Harvard Grad Student Union Contract Bolsters Advocacy Against Caste Discrimination
The tumultuous contract negotiations between Harvard University and its graduate student union in 2021 culminated in one strike and the threat of a second. Though the union conceded its headline demand for third-party Title IX arbitration before the contract was ratified in November, it won pay increases and a legal fund for harassment claims in return. But in addition to these contentious changes, the contract made a historic step: Harvard became the first Ivy League university to have a formal anti-caste discrimination policy.
Harvard is part of a growing list of universities that include caste as a category in their nondiscrimination policies, with one of the latest being the California State University system. Among some Indian and Indian-American activists, the concession by Harvard is a symbolic win in a growing anti-casteism movement in higher education — and perhaps a harbinger of more to come.
The target of their activism is caste oppression, a system of social hierarchy based on hereditary castes. The term is most often associated with the Hindu caste system in India, which consists of four main, religiously-derived caste groups — Brahmins, the highest caste group, followed by Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras.
Located beneath this four-tiered caste hierarchy are Dalits, historically referred to as “untouchables,” and Adivasis, indigenous people in South Asia. Both groups bear the brunt of religious, legal, and social caste oppression in India. By some accounts, there are approximately 200 million Dalits in India, about 15 percent of the country’s total population.
Kartikeya Bhatotia, a Harvard Kennedy School student who identifies as part of the Bahujan group — an umbrella term for Dalits and other marginalized castes — says that caste “pervades every sociological system” in India.
“The way we live, the way people interact with each other, the way they marry, intergenerational wealth, who does what work, the division of labor, is highly, highly correlated with what caste you’re from,” Bhatotia says.
Suraj M. Yengde, an associate at the South Asian Institute at Harvard who wrote the 2019 book “Caste Matters,” says his status as a Dalit followed him to Harvard. He recalls feeling excluded by friends of friends, being “yelled at” by students, or having his research or academic pedigree questioned — experiences he says were tinted with casteism.
“Caste comes across as a denigration, as an identity of shame, as something that provokes violence,” Yengde says.
Kanishka Elupula, a Dalit Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology who researches caste, says that while he has not experienced specific instances of overt casteism in America, he has heard people betray their casteist sentiments when discussing the policy of “reservation” — an Indian system of legal quotas to increase access to public sector employment and public education for marginalized castes.
“There you can see the anger and hatred that people have for lower-caste communities, or at least for the policies of reservation,” he says. “When you support these, you can feel the hostility.”
Aparna Gopalan, a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology and a member of the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Automobile Workers’ bargaining committee in 2021, says that at the beginning of contract negotiations, committee members were brainstorming new categories to include in the contract’s non-discrimination protections. She proposed caste.
Gopalan, who describes herself as coming from a “privileged caste,” says she was aware of the “danger of reproducing something” like a savior complex, and she stresses the importance of “taking the lead” from experienced activists in the space.
Nevertheless, she says she was “determined to not be silent” and that her role as the only South Asian person on the bargaining committee positioned her to make a difference in the union context.
“I haven’t ever been the person who primarily works on caste, and I don’t need to claim that for myself either, but just to not be silent seems important,” Gopalan says.
Yengde says he only learned of the caste protection after the contract had been ratified. He says he felt he had been excluded from the HGSU’s advocacy efforts, describing the moment as “a little bit heartbreaking.”
“I was never in the loop,” he says.
At the time, in a post on his Instagram story, he asked “How can you exclude the one proud Ambedkarite on campus who’s been in the corridors for longer and has been actively lobbying for caste-sensitive policies?” referring to followers of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the Indian civil rights leader who pioneered anti-caste activism in the 20th century.
Gopalan says the union did not systematically reach out to Dalit activists and students or specifically exclude any, but rather relied on connections from members of the bargaining committee who could speak to the various issues on the negotiating table.
“There’s an open call for faculty to just step in and help on all sorts of issues,” she says. “I’m really glad that Dr. Yengde is willing to help, and we invite his help.”
Despite feelings excluded, Yengde says he is happy the protection was included in the contract, and he calls on Harvard to implement further “proactive policies” to fund research into caste, increase scholarships and outreach to Dalit potential applicants, and hire Dalit faculty.
Awareness around caste has grown in America, especially after the publication of Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 bestselling book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” which compared American racism to India’s caste system and social hierarchy in Nazi Germany. But owing largely to a small proportion of South Asians and Indians in America — most of whom come from privileged castes — research and reporting about the experiences of caste-oppressed Indians in America has only begun to emerge.
According to a 2018 report by Equality Labs, an anti-caste oppression advocacy group, more than 40 percent of Dalits in America have reported experiencing caste discrimination in educational settings, and two-thirds reported the same in workplaces. Equality Labs describes the report as the “first comprehensive survey that details the extent to which Caste has embedded itself in the United States.”
Pranay Patil, a Dalit student at the Harvard Kennedy School, says that he has not personally experienced caste hostility at Harvard, but that he was surprised by the lack of dialogue about caste among Indian students at the University, which he attributes to the low population of marginalized-caste students.
He says the contract’s nondiscrimination clause will be a “very solid tool in order to really attract students from marginalized backgrounds.”
Bhatotia says that the nondiscrimination protection was a “welcome move,” but only a first step.
“Representation matters, and until we have some institutional checks in place that ensure there’s a commitment to justice, this will not be enough,” Bhatotia says.
For his part, Bhatotia serves as a co-chair of the Casteless Caucus, created late last spring, which he says will mobilize to promote “caste sensitivity” among faculty and admissions officers at the Kennedy School.
He also highlighted the work of Equity in Policy Education, a group started at HKS to increase representation for people from marginalized castes and prepare them for public policy graduate programs.
“We need to move into other universities as well,” Bhatotia says. “We need this awareness to be omnipresent across all institutions of learning.”
Correction: October 14, 2022:
A previous version of this article misstated Suraj M. Yengde's current title at Harvard. He is an associate at the school's South Asian Institute.
— Staff writer Elias J. Schisgall can be reached at elias.schisgall@thecrimson.com.