Towards caste majoritarianism?

I was recently forced to overhear a conversation between strangers, two Indian women, who met on the Bhopal-Delhi Shatabdi Express. They quickly zeroed in on each other's caste. One was a Kayastha (a privileged non-Brahmin) and the other, the younger woman, a Brahmin. Both were happy to discover that they had a Kayastha connection – the Brahmin woman revealed that she had married a Kayastha man. Then they dwelt briefly on the many subcastes and hierarchies within the Kayasthas – Mathur, Sinha, Saxena, Nigam and Shrivastav. The Brahmin woman, employed in the information-technology department of an insurance company, stated with distinct pride that, when all is said and done, Brahmins had 'sharper minds' and were born more 'intelligent'. To substantiate, she talked of how her Brahmin brother always outwitted her non-Brahmin husband in decision-making.

The Brahmin brother, it seems, could always convince his Kayastha brother-in-law of his point of view, whether on a financial matter or where to go on holiday. The quieter Kayastha woman did not protest any of this. Even when the diminutive Brahmin woman later concluded – with her own theory of caste eugenics – that her children had developed a 'better physique' owing to the Kayastha father, she underscored that she did not compromise on a vegetarian diet. Now, what would be the caste of the children of this Brahmin-Kayastha marriage, with its own power dynamics? Surely, given an option, it is unlikely they would register as 'no caste' in the forthcoming Census of India – the first to include a section on caste in nearly seven decades. Even in such mixed-caste offspring, the importance of caste in their minds would not be discounted.