Mapping Complicities in Brahmin Supremacy to White Supremacy: An Unsettling of South Asia and South Asian America

Abstract

In this article, I trace how the complicities in brahmin supremacy map onto complicities in white supremacy through the South Asian diaspora in the United States. Using my own autoethnographic accountings as a queer, oppressor-caste, low-income, non-Black, non-Indigenous, Punjabi Sikh, I explore the parallels, complexities, and incommensurabilities of class, caste, race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, religion, gender, and sexuality over transnational migrations to question who gets to claim the identities of South Asian and South Asian American, and how citizenship is negotiated within each. Tracing the logics of anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, caste supremacy, and orientalism, I analyze the ideological underpinnings that uphold brahmin supremacy and white supremacy to reveal how brahmin and white supremacy are interconnected and co-constructed.