The Urban, Savarna, Hindu Male Realizes He’s the Subaltern: Intersectionality and Illusions

The Urban, Savarna, Hindu Male Realizes He’s the Subaltern: Intersectionality and Illusions

In this post, I discuss the intersectionality of caste, especially in the Indian diaspora, and how “upper-caste” Indians often ignore their caste privilege while facing racial discrimination abroad.

Published: 8/28/2025

Positionality 101

In the humanities and social sciences, one of the first lessons you learn is to acknowledge your positionality—to recognize that you’re not an objective observer but a person shaped by identity, history, and privilege. So here’s mine: I am urban, Savarna, Hindu, male, and a Brahmin. A sentence that would make Ambedkar roll in his grave if I then claimed subalternity in India.

But life complicates identities. I’m also a brown student living in Europe—marginalized in some contexts, privileged in others. Understanding identity requires resisting simplifications; positionality is always layered.

During my anthropology studies in the Czech Republic, I researched Indian diaspora festivals. I met far more Indians than both the average Czechs and other Indians living there—and almost all of these Indians were Savarna (historically oppressive elite castes). The few Bahujans (people from the majority-castes) I met were usually laborers in smaller towns like Česká Lípa, or first-generation upwardly mobile families. Even most of these people were OBCs, while SCs and STs were almost invisible in these circles.

Meanwhile, I was getting a crash course in racism in Europe. I’ve had someone “apologize” to me when I told them I was from India, because (in his words) I came from a “shitty country.” Another time, a person told my friend that Indians don’t wash their hands after using the toilet (like we’ve seriously got jet sprays?) And then there’s the classic—Indians smell like curry (I’d honestly respect the insult more if they at least specified which curry. They don’t all smell the same! + what even is curry?)

Getting back to the topic – So, yes, brown people abroad do face real racism. But many Savarnas, when they face this racial othering, suddenly start calling themselves oppressed while completely ignoring the centuries of privilege they still carry within Indian society and also Indian diasporic communities.

The Roma and the Indians

What really opened my eyes to this selective understanding of oppression was, oddly enough, a festival. While at Charles University one summer, I attended Khamoro — the annual Roma festival in Prague. It was dazzling — music, dance, celebration of a culture that, for centuries, Europe has tried to erase or degrade.

Given that the Roma are widely believed to have migrated from India centuries ago, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons and notice the irony: here were a people linked to the same subcontinent as me, yet occupying such a vastly different social position. The Roma are structurally marginalized in Europe, often treated as the “internal other.” In contrast, Indians—especially Savarnas—were not seen in the same way. In fact, many Czechs respected India (or at least their orientalist fantasy of it). As the Czech Indologist Martin Hƙíbek has argued in his article, the “Czech other” has historically been groups like the Roma or, increasingly, the Vietnamese diaspora.

Indians, by contrast, were sometimes seen as exotic but rarely despised in the same entrenched way. I don’t agree much with Hƙíbek, because while the orientalist gaze on Indians may not look like hostility every time, it is still very much orientalism—exoticizing, stereotyping, and flattening Indian identities into simplistic tropes. Moreover, I never stop seeing the ads on Facebook groups for rental properties that explicitly mention “Preferably people who don’t cook curries”. Nevertheless, this still hit me hard that in the Czech Republic, Savarna Indians like myself had more in common with privileged migratory groups than with the Roma. Yet in diaspora conversations, Indians (most of them Savarna) spoke as though they were the Roma of Europe. They were quick to frame themselves as the oppressed, but never paused to ask what privileges they carried with them into those spaces.

Later, during my Erasmus+ in Tallinn, I sat in on a lecture by a white, English-speaking professor—an insider flipping the script—who described the different biases in learning game design (Male, English-speaking, Western, White, Upper-Class). He went on to argue that at the end of the day, capitalism and class are what really matter, saying something like: ‘A rich Black person and a rich white person will always have more in common than middle class or poor people of the same race.’ Ironically though, the professor only really recognized as a problem the one identity he didn’t quite possess—class (bourgeoise)—because as a middle-class (proletariat) man he could cast himself as oppressed, while his being male, white, and English-speaking barely registered to him as relevant. It struck me then how this logic is the same as the Savarna reasoning abroad: you’ll talk race or religion all day (because that is where you feel oppressed), but caste (and the class it embeds) conveniently doesn’t matter to you.

This gap—between how oppression is experienced and how it is narrated—was my anthropological wake-up call.

Why “Upper Caste” Gets Scare Quotes

You will notice how I keep putting “upper caste” in quotes. That’s deliberate. Because caste isn’t simply class or status. It’s identity. It’s community. For Bahujans, it’s also the history of oppression that has shaped their very existence. To deny them their caste now, after centuries of violence, would be like denying colonized countries their modernities (read more about why I use the plural form of modernity) because colonizers suddenly had a change of heart. Or, to get cheeky: it’s like privileged men suddenly saying sex work is immoral, after centuries of exploitation and abuse. Who gave them the right to decide?

