Trapped in Silicon Valley’s Hidden Caste System

Siddhant learned of the watch when he was 14. His father, a low- wage worker on the Indian railway, was trying to save up for it. The watch was made of steel and had a sketch of a portly man in it's dial. The man most responsible for changing the caste system in India was his father's hero.

After school, Siddhant liked to ride his bike down the crowded streets of Nagpur, India, past groups of kids playing cricket, to a squat concrete building where his father rented a modest office with his friends, all anti-caste activists. Inside, he would find the men sitting in plastic chairs, sharing stories of their exploits with Ambedkar, surrounded by posters of the man and newspapers spilling off bookshelves. Siddhant couldn't help but notice that one of his friends and a third appeared at the office with a watch strapped to their wrists.

Siddhant saw on his father a different version of the watch when he showed up on his bike. The gift was from a big-shot friend. It had a leather band instead of a metal strap and was powered by a battery. Siddhant blurted out: "I want that watch!"

Siddhant is a member of the most deprived caste in South Asia. Their family was poor. Siddhant used a hot iron rod to melt the straps of his torn rubber sandals, which he hid near the fire pit. Seeing his father watch, something clicked: This was a symbol of everything he was after, to be an elite, educated Dalit.

Siddhant's father made a deal. Siddhant could have the watch if he finished high school with first honors. Siddhant got his report card from the Maharashtra board of education a year later. Siddhant grabbed the watch off the shelf and adjusted it to his wrist as his father looked on.

While riding his bike 12 miles to college, Siddhant wore the watch for nearly every day. He wore it when he moved to the Bay Area to start his tech career. It was on his wrist that he was able to land a job as a software engineer at Facebook, with an offer package that was almost half a million dollars.

Indians make up a quarter of the technical workforce in Silicon Valley, so it's not unusual for them to land high-paying jobs. Those successes have come from historically privileged castes. Seven decades after India abolished untouchability, many people still suffer from poverty and limited economic opportunity.

Siddhant, who asked to use, said that revealing the identity even to any person is very dangerous. Fears may have been justified in 2020 when a California state agency filed a lawsuit against a tech giant. In the weeks that followed, more people came forward. More than 250 complaints were received by Equality Labs, a South Asian civil rights group. The individuals claimed that other Indians had made casteist slurs, engaged in discrimination, sexually harassed them, and hunted for evidence of a closeted caste.

One of the most dangerous things about caste is that it can be difficult to recognize. Because it is invisible, there are many codes and secret languages that exist around us. A pat on the shoulder can be a friendly greeting or a search for a sacred thread. It's not uncommon for a person to be a transgression, but it's also not uncommon for a person to be a burden. They always wonder if a bad thing happened to them because of who they are.

For Siddhant, who now lives in the South Bay in a $2 million home, his father's watch reminds him of where he came from and where he still wants to go. He will wear a watch and double-check that his shirt sleeves are long enough to cover it when the stakes are high.

He agonizes over whether it's time to out himself when he hides his identity. Money and prestige are not enough. Siddhant is waiting for a sign that will allow him to be himself.

The father of the modern dalit movement was born in 1891. Social movements against India's caste orthodoxy were gaining steam. His family was from a caste that ranked between rope makers and leather workers. The father worked in the military. His job gave the family a small amount of social mobility, and he attended schools where he could study English. He was 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 His teachers banned him from sharing a water tap with his classmates and from studying Sanskrit, the language of ancient Hindu scriptures.

He excelled. He traveled to New York to study at Columbia University after winning a prominent regional scholarship. He had a close-up view of the women's suffragist movement and was a mentor to John Dewey. The basis of his famous speech, The Annihilation of Caste, was created by the creation of a radical equal society.

He left New York to earn a PhD at the London School of Economics, where he continued to enjoy life as an equal to his classmates. Doors slammed in his face when he returned to India. He was recommended for a professorship in Bombay, but was not allowed to share drinking water with the other professors.

The governor of Bombay nominated Ambedkar for a seat on the city council. He began to give radical speeches advocating for economic and social equality. The Army of Soldiers for Equality was formed by Ambedkar's supporters to help spread his message. The soldiers helped protect thousands of people when they followed Ambedkar on a march to the Mahad village in Maharashtra, where he drank from a communal well.

