Ground Down and Locked in a Paperweight: Toward a Critical Psychology of Caste-Based Humiliation

Abstract

Psychology limits the scope of raising questions important in the caste context. While psychology focuses on why and how people feel humiliated, the question in the caste context is why and how people do not feel humiliated despite incessant and gratuitous attacks on their dignity and self-worth. This article argues that psychology needs to adopt a critical orientation to address the experience of caste-based humiliation. The anticaste perspective of B. R. Ambedkar provides a critical orientation and psychological insights to build a meaningful psychology of caste-based humiliation. Ambedkar rejected individualist, essentialized notions of human self and emphasized the dimension of intergroup emotions to understand caste relations. I develop this argument by analyzing the experience, impact, and resistance to caste-based humiliation among Dalits. I describe caste-based humiliation in extreme (caste atrocities) and less extreme (caste microaggressions) forms and show that the experience of caste-based humiliation is pervasive, direct, but also vicarious. I then examine the psychological impact of caste-based humiliation on the health, social vitality, and appraisal process among Dalits. I show that a caste-ridden context makes it difficult to interpret humiliation and affects Dalit life narratives through retrospective feelings of humiliation. Finally, I consider the issue of resistance to humiliation and show that mere appraisal of humiliation could also be a form of resistance. The article concludes with an emphasis on exploring the scope of psychological resistance to caste-based humiliation through individual and collective acts of meaning that interpret and transform a humiliating existence.

Social Psychological Explorations of Caste: Unravelling Challenges and Discovering Opportunities

“…It is equally important to examine how the oppressed caste groups deal with the everyday challenges thrown at them owing to their identity position. For example, Jogdand (2023) suggested that one form of resistance could be the mere appraisal of humiliation. Along the same lines, the mere existence of Dalits in a digital context dominated by opposing and suppressing voices maybe perceived as an act of resistance.…”

Laying the Ground for a Critical Psychology of Caste

“…Overall, psychology has worked as a technique for legitimizing racism and ignoring power inequalities and structural determinants of human oppression. In India, psychology has perpetuated the caste order and denigrated the Dalits and lower castes (Jogdand 2023). In this sense, psychology should be construed as a form of power that is used to control, influence, and coerce Dalit and Black/African people.…”

“…Graded inequality creates an affective climate in which various castes harbor feelings that form "[an] ascending scale of hatred and descending scale of contempt" (Ambedkar 1987: 48). In addition, Ambedkar approached emotions as group-based performative entities critical to building solidarities and mobilizing collective action (Jogdand 2023). Ambedkar's mobilization discourse is replete with his innovative usage of cognitive and affective categories.…”

“…Unfortunately, this foundation remained under-appreciated in the subsequent academic and social engagement on caste. Specifically, psychologists remained distanced from caste and ignored the anti-caste psychological thinking of Phule and Ambedkar (Jogdand 2023). As we shall see next, the interest and effort to address the psychological dimension of caste continued in various ways but there was limited growth of the 'psychology of caste' as an autonomous field of study.…”

Caste and Colourism: Analysing Social Meanings of Skin Colour in Dalit and Savarna Discourses

“…Not only through the casteist slurs but as Das (2021) writes, the expressions "You dress so well, you don't look like Dalit"… "I could never imagine you are Dalit", etc., are also casteist and discriminatory in nature. Jogdand (2023) shows how these comments constrain Dalits to an upper-caste 1 gaze, leading to their humiliation. It is important to ask oneself what stereotypical expectation or casteist associations one reproduces through this language.…”