SERIAL : 3

THE PERSISTENCE OF CASTE

A HISTORICAL OUTLINE

Anand Teltumbde

Parallel to movements branching off from Hinduism were the arrivals of the foreign traders and invasions that India’s natural abundance attracted throughout its history. The earliest known invaders were the Aryans from Central Asia, who settled and intermixed with the local population of present-day Punjab and influenced the social organization of the entire subcontinent. It is they who are said to have conceived the varnashrama dharma, the doctrine of varna-dictated righteous living, paving the way, in course of time, for the caste system. Later foreign aggressors, the Greek, the Parthians and tribes such as the Sakas and the Kushans, also merged into the local population. Most of them embraced Buddhism, which became an ascendant ideology after the reign of Ashoka, the third-century BCE emperor and Buddhist convert. By the medieval period, however, Buddhism had begun losing ground- with its increasingly abstract philosophical preoccupations, both state patronage and its mass waned, making place for a brahminic counterrevolution. The appearance on the scene of the philosopher, Adi Shankara (788-820 CE), with his regenerative (though seen by some as crypto-Buddhist) reinterpretations of Hindu scripture, nearly completed this trend. The final blow to Buddhism was dealt by the Islamic invaders who considered Buddhist establishments opposed to Islam and completed the destruction resurgent Hinduism had already wreaked upon them. 

The Islamic conquests in the subcontinent took place mainly between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries. Though they had begun in the seventh century, they did not at first make many inroads. Islam, as such, had entered India much earlier, almost during the Prophet’s lifetime, through the Arab traders. With them, and with the later conquerors, came the Sufis, Islam’s mystics, who in India were highly instrumental in the spread of the new faith. With their liberal spirituality and their preference for the company of the poor, they attracted a multitude of shudras and avarnas to Islam. In concrete terms, Islam stood for an escape from caste tyranny, for it opened to the oppressed the realms of learning and metaphysics, from which brahminism excluded them, and offered an alternative framework with which to confront caste. A virtual exodus to Islam resulted with Hinduism losing almost a fifth of its followers. While Islam in India had no reformist intent vis-à-vis Hinduism, its spread in the subcontinent was reflective of a surge of caste resistance, evidenced by the success of its epoch-altering civilizational model. Later, however, as India came under Muslim rule, the privileged-caste elite, enticed perhaps by the prospect of power and pelf, began converting to Islam; they brought with them their notions of hierarchy and, inextricable, caste as well.

Caste structures in medieval India became inflexible and even more oppressive than before, and they entirely governed everyday life. They created extremes of inequality, privilege and disprivilege, but little could be done or said against them as the system was supported by the all-pervasive Hindu religious ideology. It is in this background that the Bhakthi (literally, devotion to god) movement arose in South India between the seventh and twelfth centuries. Essentially a protest against caste oppression and the excessive ritualism of the brahmin priesthood, the Bhakti movement preached universal equality in the eyes of god. If a person expressed genuine love for god, it would manifest in love for his or her fellowmen/women. Bhakti reflected traces of the earlier Buddhist way of life but also held much in common with Sufism, whose teachings were on similar themes. These two streams together created a medieval mysticism that was independent of sectarian or orthodox practice and particularly disavowed caste customs and their tyranny.

Like the earlier shraman tradition, Sufism and the Bhakti movement also remained inwardly oriented and could not much influence caste Hindu society. Even conversion to Islam meant an escape only for the converts, but for those who stayed behind, there was no change. They perhaps faced even more hardship because of Hindu rigidification in response to the challenge from Islam. Although Sufism and the Bhakti movement clearly preached equality on a spiritual plane, and gave rise to a number of both untouchable and brahmin poet-mystics who condemned caste, no specific movement for an egalitarian society arose from their message.

The Impact of British Colonialism

The Indian societal milieu, shaped primarily by family and kinship institutions that conditioned the mind to a religious and caste identity, was greatly impacted by the establishment of British colonialism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and by its colonial culture and Western liberal ideology. The drastic and rapid changes in polity and administration that came with the integration of India into a single politico-administrative entity, and the consequent consolidation of government through a unified civil service, army, judiciary and so forth, affected the country’s entire pre-colonial social and economic structure. The various judicial and administrative practices the British introduced, being premised on equality before the law, directly undermined the importance of caste. The introduction of a uniform criminal code removed from the purview of the panchayats- village-level caste bodies that functioned as local governments- many matters that used to be adjudicated by them. Similarly, the enactment of laws such as the Widow Remarriage Act of 1856 and the Castes Disabilities Removal Act of 1850 also contributed in varying degrees to the erosion of caste authority.

Colonialism facilitated India’s contact with the Western world, itself in a period of momentous flux in the wake of the French Revolution and the opening of the Industrial Age. Indian intellectuals’ exposure to the radical and liberal ideals of democracy, popular sovereignty and rationalism set in process among a section of them a time of intense critical appraisal of India’s socio-religious practices. This inspired them to launch reform movements against Indian culture’s repressive elements; caste being predominant in the culture, it invariably became their target. Social reform movements like the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal and the Prarthana Samaj in western India advocated the removal of caste distinctions altogether. Religious reform movements like the Arya Samaj and the Ramakrishna Mission also sought to undermine caste in various ways.

While these movements were certainly apologetic about caste, they did not take any stand on its annihilation. With no space for participation from the victims of the system they decried, they could not transcend their elitist agenda in confronting it. The Bengal social reformers challenged the basis of caste oppression but did so primarily to promote national unity. The Arya Samaj and the Ramakrishna Mission sought to modify the caste system but limited this to the national removal of untouchability. It is only when a section from among caste’s victims rose up to challenge their subjection that the real movements against caste were born.

The Beginning of Anti-caste Activism

In addition to creating an enabling environment through its institutional regime, British colonialism made two direct contributions to the emerging anti-caste ethos. It opened opportunities for economic betterment, particularly to the untouchables and it allowed both untouchables and shudras access to modern education. At the beginning of colonial rule, the untouchables, who had the weakest bond with village life, entered the British army in large numbers and took domestic posts in British households. Later, when port cities and other urban centres were established, many of them migrated to these to avail of the employment opportunities there available. The building of colonial infrastructure- railways, ports, roads, warehouses, irrigation canals and factories- created further work prospects, which they additionally leveraged by setting up petty businesses. Thus a section among them could lift itself out of economic hardship and aspire for further upward mobility. Most significantly, modern education, imparted mainly through military and mission schools, resulted in a primarily urban layer of untouchables and shudras that came to realize and resent their continuing exploitation under the caste order and its embargo on their advancement.

The most uncompromising stand against caste is first seen in the later 1800s among the shudras, who had traditionally faced dwija oppression. Their resistance came to be known as the nonbrahmin movement, launched by Jotirao Phule (1827-1890) in the former Bombay province and, in the next century, by Periyar E.V.Ramasamy (1879-1973) in Madras.

Both Phule and Periyar belonged to shudra caste and organized their communities to launch an assault against caste domination in all spheres of social life. While in the beginning their campaigns effectively assimilated the shudras and the untouchables, they could not sustain this unity for long in the face of the caste contradiction between these groups. Unable to accommodate the untouchables’ yearning for emancipation, these organizations ultimately splintered into various factions. Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj, a religious movement emphasizing humanist ideals, disintegrated after his death in1890 with one coterie merging with the Indian National Congress (INC) and the other ultimately with the communists. Ramasamy’s Dravidar Kazhagam similarly disintegrated by 1949, having been transformed into a ruling-class lobby that ignored the caste question altogether.