DANGEROUS STATEMENTS FROM PUBLIC PERSONS
MARCH 7, 2023
Economist Raj Krishna coined ‘Hindu rate of growth’ in 1978 to denote the around 4 per cent growth in GDP from the 1950s to the 1980s. Amazingly, despite his knowledge and position in the past, Raghuram Rajan makes a statement that the present economy is ‘dangerously close’ to the earlier Hindu rate of growth. The colonial-missionary narratives attached the Indian social systems and all its problems to Hindu religion and we still have not been able to reject it. The surprise comes when either with ignorance or deviousness even economic issues attach themselves to the Hindu religion. The ex-RBI governor has a responsibility to explain his statement and that he is not trying to undermine the integrity of the country by putting Hindu religion in the dock.
There were three economic phases in the 20th century: 1900-1950; 1950-1980; and 1980-2000. The first two phases were of stagnation. An economic liberalization standing on the shoulders of a huge agricultural revolution by 1991-2000 rapidly increased the strength of our economy. PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh (as an economist) played a huge role in this transformation. The successive governments continued this making India into one of the fastest growing economies of the world by the turn of the century.
India had democracy first (1950) and capitalism afterwards (1991), a reverse situation of the west. Democratic pressures ensured that ‘welfare’ began before there were welfare-generating jobs. Democratic socialism pressures like free power to farmers and other subsidies dampened growth and reform process in the first three decades of independence. The state as an entrepreneur failed mainly because of corruption and bureaucracy. The dreaded licensing system, beginning with the Industrial Licensing Act of 1951, inflicted the worst damage on the private sector. The system resulted in stifling competition and allowing only state monopolies, often in remote places with improper technology, run by ignorant and inefficient bureaucrats.
The period from 1960 to 1985, considered as the ‘dark period for Indian economy’ was a result of warped political-economic policies rather than anything else. Economist Gurcharan Das attributes six state policies as reasons for this: adopting an inward-looking, import-substituting path rather than an export-promoting route; setting up a massive, inefficient, and monopolistic public sector; over-regulating private enterprise; discouraging foreign capital and denying itself the benefits of technology and world class competition; pampering organized labor to the point of extremely low productivity; and ignoring the education of its children. The routine explanations for the slow economic growth (‘the otherworldly values of the Hindus,’ ‘the immobilizing caste system,’ ‘the conservative merchant caste’) including the label ‘the Hindu rate of growth’ may not be true at all, says Das.
Angus Maddison’s research shows how India (and very Hindu) was contributing to almost 35-40% of the world GDP consistently from the beginning of the common era to the 17th century when the East India Company landed. Indian degeneration in terms of its economy, culture, heritage, and educational systems during the colonial plunder ensured that at independence, India was contributing a pathetic 1.8 % to the world GDP. The question is if ‘Hindu’ ideas slows economic growth, why did everybody in the world come to India to make money and why did we cross our civilizational borders only for trade and exchange of culture rather than to loot and plunder? The ex-governor of RBI and the acclaimed economist must tell us how ‘Hindu’ religion factors into these economic facts of the past and present.
ANIMAL CRUELTY AND HUMANS
MAY 20, 2023
Further to the thought-provoking editorial (SC rightly holds back in matters of culture, dated May 20, 2023), who defines animal cruelty? Humans have an unequal and complicated relationship with the rest of the animal kingdom, which has evolved over many million years. Animals come into the equation with humans in myriad ways: as food, as pets, for entertainment (sports that may or may not involve killing the animals), as experimental animals in the pharmaceutical and medical industries, as beasts of burden, and as war animals.
Pet abuse is a favourite obsession of NGOs like PETA. The number of animals used in the medicinal industry is too mind-boggling to even mention. We are enjoying the longevity provided by the medical and pharmaceutical industries because of experimentation and trials on an infinite number of animals. Food animals are too numerous to mention. The percentage of vegetarians in almost all countries in the world is in the single digits. India stands between 29 and 40%, which is clearly an outlier. Circuses and sports of various forms, like Jallikattu, bull fighting, and deer hunting, constitute using animals as sport. This is one area where there is a lot of noise from the animal rights crusaders, the media, and the lawyers.
