SERIAL : 7
THE PERSISTENCE OF CASTE
Beyond Varna: CASTE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Anand Teltumbde
Anand Teltumbde
An Ancient Imperative
At one level, Khairlanji is not unique. It could even be termed an unconscious reenactment of the primordial punishment of the shudras, and, by implication, of the untouchables, ordained in scripture two millennia ago. The crime of the Bhotmanges was simple- they were dalits who dared to assert their dignity. In so doing, they breached a code that ideologizes and rigidifies inequality by divine sanction, with divine wrath following all transgression. Contrary to the image of India as a nonviolent society, violence has always been intrinsic to the Hindu societal structure- it is not for nothing that Hindu gods are depicted in temple sculptures and in popular calendar art bearing deadly weapons and engaged in macabre acts of destruction.
Hinduism’s adherents would argue that this violence is against evil and is reassuring to those who are virtuous. The definition of what constitutes ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’, however, rests on caste ideology. Those who abide by caste are virtuous and those who defy it, evil. So long as its victims internalize the logic of karma determined inferiority(one of the most effective frameworks of social control) and become the system’s willing slaves (and preservers), it does them no harm; indeed, they find it supportive. It is those who rebel who are not spared.
Representing the quintessence of caste, Khairlanji lays bare the arrogance of caste society, and its assumptions about the demands from the subordinated. Khairlanji additionally demonstrates that caste, however oppressive, is essentially a self –regulatory system designed to elicit compliance with its laws (seemingly of people’s own accord). But Khairlanji, paradoxically, also reveals caste society’s vulnerability. Though oppression can be said to be endemic to caste, a caste crime is invariably the result of its victims’ defiance, a disjuncture both despised and feared. In this sense, a moment like Khairlanji represents the breakdown of the wicked equilibrium that has held the subcontinent historically frozen for thousands of years, and that has carried India through centuries of utterly underserved self-attribution with qualities such as ‘tolerant’, ‘nonviolent’, and ‘peace-loving’.
Khairlanji was no one-off, an unfortunate aberration in a globalizing, ‘shining’ India. Every village in India is a potential Khairlanji. If most villages wear a veneer of tranquility, as celebrated in coffee-table books and tourist brochures, this owes to a tacit compromise- and reconciliation- that dalits have made their demeaning circumstances. Nor are Khairlanjis confined to rural India alone. Their manifestations in towns and cities may not always leave behind brutalized, naked corpses to tease middle class sensibilities into transient commiseration. But moments of rupture are ever present. The surface calm persists so long as the compromise operates. Whenever it has collapsed, the inherent violence of this society has reared up in annihilative response.
History underscores this bitter reality. Millions throughout India are crushed and killed in spirit every day; every so often, some are killed in physical fact as well. While India’s unwieldy, malperforming state sector, where dalits are accommodated owing to statutory reservation, has become a virtual graveyard of their aspirations, the corporate sector stubbornly keeps them out. The reason given is worn but unvarying: dalits lack ‘merit’- the word ‘congenitally’ is unspoken yet implied. It is a gross injustice that in cumulative terms is no less grave than what happened in Khairlanji. No dead bodies. No post-mortems for living corpses. Only buried deeper into vapidity and asphyxiation.
Static Without, Shifting Within
If what happened in Khairlanji accords with many of the features of the caste system, it also demolishes several myths and stereotypes around it. The foremost is the conventional understanding of the system itself as operating between 'high' caste tyrants and 'low' caste, or outcaste, victims in a manner unchanged since scriptural times. Although it could be argued that caste society has staved off alteration at the structural, macro level, it has, in reality, undergone much revision in its composition and character, especially since colonialism. This has come through its adjustment to the pressures of modernism, which arrived with the British and was adopted to varying effect by the post-Independent Indian state.
Caste, in its essence, is infinitely divisive. It is not confined to a few hundred definitive castes or the thousands of multiple subcastes. Sociologists and anthropologists have provided laborious ethnographies of jatis/castes, treating them as complete, rounded categories. However, castes and caste-like identities are still being formed, evolving by amoeba-like auto-division. While they tend to contract inward in forming a new caste, they also seek to establish their relative superiority in relation to other castes. Once this external pressure for asserting superiority is released, the castes look inward once again to locate or invent hierarchies within.
In the nineteenth century, however, during the onset of capitalism, subcastes among the dwijas, the 'twice-born, higher castes, tended to collapse amongst each other, perhaps out of solidarity against the new regime, resulting in the formation of a hybrid, non-ritualistic caste identity. This continued during the post-Independence decades as capitalist relations spread into the countryside, and accelerated with their intensification during the globalizing phase. Anticaste constitutional measures also tended to soften the system's ritualistic framework - characterized, in terms of the relations between dalits and nondalits, by a taboo on physical contact and, among the nondalits themselves, by limitations ordained by notions of hierarchy. Today, the classical association of the caste system with the shastras, the Hindu scriptures, may not be fully irrelevant but it is considerably weakened, in the urban scenario, at least. As ritual identities shifted, certain of the differences between dwija and shudra castes have virtually been dissolved, though this collapse has not happened in the same degree when it comes to dalits. Rather, the cleavage between the savarnas (the caste Hindus) and the avarnas (dalits and all other excluded groups) is today caste's most overt manifestation.
