Manu Joseph: The paradox of being both upper-caste and dark-skinned in a deeply unequal society

A few days ago, he was in the news after decades because he quit commentary stating that he was constantly belittled for his dark skin. He was accusing Indians, so everything he said rang true. He said powerful people tried to hide him from the camera, they were reluctant to invite him to the toss. It was conveyed to him that he was not “presentable.”

When he opened to the media about this, he said that his life was always this way, even when he was a young cricket star. He was often mistaken for a poor person and treated shoddily.

By experience, I know that this may not be the whole truth behind why he was quitting commentary, but nothing he said about how people reacted to his general appearance is shocking.

It disgusts Indians, though. We have for long been disgusted at how colour-conscious India is. So you wonder who exactly discriminates this way. The fact is, it is most of us, including the class that is disgusted.

So, the outrage is not a process of self-improvement. It is just compensation for the self-awareness that we will persist with this behaviour that first associates the colour of the skin with poverty, and treats those who are clubbed as the underclass with no respect. An unsung fact of Indian mediocrity in every walk of life, from dentistry to news anchoring, is that it is populated with very ‘presentable’ people.

Sivaramakrishnan was lucky that his genius was in sport and not in the arts where there are a lot of pious souls who say all the right things but who are gatekeepers of class. Of all the things people do, sports is the most objective.

But even in that sphere, hailing from privilege makes all the difference. This was especially so in the 80s. And Sivaramakrishnan, for his time, did come from the right home, the right club. Which brings us to the most intriguing part of his lament. He is an upper-caste person who in his hour of catharsis is speaking the language we normally associate with victims of discrimination, not beneficiaries of inequality.

So, some people may not be so moved by his plight. But the fact is that it is worse to be dark-skinned and upper-caste in India. For what it meant was that he appeared downtrodden while belonging to a group that traditionally treated the downtrodden poorly.

In a society, marginalized people have one comfort even though they are pushed aside for how they look, what they are and what label has been given to them. They are still among their own. Everyone around them shares their plight. Also, in an increasingly unequal nation, the high and the lucky are accelerating away from those who are left behind. As a result, the underclass have very little interaction with the upper classes. But an upper-caste is stuck with his own. If he does not look like the rest of his flock, it is a perpetual torment.

When he was 14, he went to Chepauk stadium in Chennai to bowl at the nets to the Indian team, and a player, whom he didn’t name, asked him to clean his shoes, mistaking him for support staff.

Something like this commonly occurs to Indians when they holiday in the West. At least thrice, I have been mistaken for a driver, not only because I have the habit of standing still on a pavement doing nothing, but because of how I look. But is this so tragic? At most, it is annoying if you were with a woman you wished to impress, but in retrospect always funny.

After PEN gave me an award meant for “writers of colour who have been published in the United States,” in my written acceptance of the award, which was read aloud by my publisher during the ceremony, I told them they should know my colour before I took their money—“it’s the colour of good cappuccino.”

But Sivaramakrishnan probably never found all this funny. Once, he wept at his own birthday cake because someone joked that it was chocolate to match his colour. A lifetime of ridicule made him sensitive not only to his skin, but to his whole appearance that he felt was rigged against him, a human form that he implied would have been respected more by his own community if it had fairer skin.

The only time his caste was invoked was when writers, usually upper-caste writers who were attempting on-behalf-of-the-downtrodden essays, lamented that the Indian cricket team was dominated by upper-castes. So he was, theoretically, a privileged man in an unequal nation. Yet, he felt like one of the deprived.

The dark-skinned in India are at a particular disadvantage compared to the dark in other regions of the world for a particular reason. I remember the bafflement of an African who lived in Mumbai.

He said that when he would stand on a railway platform, when the train arrived, from the first compartment to the last, people dangling from doorways would scream “kaalu.” His bafflement was that most people who screamed were dark themselves. He also struggled, like Muslims, to find a home in a city that simpleton intellectuals often refer to as cosmopolitan, which it never was. But he was not as wounded as Sivaramakrishnan because he had a strong community that did not hold his colour against him since they were all his colour.

People of the same race and caste in India come in different colours. So there is the cruelty of discrimination but without the fellowship of the dark-skinned.

The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us.’