‘Pyaar Dosti Hai’ But In India, Caste Determines Who Becomes Your Friend

In Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Miss Braganza asks Rahul – “What is love?” Our hero replies, “Pyaar Dosti Hai” (Love is Friendship). He continues, “if she can’t be my best friend, I can’t be in love with her”.

The question here is how does one decide to be best friends with someone? Is it based on a conscious choice? What are the factors that influence one to be best friends with another? Was Plato right when he said similarity begets friendship?

What does all this mean in the Indian context is what I’ll be discussing in this article.

Free Will

Merriam Webster defines ‘Free Will’ as the “freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention.” But as humans, aren’t we all products of our environment?

In the light of recent research and studies, the scientific community believes that the concept of free will is, in fact, a myth – but a good one. Science claims it can explain all human behaviour through the clockwork laws of cause and effect. Our upbringing, schooling, parents, and society that we grew up in all influence our decision-making process.

Public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari argues that humans do make choices – but at the same time, he believes that they are never independent choices. Instead, he asserts that every choice depends on many biological, social, and personal conditions that a person cannot determine for himself. So do these factors in some way influence how we make our friends?

India: Land of Castes

In a caste-conscious nation like India, it is no wonder that young kids happen to know of their caste and take pride in it at such a tender age. By the time they reach adulthood, some people try to understand caste and its mechanism in our society. However, the majority of them have the same rigid and inflexible views as that of their elders.

In his book, “India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond,” author Shashi Tharoor describes a short story where the yesteryear actor Rishi Kapoor who happened to be Mr Tharoor’s schoolmate, asked him about his caste.

Tharoor wrote, “Tharoor”, he asked me at the head of the steps near the toilet, “what caste are you? I [Shashi Tharoor] blinked my nervousness at the Great Man. “I don’t know,” I stammered.

My father, who never mentioned anyone’s religion, let alone caste, had not bothered to enlighten me on such matters. “You don’t know?, little Rishi Kapoor demanded in astonishment. “What do you mean, you don’t know?

Everybody knows their caste”. I shamefacedly confessed I didn’t. “You mean you’re not a Brahmin or something”, [sic] Mr Tharoor says Rishi Kapoor never spoke to him again.

In friendships, too, some barriers impede relationships across caste and religion. Again, these might be elusive, but mainly it surfaces as palpable ones.

Prejudice

Prejudices that many people hold towards the Dalits, Bahujans, and minority religions may impede the development of friendship between them. For example, many Dalits do not want to reveal their caste at work, school, or even to their hostel mates because it brings unprecedented prejudice against them.

Along with society, television and movies have contributed their fair share to this prejudice. For example, let’s take the poster of Bollywood actor Richa Chadha’s film “Madam Chief Minister.”

If you would have noticed the poster, you can see a lady with a broom in her hand, with the tagline “Untouchable, Unstoppable.” The poster amplifies the stereotypical portrayal of Dalit identity.

The casual use of the dehumanising word “untouchable” just for marketing shows how Bollywood is negligent of the caste realities in our country. [They eventually did take down the poster after facing backlash from the general audience].

The silver screen has conditioned the audience with the prejudice that for being a Dalit, one has to be uneducated, has to come from a rural background, speaks broken English, and is a person who isn’t confident at all.

I won’t cover much about the prejudices people hold towards minority religions. Still, I would like to cite another article titled “The Effect of Affect: Friendship, Education and Prejudice in India,” wherein Asha Venugopal concludes that education does not reduce prejudice.

“In college-educated Hindus—around 11 percent of the Indian population—perceive Muslims more negatively than their non-literate counterparts. The results pose a conundrum as to the role of education. The idea of education as a promoter of liberal values fails the test.”

– The Effect of Affect: Friendship, Education and Prejudice in India, Asha Venugopal

“While a Hindu might perceive their Muslim friend to be peaceful, the individual might not hold the same view about the Muslim community, since they would consider their Muslim friend to be an ‘exception to the rule’. The creation and sustenance of prejudice towards a community could thus be independent of intergroup contact and remain relatively unaffected by even positive interpersonal relations.” [sic.]

– The Effect of Affect: Friendship, Education and Prejudice in India, Asha Venugopal

Trust

Friends provide us with a strong sense of companionship, mitigate feelings of loneliness (Lykes and Kemmelmeier, 2014), and contribute to our self-esteem and life satisfaction (Goodwin and Hernandez Plaza, 2000; Chopik, 2017).
Friends are expected to be trustworthy and considerate, affectionate, self-disclosing, and companionable. Failing to meet these expectations can impair friendship (Argyle & Henderson, 1984).

Trust may be difficult to establish between a Dalit and his Savarna mates. The Dalit might anticipate that the Savarna might be prejudiced against him, or he may doubt himself that will he be able to assimilate into the lifestyle, norms, values, and attitudes of the Savarna.

Microaggression could also cause difficulties in forming trust between the marginalised and the Savarnas.
According to Merriam Webster, microaggression means comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a marginalised group member.

Lilienfeld (2017) described microaggressions “as subtle snubs, slights, and insults directed toward minorities, as well as to women and other historically stigmatised groups, that implicitly communicate or engender hostility” (p. 139).

Microaggression could work out when one Savarna casually states things like, “Oh, you belong to SC/ST community, it is much easier for you to land a job.” “You don’t look like a Dalit.”

