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THE PERSISTENCE OF CASTE

A HISTORICAL OUTLINE

Anand Teltumbde

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. 

B.R. Ambedkar

India’s caste system has always bewildered the world. Much has been written about it; more still awaits the writing. Many scholars have tried to fathom its origins but have ultimately contributed only further conjecture. Many have tried to define it but have failed to capture its complexity. For most, it was a relic of Indian feudalism which, it was thought, would disappear once capitalism was established. Writing in 1853, the year the railways were introduced in India, Karl Marx prophesied that the new mechanized transportation system would catalyse the collapse of caste. Today, India has the world’s second largest railway network and has created, since independence, a sizeable infrastructure for capitalist industry. But all that could not kill caste, which proved more than capable of adjusting to the new reality. After independence in 1947, rural India was transformed through a modernizing project that included, among other things, land reforms and the capital-intensive technologies of the Green Revolution in agriculture. Capitalist production relations came to the villages and seemed to shake the caste structure to its roots – but caste survived nonetheless.

Since the mid-1980s, a now neoliberal India has taken remarkable strides towards globalizing its economy and, with an impressive recent growth record, has increasingly been projecting itself as an emerging superpower. The world is dazzled by its success. Caste was expected to fall away under pressure of the global order. That has not happened. On the contrary, it appears to have grown far more vicious, if caste atrocities are taken as a proxy measure.

Indeed, caste has showed an amazing resilience. It has survived feudalism, capitalist industrialization, a republican Constitution, and today, despite all denial, is well alive under neoliberal globalization.

Caste and the Indian Diaspora

In the globalized, transnational world of the twenty-first century, the need for an accurate understanding of this vicious institution can never be over-emphasized. A call for international recognition of caste as a racist violation of human rights has been addressed to the world community, not once but twice in the last decade-it went ignored in both the resolution adopted by the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in Durban and in the outcome document of the Review Conference held in 2009. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, declared in 2009 that ‘the time has come to eradicate the shameful concept of caste,’ and that ‘the international community should come together to support these efforts as it did when it helped put an end to apartheid.’

It is such international pressure that led to the introduction of the Equality Bill in the UK parliament in March 2010, a bill that outlaws discrimination based on caste and is likely to become the first piece of legislation in the world to treat caste as an aspect of race. In 2009, the UK’s Anti Caste Discrimination Alliance (ACDA) conducted a study that showed how 58 percent of the 300 people surveyed had been discriminated against because of their caste, while 79 percent said they did not think the police would understand if they tried to report a caste-related ‘hate crime’. However, the Indian government has always managed to successfully oppose the terming of caste-based discrimination as racism-this would perhaps have been different had there been a more widespread comprehension of the issues at stake.

Caste is neither so ‘country-specific’ nor, from a Western perspective, so distant an issue as may be thought. It has been carried far beyond the borders of the subcontinent with the spread of the Indian diaspora.’ Wherever Indians have gone, it has followed them; wherever they have settled, caste has also established itself. Some scholars hold that it is Hinduism – an ‘ethnic religion’, unlike other major faiths – that is a key element in defining the Indian diaspora. Arguably, this ‘key element’ can be discerned as caste, which other scholars unequivocally name as providing a more enduring marker of diaspora identity than religion. The important thing to note is that caste in the diaspora is not confined to intra-community relations alone; it notionally extends in the minds of its practitioners, beyond their boundaries to incorporate the population native to their adoptive place of domestic.

