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Comment by sumedh | Hacker News Reader

Your parents tell you your caste. You can also get a caste certificate from you local municipal office which helps you take advantage of some perks if you belong to a "lower" class.

Generally you wont be able to figure the caste of someone but there are clues like skin color, fairer skin generally is "upper" caste, sometimes your surname also gives away your caste.

Unfortunately some Indians specially from the "upper"caste take this very seriously and think they are superior compared to other Indians.

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fair skin thing is nonsense. I'm a Tamil Brahmin (Brahmin being the highest caste) and I'm one of the darkest skinned people in India. Most of my friends are far darker than most Indians from North India. It's much easier to identify through surname (Pichai I'm pretty sure is a brahmin surname), but certain states like Tamil Nadu banned surnames for this reason. If people ask me my surname, it is T. Every government document has T as my surname, I just go with that

>I'm a Tamil Brahmin (Brahmin being the highest caste) and I'm one of the darkest skinned people in India.

Do you have ancestral home in Mylapore? If not you're not real Tam-Brahm. (JK obviously)

> fair skin thing is nonsense

Well it is a stereotype, and they are often true, but not always. eg, in TN, the average brahmin or upper class individual will be fair-skinned while the lower class one would be dark skinned.

I guess up in the North, this does not hold.

> but certain states like Tamil Nadu banned surnames for this reason.

The govt did not ban it. It was more a social movement where one was looked down upon (and even discriminated against for showing they belonged to the higher castes). That's why there are still folks who continue to keep 'Iyer' in their name.

Well if Surnames are banned, why is the name Pichai still used? Genuinely asking. I also see tons of engineers from Tamil Nadu in the US with last names Iyer and Iyengars.

It wasn't banned. It was one of the side effects of the popular Self Respect movement which saw most people switch to patronymical last names from caste-based last names.

Ofcourse the Iyers and Iyengars wouldn't switch because they had more to lose than they gained from hiding their caste identity (they are the so called upper castes who have traditionally held a much priviledged position).

Caste is a great illustration of how arbitrary racial identities are.

At which point is this about race? Isn't this more like knighthood in the olden times?

The point where caste defines purity. Classism is a separate axis from the notion of religious purity that is a fundamental part of caste (which is effectively an amalgamation of the two). As such, the closest "reference point" for a U.S. citizen is the attitudes held by antebellum slaveowners regarding race. You can't comprehend the sort of...emotions that inspire the strict anti-miscegenation of racism or caste-ism, from a lens of "knighthood in the olden times".

Nevermind that one can be "knighted" - the idea that one could be "brahminated" is no different from thinking one could be "whited" in the antebellum south. (And no, the "honorary whiteness" given to certain asian ethnicities is not akin to "whiting" - it's merely defining a subdivision of a caste to be slightly higher than the other lower castes)

At no point. Indians have a distorted view of caste because of 400 years of British invasion after 500 years of Islamic invasion.

Since economic mobility was greately reduced because of economic stagnation caused by centuries of invasion, they re-applied the originally profession-based caste system using racial discrimination brought to India by the Mughals and the British.

If we're being strictly anthropological Western 'racism' is a type of caste system but all caste systems have the trait of assigning better or worse outcomes to disparate breeding pools, however defined, and re-enforcing breeding rights on some level. Almost all human societies are caste systems of some sort since the introduction of farming at least, and from a more modern perspective is a composite of multiple, simultaneous caste systems (usually referred derisively as 'isms').

    caste certificate

What, caste is an official thing in India?

Unfortunately, it has to be. If you want to decrease the effects of centuries of oppression, the oppressed have to be given a giant helping hand. Which is done by both the union and state governments in India in the form of reservations for people belonging to oppressed castes. Now this is a controversial subject, because there are people who have abused the reservations system, but overall I am of the opinion that it is a much needed system. The only way to enforce that only the oppressed castes get these benefits is to officially recognize castes and issue certificates attesting this.

Seems like a great way to actually maintain oppression.

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