Corporate Brahminism and Tech Work: Caste in a Modern Indian Profession

Abstract

This article investigates caste dynamics within the information technology (IT) industry in Chennai. While there has been considerable commentary on the dominance of ‘upper’ castes within the industry, significantly less has been said about how ‘upper-casteness’ is retained and reinforced. In exploring everyday forms of upper-caste assertion, this article unpacks constructions of ‘corporate Brahminism’ on the IT office floor. Moreover, by analysing the experiences of employees from a broader range of caste backgrounds, it highlights spaces of resistance in the industry, underlining the relationality of caste in privileged sites of work within the modern economy.

Keywords:

• Caste
• casteism
• Cisco
• India
• IT industry
• merit

Introduction

In March 2016, seated in the capacious banquet hall of a five-star hotel, I observed the proceedings of an annual corporate diversity and inclusion (D&I) conference in India’s ‘information technology (IT) capital’, Bengaluru. Organised by the industry’s national trade association, NASSCOM,¹ the event was meant to celebrate companies’ D&I initiatives and simultaneously provide participants the opportunity to learn about D&I ‘best practices’ through a host of panels and workshops. Various sessions over the course of the day-long conference addressed topics such as gender diversity, generational differences and including persons with disabilities in the IT workforce. Discussions of caste, however, were curiously absent. The sole exception was when an audience member posed a question on addressing caste inequality to a panel comprising senior executives from several major firms, who had been invited to speak about D&I approaches adopted by corporate leaders. The question was met with an uncomfortable silence from the panel. Eventually, one of the panellists responded by saying that while companies strive to create ‘diverse’ workplaces, they must nevertheless preserve a ‘meritocracy’.

Significantly, the panellist returned to one of the industry’s favoured lines when confronted with questions about caste: that their aim is to meet ‘targets, not quotas’. This maxim, often heard in elite corporate circles, simultaneously derides caste-based reservation policies in public institutions as impeding ‘merit’, while emphasising that companies’ hiring practices should be driven by internal diversity metrics (‘targets’) rather than external scrutiny and oversight. Against this narrative, this article provides a window into the actual workings of caste within the spaces of the Indian IT industry. It aims to highlight how specific forms of Brahminical oppression and dominance materialise in privileged workplaces through tightly-knit caste networks and both covert and explicit practices of distinction. Moreover, it demonstrates that, like many other forms of identity-based workplace discrimination, casteism can play out in complex and, at times, subtle ways.²

This is relevant not only in a South Asian context, but also within the diaspora, as indicated by the Cisco case. In June 2020, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a lawsuit against the IT firm for failing to address caste-based discrimination in its San Jose office. This landmark case can be traced back to a complaint made by a Dalit employee of the company who sought redressal from Cisco for targeted harassment by two Brahmin colleagues, Sundar Iyer and Ramana Kompella. In its dismissal of the original complaint, which was filed in 2016, Cisco framed caste as bounded within the geographies of South Asia and insisted that it could not, as a result, consider it a form of inequality.³ Responding to this assertion, advocacy group Equality Labs received correspondence from over 250 diasporic IT employees belonging to marginalised caste groups that detailed their own experiences with casteism at the workplace.⁴

The Cisco case has since become an anchor for wider political action by anti-caste organisations to formally recognise caste-based discrimination in the United States,⁵ underscoring how caste has indeed become ‘a world problem’.⁶ The transnational movement of caste assumes particular configurations through the migratory patterns displayed by many Indian software professionals, who often travel abroad for short projects as well as relocate for longer periods.⁷ By examining an industry that is heavily reliant on the mobility of both capital and workers, this article also aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the many intersections between caste and the global economy.⁸ As a result, it will shed light on how caste relations can animate work processes in ways that both transcend and draw from the geographical specificities of ‘place’.⁹

Much like Indian migrants to the US, especially those in IT, the Indian IT industry has been portrayed in existing research as being constituted largely of ‘upper’ castes, and Brahmins in particular.¹⁰ While pre-existing caste privilege has resulted in a disproportionate representation of caste elites in high-paying jobs, such accounts can obscure the experiences of workers who do not fit this characterisation.¹¹ Moreover, while the factors that determine entry into the profession and their linkages to constructions of ‘merit’ have been explored in previous studies,¹² there has been relatively limited commentary on the dynamics of caste reinforcement and resistance in the industry beyond recruitment. By exploring these themes, this article contributes to and extends current debates on caste dynamics in ‘modern’—that is, upper-caste-dominated—workplaces. In particular, it unpacks forms of ‘corporate Brahminism’, which are influenced by the private sector’s exclusion from state measures to ensure equal representation, and which allow the upper castes to fashion themselves as ‘casteless’.

Deriving from a larger project on the Indian IT industry, this paper draws from interviews, participant observation and an analysis of government, industry and media reports.¹³ These diverse methods were particularly deployed to understand upper-caste formations and resistance to them.¹⁴ IT conferences, for example, where I conducted participant observation, serve as important sites of upper-caste network-building, while industry reports reveal discursive framings of caste. Among my respondents who revealed their caste, all but one of the executives I interviewed identified as upper caste, as did the majority of the software workers I spoke with, although a few identified as ‘BC’, ‘Backward’ or ‘Most Backward’; none of my respondents identified as Dalit. Fieldwork was conducted primarily in Chennai, one of India’s main IT centres, with a short visit to Bengaluru. Here, my own upper-caste privilege—I belong to a non-Brahmin¹⁵ Tamil Vellalar caste that possesses the socio-cultural capital of the ‘Brahminised’¹⁶—played a significant role in being able to access spaces and people within an industry that is especially difficult to enter.¹⁷

In the following section, I consider the role of caste in India’s ‘modern’, middle-class professions, paying particular attention to the representation of caste in existing scholarship on the Indian IT industry. The next two sections interrogate the structural denial of caste in the industry, juxtaposed against material and discursive formulations of caste on the IT office floor. Finally, I will analyse a specific incident of caste oppression at the Chennai office of a large US IT firm, and the anti-caste resistance it prompted from a group of IT employees. Contrary to the dominant narrative within the industry that it has transcended caste, my aim throughout this article is to reveal how caste is constituted through its very structures.

