On Brown Blood: Race, Caste, and the Bhagat Singh Thind Case

Can one have brown blood? This is a question I have come back to over and over as I have tried to understand the now infamous 1923 United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (US v. Thind) case. The idea of brown blood seems, at least to me, to get to the heart of some of the contradictions that emerge at the nexus of race, caste, nation, and transnational movement that undergird the Thind case and the position of the dominant caste Hindu diaspora into the present.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the majority of the scholarship and broader media reflections on US v. Thind have focused on what the case revealed about the racial politics of the United States and the operations of whiteness therein.¹ Famously, Thind argued that he was of “Aryan stock,” dominant caste, and therefore white. However, as has been now well-documented, the court ruled that the visibility of his brown skin—which I will argue was actually a comment on his brown blood—made his claim for citizenship impossible. The court’s ruling, thus, reinscribed the United States as a white supremacist, anti-immigrant nation.

When caste Hindus are discussed vis-à-vis “race,” the analysis tends to focus solely on the United States and positions these conversations within the racialized histories of post-settler and post-plantation US politics. While extremely useful, such analyses may suffer from a nation-centric bias that can, at times, occlude global racial unfoldings that may connect US v. Thind not only to the racial politics within the USA but also to racial ideologies emerging elsewhere, in this case in India in particular. As a corrective, in my analysis, I follow scholarship that takes seriously the colonial constitution of race thesis and recognizes that colonialism produced complex global interconnections between inter- and intra-national governing strategies, economic relations, and racialized categories for differentiating populations.² Here, I focus on the racial politics of blood in order to capture dimensions of the global racialization of the dominant caste Hindu that are sometimes undertheorized when focused narrowly on skin color politics.

At the same time, the Thind case hinged upon the changing politics of caste as much as it reflected the ongoing contradictions associated with global racialization. Unfortunately, conversations on caste have, like conversations on race, suffered from a methodological nationalism that sees caste as a pertinent category and social system solely for those living within the confines of the region siloed off in 1947 to create the nation-state of India. Such provincializing and fixing of caste has created several interlocking issues. First, as Suraj Yengde has written, this narrow view of caste has prevented understandings of the myriad instances of caste-based social systems that exist all over the world. He writes that global caste is a “layered mechanism of immovable social hierarchy and absolute control that aims to dehumanize certain forms of labour through both structural and economical positions, as well as through the cultural practices of endogamy and ritual.”³ In moving away from India-specific definitions and ideologies regarding caste, caste critique becomes a useful way of analyzing the ways that human beings and their labor are valued, de-valued, hierarchized, and dehumanized globally.⁴ Second, and perhaps more directly pertinent to the Thind case and its aftermath, a neglect of caste outside of India has prevented scholars from recognizing the ways that caste position, caste ideology, and caste capital have all followed those savarnas (dominant castes) who moved out of India.⁵ Thind, despite being a Sikh, had argued his case for citizenship by drawing on scientific racist discourses linked to questions of blood and narratives of “Aryanness” that were already circulating in caste-colonial Indian society. This “racializing of caste” became the pivot of the Thind case, even as the court argued that his claims to pure, dominant caste, Aryan blood were unfounded.

In the rest of this article I analyze the US v. Thind case by thinking through the intersections of global racialization and global caste that have, at times, been submerged in nation-centric analyses. In so doing, my analysis reveals the way that global race and caste formations take on specific valences through transnational circulation and (post)colonial political economies. Thind, I argue, is reflective of a mobile, cosmopolitan, global savarna class that emerges over the course of the twentieth century that gives a particular historically contingent valence to race, caste, and their intersection. Specifically, I focus on the racial politics of brown blood in order to draw out some of the racial and caste contradictions that have come to define the Thind case and, more broadly, allow for shifts in dominant caste mobility during the twentieth century.

I start by providing a bit more background on the Thind case and analyze a specific passage of the ruling that focuses on the question of Thind’s blood. I then develop a historical analysis that situates how and why Thind and the US Supreme Court were able to make the racist and casteist arguments they made. In the first part, I focus on the question of “blood” as it emerged in colonial contexts and the kinds of fears and racialized contradictions therein. As I will argue, colonial racialization focused extensively on questions of blood purity, blood mixing, and the like, both in the United States and elsewhere in the world, including in India. I then turn my attention to the changing nature of caste politics in India as ideas regarding blood purity became central to the question of caste purity. I show how caste-as-blood were colonial rearticulations that also set in motion mobility regimes for perceived dominant caste peoples that, ultimately, initiated new accumulationist possibilities for them. In other words, dominant caste relations to colonization generated an upwardly mobile brown class in the United States predicated on their previously held class and caste positions.

In both the United States and Indian contexts, the racial politics of the dominant castes pivoted on the contradictory potential of brown blood for both exclusion and assimilation. Even as dominant caste peoples sought to maintain caste supremacy and find economic mobility by claiming whiteness, the possibility of their brown blood continued to be a fulcrum that they were forced to negotiate; a brown smudge that continued to haunt them as they found ever more economic opportunities as the twentieth century came to an end. As such, analyzing how figures such as Thind and other early South Asian migrants were resignified through the intertwining of race, caste, and immigration processes of the twentieth century provides some clues regarding the shifting racialized political economic position of the Indian diaspora in the twenty-first century.

