How to be free of caste

As India marks the 125th birth anniversary of B.R. Ambedkar this week, it must acknowledge the pervasiveness of discrimination and confront it head-on

This year, India has sponsored the observation of the birth anniversary of Babasaheb Ambedkar at the United Nations for the first time. The Permanent Mission of India to the UN shall commemorate the 125th birth anniversary of the Dalit icon on April 13 at the UN headquarters, a day before his date of birth, with an international seminar on ‘Combating inequalities to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)’. A note circulated by the Indian mission says that the “national icon” remains an inspiration for millions of Indians and proponents of equality and social justice across the globe. “Fittingly, although it’s a matter of coincidence, one can see the trace of Babasaheb’s radiant vision in the SDGs adopted by the UN General Assembly to eliminate poverty, hunger and socio-economic inequality by 2030.”

Juxtapose this with a recent report on caste-based discrimination by the United Nations Human Right Council’s Special Rapporteur for minority issues that has stung the Indian government, provoking it to raise questions about the lack of “seriousness of work” in the UN body and the special rapporteur’s mandate. Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution, would definitely not be pleased. Nor are the Dalit rights activists in India and abroad.

Precept and practice

This is the most recent example of India’s hypersensitivity on discussing the caste issue at any UN forum — the objections raised by the Permanent Mission of India to the UN in Geneva to the March 2016 report of Special Rapporteur Rita Izsák-Ndiaye of Hungary. Her report characterised caste-based discrimination as that based on “descent”, labour stratification, untouchability practices and forced endogamy and said that this was a “global phenomena” that impacted more than 250 million people worldwide — largely in India, but also in countries as diverse as Yemen, Japan and Mauritania. Her report cited India’s National Crime Records Bureau data to highlight that there were increasingatrocities against Scheduled Castes — an increase in reported crimes of 19 per cent in 2014 compared to the previous year. The report mentions that despite legislative prohibition of manual scavenging, the state has institutionalised the practice with “local governments and municipalities employing manual scavengers”.

Earlier, during the 2001 World Conference against Racism in Durban, when there was a major effort by Indian NGOs to include casteism on the agenda, the Indian government had vehemently opposed it. Ashok Bharti, chair of the National Confederation of Dalit and Adivasi Organisations, recently told a Web publication: “The whole government suffers from a mindset of the upper castes, that are victims of their own guilt and will therefore try to hide their faults.” He said that if the Indian government had done so well in supporting Dalits, “why have there been thousands of cases of atrocities in the past 25 years? How many perpetrators have been punished? If domestic pressures and remedies do not work, internationalisation was a viable option to seek improvement in the status of Dalits.”

The lesson from all this which India must learn is what the then UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, Doudou Diène of Senegal, said a decade ago to the international conference on ‘Human Rights and Dignity of Dalit Women’ in November 2006 at The Hague: “You have to go beyond the law. You have to get to the identity constructions. How, over centuries, the Indian identity has been constructed. All forms of discrimination can be traced historically and intellectually. One of the key strategies of the racist, discriminating communities is to make us believe that discrimination is natural, that it is part of nature, and that you have to accept it. This is part of their ideological weapon and it is not true. Discrimination does not come from the cosmos. Caste-based discrimination can be retraced and deconstructed to combat it. Please engage in this ethical and intellectual strategy to uproot what is building and creating the culture and mentality of discrimination.”

Even 68 years after Independence, Dalits and Adivasis continue to face mind-boggling social discrimination and spine-chilling atrocities across the country. One in four Indians admits to practising caste untouchability in some form in their homes — this shocking fact has been revealed by a mega pan-India survey conducted by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and University of Maryland, U.S. Indians belonging to virtually every religious and caste group, including Muslims, Christians, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, admit to practising untouchability, shows the India Human Development Survey (IHDS-II) of 2011-12. Mere tokenism and lip service will not do. India needs to jettison the centuries-old dehumanising baggage of caste stigma once and for all. It should have nothing to hide but see the reality as it is and confront the issues involved head-on.