Caste and corporate employment

The liberalisation of the Indian economy in the early 1990s brought with it an array of new, high-wage service-sector jobs, including in the burgeoning IT industry. These ‘modern’ occupations, which were often deeply embedded within global networks of capital, were presented as being truly egalitarian, where anyone could find employment if they worked hard and were suitably qualified.¹⁸ However, the oppressive logic of caste was in fact fundamental to how ‘modernity’ itself was constituted, with ‘upper-casteness’ becoming the normative, if generally coded, expression of how these institutions should function.¹⁹ A number of studies have demonstrated how the structures of the market economy disadvantage marginalised castes, arguing persuasively that social mobility is ‘blocked by caste’.²⁰ In terms of entrepreneurship, for example, caste networks play a crucial role in enabling growth, especially in terms of raising capital.²¹ Even gaining entry into these professions is highly regulated along caste lines. In an important study, Thorat and Attewell were able to quantify this discrimination by sending equivalent (spurious) résumés to potential employers, which led to different outcomes for those carrying Muslim or Dalit names and those with typical upper-caste names.²²

Yet, the prevailing discourse amongst Brahmins and other upper castes is that the new economy, and ‘modern’ publics more generally, are free of caste, purportedly evidenced by their relatively easy entry into these domains.²³ This leaves the dominance of the upper castes unquestioned, or explained through the narrative that such individuals are ‘naturally’ suited for this work.²⁴ Countering this claim, an emerging body of literature has paid attention to how caste hierarchies are reproduced in elite spaces within the mainstream media,²⁵ higher education²⁶ and academia.²⁷ By focussing on the IT industry, this article contributes to scholarship that reveals how caste oppression operates, consolidates itself and reinforces inequality in sites of relative privilege.

This is especially pertinent because previous studies on the sector have largely overlooked everyday manifestations of caste and caste inequality on the IT office floor, commenting more generally on the over-representation of upper-caste groups in the industry. Fuller and Narasimhan’s research on Chennai’s IT industry, for example, asserts that private corporations tend to be dominated by Brahmins because of factors that include reservation policies in public-sector employment.²⁸ In another study on marriage practices among IT professionals in Bengaluru, Baas has referred to the predominantly upper-caste, urban professionals he interviewed as a ‘caste’ unto themselves. This ‘IT caste’, Baas argues, overlooks differences in regional background and language, giving primacy instead to class, occupation and income in matters such as marriage.²⁹ Going beyond these characterisations of the industry, this article attempts a deeper engagement with its inherent structures of Brahminism as well as forms of resistance to caste dominance.

The situated politics of Tamil Nadu, where Chennai is located, are also relevant here. The state has a unique history in terms of caste representation in higher education and employment; as Vijaybaskar and Kalaiyarasan have argued, ‘broad basing access to opportunities in the modern economy, administration and public sphere’ was integral to its formulation of social justice.³⁰ While caste-based reservation in colleges and universities for Other Backward Castes (OBCs) was introduced in most other parts of the country in 2006, Tamil Nadu has maintained OBC reservation since 1951. Today, up to 69 percent of seats in state government or government-aided engineering and arts and science colleges are reserved based on caste.³¹ The removal in 2006 of the TNPCEE, a state exam for admission to engineering colleges, also reduced institutional barriers to entering the profession for students from disadvantaged communities.³² Moreover, with the industry continuing to expand and diversify, companies are hiring greater numbers of employees from less privileged caste groups,³³ although it should be noted that this is particularly the case for entry-level positions, with management in these companies still largely comprising caste elites.³⁴ Nevertheless, these considerations call for a more expansive view of caste relations in the IT sector.

Locating caste in a ‘casteless’ industry

As the opening vignette of this article highlighted, the Indian IT industry professes a desire to achieve ‘diversity and inclusion’ in the workplace, which it balances precariously with its consistent championing of ‘merit’. A report by NASSCOM, for example, warns companies that they might soon have to address ‘managing perceptions of dilution in merit’ [emphasis in original].³⁵ As the report continues, ‘going ahead, communication will need to show the companies’ commitment to a merit culture while ensuring their focus on diversity and inclusion’.³⁶ In other words, while the industry encourages certain diversity initiatives, it also emphasises the need for a ‘meritorious’ work culture.

