From the Social to the Clinical: Towards a Psychopathology of Everyday Casteism

Abstract

Caste has predominantly been understood as a social problem. It is understood as a form of discrimination embedded in the Hindu society that promotes Brahmanical supremacy which, in turn, is founded on the ostracization and dehumanization of the Dalit subject. The great bulk of the existing scholarship on caste has been dedicated to exploring the history, politics, religiosity, anti-sociality and illegality of caste. This article is an emphatic attempt to redirect the field of Dalit studies from considering caste—casteism, to be more precise—as a social problem to defining it as a medical or clinical or psychological problem. It introduces the reader to the neglected trend of research on the interface between caste and mental health and advances the radical possibility of understanding caste as a form of psychopathology. It makes use of the relevant psychological and psychoanalytic concepts from Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung and Jacques Lacan and proposes to define casteism in conjunction with the psychology of racism as theorized by Franz Fanon and David Livingstone Smith.