Caste and Gender in Contemporary India

Power, Privilege and Politics

Supurna Banerjee, Nandini Ghosh

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429783951
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

This book explores the intersectional aspects of caste and gender in India that contribute to the multiple marginalities and oppressions of lower castes, with particular reference to Dalits, Muslims and women. It moves beyond the conventional accounts of experiences of women in unequal social and political relationships to examine how caste as a system and ideology shapes hegemonic masculinity and feminization of work, and thus contributes to the violence against women. The volume looks at their everyday lived realities within and across diverse social and political contexts — families, education systems, labour, communities, political parties, power, social organisations, the politics of representation and the writing of the subaltern women. With a range of empirical work, it brings forth the complexities of identity politics and further analyses its limits in regional and historical frameworks.

This book will be of interest to students, scholars and specialists in caste and gender studies, exclusion and discrimination studies, sociology and social anthropology, history and political science. It will also be useful to Dalit writers and people working in the development sector in India.

1
Thinking about Caste

An autobiographical journey

Uma Chakravarti

Working on caste

When the seminar that has resulted in this volume was being planned, the organisers asked me to deliver the keynote address and also expressed the desire that I should speak on caste. As the conference was held in Kolkata I accepted the suggestion with alacrity, because over the years I had discovered that the public intellectuals in Bengal did not accept the importance of caste in Indian society and this had been the position for far too long. My friends, mainly from the bhadralok segments of society, would often argue that while caste was something that was important for the rest of India, it was not significant in West Bengal. Of course, this is not a valid position as we have discovered in recent years. While scholarship across the country on caste may vary in Bengal itself the issue of caste has not been completely ignored, as we have seen in the fine work of Sekhar Bandhopadhyaya (2011) on caste and the Namasudra movement so it has been addressed specially by historians. But it is in some ways my own journey in trying to understand caste that informs this essay, and in plotting that journey I hope we will be able to address the concerns of another generation of younger scholars who have launched themselves in their own journeys to think about caste, and hopefully they are going to do much more rigorous work (but without obfuscating the terrible workings of caste) than some of us have done to date.

Caste is itself a unique institution that has operated in our part of the world – South Asia – but did not get its due in scholarship in the years soon after we became independent. This was particularly true for my generation of scholars and activists who positioned themselves within a non-elite left and democratic perspective as they taught and worked on their research material; they went beyond their class to look at the margins but never considered caste privilege even as they thought about the dominant class; in this view such scholars had transcended the class locations and had positioned themselves in support of the vast majority of people in our country.

Further, when caste began to be taught in sociology departments, it tended to be the caste system as it was portrayed through the Brahmanical textual framework, which, in my opinion, mystifies rather than explains the workings of the caste system.¹ University departments of Sociology in the large cities have also used the writings of a range of scholars from Europe and America who tend to look at the caste system from above as most earlier works used such a lens in writing about caste because they got their information and their understanding from upper caste informants; very infrequently courses might bring in the writings of the occasional scholar who looked at the system from below. And what would be the reading of caste that we would get now 70 years after independence? Would departments of sociology teach the ‘Annihilation of Caste’ or graded inequality as outlined by Ambedkar (1979) in his writings to young students? Graded inequality is the most powerful way in which one could have explained caste. And it is only someone who was living within the purity and pollution framework as concepts used to enforce the caste system during his entire life, as a belief system who could find such a powerful way of putting forward a sociological fact based on personal experience. The concepts of purity and pollution would then be about upholding the position of the Brahmin by using these concepts as a smokescreen to reinforce the ideology of unequal power and reproducing the iniquitous structure of social relations as well as ensuring the continuation of the social power of the privileged. Much more powerful to my mind therefore are Ambedkar’s formulations on graded inequality. In this he addresses purity and pollution – with its ideological baggage – as the de-sacralised ideas of reverence and contempt that actually operate in the social domain, thus secularising the caste system. Under this explanation as one goes up the hierarchy of caste reverence increases, and as one goes down the hierarchy of caste the contempt for those at the bottom increases. This formulation is very important. Only someone who has experienced the stigma of caste will actually formulate it like that because s/he has the most powerful subjective experience of the contempt that is heaped upon certain castes regarded as low. Thus the more important thing is that the idea of pollution as the underpinning of the caste system is a debatable issue. As we know from many pieces of fieldwork or memoirs of Dalit writers, even when one stops doing the supposedly polluting activities, the upper castes don’t allow people to move out from the degraded work – you can’t move up, and you can never leave your caste identity behind (Chakravarti 1975; Valmiki 2003). Thus it is not actually purity and pollution that determines one’s position but rather reverence and contempt that is allotted to the different castes and is believed to inhere in the very being of men and women across the caste hierarchy.

