Caste Matters

by Suraj Yengde

We measure ourselves through someone else’s perception. This self is charted through a constructed vision—even we have not imagined ourselves in the form imposed upon us by the Others’ thought, or visited our selves the way the seer does. Thus, it brings with it a two-ness of our identification. This means more demeaning harm to our unrecognized—and marginalized—self, the oppressed self that is freshly wounded by the derisive gaze of the outsider who is watching us. This watching transcends the mere act of subject objectivity. It is placed in historical junctures where watching someone is not to observe but to pass unqualified judgements on them. The gaze becomes even more painful when the seer and the subject have an unequal power relation that is built on the dossiers of oppression. Jean-Paul Sartre describes what it means to look for self in the eyes of others.22 It is the other’s perfection that we choose to prioritize while presenting ourselves. Therefore, we constantly rehearse identity performances. Such repeated rehearsals add to the improvisation of how one finally comes to declare oneself. This becomes ‘my being without being-for-me’,23 meaning I am someone but I am not the owner of myself in this particular moment of interaction between the oppressor seers and the oppressed seen, the subject. This happens because, Sartre argues, we give up the agency of our self and willingly become an object for others. The audacity to giving up oneself comes from the historica...