Caste Quotes

“You are free; you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the state.”
― Muhammad Ali Jinnah

“We aren't human."

"Yes. We. Are." His voice turns fierce. "I don't give a shit what the something-somethingth council of big important farts decreed, or how the geomests classify things, or any of that. That we're not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don't have to feel bad about how they treat us.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“When we choose a mobile network, do we check whether Airtel or Vodafone belong to a particular caste? No, we simply choose the provider based on the best value or service. Then why do we vote for somebody simply because he belongs to the same caste as us?”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“I was actually permitting myself to experience a sickening sense of disappointment: but rallying my wits, and recollecting my principles, I at once called my sensations to order; and it was wonderful how I got over the temporary blunder--how I cleared up the mistake of supposing Mr. Rochester's movements a matter in which I had any cause to take vital interest. Not that I humbled myself by a slavish notion of inferiority: on the contrary, I just said--
"You have nothing to do with the master of Thornfield further than to receive the salary he gives you for teaching his protegee and to be grateful for such respectful and kind treatment as, if you do your duty, you have a right to expect at his hands. Be sure that is the only tie he seriously acknowledges between you and him, so don't make him the object of your fine feelings, your raptures, agonies, and so forth. He is not of your order: keep to your caste; and be too self-respecting to lavish the love of the whole heart, soul, and strength, where such a gift is not wanted and would be despised.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Fate determines your caste. You must accept it and live according to the rules."
You can't really believe that!"
I do believe it. That man's misfortune is that he cannot accept his caste, his fate."
I know that the Indians wear their caste as a mark upon their foreheads for all to see. I know that in England, we have our own unacknowledged caste system. A laborer will never hold a seat in Parliament. Neither will a woman. I don't think I've ever questioned such things until this moment.
But what about will and desire? What if someone wants to change things."
Kartik keeps his eyes on the room "You cannot change your caste. You cannot go against fate."
That means there is no hope of a better life. It is a trap."
That is how you see it," he says softly.
What do you mean?"
It can be a relief to follow the path that has been laid oud for you, to know your course and play your part in it."
But how can you be sure that you are following the right course? What if there is no such thing as destiny, only choice?"
Then I do not choose to live without destiny," he says with a slight smile.”
― Libba Bray, Rebel Angels

“A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“We divided ourselves among caste, creed, culture and countries but what is undivided remains most valuable: a mere smile and the love.”
― Santosh Kalwar

“I want to burn with the spirit of the times. I want all servants of the stage to recognize their lofty destiny. I am disturbed at my comrades' failure to rise above narrow caste interests which are alien to the interests of society at large. Yes, the theatre can play an enormous part in the transformation of the whole of existence.”
― Vsevolod Meyerhold

“A chair is not a caste.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of luxuries.”
― Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove

“I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind, and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women [...]: no, I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“...Of the Hindu, of whatever caste, it may be said, as of the poet, nascitur non fit. His birth status is unalterable. But with the Sikh the exact reverse is the case. Born of a Sikh father, he is not himself counted of the faith until, as a grown boy, he has been initiated and received the baptism of the pahul at the Akal Bungah or some equally sacred place.”
― Lepel H. Griffin, Ranjit Singh

“One might object that [debt peonage] was just assumed to be in the nature of things: like the imposition of tribute on conquered populations, it might have been resented, but it wasn’t considered a moral issue, a matter of right and wrong. Some things just happen. This has been the most common attitude of peasants to such phenomena throughout human history. What’s striking about the historical record is that in the case of debt crises, this was not how many reacted. Many actually did become indignant. So many, in fact, that most of our contemporary language of social justice, our way of speaking of human bondage and emancipation, continues to echo ancient arguments about debt.

It’s particularly striking because so many other things do seem to have been accepted as simply in the nature of things. One does not see a similar outcry against caste systems, for example, or for that matter, the institution of slavery. Surely slaves and untouchables often experienced at least equal horrors. No doubt many protested their condition. Why was it that the debtors’ protests seemed to carry such greater moral weight? Why were debtors so much more effective in winning the ear of priests, prophets, officials, and social reformers? Why was it that officials like Nehemiah were willing to give such sympathetic consideration to their complaints, to inveigh, to summon great assemblies?

Some have suggested practical reasons: debt crises destroyed the free peasantry, and it was free peasants who were drafted into ancient armies to fight in wars. Rulers thus had a vested interest in maintaining their recruitment base. No doubt this was a factor; clearly, it wasn’t the only one. There is no reason to believe that Nehemiah, for instance, in his anger at the usurers, was primarily concerned with his ability to levy troops for the Persian king. It had to be something deeper.

What makes debt different is that it is premised on an assumption of equality.

