Unlearning Brahmanism: Beyond the classroom

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” ― Richard P. Feynman

Before I stepped into university, I had only a hazy sense of how caste weaves its insidious threads through life. It was an abstraction, a distant hum—something I knew existed but had never felt pressing against my skin. I hadn’t bothered to unpack the intricate scaffolding of legal categories designed to uplift millions or to notice the shadowed intersections that slip quietly through the cracks. As someone who deviates from the so-called norms, I was always drawn to the spaces where systems falter, where fractures reveal the truth of our stratified lives. But my search for freedom hit an unyielding wall when I began wandering through the echoing corridors of college—a place touted as the crucible of enlightenment. Instead, it unspooled a harsher, more intimate lesson: liberation is not only elusive but often derailed in the very spaces that promise it.

Recovering from the fresh bruises of school-day bullying—a queer child’s rite of passage—or perhaps it was just the slow burn of self-loathing, I understood one thing with startling clarity: society was the architect of my alienation. I had a singular mission then—to rebuild myself, piece by piece, into someone palatable, someone likeable. As I roamed the college corridors with a restless hunger to decode the world, I poured all my energy into the exhausting theater of conformity. I thought my long hair and delicate gestures, those small acts of quiet rebellion, would be enough to remind me of who I truly was—a deviant, still.

But as I struggled to absorb the culture shock of hyper-Hinduism, one peculiar thing snagged at the edge of my consciousness. My classmates, almost all of them, carried surnames that I would later come to understand as titles—markers of caste, stretching back across centuries, draped in the mythos of millennia. Some I recognized from the stories of Hindi literature, faintly familiar, like echoes from a distant past. But most were strange to me, heavy with meanings I could barely grasp. It wasn’t until a professor casually unraveled their significance that I felt the weight of it—an inheritance of privilege masquerading as identity, written into the names they bore.

Our sociology professor spoke their names with a peculiar reverence—Mishra Ji? she would say, her tone laced with a strange kind of awe. What did it mean, really? Mishra Ji. Sharma Ji. Dubey Ji. These titles seemed to carry a weight that stretched far beyond the classroom, far beyond the individuals themselves. I, with my plain and unassuming Lal, which simply meant “son” in a dozen languages, felt a quiet dissonance. Why did some names shimmer with grandeur while others dissolved into the haze of anonymity? I let the thought wander, untethered, like a restless horse galloping into the distance.

But one day, a stray comment from her tethered me to something far darker, something insidious and ancient that had long been hiding in plain sight. She said, almost flippantly, that perhaps untouchability—modern untouchability—persisted because some people were, quite literally, unwashed. It was, she claimed, the logic of Hinduism itself: a system rooted in universal empiricism, in science. She said this with the same casual certainty that one might explain a mathematical formula.

No one flinched. No one protested. The words slid into the room and settled like dust, unnoticed by most. But I felt it—a searing rush of adrenaline, coursing through me, electrifying my indignation. Was this a substantiated theory or just another careless remark dressed up in academic garb? I couldn’t tell. I sat there, stunned, grappling with the realization that this wasn’t just a stray comment. It was a symptom of a much greater disease, a quiet yet monstrous force that thrived on its own invisibility, celebrated in whispers and reinforced in silence.

As the months slipped by, I began to notice something that filled me with a peculiar sense of awe—and a quiet unease. People like me, the ones navigating the world alone or in loose, tentative clusters, seemed to occupy a space perpetually on the margins. While some of us strained to blend in, to dissolve into the fabric of unanimity, the truth hovered over us like a shadow: we didn’t belong.

And then there were the others—the ones with surnames that carried the weight of antiquity, of power steeped in history. Their presence wasn’t just seen; it was felt, like a vibration in the air. They moved with a certainty, an ease, as if they had always known where they belonged. Friendships flourished among them, unspoken bonds woven from an invisible thread.

I watched as students with Sanskritized surnames seemed to find belonging in the very architecture of oppression, their camaraderie built on hierarchies too old and too entrenched to question. And as their circles grew tighter, I felt the distance between us widened. Friendships I once took for granted—ones I thought were solid, unshakable—began to fracture and fall away, leaving me adrift in a space I no longer recognized. It was a quiet kind of isolation, one I’d almost grown used to, but its sting remained sharp, like an old wound that refused to heal.

