Daniel Sunkari on Fighting Caste and Changing his Mind
Q & A with writer and researcher Daniel Sunkari
Hi friends — I’m back in the throes of book revision these next few months. As inspiration for me (and hopefully you!), I’ve invited a series of artists, journalists, and researchers to speak with me about their work. Some of these brilliant thinkers have helped me excavate my book’s themes—caste, kinship, colonial legacy—in ways I hadn’t thought possible. Others have shown me new ways to not only write but also live, to pursue rigor and joy in both the professional and personal.
This week, I’m joined by Daniel Sunkari, author of the newsletter Dalit Americana, which documents how and why the Indian Hindu caste system re-surfaces in America. Daniel’s writing is both personal and rooted in deep research, moving skillfully between disciplines and continents. His posts illuminate how upper-caste Hindus’ embrace of a POC identity disguises their caste privilege, how caste perpetuates itself through routine evils, and more.
In our conversation, we discussed how caste shaped his family for generations, how it travels across continents (not just a south Asian phenomenon!), how Daniel came to reconsider his views on colonial rule, and more.
Raksha Vasudevan
When did caste first show up for you, in your life or your family’s life?
Daniel Sunkari
I grew up in the States, largely insulated from caste aside from microaggressions at Indian cultural events, things like that. My family was always candid about their experiences of caste discrimination, but reflected it through a religious lens—like, India’s Hindu society oppressed them because they were Christian. This oppression showed up for them both in interpersonal interactions and in systematic denial of opportunities in India. It wasn’t until later that I realized they were using religion as a proxy for caste.
In college, I started developing a racial consciousness for the first time. That’s when the salience of caste hit me. When I went back to India, I had conversations with my grandparents that weren’t new, but just hit differently. My grandfather described people scattering from his lunch table whenever he prayed over his food, or being denied water on a long, hot walk from school because of his caste. Those conversations opened me up to the reality of caste apartheid—the scale of it, the prevalence of it.
The most egregious experiences I had of caste were during Covid. Covid really tore through India, and I had family members who endured medical neglect or were denied care because of their caste. One of them passed away as a result. I felt so helpless being all the way over here. So caste was something I’d always known about, but it took a long time to see it for what it was.
Raksha
Did your family convert to Christianity because of caste-based discrimination in Hinduism?
Daniel
It’s hard to parse motivations for religious conversion in India, where it’s not an individual spiritual decision; there are significant social ramifications. Your political identity changes. The way the state views you changes.
For many Dalits, conversion is the primary way to escape or transcend caste. I wouldn’t rule it out for my family, but it’s maybe not the primary reason. I think they were genuinely compelled by the spirituality of Jesus. And on both sides, my grandparents went to Christian schools. They were the first in their lineage to become literate—a privilege that wouldn’t have otherwise had due to caste exclusion. They benefited a lot from Christian missionary institutions, schools, hospitals, which probably played a part in it too.
Raksha
You’ve written about the opportunities afforded to Dalits by Christian missionaries and other elements of the British colonial system. How did your family’s experiences force you to interrogate your pre-existing ideas of colonialism as inherently evil?
Daniel
It started when I was visiting home from college. At the time, I was on a journey of recovering my ethnic identity and unpacking some racial wounding from my childhood and adolescence. Naturally, I was really angry toward white people. But when my family talked politics, they seemed to easily shrug off white supremacy and even colonialism when I mentioned it. At first, I couldn’t stomach that. But when I asked them more about their stories and also did some more research, I realized it wasn’t just a matter of personal preferences. They were articulating a collective memory and a complicated political history: Dalit communities across south Asia remembered the British with ambivalence if not appreciation, as accidental liberators from a yet crueler system of Brahmanism.
Raksha
My family also expresses ambiguous, sometimes positive views toward the British—but for very different reasons. We’re Brahmin; my grandfather was pretty high up in the British administration. So it benefited us in different ways, and your post compelled me to consider the issue with more nuance. Which brings me to another question: how did you go about educating yourself on caste?
Daniel
It started with fundamental frameworks around power and race that I picked up in college. I did my undergrad in the late 2010s, when there was a surge of discourse around those topics. Then I participated in a workshop by Equality Labs, the Dalit civil rights group based in the States. The curriculum covered the origins of the system, how it’s been perpetuated through generations, and how it manifests politically today in things like Hindu nationalism. It cast into new light experiences I’d never connected to caste, or had legitimized as such. The workshop also introduced me to BR Ambedkar, whose corpus is the canon of anti-caste literature. That really strengthened my understanding of caste’s historical origins, what interventions have and haven’t worked, and gave me an economic view of it too.
Since I’m Christian, I also became curious about Dalit liberation theology, a Christian tradition emerging out of Dalit communities in South India. I wrote an essay for the progressive Christian magazine Sojourners, interviewing Dalit theologians. In grad school, I wrote my thesis on caste discrimination in California workplaces, after catching wind of California’s 2020 lawsuit against Cisco. I did a policy analysis on incorporating caste into California civil rights law, which exposed me to the literature on caste and migration, civil rights law, and existing research on caste demographics and experiences in America. That’s part of why I started Dalit Americana—I wanted a forum to share what I was learning.