To be a slave, or lower caste, is to be intrinsically inferior. These are relations of unadulterated hierarchy. In the case of debt, we are talking about two individuals who begin as equal parties to a contract. Legally, at least as far as the contract is concerned, they are the same.”
― David Graeber, Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years

“When you were talking about the caste system, I was thinking about how Mexicans still have to come to terms with this in our own culture. We spoke earlier about the castas paintings that were made during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Mexico. The Spanish, establishing a form of racial apartheid, delineate the fifty-three categories of racial mixtures between Africans, Indians, and the Spanish. And they have names, like tiente en el aire, which means stain in the air; and salta otras, which means jump back; or mulatto, a word that comes from mula, the unnatural mating between the horse and the donkey. “Sambo” is now a racial epithet in the US, but it was first used as one of the fifty-three racial categories in the castas paintings.”
― Amalia Mesa-Bains, Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism

“Yes, we have to seek redemption! Redemption from the divisive politics based on caste and religion, redemption from the corruption which is eating our lives like termites, redemption from misery of poverty, redemption from the sins of our venal politicians. We need good governance and accountability. An individual has to fight for the things he rightfully deserves. People do not need crutches of any kind if the basic conditions of nation are conducive to their growth. It’s ridiculous; people are first deprived of basic amenities, denied their dues and then offered carrots to benefit the vote bank politics.”
― Madhu Vajpayee, Seeking Redemption

“What a great advantage to be of noble birth, since it gives a man of eighteen the standing, recognition and respect that another man might not earn before he was fifty. That means winning thirty years’ start with no effort.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Indian poverty is more dehumanizing than any machine; and, more than in any machine civilization, men in India are units, locked up in the straitest obedience by their idea of their dharma. The scientist returning to India sheds the individuality he acquired during his time abroad; he regains the security of his caste identity, and the world is once more simplified. There are minute rules, as comforting as bandages; individual perception and judgement, which once called forth his creativity, are relinquished as burdens, and the man is once more a unit in his herd, his science reduced to a skill. The blight of caste is not only untouchability and the consequent deification in India of filth; the blight, in India that tries to grow, is also the over-all obedience it imposes, its ready-made satisfactions, the diminishing of adventurousness, the pushing away of men of individuality and the possibility of excellence.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“We do not choose as captain of a ship the most highly born of those aboard.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.”
― James Baldwin

“Humans have divided themselves in all possible ways. Country, religion, caste, color, wealth, language, profession, intellect, the list is endless. There are divisions within divisions and the reasons for all these divisions are the same - perceptions. If perceptions can divide, what can unite us?”
― Sukant Ratnakar, Quantraz

“The moment you clasp an infant to your heart, you realize that nobody is born into a caste.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Gora

“I have discovered that some groups and castes are offered little to no opportunity to work in the public sector in Nepal.”
― Santosh Kalwar, Why Nepal Fails

“Nepal is confronted with many societal issues, including the caste system, child labor, illiteracy, gender inequality, superstitions, religious disputes, and a slew of other issues.”
― Santosh Kalwar, Why Nepal Fails

“Never judge a lesser person than yourself.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“It was Gandhi who gave the Congress Party a mass base, a rural base. Four out of five Indians live in villages; and the Congress remains the only party in India (except for certain regional parties) which has a rural organization; it cannot lose. The opposition parties, even a revivalist Hindu party like the Jan Sangh, the National Party, are city parties. In the villages, the Congress is still Gandhi's party; and the village tyrannies that have been established through nearly thirty years of unbroken Congress rule cannot now be easily removed. In the countryside, the men to watch for are the men in white Gandhian homespun. They are the men of power, the politicians; their authority, rooted in antique reverences of caste and clan, has been emboldened by Independence and democracy.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“To make democracy work, Jayaprakash Narayan suggests, to undo tyranny, it is only necessary for India to return truly to itself. The Ramraj that Gandhi offered is no longer simply Independence, India without the British; it is people's government, the reestablishment of the ancient Indian village republic, a turning away from the secretariats of Delhi and the state capitals. But this is saying nothing; this is to leave India where it is. What looks like a political programme is only clamour and religious excitation. People's government and the idea of the ancient village republic (which may be a fanciful idea, a nationalist myth surviving from the days of the Independence struggle) are not the same thing. Old India has its special cruelties; not all the people are people.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“A passionate Marxist journalist - waiting for the revolution, rejecting all 'palliatives' - told me that the 'workers' of India had to be politicized; they had to be told that it was the 'system' that oppressed them. After nearly thirty years of power, the Congress has, understandably, become the system. But where does the system begin and end? Does it take in religion, the security of caste and clan, Indian ways of perceiving, karma, the antique serfdom? But no Indian cares to take political self-examination that far. No Indian can take himself to the stage where he might perceive that the faults lie within the civilization itself, that the failure and the cruelties of India might implicate all Indians. Even the Marxists, dreaming of a revolution occurring like magic on a particular day, of tyranny swept away, of 'the people' then engaging in the pleasures of 'folk' activities - the Marxist journalist's word: the folk miraculously whole after the millennia of oppression - even the Marxist's vision of the future is not of a country undone and remade but of an India essentially returned to itself, purified: a vision of Ramraj.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“Priests were born into the Brahmin caste, and I had met enough Brahmins in my life to know that not all of them were priests, or even had a shred of spirituality in them. Usually they were arrogant and corrupt, frankly quite despicable people to know.”
― Mimi Mondal, His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light

“I'll be honest - I had never heard anything like that. Not that I ever understood the elaborate social intricacies of the upper classes, but I always knew that I did not trust them, and her story just seemed to confirm my mistrust.”
― Mimi Mondal, His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light

“Lower castes and other oppressed groups have less access to basic amenities and education and fewer prospects for social progress than their upper-caste counterparts.”
― Santosh Kalwar, Why Nepal Fails