Caste and Race: Mechanisms of Dehumanization

This essay explores the dehumanizing effects of caste and race, as two separate but interlinked social phenomena. The method followed is to analyze the issue of caste and race in diverse social contexts and bring out the similarities in the institutionalization of discrimination in the two practices. I do this by tracing the contours of racism and ‘casteism’, as historical experiences. While racism, as an experience, cuts across a host of geographical and temporal spectrum, caste is a phenomenon obtainable mainly in the Indian subcontinent and Diasporas. My argument is: despite the limited geographical spread of the latter and the wider theatre occupied by the former, the contours of the two were/are similar. The dehumanizing effects they had on the ‘object’ populations were equally demonic.

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