Caste and the Politics of Inequality in India

Review of Development and Change

The abolition of caste as demanded during pre-independence period had led to a predicament whereby the need to delegitimize caste was in conflict with the commitment to redress the disabilities of caste. The unbridgeable divergence between these two perspectives had made annihilation of caste seem more like a disabling dream than an empowering utopia. The central predicament in caste was the virtual invisibility of the upper caste and hyper visibility of the lower caste that had split society into two unequal and implacably opposed sections. One for which caste appeared to be the only available resource to improve life-chances in a game, where the playing field was far from level, while for the other camp; caste had already yielded all it could. Contemporary complexities of lower caste and their demands for social justice need to be addressed and close attention to be paid. To its taken for granted side, namely naturalization of upper caste as the legitimate inheritors of modernity. The paper retraces sociological, political, constitutional and judicial perspectives and the emergence and rise of the notion of castelessness. It is an immense privilege to be here today to participate in the collective task of honouring the life and work of Malcolm Satyanathan Adiseshaiah, a pioneer in the field of development economics and specially educational planning. Honours and awards have the entirely appropriate effect of humbling the recipient. So, even as I offer my heartfelt thanks to the Malcolm and Elizabeth Adisheshaiah Trust and its Jury for this honour, I am also mindful of the great responsibility it places upon me. I did not know Professor Adiseshaiah and can only claim a tenuous connection to him through one of his students at the Madras Christian College in the 1940s, the late Professor K.N. Raj, who was among my own teachers at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram in the early 1980s. Given the Caste and Castelessness in the Indian Republic: Towards a Biography of the 'General Category'* Satish Deshpande** * Malcolm Adiseshiah Memorial lecture delivered on 21 November 2012 at Chennai.

Social Anthropology (EASA) , 2020

Adopting a theory of modernisation that an ancient institution like caste has been replaced with modern institutions and that the adoption of constitutional democracy meant the default overthrow of caste inequality, mainstream sociology espouses that caste is now a bygone phenomenon. How, then, does caste‐based discrimination persist in modern India despite adopting constitutional democracy? How and to what extent do constitutional and legal safeguards deal with caste inequality? Dag‐Erik Berg’s Dynamics of caste and law illustrates these broader questions and demonstrates the embeddedness of caste in contemporary India, despite constitutional efforts of criminalising caste practices (untouchability).

Community Development Journal

Anti-Caste movement and Anti-Upper Caste movement are two different components at present. The country with all it's much floated Dalit (ex-untouchables or the modern day Scheduled Castes or even Neo-Buddhists) movement is not marching towards the anti-caste movement. Interestingly annihilation of caste is the least spoken topic these days among all circles, whether it is activists, politician, bureaucrats, academician, scholars, students, or any other groups. Amebedkar's clarion call to “Educate, Agitate and Organise” and his most important project of Annihilation of Caste has been almost forgotten today. People are scared of discussing annihilating caste and rarely speak on it. All efforts at various levels are aimed at consolidation of caste. Let us not forget that caste forms the mainstay of India’s society and mode of production. The highest number of labourers, agricultural labours, casual workers, migrant labourers and others hail from the Dalit communities. The common masses are not in position to discern the truth through a complex context in which certain things were said or done by Ambedkar. For instance, Ambedkar had said that Brahmanism and Capitalism were two enemies of Dalits and elaborated thathe was not against the Brahmans but their attitude, their creed. He went further and said provocatively that Brahmanism could well be found even among untouchables. Had it been only one sphere of life, then caste would have had a natural death long ago. Justice would have not required this length to remain undelivered. Hence annihilation of caste draws the background sketch of anti-discrimination struggle. This means annihilation of caste is not one-dimensional; it’s multidimensional. The dimensions include various nitty-gritties of injustice in the society needing urgent engagement. It encompasses of battles against caste institution, anti-class process, the complexities of patriarchy, and the questions of minorities, along with the issues of backwardness, poverty and disharmony.