The use and abuse of animals is part of the evolutionary game, and there is no way we can avoid that. We cannot apply moral standards and ethics to our behaviour towards them selectively. It is all right to consume them or use them in the medicinal industry for our benefit, but we seem to have exacting standards to deal with them when used as pets or for entertainment, perhaps in non-impacting areas. Again, the size of the animal seems to matter. We do not have any problems with the sacrifice of millions of rats, mice, and guinea pigs (sometimes killed during advanced stages of pregnancy) to study medicines and procedures, but horses and elephants used for film shooting become an area of intense discussion. In short, we have created our own standards for what is ‘humane.’
In such circumstances, talking about the cruelty of Jallikattu and cockfights while having a chicken tikka masala does not make any sense. It is good to have some moral standards in dealing with animal use, but they will always be fluid, grey, and interpretable. The aim for humans (in an allegedly advantageous evolutionary position) would be to settle in a dynamic equilibrium where the animals do not outnumber us and simultaneously make use of them for our own survival without completely removing them. And hence, Jallikattu will continue, bullfighting will continue, deer hunting will continue, meat will continue, and PETA will continue. We will continue to have fish in our aquariums, talk to them, and consume them too. This is the way of the world; this is the way of the complex human mind.
CONFLATING RACE AND CASTE IN THE WESTERN WORLD
FEBRUARY 22, 2023
The popular discourse in western countries (US, UK) seeks to include caste for its anti-discrimination laws (THI, 22nd February, 2023, Seattle Resolution seeking ban on caste bias sparks debate). 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. 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?
RESERVATIONS AND THE CASTE SYSTEM
NOVEMBER 8, 2022
The biggest collective failure of post-independent India is the understanding of our social systems. Instead of decolonizing ourselves and getting rid of words like caste and ‘caste-system’ we have created an institutionalized hierarchy and a pathetic game of vote bank politics. It is the singular failure of our thinkers, social scientists, and politicians that today the only global image of India is its ‘caste system’. It never struck our thinkers that caste is an alien word and has no equivalent in any of the Indian scriptures.
The colonial narratives superimposed ‘caste’ (a Portuguese word) on our four-fold varna (representing equal categories) and the innumerable and constantly evolving jatis (the only social reality of India) in trying to understand an alien culture. There was extreme confusion following their caste schemes. However, we simply assumed the truth of reductionist colonial assumptions and applied it even more vigorously. We ourselves are singularly responsible in failing to redefine our varna-jati ideas in the light of traditional understandings. Untouchability, as understood in popular terms, was a weed which we rightly made illegal but paradoxically we created a huge group of 65 million people and 1200 jatis with widely divergent practices into a consolidated group on the single but tenuous criteria of an ‘ex-untouchability’ status.
The idea of addressing centuries of neglect and oppression is great but this almost permanent government policy of reservations (or positive discrimination) raises important questions about the nature of justice; the trade-off between justice and such other equally desirable values as efficiency, social harmony, and collective welfare; and the logic of making social groups bearers of rights and obligations. Reservations raises serious questions about the nature and extent of the present generation’s responsibility for the misdeeds of its predecessors and the meaning of social oppression.
Justice is generally an individualist concept; due to an individual based on his qualifications and efforts. Justice needs redefinition obviously in non-individualist terms if social groups are subjects of rights and obligations. We should also demonstrate continuity between the past and present oppressors and oppressed. Can we claim that the nature of current deprivation is a product of past oppression conferring moral claims on the oppressed?
Again, our constantly westward looking intellectuals draw parallels between America (Whites and Blacks relations) and India (relations between the so-called upper and lower castes) and equate affirmative action with our reservations. They are different paradigms altogether. Hardly anybody has bothered to challenge or articulate the theory of justice at the basis of reservations. Increasing reservations, as a part of ‘social justice’, represents a warped political strategy and poor liberal thinking. We should not be surprised if India attracts attention globally only for its ‘caste-system’ even as a balkanization happens on a constant basis inside the country.