Perhaps I had grown accustomed to my solitude, the kind that wraps itself around you when you exist as a queer person, perpetually drifting between overlapping shades of oppression. I knew, with the kind of clarity that comes from pain, who I wanted to be with—or rather, as Oscar Wilde might have said, who I needed to be: myself.

But the callous remarks of those I once thought I could endure, their casual barbs and loaded jokes, sent me spiraling into a labyrinth of questions. How much would I let slide? How many veiled innuendos, dripping with homophobia or masquerading as harmless slang, could I ignore before they carved into me? Every word, I realized, carried a history—a lineage steeped in misogyny, homophobia, and casteism, as if the very air we breathed was laced with it.

As I peeled back the layers of this baggage, the weight of it isolating me further, the familiar anxiety of uncertainty began to creep back in. I knew I had to draw a line—a firm, unyielding boundary between their corrosive taunts and the fragile parts of myself I was still learning to protect. Their so-called intellectual camaraderie, rooted in a shared disdain for reservation and a belief in the sanctity of their own privilege, felt like a world I could no longer inhabit.

So I drifted inward, away from their circles and their smug lamentations. I had a long journey ahead—one that required finding myself in ways they could never understand. And deep down, I knew I couldn’t afford another fracture, another betrayal of the fragile self-empowerment I was trying to hold on to. To lose myself again, to the weight of their words or the silence of my own complicity, was a cost I could not bear.

As I conceded defeat in my final, faltering attempt to outrun my solitude, I found myself back in that familiar stillness, listening to “I Forgot That You Existed.” It was a song Taylor Swift, I’m certain, could never have imagined resonating with a queer kid from the remote deserts of Rajasthan. But there I was, feeling every word as if it had been written for me.

The journey back to myself wasn’t a simple matter of introspection; it required a far deeper excavation—a historical reckoning with my place in a dwindling, indifferent law college where I stood among no known peers. This wasn’t indulgence; it was survival, a necessity I came to understand after my first encounter with Ambedkar’s words. He taught me that understanding the roots and layers of discrimination isn’t just enlightening—it’s a weapon. It grants you the self-sufficiency that generations of homogeneous, Brahminized academicians have painstakingly tried to deny.

How often do we pause to notice how the marginalized exist in a perpetual state of emergency, their voices drowned beneath the weight of endless, indoctrinated hypotheses? Hypotheses churned out by those who stand atop centuries of oppression, cloaking their privilege in the garb of intellectualism. It is a system designed to suffocate dissent, to ensure that any attempt to impregnate this brittle architecture with new ideas—ideas from the margins—is met with silence or scorn.

But in that silence, I found something. A spark, a clarity, a refusal to be erased. And with that, I began the slow, deliberate process of returning to myself, carrying with me the weight of history and the resolve to never let it define my future.

When I stepped into the viva for constitutional law, it felt less like an examination of knowledge and more like an interrogation of existence. The professor hurled questions at me, rapid and relentless, each one more invasive than the last. They weren’t about the law, at least not the kind we were taught to revere in the syllabus. They were shadows—unspoken rules and prejudices—looming large over my life.

“Why do you have long hair?” “Why doesn’t anyone bully you?” “Are your parents okay with you?” “Your surname?”

In that moment, I knew the buck had to stop. It wasn’t just a viva; it was a surveillance, a quiet policing of who I was, disguised as academic inquiry. Later, I recounted it to a friend, her advice brushing off my indignation like dust: “Let it slide,” she said. “Don’t breathe in the questions.”

But how could I not? How could a professor, someone tasked with teaching the promises of the Constitution—the sacred guarantees of bodily autonomy, dignity, and the right to exist free from prejudice—fail to see the violence in his own questions? The hypocrisy of it hung in the air, sharp and bitter, like the sting of a slap. His intrusion wasn’t just unwelcome; it was a betrayal of the very foundation he claimed to uphold. And as I stood there, tethered to the weight of his words, I realized: this wasn’t just about me. It was about the architecture of a system that allowed such moments to exist at all.

In our another semester, the professor who taught us personal laws walked into the classroom every day with a tilak smeared on his forehead—a stark, unabashed symbol of Brahmanical violence. It felt less like a lecture and more like attending an RSS-sponsored seminar on “decolonizing” our minds, though the irony of that phrase would have been lost on him. His words, wrapped in shlokas from a language I neither knew nor was meant to know, carried the weight of exclusion. They couldn’t conceal his frustration whenever someone dared to question the supposed innate greatness of Brahmins.