The case US v. Thind (1923) was meant to determine whether Indian migrants could become naturalized citizens of the United States. The case followed several other high-profile cases that sought to understand the position of those immigrants who did not neatly fit into the Black/white binary that had been established as the framework for rights claims in the United States over the course of the Naturalization Acts of 1790, 1870, and 1906.⁶ The 1870 Act explicitly stated for the first time that only free white persons and “aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent” could be naturalized as citizens of the United States; a claim that was restated in the 1906 Naturalization Act.⁷ This two-part definition had three primary purposes: (1) to acknowledge the history of slavery in the United States in the aftermath of the post-Civil War overturning of the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) ruling; (2) to continue in the genocidal erasure of Native Americans; (3) to find new ways to exclude Asian migrants, especially Chinese migrants, who had come to the United States during the late nineteenth century and were already being systematically disenfranchised through policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.⁸ Therefore, the Naturalization Acts sought to find new means of maintaining white supremacy while paying some minimal lip-service to incorporating those formerly enslaved Black peoples who were now free. While much has been written about the methods by which the US state continued to disenfranchise Black Americans through Jim Crow laws, the prison industrial complex, and the like,⁹ the Naturalization Act of 1906 also enshrined the racial politics of the United States as one which sought to erase Indigenous peoples (except as part of a romantic, commodifiable cultural past) and all those migrants (especially those from Asia) who did not fit neatly into either the category of white or Black.

As such, many of the migrants who came from Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were forced to find ways to negotiate their positions in the United States and strategically make claims for the rights and freedoms associated with US citizenship, generally through arguments regarding their whiteness. As Haney Lopez argues, most of these cases were determined in lower courts, “from state courts in California to the US Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., and concerned applicants from a variety of countries, including Canada, Mexico, Japan, the Philippines, India, and Syria.”¹⁰ In some of these cases, as in Bhagat Singh Thind’s situation, the lower courts actually ruled in favor of those who sought citizenship based on claims to whiteness before eventually being overruled by the Supreme Court, indicating that the questions of who was white and who was not-white was prone to contradiction given that questions of race were historically contingent and based on fallacious science.

For example, in the case Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922), Takao Ozawa, a Japanese American who had lived in the United States for twenty years and had gone to school in the San Francisco Bay Area, sought to gain US citizenship. One of Ozawa’s primary arguments for citizenship was that he was part of the white race because his skin was “whiter” than most anglo-Americans. However, in his ruling, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, George Sutherland, argued that Japanese Americans could not be white, as whiteness was linked exclusively to the “Caucasian race” under the terms set forth by scientific racists of the period. These standards were not, according to the court’s ruling, exclusively about skin color. For example, the court rejected any test of whiteness based on skin alone because “that differs greatly among persons of the same race…Hence to adopt the color test alone would result in a confused overlapping of races and a gradual merging of one into the other, without any practical line of separation.” In other words, a skin color test would risk the mixing of the races, which could destabilize the categorical, segregated, exclusionary politics that the state required in order to maintain white-anglo power in the United States.

As importantly, it meant that the United States Supreme Court recognized that there were other ways of assessing and maintaining racial distinctions beyond skin. One way was to focus instead on the politics of blood. In Ozawa v. US, there are two important mentions of blood. The first refers to a definition of the white race as anyone who does not have “negro blood.” This definition, Ozawa’s lawyers argued, meant that the only operative distinctions in the United States were between white and Black and that anyone who could show they did not have “negro blood” should be considered white. Moreover, the lawyers for Ozawa argued that the definition of whiteness should include Japanese migrants because they “may have been pure blooded Ainos, and as such ‘Caucasian’ within the meaning of that term, as employed by most of the ethnologists.”

Ozawa’s lawyers are referring to the Ainu people, who are considered Indigenous to the island of Hokkaido, the second largest island in the Japanese-controlled archipelago.¹¹ The argument is premised on a racist settler colonial mythology that regards Indigenous blood as “pure” and therefore unmixed. In this case, Ainu blood is pure because it has supposedly never been mixed with Japanese settler blood. This ideology of Indigenous purity is used, in this case, to make the claim that Ozawa’s pure and unmixed blood was an indication of whiteness, despite the fact that Native Americans in the United States were not able to link blood purity to whiteness in this way. More broadly, this particular argument opened up the possibility that proving “non-negro” “pure” blood based on specific ethnic identification and histories might allow some populations of migrants to prove whiteness and therefore become citizens.

The US v. Thind case was a logical outgrowth of the Ozawa v. US case as it presented another migrant story that also hinged on the question of whiteness at the nexus of skin, blood, and ethnicity. However, in this case, Thind’s specific migration story as a Sikh Indian migrant played a key role in this argument.

Bhagat Singh Thind had come to the United States in 1913 to get his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley in theology and English literature. During his early years in the United States, Thind was one of the founding members of the Ghadar Party, a San Francisco-based anti-imperialist organization that was advocating for Indian independence. The movement was unique in that it brought together migrant workers, many formerly of the Punjabi peasantry from differing caste positions, and intellectuals who urged an armed revolt against British colonial rule in India.¹² Many of the individuals who became founding members of the Ghadar Party had been involved in labor movements within South Asia and elsewhere.¹³ Thind himself had worked in lumber mills in Astoria, Oregon, during summers when he was pursuing his graduate degree. As such, he was part of a South Asian migrant working class who, at least initially, saw the struggle against the British also as a global labor struggle that actually connected the struggle in India to “all forms of economic or imperial slavery anywhere in the world.”¹⁴ While the organization eventually split up into more radical communist and more conservative noncommunist factions, the Ghadar movement, and those like Thind who participated, seemed to be harbingers of an Indian diaspora that would be enthusiastic participants in global revolutionary struggles.

