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10 January 2024

8 min read

Untouchable: experiencing discrimination around the world

In America it’s in the headlines, while in India it continues to influence. Rahil Patel explores caste discrimination and finds out who helped craft constitutional protections for those affected.

Rahil Patel

Rahil is a former Hindu monk, and author of Found By Love. He is a Tutor and Speaker at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.

A group of protesters march behind a banner waving flags.

Supporters of the caste discrimination bill march.

Equality Labs

Cisco is a highly successful California based tech company. It has an annual revenue of $57 billion and boasts of many awards and prizes. Great Place to Work placed Cisco at number one on its 2023 list. But what has this to do with caste discrimination? Well, 33 per cent of Cisco’s 84,000 employees are of Indian origin and the company is struggling under a lawsuit currently upheld by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. The widely reported lawsuit is for caste discrimination against a Dalit (Untouchable) employee. The engineer has claimed to be paid less than his peers due to his low caste status.

Is this common? Well, the high caste Brahmin CEO of Google, Sunder Pichai (of Indian origin) has also faced allegations, raised by California based civil rights organisation, Equality Labs, of “caste bigotry” that is “running rampant” within his company.

“You can take an Indian out of India but you can never take India out of an Indian.” This was the sorrow filled saying I heard amongst well meaning fellow Indians whilst growing up in the United Kingdom. It usually cropped up when my Indian relatives and friends were confused by the appalling attitudes of other fellow Indians and trust me, it was quite common.

In October 2023, the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom vetoed a Bill to outlaw caste-based discrimination across his state. His decision was met with anger and rage from low caste Indian Dalits and from those who are fighting alongside them to ban discrimination amidst this rigid but ancient Hindu social structure.

It may surprise us in the west that the city of Seattle in Washington State was the first city in the USA to outlaw caste discrimination followed by Fresno in California.

But is this just a moral battle against an enemy that doesn’t really exist and a lame excuse to protest away with ‘Dalit Lives Matter?’ Or is there a tiny surreptitious fire carefully kindling away underneath the blinding smoke that mustn’t go unnoticed? After all, we are in the west…right? Of course we believe in equality…right?

The Swaminarayan Movement, America’s largest and most influential Hindu tradition saw the FBI raid it's temple compound in Robbinsville, New Jersey in 2021 for illegally importing Indians from India and illegally paying them below the national wage as well as confining them to the temple compound. The FBI raid rescued 200 workers who were largely from Dalit or Tribal castes.

When I was training in India to be a Hindu monk I remember recognising the harsh reality of the caste system in one single moment. One day, after I had finished a conversation with a friend in the temple compound I turned to head back to my room when I saw a young boy waving to me far away from the temple gates. I waved back and gestured to him to come in and talk but he stayed rooted to the spot. A little confused, I walked over and asked, “why don’t you come inside the compound?”

“I can’t.” He said,

“Why?”

“I’m a Dalit…I can’t even touch you!”

Thinking back over that mind numbing moment I can’t help imagine how hard it must have been for the woman in the Bible with the issue of blood who touched the hem of Jesus’s garment within the rigid culture of the time. The difference I guess is that Jesus turned to the broken hearted woman and healed her and then called her ‘daughter’ and defined her real identity as a result.

If the Dalit boy on the other hand came into the temple compound that day the security guards would have typically hit him with a long stick to drive him out of the temple gates. If he had touched me in the meantime I would have had to immediately go for a bath with all my clothes on and ensure that I didn’t touch any other human being or even a book or a pot on the way!

PM Modi’s comment has a pernicious and curious undertone. If Dharma is first then one is obliged to follow the caste system diligently.

