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Caste in India (1)

Caste in historical context
The changing manifestations of caste

Dr. Avinash Kumar

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Independent India:
Aspirations versus Reality

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The real way to annihilate the
caste system is “to destroy the
belief in the sanctity of the
shastras. How do you expect
to succeed, if you allow the
Shastras to continue to mould
the beliefs and opinions of the
people?”
------B R Ambedkar

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Caste: theoretical underpinnings

 A caste is a fixed social group into which an individual is born within a particular system of
social stratification: a caste system. Within such a system, individuals are expected to:
marry exclusively within the same caste (endogamy), follow lifestyles often linked to a
particular occupation, hold a ritual status observed within a hierarchy, and interact with
others based on cultural notions of exclusion, with certain castes considered as either
more pure or more polluted than others.
 Caste as a closed system where ‘entry into a social status was a function of heredity and
individual achievement, personal quality or wealth had, according to the strict traditional
prescription, no say in determining the social status’.
 However, there were some who admitted that the way caste operated at the local level
was ‘radically different from that expressed in the varna scheme. Mutual rank was
uncertain and this stemmed from the fact that mobility was possible in caste’ (Srinivas).

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Varna and Jati

 Varna conceptualised a society as

consisting of four types of varnas, or
 A person's Jati is determined at birth
categories: Brahmin, Kshatriya,
Vaishya and Shudra, according to the
and makes them take up that Jati's
nature of the work of its members. occupation; members could and did
Varna was not an inherited category change their occupation based on
and the occupation determined the personal strengths as well as
varna. The fifth major category were economic, social and political
placed all the “untouchable” castes. factors.
 Purity and Pollution

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Caste: A historical Evolution

 It was during the colonial period that caste was, for the first time, theorised in
modern sociological language. The colonial administrators also gathered
extensive ethnographic details and wrote detailed accounts of the way systems
of caste distinctions and hierarchies worked in different parts of the sub-
continent.
 Social anthropology in the post- independence India continued with a similar
approach that saw caste as the most important and distinctive feature of Indian
society.
 While caste was a concrete structure that guided social relationships in the Indian
village, hierarchy was its ideology.

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Caste and its critical dimensions

 In its economic dimension caste is a division of occupations with

ascribed status, perhaps within an agrarian village system.
 In its political dimension caste constitutes systems of dominance
and rule at local and regional levels.
 Finally, caste has an ideological dimension associated for example
with ideas of purity and impurity, ritual ranking or the moral-bodily
constitution of human difference and interaction.

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Caste and Census 1

 Caste was a key census variable from 1871 to 1931. The census of 1931 was the last census
to provide tables of the distribution of population on the basis of caste.
 Caste and religion were seen as key categories with which to explain ‘native’ behaviour.
Thus colonial authorities used caste to explain insanity, the latter “being a disease
associated with the socially higher and economically more provident classes” (Census of
India, 1921, Vol. I, Part I: 209); to help in the recruitment of ‘martial races’ to the army; or to
determine which groups had a propensity to crime (thus creating the category of ‘criminal
tribes’).
 "The principle suggested as a basis was that of classification by social precedence as
recognized by native public opinion at the present day, and manifesting itself in the facts
that particular castes are supposed to be the modern representatives of one or other of
the castes of the theoretical Indian system. “ Herbert Risley 1901
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Caste and Census 2

 The Constituent Legislative Assembly framing the Census Act of 1948 decided not to include the
component of caste on the grounds that the portrayal of India as a land of many castes,
languages and religions had been used by the British colonial authorities to claim that Indians
would never be able to unite and govern themselves and therefore needed the British to rule
them.
 However, the government continued to record information on scheduled castes and
scheduled tribes, in order to monitor the success of various government programs to improve
their situation.
 Upon independence from Britain, the Indian Constitution listed 1,108 Jatis across the country as
Scheduled Castes in 1950, for positive discrimination.
 Mandal Commission and differing positions: One view was that it was necessary to include
caste so that the economic and social status of each caste could be measured, while the
other view was that it would be difficult to identify castes and such enumeration would
unnecessarily enhance ‘casteism’.
 Socio-economic Caste Census 9
 Caste and Gender

 Caste and gender are closely related and the control and concern over female sexuality are greatest in the castes which have the
highest stakes in the material assets of society i.e. the upper castes and classes.
 In India, the customary right acquired a further economic significance with the development of private property and caste
stratification. The primary consideration in the forming of marriage alliances was and still is, the maximising of family fortunes. Women
play a crucial economic role not only by providing free domestic labour, but also through their reproductive services.
 Dalit feminists have articulated the three-fold oppression of Dalit women as:

1) Dalits are oppressed by upper castes;

