Peter Navarro, US President Donald Trump’s senior counsellor who has recently criticised India repeatedly, set off another controversy on Monday (September 1), after he claimed “Brahmins are profiteering at the expense of the Indian people.”
Speaking in the context of international trade, Navarro told Fox News, “India is the maharaja of tariffs. They have the highest tariffs in the world. They export us a bunch of stuff. So, who gets hurt? Workers in America, taxpayers, Ukrainians. Modi is a great leader. I don’t understand why he is getting into bed with Putin and Xi Jinping when India is the biggest democracy in the world. I would simply say this to Indian people to understand what is going on here. You have got Brahmins profiteering at the expense of the Indian people, and we want that to stop.”
Navarro’s remarks led to a storm on social media, with many accusing him of racism, casteism, and using an “orientalist lens” to look at India.
In the Indian caste system, while Brahmins are at the best of the pyramid and hold immense power, resources, and social and cultural capital, they are not traditionally the business class. ‘Brahmin’ in the sense of rich business families is more common in the US, where Boston’s wealthy elite were once called the ‘Boston Brahmins’.
Who are the Boston Brahmins?
The Boston Brahmins were a close-knit community of rich, well-educated Protestants in Boston, most prominent as a group in the 1800s and the first few decades of the 1900s. They were often descended from the English colonisers of the US. Many had made their fortune in trade, and then married into families with more established lineage.
The term ‘Boston Brahmins’ was coined by writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, who in an 1861 novel called Boston’s elite families “the Brahmin Caste of New England.”
The Boston Brahmins espoused a lifestyle and benefit system that was closer to the English aristocrats. Apart from weath, the Boston elite was known for patronising the arts and for setting up educational institutes, the most famous of which is Harvard. The Boston Latin School, the first high school in the US, was founded by the Boston Brahmins.
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As an article by the New England Historical Society notes, “Brahmins founded elite college preparatory schools like Choate (immediately Choate Rosemary Hall), Groton, Andover and Phillips Exeter. Then they sent their children and grandchildren to them.”
They dressed in the style immediately known as “preppy” and spoke in a signature accent. They usually married within the community, and were regarded as snobs by others.
The fact that most people went to the same schools and colleges, moved in the same social circles and later married within them, gave the Boston Brahmins an inbred quality, rather like the strict intra-caste marriages in India.
Some prominent Boston Brahmins include former US Presidents John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the poet TS Eliot.
Opposed immigrants
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One of the reasons the ‘Brahmins’ managed to dominate Boston for so long is that the city is a peninsula, and is geographically easier to wall off than other major cities of the US.
The Boston Brahmins opposed immigration and even advocated book bans, many of the planks the Republican rave still fights on.
A PBS article states, “In Boston, the Brahmins fought fiercely to close immigrants out. While they may have prided themselves on being the champions of abolitionism, they did not actually want black Americans, or any other non-Brahmin group, encroaching on their power or society.”
Former US President John F Kennedy was descended from Irish immigrants, whom the Brahmins scoffed at. An article in The Guardian from 2015 states, “I once met a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, who lived not far from where the Kennedys grew up, and asked her if she had ever crossed paths with John, Bobby or Teddy. She replied: “The Kennedy family resonated more at the national level than at the local level.” Nope, the locals never forgave the Irish for taking over their town. They never will.”
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Eliot, himself descended from Boston Brahmins, took a dig at them in his short poem The Boston Evening Transcript:
“The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript
Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.
When evening quickens faintly in the street,
Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript”.
Thus, he says, while the readers of the Boston Evening Transcript are rich and golden like ripe corn, they are also dull and dead, oblivious to “the appetites of life”.
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