Bhimrao. R Ambedkar was a brilliant economist and lawyer who studied at the London School of Economics. When his genius mind was called upon to draft the new constitution for independent India he was all too aware of how Hinduism was not so compatible with democracy. The idea of equality and dignity was evidently embedded into western institutions to his mind and Ambedkar knew very well that these ideas were founded on Judeo Christian principles, primarily, that all are created in the image of God. In other words, equal. Being a Dalit himself, Bhimrao knew the pitfalls of Hinduism’s caste system and the anarchical society it would create if the institutions left behind by the British were replaced with caste based ideas. As a result he crafted a constitution based upon Christian principles ensuring that all castes were allowed the opportunities and privileges from the state and its institutions by law. Sadly, although the state provided those privileges and protections by law in 1952 when the constitution came into effect, the society in India at large until this day does not. India exports it to the west as well.

When the current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave his speech on National Human Rights Day in India a few years ago he emphasised to the nation that Dharma needs to be held first before Human Rights… if Dharma is pursued, he insisted, Human Rights would follow. Dharma simply put, is to pursue one’s duty and righteousness as according to Hindu tradition.

At a quick glance here one is reminded of what Alexander Solzhenitsyn said during his Harvard Commencement Speech in 1978. He told his audience that it was time that the west upheld human obligation more than human rights. He had a valid point to state in a significantly individualistic culture which still prevails in the west but PM Modi’s comment has a pernicious and curious undertone. If Dharma is first then one is obliged to follow the caste system diligently.

It has taken an incredibly long time to carve away at the negatives of the caste system in India but it is nowhere near the end.

Krishna who is the most widely revered incarnation of God in the Hindu world told his disciple Arjuna to fight and kill his cousins and teachers on the battlefield of Kurukshetra as it was his Dharma to do so. As a Kshatriya warrior caste Arjuna was not meant to meditate in the forest but fight and kill, as is laid out quite clearly in the beginning chapter of the Bhagvad Gita scripture.

Although the Gita scripture is quite a complex context to unravel here, in today’s India and in large parts of the west placing Human Rights behind Dharma can be quite dangerous. It somewhat validates the violence towards those of other faiths and endorses a dislike to those of a lower caste.

The need for individual freedom from caste based social structures in India was introduced to the British Parliament by William Wilberforce and Charles Grant in 1793. Interestingly, it was the same year that the cobbler-turned missionary William Carey snuck into India against the rules of the British East India Company. The company knew that if missionaries entered the country they would battle against the unfair social order and upset the high caste Brahmins. And that would hinder their lucrative trade.

Wilberforce and Grant along with other devout Christians fought in Parliament for 20 years until in 1813 a law was passed to allow missionaries passage into India. These men and women of God began to transform the subcontinent and provide education and health care for all castes. Teaching and training the Indian mind that God created male and female first (in his image) and they then created a social order as per God’s guidance whilst cautiously deconstructing the idea of God creating a social order first and male and female after.

It has taken an incredibly long time to carve away at the negatives of the caste system in India but it is nowhere near the end.

Sadly, the caste hierarchy has infiltrated parts of the Christian faith in India too. Dalit Christians who are made in the image of God cannot enter certain churches.

What fascinates me however, is when a Dalit leaves India, in most cases, a lot of India leaves them! They are quite successful. In a society like India one is made to believe (in large part by the communities) that past life karma has destined the individual to be a Dalit and so one must continue to clean the gutters and carry away dead dogs. But when a Dalit enters into a land like the USA or the UK where notions of equality and freedom are based upon Christian values the thinking of that individual changes drastically. A Dalit engineer filing a case against his seniors is inconceivable in large parts of the Indian community in India.

But the issue of caste is not the domain of Hinduism alone. Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar is very much entrenched in a caste based order which is quite an irony as abuse of this social order was one of the main reasons Gautam Buddha established the faith.

Sadly, the caste hierarchy has infiltrated parts of the Christian faith in India too. Dalit Christians who are made in the image of God cannot enter certain churches and where they can in some parts they are not allowed to sit in the pews but on the floor, at the back.

Author E.M Forster lovingly did say that India is both a mystery and a muddle.

The late Christian and author John Stott wrote in his book The Cross that Jesus was facing the most excruciating pain in the garden of Gethsemane not because of the cross and its horrific nails but because Christ was about to be touched by sin. God readily touches us even though we are untouchable.

