Looking through glass | Review of Meet The Savarnas by Ravikant Kisana

In Meet the Savarnas, Ravikant Kisana, an academic specialising in cultural studies, forges a new metaphor from Marilyn Loden’s concept of ‘glass ceiling’ — used to explain how patriarchy and sexism hold women back — to describe savarna supremacy. “Think of south Asia — India especially — as full of people sitting in a cramped and dirty basement… looking up at what is a glass ceiling for them but is, in fact, a floor above which lives a very small group of people,” he writes. The group above are the savarnas, who “have access to all the switches in all the rooms of the house, including the basement. They switch on the lights and switch them off at will.”

Invisible barriers

A glass floor that’s also a glass ceiling is a powerful image. It encapsulates the invisible barriers that kick in to prevent someone from rising above their caste-mandated station while also protecting those above from falling lower, thereby cementing the segregation of the basement dwellers from those above ground. The vantage point of caste discourse in India is typically above the glass floor, looking down.

Kisana, in a startling inversion, points the lens of anthropological scrutiny upwards, from below the glass floor. What emerges is a searing social commentary that unpeels, with wit and precision, layers of congenital hypocrisy, narcissistic entitlement and delusions of grandeur that have propped up a hereditary elite’s fantasies about themselves.

What happens when a caste marginalised person realises that their world and opinions is of no consequence in the privileged realm of ‘serious’ people? In Kisana’s case, it launches him on a quest for savarna validation that morphs into a journey of self-discovery, and also, for the purposes of this book, an adventure in ‘other’-discovery.

Kisana is good at switching registers from the personal to the social, the economic and the political to ask questions that would seem obvious anywhere except in discourses steeped in the savarna imaginary. He wonders, for instance, how in a country where 90% of the people earn less than ₹25,000 a month, hundreds of ‘international’ schools get away with charging lakhs of rupees as fees? Why do parents pay such absurd amounts? And who are these parents? “The ‘international’ school has emerged as a narrow gatekept marker of ‘eliteness’ masquerading in the guise of academic ‘excellence’”, argues Kisana. “It is this elusive tag that savarna parents are desperate to bestow upon their children — so desperate that paying lakhs for lower kindergarten is also tolerable.” In his telling, education is a mission-critical domain for servicing the core savarna values of gate-keeping and segregation.

Savarna romance

The chapters on love, sex and marriage explore what happens when an SC/ST or OBC person forms a relationship with an elite savarna, especially those who claim they don’t “see caste” in people. They discover, of course, that the world of savarna romance — populated by modern, progressive yet “havan-compliant traditionalists” — rarely defies the norm of endogamy, with the terms of engagement (pun intended) widely disseminated by Bollywood where every love story is a savarna love story.

Kisana’s sharpest indictment is reserved for the cohort of millennial savarnas who had anointed themselves the stewards of India’s economic lift-off. Today, the Great Indian Dream is dead. No one talks of Make in India or Digital India or 100 smart cities anymore. What went wrong? In Kisana’s analysis, the implosion was pre-ordained, given the “universally embedded impulse of exclusion” that manifests in multiple ways including, for instance, in urban planning that rarely respects the rights of low income residents, in delivering a “competition-free monopoly over commerce to the Bania communities”, and in the elite savarna “pivot” to a strongman politician who was expected to champion their business interests against “the legitimate concerns of the marginalised”.

Flight of the elites

Now, with their dream of ‘Shining India’ in tatters, lakhs of elite savarnas have fled India for the First World. Despite being in the driver’s seat since independence, they failed spectacularly in nation-building — the quintessential project of modernity. According to Kisana, it is this failure that triggered their retreat from woke modernity and pushed them to embrace religion and half-baked history, realms where they can have the last word without fear of being challenged.

In eight chapters that you can race through in one sitting, Kisana combines memoir, social observation, ethnographic insights and cultural exposition to fashion a mirror for the average — in every sense of the word — savarna. No reader, whether from above or below the glass floor, can get through these pages without multiple moments of discomfiting self-recognition.

sampath.g@thehindu.co.in

Meet The Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything

Ravikant Kisana

Ebury Press/Penguin Random

₹699

Published – August 08, 2025 07:30 am IST