Contemporary South Asia

This special issue of Contemporary South Asia seeks to capture the diversity and situatedness of the caste experience and deepen our understanding of caste dynamics and lives in the twenty-first century. In this Introduction, we highlight the continuing salience of caste, offer an overview of theoretical understandings of caste and foreground the importance of analysing caste in the present as a dynamic form of human relations, rather than a remnant of tradition. Following on from this, we highlight the increasingly global spread of caste and reflect on what happens to castebased social relations when they traverse continents. In conclusion, we introduce the papers that make up this special issue. Taken together, they speak to changes in attitudes towards caste, but also the persistence of caste-based identities and dynamics in India and Britain. Even though the papers presented in this special issue work with the assumption of caste being a reality in and among the Indians, caste-like status hierarchies have existed in most, if not all, societies, and they continue to persist and intersect with other forms of differences/inequalities.

After more than seven decades of India's independence, Dalits, the ‗Untouchables', one-fifth of India's population lives in segregated section of the overwhelming majority of villages and metropolis of India. To this day, in several parts of the country it is risky to walk with footwear on, prohibited to marry girls or boys from other communities and if they dare both are killed in the name of ‗honor killing'; in some parts, the dominant caste communities constructed walls that separates the Dalits in the name of ‗purity-pollution'; do not have burial grounds/burning Ghats and cemeteries for the Dalits in several villages-all in the name of ‗Untouchability'. For all these, caste is the base structure on which others (super structures) hangs on. The root of all is caste in Latin castus, meaning-chaste‖ or-pure‖/‖separated‖. The word has been transliterated in Portuguese casta, which means-race‖ or lineage‖, and was first used in the 1700s in reference to Hinduism's system of social stratification. Hinduism as a religion and caste as its tool thrives and going strong for centuries in the Indian society. Therefore, caste as a social system played the pivotal part during colonial periods and continues to play the most significant role in the post-independent India. Hinduism is effectively and efficiently employs caste by stratifying who should be on top, middle, bottom and outside, legitimizing and reinforcing the societal order-in which slots/rungs one should belong. Therefore, the Indian society is hierarchically stratified. In such a de-humanized top-down social order, the so-called-Untouchables‖-the Dalits fall outside the varna which means color and thus considered as ‗Untouchables'. By virtue of being born in that rung, the Dalit are designated to do certain jobs such as cleaning and carrying the human excreta, burying the corpses and carcasses and removing the skins of the dead animals and working in the leather tanneries. As against the backdrop, one of the major preoccupation of this paper is to delve into Hinduism which plays the pivotal role in propelling, perpetuating and consolidating the system of caste. At the same time, attempts will be made to bring to the foreground the blatant contradictions that the-Untouchables‖ who belong to this land for thousands of years and yet treated as-the Other‖ and-the Polluted‖, during the periods of colonization and even in the post-Independent India. Further, the terrains of the-Untouchables‖ impregnated with anger, insecurity, frustration, hopes and volatility and the magnitude of atrocities meted out by them in recent times become points of reference. As a result, the changes in identity from-Untouchables‖ to Dalits have generated significant transformation from objects of vote bank politics to subjects of their destiny. Notably, employing Dalit Praxis augments Dalit power as resistive and affirmative identity, transforming the Dalits as the subjects of history apparently becomes the core of Dalit Emancipation.

