Ground Down and Locked in a Paperweight: Toward a Critical Psychology of Caste-Based Humiliation

Abstract:Psychology limits the scope of raising questions important in the caste context. While psychology focuses on why and how people feel humiliated, the question in the caste context is why and how people do not feel humiliated despite incessant and gratuitous attacks on their dignity and self-worth. This article argues that psychology needs to adopt a critical orientation to address the experience of caste-based humiliation. The anticaste perspective of B. R. Ambedkar provides a critical orientation and psychological insights to build a meaningful psychology of caste-based humiliation. Ambedkar rejected individualist, essentialized notions of human self and emphasized the dimension of intergroup emotions to understand caste relations. I develop this argument by analyzing the experience, impact, and resistance to caste-based humiliation among Dalits. I describe caste-based humiliation in extreme (caste atrocities) and less extreme (caste microaggressions) forms and show that the experience of caste-based humiliation is pervasive, direct, but also vicarious. I then examine the psychological impact of caste-based humiliation on the health, social vitality, and appraisal process among Dalits. I show that a caste-ridden context makes it difficult to interpret humiliation and affects Dalit life narratives through retrospective feelings of humiliation. Finally, I consider the issue of resistance to humiliation and show that mere appraisal of humiliation could also be a form of resistance. The article concludes with an emphasis on exploring the scope of psychological resistance to caste-based humiliation through individual and collective acts of meaning that interpret and transform a humiliating existence.