Caste Discrimination

The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India’s Hidden Apartheid

1. Cover

2. Preface

3. Introduc�on Caste: A Historical Outline

4. Beyond Varna: Caste in the 21st Century

5. The Poli�cal Economy of Atroci�es: The Shaping of the Macabre Spectacle

6. An�-Atrocity Law:Mi�ga�on and its Malcontents

7. The Khairlanji Murders:Genealogy and A�ermath

8. Post-Khairlanji:A Chronicle of Repression

9. Mass Media:Massive Prejudice

10. Atroci�es by the State:Neoliberalism, Naxalism and Dalits

11. Exploding Myths:Globaliza�on, Civil Society and the Bahujan

12. Chapter 10

 

 

 

Preface Anand Teltumbde’s analysis of the public, ritualistic massacre of a dalit

family in 21st century India exposes the gangrenous heart of our society. It contextualizes the massacre and describes the manner in which the social, political and state machinery, the police, the mass media and the judiciary all collude to first create the climate for such bestiality, and then cover it up. This is not a book about the last days of relict feudalism, but a book

about what modernity means in India. It discusses one of the most important issues in contemporary India.

— A rundhati R oy , author of The God of Small Things

This book is finally the perfect demonstration that the caste system of India is the best tool to perpetuate divisions among the popular classes to the benefit of the rulers, thus annihilating in fact the efficiency of their

struggles against exploitation and oppression. Capitalist modernization is not gradually reducing that reality but on the opposite aggravating its

violence. This pattern of modernization permits segments of the peasant shudras to accede to better conditions through the over-exploitation of the

dalits. The Indian Left must face this major challenge. It must have the courage to move into struggles for the complete abolition of caste system, no less. This is the prerequisite for the eventual emerging of a united front of the exploited classes, the very first condition for the coming to reality of any authentic popular democratic alternative for social progress. This book provides a wonderful analysis towards this understanding. I would

hope to see it read by every Indian activist and also foreigners who do not see how odious the caste system is.

— Samir Amin , Director of Third World Forum, Dakar, Senegal

Teltumbde has created a solid corpus of work that bears witness to the degradation of Indian democracy, and to the capacity of Indian socialism.

India’s revolution… is sharpened on the anvil of Teltumbde’s thoughts.

— Vijay Prashad , author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World

 

 

 

Introduction Caste: A Historical Outline Turn in any direction you like, caste is the monster that crosses your path.

You cannot have political reform, you cannot have economic reform, unless you kill this monster.

B.R. Ambedkar

India’s caste system has always bewildered the world. Much has been written about it; more still awaits the writing. Many scholars have tried to fathom its origins but have ultimately contributed only further conjecture. Many have tried to define it but have failed to capture its complexity. For most, it was a relic of Indian feudalism which, it was thought, would disappear once capitalism was established. Writing in 1853, the year the railways were introduced in India, Karl Marx prophesied that the new mechanized transportation system would catalyse the collapse of caste. Today, India has the world’s second largest railway network and has created, since Independence, a sizeable infrastructure for capitalist industry. But all that could not kill caste, which proved more than capable of adjusting to the new reality. After Independence in 1947, rural India was transformed through a modernizing project that included, among other things, land reforms and the capital-intensive technologies of the Green Revolution in agriculture. Capitalist production relations came to the villages and seemed to shake the caste structure to its roots – but caste survived nonetheless.

Since the mid-1980s, a now neoliberal India has taken remarkable strides towards globalizing its economy and, with an impressive recent growth record, has increasingly been projecting itself as an emerging superpower. The world is dazzled by its success. Caste was expected to fall away under pressure of the global order. That has not happened. On the contrary, it appears to have grown far more vicious, if caste atrocities are taken as a proxy measure.

Indeed, caste has showed an amazing resilience. It has survived feudalism, capitalist industrialization, a republican Constitution, and today, despite all denial, is well alive under neoliberal globalization.

 

 

Caste and the Indian Diaspora

In the globalized, transnational world of the twenty-first century, the need for an accurate understanding of this vicious institution can never be over- emphasized. A call for international recognition of caste as a racist violation of human rights has been addressed to the world community, not once but twice in the last decade – it went ignored in both the resolution adopted by the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in Durban and in the outcome document of the Review Conference held in 2009. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, declared in 2009 that ‘the time has come to eradicate the shameful concept of caste,’ and that ‘the international community should come together to support these efforts as it did when it helped put an end to apartheid.’ 1

It is such international pressure that led to the introduction of the Equality Bill in the UK parliament in March 2010, a bill that outlaws discrimination based on caste and is likely to become the first piece of legislation in the world to treat caste as an aspect of race. In 2009, the UK’s Anti Caste Discrimination Alliance (ACDA) conducted a study that showed how 58 percent of the 300 people surveyed had been discriminated against because of their caste, while 79 percent said they did not think the police would understand if they tried to report a caste-related ‘hate crime’. 2 However, the Indian government has always managed to successfully oppose the terming of caste-based discrimination as racism – this would perhaps have been different had there been a more widespread comprehension of the issues at stake.

