“Someone was the Brahmin and someone was the Untouchable”

Ayyan Mani’s maxim, “someone was the Brahmin and someone was the Untouchable,” makes caste more than a formal division between communities: it becomes a way to map who moves freely, who is kept below, and how the positions can be mocked or reversed without necessarily disappearing. Its sharpest image is a city road seen from a shuttle bus, where cars, motorcycles, pedestrians, and cycles form a hierarchy as legible to Ayyan as the one he sees in society. The phrase condenses his anger at inherited privilege, but also his satirical delight in finding its likeness everywhere.

The city as a caste diagram

On an evening journey toward Churchgate, Ayyan watches Bombay’s homeward traffic clog the streets. Cars sit packed together; people cross through the gaps between bumpers, while motorbikes wobble along the pavement and honk. He reads the road as a social order: cars occupy the highest position, motorcycles rank below them, pedestrians lower still, and cycles at the bottom. Even pedestrians behave as if they do not see the cyclists. The hierarchy is not an abstract comparison imposed on the scene; it emerges from the traffic’s unequal access to space and the casual disregard shown to those with less of it.

Ayyan assigns himself to the bus in this arrangement: lowly, but formidable and beyond torment. The thought gives the maxim its characteristic double edge. He recognizes his own low position, yet imagines a strength in occupying it that those above him cannot easily command. When a motorcyclist rides on the pavement, plunges back into traffic, and is struck by a car, Ayyan is amused by the rider’s stunned reaction. The accident becomes another small exposure of the city’s disorder, where everyone competes for space and rank even as the hierarchy makes some people more vulnerable than others.

The road then enlarges into a picture of national reversal. Ayyan thinks of the country as a circus in which the people once treated as inferior by Brahmins have become the nation, while the privileged appear as backward clowns in the eyes of white people. In his bitter fantasy, Dalits have their revenge through the city’s incurable commotion, and the former upper castes must suffer it or flee elsewhere. This is not a calm account of social transformation: it is Ayyan’s sardonic counter-image of power, in which those who once imposed humiliation become objects of it. The maxim holds both the old hierarchy and the wish to turn it upside down.

Inherited rank and religious identity

Ayyan gives the same history a personal scale when he speaks with Sister Chastity. She describes his forgiveness of the people who brutalized his forefathers and says that Brahmins still use degrading names for Dalits in private, whatever language they use in public. Ayyan knows this, and at first tries to appear as angry and moved as she expects. His response soon becomes more forceful: he contrasts the long making of Brahmin privilege—with its books, English, bridges, and socialism—with his own origins as the son of a sweeper in a one-room home. His bitter question about the resulting inequality is less a claim that prestige reflects intelligence than an attack on a world whose accumulated advantages are presented as individual genius.

That grievance shapes a dispute inside his family about religion. When Ayyan rolls up the Ganesha idol Oja has brought home and says he will discard it, she protests that the gods are hers too and that they are all Hindus. He answers that their forefathers were represented as demons in Brahmin stories and invokes Ambedkar’s rejection of a religion that treated them as less than human: Ayyan identifies himself and his family as Buddhists. Oja does not accept his account as a reason to abandon Hindu belonging. Their argument shows that the same inherited order can produce different claims to identity: for Ayyan, renunciation is an act of liberation; for Oja, the religion she recognizes as hers cannot simply be surrendered to the history he condemns.

Their disagreement also reaches the family’s experience of disability. Oja weeps over Adi’s impaired hearing and says that this might not have happened if they had had gods; Ayyan responds with anger. The scene does not settle the question between faith and caste politics. Instead, it reveals how differently the parents explain vulnerability: Oja turns toward religious protection, while Ayyan’s convictions make him reject the religious order he associates with his ancestors’ subordination.

Advantage in ordinary life

Ayyan’s sense of rank also shapes how he reads access to education and professional authority. When Oparna Goshmaulik arrives at the Institute, her schooling at Cathedral School, Stanford education, and position as Head of Astrobiology mark, in his eyes, a path opened to someone from a privileged background. He sees her as a high-caste woman beyond his reach and contrasts her ascent with the limited circumstances of his own family. His judgments are entangled with his resentment of elite women and with his assumptions about gender; they are not a neutral account of Oparna’s life. But the comparison reveals the central pressure behind his social vision: achievement cannot be separated, in his mind, from the homes, education, and opportunities that precede it.

The same pressure informs the contrast between Ayyan’s home and the lives he glimpses among the rich. He once sold vacuum cleaners door to door and saw the comfortable homes and inherited ease of people whose lives seemed to him almost effortless. He imagines that he, Oja, and their children might have lived in a building with a lift and entered restaurants without feeling out of place, had they been born into different homes. His memory of a woman in the chawls trying to wear a skirt and retreating after laughter and judgment adds a smaller, concrete instance of aspiration being policed in public. These details extend the maxim beyond explicit caste language: status is also encountered through housing, education, clothing, and the permission to feel at home in a space.

A possible reversal through Adi

Ayyan’s secret game with Adi is one response to the limits he sees around his family. He teaches his son questions to ask in class, turning the boy’s odd interruptions into signs of unusual ability. Adi gradually enjoys being considered extraordinary rather than being called special because of his hearing impairment, and his teachers begin summoning his parents as the questions grow more disruptive. Oja hopes he will be normal even as she tells others about his brilliance. The manufactured reputation gives the family a momentary kind of standing: Adi’s difference, instead of being read only as a limitation, is taken as evidence of distinction.

When a newspaper reports that Adi can recite the first thousand primes, the people waiting in the shared toilet queues in the BDD chawls gather around Ayyan’s copy. The photograph shows Adi wearing a hearing aid, though the earpiece is on his good right ear. Neighbours ask how to make their children brighter; Ayyan explains prime numbers to them, and they regard him with affection and respect as the genius’s father. That recognition does not erase the conditions of their lives, but it briefly alters who is being listened to and admired.

Ayyan turns that attention toward an explicit hope of escape. He proposes selling up and moving to proper flats, arguing that their children should not have to grow up in the same hell. The appeal to the next generation gives his maxim a practical consequence: if rank is inherited through the conditions of birth, then changing a child’s prospects requires more than insisting on individual talent. Yet the scheme depends on a fabricated genius image and on a newspaper’s ability to make it visible. Ayyan’s phrase therefore remains both diagnosis and wager: the hierarchy is everywhere he looks, but he hopes his son’s borrowed distinction might open a route out of it.

Political memory and the limits of reversal

The minister’s story supplies a public counterpart to Ayyan’s family history. As a child, the minister says, Brahmin priests tied him to a tree for entering a temple; the next morning he ran away from his village and came to Bombay with nothing. Ayyan has heard the fuller account of how the man moved from selling vegetables to organizing angry Dalit youth and entering politics. The minister’s rise demonstrates that people excluded from authority can acquire political power, but Ayyan also knows the violence that can accompany that power. He has seen looters return with cartons of Adidas, a detail that punctures any simple picture of political mobilization as either pure justice or complete liberation.

The story preserves the distinction at the heart of Ayyan’s maxim: a change in who can command attention does not automatically end poverty or inherited humiliation. The Untouchables have gained the right to be touched by the upper castes, as Ayyan puts it, yet remain among the city’s poorest. Across the road, the family home, the Institute, and the minister’s memories, the phrase keeps asking who occupies the higher position, who is made to accept the lower one, and what a reversal can actually repair. Its force lies in the way Ayyan makes caste visible in everyday arrangements—while the hope he places in Adi exposes how difficult it is to imagine escape without first passing through the very status system he condemns.