There is so much similarity between the Untouchables of India and of the position of the Negroes in America that he wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois. As India became independent from Britain in 1947, Ambedkar became the country's law minister. He used the time he had to work on caste protections. Affirmative action was introduced after he banned discrimination based on caste, race, and sex. The reforms did not go as far as he wanted. He resigned in frustration.

He studied South Asia's religions in order to find an alternative to Hinduism. In October of 1956, the people from far and wide left their homes on foot to trek to a 14-acre site. In front of a sea of men and women dressed mostly in white, Ambedkar converted himself from Hinduism to Buddhism. He began to recite vows to convert the hundreds of thousands of people to his interpretation of the religion. They decided to abandon Hinduism because they no longer believed their past lives would condemn them to their current fate.

Siddhant's father was among the Samata Sainik Dal soldiers that day. His wife gave birth to Siddhant in a cowshed two decades later. They moved to a slum in the city. Like their fellow slum dwellers, they raised him as both a Buddhist and an ardent follower of the Bhim Army.

Siddhant's family lived in a small hut next to a shop that sold cheap liquor for the first 13 years of his life. Crowds milling around outside, fights erupted, and drive-by stabbings occurred frequently. Siddhant and his mother used to wake up at 4 to get water from the public tap. The men of the slum left for work early, often to work as day laborers, garbage collectors, or rickshaw pullers.

Siddhant's father kept a close eye on him and his four siblings because the kids in his neighborhood often got into smoking and drinking. He spoke to them of a god like figure with power to change them and who should be emulated. Siddhant attended a school where teachers shared stories from the lives of Buddha and Ambedkar, and lessons were conducted in the main language of Maharashtra. Siddhant accompanied his father to weeklong activist camps when he was 9, where they spent afternoons discussing how Buddha's teachings could improve their lives.

His mother was walking barefoot when she stepped on a metal spike, which caused her leg to swell. They couldn't afford the hospital entry fee, and Siddhant's father raised funds for days while she was at home. Siddhant became convinced that he had to get his family out of those circumstances. His eyes were open to life outside of India. Siddhant discovered the existence of airports and airplanes when he greeted Japanese Buddhists at his father's school. Siddhant was in awe of the doctor who came to visit his family. Siddhant realized he wanted to be a professional and a social activist after reading the stories of the doctor.

By the time Siddhant was in the eighth grade, his father had enough money to move the family out of the slum and into a new neighborhood. Siddhant and his mother worked hard to build their new home by hand, with Siddhant collecting water to pour into the concrete to help it set. Siddhant compiled a personal dictionary in the back pages of his notebooks after his teachers switched from conducting his math and science courses in Marathi to English. He got his first pair of shoes as he neared graduation. He was one of only two black students in the computer engineering program at the university. He thought it was his best chance to become known as a sir, someone worthy of respect.

Siddhant and his older sister took on tutoring jobs to bring in extra income, while he set up a stall to sell his hero's written works. He used the earnings to pay for his textbooks and to start riding the bus to school. His grades were good. He would start to feel self-conscious when he heard that he was there only because of affirmative action. Siddhant's interviewer asked probing questions about his family's home, their last name, and his father's vocation when he applied for an engineering internship at the urging of a professor. Siddhant did not get the job. He thought it was because of his caste.

He hid his watch during interviews. He still wanted to attend graduate school at the Indian Institute of Technology, the country's premier universities. He scrounged up a lot of money to purchase test prep material and was studying for the entrance exam when he came across an ad for a programmer analyst in the IT department of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. He got one step closer to his dreams after applying and getting it. He was admitted under the category for government jobs, which meant his hiring counted towards a quota for scheduled, or oppressed, castes.

He took his graduate school entrance exams after moving in with a roommate who didn't object to his caste. He called his family to tell them he had gotten into the school. He had been accepted as a research assistant, which would allow him to send money back to his family, even though he was not a caste.

Siddhant set up his computer and phone in his room. He used his new computer to search the school databases for recognizable names. About 25 students showed up for a meeting in his room after he sent out cold emails to 60 students. They met up in his room to talk, study, and share his phone and computer after he started a Yahoo group for them.

A professor presented Siddhant with a challenge when he was in his final year of school. The professor told Siddhant that he would return to supervise his thesis only if he finished five big assignments in three months. Siddhant thought it was impossible. He was in and out of the hospital for 17 hours. He wondered if the professor thought he would give up because of his caste. Siddhant had seen other classmates drop out because of the same obstacles. Siddhant submitted the assignment at the three-month mark, and the professor kept his word. Siddhant thought that he had proved to the professor that his caste wouldn't hold him back.