Arguments elucidating the casteist underpinnings of ‘merit’ can be traced at least as far back as Periyar E.V. Ramasamy, the founder of the Dravidian movement, who argued that merit is ‘an invention of the Brahmins’ to maintain their hegemony in spheres of influence and power.³⁷ The rhetoric of ‘merit’—or, as I have argued elsewhere, ‘talent’³⁸—is often utilised as a bulwark against the progress offered by reservation policies, with reserved category students being marked as less meritorious.³⁹ Upadhya has deconstructed the discourse of ‘merit’ in the IT industry, highlighting the role of cultural capital—emanating from privileged positions along the axes of class, caste, urban/rural location, religion and other socio-economic indicators—in constituting it.⁴⁰ Moreover, as Subramanian has argued, ‘merit’ is not only established through access to different forms of capital that the upper castes have controlled historically, but is also deeply relational, being used to counter perceived threats to upper-caste hegemony.⁴¹

Given the role of ‘merit’ within upper-caste imaginaries, it is perhaps not surprising that recruiting employees from a range of caste backgrounds is afforded relatively little importance in D&I policies. This is further reinforced by the low-priority status of caste equality for foreign clients, for whom this diversity work is partly performed.⁴² Broaching the subject of caste with executives in the industry provoked a range of affective responses that included nervousness,⁴³ discomfort and even irritation. For example, when I spoke with Vatsala,⁴⁴ a senior executive at a major ITES company, I asked her about her own caste; Vatsala revealed that she belonged to a non-Brahmin ‘Forward’ caste. Later, when our conversation returned to the subject of caste, Vatsala expressed her annoyance with my previous question:

Shakthi: Have you heard of any discrimination in the industry based on caste, religion…?

Vatsala: No, no, no. We don’t even ask about caste in our application. I was surprised when you asked me [earlier in the interview about my caste]. In fact, I want to know why you asked me. You shouldn’t even be having it [in your list of questions].

Vatsala’s indignation reflected a broader pattern within the upper rungs of the industry, where caste inequality or discrimination is seldom discussed openly. Instead, as Fernandez observes, ‘caste’ is considered synonymous with ‘reservations’, while cultures of Brahminism in IT offices are not recognised as outcomes of the caste system. Given that reservations (‘quotas’) are not legally mandated in the private sector, the industry can simply claim ‘castelessness’.⁴⁵ This is, as Deshpande has argued, one of the inherent privileges afforded by upper-caste status, allowing it to ‘be completely overwritten by modern professional identities of choice’.⁴⁶ Moreover, castelessness is a device that operates alongside strategies of caste affirmation by the upper castes.⁴⁷ For example, some of my respondents, including senior executives, noted that they had witnessed upper-caste networks being used for career advancement. Anisha, an employee at a major company, added that ‘because they don’t behave directly, you can’t complain [to Human Resources]’, highlighting how certain claims to caste are difficult to mark as caste/ism within official corporate parameters.

This duality can also be seen in how caste is often referred to by (or subsumed under) euphemisms such as ‘background’ or ‘culture’, terms I heard repeatedly in D&I contexts. These expressions serve as discursive mechanisms that are utilised to avoid direct conversations about casteism in the IT workplace. Moreover, as Jodhka and Newman have noted, words such as ‘background’ can be deployed to exclude marginalised caste groups from more privileged spaces within the modern economy.⁴⁸ In addition, these terms possess a fluidity that asking about caste explicitly does not, allowing for claims of innocence or disavowal in gatekeeping manoeuvres. In other words, through the usage of euphemistic terms like ‘culture’ in place of caste, the industry’s corporate leaders, and, by extension, the industry itself, can confidently claim ‘castelessness’ while simultaneously keeping caste structures intact.

Among the non-executive IT employees I spoke with from a range of caste backgrounds, particularly those employed in large companies, many expressed that they could not observe clearly-defined caste hierarchies in their workplaces. However, Murali, an employee at the Chennai office of a mid-sized, US-based company, provided a more critical appraisal of caste dynamics in his office. Murali, who was also a member of an IT employees’ union in the city, explained:

Murali: There are 14 senior managers controlling all the India-based operations of the company. There is one head and 14 senior managers. Of these 14 people, 12 people are Brahmins. Openly they are all there…. There are only two BC [Backward Caste] people. Think about how the system is. Then, the next level is [software] developers. I’m telling you, even 5 percent won’t be SC [Scheduled Caste]. There are a thousand ways to find out who is there [their caste]. So, it’s 70 percent BC and 30 per cent FC [Forward Caste]. That 30 per cent will azhaga [easily] go to the manager level. But in that 70 per cent, only two people go up.

Shakthi: How many people are there at the developer level?

Murali: About 500. Now, below this, if you look at the office boys, security, I think they are also very important. The office won’t run without them. Who are they? Sweepers, office boys, security. They are 95 percentage SC. So, it just gets turned upside down…. The upper caste is on the upper level. Middle level is all BC. The lower level is SC. This is the structure. Without the social order changing, you can see it there.

Although the roles of manager, software developer and support staff listed by Murali are not assigned to particular castes in official corporate policy, Murali’s observations, based on his own analysis of social relations in his office, nevertheless indicate a transposition of traditional caste hierarchies onto professional divisions at the workplace. This modern interpretation of Ambedkar’s famous formulation of the graded division of work as well as workers⁴⁹ points to the persistence of caste in an industry that attempts to repudiate its very existence.

