Brahminical Supremacy, Class Privilege And Inhumanity: The Failure Of The Indian Upper Middle Class

How does power, discrimination and segregation show up in everyday India? Not in spaces far away from us that we don’t recognise, or can pretend to be significantly distanced from, but within the worlds we cohabit each day, in our plain sight. The prevalent questions to ask naturally are not just individual, but systemic. Realities of homes, streets, living spaces exhibit these quotidian instances for us to see, where structural power is exerted against the working class each and every day.

A posh locality in Gurgaon that houses thousands of upper middle class residents, with hundreds of homes spread across various blocks, does not have a functional washroom for female domestic helps. The homes that employ the helps refuse to let them access their washrooms if they need to relieve themselves. A woman leaves her home at 6 AM to start working in homes to earn her wages, to only return by 3 PM on an average. The work itself is intensive manual labour.

Are we, the upper class citizens, expecting them to not hydrate? What is the solution we provide if we employ their services? How and where does she then relieve herself? In many situations, when helps have requested to be allowed to then return home (to their jhuggis just outside these residential complexes), relieve themselves and return to work—all of which would result in a 30-minute delay—the answer they receive is, “Complete the job for the day and leave in one go”. Cleaning of washrooms has long been a caste-defined task. The women seeking to use the washrooms offer to clean them as well. But it is the blinding privilege of the upper class to first refuse, and then expect them to continue the work of the day before relieving themselves. This is not a one-off experience.

A simple conversation with domestic workers in a single area of Gurgaon has yielded this to almost be normative. So, inherently, the segregation of what was once space within homes, then utensils, then service lifts, has extended even to this. But what we refuse to take note of is how a refusal to allow someone something as basic as relieving themselves, strips them off their humanity and dignity in multiple ways.

The manicured parks reserved for residents remind us of our colonial past. In the same way that they do not allow dogs in those spaces, they do not allow the working class to even sit under a tree. Why? A question that was posed once by Kriti (name changed), a domestic worker in Gurgaon, was “Hum kuch kharaab toh nahin kar rahe hain na, ya humaare baithne se kuch maila ho raha hai ya kharab ho raha hai? Park mein, ped ke neeche baithne mein, kya bura kar rahe hain hum? Inhi ke ghar mein khaana banaate hain, jo yahan humko nahin dekhna chahte.”

Her statement sums up whatever needs to be said. The idea that the same spaces can be used both by the upper middle class and the working class they employ—for just simple resting, or eating a meal before they move on to the next house for their work—is unfathomable to the privileged. The upper middle class uses their assertion of power to segregate not just spaces and roles, but even the idea of how leisure can be experienced and who has the luxury.

The idea of aesthetics is driven wholly by class, where the working class, for them, exists to provide and fulfill needs that they cannot or worse, won’t answer to themselves. Apart from providing for those roles, the workers then must be hidden from sight and view, lest they create blotches on a manicured aesthetic. The idea of rest then ceases to be about humanity or need, but about where it sits in the larger aesthetic acceptable only to the privileged gaze. This entitlement comes from the exertion of power through money, exercised by those who pay for maintenance of the said aesthetics and employment of the working class.

Add to this religious and caste bias rampant in homes about not wanting to hire Muslim helps and Dalit cooks and the entire power dynamic lays itself bare for us all to see. When we look at this with the macro lens of lynchings of Muslims, and caste-based violence that is normative of Modi’s India, we realise the cultural reality and pervasiveness of power—how it moves from homes, to community spaces, to roads and then to the nation. The idea of identity and power is rolled into one. The loss of humanity is palpable in the upper caste, upper middle class, so heavily drunk on the idea of privilege and entitlement that they cease to recognise the pain they cause, and reap benefits from a system that exists only and solely for their benefit.

What the upper caste, upper middle class conveniently chooses to ignore, is that it is the working class that keeps their lives afloat in every single way. It’s a carefully designed system that keeps the working class oppressed, so that the privileged can remain so. In this fundamentally unequal system, when the upper caste paints itself as the victim of greater competition due to reservation—entitlement that they deserve to be where they are—it exhibits the one thing that privilege does well beyond all else. It blinds us to what a system that we benefit from enables for us. The brahminical upper class thrives in a system designed for them to succeed in every parameter—from education to societal acceptance, and even to challenge the world. No amount of empathy can even bring us close to the lived experiences of the oppressed, challenged at every step, stuck in a system where they are only expected to be stuck where they are to serve the privileged.

Culturally, India has always thrived on the idea of segregation, power and oppression. Whether it is the lores that have travelled through oral storytelling to television sets, to their unrecognisable versions today, to everyday habits, to the widely celebrated current political discourse of the day—the idea of power, its legitimacy rooted in the oppression of others, has been a part of India’s cultural existence for years. The brahminical, Hindu, upper class male (females are naturally below the social order), has believed that he is entitled to power. And that power is rooted in the exertion of it.

This idea has been legitimised, violently celebrated and weaponised by the Hindu right wing movement. From the Ram Janmabhoomi movement to the demolition of the Babri Masjid to Godhra, to 2014 elections and the systematic decay of secular ideas orchestrated by this regime—it can all be traced back to this fundamental need to exert and exhibit power. Add to this the accusation of minority appeasement levied against the political Opposition, and suddenly a majority, powerful set of people, look at their realities in a vacuum, refuse to recognise their privilege and attack those who in fact, are the long standing victims of the privilege offered to the brahminical patriarchs in the first place.