“If Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a global problem.” - Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, 1916
Kalapani, or “Black Water,” represents the Hindu belief that crossing seas renders one culturally unclean and causes the loss of varna, or caste. To obey the Dharma Sutra’s prohibition, orthodox Hindus throughout history refused to migrate across seas. Even the British, while facilitating forced servitude of Indian “coolies,” filled their ships with water from the Ganges to assuage the religious concerns of the Hindu laborers they were exploiting. As recently as 2012, a Hindu priest who visited London was disallowed entry to his own temple without an intensive process of purification and penance.
Clearly, kalapani hasn’t competed well with the American Dream. Today, over half of all Indians living in the U.S. are Hindu. But what’s concerning is the subversion of kalapani’s injunction: Hindus have not lost their caste in migrating, but very much retained it. In fact, caste help forge their path to the land of opportunity.
The Skilled Immigrant
Today, the South Asian American population totals 5.4 million—and growing. 80 percent are Indian. In 2019 alone, the U.S. awarded a whopping 71.7% of all H-1B visas to Indian applicants (H-1B visas are nonimmigrant visas granted to graduate-level, high-skilled workers). The H1-B is responsible for the outsized representation of Indian Americans in specialty professions like information technology, medicine, and scientific research. Today, close to 70% of H-1B visa-holders work in the technology industry—ground zero for the U.S. caste controversy.
South Asian immigration to the U.S. originally occurred for various reasons, but ballooned after the hard-fought Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which prioritized immigrants with high-skilled work potential. Given their historical access to education and wealth, most educated, specialty, white-collar professionals were of “upper” castes, so work-based migration inevitably funneled these types to the U.S. Fifty years later, these same upper-caste professionals occupy managerial roles and their caste culture has proliferated throughout every South Asian American institution.
Merit or Caste Capital?
I was born in Andhra Pradesh, a Southeastern portion of India that boasts fertile deltas and matchless cuisine, and deploys the most engineers to the U.S. In 2017, anthropologist Sanam Roohi studied the influence of caste networks on migration using a Coastal Andhra Kamma (Kshatriya subcaste) community as a unit of analysis. She found that as community members migrated out, families with children in the U.S. garnered financial capital and respectability within Kamma social circles. Families made their children “migration-ready” in pursuit of the American Dream, investing heavily in their children’s education, transition to the U.S., and marriage expenditures.
After new migrants worked for a few years in the U.S., they searched for marriage alliances in their home region—which was socially organized by their Kamma caste, as is normal—and brought their spouses to the U.S. on dependent visas. So, intra-caste marriages could be seen not only as maintaining ritual purity, but as an immigration strategy for upward social mobility. In turn, these pathways enabled future migrants from the same caste groups to access similar opportunities—reportedly, Kamma students with strong caste networks in the U.S. enjoyed easier access to technology firms led by Kammas or software companies where recruitment managers were Kammas.
Roohi concludes that high-skilled migrants from India aren’t relying primarily on economic choice or merit to migrate, but on social capital—caste capital. Roohi’s analysis isn’t unusual. Caste is necessarily layered into the pursuit of the American Dream, often smuggled into the pretense of merit.
In The Caste of Merit, Harvard University scholar Ajantha Subramanian traces the influence of caste capital in the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT)—whose alumni networks shuffle thousands of H1-B visa-holders into Silicon Valley every year. The IITs are notorious as hotbeds of casteism and exclusion—the Nature Journal found 90% of faculty at the top 5 IITs are upper-caste and none of the 22 schools abided by reservation (affirmative action for caste) requirements. Just this last Sunday, February 12, 18-year-old Dalit student Darshan Solanki committed suicide at IIT-Bombay—a tragedy alleged to be the result of caste discrimination. While the caste-privileged falsely attribute their success to pure merit and not caste, they are quick to harass Dalits as non-meritorious beneficiaries of welfare policies—resulting in tragedies like this one.
In Caste Matters, Harvard University Dalit scholar Suraj Yengde clarifies: “Merit is an outcome and not a representative of something.” Given the gaping socioeconomic and migration disparities across caste, caste-oppressed groups do not enjoy access to caste capital—rather, they endure its uglier side through discrimination. When dominant castes become H1-B beneficiaries from access to resources, when they inhabit managerial, mentorship, and recruiting roles, and when caste networks help facilitate labor migration, what happens on the other side of the black waters? Caste Americana.
Caste Americana
A 2003 study by the University of Pennsylvania found that 90% of the Indian American population are of dominant castes; Dalits and caste-oppressed individuals comprised only 1.5% of the population. A 2020 survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that roughly half of all Hindu Indian Americans identify with a caste group, and more than 8 in 10 Hindus with a caste identity self-identify as belonging to the category of general or upper-caste.
If there’s any takeaway here, it’s that caste is a fact of South Asian American reality. These figures dispel common falsehoods—that caste is an antiquated artifact, exclusive to rural Indian society, or rendered irrelevant by the highly educated character of South Asian immigrants. Caste is not sustained solely by immigrants, either—The Carnegie Endowment reports that over one-third of all second-generation Hindu Americans identify with a caste group.
Regardless of regional or linguistic diversity, South Asian America is of a highly homogenous selection: dominant (upper) caste. Like with any intractable social phenomenon, South Asian American social life, cultural institutions, places of worship, and workplaces are imbued with dominant caste culture. And with it, harm.
A groundbreaking 2016 survey by Dalit civil rights group Equality Labs found that one in two Dalits in the U.S. feared being “outed” for their caste and two out of three reported experiencing caste-based discrimination at their workplaces. Also, 40% of Dalits reported facing discrimination in educational institutions, 42% of Dalits reported prejudice at religious institutions, and 26% of Dalits even reported experiencing physical assault based on their caste… all in the United States of America.
One survey respondent said, “It becomes difficult to disclose your caste as a Dalit and still manage to keep friends or business networks.” Another said, “I’m afraid to put in my resume that I have experience working in the field of Dalit and Adivasi rights because I think recruiters may deny me employment.” Similar sentiments have been corroborated by testimonies collected by The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, and more.
In an interview conducted by VICE News, one Dalit employee said, “Caste discrimination is in every U.S. company where Indians are working.” Another Dalit employee said, “I've seen IBM contractors on the same floor that I work openly talking about caste, openly talking down to the lower castes, saying these people don't deserve to be here and just really chest-thumping their casteist ideology.”
This decades-long journey—from Indian villages to Silicon Valley board rooms, cloaked in merit, marriage, and migration—represents how caste follows Dalit Americans to terrorize them across seas. Ambedkar described caste as a “notion” and “state of the mind.” It’s this quality that allowed caste to filter through markets and cultures, and reemerge formidably across the kalapani. His prophecy came true—caste is now a global problem. It warrants a global response.
*I detail much of this research in my graduate thesis, “Apartheid Obscured: Addressing Caste-Based Discrimination in California Workplaces.”