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AI: Well, I did want to ask you when, if you can recall, about when or how you became aware of caste. Because again, here you were living in Indonesia, you were in a setting far different from the one you might have grown up in had your family stayed in India, how did that come into your awareness?

PJ: Well, everybody in India talks about caste in one way or another, and the Nayar caste, I think that's where it came into my, my sort of just general intellectual space, was just through this one caste that we belonged to called the Nayars, because the Nayars were sort of the glory light. Everything was passed down through the women, it was, it's a matrilineal caste, it accounts for, I think something like 52 percent of Keralites. And so I remember hearing about caste through that, and the Nayars were always considered, they were the advisors to the king on financial affairs and business affairs. And so we weren't in the top two -- it took me, I don't think I knew this when I was younger, it took me until much later to figure out that we weren't, we weren't Brahmins and we weren't Kshatriyas, who are warriors, we were -- Shudra is the business caste. I'm sorry, the Vaishyas were the business caste. And so it's not like we were very high on the caste scale, but there was a lot of prestige associated with the Nayar caste, and kind of financial acumen and world acumen. So I think that's how it came into being.

And then, the thing that I remember about my grandmother that I hated -- and I loved my grandmother very much -- but she was absolutely horrible to our servants. Horrible. And she... I shouldn't say "horrible." I don't know what's, what's... I don't know what was typical, I guess. But my mother says that that's how everybody was. But, you know, she would be really rude. And I remember part of -- sometimes she would say things that either directly said or maybe it implied, "Well, they're a lower caste and they're..." And I wanna sort of go back and say it wasn't that she was horrible, 'cause she also would finance their education, and so there were other pieces to it. But I just remember feeling kind of embarrassed by some of that. And so I think it entered my consciousness very quickly, because you see it everywhere, how people are treated differently. And I always wondered about that, and I think I started to equate that with standard in life or level, status in life, which was really the caste system.

AI: Right. So even if you didn't have a lot of actual discussion or conversation or teaching about it, it was something that was visible in everyday life.

PJ: Absolutely. And they would say things about the higher castes like, "Oh, he's a Brahmin." "She's from a Brahmin, she's from a good Brahmin family." And so I would always say, "Well, what is a good, what is a 'good family'?" They'd say, "Oh, she's from a very good family." And I'd say, "Well, what is a 'good family'?" And then they'd say, "Oh, it's a Brahmin family." So it wasn't talked about as much in terms of caste that way, but it definitely was there in terms of how people thought about what was good or bad in terms of people's status in life. And again, some of this, it's confusing to me when I actually figured out what it was versus what I was told at the time, or what I recognized at the time.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.