When I first began to think about caste as a historian I didn’t understand the power of the statement made by Ambedkar when he said many years before his formal conversion to Buddhism: “I may have been born a Hindu but I am not going to die a Hindu.” In other words he was saying, “I am not going to die within the ideology of Brahminism; I am going to recover myself and move to Buddhism” as an attempt at de-sacralising the caste system. Ambedkar was seeking to recover a secular being, in which the quality of humanism is important. It was this quality of humanism that drew him to Buddhism. There was revival of Buddhism in the late nineteenth century, but it is Ambedkar to whom one can credit the support to Buddhism in the early twentieth century and its reach in creating a new social group called neo-Buddhists. There was a lot of writing coming out from South India before that, but it was different from the way Ambedkar conceptualised his exit from Hinduism for its repressive and de-human structure in organising society based on caste.

Buddhism came back to India only with Ambedkar in the twentieth century; before that there was little discussion about Buddhism as a mass endorsement of its social and cultural ideas based on a secular humanistic philosophy that was perceived as the most egalitarian body of ideas that emanated from within the Indian soil. Today, the Ambekarites have to incorporate Buddhism outside of Hinduism, while the Hindus have to incorporate the real ideas of Buddhism into Hinduism and not pretend that it is something that takes its critical edge away in its difference from Hinduism. It is for this reason that I believe that scholars of Hinduism needed to sanitise Buddhism. Buddhism is our best export item into South East Asia and across the world. The radical positioning in Ambedkar’s choice of Buddhism, as a political statement against caste and Hinduism, which are intertwined, is denied.

When I decided to do research I was drawn to working on Buddhism. As I was a scholar of ancient Indian history I wanted to stay with my field, and so I did a textual study of the Buddhist texts. I was already interested in looking at the social philosophy of Buddhism, which drew people to the new ideas in the Buddha’s own time. I was particularly interested in the social groups that came into the early Buddhist movement: which social categories were they drawn from, were there many followers from among the low ranking groups and so on. It was the first study of that kind. But it led me to look at the Buddhist texts as an independent body of texts, not always related to the Brahmanical texts and one that might hold a different view of society (Chakravarti 1987). Unfortunately one of our mistakes has been to say that the Brahmanical texts provide us with a grid of social differentiation and that the categories of caste, i.e. jati or varna in the Brahmanical texts must be the benchmark for understanding early Indian society. This means that the categories mentioned in the Buddhist texts are to be fitted into the Brahmanical categories without giving them an autonomous basis for their categorisation. As I did a close reading of the texts I was forced to acknowledge that I would have to take note of the Brahmana and his mode of writing texts when you look at ancient India. But I could not regard him as a more authentic theorist of his times than any other mode of outlining hierarchy or inequality and so I must look at ancient India without the spectacles that the Brahmana had provided us with. We would never be able to see the Buddhist textual material for what it was trying to say and if we did that, then we would see that what is regarded as something created in the Vedic period and regarded as sacred and authentic, was meant to legitimise the normative tradition of the society that the Brahmanas tried to create centuries afterwards and put into the later Mandalas of the Rig Veda in the form of the Purusha Sukta hymn in order to claim authenticity, legitimacy and sacred authority (Herrenschmidt 2004: 40–42).