POOR UNDERSTANDING OF VARNA-JATI-ASHRAMA AND DHARMA
OCTOBER 9, 2022
Both the contradictory nature of Mohan Bhagwat’s statements and the resultant criticisms result from the basic failure of our intellectuals to truly describe India except in colonial terms. Our indigenous phenomenon is Sanatana Dharma, a huge conglomeration of traditions, based on rituals and with the essence of an indifference to differences. What came from alien lands were religions, inherently intolerant, with the idea of ‘My One True God’ against ‘Your Many False Gods.’ The transformation of traditions into proper religions (Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism) and then applying the mantra of secularism, a solution for European Christendom at a specific time of its history, is the cause of so many problems, including the so-called Hindutva. The Indian solution to pluralism was ‘traditionalising the religions’ which allowed Sanatana Dharma to absorb any number of faiths. ‘Religionising our traditions’, in reverse, remains the single biggest failure of our academic-political-legal systems. Varna-jati-ashrama is a civil societal system which allowed India to survive brutal invasions from across centuries. Of course, untouchability was a terrible weed which we could address from within. Colonial-missionary narratives with a purpose to break India superimposed Caste, a western idea, on varnas and jatis and then made them into an ‘idolatrous’ religious phenomenon fit for condemnation. Our discourses and counter discourses have not deviated a single bit from the colonial narratives.
THE TRICKY ISSUE OF RESERVATIONS
SEPTEMBER 22, 2022
With our honourable CM proposing to increase the ST reservation quota to 10%, the reservations goes beyond 50% of the total. Is this allowed? The percentage for other groups cannot change as it might raise angers. It is a sad failure of our political-academic- intellectual scholarship in post-colonial India that we could draw a better understanding of our varnas and jatis in the light of our traditions. Not only we accepted the colonial superimposition of the word ‘caste’ (which has no Indian equivalent) on our social systems but we successfully created a whole lot of groups and perpetuated the story of a ‘caste-system’ in India.
Reservations unfortunately have become the most potent political tool in India with much collateral damage. We are perhaps the only country with an extensive Constitutional programme of ‘positive discrimination’ (seats reserved in assemblies, public jobs, and professional academic institutes) in favour of deprived groups to integrate them into mainstream and address centuries of neglect and oppression. A permanent government policy now, not the original intention of our Constitution makers, positive discrimination raises important questions about the nature of justice; the trade-off between justice and such other equally desirable values as efficiency, social harmony, and collective welfare; and the propriety of making social groups bearers of rights and obligations.
It also raises questions about the redistributive role of the state, the nature and extent of the present generation’s responsibility for the misdeeds of its predecessors, and the meaning of social oppression. Justice is generally an ‘individualist’ concept; the due to an individual based on his qualifications and efforts. Justice needs redefinition obviously in non-individualist terms if social groups are subjects of rights and obligations. We should also demonstrate continuity between the past and present oppressors and oppressed. We must also analyse the nature of current deprivation and that it is a product of past oppression conferring moral claims on the oppressed.
Scholars like Dr Bhikhu Parekh say these questions are important in India where positive discrimination has no roots in the indigenous cultural tradition and is much resented. There are few studies either challenging or articulating the theory of justice at the basis of reservations. Some work however relies on American literature, without appreciating that the historical relations between different Sanatani groups bear little resemblance to those between the American whites and blacks.
AN URGENT NEED TO TRULY UNDERSTAND OUR SOCIAL SYSTEMS
JULY 22, 2022
It is a matter of great pride and happiness that a deserving candidate has become the President of this country. It is 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’. It is still essentially a negative definition of anyone in India who is not a Muslim, Christian, Jew, or Parsi.
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. Scholars feel 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. A scholar 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?
HOW DID THE BRAHMINS BECOME VILLAINS?
OCTOBER 1, 2021
Further to the article on Brahmin welfare corporations on the editorial page (THI 1st October, 2021), it is unfortunate that Brahmins have faced a strong antipathy for centuries. The basic Brahmanical account standing rock like from 17th century European narratives to present day ‘scientific’ explanations is this: ‘As a priesthood, the Brahmins mediate between the devotees and their deities by sacrificial rituals. They are the creators of a four-tiered hierarchy of classes, assigning the highest status to their own priestly class and the lowest to the Sudra or servant class. Traditionally, the learned Brahmin is the recipient of many privileges. Lacking military prowess and political-economic power, the minority Brahmins drew on their ritual status to seek a special alliance with the warrior-ruler class. They reduced the lower castes to a state of subjugation by imposing many restrictions like denying access to the Vedas and treating them as impure or untouchable, and preventing upward mobility between castes.’