After joining the US Army and fighting in World War I, Thind applied for citizenship on three separate occasions. In 1918, he applied while in the US Army and was initially granted citizenship by Washington state based on his military service but was overturned by the Bureau of Naturalization due to the racial requisite that one had to be white or of African descent to be naturalized. He applied again in 1919 in Oregon arguing he was white and had been in the military and in 1920 he was again granted citizenship, this time by the Oregon state court. However, the Bureau of Naturalization again opposed Thind’s citizenship and appealed to the US Supreme Court to answer the question “Is a high caste Hindu of full Indian blood, born at Amrit Sar, Punjab, India, a white person?”¹⁵

Somewhat counter intuitively, given Thind’s earlier radical work with the Ghadar Party, Thind’s claim for citizenship brought together conservative understandings of caste, blood purity, regional identity, and whiteness. His lawyers argued that Thind was “of high-caste Hindu stock, born in Punjab, one of the extreme northwestern districts of India, and classified by certain scientific authorities as of the Caucasian or Aryan race.”

In common parlance in the United States, the category Hindu became a catchall term for anyone from the Indian subcontinent. As Junaid Rana writes, this meant that “Hindu” was used to refer to people from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, or Sri Lanka and collapsed all religious groups from the subcontinent—including Sikhs, Christians, and Muslims—into this category.¹⁶ The result was a further global entrenchment of the idea that India was a Hindu nation, which erased any differences between those who were migrating and reinscribed the savarna Hindu Indian migrant as the “true” representation of India. We can read Thind’s claim that he “was a high caste Hindu” despite the fact that he was a Sikh as a direct result of this collapse of all South Asian religious groups into the single category of Hindu.¹⁷

The particular racialized concepts of dominant caste Hindus as Aryans merged the ideas of Orientalist philologists, for example Max Muller, and scientific racists, for example Johannes Blumenbach, who were looking to prove non-Semitic lineages for the white race. They landed on Sanskrit as their linguistic lineage and, therefore, claimed that their ancestry and that of the Vedic people were both of “Aryan stock.” Not surprisingly, as I will discuss further below, this racial linking between white Europeans and Hindus also followed in the opposite direction, with dominant caste Hindus claiming whiteness.

In trying to make the claim that Thind was not eligible for citizenship, Justice Sutherland, who had also presided over the Ozawa v. US case, had to reckon explicitly with these scientific racist understandings of the Caucasian/white race. Unlike in the Japanese example, Hindus were explicitly included within the category “Caucasian,” which was also glossed as Aryan. However, in the court’s decision, the court cited scientific racists—including Blumenbach, Deniker, Keane, and Huxley—in order to argue that the linguistic claims to shared Caucasian and Aryan ancestry could not be equated with whiteness. In these arguments blood purity took on even greater importance than in the earlier Ozawa arguments, with the court making explicit how blood purity and blood mixing could or could not determine the whiteness of the Hindu. Sutherland cited the Encyclopedia Britannica:

First, in the court’s ruling, subtly and importantly the Scandinavian is described not by skin color but by hair color, implying once again that whiteness extends to characteristics beyond the skin. Second, the “blond Scandinavian” and the “brown Hindu” are acknowledged to have a shared ancestry. Third, the court enshrines the category of “brown Hindu,” which implies that the racialized category brown is separate from the category Hindu. This move suggests both that brownness extends beyond the category of Hindu and can be attached to other ethnic or religious groups and, as importantly for the case itself, that Hindus could be something other than brown. That is to say, the court posits that, historically speaking, there may in fact have been a category of “white Hindu” in the past that had been sullied by intermixture. Here, brownness is ontologically linked to this kind of racial impurity and “intermediate classification” but also portends the possibility that Hindus had been white and therefore could potentially aspire to re-claim their whiteness.

Fourth, the court’s logic is conflating several categories, including those of India, the Hindu, the Brahminical religion, and the caste system. While “Hindu” was a Persian term that emerged in the thirteenth century to refer to those who lived around the geographic region of the Indus River, the British, in particular, mapped the term onto the cultural and religious practices associated with Brahminism.¹⁸ This simplistic mapping of India onto Hindus and Brahminism would continue to remain operative, reflecting the idea of India as the “home” of the Hindu and those who followed the Brahminical scriptures and ritual caste rules. As importantly, the shared ancestry between the Scandinavian and the Hindu is rendered moot because the “vaunted purity of blood which the caste rules were calculated to perpetuate” had failed to prevent the mixing of blood and, therefore, was the reason for the phenotypical differences between dominant caste Hindus and white peoples. Here, what I want to make clear is that the court is assuming a priori that caste was meant solely for the perpetuating of blood purity, a logic that, as I will argue later in this article, was actually part of the colonial process of “racializing caste” that initiated new global accumulationist possibilities for the dominant castes.¹⁹

Yet, while the case seemed to put an end to Thind’s possibilities of getting citizenship, Thind applied for and received US citizenship through the state of New York within a few years of being turned down by the US Supreme Court based on a law passed by Congress that conferred citizenship on those who had served in the military. In fact, Thind went on to complete his PhD and have a long career as a writer and “spiritual teacher” in the United States. Eventually, he married a white woman and prospered in an appropriately assimilated brown life in the United States.

