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Marilyn Loden is widely credited by feminist scholars for coining the term “glass ceiling” to draw attention to the material power that patriarchal social settings exert in limiting women. For instance, in a corporate setting – in theory at least – a talented and hardworking woman should be able to rise through the ranks and reach the very top. Beyond a certain level, however, no matter her merit, ingenuity and commitment to succeeding, she finds herself mysteriously stagnating. She can see her male peers continue to rise and rise, but she stays at her level. It is as if she has hit an invisible ceiling – a ceiling made of glass, if you will. It lets her see above her but keeps her from rising herself.
This has been a powerful metaphor, very visual and lucid in explaining the power of patriarchy within the corporate set-up and other social settings. It has also been used by other marginalised groups and racial minorities to explain the gatekeeping power of cultural elites.
However, when it comes to caste and savarnas, it is useful to think of a “glass floor” rather than a ceiling.
Think of South Asia – India, especially – as full of people sitting in a cramped and dirty basement. Think of millions and millions of heaving masses, sweating, crying, pleading, clawing – sometimes angry, sometimes despondent, sometimes hopeful, but at all times in the basement. Looking up at what is a glass ceiling for them but is, in fact, a floor above which lives a very small group of people. This small group of people, let us call them savarnas, have access to all the switches in all the rooms of the house, including the basement. They switch on the lights and switch them off at will. They turn on the water and turn it off at will. Among the savarnas, there are often major disagreements about who should be controlling the switches, how often the lights or water should be kept on and when to switch them off. There are fights even. It is serious stuff. Many cliques and factions scheme and plot ruthlessly to keep each other out of power over the switches. But below them – beneath the floor on which the savarnas walk – millions upon millions look up without any hope of rising beyond the basement. They are stuck in the basement. They have been there for a thousand years and more.
The savarnas above the glass floor are aware that there is a mass of humanity in the basement “below” them, but they are not always clear about exactly how many there are or in what condition they live. After a point, numbers lose their potential for shock or horror. What does 200 million mean? What does 500 million mean? What does living on Rs 250 per day mean? What does raising children on Rs 150 per day mean? Does living on Rs 100 per day make you poor? What about Rs 47 per day?
There have been many attempts at estimating what the “poverty” line should be in the context of India. This has major policy implications. If a person is said to be below the poverty line, it means they are at a level of precarity where it is not practically possible for them to survive on their own. The C Rangarajan Committee, in its 2014 report, suggested that Rs 47 per day in urban India should be one such viable “line”. Anyone making less than that in a city must be considered “poor” – which means if you make Rs 48 per day, you cannot be considered poor. By this measure, 26.4 per cent of urban Indians can be classified as poor – meaning roughly one in four people in urban India earn less than Rs 48 per day. That sounds low, but 48 is still just a number. It does not become real or horrifying at first glance to most urban, wealthy savarnas. It is so low that it loses its capacity to be imagined in real terms.
Therefore, as a professor who often teaches within savarna institutions, I conduct an exercise in my classes to bring into focus a more real frame of reference. I ask my students to think back to the most wretched and desperately poor person they have ever seen in their lives – which have been spent mostly in urban areas. Someone so vulnerable that their grim persona shook them to their moral core. One by one, examples come. It is usually a beggar, someone foraging at the railway dump yard, ragpickers at the landfill or something similar. Then we try to calculate how much money each of these persons could be making per day. It almost always winds up to be above Rs 50 per day. What this means is that their worst imagination of what “poor” is may not even be classified as “poor” by the statistical modelling of the state. Such is the ghastly deprivation and scarcity in this society that one in four Indians live in a state of poverty that is beyond the imagination of savarna systems.
The scale of wretchedness and the mass of people living in this state have an enormity and urgency that wealthy savarnas seem truly incapable of grasping. Maybe ignorance is an adaptive feature. If you were forced to confront the existential terror of social inequality daily, then smiling for every selfie or buying expensive clothing or eating luxury food would become a torturous activity of macabre horror for the savarnas.
The era from the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s was a period of wild prospecting by many savarna entrepreneurs. They were giddy at the likelihood of mining great wealth from the vast masses living below the glass floor. Fortune, it seemed, was just waiting to be won by that one great business idea or delivery/ execution mechanism that would crack open the Indian “masses”. No doubt spurred by similar sentiments, in 2011, two savarna techies working on the project that eventually became ‘Aadhar’ decided to quit their jobs and launch a start-up selling healthcare services. The lure was, of course, the 600 million Indians they had estimated to possess mobile phone connections – each of whom were potential customers. To put this number in context, it is roughly twice the entire population of Western Europe.
This was the epoch of delusion, where every corporate estimate assumed that the millions in the “basement” could now be engaged solely through the wonders of mobile telephony and digital connectivity. It was taken for granted that they were just waiting there, latent and unengaged only due to the lack of entrepreneurial innovation and technological handicaps, and not because of the crushing poverty and caste stratifications that rendered any attempts to build consumerist markets around them untenable. All savarna business pundits and business school elites speculated that just one great idea, algorithm or app was needed to reach out and connect to these standby millions. Thus emerged a scramble among savarna elites to try and bridge this gap, to make their billions while also taking credit for revolutionarily “transforming India”.