2) Agricultural workers are subject to class oppression, mainly at the hands of upper caste land owners; and
3) Women are facing patriarchal oppression at the hands of all men, including men of their own castes

 Despite often being represented as having relative gender freedom (compared to upper-caste women) Dalit women face highly
exploitative work conditions. In a national survey, a third recorded experience of physical mistreatment 10
Caste and Policy Paradigm

 Non-Discrimination (anti-Atrocities laws, 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act and subsequent

amendments)
 Affirmative Action (Reservations in higher education and jobs)

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Caste and Mobility:1

 Chiefly among the factors influencing the rise of exogamy is the rapid urbanisation in India
experienced over the last century.
 The internet has provided a network for younger Indians to take control of their
relationships through the use of dating apps???

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Caste and Mobility:2

 In the industrial workforce, rural migrants experience mobility, mixed-caste working/living

spaces and friendship groups. Individual experiences of casteless mobility are a reality, but
at the scale of national data sets the diversification brought by post-reform development
has not broken the association, across states, of upper castes with higher-status professions
and Dalits with manual and casual labor.

 In labor markets, three caste effects can be mentioned: (1) occupational ranking, (2)
network effects (or opportunity hoarding), and (3) categorical exclusion.

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Caste and Existing Realities: 1

 Uttar Pradesh (13,146 cases) reported the highest number of cases of atrocities against
Scheduled Castes (SCs) accounting for 25.82% followed by Rajasthan with 14.7% (7,524)
and Madhya Pradesh with 14.1% (7,214) during 2021.
 The delivery of public services is also a source of discrimination. A 12-village rural health
care study across Gujarat and Rajasthan found Dalit children experiencing untouchability
(e.g., aversion to touch during diagnosis) in the idiom of cleanliness from upper-caste
junior health workers; more so among government than private or “traditional”
practitioners
 Dalits, Public Distribution System and Mid-Day Meal

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Caste and Existing Realities: 2

 In 80 percent of 565 villages across 11 Indian states recently surveyed, Dalits

faced segregation and exclusion in public spaces and markets;
 27 percent of the 42,000 households in a nationally representative survey (in
2011–12) admitted practicing untouchability in private spaces (e.g., barring Dalits
from entry to areas of the house, or using separate utensils)

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Caste and Politics

 Caste remains a vital axis for political mobilization in India: Kanshiram and Mayawati, OBC
politics and Caste politics in the south
 However, recent politics suggests that caste politics will be increasingly modified by two
things:
1. Mobilization will be less around broad categories of Scheduled Caste (SC)/Scheduled
Tribe (ST) and Other Backward Class (OBC), but rather around creative coalitions of
subgroups within them
2. As also the migration and dispersion of populations, actually weakens the possibilities of
caste solidarity and therefore caste politics

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New Forms of Caste Movements

 Conversion as a tool
 Dalit Panthers Movement
 Dalit Literary Movements
 Dalit Feminism

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Dalit Assertion in the 1990s: transformation of a
“rights-based” to a “Dalit human rights” approach

 increases in violent hate crimes correlate with the narrowing gap between the standard of
living of Dalits and dominant castes; and violence commonly targets for destruction, often
by arson, the material signs of Dalit progress (housing, shops, consumer durables or vehicles).
But it also takes forms that maximize trauma and humiliation, including sexual violence, public
stripping, forced consumption of excrement, and uploading humiliating attacks on social
media
 Mandal debate giving a national visibility to the caste question, an upsurge in anti-Dalit
violence fueling new social movements and Dalit political parties in the south and the rising
success of the Dalit-focused Bahujan Samaj Party in the north, and with the birth centenary of
Dr B.R. Ambedkar (in 1991) giving focus to him as a political icon
 Caste was placed on the development and human rights agenda of interlinked local and
international civil society campaigns, social movements, political parties and NGO networks
focusing on caste abuse, inequality and economic exclusion, claiming a moral, political and
legal equivalence between racism and caste discrimination, experienced by Dalits as “India’s
hidden apartheid”
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Caste in contemporary times: several paradigms

 Policy discourse on caste is based on the notion of caste as an archaic system

and source of historical disadvantage due compensation through affirmative
action.
 It has, in parallel, produced a caste-mobilizing politics prompted by reservations
and anti-reservations, caste-party-political assertions and the elite silencing of
caste in the name of merit.
 If caste is erased from modern development discourse, it is on the premise that
caste discrimination is being eliminated through market-led development. What
disappears from view is the significance of caste in the working of the modern
economy itself, especially post-1991 liberalization.

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Caste Today

Caste processes can be understood in

terms of generalized social
phenomena, such as ascriptive
hierarchy, identity discrimination,
categorical exclusion, opportunity
hoarding or elite capture.

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