Brahminism in the IT workplace

As the previous section has highlighted, the proclamation of castelessness cannot be equated with the absence of caste. At times, ‘upper-casteness’ is pronounced explicitly, such as in 2017, when the then Infosys CEO, Vishal Sikka, proudly called himself a ‘Kshatriya warrior’.⁵⁰ In addition, more coded forms of caste dominance in the industry, observed in food practices, dialects, names, and through a variety of other markers, reveal how caste is merely ‘transcod[ed]’ onto other practices, rendering it ‘caste by other means’.⁵¹

This was brought out in my conversation with Deepika, a young software tester, whom I offered to drive home after our interview. During our drive, Deepika, an upper-caste non-Brahmin, chatted with me about her work life and friends. She began discussing her Tamil Brahmin colleague and friend and mentioned casually that while he would condescend to visit ‘non-veg’ restaurants with their colleagues outside of office hours, he would refuse to consume even a beverage in these establishments. This display of dietary preference highlights how shifting the emphasis from being Brahmin to being ‘vegetarian’—a term that is charged with connotations of caste⁵²—can serve to both disguise caste and simultaneously affirm it. This point was similarly stressed by Murali, who declared:

All these Iyer⁵³ boys will put a namam⁵⁴ and come. This namam romba velipadiya therithu [this namam very obviously shows their caste]. What they say is, this is their culture. But this is not culture. They are showing that I am the dominating caste.

In exhibiting to the rest of the workforce that they are the ‘dominating caste’, we can observe through Murali’s reading that ‘culture’ becomes a proxy for caste supremacy by Brahmins and other caste elites.⁵⁵ The industry’s insistence that it has somehow transcended caste is therefore disrupted constantly by the actual functioning of caste on the office floor.

Moreover, the intricate workings of caste in the industry are not only seen in practices of upper-caste assertion, but also in processes that ‘other’ members of marginalised castes. This was highlighted in my conversation with Varsha, a young software developer from the city of Coimbatore employed at a major IT firm. Varsha identified herself as a Nair and was also an IT union member. When I asked Varsha about whether she knew of any incidents of caste-based discrimination at her workplace, she responded:

When I am talking to you [a colleague] on a personal level, I will tell you my problems, then you might know I am this caste, or something, you might come to know…now, if I tell you [my caste], you might not think in a caste-based way, but you might tell your friend, and he may not like me because of that. Those kinds of problems are there. ‘Oh, he’s SC, is it? Oh, I didn’t know…even though he’s SC, he’s like this?’ That kind of thinking…. But people will not know. Someone will say, ‘Even though he’s SC, he’s dressed like this’. Nowadays, we don’t know who is what…. And the [facilities maintenance] people, they will come and clean, all that. Some people will disrespect them. Some of them will be very old, and they will call us ‘madam’, ‘sir’, like that. That will be difficult for us, we will say, don’t call us that, but they will say, if we don’t address you like that, our supervisor will scold us.

Varsha’s reflections underline the continuing circulation of negative stereotypes about marginalised groups. At the same time, she observes that the middle-class status offered by employment in IT can potentially serve to deflect unwelcome interrogations into one’s caste location. This aligns with Dickey’s argument that ‘people whose caste is low but who belong to the middle- or upper-class can foreground symbolic markers of their class rather than caste identity’.⁵⁶ In addition, both Varsha and Murali (in the previous section) indicated that caste dynamics in the IT office travel beyond the world of IT developers, managers and executives to encompass the often invisibilised work of cleaners, security guards, drivers and other support staff.⁵⁷

As mentioned earlier, the functioning of caste relations on the office floor can also translate to in/exclusion within caste-based networks, thereby carrying implications for professional advancement. This was highlighted in an incident recounted by Muthu, a non-upper-caste⁵⁸ software engineer and member of an IT union, who had recently left a large Indian IT company. I asked Muthu if he had experienced any discrimination at work, to which he responded:

My manager was a [Tamil] Brahmin, so he used to talk in that slang [Tamil Brahmin dialect]. So, one day, just for fun, I also spoke in that slang. He thought I was a Brahmin and he touched my shoulder and he asked, ‘why aren’t you wearing a poonal?’⁵⁹ I said, ‘I’m not a Brahmin’. Only then, I realised there is some caste-based…because my company has a lot of higher-caste managers, Brahmins, Nairs, Reddys, most of the managers are these castes, so there is high-caste domination even in private companies. I have faced that.

In Muthu’s statement, we can observe the use of caste markers to distinguish workers—a crucial step for maintaining upper-caste networks. It is worth noting here that the Brahmin hunt for other poonal wearers has been reported among Indian IT workers in the diaspora as well.⁶⁰ Crucially, the habitual use of ‘Brahmin slang’ by Muthu’s manager underscores how these markers are normalised in the industry, which fails to acknowledge the linkage between such conspicuous displays of caste status and the buttressing of Brahminism in the IT workplace.

The project of locating other members of one’s (upper) caste within the IT workplace through these methods might not always succeed, however. For example, when I met Parvati, a Telugu, non-Brahmin, upper-caste senior executive at a major company, I asked her if she had faced any kind of discrimination in the industry. She replied:

I have never had that background for discrimination [I did not belong to a group that faced discrimination]…. We’re a very Brahmin-dominated [industry]. Most people thought I was a Brahmin, because I had this name [which sounds like a typical Tamil Brahmin name], so….

While Parvati observed that she often ‘passed’ for a Tamil Brahmin, this was certainly influenced by her own privileged class and caste status. Parvati, like many other executives, was a member of what Fernandes has termed the ‘old’ middle class, with access to substantial social, economic and cultural capital.⁶¹ Parvati’s lived experience of caste stood in marked contrast to that of Neeraja, an executive at a small company. Neeraja referred to her caste simply as a ‘backward community’; she reflected that because her parents were both educated and had been in secure government employment, she was able to enter the industry at a time when non-upper-caste groups were extremely under-represented. She then proceeded to tell me about her experiences in the industry:

Neeraja: Generally, there is preference for one particular community…. It’s not been a major problem, but I have felt at times that this is playing a role somewhere, sometimes.