Our textbooks describe the Brahmins as oppressors, exploiters, and creators of the caste system. The left influenced academia with their theories of exploiter and the exploited, the missionaries, and the brainwashed intellectuals continued the British story post-independence. Brahmins were neither rich nor powerful at any point of time in history. The present social sciences just build up data to show the validity of previous truths; rarely, do they turn back to reflect that these narratives could be false too.
Dharampal (The Beautiful Tree) deconstructs the popular idea that education was the exclusive domain of high caste Brahmins, who denied education to others, based on reports commissioned by the British themselves. A survey from 1822 to 1825 in the Madras Presidency showed that the predominant castes in schools were the Sudras. In the Tamil areas, the composition of the school going children was forward castes, 13-23%; Muslims, 3-10%; and Sudras and other castes, 70-84%. In Malabar areas, the forward castes were 20%, Muslims 27%, and Sudras about 50%. Another report in 1825 showed that out of 1,88,680 scholars in Madras Presidency, Brahmins were 23% and Sudras 45%. In Telugu areas, Brahmins were between 24-46%, and Sudras between 35-41%. This is a problem for British historiography because the literacy rate when they left India was about 12%. It was not the outcome of the forward castes ‘denying’ others the access to education but the replacement of the traditional and classical education system by the Anglicized education.
Many thousands of Brahmins lost their lives in the Islamic invasions and the Goan Inquisitions as they were the primary target of the ire of the invaders. Francis Xavier made his position clear when he wrote to the king of Portugal, his patron, ‘If there were no Brahmins, all pagans would be converted to our faith’, calling them the ‘most perverse people.’ In many feudalistic excesses, many non-Brahmin communities as land owners were responsible for oppression of the deprived. Somehow, our social sciences ensured that Brahmins became the prime villains in society.
Meenakshi Jain writes that Brahmins were prominent in the freedom movement confirming the worst British suspicions of the community. Even though for centuries Brahmins and non-Brahmins had been active political and social partners, the fissures grew by the machinations of the British. Some British observers like Colebrooke concede that there was little difference in the condition of the Brahmin and the rest of the native population. The British census operations, especially that of Risley (1901), were determined to show race as the basis for the caste-system. The British census operations destroyed the flexible jati-varna system and raised caste consciousness to a feverish pitch, inciting animosities, and a general hardening of the system. Caste consequently became a tool in the political, religious, and cultural battles.
Post-independence, many studies have shown Brahmins to be in a continuous downward spiral mode. Land holdings have reduced. Traditional occupations like family and temple priesthood, recitation of the Vedas and practice of Ayurvedic medicine no longer prove remunerative nor command respect. A few decades back (1978), the Karnataka state finance minister stated the per capita income of various communities: Christians 1,562; Vokkaligas Rs 914; Muslims Rs 794; Scheduled castes Rs 680; Scheduled Tribes Rs 577; and Brahmins Rs 537. One study in the previous united Andhra Pradesh showed 55% of them living below the poverty line, 10% higher than other groups. The unemployment rate among them was as high as 75 per cent. Such is the deep antipathy to Brahmin community that despite consisting of hundreds of jatis, with no uniform rules of living and social interaction, a success is a result of ‘privilege’ and individual faults project to the whole community across the length and breadth of the country.
Academia, media, NGO activists, and intellectuals project the Shramana (Buddhism and Jainism) and Bhakti movements as egalitarian anti-caste revolts carrying a ‘millennial-long’ conflict with Brahmanism and the ‘tyranny of caste.’ This hypothesis places Buddha (Martin Luther of India) as the first reformer opposing corrupted Brahmanas and preaching the equality of man. Scholars have shown that Buddhists neither rejected Brahmanas nor did they fight against the ‘caste system’. Buddha and Buddhists considered varna divisions to be an appropriate dharmic grouping of society. Buddhism was just another tradition in the Hindu land where new traditions, sects, and gurus evolve all the time showing many paths to the final enlightenment.
Unbroken, this narrative about the wily Brahmins continues prominently in introductory works, encyclopaedia entries, and other sources as elementary facts about Indian culture and religion. The Balagangadhara school shows that Christian-theological ideas concerning heathen priesthood and idolatry; Aryan racial notions of biological and cultural superiority and inferiority; and anthropological speculations about ‘primitive man’ and his ‘magical thinking’ explained the role of Brahmins in Indian society till about three decades back. These concepts, crucial to the speculations about the Brahmin priesthood rise, reflected Protestant and philosophical critique of priesthood pervading 18th- and 19th-century Europe.
