Ravikant Kisana on privilege and the uncomfortable truth of development

ask: watthat let you Write ‘Meet Savannah People‘? one: Part of this comes from my life experiences, but also because I didn’t grow up in a Savarna household. My mother is a Scheduled Caste and my father is an OBC, an inter-caste marriage. Neither family has intergenerational literacy and a tradition of so-called high culture. But they were immigrants from Punjab. They raised their children in Calcutta. So I was exposed to a world that was not mine. As I grew up, I realized there was a world around me, but I couldn’t access it. That world always seemed so much bigger than mine. It seemed to be packed with very interesting people talking about books, culture, art, and “higher things.” When I look at my family and the people around me, my concerns are very mundane, very existential. And as a young man…, I really wanted to escape the orbit of that world. Over time, I began to realize that much of the world was coded around politics and representations of caste. This is Savannah’s world. In this world, they decide what is legal, what is talkable, what is real and what is false. No matter how hard I try, I can’t fit into that world… I ended up going into academia, into cultural studies, and doing quite a bit of cultural anthropology as a method. I learned that when it comes to caste, sociology and anthropology departments in India are filled with these books and studies that center on Dalit communities, tribal communities, and even OBC communities. A lot of very interesting work has been done in this area. But Savannah’s world...not a lot of anthropological work was done there. Part of the reason is because it’s so inaccessible. For example, it would be easier to go to urban slums to do research, do fieldwork, and interview people. You can’t walk into a gated community in Gurgaon or Bangalore and try to do this… But more importantly, it’s like an academic blind spot, where there are all these great writers, thinkers, intellectuals in civil society, in the media, in academia, and they’re all writing about caste, but they’re not writing about their own castes and communities. It’s as if their eyes are always looking outwards, rather than themselves. I think this was the culmination of many different threads that led me into this space where I began writing and theorizing about Savannah. It started with articles for various digital media platforms and I was trying to do a very loose series called “Be Like Savannah”… One of the articles, “Date Like Savannah,” I thought I wrote a very non-controversial article. This is just a little bit about how caste, dating, and intimacy overlap. I got a lot of backlash. A massive campaign was launched on social media. I was called all kinds of names. It had an impact on my career and the university where I worked. I had to bear some consequences for this. The backlash also made me realize that this was actually a very meaningful conversation. This made me more determined to write this article. ask: yesWho are you Now take this book with you Approximately your domain name space. How do you navigate it? one: This is very challenging. The beginning of the book is very close to a memoir as I ground myself and my gaze in the book. As you get deeper into it, it becomes more social. This is not just a book about caste. It’s also a book about this period…from the late 90s, early 2000s right up to about Covid, 2020, 2022, because in this period the greater consensus is that India as a story is doing well, we are emerging, this is our rise to a superstar superpower. Everywhere it’s like you can’t say anything negative, or you can’t say the emperor has no clothes. Because then they’ll yell at you and call you a naysayer. I try to theorize this in the book through the idea of ​​a glass floor. So if I’m below the glass floor and what you call the Shining India story is happening above the glass floor in Savannah’s world, well, that world looks very different to us… But it almost comes at a cost. My academic career took a hit. It’s almost like you’re always walking with a target on your back. Any right-wing reactionary group could take the title of the book itself and create all sorts of rhetoric around it. So what certainly comes with it is a challenging and heavy responsibility… I would also like to point out that Savannah also gave us a lot of understanding and love. A lot of people have read this book and come back to me, not out of anger or pain, but out of some sense of, okay, I’m going to self-reflect now, I’m going to look at myself. ask: Iof a great historical moment you captured from modern India, but you also make visible a young and modern audience use their lingo. one: When I was in college in the early 2000s, we were told that the 21st century was the century of Asia, India, and China… There are jobs, the tech industry is booming, and real estate is booming. Hollywood is taking notice. Through every popular narrative imaginable. It looks like we are rising. We should reach superpower status by 2020 because this is what APJ Abdul Kalam told us. This date has now been moved back to 2047... Forget being a superpower when 2020 rolls around, it’s one of the most challenging years for the Republic. It started with the Shaheen Bagh protests and then moved into COVID. That motivation completely collapsed. We, on the other hand, seem to have emerged and we start asking ourselves the question, where did we go wrong? I think our mistake was that for 20 to 25 years, the steering wheel of this story was given to a very specific group of Savannah elites who didn’t even quite understand their own blind spots. So with this book I try to explain why the Indian story doesn’t work, why it ends up replicating these super-privileged enclaves while creating a system where our cities are unlivable, our policies don’t work, the political and existential crisis, the climate change crisis, etc., all exacerbated by all the fruits of this great success story that we thought we were going to get, but we haven’t received yet. I tried to answer some of these questions without trying to pathologize them as “this is what happens in India”. The system is broken. Too often, the analysis is hidden behind these general statements – “everything is broken, everything is corrupt”. No, what does broken mean? Who is responsible? Who are the beneficiaries of such a system? What are their political views? What is their social and cultural inner life? I think in this book I tried to connect those two things. This is not just a description of Savannah, nor is it just a book about caste. It’s about those two things and how they intersect with policymaking and the larger trajectory of this moment that we’re going through in India, but we seem to be kind of squandering it. So, in many ways, this is also a book about the tragedy of a postcolonial country, a country where all parts of the country are functioning and promising themselves that it will transcend itself and reach higher, but are unable to do so. ask: timeThis is so Said a lot should say in class, In the conversation in the living room, In opinion articles. one: Wherever there is production of knowledge, wherever there is distribution of knowledge, there is almost no caste diversity of any kind. As a result, the structure becomes unaware of itself. Many well-meaning Savarna intellectuals, thinkers, progressives often end up misdiagnosing and misunderstanding what they themselves are replicating. Criticism therefore becomes right versus left, progressive versus conservative. However, if you look at it from a caste formation perspective, in many cases conservatives and progressives tend to be people in the same WhatsApp family group… Our perception of caste is fundamentally through narratives of oppression, through ideas of pain and exclusion. Don’t get me wrong, these need to be documented and discussed over and over endlessly. But the system through which it mediates and operates is the Savarna system. There is a sadness in this. There’s a kind of absurdity in that… One way of dealing with the sadness and tragedy of caste and its absurdity is to also rely a little bit on humor, because otherwise it becomes too heavy, too intense, and you can’t process it. So it’s also an ode to a certain dysfunction in society. This is the code that causes an error when the system is running. You see all these attempts to write it and correct it and do the right thing in xyz, but the code is somewhere else. This system is operating on a different level… My attempt in writing this book was in the hope that Savannahs would see themselves a little bit, know themselves a little bit, so that they could understand themselves a little bit and thus better understand the system that they were creating.