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Out of curiosity, for Indians working in America, how hard is it to hide your caste or pretend to be of another caste altogether? Is this something that comes

• zeroth32 4y ago
  Your surname literally gives it away.
  • FlyingSnake 4y ago
    Not really. You’ve no way to find out the caste of a Prasad or Kumar or Deshmukh or a Muralidharan
    • choko 4y ago
      But it's relatively simple if it's a Srinivasan.
    • random314 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deshmukh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deshmukh Upper caste
      • FlyingSnake 4y ago
        Wrong. Here’s what The article you posted says: > However, the title Deshmukh should not be associated to a particular religion or caste
• giantg2 4y ago
  Not Indian, but a friend told me that most (if not all) of the names do correlate to caste. No idea if people change them, other than for the normal marriage changes.
  • automatic6131 4y ago
    >No idea if people change them, other than for the normal marriage changes. Inter-caste marriages are also extremely rare.
    • giantg2 4y ago
      Yeah, but if we're talking about people in the US, it's not that rare to marry outside of your caste, which includes marrying non-Indians. Right?
• yardie 4y ago
  I'm not Indian American my origins are Caribbean but I have some Indian origins and can offer a few answers from my experience. > Is this something that comes up in conversation among Indians? It starts casually with "where are you from?" and the questions get more invasive. > Do names tend to correlate to you caste? In India, yes it does family name is derived from caste. I had some friends adopt English names to get from under their caste names. So quite a few Johnsons, Smiths, Matthews, Pauls out there.
  • __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
    > It starts casually with "where are you from?" and the questions get more invasive. Whenever I mention to a team member that I was interviewing somebody for a position on our team, they always ask: "are they in India?" I had never really wondered why before.
  • paxys 4y ago
    > I had some friends adopt English names to get from under their caste names. So quite a few Johnsons, Smiths, Matthews, Pauls out there. There is an interesting history behind this. When Christian missionaries first arrived in India to spread their religion (in the late 1700s/1800s) they were initially unable to make much progress, but then found success among lower caste Indians by promising them a life of equality. So the vast majority of Christian converts in India are from these castes.
    • yardie 4y ago
      LOL. The first Indian American I met with an English surname I assumed was adopted. Then I met another with the same surname and assumed they were related.
      • AareyBaba 4y ago
        India also has a minority population of Anglo-Indians with British surnames. Williams, Jones, Norton, Barnes, Peters, O'Brien are names you can find in Mumbai and Kolkata and Chennai. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Indian_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Indian_people
• ummonk 4y ago
  Names in some regions of India correlate strongly with caste. Physical appearance can also be somewhat suggestive. There are however regions in India that have given up the use of last names are adopted new last names as a counter to casteism. Diet also tends to be somewhat indicative - in regions without high prevalence of vegetarianism, castes with high ritual status tend to be vegetarian. A barrier to casteism in the diaspora (and in higher class circles in cosmopolitan cities in India) is that an Indian from one region of India is unlikely to know the last names of Indians from other regions of India. Likewise with diet, many Brahmins from a vegetarian background adopt a non-vegetarian diet so it's really not a useful distinguisher. FWIW, I haven't perceived any casteism in tech companies, or anyone trying to ask my caste, and I have an ambiguous last name and eat a meat-heavy diet. There's a decent chance my experiences would be different if I worked in less elite tech companies (e.g. Cisco) rather than top startups / FAANGs.
  • terminal_d 4y ago
    > There are however regions in India that have given up the use of last names are adopted new last names as a counter to casteism. That's not true afaik. It's usually to cover up cousin marriages.
• wobbleblob 4y ago
  I thought people lose their caste when they cross the "black water".
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • ummonk 4y ago
    Yeah, going by the Smriti and Purana scriptures (which no one really follows), we're all polluted in America.
• FlyingSnake 4y ago
  There are various caste markers that casteist people use to identify the caste of the other person. Some of them include food preferences, accents (yes Indian languages also have different accents). I have seen that people can be casteist on both ends of a spectrum and it’s really hard to tell what marker of yours will be noted by the other party. I’ve seen that most people these days don’t try to pretend about hiding their caste, especially due to the mainstream anti-casteism movements. I personally don’t give a damn about people guessing my caste based on my rural accent and dietary habits. Edit: I must add that while I’ve seen discussions around caste privileges, but I’ve never been discriminated against based on my caste. The only discrimination I’ve faced is the standard discrimination against non-white peoples.