The manifestation of caste within the diaspora depends upon the position occupied by the dispersed groups within the hierarchic cast continuum. Where dispersion happened at its lowest band, as in South Africa, Malaysia and other countries where those of Indian origin are largely descended from colonial indentured labour, caste manifests least as compared to places that received dispersion at higher strata. In South Africa or Malaysia, for example, caste identities are not dominant – among other reasons because their maintenance was of little value to the migrants to these places, drawn as they were from the lower ranks of the caste hierarchy. That, however, did not prevent the small segment of higher caste migrants from keeping their distance from the ‘lowly’ labouring classes, diasporic as well as black. In East and West Africa, Indian trading caste settled in these parts for over a century, have fastidiously preserved their caste existence, even to the extent of recreating the abominable practice of so-called untouchability – in the absence of actual ‘untouchables’ (or ‘dalits’ as they are prevalently called in India), this degraded status has been accorded to the native black population. A similar development is observable in Europe, where, during the post-World War II reconstruction effort, many dalits migrated and settled as workers. In America and Canada, South Asian immigrants from both dalit and nondalit backgrounds mostly arrived in pursuit of higher education and settled later in modern professions; these segments are, by and large, more sophisticated than those in Africa and Europe, yet the problem of caste continues to manifest itself among them, even if in subtler terms.

Caste, Varna and Jati

The word ‘caste’ (from the Latin castus) was loosely applied to the Hindu system of social stratification by the sixteenth-century Portuguese, India’s first modern European colonizers. Since casta in Portuguese means ‘pure’ or ‘chaste’, the word connoted the Portuguese understanding of the phenomenon as being akin to race, species or lineage, as they thought the system was intended to preserve purity of blood. A more particularized view emerged with later European observers who became aware that, while systems of social division have existed throughout history across the world, the form prevalent in India was not to be found anywhere else.

Caste, as such, is a form of social stratification involving a mode of hierarchically arranged, closed endogamous strata, membership to which is ascribed by descent and between which contact is restricted and mobility impossible. The Indian word for caste is jati. When we refer to ‘caste’, we really speak of jati, although many tend to confuse it with varna, which refers to the basic ‘classes’, four in number, established in Hindu scripture. The chaturvarna or four-varna system enshrined a hierarchical segmentation of society into the following primarily professional orders: Brahmins (the priestly castes), kshatriyas (the warrior/fighting castes), vaishyas (the business/trading castes) and, at the lowest rung, shudras (the working classes: artisans, agriculturists, food gatherers, hunters, fisher folk and the like). While there are only four varnas as given in Hinduism, there are thousands of jatis. These may have evolved as subdivisions of particular varnas, but by the present day, they have developed characteristics very distinct from their originals.

Varna represents Hinduism’s hierarchical framework, but it is jati which really dictates the rules and regulations of life for the average Hindu. Each jati has its own special norms dictating permissible food, occupation, marriage, social interaction and so forth, and form each jati/caste come numbers of subcastes, making the whole system highly complicated. While the caste cluster within a varna easily admits the varna hierarchy, the castes within it contend among themselves for superiority, the more vigorously with those in their hierarchical vicinity. Perennial internal tensions paired with the jatis’ acceptance of their inferiority/superiority within the broad varna framework have lent the system its dynamism as well as its longevity.

The beginnings of the caste system are obscure and so is its evolution. There is a broad consensus, however, that it evolved through the varna system and reached its maturity between 600 and 200 Before Common Era. Its laws were codified between 200 BCE and the second century CE in the Manusmriti, or the Laws of Manu, ascribed to the mythological ancient lawgiver, Manu, who is credited with the creation of the Hindu social code. Of the varnas, the Brahmins occupied the highest place, being said to have materialized from the mouth of Brahman, the divine being. The origin of the kshatriyas and vaishyas was ascribed respectively to Brahman’s arms and thighs; shudras, the lowest of the order, were deemed to have sprung from his feet. Testifying to education’s primacy in ancient India (and to the system’s exploitative ingenuity), the three upper varnas were also given the name dwija, the twice-born, denoting the ‘second birth’ they were said to undergo at the upanayana ceremony, performed in childhood and making their transition into the world of formal learning. This initiation, again, was the prerogative of only men. The ceremony and with it education were and are proscribed for shudras. Also debarred were the large numbers of people caste society excluded from its confines: its ‘outcastes’, those today called dalits.

to be contd...