Meet the Savarnas: Ravikant Kisana's Caste Ethnography

The Hindu

08-07-2025

Published : Jul 08, 2025 18:33 IST - 6 MINS READ
Many things about Ravikant Kisana's Meet the Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything make it a deeply necessary book to read but importantly, a more necessary one to have been written.
The reader is given ample warning at the start of the book. While I imagine the non-savarna reader to be in a constant state of chuckles while reading this, I cannot imagine what sounds the savarna (upper caste) reader might consider apt. Kisana writes: 'Let the Savarnas read this work, digest it, introspect or seethe—this prologue and book introduce them to their own selves. If they do not like what they meet, it is their internal matter.'
'It is their internal matter' is giggle-inducing because true, it is the internal matter of the savarnas. But what is also implied is a much more entertaining idea—'your internal matter is you, and what you don't like, no one can possibly do anything about'.
Meet the Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything
By Ravikant Kisana Ebury Press Pages: 256 Price:Rs.699
The first chapter mentions a 'Kulkarni', a painfully familiar savarna woman we might all know from college, a friend of a friend, former editor-in-chief of the school/college magazine, a word-lover/an Instagram influencer. She is what they call a well-rounded, well-cultured, well-raised intellectual lover of art and books. So when she asks, 'Is Ravikant 'really' writing a book?', the eyebrows of several non-savarna readers go up and come down. We don't have to know her all too well to know that she is an important presence in a book called Meet the Savarnas because as you might already know by now, she obviously doesn't know what a savarna is.
Kisana offers his reader some insightful explorations into all those social interactions some of us, and he, have spent years trying to free ourselves from. The ones that brutally let us know that Friends was no longer a cool TV show or that it's not this Beatles song you are supposed to like, it's the other one. His own navigation in and out of the savarna groups that maintained what was cool and what was not are all narrated with more humour than I imagine was possible.
Shame memories
The American writer Jennifer Egan mentions something called 'shame memories' in her Pulitzer prize-winning book, A Visit from the Goon Squad. These are embarrassing, shameful, often stupid memories we have of ourselves that tend to show up in our lives at random, without notice. You could be chairing a meeting and at the back of your mind, a memory will slowly leak itself into your brain, never letting you forget about that one time you misspelt Enrique as Henry K or that time you made an almighty fuss that the shop selling you Lynyrd Skynyrd did not have their lesser-known tracks.
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Gen Z may call it 'cringe'. And it is only now that I have the courage to look back at them smilingly and call them funny, but Kisana has a delightful word for these impersonations that non-savarna adolescents often participate in, in order to belong to a cool, savarna gang. He calls them 'auditions', a way of accumulating some degree of cooldom to pass off as okay or at least tolerable in schools and colleges.
I am curious about the ways in which an ethnographer studying the savarna revisits these memories. A lot is unpacked, yes, and a lot more is won. By that understanding, I believe that this book is crucial for how much it allows us to win ourselves over from those old auditions we took part in. That winning over is interesting because it is often the first step a Dalit person takes towards hugging their identities, and themselves.
Years ago, while preparing for a Master's exam, I sat rolling my eyes at the computer screen for every search result that Google showed me for the keywords 'ethnography—Dalit—food': scores of research papers, articles, and essays, academic and otherwise, all authored by savarna academics. I thought back to what the word ethnography means. It comes from the Greek ethnos (people/folk/nation) and grapho (write)—writing about people. I have been somewhat curious about its fluid form—people, meaning any people; writing, meaning any kind—but it was puzzling to see how ethnography as a social science fit so well into the hands of the savarna academician perpetually itching to score Academic Performance Index (API) points in Scopus-indexed journals for enlightening us all with caste narratives that they have 'discovered'.
It took a while before Dalit and Bahujan writers began asking the question why the savarnas do not write about themselves. Kisana's ethnography of the savarnas seems to offer a better question and its own answer to that question. For all practical purposes, this book, where the knife is reversed, where the lion has learned how to write, so now every story need not glorify the hunter, so to speak, is far more useful in its function as an ethnography, sans Scopus, sans API.
It is only as I write this that I am becoming aware of what seems to be my first time reading the dismantled structure of the fragile savarna person in a book form and that, too, becomes an enjoyable experience for the reader. Such a project runs the risk of becoming repetitive but the book does feature eight chapters, each of which delve straight into the heart of savarna ethos in academia, the corporate world, stand-up comedy, cinema, marriage etc. So it is possible that you will recall at least one savarna who is notoriously close to the one being described in the chapter you are currently reading. It is also possible that it could be the same person. Kisana's writing delivers slap after slap to this person.
I see the book also as an important document that must be preserved for the job it does on behalf of those of us who do not know how to ask uncomfortable but necessary questions. There is a lot of work that goes into how much Kisana allows for discomfort to be a part of the writing, for a thought, a problem, that he continues to hold in his palms, observing it from all angles.
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Several interesting attempts are made to sustain and understand the discomfort of a question such as 'Why do Dalit men continue to seek Savarna women?' I have myself played so much table tennis with this question that I am no longer interested in an answer, because there are so many. But to give him credit, Kisana addresses the question with a straightforward kind of sincerity. I have also often wondered why we don't have a name for a Savarna-Karen here in India. It opens a whole lot of tricky conversations I don't know my way out of yet. But Kisana makes commendable attempts at understanding these amoebae of cultural phenomenon. Which is why most of the pages in this book are a tickle, a giggle, a laughlet.
My only grouse with the book is that it doesn't seem to entertain the idea of an Shah Rukh Khan-loving Dalit person who loves him, not for anything else but for his dimples or for no solid reason, in much the same way that an entire generation of Dalit fathers have loved Jackie Chan, Sridevi, and Bruce Lee. But perhaps that isn't the book's problem.
Vijeta Kumar lives in Bengaluru and teaches English in St. Joseph's College. She blogs at rumlolarum.wordpress.com.