Life & Wisdom Quote by Francois Gautier

A provocation disguised as a diagnosis: Gautier flips the familiar script in which the West positions itself as caste’s chief prosecutor. “Remains obsessed” is the tell. It implies not principled concern but a fixation, a need to keep returning to caste as explanatory shorthand for India and, by extension, for Western moral superiority. The phrase turns critique back on the critic: who benefits from this obsession, and what does it simplify?

The line works because it smuggles in two claims at once. First, that Western discourse often treats caste less as a complex social reality (historical, regional, mutable, politically instrumentalized) and more as a narrative device: a ready-made symbol of “backwardness” that can anchor headlines, policy postures, and NGO messaging. Second, that this focus can become selective empathy. Caste is highlighted as uniquely Indian while parallel Western hierarchies-race, class, immigration status, inherited wealth-are framed as unfortunate inequities rather than civilizational indictments.

Gautier’s subtext is also defensive, even strategic: by naming the West’s “obsession,” he tries to delegitimize external scrutiny and re-center authority over the topic inside India. That move can read as a pushback against caricature, but it also risks functioning as an escape hatch from inconvenient realities. Context matters: Gautier has written from a perspective often skeptical of Western media frames on India. In that light, the line is less a sociological argument than a media critique: the West keeps caste in the foreground because it keeps India legible on terms the West already understands.