The Silent Violence
In the posh area of South Delhi, the office was one of the top 4th floors, shiny glass-and-chrome places where everything looked modern but nothing truly was. The posters of Sustainable Development Goals on the wall spoke about equality, justice, peace, anti-racism etc,” It was late evening when Sreejith and David, in an angry mood, wandered into the office, complaining about the upcoming research project. The new project data presentation is tedious, long field work, beneath what they believed their university degrees and social group they come from entitled them to.
Sreejith and David took a coffee from the machine and went to their seats and started discussing about it “this is such mediocre work,” Sreejith whined. David said, “Mediocre? This is the kind of thing you give to a ‘Chamar-type’ job role, not to people like us.” He said it very casually. Sreejith laughed, adding, “Exactly. We’re being treated like ‘Bhangis’”
At the corner of the room, after their conversation ends, Siddharth pauses mid-sip of his black filter coffee. He didn’t look up. He didn’t think to call them and correct them. Past experiences taught him, years ago that some violence arrives silently, gently, wrapped in humour and satire.
The two men continued with their talking, unaware of the silent tremors they had created. To them, the slurs are just metaphors and casual words for “lowly”, “beneath us” etc.
They weren’t thinking of the people those words had been used against for generations. They weren’t thinking at all but Siddharth was. With a smile Siddharth started feeling the resonance and depth of words that had been used to define people, their jobs, entire lives, communities, etc. Words that had once dictated who could listen to religious verses, who could sit on the chair, who could touch/drink water etc. Now those same words are being used to describe a situation, a person, or a draft of a research paper/report. He was shocked and thought, how a so-called modern, socially-politically aware and liberal society claims to be egalitarian when its vocabulary still carries the dust of thousands of years of old cruelty.
He wondered how a joke could be so light for the speaker, so satirical for the listener, and so heavy for an observer. Later, when the office emptied out, Siddharth stayed there late and finished the work with a quiet thunderstorm in his mind. He didn’t feel anger, agitation, because anger and agitation were too small for what he felt. Babasaheb rightly said about the caste system in India, “…. turn in any direction you like, caste is the monster that crosses your path. You cannot have political reform, you cannot have economic reform, unless you kill this monster” (Annihilation of Caste).
He felt a kind of emptiness and discrimination, the kind that comes from recognizing a harsh truth, and in that moment, a bitter truth settled, “Some hierarchies survive not through physical violence, but through subtle language. And sometimes, the deepest wounds are inflicted not by what is said to you, but by what is said around you.”
“Some hierarchies survive not through physical violence, but through subtle language. And sometimes, the deepest wounds are inflicted not by what is said to you, but by what is said around you.”
When no one reacts.
When casteist words are used in metaphor in group conversations and no one reacts, the silence functions as approval. The words gain legitimacy through the lack of resistance, and it starts being accepted in the society. It becomes a regular use word, a vocabulary, a normal, an integral and significant part of the language. The absence of resistance is not accidental, it reflects how deeply these words have been accepted and internalized in society. Like the phrase “chori-chamari” to refer to theft is everyday vocabulary in the east.
The person who hears, observes the word, and smiles, he/she feels its weight often chooses not to react. Not because the word has lost its meaning, but because challenging it requires strong emotional labour that rarely gets support from the society. Their silence is a consequence of the oppression which his/her ancestors faced for centuries. It shapes how people think about worth, work, community, and each other. The main question is very basic and simple: when oppressive language becomes ordinary language, the oppression becomes ordinary too.
PhysicsWallah Case
In a recent case, a teacher named Mr. Rishi Jain, one of the teachers of PhysicsWallah, created a controversy after a casteist slur surfaced publicly. The teacher later issued an apology. PhysicsWallah took a strict action against him and suspended the teacher with immediate effect and wrote it on X ‘PhysicsWallah maintains a zero-tolerance policy toward any form of discriminatory or insensitive language.' The incident open ups a reality of the modern India, while casteist language continues to be used casually.
In this case, it is important to notice that the teacher’s remark was not directed at any specific student. But, the absence of direct targeting does not make the language neutral. The terms used are historically deeply set in caste-based hierarchies and carry meanings that extend beyond their immediate context. The incident shows how caste operates not only as a visible social structure, but also as an internalised system of thought expressed through everyday language. As Babasaheb said, caste is not merely a division of labour, but a division of labourers, sustained through deeply rooted social practices. And language is one such practice.
