Some would say he had it coming. The doyen of India’s nationalist historians, R.C. Majumdar, has said that Mill “suffered from a strong dose of racial prejudice and ignorance about ancient Hindu culture”. Likewise, for the Stanford historian Priya Satia, Mill was little more than a propagandist for empire, an apologist for “Britain’s civilising mission”. To be sure, there is plenty in Mill’s triple-decker History of British India to support this view. “The Hindu,” Mill writes, “like the eunuch, excels in the qualities of a slave.” In the Muslim, he discerned “the same insincerity, mendacity, and perfidy”. India was a “rude” and “backward” society.

But to carp about a clutch of infelicitous phrases is to miss the wood for the trees. The charge of racist imperialism, of course, isn’t easily resisted in our time. Understanding the thought-world of the 19th century, however, requires more than a mindless aggregation of poorly-aged gaffes. Reflexive cries of “Orientalism” will not do. The truth is that Mill was a radical egalitarian ahead of his time.

If the History took the form of a scathing sermon, it was only because its author was a sour man. His impatience with Indian tradition must be taken as a proxy for his frustration with British tradition. Railing against the caste system was a way of railing against the class system. Born in Angus in 1773 to a shoemaker and smallholder, Mill had a keen awareness of status. His mother had married down. Mill’s benefactress, who put him through Edinburgh University, that centre of the Scottish Enlightenment, reminded him of his station when he fell in love with her daughter, whom he was tutoring. Wilhelmina Stuart was hurriedly married off to the seventh baronet of Pitsligo, very much against her will. In her dying breath, apparently, she would call out Mill’s name, and he would name his daughter Wilhelmina.

Mill carried his hatred for the aristocracy into maturity. It didn’t help that, studying for the Kirk, he had to moonlight — like the character in Parasite — by teaching the privileged sons and daughters of the titled nobility. Disillusioned with the ministry, he reinvented himself as a freelance writer in London, married, and sired nine children.

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Mill had never been to India. It was poverty and precarity that prompted him to write his History, a job application masquerading as a 2,000-page love letter to Progress, in 1818. In it, Mill made a virtue of his shortcomings, spinning his lack of first-hand experience, not to mention his monolingualism, into a commitment to objectivity. But no matter. Ruth Benedict wrote The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, arguably the greatest work of 20th-century anthropology, without ever setting foot in Japan, and the East India Company’s head-hunters duly recognised Mill’s equally impressive achievement. On the strength of it, Mill was placed in charge of examining the Company’s prodigious correspondence, a position he held until his death — as a very rich man — in 1836.

Proclaiming the creed of Utilitarianism, the History seemed to come out of nowhere. At the time, the Company men who ran the subcontinent were traditionalists to a man — committed, in the first viceroy Warren Hastings’s phrase, to “reconciling the people of England to the nature of Hindustan”. Indians, by their account, were incorrigible. It was the Company’s job to interpret their way of life. Mill disagreed: the point was to change it.

It may appear that in tut-tutting at the nabobs who went native, Mill shared the reforming ambition of the radical Clapham Sect, which believed in putting the heathens to rights with the aid of its militant brand of Christianity. Yet Utilitarianism was an altogether different proposition. For one thing, it belonged to the Enlightenment tradition. Indeed, Mill and his mate Jeremy Bentham thought in universalist terms, where once even Voltaire held that different rules applied in the “oriental despotisms” of the East.

So it was that where, like obliging Erasmus students on cultural exchange, the likes of Hastings and his successor Charles Cornwallis coolly accepted — appreciated even — the inequities of the caste system as a fact of life, Mill vehemently denounced the “detestable views of the Brahmins” in rather colourful terms. Caste was “a degrading and pernicious system of subordination”, and the Hindu “system of priestcraft” was “built upon the most enormous and tormenting superstition that ever harassed and degraded any portion of mankind”. It was for this reason Mill described Hindus as “the most enslaved portion of the human race”. The enormities of untouchability, in particular, made a deep impression on him: “Those wretched outcastes had no resource for subsistence excepting either the bounty of the established classes, to whom they were objects of execration and abhorrence, or the plunder of those same classes, a course to which they would betake themselves with all the ingenuity of necessitous, and all the atrocity of much injured, men.”