Towards a transformation

If India has to move ahead to a caste-free nation, the need is for an all-embracing, inclusive pan-India social movement of social and cultural transformation. Ambedkar showed the way: “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.” In fact, the Dalit political vision today not only encompasses the most oppressed, exploited and marginalised sections of the caste system but also other sections which took on the Brahminical hegemony in 1970s and 1980s — the backward castes and Adivasis. The Dalit political vision has now moved beyond the rhetoric of the Bahujan Samaj Party and the factions of the Republican Party and the decorative Dalit politicos in the Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party, Samajwadi Party, Janata Dal (United) et al or even the low-caste-based Maoist organisations. New social movements like SEWA (Self Employed Women’s Association) in Gujarat, NBA (Narmada Bachao Andolan) in Madhya Pradesh and MKSS (Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan) in Rajasthan among others have fundamentally broadened the Dalit political vision.

The suicide of Rohith Vemula has exposed why attempts to co-opt Ambedkar as a ‘Hindu reformer’ cannot succeed due to inherent ideological contradictions. The challenge posed by the Ambedkar Students’ Association at the Hyderabad Central University to the Brahminical hegemony of Hindutva represented by Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad is in the very logic of the Dalit political vision.

Now, integrating social and cultural transformation with an economic alternative is critical. Our tryst with destiny can go on and on. But let us grab this moment of truth. So that we can “redeem our pledge”, which has remained unredeemed for more than 68 years, to make conditions for the last men and women representing the Adivasis and Dalits, the marginalised and poor people of India to give unto themselves what is truly theirs. That is the challenge before the people of India.

Suhas Borker is Editor, Citizens First TV (CFTV), and Convener, Working Group on Alternative Strategies, New Delhi.

Keywords: Caste, Politics, 125th birth anniversary of Babasaheb Ambedkar

Source: The Hindu, 13-04-2016

Genes loosen iron casts of Indian castes

Pure castes are a myth.

How old is India's caste system? How many ancestries have made up the mosaic of Indian civilisation?

It was believed that two kinds of people - Ancestral North Indian (ANI) and Ancestral South Indian (ASI) - entered India at different times. These two groups intermingled, but over time, reduced their interaction and then stratified. Thus caste was born

A study - published in last week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - finds that this story isn't so neat. There, authors proffer evidence for two more groups - Ancestral Austro Asiatic (AAA) and Ancestral Tibeto-Burman (ATB) that currently constitute much of India's tribes.

In the graphic below, nine caste/ethnic tribe groups of 20, studied by the scientists, are depicted with their rough, geographical location. The four circles represent the four ancestries that have made up mainland India - ANI, ASI, AAA and ATB - and the coloured arches in the chart show the proportion of genes from these ancestries that make them.

Pure castes, thus, are a myth.

Social and cultural characterists of nine population groups

Name	Description	Sample Size
Khatri (KSH)	Upper caste/ North/ Indo-European/ Traditionally warrior	19
Maratha (MRT)	Upper caste/ West/ Indo-European/ Traditionally warrior	7
Iyer (IYR)	Upper caste/ South/ Dravidian/ Traditionally priest	20
Gond (GND)	Tribe/ Central/ Dravidian/ Austro-Asiatic/ Agriculturist	20
Paniya (PNY)	Tribe/ South/ Dravidian/ Austro-Asiatic/ Hunter-Gatherer	18
Birhor (BIR)	Tribe/ Central/ Austro-Asiatic/ Hunter-Gatherer	16
Kadar (KDR)	Tribe/ South/ Dravidian/ Hunter-Gatherer	20
Ho (HO)	Tribe/ Central & East/ Austro-Asiatic/ Agriculturist	18
Jarawa (JRW)	Tribe/ Andaman and Nicobar/ Ongan/ Hunter-Gatherer	19

Mainland India's four ancestral components

The genes that make up castes

The following numbers show approximately the number of generations before which caste groups became endogamous. For instance, 70 generations (22 years for a generation) ago, the Iyers had genes from both AAA and ASI whereas around the same time the HO had genes from three ancestries.