The Buddha, on the other hand, understood social categories in a completely different way. He rejected birth based identity as the basis for difference in society and questioned the position that anybody who was born in a certain social group must always carry that particular identity with them. He argues that in the North West of India there are only two categories of people: masters and slaves, and masters can become slaves and a slave can become a master. So there is nothing permanent or fixed about identity. Further he makes a point, very significant from a feminist point of view, about the process of reproduction in terms of claims of purity of birth. How is the birth process of a Brahmana different from everybody else? Birth processes are the same, the baby is born in exactly the same way as in any other social group. So he brings biology into countering ideology: the ideology of inherent highness and inherent lowness. Thus he bluntly dismisses the argument that there is something special and something secret in the birth processes of the Brahmans, and women are at the centre of the discussion about the basis of claims to ‘pure’ birth. In talking about the reality of biological processes, he was demolishing the claim to supernatural processes, and that was very powerful material from my point of view (Chakravarti 1987).

One of the earliest pieces that I published in EPW was an account of the way in which a hierarchy of varna, jati and other modes of stratifications are referred to in the Buddhist texts (Chakravarti 1985). The Buddhist method of addressing inequality was a very distinct one. Buddha was quite secular in his approach, so he accorded much greater acknowledgement of labour based work which is performed by a large number of social groups. In contrast, some categories such as Vaisya and Shudra (who in the Brahmanical texts are the social groups to whom labour is allocated) disappear in the Buddhist text as real empirical categories who perform labour. Further he outlined a distinct category of persons who control resources such as Gahapatis, who did not figure in the Brahmanical texts. I was therefore quite fascinated by these materials, and perhaps that was my first real engagement with caste as a system of differentiation that was quite distinctly represented in two sets of texts produced in early times, so I continued to think about caste and write about it in a series of zig-zag moves. And as I went through the texts produced both by Brahmana ideologues and by Buddhist scholars and as I read the classic works on caste by scholars from the nineteenth century onwards I developed some kind of understanding of caste which I shall summarise in the following sections.

Understanding caste

Over the centuries Brahmanical theories about the four varnas outlined in the Rg Veda were elaborated by the Brahmana ideologues to try and explain the proliferation of caste groups far beyond the original division into four varnas. These jati divisions were said to have emanated from mixed unions between the four varnas, thus producing new categories. There are by now thousands of caste groups across India, and locally they reproduce the basic features of inequality in economic and social status. In this context the tribe–caste continuum is important as the transformation of tribe to caste has been critical in widening the labour pool as new areas were opened up for a more intensive practice of agriculture. According to the anthropologist N.K. Bose (1967: 207), tribes were drawn into the caste system as their own control over lands was eroded over many centuries; these erstwhile non-caste groups however retained their cultural practices even as they joined the caste system, mostly at the bottom end of the hierarchy. Gender practices therefore varied widely between castes. Especially significant were the differences in the norms of sexual governance: while the highest castes stringently controlled the sexuality of women and enforced celibate widowhood, the lower castes practiced and were sometimes required to practice enforced remarriage of widows. This variation was congruent with the logic of the caste system: in order to maintain the purity of the non-labouring body of the ritually pure it was necessary to reproduce the labouring body on a wider scale. As feminists have argued, the corollary to the concept of graded inequality represented by the elaborate hierarchy of the caste system was the system of graded patriarchies making for distinctions between women derived from varying reproductive practices.

The historical perspective on caste is therefore very important. It is also necessary to bear in mind that it is not a static system and has adapted to regional differences across south Asia. It has accommodated a degree of internal mobility especially for castes that are not at the very bottom of the hierarchy. The question of caste mobility with specific attempts at claims for higher status, especially since the census enumerations began in the nineteenth century have given rise to the term Sanskritisation, a process whereby the lower orders emulate the lifestyle and the ritual practices of the upper castes to press their claims for higher status. Such a process, whereby the lower castes attempted to practice social mobility, also reflects that they never shared the social consensus of the upper castes about their own low status, despite the fact that they too practice discrimination against those who are placed lower to them in the caste order. What is important is that the ideology of the caste system is reinforced, implicitly at least, and not frontally challenged in the process of Sanskritisation.

