It is a matter of great pride and happiness that a deserving candidate has become the President of this country. When a person of humble origins makes it to the top, there is always a feeling of warmth. However, it is also an appropriate time that we redefine what ‘caste’, ‘varna’, ‘jati’, ‘tribes’ mean in the Indian context. The colonials superimposed ‘caste’ which grew in the western contexts on the varna and jatis of India to create a most obnoxious ‘caste-system.’ The only reality of India is the various ‘jatis which have constantly evolved, grown in number, merged, and even dissolved across hundreds of years. The social, political, and economic dominances have fluctuated for various jatis across time and space in India. Varnas, always four, have been perhaps more of an ideal. A one-to-one correlation for the jatis to the varnas has almost been a forever impossible task. Our social sciences not only failed to question the colonial narratives but kept providing ‘data’ to further the narrative.
The colonials understood the country in the divisive frameworks of castes and tribes. Unfortunately, identifying groups as ‘Hindu’ and ‘tribals’, implying a difference, encouraged an artificial divide in the country. Scheduled Tribes in India constitute 8.2% of the total population (Census 2001). The criterion to identify a tribe: primitive traits; distinctive culture; geographical isolation; shyness of contact with the community at large; and backwardness are subjective, ambiguous, and many times circular. Similarly, the Indian Constitution is yet to clearly define the word ‘Hindu’ and it is ambiguously and circularly in a negative format of anyone who is ‘not a non-Hindu by religion’. Various acts like the Hindu Marriage Act (1955), Hindu Succession Act (1956), and the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act (1956) define the scope of the word ‘Hindu’ as:
- any person who is a Hindu by religion in any of its forms or developments, including a Virashaiva, a Lingayat, or a follower of the Brahmo, Prarthana, or Arya Samaj;
- any person who is a Buddhist, Jaina, or Sikh by religion;
- and any other person who is not a Muslim, Christian, Parsi or Jew by religion, unless proved that the group of the person does not fall in the ambit of Hindu law or custom.
Adivasi (adi, original; vasi, inhabitant), a word coined in the 19th century is hardly a self-description of the tribals. The Aryan Invasion Theory, propagated by the colonials, claimed that the Aryans came to India in the middle of the second millennium BCE and pushed the original Dravidians (to the south of Vindhyas) and the tribes (into the forests and the hills). In settler colonies (America, New Zealand, Australia), ‘aboriginal’ made sense to distinguish the European settlers from the natives. However, in non-settler colonies like India, the term ‘aboriginal’ became a pure colonial construct where the urban and the agriculturally advanced peoples became the ‘majority’ group. This imaginary division of the Indians as ‘natives’ and ‘invaders’ is a permanent colonial legacy.
The concept of race and tribe are in the dustbin of the western social sciences even though getting rid of them has proved difficult. The impossibility of defining the term ‘tribe’ and its broad usage is responsible for its incoherence as a category. Dr Balagangadhara Rao writes that that ‘tribe’ is a key but obsolete concept from anthropology’s early history that usually served colonial, administrative, and ideological purposes to mainly paint the local groups as “primitive” or “backward”. In the post-colonial era, even international forces like the ILO strengthened the idea of a distinction between ‘dominant national communities’ and ‘indigenous/tribal peoples’ introducing an internal coloniality and a permanent faultline. The ‘minority tribal communities’ become racially and culturally distinct from the ‘majority national communities.’
The ancientness of the Hindu religion itself to the pre-Aryan times makes it as ‘aboriginal’ as the tribal populations. The similarities between Hindu traditions and the tribal traditions in their fundamental polytheistic nature and a paganism (deifying the feminine, nature, and animals) show them clearly distinct from the prophetic-monotheistic religions. Interestingly, anthropologists deny that the tribals of Jharkhand and North-East are even the ‘original’ inhabitants. Tibeto-Chinese speaking communities (Northeast India) and Austro-Asiatic speaking ones (East India) immigrated to India in ancient historical times and met with existing indigenous Indian populations living already on their migration routes. Hence, the historical data do not support the division of India’s population into ‘aboriginal tribals’ and ‘non-tribal’ invaders.
The Indian political-bureaucratic-education systems used these divisions only for gathering votes and fissuring our society. Varna-jatis of India prevented the disintegration of civilization in the face of a constant onslaught for hundreds of years. Untouchability was a noxious weed rightfully attacked and reformed from within. It was a dangerous colonial narrative carried forward by some of our own intellectuals which says Hinduism equals caste system which equals untouchability and the solution for untouchability is destruction of Hinduism. What needs urgent dissolution are the words like caste, sub-caste, tribes and all the divisions going in their name by politicians and agenda driven academics. Indologists use discredited theories from earlier social sciences to put across outlandish claims regarding our culture. Again, Dr Balagangadhara rues that the anthropologists spent about 100 years attempting to get rid of a pernicious and incoherent concept like ‘tribe’ only to see it sneak back in, via Indology into the Indian Constitution, Indian legislation, and their administration. Can we attempt a serious understanding of our social systems instead of simply parroting western narratives?
RANDOM MUSINGS 