The War in the Soul: Why Indian Psychology is Blind to the Trauma of Caste

 

In the landscape of modern mental health, we are taught that the "mind" is a theater of infinite potential—a space of neuroplasticity and evolving personality. Yet, for millions living under the Indian caste system, this internal expanse is systematically foreclosed by the external reality of "birth." While global psychological discourse has expanded to address the traumas of gender, race, and colonialism, the discipline within the Indian subcontinent remains marked by what philosopher Divya Dwivedi describes as a "stunning and yet mundane" absence: the failure to confront the psychological devastation of caste. This is not a mere oversight; it is a "blindness that watches over a society," a functional repression that allows a ceremonial order of inequality to persist while the individuals within it are reduced from "evolving personalities" to immutable biological categories.

1. Psychomachia: The Internal War of the Oppressed

Caste-based suffering is typically quantified through socio-economic data—poverty lines, land ownership, or educational gaps. However, there is a deeper, more invisible struggle that Dwivedi identifies as Psychomachia: the war within the soul. This is not a purely individual pathology, but what Frantz Fanon termed a "sociogenic" issue—a mental state produced not by the brain’s chemistry alone, but by the very architecture of the social world.

The depth of this internal conflict was articulated with haunting clarity by Kanshi Ram, a 22-year-old mason who sought work in a war zone to escape the destitution of his social position:

"People like us are at war with society, and internally with our souls, from the time of our birth."

When a social order sanctions humiliation, lynching, and exclusion as its "regularities," the trauma is not an accident of life; it is the atmosphere in which the soul is forced to breathe. This "war in the soul" remains a psychic dimension of suffering that professional psychology has largely neglected, preferring to treat the individual in isolation from the social forces that demand their self-denigration.

2. Verneinung: The Intellectual Art of Denial

If the lower castes experience psychomachia, the upper-caste academic and public spheres are characterized by Verneinung—a Freudian term for negation. In the clinic, negation is a way for the unconscious to allow a repressed thought to appear, provided it is chaperoned by a "no." It is a "lifting of repression" without the "acceptance" of the truth.

In the Indian social sciences, this manifests as a "caste blindness" that protects the status quo. Scholars acknowledge suffering but refuse to name its source, creating a specific "syntax of negation":

• "We see poverty, but it is not caste."

• "We see backwardness, but it is not caste."

• "We see the same effects as produced by institutional racism, but caste is not like racism."

• "Caste exists only in the obsession of the anti-caste crusaders."

This intellectual gaslighting serves a specific purpose: by shifting the focus to "culture" or "economic backwardness," the institution avoids the "annihilation of caste," keeping the mechanisms of domination hidden behind a mask of clinical neutrality.

3. Hypophysics: The Death of the "Mind"

This intellectual blindness (Verneinung) exists specifically to protect a deeper, biological hierarchy known as hypophysics. This is the belief that value—superiority or inferiority—is intrinsic to human nature and transmitted via janma (birth). The etymological link is critical: "nature" itself is derived from the Latin natus (birth), just as jāti (caste) is the twin of janma.

In this scalology—a graded hierarchy where value is "soldered into birth"—the concept of a "mind" is fundamentally a threat. As the Dalit scholar Rohit Vemula poignantly wrote before his suicide, "Never was a man treated as a mind."

In a caste-based civilization, a person is not allowed to mutate or grow through exchange with the world; they are viewed merely as a "bundle of unchangeable qualities" (guna). The polynomia of the mind—its capacity to follow multiple laws, invent new functions, and explore diverse identities—threatens the "ceremonial society." If a person can become anything, the rigid order of the scalology collapses. To preserve the hierarchy of the body, the caste system must effectively "kill" the mind’s potential for change.

4. The Myth of the "Universal Indian" Psyche

Recent movements to "decolonize" Indian psychology have sought to move away from Western models, yet they have often fallen into the trap of internal colonialism. Scholars like Ashis Nandy and Sudhir Kakar have historically universalized the upper-caste experience as the "Indian" experience.

They speak of the "Indian joint family" or "Indian mythology" as a monolith, ignoring that these structures are often specific to the lifeworld of the upper castes. By presenting these specific cultural forms as the "Indian psyche," they erase the lived experience of the Dalit-Bahujan majority. In this "decolonial" framework, the hierarchy of caste is not dismantled; it is simply rebranded as "indigenous tradition," while the internal colonization of the lower castes remains unaddressed in what is termed "Health Humanities."

5. Why the Clinic Alone Cannot "Cure" Caste

Traditional therapy often aims for "rehabilitation"—helping the patient adjust back into their social environment. However, as Fanon warned in his "sociodiagnostics," rehabilitating a victim back into an oppressive system is a failure of the clinic.

The clinic’s silence on caste is not just a lack of empathy; it is a theoretical failure. If a psychologist does not recognize that a patient's self-doubt and "melancholia" are rational responses to a "social background" of systemic humiliation, they become an instrument of that very persecution. A "political, emancipatory psychoanalysis" is required—one that recognizes that healing cannot be confined to the couch. It must involve an intervention in social transformation, for the only true "talking cure" is the dismantling of the social order that pre-defines the patient as a "loser" or "inferior" by birth.

Conclusion: Beyond the Ceremonial Society

The psychological health of the subcontinent depends on a shift in the "father function"—the source of our social imperatives. For decades, the "Old-New Father" has been M.K. Gandhi, whose language of communal harmony often masked the preservation of caste logic. Even his renaming of the oppressed as "Harijan" was a symbolic act of the "Old-New Father," reiterating that they were "born of caste mixing" while pretending a god (Hari) had fathered them.

To move beyond this ceremonial society, we must embrace the "New Law" envisioned by B.R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar’s "annihilation of caste" was more than a political project; it was a psychological necessity. It was a call for a society based on fraternity and the recognition of polynomia—the common project of holding everyone’s freedom in common.

As we look toward the future of mental health in India, we must confront the fundamental tension that psychology has long evaded: Can a mind truly be "healed" in a society that pre-determines its value before it is even born? Until we acknowledge the war in the soul, we remain silent witnesses to a society that prefers its citizens to be bodies of birth rather than minds of change.