The relentless work by William Carey, Wilberforce, Grant and other Indian reformers began to change the Indian mindset primarily by introducing the notion of love and freedom at every level of Indian society. Do we have the will to continue respectfully that fight?

Article

Belief

Comment

Wildness

15 January 2025

7 min read

In Search of Wild Gods: Nick Cave and Tom Holland in conversation

On unexpected and remarkable connections in a time of change.

Roger Standing

Roger is a theologian and author with a particular interest in the relationship between faith and culture.

A view of an in-conversation on a stage, with a video screen above showing a close up.

x.com/readalanread

“I’ve got to ask this, the opening lyric of one of your most famous songs says, ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God.’ Do you now?”

A nervous, but anticipant chuckle, rippled around the audience. How would the world-famous rock star answer?

With his band the Bad Seeds, Nick Cave, was in the middle of a world tour having completed the European leg with two sell-out nights at the O2 in November.

“I don’t know.” He said.

“I don’t sort of test God. I do pray, but I don’t pray for things.”

It was a cold January evening, a Thursday, and actually freezing outside in central London. But inside the hall 800 souls had turned out to hear a conversation billed as In Search of Wild Gods. A not-so-subtle nod to Cave’s critically acclaimed recent album, Wild God.

Organised by the online news and opinion website UnHerd, and hosted by its editor Freddie Sayers, Cave was joined in the conversation by The Rest is History podcaster, Tom Holland. Two men who on the surface would appear to have little in common and exist in different worlds.

Sayers confessed that, though a non-Christian himself, he found something ‘enticing’ about his guests. Especially so in the way they think deeply about the biggest questions of life, faith, values and personal experience.

The conversation was candid. Cave spoke movingly about how in the structure and liturgy of a twelfth century church he had discovered the purpose-built place for his ‘existential sorrow’. He shared how he and his wife Susie were quietly prayed for by an old lady at a communion service and had experienced ‘a deeply, deeply moving movement from a kind of inner despair to a sort of relief’.

For Cave there is something ancient, something beautiful, something that evokes a profound sense of humility that this form of worship immerses and buries him in. Then it is the Christian story that pulls everything into focus.

“I’m a storyteller, it’s the way I see the world. I see the world naturally, symbolically, poetically and so the story of Christ fits in there very well.”

And the album Wild God charts the movement in his journey towards joy.

“I called all around me, said have mercy on me please

For joy. For joy. For joy. For joy. For joy.”

Tom Holland’s story is different. Having grown into an atheist who considered the supernatural to be ‘essentially nonsense’ he happily became a writer of vampire fiction. However, as he progressed into writing history, he realised that to properly understand the world of the Romans or Vikings you have to imaginatively enter their supernatural world. If you don’t, it doesn’t make sense.

First writing about the ancient world, and then about the beginnings of Islam, he realised how alien they seemed to his own core instincts. His journey had begun. He was discovering the fruit of having been brought up in a society and culture shaped by Christianity for a thousand years.

Writing his best seller Dominion only further deepened this conviction. The realisation that his belief of every human being endued with an inherent dignity and value rests on the Genesis story of God creating men and women in his own image was a revelation. If this biblical framing is lost then human life is even more vulnerable to exploitation, manipulation or extermination. As some radical voices proposed during the pandemic, ‘humans are the real virus!’

Then, fear driven experiences added a further dimension to his growing convictions. While filming in Iraq, having previously entered no-man’s land between the Kurdish and ISIS forces, he entered an Armenian church ISIS had trashed. The one unbroken object was a framed picture of the Annunciation and the Angel Gabriel speaking to Mary. In that moment he felt the rush of something very strange and felt the presence of an angel. This was something of a surprise. He reflected:

“… realising that if I could seriously think that I could experience an angel it was kind of an amazing experience. I would have never in my wildest dreams imagined that I could literally be able to believe in an angel, and for a brief moment I did believe that I could experience an angel … I know what it's like to believe this and it is incredible.”