A strong example of how the power to define identity is monopolized by those coming from dominant and privileged positions is how anti-racism movements impose new terminology on Black authors. Even with the best of intentions, this can become another form of imposition, as Minna Salami, a Black writer herself discusses in her article. She argues that Black authors, should have the agency to decide how their identities are framed. The debate over capitalizing the “B” in Blackness is a strong example of this. When influential institutions like the Associated Press (known as the bible of journalism) updated their style guide to capitalize the “B”, in “black” many anti-racist scholars found this transformational. It was a change that many Black scholars welcomed since it frames the lowercase “black” as a color rather than an identity. This small typographical change holds many different meanings: for centuries, Black people have been forced into limiting racial categorizations, it was a color that defined them. However, now this imposition is reaching out to an extent that White scholars are arguing with Black authors on what is the correct way to refer to their own communities. This is yet another epistemic control over when and where something is right and when it is not. And the decision to decide the time and the discourse of what is right always remains to be in the hands of the powerful and the oppressors, themselves. Minna Salami makes a strong case that Black people have the power to shape their own identities, not just conform to externally imposed standards, however well-meaning they may seem.

That’s the power game. The Savarnas get to decide when caste matters and when it doesn’t. When it benefits them, caste is “tradition.” When it implicates them, caste is “outdated.” That’s why I’ll either use Savarna, or “upper caste” with air quotes—because it’s not inherently superior, and because acknowledging Bahujan caste identities as equal is non-negotiable.

Intersectionality Abroad: The Convenient Version

When Savarnas move abroad, they suddenly embrace a simplified version of intersectionality: “I am brown, therefore I am oppressed.” Sure, racism and xenophobia are real. But where does caste fit into this picture? It usually doesn’t. At best, caste is reduced to dinner-table nostalgia about family surnames or “which region are you from?” At worst, it’s twisted into a new form of victimhood: “We’re being oppressed by the state back home because of reservations. I didn’t get into an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) because of quotas.”

This is where anthropology-trained me wants to bang my head against the nearest ethnographic table. Because data tells us the opposite. Savarnas are still absurdly overrepresented in positions of power.

But data says otherwise.

These Numbers Don’t Lie

Indian institutions celebrated as “meritocratic” remain overwhelmingly Savarna-dominated:

So no—Savarnas are not oppressed by the state.
They ARE THE STATE

Why Don’t Savarnas See Caste Abroad?

To begin with, Savarnas often don’t even notice caste back home. Privilege works best when it feels invisible. So when they move abroad, it’s not surprising that caste slips even further out of sight. If anything, their privilege makes it easier to hide behind a new identity of simply being “Indian,” while the caste inequalities fade conveniently into the background.

Basically, when you move abroad from India, caste becomes less visible. White colleagues won’t ask if you’re a Brahmin or Yadav. Most won’t even know what that means. So, your Savarna privilege feels “neutralized,” while your brownness suddenly feels hyper-visible.

That’s why Savarnas abroad slip into this comfortable illusion: “Here, I am only oppressed.” Which, to be clear, is a less than half-truth. Abroad, you are racialized. But your caste privilege doesn’t vanish; it just hides in plain sight. For example: Why did I mostly meet Savarnas among the Indian diaspora in Czechia? Because caste privilege shapes who can afford to go abroad, who can navigate visas, who gets scholarships, who has family networks in Europe. Meanwhile, Bahujans remain underrepresented not because they don’t want to migrate, but because the social and economic capital required to do so is itself caste-mediated.

Personal Encounters with the Illusion

Some uncomfortable conversations during my ethnographic fieldwork revealed a lot to me:

  • Many Savarnas genuinely believed Brahmins made up 30% of India’s population—because everyone in their social circles was Brahmin.
  • Students blamed reservations for not getting into IITs but went silent when shown that 98% of IIT professors are Savarnas.

This isn’t just ignorance.
It’s a narrative convenience.

Here Comes the Intersectionality

Intersectionality isn’t a competition of who is most oppressed. It’s the recognition that privilege and disadvantage coexist within the same person.

For Savarnas abroad, this means acknowledging:

  1. Yes, you are racialized in white-majority spaces.
  2. But you also carry caste privilege that shapes your opportunities—even in the diaspora.

Ignoring one while emphasizing the other is dishonest.

So the next time a Savarna abroad says reservations “oppressed” them, I’ll remind them:

98% of IIT professors still look just like you.
If that’s oppression, you are the oppressor.