The popular discourse in western countries (US, UK) seeks to include caste for its anti-discrimination laws. The latest example is the Seattle Resolution in the US seeking a ban on caste bias. This sparked a huge debate across the continents placing Indians on the defensive. However, such attempts betray a lack of understanding on the nature of varna and jati and how poorly they correlate with the concepts of caste, race, and slavery which grew purely in the western contexts. The anti-discrimination legislation proposes to add caste as “an aspect of race” alongside the other elements that had made up the idea of racial groups (color, nationality, and ethnic and national origins).
The present scholarship conflating race and caste and the campaign for caste legislation stigmatizes Indians as presumptive caste oppressors whose public profile has clearly turned positive with regards to employment, educational performance, family stability, and less crime involvement in the west. However, western accounts of multiculturalism, as an agency to destroy caste, paradoxically becomes intensely inimical to jatis. Scholars ignore the important social reality of jatis (about 4,000 of them today) in their discussions on caste. Europeans used caste first for varna, then to both varna and jati, and even included terms like biradari or kula. It is therefore unclear what caste specifically picks out in the conceptual language of caste studies.
The classical conception of the caste system presupposes that jatis are oppressive hierarchical systems which are birth-based, endogamous with exclusionary purity rules, and occupationally restricted. The source of caste is Hinduism, Hindus are its carriers, and its perpetrators are Brahmins. These ideas, clearest in the writings of Christian missionaries, are present in secularized form through the social sciences. However, regarding the “caste system,” two centuries of research has failed to determine its rules, properties, consequences, relation to social conflict, and differences from other social organizations. The confusion on the meaning of the most basic of terms in almost all caste studies remains glaring over the last two centuries.
Three main characterizations in race and caste scholarships (endogamy, which allegedly preserves purity of blood of the groups; color-consciousness or skin color of people as the discriminatory mark of both caste and race; and hierarchy of the groups) suffers from fallacies, assumptions, and contradictions. Scholars are yet to explain that if the races and castes are similar social organizations, how would one explain the existence of thousands of jati groupings in India, as against only two basic racial groups in the United States? How could a dual system of race (blacks and whites) transpose itself to a society with thousands of mobile jatis with no fixed hierarchy and variable group status across time and space? In different ways, the muddled academic-political superimpositions of slavery (initiated by the Enlightenment theories), race (initiated in the post-war years) and caste on the varna-jati indigenous systems end up causing immense damage to Indians and its culture surviving against so many odds across the centuries. But how long will it hold?
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