Caste is neither so ‘country-specific’ nor, from a Western perspective, so distant an issue as may be thought. It has been carried far beyond the borders of the subcontinent with the spread of the Indian diaspora. 3 Wherever Indians have gone, it has followed them; wherever they have settled, caste has also established itself. Some scholars hold that it is Hinduism – an ‘ethnic religion’, unlike other major faiths – that is a key element in defining the Indian diaspora. 4 Arguably, this ‘key element’ can be discerned as caste, which other scholars unequivocally name as providing a more enduring marker of diaspora identity than religion. 5 The

 

 

important thing to note is that caste in the diaspora is not confined to intra-community relations alone; it notionally extends, in the minds of its practitioners, beyond their boundaries to incorporate the population native to their adoptive place of domicile.

The manifestation of caste within the diaspora depends upon the position occupied by the dispersed groups within the hierarchic caste continuum. Where dispersion happened at its lowest band, as in South Africa, Malaysia and other countries where those of Indian origin are largely descended from colonial indentured labour, caste manifests least as compared to places that received dispersion at higher strata. In South Africa or Malaysia, for example, caste identities are not dominant – among other reasons because their maintenance was of little value to the migrants to these places, drawn as they were from the lower ranks of the caste hierarchy. 6 That, however, did not prevent the small segment of higher caste migrants from keeping their distance from the ‘lowly’ labouring classes, diasporic as well as black. In East and West Africa, Indian trading castes, settled in these parts for over a century, have fastidiously preserved their caste existence, even to the extent of recreating the abominable practice of so-called untouchability – in the absence of actual ‘untouchables’ (or ‘dalits’ as they are prevalently called in India), 7 this degraded status has been accorded to the native black population. A similar development is observable in Europe, where, during the post- World War II reconstruction effort, many dalits migrated and settled as workers. In America and Canada, South Asian immigrants from both dalit and nondalit backgrounds mostly arrived in pursuit of higher education and settled later in modern professions; these segments are, by and large, more sophisticated than those in Africa and Europe, yet the problem of caste continues to manifest itself among them, even if in subtler terms.

Caste, Varna and Jati

The word ‘caste’ (from the Latin castus ) was loosely applied to the Hindu system of social stratification by the sixteenth-century Portuguese, India’s first modern European colonizers. Since casta in Portuguese means ‘pure’ or ‘chaste’, the word connoted the Portuguese understanding of the phenomenon as being akin to race, species or lineage, as they thought the

 

 

system was intended to preserve purity of blood. A more particularized view emerged with later European observers 8 who became aware that, while systems of social division have existed throughout history across the world, the form prevalent in India was not to be found anywhere else. 9

Caste, as such, is a form of social stratification involving a mode of hierarchically arranged, closed endogamous strata, membership to which is ascribed by descent and between which contact is restricted and mobility impossible. 10 The Indian word for caste is jati. When we refer to ‘caste’, we really speak of jati, although many tend to confuse it with varna , which refers to the basic ‘classes’, four in number, established in Hindu scripture. 11 The chaturvarna or four-varna system enshrined a hierarchical segmentation of society into the following primarily professional orders: brahmins (the priestly castes), kshatriyas (the warrior/fighting castes), vaishyas (the business/trading castes) and, at the lowest rung, shudras (the working classes: artisans, agriculturists, food gatherers, hunters, fisherfolk and the like). 12 While there are only four varnas as given in Hinduism, there are thousands of jatis. These may have evolved as subdivisions of particular varnas, but by the present day, they have developed characteristics very distinct from their originals.

Varna represents Hinduism’s hierarchical framework, but it is jati which really dictates the rules and regulations of life for the average Hindu. Each jati has its own special norms dictating permissible food, occupation, marriage, social interaction and so forth, and from each jati/caste come numbers of subcastes, making the whole system highly complicated. While the caste cluster within a varna easily admits the varna hierarchy, the castes within it contend among themselves for superiority, the more vigorously with those in their hierarchical vicinity. Perennial internal tensions paired with the jatis’ acceptance of their inferiority/superiority within the broad varna framework have lent the system its dynamism as well as its longevity.