Siddhant got a job at a tech startup in Bangalore with the help of a professor. He allowed himself to expose his watch, but it was a small thing. His last name was a mystery in Maharashtra. He thought he could pass more easily as a privileged-caste person in Bangalore.

Siddhant was ecstatic when he was told he was going to work in the US. He moved with three of his Indian colleagues into a company-owned apartment in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg. Siddhant slept in the hallway. His roommates were Hindus from Tamil Nadu who wore white thread across their chest and shoulders to mark their Brahmin identity. Siddhant had no choice but to be himself. He said a prayer in the morning. Siddhant told his roommate that he was no longer a Hindu because of caste and his ancestral conversion. They talked politics and watched movies in the evening.

His new life was a dream come true. He felt isolated again. He was worried about abandoning his community. In October 2004, Siddhant quit his job and returned to India, to the city of Pune, a startup hub southeast of Mumbai. He got a new job, started another Apna Yahoo group, and rented a two-bedroom apartment to serve as an office for Ambedkarite activities. Some 50 people showed up every weekend. They planned how to act on the call to educate, organize, and discuss technical work by people living in different slums.

Siddhant kept a low profile at work after his manager said he needed to hire more people. Siddhant started a small training institute and a service to find people hostels because he was aware of the difficulties faced by the dalit community. He paid the local Buddha viharas' tutors out of pocket to teach English and math. Siddhant tried to build a startup that would hire people from marginalized communities, but the company didn't last. His day job wasn't going well either. His manager blamed Siddhant for the loss of the US client. Siddhant concluded that his manager had made him the scapegoat because of his caste.

Siddhant quit and found a job at a company that recruits many of its workforce in India. He earned a lot of money for Indian engineers. In 2015, inspired by stories of Indian American CEOs and high salaries, he convinced his managers to send him back to the United States, but this time to the Bay Area, with his wife and two children.

He used his groups to start meeting other people. He kept his mouth shut about his personal life outside of his world. Bollywood music and blinking lights were part of a party thrown by his department at Cisco. Siddhant went for the food and camaraderie, but his colleague from Vietnam asked why he wasn't dressed up in traditional Hindu garb. She remembers that he smiled and turned away. She requested not to reveal her name out of sensitivity to Siddhant. He was always a puzzle to her, never volunteering any information about himself.

They went out to grab lunch a year later and she asked if he was planning to celebrate. Siddhant told her that he was going to tell her, but she had to promise not to tell anyone. He said he doesn't celebrate because of the holiday's Hindu origins.

She wasn't sure why he was being secretive, but she was excited to have a colleague like that. Siddhant explained the plight of untouchables, the need to escape the caste system, and his family's conversion. After he told her about his secret, she was like, "Oh my God, I have this big secret of his." She says that he has to hide and that it was unfair.

Siddhant won a lottery for a green card and started interviewing for jobs. He had pushed his salary into the six figures and was confident he could double it, but now he discovered a new club he needed to break. Siddhant asked if he could be the chief technology officer at the company he was looking to hire. The founder asked if Siddhant was from the FAANG group, meaning he worked at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, or Google. The man said that Cisco wasn't impressive enough for potential investors.

Siddhant focused on the FAANGs. He was at his desk in March of last year when he received a phone call that he was going to be a systems infrastructure specialist at Facebook. As a child, he had believed that his starting salary would be much more than it was. He told his wife that life would change.

A friend tipped him off that another person in the network was involved in a fight over caste discrimination, and that the case might go to court. Siddhant's spirits sank after hearing this. He thought that if casteism existed in India, it would spread to other parts of the country. He wondered if he had skirted through on luck at the company. A colleague tried to praise him in a way that stung. You are no longer a person of caste.

As he focused on his new job, he pushed his uncomfortable thoughts aside. He was very excited about Facebook's six-week boot camp for new hires. Most of his teammates were Russian, and he was relieved to learn that none of his managers were Indian.

The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing had filed a lawsuit against Cisco, and Siddhant learned the details of the case after two years. A team of all dominant-caste Indian immigrants was worked on by a Dalit under the name of John Doe. His manager told two colleagues that the person was from a marginalized caste and that he had attended the prestigious institute under affirmative action. The lawsuit says that the man was demoted and removed from the team after he filed a discrimination complaint. Siddhant remembered that as long as they don't disclose, they won't be discriminated against and enjoy the same status as others.

