Making Merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Social Life of Caste

Abstract

The politics of meritocracy at the Indian Institutes of Technology illuminates the social life of caste in contemporary India. I argue that the IIT graduate's status depends on the transformation of privilege into merit, or the conversion of caste capital into modern capital. Analysis of this process calls for a relational approach to merit. My ethnographic research on the southeastern state of Tamilnadu, and on IIT Madras located in the state capital of Chennai, illuminates claims to merit, not simply as the transformation of capital but also as responses to subaltern assertion. Analyzing meritocracy in relation to subaltern politics allows us to see the contextual specificity of such claims: at one moment, they are articulated through the disavowal of caste, at another, through caste affiliation. This marking and unmarking of caste suggests a rethinking of meritocracy, typically assumed to be a modernist ideal that disclaims social embeddedness and disdains the particularisms of caste and race. I show instead that claims to collective belonging and to merit are eminently commensurable, and become more so when subaltern assertion forces privilege into the foreground. Rather than the progressive erasure of ascribed identities in favor of putatively universal ones, we are witnessing the re-articulation of caste as an explicit basis for merit and the generation of newly consolidated forms of upper-casteness.

When Cracking the JEE is not Enough

“…38 This observation confirms the analyses carried out at IITM (Subramanian, 2015): with the creation of quotas for the OBCs, GENs increasingly tend to function as a separate entity and to avoid any kind of association with lower status groups. The theoretical model developed by Norbert Elias (Elias and Scotson 1965) seems to be pertinent here: everything occurs as if the GEN students successfully claim a collective identity constructed along the lines of the "minority of the best" model, a merit-based minority, into which they attempt to assimilate students from reserved categories admitted "on the basis of merit."…”

“…The success of IIT graduates in the US computer industry in the 1980s (Lardinois 2014) and the liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s tend to make IIT a "brand" associated with Indian global competitiveness and the values of a private sector "disembedded from the social and political spheres" (Subramanian, 2015). However, with the introduction of quotas for the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) 2 in 1973, then a new category of reservations for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) 3 in 2008, 49.5% of seats at IIT are now "reserved," as compared with only 22.5% before 2008.…”

“…In contrast, students admitted on the basis of quotas, the SCs and STs in particular, are assigned a collective identity constructed on the basis of the "minority of the worst" model. 35 Thus when an upper caste (GEN) student has bad results, "it's because he/she is too busy having fun" while a student admitted on the reserved quota's bad results are interpreted as the result of intellectual shortcomings (Subramanian 2015). 39 This oppositional structure deserves a specific analysis, questioning, for example, the social gradations that exist within both groups as well as the price to be paid to be included in the community of the best.…”

Faculty Diversity at the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs): A Preliminary Snapshot

“…8 This Bourdieusian argument has been deployed to shed light on the co-evolution of the social life of caste and modern notions of merit. 9 In his seminal essay, "The Forms of Capital", Pierre Bourdieu had first emphasized how various forms of social and cultural capital are transmutable. 10 Bourdieu specifically signals out credentialed educational qualification as the "institutionalized state" of cultural capital that is a "product of conversion" of other forms of capital.…”

Minds of caste - Discrimination and its affects

“…Indeed, regimes of affirmative action such as India's, produce complex 'double-stigma' effects, as Dalits are stigmatized both for their caste identity and as recipients of state provisions (Deshpande 2015). While such processes are now understood, the impact of a system that masks caste privilege at the top within a discourse of casteless merit, while relegating the negative psychological load of caste identity to the bottom by construing caste itself as a subaltern formation (Subramanian 2015) have hardly been examined. How does this deplete the core human resource of self-worth, provoke humiliation and other affective and psychological impacts of life within a cultural landscape of caste?…”