Confronting Privilege

This chapter, in its attempt to reverse the focus on inequality, from the lives of the oppressed to the affairs of the privileged, examines the ‘other side’ of the story of the Indian caste system and its complex practices. While caste studies have made a profound impact on studying inequality and social stratification in Indian society, a majority of those accounts, while addressing caste inequality from its lower end, mostly through a top-down approach, abandoned the privileged caste positions—a potential site of scrutinising domination—that functioned as the sources of power and control in the reproduction of caste inequalities. By bringing privilege to the centre of analysing caste, the chapter hopes to examine the ‘general category’ (the group of people who fall outside of caste-based reservation in education and employment), which, in other words, is reckoned for the identity of the upper castes in its administrative enunciation in the context of affirmative action and reservation. The chapter also makes an attempt to trace the practice of identifying caste in the ‘visual field’ of ordinary encounters of social life—how caste is seen and sensed—with reference to the informal sites of higher education in India. In order to enter these specific settings on the equivocations of caste as processes of domination and manifestations of cultural capital, the chapter hopes to enter the domain of privilege, which is hitherto unmarked as a potential site to study inequality.