In order to understand how a figure such as Thind can hold such a complex and multidimensional position and signification—both external to and within the US body politic and participating in global anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle while claiming whiteness—requires a further elaboration of and excavation of the blood-based contradictions associated with global brownness and global caste, which I will turn to next. Particularly, I situate Thind within reconfigured US and Indian racial politics and, specifically, within an emerging global savarna class whose migrations to the United States over the course of the twentieth century shifted how one can read complex figures such as Thind.

As mentioned above, the court’s ruling is evoking the category “brown” as separate from (though potentially modifying) particular ethnic, national, religious, or caste identities. In this section I want to show how the analysis of brown blood can help to focus attention on hidden and innate internal racialized capacities, especially as it is tethered to the body of the savarna (dominant caste) Hindu immigrant. In turn, such an examination helps to locate Thind within a racial formation associated with global brownness that was emerging in the early twentieth century and enfolding the dominant castes into its logic.

I argue that brown blood operated within a colonial cosmology tethered to anti-miscegenation, white supremacy, and global assimilationist fantasies, creating the conditions for potential mobility for brown peoples, including “brown Hindus,” even as it de-limited the extent to which they might ascend in the global racial hierarchy. Brown blood, as articulated in the Thind case and in a broader colonial cosmology, assumed an impurity of the blood—brown smudges that included inability to govern, underdevelopment, impoverishment, etc.—no matter the attempts at proving one’s linguistic, cultural, economic, political, and civilizational capacities. Somewhat paradoxically, over the course of the twentieth century, brown blood also allowed for mobility of dominant caste Hindus in the context of an anti-Blackness that positioned brown peoples as potentially assimilable, as opposed to those who were Black, if they properly espoused white civilizational values.

Controversies over what constitute the racial politics of “brown,” especially with regard to who is brown, continue into the present primarily because the term is tethered to German, Spanish, Portuguese, British, and American strands of racist discourse that have brought much of the colonial world under their remit in contradictory ways. As such, I draw from the work of Nitasha Tamar Sharma, who argues that understanding brownness requires us to follow the historical and political economic processes through which the category takes on various interlocking racialized meanings.²⁰ In the case I am concerned with here, “brown” was first linked to those from South Asia, and Indians in particular, when German racist scientists mapped skin tone onto the racial categorizations proposed by white supremacists of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This delineation as “brown” peoples became central to the self-fashioning narratives of savarna Indian elites as they began traveling beyond the confines of the Indian subcontinent during and after British colonialism.²¹

I am focusing analytical attention on brown blood because it foregrounds those internalized, intimate capacities tethered to the body associated with colonial racialization that are often overlooked in the racial theorizing regarding the coloniality of brownness.²² Unlike race-as-phenotype, race-as-blood evokes what is hidden, and therefore is easily mapped onto other markers of belonging along which global power operates. It is the very invisibility of blood that made it such a powerful and intransigent modality of racialized hierarchy and oppression. The politics of brown blood actually begins in the Old World. Junaid Rana, for example, has argued that Christian clashes with Jewish and Muslim (sometimes glossed as Moorish) peoples in the “Old World” between 1300 and 1500 were the basis for differentiations that located the problem with these latter two groups in the impurity of their blood; an impurity that could never quite be eliminated even if these peoples converted to Christianity.²³ In turn, Rana argues that the cultural practices associated with these religious groups became the fodder for their racialization, especially because these groups could not be easily differentiated by phenotype alone. In other words, their blood, too, was “browned” based on the possibility that they remained non-Christian on the inside.

These early fears regarding hidden impure blood congealed in the New World in the aftermath of slavery, when white supremacist laws such as the one-drop rule were meant to prevent the legal admittance of anybody who had even a single drop of “Black blood” into the white body politic.²⁴ In this sense, the Thind case seems to signal the entrance of brown peoples into this racist ideology, marking brown blood explicitly as the result of the potential loss of whiteness and therefore a de facto reason for exclusion.

At the same time, and in stark tension with the above construction, brown blood represented the possibility that romantic ideas associated with assimilation might eventually come true. Here, I am drawing directly from the work in anthropology that argues that mid-twentieth-century discourses on racialization, especially in the United States, sought to solve the problem of race through the romantic ideology of blood mixing that could, over time, “lighten” the blood of the body politic.²⁵ This politics of brown blood actually linked itself to the politics associated with Native American “red” blood, which, unlike the politics of anti-Blackness, assumed the possibility of assimilation by “killing the Indian and saving the man.”²⁶ Most notoriously, this manifested in the Native American boarding schools that sought to eliminate any trace of Indigenous language or cultural practice under the false justification that such violent erasure would eventually allow Native Americans into the US body politic. Famously, anthropologists of the early-to-mid-twentieth century, Franz Boas in particular, also maintained this assimilationist position, believing in the “progressive” politics that all the “lower races,” whether Black, brown, or Indigenous, ought to be assimilated rather than eradicated. As Lee Baker has written, this “antiracist racism” amounted to “encouraging the gradual process of lightening up this large body of people by the influx of white blood.”²⁷

This US-centric ideology intersected with a global pedagogic assimilationist logic that was also being espoused in India, most famously framed by British viceroy Thomas Macauley, who, in the 1830s, endeavored “to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”²⁸ That is to say, the inclusion of those peoples whose blood was not quite white was actually intended to produce a class of subjects who worked at the behest of white-colonial power. In the case of India, those who were selected to assimilate into the global white body politic were dominant caste peoples and those other Indians who could pass as such. These caste groups were selected precisely because they were already at the highest rungs of pre-colonial social hierarchies, what Cesaire would call “the old tyrants” who the colonizers sought to collaborate with during the early stages of colonization.²⁹ Importantly, this relation between the British colonizers and Indian dominant caste elite set the conditions for both who would take power post-colonization in India and who were then later assumed to be assimilable into the United States body politic over the course of the mid-to-late twentieth century. For example, Shefali Chandra has argued that the negotiation of the Brahminical elite with the British colonial apparatus worked to make Brahminism hegemonic in India through a gendered and sexual caste politics that “domesticated the authoritative power of English.”³⁰ In other words, by becoming the standard bearers of English, the dominant castes were able to maintain their positions post-independence in India and abroad.