Imre Lakatos, 20th-century philosopher of science, characterized every research program as having three elements: a ‘hard core’ of basic theses and assumptions; a ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary hypotheses surrounding this core; and a ‘heuristic’ or problem-solving machinery. The protective belt allows it to cope with the problems by immunizing its hard core against falsification. Jakob De Roover says that the basic assumptions about the religion of the Brahmin are part of this program’s hard core, whereas the claims concerning the Aryan invasion, racial superiority, magical thinking, and the varna ideology are part of its protective belt. The British attacked Brahmins for many reasons, but it is sad that our politicians, social sciences, and society failed to look beyond what the colonials said even after seven decades of independence.
RESERVATIONS AND CASTE
SEPTEMBER 2, 2021
The opinion piece by Mohan Kanda (THI 2nd September, 2021) on caste census makes some interesting observations on the problems of caste and reservation but there is an urgent need to explore alternative routes.
One of the biggest failures of social sciences and politics in independent India is its dealing with both caste and reservations. India has a unique and extensive Constitutional programme of positive discrimination (seats reserved in assemblies, public jobs, and professional academic institutes; lower cut-off marks) in favour of groups of people. The original and admirable idea was to integrate deprived groups into mainstream socio-economic-political life and address centuries of neglect and oppression. The short-term nature of such a policy went for a toss.
Eminent political theorist Dr Bhikhu Parekh says that positive discrimination raises important questions about the nature of justice; the trade-off between justice and such other equally desirable values as efficiency, social harmony, and collective welfare; and the propriety of making social groups bearers of rights and obligations. It also raises questions about the redistributive role of the state; the nature and extent of the present generation’s responsibility for the misdeeds of its predecessors; and the meaning of social oppression.
Justice is generally an individualist concept; the due to an individual based on his qualifications and efforts. Justice needs redefinition obviously in non-individualist terms if social groups are subjects of rights and obligations. We should also demonstrate continuity between the past and present oppressors and oppressed. We must also analyse the nature of current deprivation and that it is a product of past oppression conferring moral claims on the oppressed. These questions are important in India where positive discrimination has no roots in the indigenous cultural tradition and is much resented.
Regarding the caste system itself, the Indian ‘caste system’ appears to have adapted itself to many challenges over the centuries- Buddhism, Bhakti movement, Islamic invasions, British colonialism, and the integration into a world capitalist system. The so-called caste system exhibits enormous complexity, manifests order, and touches every occupation. And yet, as Dr Balagangadhara says, no Indian could tell you much about the ‘principles’ of this system, leave alone the dynamics of its reproduction. Theories about this social organisation are not within the Indian tradition. However, Indologists and intellectuals during the last two centuries have authored treatises theorising the caste system which we have simply internalised without questioning.
The word ‘caste’ is a Portuguese import and has no equivalent in any of the Indian scriptures to begin with. The only reality of Indian society are the jatis and the four varnas. There is a huge conflation of the categories of caste, the thousands of jatis, and the four varnas. The few jatis initially have evolved into thousands based on various characteristics like endogamy practices (marriage rules), commensality (eating or food practices), rituals, gods believed in, occupation, place of stay, and even gender. Individual jatis have gone up and down on the social, political, or economic scale. The one-to-one correlation of jatis to one of the four varnas has been the most difficult, dubious, and irrational exercises starting from the colonial times to the present.
The Varnas are categories; and a hierarchical ordering of the categories by cherry picking of selective literature has been the great disruptive contribution of colonial and Indological narratives. There are equally valid scriptures, but conveniently ignored, in the corpus which show an equality of the varnas and even a reversal of hierarchy. The description of jatis was mainly ‘duty based’ in Indian thought. It turned into a ‘right based’ division in scholarly writings. Historically and in contemporary times too, jatis belonging to Sudra varna (or not from Brahmin, Kshatriya, or Vaishya varnas) have been the most powerful socially, politically, and economically in most parts of India. The negative connotation of being a Sudra (despite categories implying equality) has been a persistent narrative since the colonial times.