“Are you kidding me?! You can’t be a Dalit.” “Casteism doesn’t exist anymore.” “Reservation affects merit.” “You guys get everything for free.” “I wish I were a Dalit, and I could have also availed the fee concession”, etc.

“Anyone incident may not seem significant, but multiple daily experiences with microaggressions have long-term negative effects such as self-doubt, anxiety, helplessness, fear, diminished self-esteem, and feelings of isolation.”

– Friendships Across Race, Ethnicity, and Sexual Orientation, Suzanna M. Rose and Michelle M. Hospital

Colourism

As Dalits in this country are usually associated with dark skin tone, the caste system in India too involves skin colour bias.

Rajesh Rajamani’s “The Discreet Charm of Savarnas” (2020) is a satirical short film on three young ‘woke’ Savarnas who want to cast a “Dalit-looking person” for their new movie. In the end, they do manage to find a Dalit actor, but they find her “little too pretty to be cast as Dalit.”

What they do next won’t surprise many of us, as it is a practice in Bollywood to darken the face of the fair-skinned actors to portray characters from disadvantaged backgrounds.

“Irrespective of one’s colour score, caste, or region, the desire for a lighter skin tone persists; therefore, other things being equal, lighter skin colour is related to higher societal acceptance. At the same time, a higher caste with a darker skin tone may be acceptable more when compared to a lower caste and having a darker skin tone.”

– India and Colorism: The Finer Nuances, Neha Mishra, 14 WASH. U. GLOBAL STUD. L. REV. 725 (2015)

Romance

What is love? I think that is a pretty subjective question to be asked. The definition of love might depend upon an individual and his entire idea of love.

But is love, at first sight, a thing? A mere physical attraction for someone could be concluded as love? Or is it just a wrong idea of love that has been popularised by art and literature?

Psychologist and sex therapist Lauren Fogel Mercy, PsyD, explains romantic love requires knowing someone and their whole self—something that’s impossible to do just by looking at a person.

In India, as we have seen above, caste plays an influential part in deciding who we become friends with. Similarly, does it also affect our romantic interests?

“The love that comes from friendship is the underlying facet of a happy life.”

– Chelsea Handler

In India, the upper caste usually carries around their caste identity as their surname. It naturally gives them a positive advantage in a caste-conscious society. However, for developing a romantic relationship with someone, the two individuals must get to know each other.

While most upper castes could identify other people of their community just by knowing their surname, it gets much easier for them to identify their ‘potential companion’ and move things forward. At least they now don’t have to worry about the caste part of issues.

Things don’t sail this smooth in the case of a Dalit and their upper-caste love interest. In a nation where honour killing is still prevalent, the idea of love for a Dalit gets distorted.

How many love stories would have failed to bloom in this nation even before its seeds were sown just because of caste? So many won’t even approach their love interests as they make it up in their mind- it simply won’t work out -as, in the hierarchy of caste, they are no match for each other.

The idea of inter-caste love itself raises many questions and doubts in one’s mind like what if dating works out to be good, how will they proceed further in this relationship? Will parents agree to this relationship? What if parents oppose this relationship?

This kind of relationship always brings a risk factor of someone getting hurt. The hurt could be mental, or in India, it could also be physical, which may even lead to death. All for loving someone of the same species.

Let’s consider an upper caste person who is educated, financially stable, and is pretty much aware of the caste-related issues in this nation. Still, the person believes that- concerning their ‘family’s casteist ideas,’ it would be much ‘easier’ for them to date, love, and get married to someone from their caste.

In this scenario, I would like to know from them – won’t be an unintentional positive prejudice. Now that you know this person you want belongs to your caste. Won’t your mind unconsciously process that at least that part of the issue is sorted out?

Now all you have left to check is the compatibility factor. So won’t your subconscious mind crave for the relationship to turn out to be good so that your family also can come on board quickly?

I know people can’t just ignore their family who has raised them to this point of their lives and to take such a ‘big decision’ against their will won’t be easy for a loving child. But if somebody feels comfortable or easier to love somebody of their caste, don’t they conform to their parent’s casteist ideas?

So does that make them a promoter of caste? Letting something like caste cause prejudice in one’s mind, isn’t that wrong? Is that their fault? Or are they just conditioned to feel so by society?

Let’s take the same hypothetical situation with the same person as above. Instead of an upper-caste person, you now have a Dalit person as the love interest. Now the prejudice has changed to negative.

Before anything takes a proper form between them, their mind subconsciously projects the barrier called caste in front of them, which wasn’t present in the earlier case of the upper caste love interest. So what does that make them? A loving child or something else they wished they never were?

India is a nation where still parents decide who their children should live with for the ‘rest of their lives.’ As a result, arranged marriage is the most common way Indians get married.

The rate of inter-caste marriages in India, as of 2011, was merely 5.82%, and there has been no upward trend over the past four decades. Moreover, as many as 145 incidents of honour killings took place in our country between 2017 and 2019.

Love is friendship, but we live in a society where some friendships could cost one his life, where love is denied, where love is hated.

“I am convinced that the real remedy is intermarriage. Fusion of blood can alone create the feeling of being kith and kin, and unless this feeling of kinship, of being kindred, becomes paramount, the separatist feeling—the feeling of being aliens—created by caste will not vanish.”

– Annihilation of Caste, B.R. Ambedkar