The aforementioned savarna techie boys, similarly inspired, decided to pursue their entrepreneurial dream but, crucially, first decided to gain business intelligence about their estimated 600-million-strong Indian market. While this may appear to be the most natural first step – and indeed, business school professors and industry veterans exoticise the “real world” and the learning experience of doing business “on the streets” ad nauseam – it appears that street knowledge continues to be very thin among management professionals and within institutional pedagogy.
It is sufficient to say for now that the ethnography of both the extremely poor and the extremely rich in this country is little understood – at least in real, material terms.
So when Tushar Vashisht and his friend decided to live on what they speculated was the income earned by an “average Indian” for a month, they could not have known what they would discover. They decided to limit themselves to Rs 100 per day, or about Rs 3000 for the month (not counting the rent). How they arrived at this figure is unclear, but their commitment to live on roughly Rs 3000 for the whole month was commendable – based on the story he himself has told multiple times over.
The two boys – one a former investment banker in San Francisco and the other a computer science graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – moved into a small, 10-foot x 6-foot “room” in the Bellandur suburb of Bangalore. They reported paying a rent of Rs 1500 each for that tiny hovel, and this money was not counted in their living off Rs 100 per day equation. They both reported losing weight from malnourishment. But, interestingly, they started developing insights into the interconnected math of calories, labour, money and time that almost every impoverished person knows instinctively. For instance, the further one has to walk means not just more time spent but also burning more calories. So, workspaces had to be close by. Protein immediately disappeared from their diet since it cost more money to consume. They had to load up on cheap carbohydrates to meet their energy needs.
It is not revealed what kind of labour the boys performed during this experiment, but it is unlikely that they engaged in the kind of hard manual labour jobs that people at such levels of financial precarity usually have to do. The physical exertion and lack of sanitation at such job sites place great stress on the body. In research I conducted among women sanitation workers in Pune, almost all respondents reported chronic pains and aches, for which they routinely self-medicated. Additionally, multiple studies have connected the lack of access to safe and dignified washrooms for women to them limiting their water intake during work hours, placing great stress on their kidneys and leaving them vulnerable to urinary tract infections. And once they fall ill, taking a day off from work is not an option in such income-insecure households.
Health risk estimation takes on a completely different form from the way elite savarnas are used to imagining repression, and “bearing it” becomes the default means of coping with early stages of most ailments. This further transfers intergenerationally through codes of personal behaviour and expectations. My mother, a woman of stout resolve, inherited and passed on such codes, wherein even today, it is a matter of deep personal ego in our family to take “rest” for illnesses like fever. It was only much later in life, when I was around savarna circles, that I realised it was not juvenile or pampered to nurse yourself back to health after a minor illness or injury. Endurance gets romanticised and normalised to the point that “toughness” becomes something that vulnerable individuals must constantly perform, both as a culture and out of a lack of options.
It is almost certain that the savarna boys did not delve into these obvious terrains of intersectional vulnerabilities and could “opt out” at any time, or take days off. They had, of course, kept the clothes, laptops and even a badminton set from their pre-experiment lives. They had simply reduced their social experience to limited monetary budgets while retaining cultural capital and amenities from their regular lives.
What social learning such a flawed method provided besides self-congratulatory anecdotes is debatable, but they did uncover another interesting facet of life on the margins. When you are so income-distressed, your world shrinks. They reported that “life” had to be conducted within a 5 kilometre radius as far as possible because anything beyond was not a regular walking distance and hence subject to additional spending for public transport. Not to mention, the exertion would place additional energy demands on the already energy-deficient body, with no means of supplementing it.
Following the conclusion of their experiment, Tushar gave multiple narrative accounts of the “lessons learnt” via media platforms and TED talks (avenues that are almost exclusively run by fellow savarnas). This was a “popular story” within savarna circles. Their own kind had ventured below the glass floor and brought back stories from the other side. Akin to travellers’ tales from the past, their stories cast them as adventurers, mavericks, whose legend spread wide. Young men would seek them out based on these stories and say, “I want to work for you,” and the story of this “experiment” became the seeding story of their future business. No doubt it was narrated multiple times for potential investors and clients. The savarna capacity for self-aggrandising mythmaking is built on the capacity to perform humility while appearing to endure sacrifice for the public good. These experiments, which may have begun as a means of gathering business intelligence for their mobile-based healthcare business, instead created a compelling “savarna” story. The only unique aspect of this story was that it was experienced in a very diluted way by two of their own – whereas for hundreds of millions of people below the glass floor, it is a daily reality.
They did eventually launch their healthcare solutions app in 2011, known today as “HealthifyMe”. A very useful app for counting calories and wellness coaching, among other things. It is a very successful business, with an operating revenue of over Rs 220 crore in 2023. It claims to have a user base of 35 million. While impressive, this is far from the 600 million “masses” that were just waiting to be monetised (as per the market wisdom from about two decades ago).
Excerpted with permission from Meet the Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything, Ravikant Kisana, Penguin Random House India.
This article first appeared on Scroll.in
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