This divide is where the continuum of social osmosis breaks. Even classical scriptures and mythologies talk only of varna-based castes and appear to treat the shudra as the lowest in their hierarchy. Avarnas find no mention, being outside this system. Both sides of this divide, savarnas and avarnas, have managed to blur the contours of caste among themselves to a large extent and have a fair amount of internal social osmosis. Yet even today the few inter-caste marriages that happen are seen mostly within the savarnas; marriages between dalits and nondalits are rare. Antidalit prejudice is the general manifestation of this reinforced divide; in the villages, the dens of caste, it is seen easily precipitating into heinous caste crime.
Backward Class Ascendency
It is sheer intellectual inertia to continue blaming the traditionally privileged for caste as it obtains at present. Contemporary caste society cannot be understood, much less dismantled, along the simple dimensions of religion or tradition. It has become far more complex, under the influence of the political economy that characterizes modern India, and the so-called 'secular', 'democratic' politics and 'socialist' policies that the Indian republic has imposed for six decades over an iniquitous social base. Caste as seen today represents an indeterminate outcome of the interaction between the psycho-socio-cultural residue of the past and the strategies the state followed in favour of certain classes that have resulted in the perpetuation of inequity.
While the hegemony of the brahmins and other higher castes over state and civil society may appear intact (given their preponderance in the higher brackets of all wings of governance -judicial, legislative and executive - and in most institutions comprising civil society), it cannot be denied that their influence is steadily loosening. Other social groups have risen to seize their share, while the dwijas, with their initial cultural advantage, have shifted ground to the capitalist, globalizing sectors of the economy. They do not now evince much interest in caste except for its utility in maintaining the status quo and safeguarding their social, economic and political position.
The ascending groups, the traditional labouring castes, on the other hand, are still entrenched in their traditional sectors, not yet divorced from the conventional Indian social structure. Developmental policies such as land reform, howsoever half-baked in implementation, made landowners of these castes - the shudras, classified in state parlance into Backward Classes (BCs), Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and even Most Backward Classes. It is these groups that are predominantly associated with and implicated in caste discrimination and atrocity. There were no privileged castes, brahmins or kshatriyas, in the conventional sense in Khairlanji. The aggressors belonged to shudra castes - kunabis and kalars - listed as Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Here lies another significant shift from the ritualistic caste system, under which only the brahminical castes were the oppressors and the huge mass of shudra labouring castes were the oppressed. Right from the carnage at Keezhvenmani (1968) to the Khairlanji lynchings (2006), through four decades of caste carnage, there has in fact been no direct involvement of the brahminical castes at all. Rather, it can be said that the manifestation of caste violence as atrocity is a post-1960s phenomenon, connected with the rise of the Backward C1asses.
For dalits, modernization's foremost significance has been in the spread of education, helping them avail of employment opportunities in public services through job reservation. Although in direct terms it helped only a small fraction of the dalit population, indirectly it has helped many in elevating their aspirations. A decline in their traditional occupations - partly owing to technological changes, sometimes because of their moving away from the ritually 'polluting', 'menial' professions forced upon them, but largely because of the spread of education - made dalits swell the ranks of agricultural labourers or migrate to informal sectors in urban areas. This led to a marginal increase in their occupational diversity in modern economic activities. However, in the main, says sociologist K. Srinivasulu:
Modernization had virtually no impact on dalits in the countryside and it would not be an exaggeration to say that the impact of the developmental process on the life of an average dalit was extremely marginal and superficial. As far as the dalits' economic conditions are concerned, land reform legislations, developmental programmes and policies, minimum wage legislation and social welfare policies had little influence.
The pervasive contradiction between dalits and nondalits that surfaces so violently in rural areas mostly derives its material sustenance from the opposition between the dalit's role as landless labourer and the shudra's new position as dominant landowner. This dynamic may not be defined exclusively in economic terms, however. The most overriding factor here remains the deep-rooted socio-cultural contradiction between dalits and nondalits, with shudras having assumed the brahminical baton.
The difference in this changed caste equation is marked, on the one hand, by the sheer numbers of the new oppressors (the shudras) and by the relative progress and associated assertiveness of the oppressed (the dalits) on the other. The phenomenon of caste violence in rural India is directly attributable to this changed equation. If its increase is symptomatic of the rising aspirations of the dalits and their challenge to established structures of socio-economic, cultural and political dominance, then the violence is also an expression of resistance to these aspirations by the dominant castes.