Castes thus began to harden and the upper castes became endogamous only around 1500 years ago.

Key:

Khatri KSH | Gujarati Brahmin GBR | West Bengal Brahmin WBR | Maratha MRT | Iyer IYR | Kadar KDR | Irula IRL | Paniya PNY | Gond GND | Ho HO | Santal SAN | Korwa KOR | Birhor BIR | Manipuri Brahmin MPB | Tharu THR | Tripuri TRI | Jamatia JAM | Jarawa JRW | Onge ONG | Pallan PLN

(Authors: Analabha Basu, Neeta Sarkar-Roy, Partha P. Majumdar. Text: Mohit Rao)

(Graphics: Deepak Harichandran and L Balamurugan)

Keywords: Caste, ancestors

Source: The Hindu, 2-02-2016

the modern INDIAN - The Past Of Caste

Amish





Ancient India did not sanctify it, caste discrimination is more recent than we think

The tragic death of Rohith Vemula has again brought to the forefront of public imagination the painful reality of caste discrimination in Indian society . Notwithstanding the noise generated by relentless pursuit of politics, evidence clearly indicates that the Scheduled Castes as a group do face terrible prejudice in India.Understandably, many non-Westernised Indians would be loathe to accept the `atrocity literature' churned out by Western academics NGOs. After all, among the most oppressed minorities in the civilised world are the AfricanAmericans and the European Romas, as evidenced by various detailed studies.
However, the hypocrisy of Western academics media NGOs cannot be an excuse for Indians not to confront their own failings. The present birth-based caste system and caste system and its attendant societal discrimination is a blot on India and completely against the conceptualisation of our ancient culture.
There are some who claim that the present caste system is sanctified by our ancient scriptures. Not true. B R Ambedkar, in his scholarly book `Who were the Shudras?', had used Indian scriptures and texts to prove that in ancient times India had widely respected Shudra rulers as well, and the oppressive scriptural verses, justifying discrimination and a caste system based on birth, were interpolated into the texts later.
In the Bhagwad Gita, Lord Krishna clearly enunciates that He created the four varnas based on guna (attributes) and karma; birth is NOT mentioned.Rishis, or sages, were accorded the highest status in ancient India, and two of our greatest epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, were composed by Rishis who were not born Brahmins.
Valmiki was born a Shudra and Krishna Dwaipayana (also known as Ved Vyas) was born to a fisherwoman. Satyakam Jabali, believed to have composed the celebrated Jabali Upanishad, was born to an unwed Shudra mother and his father's name was unknown. According to the Valmiki Ramayana, Jabali was an officiating priest and adviser to the Ayodhya royalty during Lord Ram's period.
Arvind Sharma, professor of comparative religion at McGill University, states that caste rigidity and discrimination emerged in the Smriti period (from after the birth of Jesus Christ and extending up to 1200 CE) and was challenged in the medieval period by the bhakti movement led by many non-upper caste saints. At the time even powerful empires emerged that were led by Shudra rulers, for example the Kakatiyas. Then, the birth-based caste system became rigid once again around the British colonial period. It has remained so, ever since.
Scientific evidence provided by genetic research corroborates the ancient scriptural absence of a birth-based caste system. Banning of inter-marriage in pursuance of `caste purity' is a fundamental marker of this birth-based caste system.Various scientific papers published in journals such as the American Journal of Human Genetics, Nature and the National Academy of Sciences Journal, have established that inter-breeding among different genetic groups in India was extremely common for thousands of years until it stopped around 0 CE to 400 CE (intriguingly, this is in sync with the period when Sharma says caste discrimination arose for the first time in recorded history).
The inference is obvious. The present birth-based caste system ­ a distorted merger of jati (one's birth-community) and varna (one's nature based on guna and karma) ­ emerged roughly between 1,600 to 2,000 years ago. It did not exist earlier. Note that the word `caste' itself is a Portuguese creation, derived from the Portuguese Spanish `casta' meaning breed or race.
The founding fathers of the Indian republic were, thankfully , aware of the pernicious effects of the birth-based caste system on Indian society . The Indian Constitution had bold objectives. But, as is obvious today , while government policies such as reservations have made a difference, they have not been good enough.
The work of Dalit scholar Chandra Bhan Prasad shows that the post-1991 economic reforms programme has seminally addressed this issue. According to the 200607 All-India MSME Census, approximately 14% of the total enterprises in the country are owned by SCST entrepreneurs, and they generate nearly 8 million jobs! The figure is probably much higher today .
There are many who claim that the reservations policy has ignored the upper caste poor and rural landless. This may hold some truth. But this is also largely due to the absence of enough education facilities and jobs, which leads to rationing of the few opportunities that do exist.
Post-1991 reforms have no doubt brought down these shortfalls, but they have not gone far enough. Many argue that reformist policies will not just help the Dalits, but also the rural and urban upper-caste poor.
So, as Prasad has pointed out repeatedly, more economic reforms and urbanisation will go much further in mitigating caste discrimination and poverty in general, compared to government policies. However, caste discrimination must be opposed and fought against by all Indians, for the sake of the soul of our nation.
Annihilating the birth-based caste system is a battle we must all engage in at a societal level. We will honour our ancient culture with this fight. More importantly , we will end something that is just plain wrong.
Source: Times of India, 2-02-2016