However, as Macauley’s quotation implies, colonial assimilationist logics required that the fetish of liberal modernity, with its ideals of universal rights, technocracy, and the like, be tethered to a paternalistic “imperial initiative” that saw the colonized as not-quite-yet-ready to govern themselves. For example, in Prospect of a World Without Racial Conflict, Dubois wrote this:

According to Dubois, the perceived incapacity to govern was a colonially imposed racial lack, supposedly tethered to the blood of the brown Indian. This was the never achievable future capacity of the brown colonized subject that they ought to aspire for and, therefore became part of their ontological racial positioning.

As one example from India, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, argued that “the brown, yellow and black races of Asia and Africa, [are] all hunched up more or less together. How far we of the last of these classes are from the heights where our rulers live.”³¹ Nehru is articulating a global “underclass” that includes so-called brown peoples. However, critically, Nehru’s conception also links brownness to a global material position. In other words, the racial logics associated with brownness, naturalized “capitalist inequalities and the violence that maintains them by naming the differences that justify unequal social relations as innate—as “biological,” “cultural,” “environmental,” and so forth.”³² In this case, Nehru is implicitly foregrounding the naturalized discourses regarding poverty and underdevelopment that came to shape the contours of brownness in the 20^th century and that connect brown peoples from across the global south. Indeed, colonial racial capitalism required erasing the legacies of colonial exploitation/expropriation that had resulted in much of the poverty in the post-colonized world by blaming such lack on the innate incapacities of colonized brown peoples.³³ The Indian case is one stark example of the intransigent linkage between brownness and poverty. The British famously extracted nearly $45 trillion from India from 1765 to 1938³⁴ and justified this extraction of resources because of what they deemed as India’s extreme, inherent poverty and destitution. The mark of abject impoverishment has continued ever since, with India continuously being characterized as one of the poorest and most unequal nations in the world. This is also why the racial politics of “brown blood” indexes a historical struggle against a perceived essential underdevelopment, inadequacy, and impoverishment.

Seen in this way, Thind’s enthusiastic participation in India’s anti-colonial, nationalist struggle even as he sought to assimilate into the United States reflects the way that postcolonial brown racial politics required the ongoing proof that one’s people has the capacity to eventually rule themselves and could find a means out of a perceived intransigent underdevelopment. In fact, for Thind to prove that he could become part of the US body politic required that his place of origin also prove itself. Without this, Thind’s attempts at proving whiteness, civilizationalism, and the like would fail. This striving against racialized inadequacy continues to be one vector by which to understand the postcolonial brown nation-state, which defines itself through and against the state apparatus, constitutional ideologies, developmentalism, and racialized categories that began to take shape under colonial rule.

At the same time Macauley’s above statement also reflects other aspects of brown neocolonialism. For example, those (East) Indians who were educated in English medium schools and learned appropriate white-anglo cultural values—white supremacy, hyper-capitalism, puritanical patriarchal norms, and the like—assumed that they should be able to find economic mobility and legal inclusion in the colonial metropoles to which they moved and lived. Thind would have been just the kind of subject who had imbibed such colonial valuations. In fact, his PhD in English Literature reflected the way that the colonial language had and has become the assumed marker of economic and cultural mobility. Into the present, this particular logic of assimilation holds true in the liberal savarna diasporic imagination, who assume that their education, language, and class positions should, by definition, allow them easy entry into the United States, especially when they live in mostly white enclaves and go to mostly white schools, which are a byproduct of a longer racist history of US school segregation. By learning white cultural praxis and complying with white supremacist legal, educational, and economic models, dominant castes have found mobility and the ability to accumulate wealth in the United States.

These assimilationist logics also traffic, by definition, in the logics of anti-Blackness. In fact, put more forcefully, brown racialization actually requires projects of brown expropriation rooted in anti-Blackness. In this vein, Moon Charania conceives of brownness as a peculiar and fraught in-betweenness in relation to both whiteness and Blackness.³⁵ She offers “brownness as a racial formation trapped in its own shifting specificities as one that, yes is ‘coexistent, affiliates and intermeshes with Blackness’…but one that can also remain aloof toward, dismiss and extract from the global and diasporic field of blackness.”³⁶

In Thind’s case, his lawyers argued explicitly that he had a revulsion to marrying any woman of the “lower races” and that “the high-caste Hindu regards the aboriginal Indian Mongoloid in the same manner as the American regards the Negro, speaking from a matrimonial standpoint.” On the one hand, this logic fit directly within the politics of anti-miscegenation in the United States, which violently maintained the separation between those with white blood from those with any hint of Black blood; criminalizing interracial marriage even as (post)plantation life was marked by the sexual violations of Black women by white men. Importantly this version of anti-Blackness is also positioned within patriarchal sexist caste cosmologies that require that Hindu men not marry or intermix with “low-stock” women. More specifically, Thind’s anti-Black argument required an articulation of caste that was predicated on hyperendogamous sexual practices, which rested on emerging ways of understanding caste-as-blood politics in India. As such, I turn to the politics of caste and blood in the next section.

