“The whites are the Brahmins of the Brahmins”

“The whites are the Brahmins of the Brahmins” is Ayyan Mani’s sharp comparison between racial privilege and caste supremacy. Repeated to his wife, Oja Mani, the expression condenses his suspicion that prestigious institutions can present themselves as universal while still placing white people at the top of an unspoken hierarchy. Its force comes from the way it carries the language of caste into a gathering devoted to humanity’s search for life beyond Earth.

The Expression in Use

At a formal event announcing that the Giant Ear would scan the skies for signals from advanced civilizations, Ayyan watched the speakers from a dark corner. Among those invited to the stage were an elderly scientist, Jana Nambodri and his associates, and a white visitor making his first visit to India. Ayyan’s observation about white people came as he noted the visitor’s imposing stature and the recurring presence of a white man at such gatherings. The remark punctures the ceremony’s promise of a shared human enterprise: even in a meeting about extraterrestrial life, Ayyan sees familiar arrangements of rank.

The phrase is not a claim that racial and caste identities are identical. Rather, its doubled superlative makes the comparison pointed: in Ayyan’s view, whiteness occupies a position even more elevated than the Brahmin status that already marks the summit of caste. The line turns the language of inherited hierarchy back on an international scientific scene whose formal welcome and talk of mankind’s search for company might otherwise appear egalitarian.

Caste, Class, and Social Power

Elsewhere, Ayyan describes the distance separating Dalits from people he calls the new Brahmins: those who write books, speak English, build bridges, and preach socialism, while leaving a world that remains unattainable to a Dalit child raised in a one-room home by a sweeper father. The comparison with white privilege belongs to this broader account of social power, in which education, public authority, and cultural prestige can reproduce exclusion even when they arrive dressed as progress.

Sister Chastity tells Ayyan that Brahmins still privately call Dalits Untouchables while using Dalit in public. He responds by speaking of centuries of inequality and the expectation that the poor should marvel at what the privileged have achieved. In this context, his expression about white people extends the same critique beyond India: the names and histories differ, but the visible respectability of the powerful does not erase the hierarchy beneath it.

Religion and the Dalit Perspective

The comparison also sits within Ayyan’s insistence that Dalit identity cannot be separated from religious history. During a quarrel with Oja over the family’s religious belonging, he argues that the Hindu gods were created by Brahmins and that stories of gods battling demons cast his ancestors as those demons. He identifies the family as Buddhist and credits Ambedkar with showing Dalits a way to renounce a religion that had treated them cruelly. Oja resists his distinction, saying that the gods are hers too and that they are all Hindus.

That disagreement gives the expression a domestic as well as political context. Ayyan’s comparison is not an abstract slogan detached from lived identity: it belongs to a household where religious belonging, caste memory, and the meaning of social change are contested. Its compressed wit points toward the same question raised by the family’s argument—whether the language of inclusion changes a hierarchy, or merely gives it a more acceptable public face.

Meaning in the Scientific Gathering

The scene’s irony sharpens when the white visitor welcomes India to humanity’s search for company, while other speakers celebrate youth and the Giant Ear’s new purpose. Ayyan listens as the event presents itself as a new dawn, but his phrase directs attention to who appears naturally authoritative within that universal story. Later, an elderly speaker praises ancient Indians as the oldest and greatest civilization, drawing applause for claims that dismiss other peoples as uncultured. Ayyan laughs at the spectacle of one grand hierarchy being answered with another.

The expression therefore works in two directions: it exposes the elevated position Ayyan perceives white people to hold, and it reveals his impatience with claims of greatness that leave social subordination intact. Its recurring, conversational form—something he tells Oja rather than an official declaration—makes the line a compact instrument of his critique, carried from domestic life into the public world of science.