Why caste battle in TN never ends

M Kalyanaraman & Bosco Dominique

TNN





Today, nearly every caste group in the state has political strength and this accounts for the endless cycle of violence not witnessed anywhere else in the South

Parameswari and Suresh (names changed) work at large banks in Chennai and have known each other since they were classmates in a Vellore college. The two wanted to get married but Parameswari's parents, who live in a village near Vellore, have refused permission. They are vanniyars, categorized as OBCs, and the boy is a Dalit.The family's fears are understandable -over the last couple of years, Vanniyar-Dalit marriages have led to violence across northern Tamil Nadu. Chennai is just 200km away from Parameshwari's village but it is far removed from her family's realities.
Violent clashes between dalits and OBCs have been a feature of the southern districts for many decades. But since the late 1980s, when PMK chief S Ramadoss, a vanniyar leader, started a powerful campaign demanding separate quotas for his caste group, violence has become common in the north too.
In the past it took egregious instances of untouchability to set off a conflict -serving tea to Dalits in separate tumblers or refusing to let them use footwear for in stance. But today , violence is sparked off by inter-caste marriages and dalit demands to worship in temples.
Typically , Dalits would ask for the right to pull the village temple car (rath) during festivals. But, at Seshasamudram village in Villupuram, the Mariamman temple was for dalits, and the district administration had brokered an agreement between the Vanniyars and the Dalits on the route the car would take.
On the night of August 15, a dozen Dalit villagers were decorating the car for next day's procession when there was a sudden blackout. A mob descended on the dalit colony , launching a brutal attack. As the 80-odd Dalit families fled the colony , the mob got to work, burning down houses and vehicles. The temple car was torched and petrol bombs were lobbed into homes.
It took the police four hours to bring the situation under control. Over 70 persons were taken into custody and charged under various sections including prevention of atrocities on SCST act. “We never expected violence on this scale especially after we reached a consensus.Most Vanniyars are not against taking our temple car in procession but a few influential people were against it. They said the presiding deity can be taken in a bullock cart through public roads, not the temple car,“ says a dalit representative.
The violence has raised the political temperature in the state. A week after, the Dalits have still not returned home.Ramadoss has alleged that the police and district administration are biased against Vanniyars. Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, the party that represents the Dalit caste group in northern TN, has flayed the delay in providing compensation to those affected.
It is important to understand the tussle over the temple car. In Tamil Nadu, the temple is the centre of village -and community -life. Temple festivals are the most significant events in the village calendar and Dalits have been increasingly demanding that their right to worship and take part in common festivals be upheld.The dominant OBCs in the areas have often opposed this.
“This is the classic situation that Ambedkar described.The OBCs may be vociferous in their opposition to upper castes and brahmins, demanding quotas as under-privileged, but they need the Dalits under them so they feel superior,“ says C Lakshmanan, faculty at the Madras Institute of Development Studies.
“That we have so many caste outfits with political strength is the reason for the violence that we don't see in other southern states,“ says Dalit scholar and VCK member D Ravikumar.