Contrast this with the head-in-the-sand observation of Mill’s nemesis, the Bombay governor Mountstuart Elphinstone: the condition of the lower castes “was much better than that of the villains of the Middle Ages or any other servile class with which we are acquainted”. What’s more, while Mill was drawing attention to the plight of India’s underclass, Elphinstone insisted that such a “servile class” had ceased to exist in the early 19th century.

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Our latter-day Elphinstones, of course, still like to bang on about cultural relativism, defending primordial hierarchy as “alternative modernity”, primitive savagery as “alternative justice”, shamanic quackery as “alternative medicine”. These are fanciful sleights of hand. It’s an uncomfortable thought, but too much sympathy for an alien society can easily shade into a naive exculpation, if not outright endorsement, of its most hidebound traditions.

Some of Mill’s contemporary critics, such as Lord Bhikhu Parekh, complain that the Utilitarians tipped the balance too far in the opposite direction. For nearly 40 years, to 1855, the History was the established textbook at Haileybury College, the Company school in Hertfordshire. It was insinuated by early Indian nationalists, including Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and R.G. Bhandarkar, that Mill had spawned a whole generation of Indian Civil Service apparatchiks inimical to Indians, a foreign ruling caste as removed from hoi polloi as the native Brahmin elite. Not so. To the traditionalist credo of “live and let live”, the Utilitarians had one of their own: “Human nature is the same in Cawnpore as in Cheapside.” Ideology trumped culture. Far from being a homogeneous mass of traditionalists, Indians, too, had their diminutive reforming currents. The heirs of the Scottish Enlightenment found allies in the freethinkers of the Bengal Renaissance.

Mill’s greatest contribution, however, was his stab at bettering the lot of the Indian peasantry. This is a side of him generally ignored by decolonial historians, for it sits uncomfortably with their Manichean worldview. In Mill’s time, two systems of land tenure prevailed: Cornwallis’ zamindari system, predicated on middlemen who served as tax-farmers and prevalent in Bengal, and Thomas Munro’s ryotwari system, widespread in the South and North-Western Provinces, wherein the state took a share of the produce directly from peasants. Both were perversions of pure capitalism. Mill’s solution was to bring all land under public ownership. He was inspired by David Ricardo, who had held that “the interest of the landlord is always opposed to every other class in the community”. It followed for the Utilitarian Mill that the “greatest happiness of the greater number” could only be secured if the parasitic rentier interest was eliminated.

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It should be stressed that, despite being a radical egalitarian, Mill was no Marxist avant la lettre. His vision turned on free trade and individual enterprise, both shackled in equal measure by government and go-betweens. Here, then, was a rather quaint, Right-wing case for nationalisation. A big state was dead weight, he argued. As universal landlord, government could extract the tiniest rent to conduct its business and educate the masses, and so eliminate taxation altogether. As he put it in his History, “light taxes and good laws; nothing more is wanting for national and individual prosperity all over the globe”.

What of good laws? Here, too, the cocksure know-it-all that that he was, Mill had a ready answer: abolish juries and judicial procedures, investing competent judges with autocratic powers. Mill and his mentor Bentham had no time for the Whig fetishisation of checks and balances. The separation of powers was pooh-poohed in Utilitarian circles. Betraying a vestigial Protestantism — he had in fact developed his own eccentric faith — Mill hoped that mass education and simpler legislation would render the legal profession redundant and every man his own lawyer. More importantly, where Company traditionalists supported having separate legal codes for Hindus and Muslims, and preferential treatment for Brits, Mill believed there ought to be only one law for everyone.