Shakthi: But has it ever affected you personally in terms of promotions, or…?

Neeraja: Yes. In fact, one of the reasons why I decided to move out of my previous organisation is primarily because I felt I was not given the opportunities I wanted to get, and, they were kind of trying to stereotype me.

Shakthi: But it’s interesting, because they’re not technically supposed to know what your caste is….

Neeraja: But they would know that I am not of that community, so they may not accept me, right? [emphasis in original]

Although Neeraja did not mention Brahmins explicitly during our conversation, her remark about ‘that community’ was a clear reference to them (and Tamil Brahmins, in particular). Her recollections underscored the crucial role of caste as a form of social capital for caste elites. In other words, the performance and recognition of caste markers, beyond being a mere symbolic exercise, carry significant material outcomes. As Neeraja’s account reveals, this is seen not only during recruitment into the industry, as other studies have highlighted,⁶² but even within the executive tiers of the IT workforce.

What’s in a ‘fancy’ name?

The performance of ‘upper-casteness’ in the Indian IT industry does not go uncontested, however.⁶³ This was evident in the retelling of an incident at the Chennai office of PayPal, a US financial technology company, by two of my interlocutors, Kamala and Wasim, both of whom were former IT employees. Kamala had been an employee of PayPal in 2011 at the time of the incident, and was also one of the founding members of the IT union to which Muthu, Varsha, Murali and Wasim belonged. The union emerged from an organisation known as the Save Tamils Movement, formed in 2009 to show solidarity with Tamils in the Sri Lankan civil war, and consisted largely of IT professionals and students. Later renamed Ilanthamizhagam Iyakkam (Young Tamil Nadu Movement), the organisation broadened its scope to other socio-political issues, including espousing strongly anti-caste views, influenced by the writings of Periyar. Although not all members of the union are involved with Ilanthamizhagam, the union’s origins in the group are significant nonetheless, and the critical assessment of caste relations in the industry presented by its members can itself be considered a form of resistance to the sector’s Brahminism.

When I first met Kamala and Wasim, who had both left the industry to work as activists with Ilanthamizhagam, they narrated the sequence of events at PayPal, which began with the company’s preparations for their Annual Day function. Corporate Annual Day celebrations often include ‘team-building exercises’ for employees, such as games, competitions and parties. Kamala and Wasim recounted how employees were assigned to teams based on which floor of the office they worked on, and the names given to these teams:

Wasim: The company had put caste names for groups…. Tamil Nadu Iyers, Kerala Namboodiris,⁶⁴ like that, they gave a caste name, the team name was given as a caste name.

Kamala: It was for the [company’s] Annual Day celebration, as a competition among employees. There were seven floors, each floor was a group with a specific name. They decided to give caste names for these groups. So, I asked why they did it. They didn’t understand at all, at the HR level, they said it’s just a ‘fancy name’.

As they continued to explain, employees were placed in teams that were meant to represent different states in India, with each team being given a name that corresponded to an upper-caste group in that region, such as Banerjees of Bengal or Iyers of Tamil Nadu.⁶⁵ When I met Kamala again, she described her attempt to raise a complaint against the use of caste names with her company’s management, and their response:

Their management people, in India, are upper-caste, upper-class background people. Secondly, HR, in any company, if you see, there are a lot of Brahmin and upper-caste people only. So, for these people, the question is, what understanding do they have of caste? …I said, ‘In place of caste, you can use any other names’. When I raised this, they didn’t even consider it as an important matter. I had to raise it in HR, and if you see who is in HR, it is these people [upper-caste people] only. So, for these people, they don’t even think it is an issue. ‘That is not a problem, it is a fancy name’, they said all these things.

By framing upper-caste names as mundane (or in this case, ‘fancy’) articulations in the corporate workplace, we can observe a particularly striking example of corporate Brahminism. Here, the use of these names homogenises the experiences of employees from a much wider range of caste backgrounds; more importantly, it conceals the violence embedded in caste relations. The application of ‘castelessness’—itself a form of caste capital⁶⁶—or, conversely, the association of caste with reservations, has allowed the upper castes to dismiss such incidents as superficial and without significance to the material realities of the office. Moreover, the usage of caste names for teams reveals the extent to which caste has been decontextualised within the industry; in other words, rather than having to display caste status through ‘other means’,⁶⁷ caste names themselves become these other means.

When PayPal’s management continued to be largely unresponsive, Kamala and other members of Ilanthamizhagam staged a protest outside their office. A marked act of anti-caste resistance, the protest gained press coverage that brought the issue to the attention of the company’s US management. As a result, PayPal’s office in Chennai eventually issued an apology letter and dropped any explicit mention of caste from team names. However, the disappearance of caste names was not sufficient to erase caste from the event; as Kamala continued:

Then, they conducted their Annual Day. Actually, the concept was a ‘wedding’ concept [chuckles]. They have to show how weddings are conducted in different states, that’s the concept. So, what they [did] was, how each caste conducts weddings. That’s how they approached it. They said, that’s only that state’s marriage celebration. So, how weddings in Tamil Nadu are conducted was how Brahmin families conduct them.

