The Savarna Delusion.

The social media comments on my earlier post (here’s the Facebook link, and here’s the LinkedIn one) have been… revealing in ways I genuinely did not expect. On every platform, across every demographic, from people I have known for decades to strangers who have never interacted with a Dalit in their lives, the responses poured in, and I truly thought I was prepared. I believed that by now, after everything I have lived and seen, I had reached a point where nothing my own community said about caste could surprise me. I thought I had accumulated enough life experience, loved and married across enough boundaries (yes, including Dalit), travelled enough, read enough, worked enough, had enough friends from enough worlds, to not be shocked by what Savarnas think.

But I was wrong. Spectacularly, humiliatingly wrong.

And maybe that humiliation is the real story here.

Not my friend’s iPhone.
Not the satire.
Not even the poem that sparked the whole thing.

The real story is that I, an English-speaking, urban, über-educated, Maharashtrian Brahmin man, who has spent nearly his entire life wrapped in the cashmere shawl of privilege, actually believed my community had evolved. I thought we had moved, if not very far, then at least marginally out of the swamp. I thought we had, by now, agreed on the basic truth that caste exists, caste harms, caste privileges, caste must be dismantled, and until it is dismantled, reservations must remain.

I thought only fringe WhatsApp scholars denied caste.

And then I posted one satirical piece about meeting a Dalit friend with an iPhone.

Immediately, as if by magic, savarnas, and Brahmins in particular, crawled out of every intellectual gutter imaginable to insist that caste is over, that reservations should end after two generations, that Dalits who have “made it” should give up their rights voluntarily, that poor Brahmins are actually the oppressed majority who deserve quotas, that affirmative action should be economic, not social, that everyone must now be treated “equally”, that historical violence cannot dictate present justice, and that they, personally, have never hurt a Dalit so they have nothing to feel guilty about.

These are not fools.
These are not uneducated villagers.

These are my people.
My classmates.
My colleagues.
My neighbours.

People who can quote Dawkins and Sagan and still believe caste is an outdated superstition we cling to for political drama. People who teach their children evolution but cannot apply an inch of that logic to social hierarchy. People who know the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell but think caste is just an administrative inconvenience.

And then came the gems.

One earnest gentleman declared that Dalits abroad never beg for reservations, so clearly the problem is in India, not in caste. I asked him, gently, why he thought there were no reservations in the US.

Instead of saying the obvious (that white Americans do not recognise caste because it is not their system), he seemed bewildered and replied that he genuinely did not understand the question.

The idea that reservations exist because of oppression and disappear where oppression disappears was simply not available to him as a thought. Not out of malice. Not even out of denial. Simply out of conceptual illiteracy.

And, of course, the familiar chorus rose on schedule.
“I feel no guilt because I have personally never hurt a Dalit.”
“I worked hard for everything I have.”
“I never used my caste for anything.”
“Merit should be the only criterion.”

As though merit floats in the sky like a helium balloon.
As though it is not shaped by centuries of stacked advantage passed down like family heirlooms.
As though personal innocence erases structural benefit.
As though caste is a matter of individual ethics and not collective architecture.

And then, inevitably, someone asked, “What is your proof that Brahmins oppressed Dalits for three thousand years?”

Proof.
As though caste is a cold case requiring a forensic lab.

Should I have sent him Romila Thapar, Jaffrelot, Omvedt, census records, Manusmriti, colonial archives, freedom-struggle and post-independence Parliamentary debates, temple-entry movements, land ownership patterns, court judgments, police records, Constituent Assembly proceedings, even just Ambedkar’s “Annihilation of Caste”?

Or maybe I should have simply told him to step outside and look around.

Look at the surnames on the nameplates in his own building.
Look at the surnames in the ICS and IAS rosters.
Look at the surnames of judges.
Look at the surnames of police commissioners.
Look at the surnames in Parliament and Legislative Assemblies and Councils.
Look at the surnames of national awardees.
Look at surnames of the feted artists, writers, and performers, even in sport.
Look at the surnames of highly paid journalists and anchors.
Look at the surnames of people after whom we have named roads and bridges.
Look at the surnames of CEOs, vice-chancellors, editors, columnists, cultural icons, vice-presidents of companies, and moral custodians of the nation.

If he wants proof, it is tattooed across every pillar of Indian society.

We have a token Dalit President to wave at foreign delegations.
We have a Prime Minister who claims OBC status conveniently created decades after he was born (but then, let us not get into what else he claims)
And… that’s kind of about it.

And behind these symbolic dances, the actual machinery of power sits firmly, predictably, comfortably in savarna hands.

Proof?
Look at the country.
In fact, just open the newspaper and look at the news.
If you cannot see it, that blindness is the proof.

But here is the part that embarrasses me most.
I am a Brahmin writing this post.

A Chitpavan, Puneri, English-speaking, urban Brahmin.
A man from the very community that invented, sanctified, industrialised, and benefited from the caste system.
A man who discovered caste only in the most second-hand ways, through the people he loved or lived with or listened to.
A man whose understanding comes from glimpses, not lived experience.
A man who still has blind spots the size of entire districts.
A man who still stumbles, centres himself, misunderstands, and overestimates his own progressiveness.

I know exactly how ridiculous this looks.
Another Brahmin lecturing India about caste.

It is awkward.
It is uncomfortable.
It is faintly shameful.

But I also know this:
Dalits do not need me to speak for them.
Brahmins need me to speak to them.

I am not here to represent Dalits.
I do not have the right, the authority, or the experience.

I am here to talk to Brahmins.
I am here to hold up a mirror to my own people.
I am here to embarrass, confront, provoke, unsettle, disturb.

If Brahmins will not listen to Dalits, then the least I can do is tell Brahmins that they are making fools of themselves.

Because if we truly believe we are the intellectual vanguard of Indian civilisation, the custodians of culture and reason and refinement, then we have done a spectacular job of proving the opposite. We have taken centuries of accumulated advantage and turned it into entitlement. We have taken the moral legacy of reformers like Gokhale, Agarkar, Ranade, Karve, Bapat, Sane, Amte, Narlikar, Dabholkar, and turned it into excuses, deflection, resentment, and fragile pride.

And we have built, brick by brick, every modern right-wing movement in this country.
The educated, cultured, well-read Puneri Brahmin has been the nervous system of the Indian right for decades.

So if there is anyone I am qualified to criticise, it is not Dalits.
It is Brahmins. More so, the Puneri variety.
My own.

The truth is simple. Brutal, but simple.

Caste is not disappearing.
Reservations are not obsolete.
And the most educated savarnas are not anywhere close to understanding either.

That is the real satire.
That is the real tragedy.