Caste: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

In December of 2017, Isabel Wilkerson arrived in London to attend a conference on caste. At the convention center, she noticed that there was no one else of African descent in the audience. She had come to study the caste system in India—and she was hoping that after the successful publication of her first book, she would be recognized as a legitimate scholar and a “well-spoken and focused” person. But when she approached an Indian woman whom she could tell was upper-caste and asked for a packet of papers that had been presented earlier that morning, the woman questioned why Wilkerson needed a copy and refused to give her the materials. 

At lunch, Wilkerson sat next to an Indian man who was sitting alone. They began talking, and he told her that his name was Tushar and that he belonged to the second-highest caste—the warrior-soldier caste. Wilkerson was intrigued by Tushar’s bookish appearance and felt struck by the phenomenon of “miscasting” that caste creates. Tushar continued to tell Wilkerson about how growing up in India, he’d felt moved to help members of the lower castes he saw struggling on the streets—but he was always told to stay in his place and ignore their plight because “caste [was] created by God.”

When Tushar asked Wilkerson what caste she belonged to in the U.S., she told him that she was an “American Dalit”—but that she was living proof of caste’s arbitrary nature and artificiality. The two continued to trade stories of their heartbreaking experiences bearing witness to their countries’ respective caste systems. Each of them was miscast, meaning that they had defied their caste assignments and refused the definitions thrust onto them at birth.