With the theme of the event in question being weddings from different states, the distinct rituals of Tamil Brahmin and other upper-caste weddings were deemed representative of matrimonial ceremonies across entire subnational regions. This homogenising characterisation of upper-caste identities can also be seen in companies abroad,⁶⁸ where the corporate celebration of ‘multiculturalism’ often translates to foregrounding privileged caste ‘cultures’.⁶⁹ Moreover, as Natrajan argues, the process of converting caste into ‘culture’ allows caste inequality to persist by framing caste as a system of horizontal difference.⁷⁰ Rather than being discrete spheres, the ‘private’ or ‘cultural’—interpreted here in marriage rituals or caste names—and the ‘professional’ setting of the workplace are deeply interwoven.⁷¹

Conclusion

While the Cisco case has brought significant attention to caste in Silicon Valley, the IT industry in India remains a crucial site for analysing caste relations in the modern economy, as this article has shown. Caste formations in these physically distant locations do not exist in silos but are shaped in similar ways by the configurations of IT work, even as they exhibit situated and distinct articulations. Unlike in public institutions, which cannot completely evade conversations around caste disparities, the prevailing rhetoric in the private sector is that caste has not entered these spaces. As a result, ‘caste’ in the corporation is largely detached from upper-caste identities and practices, and the related consolidation of caste capital. Even as overt and veiled acts of caste oppression create slippages in the industry’s narrative of having transcended caste, the veneer of ‘castelessness’ enables cultures of Brahminism to flourish.

This article builds on commentary underscoring the over-representation of upper castes in the industry by examining how ‘upper-casteness’ itself is produced, retained and resisted. Further, it takes into account the presence of employees from a broader range of caste backgrounds in elite workplaces. Framing the IT office floor as being inhabited by a relatively homogeneous mass of upper-caste workers risks invisibilising acts of anti-caste resistance within the industry as well as the experiences of workers from marginalised castes more generally. This is crucial when ‘merit’, a term cut through with deep striations of inequality, is invoked repeatedly to deflect calls for reservation policies in the Indian private sector. As this article argues, analysing the relationality of caste, and the mechanisms through which upper-casteness is reproduced, can provide us with deeper insights into the structures of privileged work in the modern economy.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my research participants for their time and thoughts. An early version of this paper was presented at the ‘Anti-Caste Thought: Theory, Politics and Culture’ conference at the University of Wolverhampton in October 2021. I would like to thank Meena Dhanda and Karthick Ram Manoharan for organising the conference, and Gaurav J. Pathania and the conference participants for their questions and feedback. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and Kama Maclean for her editorial input.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. National Association of Software and Service Companies.

2. This has also been noted in a report on caste discrimination in British workplaces: see Hilary Metcalfe and Heather Rolfe, Caste Discrimination and Harassment in Great Britain (London: National Institute of Economic and Social Research, 2010), accessed August 14, 2020, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/85522/caste-discrimination.pdf.

3. Anahita Mukherji, ‘The Cisco Case Could Expose Rampant Prejudice against Dalits in Silicon Valley’, The Wire, July 8, 2020, accessed October 5, 2021, https://thewire.in/caste/cisco-caste-discrimination-silicon-valley-dalit-prejudice.

4. Natasha Tiku, ‘India’s Engineers Have Thrived in Silicon Valley. So Has Its Caste System’, The Washington Post, October 27, 2020, accessed October 3, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/27/indian-caste-bias-silicon-valley/. A survey by Equality Labs also found that two out of every three Dalits in the US have faced caste-based discrimination at work: Maari Zwick-Maitreyi et al., Caste in the United States: A Survey of Caste among South Asian Americans (San Francisco, CA: Equality Labs, 2018).

5. Coinciding with and subsequent to the lawsuit being filed against Cisco in 2020, a number of universities in the US have formally prohibited caste discrimination on their campuses. In February 2023, Seattle, one of the country’s tech capitals, became the first US city to officially recognise caste as a protected class alongside other identity categories such as race, religion and gender: see Conor Murray, ‘Seattle Bans Caste Discrimination: What That Means and Why the Movement against Social Stratification Is Growing’, Forbes, February 23, 2023, accessed May 18, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2023/02/23/seattle-bans-caste-discrimination-what-that-means-and-why-the-movement-against-social-stratification-is-growing/?sh=13bc5caf21eb.

6. Sridhar V. Ketkar, History of Caste in India, Vol. 1 (New York: Taylor & Carpenter, 1909), quoted in B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development’, in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Vol. 1, ed. Vasant Moon (Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1979–2006 [1916]): 6.

7. In the Cisco incident, Iyer, Kompella and the unnamed Dalit engineer were all alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, a feeder institution for technology work in Silicon Valley as well as in India.

8. David Mosse, ‘The Modernity of Caste and the Market Economy’, Modern Asian Studies 54, no. 4 (2020): 1225–71.

9. Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 1994).

10. See, for example, Chris Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan, ‘Information Technology Professionals and the New–Rich Middle Class in Chennai (Madras)’, Modern Asian Studies 41, no. 1 (2007): 121–50; Michiel Baas, ‘The IT Caste: Love and Arranged Marriages in the IT Industry of Bangalore’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 32, no. 2 (2009): 285–307; Smitha Radhakrishnan, Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

11. For recent work on the experiences of Dalits in the industry, see Palashi Vaghela, Steven J. Jackson and Phoebe Sengers, ‘Interrupting Merit, Subverting Legibility: Navigating Caste in “Casteless” Worlds of Computing’, CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2022): 1–20.

12. Carol Upadhya, ‘Employment, Exclusion and “Merit” in the Indian IT Industry’, Economic & Political Weekly 42, no. 20 (2007): 1863–68; Marilyn Fernandez, The New Frontier: Merit vs. Caste in the Indian IT Sector (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018).