Raksha
So that was your main motivation for starting the newsletter?
Daniel
Yeah, there weren’t many Dalit voices on that subject or any subject really. There are a lot of non-Dalits writing about Dalits or caste, and virtually none who were Dalit American, as in living in the States but connected to this particular identity. I was also curious about taking these Dalit Christian perspectives that were very native to how I grew up, and positioning them alongside other perspectives and ideas like Orientalism and seeing where that might yield an interesting insight or truth.
Raksha
What happened with that bill in California that would have added caste to civil rights policy?
Daniel
It was unanimously passed by the state legislature. But the governor vetoed it under pressure from Hindu lobbyists who are also big Democrat donors. In his explanation, he said caste is already implicitly covered by civil rights.
Raksha
Why not just make it explicit?
Daniel
Right. It would’ve been a minor update with significant implications. Since then, some cities have added caste to their human rights commissions, and some universities have followed suit. But that bill would’ve been the largest policy of its kind in the US. It got close, but didn’t pan out.
Raksha
A common misconception is that caste is a South Asian problem in South Asia. But as you’ve written about, caste travels across continents and oceans. Can you tell us about that?
Daniel
There are two ways to interpret this. One is to look at other social hierarchies analogous to caste—ones that function with the same operating software, so to speak, in different contexts. Isabel Wilkerson famously wrote about this in her book Caste, comparing the American racial caste system, the Hindu caste system, and Nazi Germany.
The second way is how the Indian caste order in particular migrates. Starting in 1965 [when US policy began prioritizing “high-skilled” immigrants in fields like engineering and medicine], immigration from India started permeating the managerial classes here. Most were admitted thanks to their educational or economic status; so naturally, most were upper-caste. A 2003 University of Pennsylvania study found roughly 90% of Indian Americans were from so-called upper castes, with Dalits at around 1.5%. That study is dated, but the numbers have likely stayed close. People still very much have caste alliances. They marry along caste lines. They help others members of their caste migrate. One ethnography of the Kamma [upper-caste] community in coastal Andhra Pradesh, where my family is from, found that Kamma students enjoyed significantly greater access to US tech firms led by Kammas.
Because South Asians are a minority here without as much political power as back home, you don’t see the structural violence you see in India. But when you double-click into the Dalit experience, you see high rates of discrimination in education and employment. Upper castes perpetuate rituals of purity and pollution, even in the diaspora. The Cisco lawsuit brought much of this to light, with tech-sector employees coming forward to describe the casteism they faced at work.
I recently spoke with Suraj Yengde, a scholar documenting how caste shows up in different societies. He went to Trinidad and found that the caste identity was still very present there, but in unexpected ways. Most Indians there are descendants of indentured laborers brought over during British colonization—roughly 90% from Dalit or Shudra low-caste backgrounds. But Yengde found no one identifying as Dalit, and even found people identifying as Brahmin—though, on paper, no one of Brahmin lineage was brought on those ships. And people were still practicing caste in marriage norms, temple rituals, and social alliances.
Raksha
I saw something similar in East Africa. In the late 19th century, many South Asians were brought over as indentured labor to build the East African railway. And there have been several subsequent waves of migration, all the way up to today. But both then and now, it’s not generally upper-caste people migrating—it’s the so-called lower castes or merchant castes. But many South Asians I met there identified as upper-caste. I don’t think it’s necessarily a lie. I wonder if instead there’s more room for caste mobility in a different context, with different rules. Caste didn’t disappear—it mutated.
Daniel
That’s a good way of putting it. It’s resilient—even across seas, even in entirely different political and legal structures.
Raksha
How does your family feel about your work around caste?
Daniel
They were pleased to see me reading Ambedkar, because he’s so revered in really every Dalit household. And they appreciate the awareness I’m raising and my engagement with this important topic. But they weren’t super stoked about my embracing and declaring my Dalitness. They see “Dalit” as a fundamentally cruel and imposed identity, one they’d never choose to claim themselves. But growing up in the States, my logic around identity comes from precedents like the Black Power movement, where there’s this notion of reclaiming an identity, even one with traumatic roots. Dalit means “broken or crushed” and the idea of a self-proclaimed “broken people”—which also implies deep resilience—that made a lot of sense to me.
A last housekeeping announcement: I’m teaching my course on Writing a Book Proposal through Off Assignment again this summer. I had so much fun doing it last time, and we’ve curated another great line-up of guest speakers this year. We’ll discuss everything I wish I knew when I was struggling through my own proposal (which eventually sold to Graywolf and won me a Whiting Grant). By the end, you’ll have a draft of your own proposal to take forward + a community to help you perfect it. Any questions, DM me.
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