An Ancient Imperative
At one level, Khairlanji is not unique. It could even be termed an unconscious reenactment of the primordial punishment of the shudras, and, by implication, of the untouchables, ordained in scripture two millennia ago. The crime of the Bhotmanges was simple- they were dalits who dared to assert their dignity. In so doing, they breached a code that ideologizes and rigidifies inequality by divine sanction, with divine wrath following all transgression. Contrary to the image of India as a nonviolent society, violence has always been intrinsic to the Hindu societal structure- it is not for nothing that Hindu gods are depicted in temple sculptures and in popular calendar art bearing deadly weapons and engaged in macabre acts of destruction.
Hinduism’s adherents would argue that this violence is against evil and is reassuring to those who are virtuous. The definition of what constitutes ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’, however, rests on caste ideology. Those who abide by caste are virtuous and those who defy it, evil. So long as its victims internalize the logic of karma determined inferiority(one of the most effective frameworks of social control) and become the system’s willing slaves (and preservers), it does them no harm; indeed, they find it supportive. It is those who rebel who are not spared.
Representing the quintessence of caste, Khairlanji lays bare the arrogance of caste society, and its assumptions about the demands from the subordinated. Khairlanji additionally demonstrates that caste, however oppressive, is essentially a self –regulatory system designed to elicit compliance with its laws (seemingly of people’s own accord). But Khairlanji, paradoxically, also reveals caste society’s vulnerability. Though oppression can be said to be endemic to caste, a caste crime is invariably the result of its victims’ defiance, a disjuncture both despised and feared. In this sense, a moment like Khairlanji represents the breakdown of the wicked equilibrium that has held the subcontinent historically frozen for thousands of years, and that has carried India through centuries of utterly underserved self-attribution with qualities such as ‘tolerant’, ‘nonviolent’, and ‘peace-loving’.
Khairlanji was no one-off, an unfortunate aberration in a globalizing, ‘shining’ India. Every village in India is a potential Khairlanji. If most villages wear a veneer of tranquility, as celebrated in coffee-table books and tourist brochures, this owes to a tacit compromise- and reconciliation- that dalits have made their demeaning circumstances. Nor are Khairlanjis confined to rural India alone. Their manifestations in towns and cities may not always leave behind brutalized, naked corpses to tease middle class sensibilities into transient commiseration. But moments of rupture are ever present. The surface calm persists so long as the compromise operates. Whenever it has collapsed, the inherent violence of this society has reared up in annihilative response.
History underscores this bitter reality. Millions throughout India are crushed and killed in spirit every day; every so often, some are killed in physical fact as well. While India’s unwieldy, malperforming state sector, where dalits are accommodated owing to statutory reservation, has become a virtual graveyard of their aspirations, the corporate sector stubbornly keeps them out. The reason given is worn but unvarying: dalits lack ‘merit’- the word ‘congenitally’ is unspoken yet implied. It is a gross injustice that in cumulative terms is no less grave than what happened in Khairlanji. No dead bodies. No post-mortems for living corpses. Only buried deeper into vapidity and asphyxiation.
Static Without, Shifting Within
If what happened in Khairlanji accords with many of the features of the caste system, it also demolishes several myths and stereotypes around it. The foremost is the conventional understanding of the system itself as operating between 'high' caste tyrants and 'low' caste, or outcaste, victims in a manner unchanged since scriptural times. Although it could be argued that caste society has staved off alteration at the structural, macro level, it has, in reality, undergone much revision in its composition and character, especially since colonialism. This has come through its adjustment to the pressures of modernism, which arrived with the British and was adopted to varying effect by the post-Independent Indian state.
Caste, in its essence, is infinitely divisive. It is not confined to a few hundred definitive castes or the thousands of multiple subcastes. Sociologists and anthropologists have provided laborious ethnographies of jatis/castes, treating them as complete, rounded categories. However, castes and caste-like identities are still being formed, evolving by amoeba-like auto-division. While they tend to contract inward in forming a new caste, they also seek to establish their relative superiority in relation to other castes. Once this external pressure for asserting superiority is released, the castes look inward once again to locate or invent hierarchies within.
In the nineteenth century, however, during the onset of capitalism, subcastes among the dwijas, the 'twice-born, higher castes, tended to collapse amongst each other, perhaps out of solidarity against the new regime, resulting in the formation of a hybrid, non-ritualistic caste identity. This continued during the post-Independence decades as capitalist relations spread into the countryside, and accelerated with their intensification during the globalizing phase. Anticaste constitutional measures also tended to soften the system's ritualistic framework - characterized, in terms of the relations between dalits and nondalits, by a taboo on physical contact and, among the nondalits themselves, by limitations ordained by notions of hierarchy. Today, the classical association of the caste system with the shastras, the Hindu scriptures, may not be fully irrelevant but it is considerably weakened, in the urban scenario, at least. As ritual identities shifted, certain of the differences between dwija and shudra castes have virtually been dissolved, though this collapse has not happened in the same degree when it comes to dalits. Rather, the cleavage between the savarnas (the caste Hindus) and the avarnas (dalits and all other excluded groups) is today caste's most overt manifestation.
