Myths of meritocracy: caste, karma and the new racism, a comparative study

Caste, Race, and Abjection: An Essay on Sub-humanity

“…The debits and credits of karma span over any number of life cycles, or reincarnations of the soul, which explains birth in a condemned versus exalted group. Tasked with rationalizing social injustice, an otherwise robust system of monistic philosophy rapidly devolves into tangled speculations about transmigration and accounting of karmic dividends over scores of lives (see Singh 2018). As Weber demonstrated, the doctrine of karma was a most effective solution to the problem of theodicy.…”

“…This not only challenges the exceptionalism, which has held so much sway in the scholarship and popular thinking on caste, but also shows us how race and caste converge in emergent forms of social exclusion. In race as much as in caste, an ideology of karma , that is, just deserts for one’s behavior or works, is conjured to explain away dizzying social discrimination and inequality within the frame of a broader discourse of absolute individual equality (Bonilla-Silva 2006; Singh 2018; Steinberg 2001). The extensive accounting of behavior accruing and spent over different life cycles, speculated by Indian metaphysicians, is quite in accord with the fine calibration of reward and merit—across generations—in contemporary cultural racism.…”