Many of the analyses of migration, especially of dominant caste Hindu migrants, have focused primarily on the impact of United States policy and practice on such migrants. The story of such migration has often times begun with the changing migration policies of the United States, specifically the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, which pegged immigration quotas to new standards of education rather than race. In such analysis, the focus or determiner on race, racism, and racialization is primarily that which was occurring internal to the United States. However, the movement of migrants such as Thind and the logic they utilized for claims to citizenship was produced in a much more complex global order that allowed for some and not others to begin moving across the world.

I focus here on the politics of migration from India that were shaped by twentieth-century shifts in understandings of caste as “racial casteism” linked to brown blood.³⁷ The racializing of caste through the rhetoric of blood meant that proof of caste position was aligned with global ideologies of blood mixing and anti-miscegenation. In tracing these shifts, I show how the questions of blood internalized questions of purity and pollution and linked dominant castes with natural intellectual and spiritual capacities. That is to say, these capacities were imagined as “in their blood.” This shift toward internal capacities supported new kinds of occupational and migratory possibilities and, in turn, allowed dominant castes to find new strategies for accumulation both in India and abroad. In fact, we can understand how figures such as Thind have been repositioned and resignified through contextualizing him within this twentieth-century ascendant global savarna class.

In the Ambedkarite tradition—associated with the scholar, activist, and architect of the Indian Constitution, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar—caste has been understood as an oppressive system of brahmin supremacist legal-religious justifications for a graded, static, predestined “division of labourers.”³⁸ Savarna is a term meant to denote those who come from any one of the four graded laboring castes of the Hindu varna system—the shudhras (peasants and other ‘manual’ laborers), vaishyas (merchants), kshatriyas (warriors), and brahmins (priests)—as opposed to Dalits, whose labor was considered spiritually impure and outside of the varna system, and therefore avarna.

In the early twentieth century, in the wake of British colonial exposure and the scientific racist turn, caste was also justified in racial terms. The British in India determined what communities would play specific roles in the colonial bureaucracy based on what they perceived as the immutable labor capacities of different castes, effectively “racializing caste.”³⁹ Increasingly, the legal and religious institutionalization of caste-based oppression was also justified on the grounds of maintaining the blood purity of dominant caste people who were supposedly “Aryan” and therefore actually white by ancestry.⁴⁰ Popularly termed the “Aryan myth,” this ideology proposed that brahmins and other dominant castes were actually just Europeans who had migrated to the subcontinent many years in the past.

Some on the Indian subcontinent also drew upon and contributed to this scientific racist legacy. For example, the Hindu supremacist nationalist leader Lokmanya Tilak wrote The Arctic Home in the Vedas (1903), in which he argued that the dominant castes were originally Aryan people who migrated from the Artic some 8,000 years earlier, explicitly mapping Vedic hymns and astrology onto this imagined movement.⁴¹ In writing this text, Tilak was in conversation with Max Muller and William F. Warren, the President of Boston University from 1873 to 1903, revealing the extent to which scientific racist discourses were circulating globally. Similarly, in Caste and Race in India (1932), the brahmin sociologist G.S. Ghurye (also known for being the mentor of sociologist M.N. Srinivas), argued that there was a relationship between race and caste and sought to prove it by deploying the scientific racist measuring techniques developed in the United States. Ghurye focused on measuring crania, nasal cavities, and all sort of other phenotypic characteristics as proof of a clear race/caste relationship, predicated on the idea that brahmins were Aryans. In his interpretation of his data, Ghurye postulated that “the state of things can be the result only of such regulations that prevented the possibility of the Brahmin blood being mixed with aboriginal blood.”⁴² Here, Ghurye is positing that brahmins were especially pure in blood because of their hyperendogamous practices. However, Ghurye also goes on to suggest that the “physical type of those from the Panjab is so uniform as to preclude any possibility of large mixture. Hence we can reasonably assume that a large bulk of the present inhabitants of the Panjab are the descendants of the Vedic Aryans.”⁴³ Thind himself was from Amritsar, Punjab, and, therefore, the argument that those from the north and northwest of India, especially the Punjab, were Aryan and largely “unmixed” became a pivot of the Thind case. Subtly, yet importantly, this conversation regarding Punjab also collapsed religious minorities, such as Sikhs, into the broader racialized categories of “pure” dominant caste peoples predicated on their regional location within India.

More broadly, Ghurye is clearly articulating the logics of caste through the language of blood, effectively racializing the conversations of caste and mapping the colonial ideas of blood purity onto caste-based exclusion. Caste-as-blood took the question of caste “inside,” the danger of caste impurity further tethered to maintaining the kinds of hyperexclusionary cultural practices that could prevent the potential “browning” of dominant caste blood. These racialized arguments regarding caste were themselves part of a broader attempt by caste Hindus to find strategies to maintain their social and material supremacy at a moment when Dalit resistance and Dalit mobility were destabilizing the hierarchies of the caste system.⁴⁴

As such, the colonially influenced idea that one’s caste reflected biologically immutable capacities rooted in heredity and endogamy shaped how caste hierarchy and caste-based accumulation could persist over the rest of the century.⁴⁵ Seen in this light, Thind’s “revulsion” to marrying someone from a “lower race” was rooted in this emphasis on racial casteism, which required racist matrimonial boundary policing to prevent the loss of caste purity and therefore social, cultural, and monetary capital. Let me be clear that such hyperendogamous practices were already an inextricable part of the caste system. However, caste politics had now rooted itself in the logics of brown blood, focusing as much on the internal, unseen, and unverifiable markers of purity as on external markers of caste. This type of racist and casteist politics of desire continues to exist within many dominant caste communities, who may tolerate their male children marrying white women, but in many cases will seek to prevent any marriage to oppressed caste, Black or Muslim women. What this version of endogamy reflects is not only “racism” in the abstract but a racism rooted in a racial and caste capitalist system in which particular marital and sexual decisions have perceived potential for the loss or accrual of social, cultural, and symbolic capital.