13. I conducted 61 semi-structured interviews with IT employees, managers and executives as well as a number of people linked to the industry, such as IT union leaders and bureaucrats, and participant observation in a limited capacity on the office floor as well as in sites connected to the industry, such as IT conferences, over nine months during 2015–16. Initial respondents were located through personal and professional networks, and from there, through snowball sampling. In a few cases, I approached participants at IT conferences I attended and asked them if they would be willing to be interviewed by me.

14. My research focussed on the sector of the IT industry known as ‘IT services’, which is primarily centred around software development and testing. It does not extend to IT-Enabled Services (ITES) such as call centre work, data entry and transcription; however, some executives I interviewed who hold decision-making positions within industry bodies were employed at ITES companies.

15. The term ‘non-Brahmin’ carries particular socio-political and affective meanings in Tamil Nadu. For a deeper analysis of its origins and history, see M.S.S. Pandian, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007); see also V. Geetha and S.V. Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (Calcutta: Samya, 1998).

16. The ‘Brahminised’ castes, in Aloysius’ eloquent formulation, vary from region to region, but are united in ‘drawing religio-cultural and also economic sustenance from [the Brahmin core]…in ceaseless mutual reinforcement’: G. Aloysius, The Brahminical Inscribed in Body-Politic (New Delhi: Critical Quest, 2010): 41–42.

17. I have spoken more about my own access to the industry as a privileged researcher in: S. Shakthi, ‘Confronting My Many-Hued Self: An Autoethnographic Analysis of Skin Colour across Multiple Geographies’, Emotion, Space and Society 37 (2020), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2020.100732.

18. Fernandez, New Frontier, 20.

19. Aloysius, Brahminical Inscribed, 12.

20. Sukhadeo Thorat and Katherine S. Newman, ed., Blocked by Caste: Economic Discrimination in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010).

21. Surinder S. Jodhka, ‘Ascriptive Hierarchies: Caste and Its Reproduction in Contemporary India’, Current Sociology 64, no. 2 (2015): 228–43.

22. Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell, ‘The Legacy of Social Exclusion: A Correspondence Study of Job Discrimination in India’s Urban Private Sector’, in Blocked by Caste: Economic Discrimination in Modern India, ed. Sukhadeo Thorat and Katherine S. Newman (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010): 35–51.

23. Ramesh Bairy, Being Brahmin, Being Modern: Exploring the Lives of Caste Today (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010): 114.

24. Renny Thomas, ‘Brahmins as Scientists and Science as Brahmins’ Calling: Caste in an Indian Scientific Research Institute’, Public Understanding of Science 29, no. 3 (2020): 306–18; 309–10.

25. Pallavi Rao, ‘The Five-Point Indian: Caste, Masculinity, and English Language in the Paratexts of Chetan Bhagat’, Journal of Communication Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2018): 91–113.

26. Ajantha Subramanian, The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

27. Thomas, ‘Brahmins as Scientists’, 306–18.

28. Fuller and Narasimhan attribute the large presence of Brahmins in the industry to ‘the high value that Brahmins give to education, notably in mathematics and science, and their position as the best-educated community in Tamilnadu’. This perspective does not acknowledge the wider socio-political context in which the IT industry is embedded, where Brahmins have managed to maintain their monopoly over certain professions because of their active subjugation of other castes. Fuller and Narasimhan, ‘Information Technology Professionals’, 142–43.

29. Baas, ‘IT Caste’, 306–07.

30. A. Kalaiyarasan and M. Vijaybaskar, The Dravidian Model: Interpreting the Political Economy of Tamil Nadu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021): 27.

31. Up to 50 percent of seats in private engineering colleges in the state are also subject to caste-based reservation policies.

32. The Tamil Nadu Professional Courses Entrance Examination (TNPCEE) was also used for admission to medical colleges. More recently, the federal government made an entrance examination known as the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) compulsory for admission to medical colleges across the country. This has been met with vocal opposition in Tamil Nadu, amplified by the deaths by suicide of medical aspirant S. Anitha and a number of other students who could not meet the cut-off marks required for admission.

33. Kalaiyarasan and Vijaybaskar, Dravidian Model, 182–83.

34. Corporate boards in the top 1,000 private companies in India are overwhelmingly comprised of upper-caste members: see D. Ajit, Han Donker and Ravi Saxena, ‘Corporate Boards in India: Blocked by Caste?’, Economic & Political Weekly 47, no. 32 (2012): 39–43.

35. ‘Diversity in Action: NASSCOM Corporate Awards for Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion 2011’, NASSCOM and PricewaterhouseCoopers Pvt. Ltd (PwC), 2011.

36. Ibid.

37. K. Veeramani, ed., Collected Works of Periyar E.V.R. (Chennai: The Periyar Self-Respect Propaganda Institution, 1981): 276.

38. S. Shakthi, ‘Travelling “Down South”: Language, Cultural Capital and Spatiality in Chennai’s Information Technology Sector’, Social & Cultural Geography (online, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2023.2171100.

39. See Odile Henry and Mathieu Ferry, ‘When Cracking the JEE Is Not Enough: Processes of Elimination and Differentiation, from Entry to Placement, in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs)’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 15 (2017), accessed August 12, 2021, https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4291; Satish Deshpande, ‘Exclusive Inequalities: Merit, Caste and Discrimination in Indian Higher Education Today’, Economic & Political Weekly 41, no. 28 (2006): 2438–44; Surinder S. Jodhka and Katherine S. Newman, ‘In the Name of Globalisation: Meritocracy, Productivity, and the Hidden Language of Caste’, in Blocked by Caste: Economic Discrimination in Modern India, ed. Sukhadeo Thorat and Katherine S. Newman (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010): 52–87.