All About Ambedkar: A Journal on Theory and Praxis, 2022

This paper is an attempt to integrate Bhimrao Ambedkar's ideas on caste system, untouchability, caste violence and democracy. It is divided into three sections. The first section includes the critique of B. R. Ambedkar's theory of caste system, the Graded Hierarchy. Through a close reading of Ambedkar's early and later texts the paper identifies two critical components that underpin the generation and operation of castes as a system: generative and ranking functions. It explores how ranking is an essential step in the systematization of castes into a hierarchy. It also explains how and why inter-caste and anti-Dalit violence are an integral part of the stabilization of the caste system as a graded hierarchy. The second section narrates Ambedkar's analysis of the state of Dalits under the caste code in Indian villages which he called the lawlessness of lawfulness. It presents his personal documentation of the discrimination, humiliation and violence Dalits experienced at the hands of caste-Hindus and explains how the punitive complex was tactical in the maintenance of the dominance of latter in the village economy where the former were treated as the hereditary bondsmen of their caste-superiors. The final section explores why Ambedkar pursued political power as a means to solve the problems of caste and untouchability and its larger meaning and consequences to his ideas on democracy as associated mode of living. Published in All About Ambedkar: A Journal on Theory and Praxis, Volume 3, Number 2, 31 December 2022, pp. 172-182 ISSN 2582-9785

Hinduism in the Modern World, Brian Hatcher (ed), 2016

Is there a secular trend of decline in the strength of caste in Indian society? My assessment is that there is, although one cannot be categorical because there are many counter-currents that act against the main current. Further, I believe that the trend of change towards the weakening of caste began during the British rule around the middle of the 19th century and has continued, with many ups and downs, till the present. This view is at odds with the current enthusiasm for identity politics in which signs of the growing importance of caste are seen as indications of a progressive movement towards the attainment of social justice. In the early years of independence, forward-looking Indians had their minds on development and modernisation, and when they thought of caste, they thought of it as an obstacle. Liberal and radical intellectuals alike believed that caste belonged to India's past, not its future. Marxists were particularly scornful of those who undertook to study and write about caste. They believed that it was a fit subject for bourgeois sociologists but not for those concerned with the real contradictions in society. They believed that caste consciousness was an obstacle to class formation. But we cannot for that or any other reason wish it out of existence. Caste continued to receive the attention of sociologists and social anthropologists in the 1950s and 1960s, and they were joined by small numbers of political scientists and others. It was M.N. Srinivas who more than any other scholar pointed to the continuing, and in some respects increasing, importance of caste. Without taking anything away from Srinivas's foresight, it must be pointed out that in making his case about the resurgence of caste in independent India; he took all his examples from the field of politics. If we focus our attention on the political process alone, we are likely to conclude that caste has grown stronger and not weaker since the time of the Emergency. Caste is now used more extensively and more openly for the mobilisation of political support than it was ever before. If our objective is to assess long-term trends of change in caste, it will be a mistake to concentrate solely on politics, and that too on electoral politics. A serious weakness in the scholarly writing on caste in the last 25 years and particularly since the time of the Mandal agitations has been the neglect of all aspects of caste other than the political. The association between caste and occupation has weakened, slowly but steadily, while restrictions on marriage

This speculative paper argues that the caste system of India could be seen as a present-day remnant of 'tribal apartheid' which came into being when Indo-European warlike nomadic pastoralists overran and dominated an earlier urban Dravidian peoples. This form of discrimination based on identity is akin to racism. The enduring salience of caste and colour consciousness among Indians forms one of the great modern paradoxes that have resisted Indian governmental attempts to bring about social change. It is a truism that any statement made about India even when backed by some adduced facts can be immediately contradicted by equally probable deductions and countervailing information. This sense of intellectual confrontation has been heightened to painfully shrill levels of late, and everything is now being called into venomous political question and public debate. Paintings, literature, theatre, cinema, and even scholarly works on prehistory are seen as deliberate and malicious insults to one community or other. In such a charged social atmosphere, it is impossible to raise debates on the fraught question of the Indian Caste System without immediately igniting attack. Hence, most Indian scholars avoid exploring this question after routinely passing a comment condemning it, and decrying its continued social observance, though outlawed by law. However, because of its singularity as a socio-religious system, its discriminatory hold over the civic life of over two-hundred million people, and its constant fueling of heinous violence in India, the caste system deserves to be studied with whatever intellectual honesty is possible, and not only through the lens of inflamed bigoted passion, derogatory or defensive.