He spoke with the confidence of inherited privilege, glorifying the so-called intellectual richness of ancient Indian discourse, while carefully sidestepping the violent history that ensured such knowledge never slipped into the hands of a Shudra. The very idea of a Shudra daring to quench their thirst for understanding—let alone questioning the hierarchy—was a crime, punishable by the cruel machinery of state-sponsored retaliation. This was a history he conveniently ignored, choosing instead to paint Brahmanical dominance as the natural order of things.

Whenever a student, self-seeking and audacious, dared to protest, his response would arrive cloaked in the same language of fabricated tolerance. He’d speak of the "openness" of ancient Indian traditions, as though centuries of systemic oppression could be papered over with a few Sanskrit verses. The absurdity of it all stirred something deep in me—anger, yes, but also a quiet, mocking laughter.

I would recall Babasaheb’s last, desperate attempt at reconciliation with Hinduism and feel the same bitter humor rising in me. The professor, with all his sugarcoated wisdom, was nothing more than a reminder of why that reconciliation had failed, why it was doomed from the start. His lectures weren’t just teachings—they were monuments to a history that refused to crumble, a history I was determined to see for what it truly was.

I remember another professor, his voice thick with frustration, lamenting the Brahmanical dominance at BHU. He spoke bitterly about how the institution would never tolerate a dissenting voice from one of its own professors, how the very air there seemed to choke any attempt at questioning the status quo. He admitted, almost with a tinge of irony, that he had never truly grappled with his own identity as an OBC until he stepped into this college, where the weight of its centuries-old traditions pressed down on him in ways he hadn’t expected. His efforts to diverge from the path laid out by the forefathers of the institution were met with fierce resistance—a resistance he mocked, though I understood the source of his bitterness all too well.

I recalled, too, a conversation I had with my neighbour from the village once, when he asked, almost in disbelief, “Why was BHU even founded?” The question hung in the air, as if it were a riddle without an answer, or perhaps one whose answer was too painful to voice. In that moment, I nodded along with him, feeling the solidarity between us. We weren’t alone in this—the constant hum of the Brahmanical hierarchy was something we both felt, an invisible hand that shaped everything around us, from the lectures to the spaces in which we were allowed to exist. It was a quiet, unspoken force, but its presence was as oppressive as any loud, angry protest. We were, in a sense, two small pieces in a much larger puzzle, and for the first time, I felt the depth of that shared understanding.

As I tap out characters on my small phone, a thought lingers in the quiet corners of my mind: why is there so little literature that grapples with the historical oppression of Dalits and backward classes in India? Why is it that the libraries overflow with books on black liberation in the United States, but here, in the heart of this ancient land, where caste and oppression are etched deep into the very soil, we barely scratch the surface? Is it the median literacy of India, or is it the unspoken censorship of Brahmanism that dictates which Dalit protests are deemed worthy of recognition?

From my vantage point in the ruins of this university, I can’t help but wonder—has it always been this way? Did they always decide what our questions would be, the questions we were allowed to ask? Perhaps our understanding of shared oppression in the context of India is flawed, distorted by the very forces we seek to dismantle. Doesn’t Brahmanism haunt every spectre of exclusion we endure? From the simple aversion to women stepping out of their prescribed roles, to the deep-seated disdain for homosexuals—how often do we bend, without question, to the authority that dictates every aspect of our lives? From the choice of whom to marry to the rituals of death, we live in submission, perpetually tethered to a system that seeks to control even our most intimate moments.

And all the while, this long shadow of temple India looms, obsessively intertwined with the rise of Hindu extremism. We rarely stop to consider the irony: we are, in so many ways, fighting to preserve a system that once saw half of its population as nothing more than objects of disdain, relegated to the fringes as untouchables. As class consciousness erodes, the spaces where new thoughts should bloom—like universities, places of intellectual freedom—are hijacked by extremists, bent on enforcing conformity and preserving the ancient hierarchies that continue to govern our lives.

Will we ever learn? Will we ever see through the smokescreen of tradition and orthodoxy, and confront the ugly truths about who we are, who we’ve been, and what we’re complicit in? The questions linger, unanswered, like an endless echo in the dark.