These were big, bold reforms. Needless to say, Mill’s startlingly original assault on privilege did not go down well with the men on the spot, many of them of aristocratic and gentry stock. Land reform along the lines proposed by Mill was briefly piloted in the Bombay Deccan, but then abandoned as impracticable. Spurred by developments at home — the Great Reform and Slavery Abolition Acts — a soupçon of social reform ensued in British India from the 1830s on, admittedly more of Whiggish than Utilitarian stamp, outlawing suttee and enabling widow remarriage. But then, in 1857, the deus ex machina of the Great Rebellion detonated. For a brief moment, it appeared that Britain’s empire in India was teetering on the edge of collapse. Lessons were learned, and the blame laid squarely on reformist zeal.

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In the autopsy of the revolt that followed, the view from London was that traditionalism was a better doctrine to rule India than Utilitarianism. One could either keep the moral high ground or keep an ear to the ground — but not both. So it was that the traditionalist consensus that ran from Clive of India in the mid-18th century to Elphinstone in the mid-19th, fleetingly interrupted by the Utilitarian moment, resumed for another 100 years until independence in the mid-20th. Ultimately in the grand scheme of empire, Utilitarianism was little more than a blip, a pointillist dot shrouded by the thick brush strokes of traditionalism. But of its existence, and brief influence, there can be little doubt.

Mill himself, it needs stressing, was no saint. Like Whitman, he contained multitudes — embarrassing contradictions even. Iconoclastic in some ways, he was utterly conventional in others. For one thing, his impeccably liberal premises led him to conclusions that were incontrovertibly authoritarian. Utilitarianism, after all, preached the doctrine of happiness, not liberty — of good government, not self-government. Mill himself ruled out democracy for Indians. Likewise, to the dismay of his contemporaries — his son John Stuart Mill especially — he argued against extending the franchise to women, who, like children, had no interests independent of the family patriarch.

In philosophical mode, he struck a rather different note. Each individual, he wrote in his Essay on Government, was the best judge of his own interests. Suffragists a century on, then, were staying true to Mill’s principles rather than his prejudices, as indeed were Indian nationalists after independence, when they abolished zamindari and outlawed untouchability. It’s an irony of history that it was the Indians, not the British, who put into practice the theories James Mill advanced in his History of British India.

It all makes for a rather disconcerting narrative. The only problem is that it’s almost certainly wrong. Yes, the Cisco lawsuit is newsworthy, but individual lawsuits do not establish generalised truths.

If you look at the fingerprints on many of these stories, much of the concern over America’s alleged caste system stems from a California-based non-profit called Equality Labs. Its Executive Director, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, is a Berkeley-educated daughter of a physician, who began her Dalit (the lowest caste) activism as a university student. Her 2018 report, and its horrifying findings, remain extensively quoted: for example, 25% of Dalit respondents said they had faced verbal or physical assault based on their caste; 50% of Dalits live in fear of their caste being outed; 67% reported being treated unfairly at their workplace. (The report also talks of “Caste apartheid”.)

The total sample size was 1,500, which is not a small number, and far superior to anecdotes. But the issue with the report has more to do with representativeness. The authors state that it was a “web-based, self-reported, self-administered questionnaire”, and that it was distributed “through direct contacts, community listservs, community organisations, immigrant organisations, South Asian religious, cultural, and linguistic networks, and social media”. The survey was written by “South Asian academics, anti-Caste activists, community members, and policy advocates”, and was endorsed by the Dalit American Coalition, the International Campaign for Dalit Humans Rights, and the Dalit American Women’s Association, among others. It also used “snowball sampling”, where respondents referred other respondents, resulting in a strong skew in demographics and views.

In short, this survey was likely completed by individuals already conscious of and concerned with prejudice and discrimination against Dalits in America. This does not invalidate the report, but it does suggest that its results may not be a good representation of Indian American experiences and views.