The real edge to caste contestations came not from caste mobility moves but from the emergence of a coherent and cogent critique of the caste system itself in the second half of the nineteenth century. Among the significant developments in the formation of an anti-caste polemic which has left a legacy for Dalit groups, and has provided a way to think about caste from another perspective than that of the top, was provided by Jyotiba Phule and his compatriots in western India. In Phule’s conceptualisation of caste a definitive turning point was reached as he rejected the process of Sanskritisation and broke through the ritual idiom of earlier caste movements which had worked within the parameters of Brahmanic ideology. In other words he broke through the blocked ‘cultural imagination’ of the lower castes whereby they are unable to reconceptualise the caste system except within the hegemonic framework of the upper caste view of social groups – or jatis – in an inevitable hierarchical relationship to each other, as Sekhar Bandhopadhyaya (2004) puts it. Phule was unambiguous in his rejection of the caste system which was an unacceptable system for the lower castes; in this his writing was not only different from those who were trying to recast the histories of their respective caste but also from the writings of upper caste intellectuals whose analysis of caste was marked, in the main, by a false and forced consensus. He emphasised the power of a radical education that would enable the lower castes to analyse the basis of their exploitation and oppression, thus breaking the hold of Brahmanic ideology (Chakravarti 1998).

In the twentieth century the critique of caste acquired a sharper edge in the works of Ambedkar, who wrote on caste from a Dalit perspective and described caste as a system of graded inequality with increasing respect as one went up the scale of hierarchy and mounting contempt as one went down the scale of hierarchy, and Periyar, who attempted to link women’s oppression to the caste system and the control over their sexuality. Both were sensitive to the relationship between caste and gender, both were politically active, and both took on the narrow social basis of the national movement (Geetha and Rajadurai 1998).

The state in India after independence has had to make various concessions to the Dalits, a term of self-reference that the politicised sections of the lower castes have given to themselves. They were called Scheduled Castes since the time of the British in access to education and to political representation termed reservations, rather than affirmative action and carry the burden of a top-down grant rather than a means of providing representation in a highly unequal situation. The Indian Constitution also abolished the practice of untouchability but did little else by way of breaking the connection between caste and class, especially in breaking the highly skewed access to productive resources. Instead these measures have led to a false debate on merit and to charges of the undeserved occupation of official positions that have resulted in slowing down the pace of change and to the inability to cope with the demands of global developments. Further, even conceptually neither the state nor the reformers or revolutionaries have addressed the critical question of how the fairly stable structure of production and reproduction tied to the relationship between caste and class can be broken or what strategies are required to be adopted for a radical praxis in India.

To return to how I developed my own understanding of caste based on textual readings and the works of scholars it became clear to me that caste is a ‘material reality’ with a ‘material base,’ it is not only a form but a concrete material content, and it has historically shaped the very basis of Indian society and continues to have crucial economic implications even today. There are two hierarchies operative in Indian society: one according to ritual purity with the Brahmana on top and the ‘untouchables’ at the bottom, the other acco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Introduction: interrogating intersections, understanding identities
• 1 Thinking about caste: an autobiographical journey
• 2 Negotiating with patriarchy and access to higher education
• 3 Kaarigars, karkhaanas and the art of embroidery
• 4 Negotiating gender: caste and disability identities of women in India
• 5 Caste identity and community feast among Yadavs: an interpretation
• 6 The Hindutva politics of Uma Bharati: challenges to women’s movements
• 7 Nationalism of exclusion: gaumata and her unholy sons
• 8 ‘Chandalini-r Bibriti’: interrogating caste and gender in contemporary Bengali Dalit literature
• 9 Bama’s Karukku: a beaded string of gender, caste, religion
• 10 Caste–gender intersectionalities and the curious case of child nutrition: a methodological exposition
• Index