The beginnings of the caste system are obscure and so is its evolution. There is a broad consensus, however, that it evolved through the varna system and reached its maturity between 600 and 200 Before Common Era. 13 Its laws were codified between 200 BCE and the second century CE

 

 

in the Manusmriti, or the Laws of Manu, ascribed to the mythological ancient lawgiver, Manu, who is credited with the creation of the Hindu social code. 14 Of the varnas, the brahmins occupied the highest place, being said to have materialized from the mouth of Brahman, the divine being. The origin of the kshatriyas and vaishyas was ascribed respectively to Brahman’s arms and thighs; shudras, the lowest of the order, were deemed to have sprung from his feet. Testifying to education’s primacy in ancient India (and to the system’s exploitative ingenuity), the three upper varnas were also given the name dwija , the twice-born, denoting the ‘second birth’ they were said to undergo at the upanayana ceremony, performed in childhood and marking their transition into the world of formal learning. This initiation, again, was the prerogative of only men. The ceremony and with it education were and are proscribed for shudras. Also debarred were the large numbers of people caste society excluded from its confines: its ‘outcastes’, those today called dalits.

An often-overlooked feature of caste society is that it did not actually include every member of a given population. No matter the despised position of those at the lowest end of the varna spectrum, to not find even such ‘inclusion’ was no blessing. Caste society did not cover India’s geographically isolated adivasis (its indigenous tribespeople, who lived in forests and in inaccessible mountain regions), and those who, though part of the economic system in terms of labour relationships, were excluded from all other interaction because they were ‘untouchable’ and even ‘unseeable’. Any contact with members of this group, even their sight, sometimes even their shadow, was held to be ritually polluting and abhorrent; elaborate purifications would be undertaken if such occurred.

To this group were assigned tasks such as the removal of waste (including human excrement from dry latrines), butchery, the flaying of animal carcasses for their hides, the making of footwear and the tending of funeral pyres – everything, in other words, that had to do with decay, death and the ‘unclean’. They lived segregated from the main population, on the fringes of villages and towns, and could not enter ‘pure’ environments such as schools or temples or go near public drinking water. These people were technically called the avarnas, i.e., those beyond the pale of the varna system (as contrasted with the savarnas, those within its fold),

 

 

although more derogatory epithets abounded. Later, as the various castes evolved, the avarnas remained ‘outcaste’. Their lives were, and in many places remain, wretched beyond description.

Classically, the system’s structure rested on a balance between the acquiescence of the non-privileged in the belief that they were fated to be oppressed and the conviction of the privileged that they had the right to be oppressive. The ideological power for this balancing is sourced from the Hindu religious and philosophical system through the twin doctrines of karma and dharma . These provided the justification for a person’s caste- assigned status by basing it on his or her karma (previous deeds, not only in this life, but, according to the doctrine of reincarnation, in previous ones as well), and held out the promise that if people observed their dharma (religious duty) by faithfully discharging their caste obligations, they would be born into a higher caste in their next birth. Another of the structure’s characteristics was its internal elasticity. It was not concerned with particular castes so long as they conformed to its own core logic. It could easily absorb a new group within a caste, create new castes and collapse or rearrange old ones. 15 This elasticity made it possible for caste society to survive upheavals in its history and effectively manage internal strain.

The commonplace understanding of the caste system as having held Indian society in fossilized form for over two millennia is therefore not quite correct. While it is accurate so far as the broad varna framework is concerned, the castes within this framework have been fluid. Many new castes were formed and many have disappeared; many split up and many merged with others over time in response to local political and economic demands. If caste society had not changed over the centuries, we would have found at least traces of today’s social structure in history. However, the fact is that it is so difficult from today’s perspective to comprehend the society of even a couple of centuries ago that to speak of there being no change in history is impossible.

Untouchability and the Constitution

The Indian Constitution abolished untouchability when it came into effect in 1950 and provided a fairly comprehensive scheme of positive

 

 

discrimination in favour of adivasis and dalits. Under it, these groups are recognized respectively as Scheduled Tribes (generally referred to by the acronym, STs) and Scheduled Castes (SCs). The terms derive from the enumeration of their communities in schedules prepared under the colonial India Act of 1935, 16 and were constitutionally adopted for the purpose of instituting protective and developmental measures in their favour. These included the policy of reservation, i.e., of keeping open a fixed percentage of openings in government-funded educational institutions and state employment only to disadvantaged groups. Reservation has had far-reaching impact, though not entirely or exclusively in the way envisioned (as we shall see in Chapter 2).