Siddhant watched nervously as his South Asian colleagues discussed the news in an internal Facebook group. He couldn't tell if the anger was aimed at the alleged discrimination or at the likes of the post. Some people said they were appalled or that the suit was baseless. Siddhant did not speak. He didn't want to draw attention to himself in front of the 7,000 people in this group.

The topic of caste discrimination kept coming up as the US grappled with its own racial caste system after George Floyd's death. A lawsuit was filed by a former employee of the US branch of an Indian IT company. A group of 30 female engineers shared their experiences with bias and argued for workplace protections in an anonymous statement to The Washington Post.

Siddhant helped organize panels for the Dalits through the Ambedkar International Center, a US-based advocacy group. Many of the people who attended kept their videos off and refused to go on the record. He couldn't help but think that he should listen to his own advice, as Siddhant encouraged the members of his community to remain confident and own their experiences.

His anxiety was getting worse. He met with a therapist on the advice of his wife and a few close friends. He turned a critical eye on his career because he felt that something was missing. He had been at his current job for a long time and felt like he was stalling. He'd always chased achievements as a way to prove himself to others. He was at a loss. Siddhant didn't know how to explain his feelings to a therapist.

Facebook's London HR team was organizing a companywide meeting to discuss caste bias. Siddhant was invited to be on a panel by a Brahmin friend. Siddhant wrote an anonymous statement that his friend read. Siddhant left his Zoom dark as his friend spoke.

The caste debate came up in April of 2021. The Santa Clara County Human Rights Commission was debating whether to add caste to its anti discrimination policy. Over seven hours, 269 people delivered speeches. A group of self-identified Dalit tech workers kept their videos off the internet as they described how they had lost their jobs and faced casteist slurs. People from dominant-caste background spoke of seeing bias in their communities and tech companies. A representative from the union spoke about how difficult it is for victims to come forward, many of whom are in the US on visas. Many allies topped off their statements with "Jai Bhim", a tribute to Bhimrao Ambedkar, but others, including a few who self-identify as members of oppression, were worried that adding caste would hurt the cause.

Siddhant was surprised that the debate was happening where he lived. caste was added to the California Democratic Party's code of conduct. Colby College, UC Davis, Harvard, UC San Diego, and the Cal State University system all have caste protections. Siddhant is waiting to hear about the lawsuit. Kevin Brown, a law professor at Indiana University Bloomington, says that the state of California will decide if casteism is a form of discrimination. He sees a strong argument in favor of California's anti- discrimination law.

There is no need forcaste discrimination to manifest through an atrocity.

In September 2020, I messaged Siddhant. He helped organize a panel with 18 other people who shared their experiences. Siddhant and I talked for three hours. He told me that anyone could see his wristwatch. He marveled at the courage of the person who came forward in the lawsuit. He agreed to work with me under a different name. He was worried that other members of the Indian diaspora would turn on him for promoting anti-Hindu hatred.

After a year and a half of talking, he started to think that he should use his name. He was forced to reckon with his life after the interview process. He was looking for ways to out himself for this story without having to make a decision himself. Siddhant asked if the pictures would be better if his name was attached, but I told him the photos would be beautiful regardless. Siddhant put his face toward the camera when Vaselenko asked if he was comfortable having his front side captured.

He ran through his list of pros and cons after his wife urged him to do so. Helping the world understand the entrenched nature of caste is one of the pros. Helping his community see that they have merit. It felt like a huge personal risk to open up.

He couldn't do it. He is still worried that his words could be seen as feeding a feud. If people think I am making people hate me, that will be a problem.

He pushes against the edges of his comfort zone. The large framed black-and-white portrait of Dr. BR Ambedkar sits on an altar by the fireplace, which is where the Indian parents of his children are invited to visit. Siddhant has told his sons all about Ambedkar, and they pray before the altar on important days. He likes to say that Martin Luther King Jr. was a great leader for Black Americans, just like the great leader of the people, Dr. Ambedkar.

Siddhant's older son shared a story from his own life when he was a child. The kids shouted out their religion, region, and caste. They all said they were Brahmin. Everyone laughed when Siddhant's son blurted out, "I'm an untouchable!"

Siddhant laughed at the story. He thinks they thought his son was silly. Siddhant was more interested in his son's mindset.

The San Francisco Asian American Journalists Association supported the story.

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