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THE PERSISTENCE OF CASTE

A HISTORICAL OUTLINE

Anand Teltumbde

An often-overlooked feature of caste society is that it did not actually include every member of a given population. No matter the despised position of those at the lowest end of the varna spectrum, to not find even such ‘inclusion’ was no blessing. Caste society did not cover India’s geographically isolated adivasis (its indigenous tribes people, who lived in forests and in inaccessible mountain regions), and those who, though part of the economic system in terms of labour relationships, were excluded from all other interaction because they were ‘untouchable’ and even ‘unseeable’. Any contact with members of this group, even their sight, sometimes even their shadow, was held to be ritually polluting and abhorrent; elaborate purifications would be undertaken if such occurred.

To this group were assigned tasks such as the removal of waste (including human excrement from dry latrines), butchery, the flaying of animal carcasses for their hides, the making of footwear and the rending of funeral pyres-everything, in other words, that had to do with decay, death and the ‘unclean’. They lived segregated from the main population, on the fringes of villages and towns, and could not enter ‘pure’ environments such as schools or temples or go near public drinking water. These people were technically called the avarnas, i.e., those beyond the pale of the varna system (as contrasted with the savarnas, those within its fold), although more derogatory epithets abounded. Later, as the various castes evolved, the avarnas remained ‘outcaste’. Their lives were, and in many places remain, wretched beyond description.

Classically, the system’s structure rested on a balance between the acquiescence of the non-privileged in the belief that they were fated to be oppressed and the conviction of the privileged that they had the right to be oppressive. The ideological power for this balancing is sourced from the Hindu religious and philosophical system through the twin doctrines of karma and dharma. These provided the justification for a person’s caste-assigned status by basing it on his or her karma (previous deeds, not only in this life, but, according to the doctrine of reincarnation, in previous ones as well), and held out the promise that if people observed their dharma (religious duty) by faithfully discharging their caste obligations, they would be born into a higher caste in their next birth. Another of the structure’s characteristics was its internal elasticity. It was not concerned with particular caste so long as they conformed to its own core logic. It could easily absorb a new group within a caste, create new castes and collapse or rearrange old ones. This elasticity made it possible for caste society to survive upheavals in its history and effectively manage internal strain.

The commonplace understanding of the caste system as having held Indian society in fossilized form for over two millennia is therefore not quite correct. While it is accurate so far as the broad varna framework is concerned, the castes within this framework have been fluid. Many new castes were formed and many have disappeared; many split up and many merged with others over time in response to local political and economic demands. If caste society had not changed over the centuries, we would have found at least traces of today’s social structure in history. However, the fact is that it is so difficult from today’s perspective to comprehend the society of even a couple of centuries ago that to speak of there being no change in history is impossible.

Untouchability and the Constitution

The Indian Constitution abolished untouchability when it came into effect in 1950 and provided a fairly comprehensive scheme of positive discrimination in favour of adivasis and dalits. Under it, these groups are recognized respectively as Scheduled Tribes (generally referred to by the acronym, STs) and Scheduled Castes (SCs). The terms derive from the enumeration of their  communities in schedules prepared under the colonial India Act of 1935, and were constitutionally adopted for the purpose of instituting protective and developmental measures in their favour. These included the policy of reservation, i.e., of keeping open a fixed percentage of openings in government – funded educational institutions and state employment only to disadvantaged groups. Reservation has had far-reaching impact, though not entirely or exclusively in the way envisioned.

Caste in India is far from restricted solely to the Hindu population – it has infiltrated the country’s practice of Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Sikhism as well. Contravening the egalitarian tenets of these faiths, their adherents maintain varying levels of Hindu caste discrimination against low-caste and outcaste converts; conversion did not erase caste status. The Constitution, while making no sectarian stipulation for an adivasi group’s obtaining Scheduled Tribe status, originally limited its list of Scheduled Castes to ‘Hindu dalits’ alone. The law was amended in 1950 and in 1990 to include Sikhs and Buddhists descended from erstwhile untouchable groups. A persistent demand still remains from formerly untouchable converts to other religions, notably Christianity and Islam, for obtaining SC status to enable them to avail of the associated positive discrimination, i.e., affirmative action, benefits.

