Correct. No one has ever announced their caste to me except Brahmins. Ironically, one to explain why he was vegetarian and the other to explain why he was NOT vegetarian.
It seems like confirmation bias would also be a thing. If it’s important to you to avoid certain types of people because you think it will be polluting for you to have certain types of context with them, you likely think you can spot them. And whether you are right or wrong, you likely never find out, so you just go your merry way. And you’ll remember the times you got it right over the times you were wrong, or unsure.
How much of a role do accents play in caste identification? Would you stand a good chance of being able to tell a person’s Caste over the phone simply chatting about the weather for instance?
I realize India has a massive variety of languages and dialects, but is there some common linguistic markers, perhaps even just to tell someone’s level of education?
We had a guy where I used to work, who was a PhD chemical engineer. Someone said they saw a fax from another (East Indian) colleague at another site addressing him as “Prince…” so-and-so. I imagine there things matter.
When we were in India a few years ago, we mentioned about a number of our neighbours being Indian (hmmm, the guy three doors down has the license plate “PUNJAB”) and they started telling us about the names - “that one means farmer, that one means judge…” and so on.
I suppose the difference is that European society is somewhat more socially mobile so past family occupation means less. My father was a professor of science, my one uncle was a pig farmer.
I very much doubt this. There are highly educated and poorly educated and affluent and poor people from every caste. Your accent would reflect your ethnic group, the place you grew up, and likely your school. I should think it would be unlikely to identify your caste.
A Soviet Jewish friend, who was also unable to bribe officials, explained this to me. A bribe, he said, is not just a fee for a service, it’s also a social transaction. “We are helping each other”. And so, the official needs to feel some connection to the bribe-offerer. He said he hoped to smooth his passage by bribing officials, and brought money to do it, but was never able to.
Tamil is one language where the accent and diction would easily identify a Brahmin.
The trouble with trying to talk about India’s caste system is the same problem that affects anything about India. India is not really a single country - except in the political sense. Its is akin to Europe - a multitude of languages, cultures, races that exist in a continuum.
However, sometimes I feel like I’m seeing something - but I don’t quite know what I’m seeing, so I can’t call it out. It’s just that the interaction is odd in a way that I can’t quite place, but it’s there.