This shift in caste logic allowed dominant castes, and those who affiliated with the dominant castes, to find new forms of mobility that previously did not exist for them (even as some conservative dominant caste leaders voiced displeasure at this shift in caste logics).⁴⁶ Historically, brahmins were seen as the priestly caste and, therefore, incapable of techno-materialist work because it had traditionally been associated with the manual labor of oppressed castes. Ajantha Subramanian explains that during the colonial period the British brought over their own engineers and scientists with the assumption that Indians, and brahmins in particular, did not have the capacity for engineering.⁴⁷ However, as urbanization and industrialization created the necessity for local skilled labor, dominant caste men gained access to colonial education and were conscripted into technical jobs now deemed “conceptual” rather than “manual.” Over time, as these jobs became increasingly valuable and valued (in relation to bureaucratic and administrative jobs in the state apparatus), the technological industries in India became the almost exclusive purview of dominant caste men.⁴⁸ The result was a new racialized stereotype that associated dominant caste Indian men, especially brahmins, with the innate cognitive capacity to be science experts, and more generally, to take on roles associated with “thinking.” Practically, this meant that occupations which were previously barred to brahmins, and which would have historically resulted in the loss of caste position, could now be joined as long as one maintained appropriate blood ties through hyperendogamous exclusionary practices predicated on who one was allowed to touch and not touch.

It should be noted that the ideology of caste-as-blood relations was inherently gendered, making the labor of maintaining caste tradition the purview of (cishet) women in the patriarchal household even as (cishet) brahmin men were exposed to new occupational and cultural possibilities. Uma Chakravarti, for example, has argued that women were “gateways” to caste purity, again pointing to the way that the intimate domains of blood purity became central to caste rearticulations.⁴⁹ However, as Omvedt points out, this historical unfolding also meant that one strand of Hindu reform over the next sixty years would focus on the problems of widowhood, sati, educational mobility, and occupational mobility for brahmin women as long as they maintained their position and domestic role within the exclusionary heteropatriarchal Brahminical household.⁵⁰

Importantly, the process of caste racialization occluded the material conditions and caste capital that had allowed for the accrual of such skills in the first place, while creating the perception that the dominant castes were “naturally” intellectual i.e., it was “in their blood” to be well-educated and join technical industries. As a result, savarnas, especially those at the higher rungs of the caste hierarchy, have been able to skirt discussions of their own caste positions, rendering them as the normatively unmarked “casteless” communities whose educational and occupational mobility has nothing to do with caste and is instead based solely on their natural abilities.⁵¹ This phenomenon has been especially true for those Indians who traveled to the United States, where caste has not been recognized as an operative form of discrimination until quite recently.⁵² In this sense, Thind’s story would actually foreshadow the shifting migratory patterns and migratory ideologies of the twentieth century, during which the articulation of caste through blood facilitated the movements of large numbers of well-educated, economically mobile, dominant caste peoples to the United States.

In fact, to think specifically about how blood-based articulations of caste created new circuits of accumulationist possibility one need only look at the way that the racialization of blood directly impacted and reshaped caste orderings of movement. In the tradition of “kala pani”—or Samudrolanghana or Sagarollanghana—crossing the sea would result in the loss of one’s caste position. Thus, when the British East India Company recruited dominant caste soldiers to join them in the late-1700s and 1800s, they actually adapted their standards such that overseas service would not be required.⁵³ This was why the earliest migrants to the United States and the rest of the Americas were not brahmins, but Punjabi Sikhs and Muslims from the subcontinent who came to the United States to work in labor intensive industries.⁵⁴ Vivek Bald, for example, has written about early Muslim Bengali sailors who jumped ship at US ports and assimilated into Black and Latinx communities in the United States.⁵⁵ Thind himself, given when he came to the United States, had some similarities to these early migrants in terms of his labor slotting as a worker at a lumber mill. This fact is also partial account for his early participation in the Ghadar movement.

However, the rendering of dominant castes as “casteless” also exacerbated a problem in dominant caste Marxist socialist movements, which were unable to reckon with caste in their critiques of capital. In fact, as V. Geetha writes regarding the inability of savarna Marxists in India to grapple with caste, “By refusing to grant it analytical significance, they sidestepped questions to do with the historically specific expressions of ruling ideologies and interests in the Indian context.”⁵⁶ Instead, caste was mostly seen as a subordinate rather than constitutive aspect of fights for economic justice and, therefore, the fact of savarna authority and domination within socialist struggle was left unquestioned. Read in this way, Thind and some others in the Ghadar struggle who, at least early on, were espousing a radical socialist agenda, were also part of this growing savarna class whose caste position was masked, unaddressed, and, therefore, perhaps destroyed the possibility of a more sophisticated and historically grounded revolutionary spirit.⁵⁷

