippings to suck out more juice in an attempt to chisel the contrast between the personal and the political. I kept emphasizing that Sastri’s personal qualities – masterful oratory, pleasing personality, deep knowledge, rational argumentation – made him a rare diplomat who could communicate and convince across racial lines.
I do not recall exactly when, except that it was in the latter part of the two years of writing by when I had pored over the same newspaper clips countless times, it struck me that Sastri’s personal qualities were being attributed to his being brahmin.
‘Struck me’ in perhaps the wrong expression here. For there were two big paragraphs in a not-so-long newspaper article, from which I had liberally drawn, which clearly stated that Sastri was of Brahmin caste who were the intellectual leaders of India. They were quite unlike the ‘coolies’ that Canada received. The debate between liberals and conservatives in White Canada emphasised the contrast between the brahmin and the coolies. Liberals argued that not all Indian immigration to Canada would be bad. If more of Sastri’s caste type would immigrate, Canada should have little to object. While the conservatives were alarmed at the dangerous hope in Sastri’s promises: his sagely disposition would lull White Canadians into the fuzzy comfort of believing that most immigrants could be like him. When the fact was that they could not be, because the brahmins were a miniscule minority in India.
In any case, in my eagerness to make a point about racism, I kept, repeatedly, unseeing the caste dimension. I use the word ‘unseen’ because the caste argument was not even hidden behind euphemistic language; it was spelled out in all its crudeness. And yet, I had looked past it several times. Whether it was my disciplinary training that had hardwired me to ignore caste when researching ‘international relations’, or my own acute caste privilege that had made me epistemologically incapable of ‘seeing’ it, I couldn’t tell, although it was perhaps both. But what was unmistakably true was that a deep caste-bias afflicted my research and scholarship.
What does caste have to do with diplomacy?
The state of the general scholarship on international relations and diplomacy follows the same epistemological blindness to caste. Whether this is deliberate or structured is not for me to pontificate on, but this complicity in the continuing erasure of casteist experiences and anti-caste scholarship from our disciplines can only translate into poor scholarship.
Rarely have there been attempts to see how caste shapes the thinking, practicing and shaping of international politics. In fact, in the process of assembling this special issue with Pavan and Kala, perhaps the most common response we have received from even otherwise well-meaning colleagues is ‘What does caste have to do with diplomacy?’. To them caste is a ‘domestic issue’ and they struggle to see its relevance for India’s relations with the world outside.
Caste system stratifies a society on the basis of high and low births. A caste based social order is one of ‘graded inequality’, as B.R. Ambedkar, regarded as the messiah of social justice, defined it. The status and power increase the higher one goes in the pecking order of caste births, while contempt and dispossession rise with the slide downwards in the caste hierarchy. In fact, caste, Gajendran Ayyathurai asserts, should be characterised as a ‘social disorder’, for it is a system of segregation and degradation for the majority of the Hindu society.
With this Special Issue, our hope is to initiate a long-absent discussion on caste in international relations and diplomacy, by delineating the ways in which caste is the absent presence in our conversations. Drawing on the framework of critical caste studies, this is the first effort to systematically investigate the relationship between caste and diplomacy in India. However, as Pavan, Kala and I highlight in the introduction, caste is no more an institution limited just to India. India’s 35 million strong diaspora, spread across 203 countries, makes it a global phenomenon, in a sense that Ambedkar had predicted. This has ramifications for domestic legal and political institutions of the host countries.
The collection of articles here is an attempt to preliminarily understand the relationship between caste and international politics and diplomacy. Alongside race and gender, caste affords another analytical vector to think about hierarchical orders and practices of international politics and diplomacy. Going further however, these discussions also provide a valuable corrective to the essentialist romanticisation about global south and decolonial practices.
Vineet Thakur is a University Lecturer at the Institute for History, Leiden University. His research interests are in diplomatic histories of the Global South and disciplinary histories of International Relations.