We are not supposed to be talking about this

In discussions with Indians or people of Indian origin, I find that mention of caste is often frowned upon unless the group consists of people of one caste. I am not sure whether this is fruitful. Recently, there has been resentment from Hindus about conversions to other religions. It seems to me there were a lot of conversions to Hinduism within India and South East Asia in the old days, and conversions to both Islam and Hinduism in East Bengal until 18th century (Richard Eaton's book on Bengal frontier). For some reason or other, Hindus have not been trying to convert others on a large scale in recent times. In any case, the discussion of the role of caste in the conversions and the opinion of Dalits about Hinduism or conversions have not been prominent in the discussions that I have seen. Similar problems with respect to black white differences have been studied by some scientists. Recent experiments from Norton, Sommers and others have been reported in Sciencemagazine and discussed in 3quarksdaily. Similar research goes back to Color Blindness and Interracial Interaction by Michael I. Norton, Samuel R. Sommers, Evan P. Apfelbaum, Natassia Pura, and Dan Ariely, and earlier papers.
Samuel Sommers reports these results off and on in his blog at Psychology Today. Here is a recent post ''I don't think we're supposed to be talking about this...'' . Excerpt:

"So efforts at strategic colorblindness, attempts to claim that one literally doesn't see race, are suspect for a number of reasons. First, they're clearly disingenuous, as we know from brain imaging studies that race is one of the very first characteristics we notice when we see a face, sometimes in only 150 miliseconds. Second, they come at the expense of communication clarity and efficiency. And third, they don't even work as intended, as they often contribute to making a lousy impression on others as you stumble through an interaction too distracted to let your real personality show.

Of course, none of this means we should talk about race all the time or always use race in describing other people. As I'll discuss in another post soon, sometimes mentioning race in a description of someone provides a clue that you are indeed biased by race. But as our research illustrates, pretending that we don't notice race is not only silly, it's also counterproductive. We do notice race. Nobody, Dr. King included, ever asked us not to. He just dreamed that one day we wouldn't judge each other on the basis of it."