Coming Face to Face With the Savarnas

Departmental colloquiums rarely see packed audiences. But the one that took place on Monday, 14th September featuring Ravikant Kisana, author of Meet the Savarnas, had been long anticipated by the student body, for more reasons than one — it almost didn’t take place. In a statement posted to their Instagram account on 2nd September, the Savitri Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle (SAPSC), an anti-caste reading circle and student organization, details that Kisana’s entry was not initially approved by the administration. However, Professor Vivek Narayan of the English department stepped in to host the talk as a part of the academic colloquium series. The department, as it turns out, needed nobody’s permission. 

Kisana, more popularly known by his online moniker and podcast “Buffalo Intellectual”, had originally been invited as a visiting speaker for an event being organised by the SAPSC. Dr. Dheeraj Sanghi, the Dean of Student Affairs, justified the denial of entry by stating that “some people’s presence on campus would be undesirable”. This is far from the first time Kisana’s presence elicited controversy. In March 2024, the Social Justice Forum (SJF), a campus political group, hosted Kisana for a talk on the role of caste in spaces such as the classroom. The group was denied a classroom for the event, and Kisana was forced to speak to students on the lawns outside the Library Cafe. 

Speaking to an overflowing lecture hall, AC 04 005, with students seated on the steps and floor, Professor Vivek Narayan opened the event by talking about how the event provided us with “an opportunity to think about what a university is”. Having taught critical theory, cultural studies, and caste studies at Woxsen University, IIM Kozhikode, NLSIU Bangalore, and FLAME, Kisana was unafraid of confronting the forces that brought him here in the first place. In high spirits, Kisana joked about how this was the first time that he had been invited back to the same university. In a conversation afterward, Kisana stated that the only thing he believes has changed in the past few years is the rising incidence of Savarna guilt among the university’s professors. “The older professors don't even care about that, but they understand that caste is now firmly in the academic discourse,” he said.

Meet the Savarnas, Kisana’s first book, looks at the Indian upper-caste as a distinct social group of their own, immersing readers in the world of the early 2000s. There are countless stories of the generation that Kisana so potently describes — engineers turned B-school graduates, ready to change the nation forever in a bid that he terms the “Great Indian Dream”. Asked what he took as a starting point, given the lack of scholarship specifically on Savarnas, Kisana said, “Research is very clearly a product of my own experiences, as somebody who is always this outsider trying to fit in.” In an essay for The Swaddle, Kisana puts forward the idea of “switching”, a process by which Savarnas posing as outwardly politically progressive can effortlessly slip back into their conservative, privileged family environments without any discomfort. This is possible only because their social lives are “public-facing performances”. Kisana considered the larger social barriers that stand in the way of unconventional ethnographies. “Of course a child from a slum can go into a Gurgaon high-rise and observe the life of a millionaire,” he said. It is just that there are forces preventing that from happening. 

Addressing the irony of speaking about caste to an audience of an elite private university, Kisana declared that Ashoka was where this relentlessly optimistic, early 2000s project succeeded the most. “Most of the sharpest academic, brilliant minded Ambedkarites I know are outside academia. They eventually have to end up in activism or something because they can't fit within the university system.” he said of the institutional casteism pervasive in Indian academia.  Elaborating on the compelling notion of “savarna mediocrity”, Kisana spoke of the massive blindspot that Savarnas have towards their own knowledge production systems. He asserts his own right to be completely mediocre, one that has been historically denied to lower caste people. “In my own career the more I have spoken out, the more it has opened doors, but it also gets me shut out from certain tiers of institutions,” he said. Kisana went on to critique the idea of the family business itself, and the decades of institutional caste privilege such enterprises are built on.

“The people who liked you as long as you were talking about feminist or leftist or queer politics — the moment you start talking about caste, they are suddenly provoked because they don't see themselves as casteist. There are not nearly enough Dalit students here,” said Kisana, bringing our attention back to the things that we simply could not continue to ignore. Ashoka, despite its constant emphasis on the diversity of its ever-growing student body, has no system of caste-based affirmative action, like most public universities in the country. The university administration, despite SJF-led protests that began in 2024, has refused to conduct a campus-wide caste census. For most Ashoka students coming from privileged backgrounds, organisations such as the SAPSC are their first and only introduction to anti-caste studies. 

“My being here is no substitute for an institutional academic presence. Representation is nothing without material politics.” Kisana’s words reminded us, ringing truer than ever. Guest speakers, solidarity meetings, or reading groups are a commendable starting point, but no amount of rhetoric can dismantle the deep-seated caste prejudices that Ashoka continually refuses to contend with.

(Edited by Maya Ribeiro and Aishani Misra.)