The persistence of the social isolation of outcaste converts has been acknowledged by many people and institutions. Recently, the government-instituted Sachar Committee report on the social and economic indices of India’s Muslims revealed that caste oppression is not solely a Hindu preserve. While the Sachar Committee noted that 22.2 percent and 9.1 percent of the Hindu population belonged to the SC and ST categories respectively, it identified SCs and STs among other religious communities too. Thus, it gives the SC and ST percentage among Muslim as 0.8 and 0.5; among Christians as 9 and 32.8; among Sikhs as 3.7 and 0.9; among Jains as nil and 2.6; among Buddhists as 89.5 and 7.4; among Zoroastrians as nil and15.9, and among other religious communities as 2.6 and 82.5 percent respectively. India has not included caste as a census parameter since 1931; nonetheless, working from the Sachar Committee data the SC and ST components of India’s population can be estimated at 19.7 and 8.5 percent respectively.

The number of these outcastes works out to over 222 million people in India alone. If one adds to this the outcaste population in the rest of South Asia- across Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Myanmar- it would easily exceed 300 million, which enbloc makes them the fifth largest population in the world, even when compared to a country-wise ranking. This huge section of humanity has faced the worst kinds of social exclusion and oppression throughout the subcontinent’s history. In India, even after six decades of constitutionally mandated protective policies, their oppression has continued. Rather, its viciousness appears to have increased in recent years, notably during the post- 1990s neoliberal phase.

Various official data and the finding of an all-India Action Aid survey conducted in 2001-02 testify to the existence of an extreme form of untouchability still practiced in rural India. The Action Aid report revealed that in 73 percent of the villages surveyed, dalits could not enter nondalit homes; in 70 percent they could not eat with nondalits; in 64 percent, they could not enter places of worship; in 53 percent, dalit women suffered ill-treatment from nondalit women; in 38 percent, dalit children had to eat separately at school; in 33 percent, nondalit health workers did not visit dalit homes, and in 32 percent, dalits could not enter police stations. The survey included a wide range of parameters and observed on all of them variable but alarming degrees of untouchability and discrimination.

More recently, a 2010 survey by the Navsarjan Trust and the Robert F. Kennedy Centre for Justice and Human Rights conducted over three years in randomly selected 1,589 villages in the state of Gujarat revealed that ninety-eight forms of untouchability were practiced against dalits. According to the study, in 90.8 percent cases dalits were not allowed into temples; 98 percent of the respondents said that nondalits keep separate utensils at home to serve food or tea to dalits; in 98.1 percent of the village surveyed, a dalit cannot rent a house in a nondalit neghbourhood.

Opposition to caste

Pervasive though caste oppression is, it has not gone unquestioned, despite the opposition having still to achieve enduring effect. Resistance to caste can be traced to the shraman tradition in India, dating perhaps even to the emergence of the Vedic Brahmins, the inventors and guardians of caste and the composers, c. 1500-1000 BCE, of Hinduism’s oldest scriptures, the Vedas. Peripatetic anchorites, the shramans had a radical view of life and society, nearly opposite to that of brahminism, that they preached as they wandered the land. Their practice was typically of three kinds: austerities, meditation and the production and dissemination of knowledge, spiritual and temporal. Several shraman movements are known to have existed before the sixth century BCE, but we know little about them and their beliefs. They reached the zenith of their success during the times of Mahavira and the Buddha, the founders respectively of Jainism and Buddhism, who propounded the best-known shraman ideologies, which the two religions later institutionalized. Both creeds were against caste; Buddhism is particularly well known as its first major challenger. However, given its enunciate mode, its objections remained largely passive and hence, despite its sway across the subcontinent for nearly eight centuries, it could not eradicate the caste system.