Viviana <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: By the way, a few months ago I asked if anyone on the list had married outside of his/her caste and received no response.
Viviana (without caste!) I would have liked to have responded to your query but did not quite know how. Since I have never believed in caste, I had to believe that anybody I married was essentially casteless; the question of whethere I had married outside my caste therefore simply did not arise. My parents did not believe in caste, either, and I learnt from their example; I do not believe a person's caste ever being discussed by the family. Once, indeed, when I was in college, I remember my favourite aunt came over to our house to complain to my mother that I was going out with a fellow student who "was not of our caste"; my mother invited my aunt to leave right away. She was so incensed that when my mother died a few years later, she did not come to the house; obviously, caste was a matter of great and overriding importance in her personal scheme of things. Nevertheless, in time she and I managed to maintain good relations. Years later, I fell in love and married. In the 51 years that have elapsed, my wife and I have never discussed anybody's caste at our table (or anywhere else, for that matter). Yet, when we visit friends and neighbours and relatives in Goa, and somebody's name comes up, somebody else will immediately say, "Oh, he is ----", but more often than not it is said not as a putdown, but as a matter of fact. My wife and I did come across an instance of caste prejudice soon after we were married in Bombay. A group of young friends were singing mandos in our flat in Byculla when another of our friends came in, took me aside, and objected to the fact that non-Brahmins were singing mandos that should only be sung by Brahmins! I promptly asked him to leave. A question that still baffles me: How on earth did he figure out that the singers were non-Brahmins, when he did not know them at all, and I, who knew them well, had not bothered to find out? And why did his view of caste privilege extend to the singing of songs, that should belong to everybody? Fortunately, that friendship, too, survived that episode. Perhaps the lesson here is that prejudice is everywhere, and one way to combat it is in the way we lead our own lives. My father taught me, when I was still a young man, to believe in myself: "Believe that no man is your superior" was more or less how he put it. I turned it around to also mean, "No man is my inferior, either." That attitude makes a world of difference in how we deal with the human beings around us. Best regards, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, Porvorim and New Jersey