For Holland, allowing himself to consider that the world may be stranger than he thought was a game changer. Having been diagnosed with cancer during the pandemic he believes a prayer for divine help at the site of an apparition of the Virgin Mary was answered. It left him with the bemused thought, ‘this is brilliant I'm a Protestant Atheist who is contemplating the possibility of a Marian intervention.’

When Sayers asked Holland and Cave whether they think about themselves as Christians, Holland was clear, ‘I do’. He has come to own that his deep-seated ‘gut convictions’ have no objective justification outside of Christian faith. Added to this his profound experience of the supernatural is Christian and he has no experience of any other way of approaching the divine. He admitted that even allowing himself to contemplate the possibility of faith felt a little illicit at the time. Yet he realised opening himself up to the possibility made his life happier and more interesting. Even so, he still does not believe in life after death.

Cave was more circumspect. He didn’t feel the need to call himself a Christian or not a Christian.

“… but I have to say there are moments in church where this feeling is washing over me and I'm thinking about these claims that are being made, and I can kind of believe it. It feels like there is something that is both truthful and imaginative … that is more beautiful than rational truth and feels like something that I really truly can believe in. That doesn't mean that I feel that way all the time, but I do feel that really seeping into my life more and more and I guess this is the beauty of the ritual of going to church.”

Sayers wondered whether we are at a ‘change moment’ in Western culture. With past certainties falling away, political upheavals and technological changes he wondered whether we were at the beginning of momentous shifts? ‘It does feel’ he suggested, ‘like this is a time where things are being revisited at a really fundamental level and people are searching.’

Holland was not so sure. He saw the rapid fading of Christianity in the West and the subsequent fading of the ‘muscle memory of values’ as pointing in the other direction. Atheists at least took Christianity seriously, but he saw a rising generation with no understanding or interest in the stories that underpin our culture.

He was happy to identify himself a Christian and sees this as being inextricably linked with the cultural values that have shaped contemporary Britain. Along the way he hopes that others might be provoked by his example to undertake a similar journey to his own.

Cave, likewise, didn’t think there was a ‘crisis of meaning’ in the world at large. He was more concerned with what he saw as a ‘general demoralisation’ going on in the West as a result of what was happening in the world. A kind of flattening of expectations, which led him to be concerned about what might rise up on the back of it.

Yet he sensed there was a change, a ‘quite remarkable’ and fundamental change. Given the kind of platform UnHerd is, he observed:

“… you've invited me along to talk about my religious ideas no one would have done that five years ago.”

And maybe that’s it.

As a musician and poet, through personal tragedy, sorrow and searching, Cave has insights to share about ‘life, the universe and everything’.

As an historian, Holland’s reflections and personal experience have led him to make, what for him, have been unexpected and remarkable connections.

Truth be told, Cave and Holland stand in a long line of artists and academics, public figures and popular heroes who have had similar experiences and journeys. Individuals who have made the same kind of connections and sought to share them with whoever wanted to listen. From the author G.K. Chesterton to journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, and the scientist Francis Collins who led the Human Genome Project to physicist John Polkinghorne the list is a long one.

Maybe what is happening in our culture is the beginning of an opening up of new possibilities in our public conversations.

The wars and the rumours of wars. The climate crisis. Fuel poverty. The ascendancy of a different brand of political leadership offering a very different view of the world. The existential threat that rapidly advancing technology typified by AI offers, accompanied by the prospect of unimaginable and hopeful advances. All of these trends, and an ever-lengthening list of others, promise a disruption to the patterns of life with which we have become familiar and comfortable.

Maybe this disruption is the portent of revisiting the more fundamental matters of our existence.

Maybe, in future, we will look back to Cave and Holland as contemporary prophets whose reflections paved the way forward. If there are cracks in our old inherited order, maybe …

“There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.”

(‘Anthem’ by Leonard Cohen, 1992)

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