But the public commentary around Harris and Vance, two figures of Indian descent in the spotlight of the 2024 presidential election, misses complex (and perhaps inconvenient) truths about the Indian migration to the U.S.—about who was able to immigrate and what they made of themselves here.
Like other Indians now in the U.S., Gopalan and the Chilukuris benefited greatly from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which did away with existing race-based exclusions and opened America’s door to immigrants from around the world. These laws favored professionals, selecting Indian immigrants from a narrow pool of applicants already at the height of privilege. Both Harris’s mother and the Chilukuris are Brahmins, topmost in India’s hierarchy of castes—“backgrounds in which access to educational capital was a defining feature,” says anthropologist Ajantha Subramanian, author of The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India. This thin upper crust, in addition to having intergenerational educational advantages, also benefited most from “the postcolonial state’s investment in higher education, especially in science, medicine, and engineering,” according to Subramanian. Gopalan was a graduate of the University of Delhi, and Krish Chilukuri of the Indian Institute of Technology, the elite engineering college created by India’s government after the country won independence from the British in 1947. IIT graduates were chief among those who took advantage of the U.S. immigration overhaul, especially from the 1990s onward, as caste-focused affirmative action policies were rolled out in India and the tech boom kicked off in Silicon Valley. Caste and accompanying advantages helped Indians obtain specialized education in India and then migrate legally to the U.S. Once they arrived, these Indians were well equipped to prosper.
“It’s important to situate caste not as a strand that weaves into how we navigate the world, but rather the very foundation of how Indians—and South Asians—see the world,” says Christina Dhanuja, a writer, caste researcher, and founding member of the Global Campaign for Dalit Women.
The caste system, which colonial powers only strengthened, was legally abolished in post-independence India. Yet it remains entrenched, dictating marriage decisions, culinary practices, housing distribution, and the workings of the justice system, among other aspects of Indian life. (The vegetarianism that Kaling and Harris claim is specific to their caste, and not something all South Indians adhere to, for instance.) The caste system is a violent paradigm that denies basic needs and human rights to those it relegates to its lowest ranks. When Indians migrated around the world, they took caste with them, just as B.R. Ambedkar, India’s foremost political theorist, anti-caste thinker, and the drafter of its constitution, had predicted.