Sociologists explain this as the process through which social structures become internalised by the society and reproduced through routine behaviour, often without conscious intent. For many people, such language may appear routine and unproblematic. On the other hand, for Dalits, these words still carry their historical and emotional baggage. They are not just expressions, but reminders of trauma, and the struggle for dignity. The normalisation of such words shows that while the legal framework may challenge caste discrimination, its presence continues in subtle, linguistic forms. Addressing this requires not only legal awareness, but also critical self-reflection on how everyday speech can reproduce social hierarchies.
How Oppressive Words Became Everyone’s Vocabulary
Casteist words did not remain confined to the groups that invented them. Over time, they become a part of the shared vocabulary of the society, used across caste and religious lines. This happened not because the words lost their meaning, but because they became rooted in everyday speech long before most people understood their origins. Children hear these words at home, in society, in schools, elderly people discussing and internalising them as ordinary words or descriptors. By the time they learned the history behind them, the words had already become habitual, and engraved in their minds and the hearts.
The society uses these terms casually to describe anything considered “low,” “dirty,” or unpleasant, and social capital and authority gives the vocabulary a legitimacy. Many marginalised communities adopted the same words simply because they were the only available descriptors in their world. When a society normalises words, people internalise it before they understand its implications. In many cases, lower-caste and marginalised people use the same words not out of self-hatred, but because they have been taught that this is the “correct” or “common” way to describe certain situations, things or people.
This is how language maintains hierarchy, not through openly hatred or physical violence, but through silent unexamined familiarity. When a word is used by everyone, dominant caste groups, marginalised groups, and those who consider themselves neutral, it becomes part of the shared culture. And once it reaches that point, challenging it requires conscious effort, because the harm is no longer obvious to those who have grown up hearing it.
Humour as a vehicle for normalising humiliation
Humour often masks casteist language by turning humiliation into socially acceptable. When such a term is delivered as a joke, it is defused in appearance: listeners laugh, the speaker gets approval, and the slur is treated as harmless banter rather than an act that reproduces exclusion. That laughter functions as social permission, it protects the speaker from critique and makes objection awkward or costly. Objection is often called “over-reaction” or “overtly sensitive”. Over time, repeated jokes do more than amuse, they teach people what can be said without consequence, and they make certain insults feel ordinary.
This process works through two linked dynamics. First, the joke reframes the act: cruelty is presented as humour, and the focus shifts from the harm to humour. Second, the social rule “you can’t take a joke” shifts responsibility onto the person who is hurt, insinuating that objection is a failure of humour tolerance. Together these circumstances reduce the likelihood of challenge and allow oppressive vocabulary to circulate freely. The recent judgment by the Supreme Court of India, kind of says something similar, “merely using abusive language against a member of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes cannot be an offence.”
A common defence is that humour is free expression or social bonding. Another defence appeals to intent, if the speaker did not mean harm, why treat the remark as oppressive? These arguments matter, but they miss the structural point, the impact of a joke depends on who is joking and who is being joked about, intent does not erase effect. Changing this requires shifting social norms about what counts as acceptable humour. It is not a call to ban laughter, but to refuse laughter that normalises humiliation.
The Final Act
Language started as an identity, a medium of communication; it was never of a grammar or standard but over the time, it became an instrument to justify the superiority. Casteist slurs function as a form of hate speech, not because they are always shouted with malice, but because they are woven so deeply into everyday language that people stop noticing the violence they carry. When words like “chamar,” “Kanjar”, “Chandal”, “bhangi,” “chhapri” etc. are used casually, they do more than insult, they reactivate and ignite a long history of humiliation, often unconsciously. This is how internal division begins, not through dramatic conflict, but through the slow decline of empathy. Each casual slur reinforces invisible boundaries, turning caste into a daily performance of superiority and inferiority. Over time, people become more invested in defending their caste, religion, ideology, or God than in recognising the dignity of a person in front of them. Mindfulness and empathy become essential here, because unlearning the oppressive language is not just about politeness, it is about dismantling the subtle hierarchies across the religions and social groups that destroy society from within.
And the final question remains, as a society are we ready to unlearn the casteist language, to eliminate words of their inherited violence and choose speech that restores dignity?