In 1969, John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival wrote Fortunate Son as an indictment of inherited advantage: some are born protected, others are born exposed.
“Some folks are born silver spoon in hand/ Lord, don’t they help themselves”
Suraj Yengde’s Caste: A Global Story reasserts the same indictment, but with a different ethnographic ground and a wider comparative reach. Ranked inequality of a caste-like kind appears in many places, even if India’s version carries what Amartya Sen, in his foreword to the book, calls a “shameful uniqueness”. Yengde’s narrative follows that ranking system as it moves across oceans, archives, and generations.
“It ain’t me, it ain’t me I ain’t no senator’s son/ It ain’t me, it ain’t me I ain’t no fortunate one”
Readers of Yengde’s earlier Caste Matters will recognise the same auto-ethnographic impulse. That earlier book was driven by the lived experience of what he calls ‘Dalitality’ – a term he uses to name the accumulated weight on the being of those born into the lowest rung of the caste ladder. The new book keeps the personal current but then travels with it. The introduction and Chapter 1, ‘Colonial Dalitality’, examine how the British census and official reports first gave administrative shape to Dalit groups by recording their subjection, occupations, and socio-spiritual separateness. Yengde insists that Dalits were never merely passive subjects in these classifications; they also claimed, refused, or reworked the labels imposed upon them.
Chapters 2 and 4 stage the book’s central claim: that caste is not a fixed Indian inheritance but a system of ranking that crosses borders and takes new forms.
In Chapter 2, ‘Affairs of Letters: Dalit Responses to Black Literature’, Yengde shows that the conversation between Dalits and Black Americans did not begin with the Dalit Panthers or in the 1970s. Ambedkar himself was the first major Dalit thinker to engage African American experience systematically, notably in his reply to Lala Lajpat Rai’s comparison of untouchability and American slavery. Later, M N Wankhede, principal of Milind College and founder of the journal Asmita, became the central mediator, introducing Black literature to a generation of Marathi Dalit writers. Janardhan Waghmare, writing from rural Marathwada, pushed the comparison further, treating slave narratives as directly analogous to Dalit conditions and reading the American Dream against Malcolm X’s American nightmare.
What Yengde captures well is both the depth of this one-directional literary solidarity and its limits: after the 1960s, the Black American side remained largely unaware of Dalit developments, language barriers slowed translation, and the relationship stayed more inspirational than reciprocal. The chapter is innovative precisely because it refuses easy romance; it documents a real intellectual genealogy while remaining honest about its asymmetries.
“It ain’t me, it ain’t me I ain’t no millionaire’s son/ It ain’t me, it ain’t me I ain’t no fortunate one”
Chapter 4, ‘The Dalit Republic of Diaspora: A Case Study of Trinidad’, is the book’s most vivid demonstration that caste does not simply dissolve when it crosses the ocean. Drawing on earlier ethnographers and his own fieldwork, Yengde shows that while many lower-caste indentured labourers arrived in Trinidad, hierarchy reasserted itself in new forms. Colin Clarke’s 1964 survey found that only a small fraction of Hindus still knew their caste by name, yet Brahmanical prestige had actually increased rather than faded. Outcastes were still marked – food served on a leaf instead of a plate, subtle exclusions at religious gatherings. Caste survived as a code of identity, prestige, ritual, and endogamy. It underwent what Yengde calls a kind of creolisation: mixed with other groups, reshaped across generations, and kept alive inside Hindu organisations such as the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, where pandit superiority could still surface in the order of the food line. The chapter makes Yengde’s global claim concrete: caste moves, mutates, and finds new institutional homes rather than dissolving.
The book concludes by returning to the author’s notes as archivist and activist. The result is a more ambitious book than Caste Matters. It demonstrates the same urgency of voice, but now, it’s stretched across a larger map.
“Some folks inherit star-spangled eyes/ Ooh, they send you down to war/ And when you ask them, ‘How much should we give?’/ Ooh, they only answer, ‘More, more, more’”
This song still cuts because the structure it named has not disappeared. Yengde’s book demonstrates this on a larger map. In the conclusion, he turns the question back onto the dominant castes themselves: it is we, more than the caste-oppressed, who need to confront the social and religious creeds that cannot tolerate human equality. Some are born protected by the system; others inherit its weight. Yengde, like Fogerty, asks who gets to remain the fortunate one, and at whose expense the protection is maintained.
The writer, as Dr Jekyll, is a Professor of Philosophy, Politics and Law, author and editor of over 20 books and counting, and as Mr Hyde, one of India’s top-ranking Ironman triathletes.
Aakash Singh Rathore
(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH).
Courtesy : DH
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