Caste is not just some arbitrary marker. It dictates quiet a few things in your life - like what dialect you speak, your diet, who you marry, which part of the city/town/village you hail from, and even your politics. So for an Indian, identifying someone's caste is pretty easy.
Which gives me pause. German speaking countries have a wide range of dialects, even regional. I am able to tell a guy from Vienna from someone from Tyrol. Upper Bavaria from Lower Bavaria, Berlin from Hamburg. There are older people who can tell from Bavarian county and which mountain valley you are. The latter becoming more difficult, so, with people moving around. Just imagining to use these differences to discriminate people gives me the chills, because it would so damn easy to do. And also, at least superficially, maybe even legal.
If you're raised in India, it is relatively easy to determine someone's general (varna) caste and specific (jati) caste from their familial name(s) and/or physical appearance. You can pick these things up by osmosis from adults (my case), through being taught, or simply through caste-influenced culture. It's quite complicated, and I'm not an expert. You don't even have to be Hindu to be a part of the caste system - Muslims and Christians may retain a familial name that is a marker of caste; in some cases, even without a name as a marker someone who knows of your particular community may be able to tell what caste a non-Hindu is simply by knowing what community you're from and being able to tell what caste that community is historically.
> it is relatively easy to determine someone's general (varna) caste and specific (jati) caste from their familial name(s) and/or physical appearance.
Is this because people from a specific caste tend to concentrate in a specific geographic region?
I've learned as a Westerner that there's no model I've grown up with that's really the best for making sense of India as someone who wasn't born there. What makes the most sense to me is what an Indian colleague told me - "think of it as the United States of Europe -- that many languages, that much diversity, that much complexity and problems."
No, not geographic. Unlike ethnicity or color, the caste system is racial discrimination based on profession.
In old Indian kingdoms, there were warriors, priests, teachers, business people, janitors etc.
The caste system basically puts a social value on each of these with priests (who were also teachers) being at the top.
The problem is, you couldn't just choose to be a priest.. or a warrior.. or a janitor. You were born into the profession. You were a janitor because your father was a janitor and his father before him.
Discriminating based on caste for the purposes of education, work, government services, etc.. has been outlawed in the Indian constitution since 1948. It still happens, because people are people, but less so with each generation.
Have you managed to figure out what kinds of things you do to pick out caste, or is it all subconscious? I ask because I have literally no idea how you’d tell; I’ll have to ask my parents (born and raised in India) if they can because if they do have that ability I’ve certainly never figured it out. Then again, the only reason I hear them talking about someone’s caste is if that person ran into issues because of it…
Personally, I would engaging with the caste system for any purpose other than to destroy it is very wrong. I've seen plenty of upper-caste people assume someone's caste based on their appearance. They may have been wrong, but I fail to see how that is relevant, as I'm not justifying or explaining, just describing. If your particular objection is to the word 'determine', then I think we're getting hopelessly bogged down in semantics.
How long do you think it would take, as an American, to figure out of someone is from New York, Boston, or Alabama? You'd know practically the moment they opened their mouth.
Yeah, it might take you longer to figure out if someone was from Florida or California, but that would probably come out relatively quickly in how they talk about beaches.
Humans group and identify others (often wrongly) really quickly.
I don’t think this is a great comparison. Since I’m American, I’m going to pick something else that would be a bit more foreign: I can “tell” if a person is Scottish or Irish from their accent, but I have absolutely no idea how to know if someone is of a certain caste. I could meet up with a carbon copy of myself and not be able to discern their caste because I have zero knowledge of why I “look like” the one I belong to.
I'm more surprised 67% of Dalits would have coworkers knowing their caste. Can someone give context on how this happens?