As Jakob De Roover points out, Dalits or scheduled castes have been a political and legal creation since the beginning of the 20th century. 1200 jatis with varied practices and customs and 65 million people merge into a single group based on the single tenuous idea of ‘untouchability.’ Scholars, including Ambedkar, could not define what exactly is untouchability. The definitions have been tenuous, circular, and vague; and scholars have included any practice as untouchability to fit the data into their preconceived notions. Many practices no longer exist and untouchability as a practice is illegal, yet a huge group exists where despite all positive discriminations (reservations, lower cut-off marks, legal privileges and so on), anger seems to be ever increasing.
Sufiya Pathan elegantly shows that the data for Dalit exploitation is methodologically faulty, has plenty of cherry-picking, and riddled with selective interpretations. Yet, the intellectual dishonesty regarding the figures and the generalisation of prominent anecdotal reports do manage to give a massive negative image of India in national and international platforms. Much money, many agendas, many careers, both national and international, perpetuate and thrive on the continuing Dalit exploitation story in India.
The political creation of castes almost daily and classifying them as forward, backward (even sub classifying as A, B, C, D) is a sad understanding of our social systems which is continuing to divide the country. These creations have only encouraged false notions of superiority, inferiority, shame, anger, and helplessness. There is no denial of the elements which go in the construction of the system. But an overarching ‘system’ to explain all these evils needs more research and study as it may not even exist. Such discriminations and oppressions occur in all countries and cultures (slavery, colonialism, communist countries, religious imperialisms, capitalistic societies, European and Indian feudalisms). Seeing a caste system as an explanation of Indian evils but none whatsoever for other cultures is intellectual dishonesty, says the Balagangadhara group.
The political, legal, and academic perpetuation of the caste-system narrative is destroying the country. We need fresher narratives. The ‘caste-system’ was only an experience of the colonials who put a meta-narrative to their experience of jatis in India. Three colonial ideas (the word ‘casta’; the racial Aryan- Dravidian theory; and the Protestant criticism of the priesthood of the Catholics and Jews) gave a structure to their experience of Indian social systems. This narrative superimposed on India to make the Brahmins as villains in the oppressive caste system.
Sadly, the academia in the post -independence period with strong Marxist hold, instead of questioning older narratives, continued this story of Aryans, of evil Brahmins, of exploitation, in tune with their exploiter-explored paradigms. In recent times, insurgent scholarship at some well-known institutions go further in blaming Brahmins for everything wrong in colonial and post-colonial India by theorizing terms like ‘Brahminical’, ‘Brahmanical patriarchy’, and ‘Brahminism’. Even the so-called ‘rape culture’ and ‘fees hike’ in institutions reflect Brahminical attitudes according to the students at these universities.
Today, most Indian citizens are victims of colonial consciousness and would even refuse to believe that there can be an alternative story about ourselves. We need fresh narratives on Varna and Jatis to create unity and truly break the vicious anger generating ‘caste-system’. Despite all reservations and political attempts, the caste consciousness and deep fissures have only increased. Can our social and political systems devise better social understandings and solutions which result in unity and not disintegration?
NARRATIVES OF TRIBALS AS ‘TRUE INDIGENOUS INDIANS’ ARE MISCHIEVOUS
SEPTEMBER 16, 2022
Descriptions of tribals as truly ‘indigenous’ people of India are wholly divisive narratives separating them from ‘mainstream’ Hinduism. The neologism Adivasi (adi, original; vasi, inhabitant) of the 19th century is a pure colonial construct which became the most successful disinformation campaign of modern times. 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’ in intellectual narratives now pits the majority dominant Hinduism (originally foreign invaders) against the ‘original’ inhabitants (now minorities). The majority, by implication, are simply the pre-European colonizers of the tribal minorities. Koenraad Elst writes that going by the historical definition, tribals are Indian pagans (or Hindus) simply because they are not prophetic-monotheists. The examples of many ‘tribal gods’ in the country (Sammakka-Sarakka in Telangana, Jagannath Puri cult) clearly unite the equally pagan Hindus and the ‘tribal’ communities into one large whole. They have many elements in common: by distant common roots; by the integration of tribal elements in the Sanskritic civilization; and by the adoption of elements from the Vedic-Puranic Tradition in the tribal Traditions. As one scholar rues, 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 and other social sciences, into the Indian Constitution, Indian legislation, and their administration.
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