This divide is where the continuum of social osmosis breaks. Even classical scriptures and mythologies talk only of varna-based castes and appear to treat the shudra as the lowest in their hierarchy. Avarnas find no mention, being outside this system. Both sides of this divide, savarnas and avarnas, have managed to blur the contours of caste among themselves to a large extent and have a fair amount of internal social osmosis. Yet even today the few inter-caste marriages that happen are seen mostly within the savarnas; marriages between dalits and nondalits are rare. Antidalit prejudice is the general manifestation of this reinforced divide; in the villages, the dens of caste, it is seen easily precipitating into heinous caste crime.
Backward Class Ascendency
It is sheer intellectual inertia to continue blaming the traditionally privileged for caste as it obtains at present. Contemporary caste society cannot be understood, much less dismantled, along the simple dimensions of religion or tradition. It has become far more complex, under the influence of the political economy that characterizes modern India, and the so-called 'secular', 'democratic' politics and 'socialist' policies that the Indian republic has imposed for six decades over an iniquitous social base. Caste as seen today represents an indeterminate outcome of the interaction between the psycho-socio-cultural residue of the past and the strategies the state followed in favour of certain classes that have resulted in the perpetuation of inequity.
While the hegemony of the brahmins and other higher castes over state and civil society may appear intact (given their preponderance in the higher brackets of all wings of governance -judicial, legislative and executive - and in most institutions comprising civil society), it cannot be denied that their influence is steadily loosening. Other social groups have risen to seize their share, while the dwijas, with their initial cultural advantage, have shifted ground to the capitalist, globalizing sectors of the economy. They do not now evince much interest in caste except for its utility in maintaining the status quo and safeguarding their social, economic and political position.
The ascending groups, the traditional labouring castes, on the other hand, are still entrenched in their traditional sectors, not yet divorced from the conventional Indian social structure. Developmental policies such as land reform, howsoever half-baked in implementation, made landowners of these castes - the shudras, classified in state parlance into Backward Classes (BCs), Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and even Most Backward Classes. It is these groups that are predominantly associated with and implicated in caste discrimination and atrocity. There were no privileged castes, brahmins or kshatriyas, in the conventional sense in Khairlanji. The aggressors belonged to shudra castes - kunabis and kalars - listed as Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Here lies another significant shift from the ritualistic caste system, under which only the brahminical castes were the oppressors and the huge mass of shudra labouring castes were the oppressed. Right from the carnage at Keezhvenmani (1968) to the Khairlanji lynchings (2006), through four decades of caste carnage, there has in fact been no direct involvement of the brahminical castes at all. Rather, it can be said that the manifestation of caste violence as atrocity is a post-1960s phenomenon, connected with the rise of the Backward C1asses.
For dalits, modernization's foremost significance has been in the spread of education, helping them avail of employment opportunities in public services through job reservation. Although in direct terms it helped only a small fraction of the dalit population, indirectly it has helped many in elevating their aspirations. A decline in their traditional occupations - partly owing to technological changes, sometimes because of their moving away from the ritually 'polluting', 'menial' professions forced upon them, but largely because of the spread of education - made dalits swell the ranks of agricultural labourers or migrate to informal sectors in urban areas. This led to a marginal increase in their occupational diversity in modern economic activities. However, in the main, says sociologist K. Srinivasulu:
Modernization had virtually no impact on dalits in the countryside and it would not be an exaggeration to say that the impact of the developmental process on the life of an average dalit was extremely marginal and superficial. As far as the dalits' economic conditions are concerned, land reform legislations, developmental programmes and policies, minimum wage legislation and social welfare policies had little influence.
The pervasive contradiction between dalits and nondalits that surfaces so violently in rural areas mostly derives its material sustenance from the opposition between the dalit's role as landless labourer and the shudra's new position as dominant landowner. This dynamic may not be defined exclusively in economic terms, however. The most overriding factor here remains the deep-rooted socio-cultural contradiction between dalits and nondalits, with shudras having assumed the brahminical baton.
The difference in this changed caste equation is marked, on the one hand, by the sheer numbers of the new oppressors (the shudras) and by the relative progress and associated assertiveness of the oppressed (the dalits) on the other. The phenomenon of caste violence in rural India is directly attributable to this changed equation. If its increase is symptomatic of the rising aspirations of the dalits and their challenge to established structures of socio-economic, cultural and political dominance, then the violence is also an expression of resistance to these aspirations by the dominant castes.
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