What Caste Is A Nobel?

Anyway, a coloured American’s journey to presidency and beyond to the Nobel was unthinkable just four decades ago, when the civil rights movement, under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr, battled centuries-old racist prejudices. This year’s Nobel announcements are remarkable in another way too. The gender barrier in economics has broken with Elinor Ostrom. With all this movement, it’s time to ask in India too: when will Dalits break their glass ceiling and rise from quota to excellence, from merely holding office to putting in lasting achievements? Have we created conditions for them to accumulate enough cultural capital to take them to this essential next stage of empowerment? I am surprised how nobody here has yet courted controversy with the Brahminical ‘twist’ to the Nobel, considering that out of the six Nobel winners of Indian origin, four are Brahmins, of whom three are Tamil Brahmins. No one will be so facetious as to argue for a Dalit and obc quota in Nobel prizes based on this fact, but some genetic supremacists will latch on to it to insinuate that some communities are congenitally more advanced than others, what with another fact that most Nobel prize winners have been Jews. But it is not genetics, it is cultural capital, which in a hierarchical order is concentrated at the top and is a result of various historical factors and contexts, that explains the apparent correlation between communities and achievement. Cultural capital gets transmitted from generation to generation and over generations, which makes its recipients well-entrenched. Intelligence is distributed across all sections of society, but opportunities are not. So it is with geography. There are plain historical reasons as to why most Nobel winners in India are from the upper castes of Tamil Nadu and Bengal.

That most Indian-origin Nobel winners are also migrants to the greener academic pastures of the West raises another point. Displaced from positions of political and bureaucratic power because of democracy and affirmative action, the Brahmins and other upper castes entrenched themselves more and more in the power of knowledge, which in any case they had traditionally the sole access to. And they had accumulated enough resources historically to go and access  advanced knowledge, facilities for which were available only beyond the borders. The international arena is yet beyond the reach of Dalits and other deprived sections for whom even the journey from the local to the regional and then on to the national is still quite arduous. Perhaps, it might take a generation or two more for them to acquire the cultural capital for the leap to excellence. That excellence is not beyond the deprived is exemplified by the achievements of Ambedkar himself, whose intellectual contribution to the democratisation of Indian society is immense.

And talking of awards, don’t ever forget that many times they betray the limits of their jury’s vision. Failure to recognise Gandhi’s contribution in his lifetime betrays the blinkers and weakness of the Nobel establishment of his time than anything else. Similarly, the Nobel bypassed the harbingers of modernity in literature like Tolstoy, Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce. As Venky Ramakrishnan has said in an interview, “Don’t judge achievement or science by awards. S. Chandrashekhar got the Nobel for physics for his work on black holes more than four decades after his achievement because Arthur Eddington, the arbiter of astronomy in his time, failed to recognise his genius.” This brings us to another point: it’s better to award somebody on the peak of promise, for it might spawn fresh creativity, rather than downhill at the fag end of career when it’s full stop to creativity.