  • paiute 4y ago
    White americans do this too. Think ozarks. I know plenty of ridiculously smart people from this region, who if they talked about the food they ate or didn't work hard to extinguish their accents would probably not have jobs w/ coastal tech companies.
    • shapefrog 4y ago
      • onion2k 4y ago
        In my experience that's not true at all. People from all strata of society wore those red hats. It's not a signal of class or 'caste' or anything similar. I've never met anyone who'd open carry an assault rifle, but again, I doubt you can really tell much about their background like whether they're rich, poor, working class, elite, or whatever else from it.
        • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
          I've also never seen a work environment where you could open carry anything. (Though I have been to a church that had a small sign in the parking lot, asking that people not open carry in church. And no, that was not what you would consider to be a "redneck" church.)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• savrajsingh 4y ago
  In the Sikh way of life, first names are gender-neutral and everyone takes the surname Singh or Kaur (deleting the family last name) to specifically combat caste and gender discrimination. I'm speaking of the ideals of the faith here, I know in practice it's different - caste creeps back in, but the Sikh faith began in the late 1400's as a revolution against caste injustice and discrimination.
  • spaceman_2020 4y ago
    But isn’t caste still an issue in Sikhism? The very reason why Congress chose a lower caste Sikh chief ministerial candidate in the recent state elections?
  • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    "Singh" means "Lion", doesn't it? Is there any significance to "Kaur"?
    • savrajsingh 4y ago
      Kaur can be roughly translated as 'warrior princess.'
• nharmonia 4y ago
  Interestingly, I grew up in India but have no clue what my caste is. I could probably ask my parents and they'd know but it has never come up. Religion and sub ethnicity came up a lot more often while growing up. Funnily enough the only ones who have ever asked me about my caste were white people. I had always assumed the caste system was a thing of the past but looking at how it's still present even at companies in other countries, I imagine I just grew up in a bubble.
  • bergenty 4y ago
    I don’t think your experience is unique. Most people in my experience that grew up in Indian cities have very little interaction with caste.
  • isk517 4y ago
    Really not surprising considering the size and population of India, but I think the question of real importance is whether you where the one in the bubble or if there are just large bubbles in India were caste is still considered really important.
  • statguy 4y ago
    I am guessing that you are upper caste, which is why it didn't really come up. If you were lower caste it would have been a different story.
• pratik661 4y ago
  Paying people to alter historical genealogy records to hide caste origin was a fairly common practice in India, especially by new kings.
• manifestdissent 4y ago
  As a mixed-race individual, I don't face that question by default in the US. There are enough mixed people in the US that I don't get asked "where are you from." But as soon as they realize I'm half-Indian, they will hunt me down and ask me questions. They'll try to ask me my parent's names etc. (names signify caste) It's sad behavior. If it helps, here's a comment I wrote about my travels in India that might shed some light on the phenomena; - My travels in India have been revealing. Caste and class are inextricably linked, and a part of their daily vernacular. They're used as descriptors, "s/he's an X" (as if that means something to me!) And there's a huge coded language with inferences going on. It's a bit like saying, "s/he's jewish". Something that just doesn't happen in the US anymore (unless you're around rather unsavory folks) It's such a deep part of the milieu that I'm not surprised when I hear stories about it being exported. True story. I met this Indian woman while working out of the local hipster cafe. We had mutual friends. And ended up going out for lunch. On the way back, she started asking questions about my background. They grew intensely personal. Until she was interrogating me on the sidewalk. Unsatisfied with my responses, she just gave up & cut to the chase, "What's your mother's caste?" Last I checked, she moved to the States and is a contractor for a FAANG. She's hardly unique though. Indian people cannot stop asking questions. Where are you from? Where were you born? Why's your skin so pale? Where are your parents? What do they do? Where did you go to school? Why aren't you married? What's worse is that the society is insular. Even in a big city, few people socialize outside of, in descending order of proximity, family > friends of the family > classmates from elementary school > people from their high school > college > (perhaps, sometimes) work. I have met people who have gone through their entire life without ever meeting someone from a lower social class/caste. Casual greetings with people who clean their homes don't count. There's a lack of je ne sais quoi. A certain lack of creative energy. A kind of absence of the meeting of free radicals that sparks interesting ideas and art. Culturally, it's as if, the society has submerged itself in halon, determined to not let the sparks of creativity and genius spark. This problem is so acute that every free radical I've met has done their very best to move away as soon as humanly possible.
• thewileyone 4y ago
  From what I understand, there's a huge ledger of names that is used to identify castes. I've seen great performers never get any promotion and the useless becoming senior managers because of their caste. Pretty vicious.