One of the most striking and important racialized characteristics that traveled with dominant caste “Hindus” as they moved from India to the United States was a perceived special, primordial spiritual capacity. The Hindu American benefited from the global representation of Gandhi as the “nonviolent” anti-colonialist, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁵⁸ This seeming preternatural capacity toward nonviolence linked itself to a colonially constructed idea of the brahmin as excessively spiritual, industrious, and gentle. In this colonial portrayal, the Hindu brahmin figure, as Shaista Patel writes, was “constructed as genteel and honourable in opposition to barbaric Muslims” and the “loathsome Ethiop.”⁵⁹ Such portrayals allowed Anglo, Christian, Europeans to valorize their encounters with this supposedly mild, industrious, and hyper-spiritual group of Hindu Indians, while maintaining their anti-Muslim and anti-Black cosmology.⁶⁰

The discursive force of the singular racialized caricature of the brahmin, presented him as a priestly man who absconded from material impulses (making money, sexual practice, and the like) and therefore did good works in the world without any expectation of reward (enshrined in the idea of Hindu dana).⁶¹ This perception was amplified as a group of spiritual gurus—including Osho, Baba Ram Dass, and Paramahamsa Yogananda—moved to the United States in the early-to-mid-twentieth century and began proselytizing to (mostly white) Americans.⁶² Perhaps this is one explanation for how and why Thind moved away from the more militant, armed ideologies of struggle associated with the Ghadar movement and instead joined this group of “spiritual gurus,” writing books on Sikhism, Christianity, the science of spirituality, meditation, and enlightenment. Importantly, Thind produced work that situated spirituality at the nexus of Sikhism and Christianity, further linking the dominant caste world to the world of whiteness and rendering it separate from both the Semitic and the Muslim world.

Ultimately, this historical legacy produced the possibility that these Hindu Indian Americans continue to be perceived with a racialized capacity toward selfless, nonviolent service. For example, Indian Americans continue to be seen in opposition Muslim Americans from the subcontinent: the good, peaceful, docile brown subject opposed to the bad, violent, potential brown terrorist. When read this way, the continued efforts to erase caste and caste-based oppression from K–12 textbooks in the United States (and in California in particular) by many conservative Hindu American groups might take on another valence: in centering caste and the violence of the caste system, the lie of Hinduism as a religion of peace and nonviolence is made evident and the Hindu can no longer draw capital from caste hierarchy while rendering it invisible.

In this article I have argued that a version of scholarly methodological nationalism siloes and provincializes conversations on both race and caste. In response, I have sought to provide a more nuanced understanding of global processes of racialization and casteism, especially as more and more dominant caste Indians have intimate relations with and power within the United States. Specifically, I have excavated some of the arguments embedded in the Bhagat Singh Thind case and positioned them within a broader historical context that connected the United States and India in order to lay out some of the contradictory intersections of race and caste. In doing so, we can see how Thind as a figure changes in signification as a global savarna class, with unique perceived racialized capacities, and comes into further prominence over the course of the twentieth century.

I have sought to operationalize the idea of “brown blood” to get at some of the specific ways that race and caste intersected in creating this global savarna class. In particular, I have shown that the question of brown blood locates the questions of race and caste inside, in the invisible, hidden capacities of the body. This very invisibility is what creates the contradictions associated with the arguments of the Thind case but also reflects the ongoing paradoxes of global race and caste into the twenty-first century, especially for dominant Hindus.

Brown blood operated within a changing global caste cosmology, one which pushed the understandings of caste impurity and pollution inside, tethering questions of purity to the blood. At the same time, caste-as-blood also suggested, if tenuously, that Europeans and dominant caste Hindus were of the same stock, potentially linked together by histories of whiteness. For the dominant castes, and those such as Thind who placed themselves within this cosmology, the potential to prove whiteness through purifying themselves—by obtaining the right education, by developing and governing themselves, by marrying the right person and eradicating any signs of mixing with those deemed lower in caste and racial hierarchies—was and continues to be enticing.

However, in so doing, the dominant castes in India and abroad have locked themselves into their positions within the colonial matrix of power because brownness, by definition, indicates a racial inadequacy that cannot be eliminated no matter the proof given, the cultural politics espoused, or any number of other attempts at purification. For example, no matter the extent to which the Indian nation-state attempts to prove its legitimacy by purifying itself of any non-Hindu, non-dominant-caste peoples and show the world that it has ascended in the global racial hierarchy of nations, the brown smudge of poverty, of underdevelopment, of lack of civilizational respectability continues. No matter the extent to which the Hindu American seeks to prove themselves as respectable members of the US body politic by amassing ever more wealth and educational pedigree, when white supremacists come into power the fact of their brownness renders them at risk. These brown smudges haunt many of the more conservative and supremacist members of the dominant castes, who, because of their caste position, privilege, and capital, assume that they actually must be at the top of the racial hierarchy because they have always been at the top of the caste hierarchy; it is “in their blood.”

But for other savarnas in the diaspora, the reckoning with race and caste perhaps can take us in another direction. Unlike assimilationist aspirations, another way forward is to take seriously abolition and annihilation, to join movements that eschew liberal politics and reformist agendas that merely seek to make racial and caste hierarchies more palatable and less visible to those in power. Indeed, if we learn anything from Thind and his early participation in the Ghadar movement, it is that the tendency toward a global anti-imperial and anti-colonial struggle is also part of the history of South Asian migration to the United States and in India as well. While casteism and its links to whiteness may have undermined the more radical anti-imperial potentials of such projects, perhaps this history can still provide a kernel for a different politics, one in which anti-caste, anti-racist, anti-imperial, and anti-capitalist solidarities congeal toward more egalitarian futures.