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Several years after the Equality Labs survey, the Carnegie Foundation and YouGov collaborated on a report using a representative sample and came to different conclusions. While the Equality Labs sample was 24% Dalit, the Carnegie report found that 1% of Hindu Indian Americans who identified themselves with a caste were Dalit. This is in line with other private surveys I have seen, as well as the unrepresentative caste demographics of Indian Americans when compared to the subcontinent. While 22% of Hindus in India are “upper caste”, 80% of Hindus in America who identify with a caste — roughly half of all Indian Americans — are upper caste. Moreover, a quick perusal of a The New York Times wedding pages for a common Indian surname like Patel suggests that while 95% of Indian Hindu marriages are intra-caste, closer to 30% of US-born Indian marriages are intra-caste, and the true value is probably lower. In America, the melting pot is still operational.

The issue of endogamy is critical because the genetic data indicates that Indian castes, and in particular, subcastes or jati, have been strongly endogamous for 1,500 years in the subcontinent. While in the US racial differences between blacks and whites are organised around physical appearance, despite some average differences in looks between Indian castes even within a region, they are not striking enough to organise the communities.

Rather, castes operate genealogically as lineage and kinship networks that regulate marriage, uphold collective honour and distribute and control power and resources. There are Indian political parties whose vote banks are specific castes, and though there are some rarefied urban professional milieus where caste is marginal to their experience, it pervades the occupational, social and personal lives of the rural majority. Upper-caste groups tend to control disproportionate wealth and power, while lower-caste groups must make do with affirmative programs that reserve government jobs for their communities.

These inequalities in the subcontinent explain the demographics of Indian Americans, who are the most well-educated and wealthiest ethnic group in the US. Overwhelmingly still an immigrant community, Indian Americans have been able to migrate primarily due to their educational and professional qualifications, which means they will be drawn from the upper-caste elites of the subcontinent. Though fewer than 5% of Indians are Brahmin, private surveys indicate that 25% of Indian Americans are Brahmin. Dalits are 15% of India’s population, but they are no more than 1% of Indian Americans.

There are three different dynamics to consider when evaluating all these facts. First, it is possible and perhaps even likely that the small number of Dalits in the US experience some level of prejudice and discrimination. Second, Indian Americans belong to an overwhelmingly privileged caste in the subcontinent, but are still a racial minority in the US. They are 1.4% of the American population, of whom only 50% are Hindu. Dalits are 0.014% of the American population (1 out of 7,200).

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Third, whereas in India it is possible that one’s friendship network could be limited to one’s subcaste, the Carnegie report finds that only 43% of immigrant Indian Americans even have mostly or all Indian friends, with the figure being 25% for those born in the US. 28% of US-born Indian Americans have almost no Indian friends, while 17% of foreign-born Indian Americans are in this category. Of those Indian Americans who are Hindu, 50% have almost no friends from the same caste as themselves. The fact that they can make this assessment indicates that caste is salient to them (most are immigrants), but their revealed preferences in friendship networks indicate that they do not self-segregate by caste.

America, then, is not India, and, contrary to some paranoid conspiracy theories, upper-caste Hindus do not call the shots in the US (no, Kamala Harris, whose mother is a Tamil Brahmin, is not very influential). Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella are both upper-caste South Indians, but the workforce of Google and Microsoft are 50% non-Hispanic white. Though there are exceptions in Silicon Valley and at a few family-owned businesses (those glamorous motels!), Indian Americans’ workplaces are mostly dominated by non-Hispanic whites or are multiracial.

Since more than half of Indian Americans arrived after the turn of the millennium, they have brought many aspects of their culture to the US, some of which likely do include unpleasant attitudes around caste and jati that were nurtured on the subcontinent. But the social context of the US is entirely different to India; the reality is that the Indian communal dynamics do not and cannot apply.

Does this mean that Dalit Americans experience no discrimination or prejudice? Of course not. But there is a huge difference between India and the US in the pervasiveness of caste-based discrimination. America undoubtedly has many social ills relating to class and ethnicity, but this isn’t because India is importing its own problems to the US. The vast majority of Indians come to the US for a simple reason: to get rich, not to maintain caste hierarchy.