40. Upadhya, ‘Employment, Exclusion and “Merit”’, 1863–68. Fernandez refers to this as ‘pure merit’, applying a Bourdieusian analysis of capital to similarly demonstrate how it is structurally constituted: Fernandez, The New Frontier, passim.

41. Ajantha Subramanian, ‘Making Merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Social Life of Caste’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, no. 2 (2015): 291–322; 293.

42. S. Shakthi, ‘The Law, the Market, the Gendered Subject: Workplace Sexual Harassment in Chennai’s Information Technology Industry’, Gender, Place & Culture 27, no. 1 (2020): 34–51.

43. This sentiment is also reported by Mosse when discussing caste among both Indian and foreign employees at international aid agencies in Delhi: Mosse, ‘Modernity of Caste’, 1237.

44. All names are pseudonyms.

45. Fernandez, New Frontier, 3.

46. Satish Deshpande, ‘Caste and Castelessness: Towards a Biography of the “General Category”’, Economic & Political Weekly 48, no. 15 (2013): 32–39; 32.

47. Subramanian, ‘Making Merit’, 302–03.

48. For more on how questions on ‘background’ are utilised by hiring managers to situate employees within social categories, see Jodhka and Newman, ‘In the Name of Globalisation’, 76–81.

49. B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Annihilation of Caste’, in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Vol. 1, ed. Vasant Moon (Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1979–2006 [1916]): 47.

50. ‘Vishal Sikka on Infosys Issue: I am a Kshatriya Warrior and I am Here to Stay and Fight’, The Financial Express, February 14, 2017, accessed September 12, 2021, https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/vishal-sikka-on-infosys-issue-i-am-a-kshatriya-warrior-and-i-am-here-to-stay-and-fight/550136/.

51. M.S.S. Pandian, ‘One Step outside Modernity: Caste, Identity Politics and Public Sphere’, Economic & Political Weekly 37, no. 18 (2002): 1735–41; 1735.

52. See, for example, D. Karthikeyan and Hugo Gorringe, ‘The Hidden Politics of Vegetarianism: Caste and The Hindu Canteen’, Economic & Political Weekly 49, no. 20 (2014): 20–22; M.S.S. Pandian, ‘Chicken Biryani and the Inconsequential Brahmin’, Economic & Political Weekly 26, no. 35 (1991): 2043–44.

53. While Iyers are a Tamil Brahmin sub-caste, Murali is using the term ‘Iyer’ here to refer to Tamil Brahmins in general.

54. A namam is a distinctive U-shaped forehead marking. Contrary to Murali’s statement, it is most commonly worn by Iyengars, another Brahmin sub-caste, and not Iyers.

55. Balmurli Natrajan, The Culturalization of Caste in India: Identity and Inequality in a Multicultural Age (London: Routledge, 2011).

56. Sara Dickey, ‘The Pleasures and Anxieties of Being in the Middle: Emerging Middle-Class Identities in Urban South India’, Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 3 (2012): 559–99; 571.

57. My own study is limited to the experiences of software professionals; for an analysis of how low-wage service workers negotiate the IT industry, see Kiran Mirchandani, Sanjukta Mukherjee and Shruti Tambe, Low Wage in High Tech: An Ethnography of Service Workers in Global India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

58. Muthu referred to his caste as a ‘different caste’ and indicated that he did not belong to a ‘Forward’ caste.

59. A poonal is a thread worn over one shoulder and across the body by male Tamil Brahmins. It is also worn by Brahmins as well as, in some instances, other ‘twice-born’ castes in other parts of India.

60. Tiku, ‘India’s Engineers’.

61. Leela Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

62. Jodhka and Newman, ‘In the Name of Globalisation’, 76–81; Upadhya, ‘Employment, Exclusion and “Merit”’, 1863–68.

63. Emerging research has underscored the agency displayed by Dalit software engineers in ‘navigat[ing] computing on their own terms’: Vaghela, Jackson and Sengers, ‘Interrupting Merit’, 13.

64. Namboodiris are a Brahmin caste from Kerala.

65. For media reportage on the case, see ‘Not Funny! MNC Banners “Caste Out”’, The New Indian Express, November 10, 2011, accessed April 24, 2017, https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/chennai/2011/nov/10/not-funny-mnc-banners-caste-out-308681.html.

66. Deshpande, ‘Caste and Castelessness’, 33.

67. Pandian, ‘One Step outside Modernity’, 1735.

68. This phenomenon has been observed in the market-driven logic of Indian diasporic consumer culture as well: see Bandana Purkayastha, Negotiating Ethnicity: Second-Generation South Asian Americans Traverse a Transnational World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005): 140.

69. Snehanjali Chrispal and Hari Bapuji, ‘It’s Not Caste! It’s Culture! MNC Reproduction of Local Inequalities at a Global Level’, unpublished paper presented at the ‘Caste Work in Management Studies: How Are Historical Stigma and Inequality Reproduced?’ online symposium, School of Management, University of Bath, July 29, 2021.

70. Balmurli Natrajan, ‘From Jati to Samaj’, Seminar 633 (2012): 544–47.

71. Pandian, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin, passim; Aloysius, Brahminical Inscribed, 12.