An economist's rise defies caste system

By Anand Giridharadas - International Herald Tribune: "In the village where he was not born, Narendra Jadhav's untouchable ancestors walked with brooms on their rumps to erase their polluting footprints. When a cow died, too sacred for others to eat, it was the untouchables, the hungry lowborn, who plucked at the stringy carcass, blood spraying their faces as their children shooed scavenging dogs.

Jadhav's kin succumbed to an accident of birth afflicting every sixth Indian: birth as a Dalit, or untouchable. But because his parents fled the village one night decades ago, Jadhav won a slender second chance. And for having parlayed that chance into a berth in India's governing elite, Jadhav marches in the vanguard of a trend that is eviscerating the caste.

"It may be in the interest of others to be your masters, but why should it be in your interest to be their slaves?" Jadhav said in an interview, citing a question posed by Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the late champion of Dalit rights. "My grandfather and his father and his father had never asked that question. My father asked that question."

Jadhav, 52, may or may not become, as well-wishers introduce him, "the future president of India." He may or may not become, as politicians have urged, a national political leader, perhaps a finance minister, blending his talents as technocrat and populist.

For now, he is the chief economist of India's central bank, and to many Dalits, that offers promise enough: Should he become the head of the bank, the signature of his Dalit name will adorn billions of bank notes, touching nearly every Indian, including 160 million Dalits.

And as if to defy the core proposition of the caste system - that thinking be left to Brahmins and tasks like cleaning latrines to Dalits - Jadhav moonlights as a prolific author. His oeuvre includes economics textbooks, political tracts in his Marathi mother tongue, and, most recently, a family memoir, already published in French and Spanish, that is being made into a movie and whose U.S. edition was released Tuesday under the title "Untouchables."

His is a story of penetrating perhaps the most intricate system of barriers to meritocracy ever conceived.

The 3,500-year-old caste system in India divides humanity into hereditary professions: priest, warrior, merchant and laborer - subdivided into thousands of minicastes, from laborer to cobbler. Lurking below everyone are the untouchables.

And in what Jadhav calls "a brilliantly administered con job," Dalits are taught that low birth is penance for sins in a past life and that enduring it is the way to have better luck next time.

"They tell people, 'You carry human mess on your head now, because if you do that and do it dutifully, then in the next life you will carry flowers.' What bull is this?" said Jadhav, whose family, like many Dalit families, abandoned Hinduism for Buddhism. "It's a massive dose of opium that was given to these people so that they don't stand up and fight."

For centuries, and still today, for many, inherited professions were combined with more quotidian oppressions: living outside one's own village, going from hut to hut begging for food and wearing the brooms.

Today, more than a half century after India's Constitution outlawed caste discrimination, Dalits remain disadvantaged vis-à-vis the highborn: less literate, more diseased and less employed.

Statistically, according to aid groups, being a Dalit shaves 16 years off a woman's life.

Today, India's Dalits suffer the oppressions of different centuries all at once: Some endure glorified slavery more typical of the medieval period, others live in what amounts to segregation, still others face high-class contempt on the cocktail-party circuit.

At those parties, "What's your name?" often begins a string of questions, all burrowing in on one thing.

"What is your caste?" Jadhav said, his pitch rising as he cited that one thing. "The moment I say my name is Jadhav, the person shaking hands says, 'Oh, I see.' There is this very subtle change I've noticed - even today. He's asking me - it's written all over his face - 'What are you doing here? How? How?"'

Jadhav is perhaps the Booker T. Washington of the Dalits, attacking caste by disproving its premise - by rising within, not outside, the system.

Just as Washington once advised African-Americans, Jadhav today counsels Dalits to rise by educating themselves, not by waiting for emancipation.

Jadhav grew up in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, outside the village caste rigidities, because his father fled them. With his wife in tow, Damodar Jadhav walked off one night in a sudden, tradition-rupturing huff.

They settled in Bombay, a teeming port promising anonymity. His father eked out a wage as a municipal worker; his mother sold produce on the street. They lived in a slum, without electricity or private bathrooms.

Jadhav's first career goal was to be a gangster, a profession for which he had many local role models.

In school, where an affirmative-action program for Dalits paid his tuition, one teacher taunted him publicly as the government's "son-in-law."

The Dalit-rights movement altered his course. Led by Ambedkar, who had earned doctorates from Columbia University in New York and the London School of Economics, the movement touted education as a panacea for Dalit power. Jadhav's illiterate father became a devout, early member and carried that message home.

Embarrassed by his village accent, Jadhav never spoke in school. But, toiling quietly, he began to top school rankings, even scoring first place in Sanskrit, the divine language of the Brahmins. Egged on by his father, he earned a bachelor's, a master's and doctoral degrees - the last in the United States on a scholarship.

At the Reserve Bank of India, which he joined at 25, he rose quickly. Recognizing his talents, superiors asked him to write their speeches.

Today, his friends include many of India's most powerful names. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India is an old acquaintance.

"There are many Narendra Jadhavs, many. They're still not big, but they will be, at the grass roots," he said. "What is happening in India is nothing short of a silent revolution."

From 1981 to 2002, the number of lower-caste students in middle or high school rose from 3.4 million to 11.8 million, growing 3.5 times, against an average of 2.4 for the broader population.


"When I go to upper-caste, middle-class homes, the father and mother would be complaining: 'The child is not studying, he's watching TV,"' Jadhav said. "When I go to slums to meet my relatives, they don't have that kind of problem. You will see that the light is not there; there is a gutter flowing nearby. But the child is sitting there in whatever room has electricity, and he is studying. He doesn't need motivation.""