Neither BPL nor APL

Socio-Economic and Caste Census can help identify welfare beneficiaries without falling into a binary trap.

The release earlier this month of the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) has been followed by much media analysis. Some have expressed scepticism about what it shows and others have treated it as yet another set of numbers on how many are poor in India. It has also been variously hailed as revolutionising benefit transfers and slammed mainly on the absence of the caste data. However, no one has really discussed what this data enables and what still remains to be done. Also, after the big-bang release, the government has not elaborated on how it intends to use this data or on the timelines involved. My aim here is to congratulate the present government for taking ownership of the SECC, and also point out that there are still pending matters. Not many know that the SECC grew from an almost routine exercise to perhaps one of the most ambitious of its kind ever conducted anywhere. The original intent was to simply update existing BPL (below poverty line) lists. The last BPL census had been conducted in 2002 and the procedure then adopted was to collect information on 13 indicators for every rural household and assign a mark for each of these. Households were ranked on the basis of their total marks, and the cut-off for BPL selection was the mark at which the total number of BPL households in a state was equal to the Planning Commission’s poverty estimate for that state. Since the latter was based on surveyed per capita consumption, completely different from the BPL census indicators, the result was a conceptual hotchpotch. It also lacked transparency — no one really knew why they had or had not been classified as BPL — and was therefore subject to manipulation. The outcome, as is well known, was that many relatively rich persons were included and many genuinely poor people were left out of the BPL list. This list, moreover, was mindlessly binary since it determined eligibility to either none or several welfare benefits, each of which sought to address a different need. The committee appointed by the ministry of rural development, under the chairmanship of N.C. Saxena, to suggest the broad design of the new BPL census noted all of the above and proposed a radical departure: A three-fold classification of households between “excluded”, “automatically included” and “others”. The first of these, to be identified on the basis of assets and income, would be excluded from welfare benefits. The second, to be identified on the basis of acute social destitution, would be eligible without any further condition. “Others” would be ranked on the basis of indicators of deprivation and would, resources permitting, be eligible for suitable benefits. Further, noting problems of manipulation, it recommended both gram sabha oversight and a national data registry. The implementation of this was led by B.K. Sinha, then secretary, rural development, who took a number of pathbreaking steps. Conscious of possible data misreporting, he set up a small core group of officials and academics and, taking the states on board, conducted a detailed pilot census in 250 villages across the country to test the reliability of the indicators before finalising the questionnaire. He coordinated with the registrar general who, in the meantime, had been asked to conduct a caste census. So both exercises could be done through the same questionnaire, riding on house-lists prepared for the 2011 Population Census and the National Population Register. He also got public-sector undertakings to provide over six lakh handheld electronic devices and operators who worked with state officials to conduct a paperless census, household data from which was uploaded in near real time on to a central server. The core group at the Centre analysed this data against the Population Census and other sources, requesting resurveys in cases of gross mismatch. In addition to this and other supervisory checks, he also got the states to agree that, in the interest of transparency, the preliminary data uploaded would be final only after every household had the chance to see their data, file objections and subject it to public audit in the gram sabha. The data now released is mainly the preliminary upload for rural areas, which was already in place by end-2013. The final lists after public audit are complete only for half the rural districts, and progress has been even slower in urban areas, where the urban development ministry is implementing a different methodology, devised by a committee chaired by S.R. Hashim. On caste data, the registrar general’s office still awaits inputs from the states on how to classify the very large number of castes reported. There is, therefore, much to be done before the SECC is completed. Nonetheless, having examined the rural data as chair of an expert committee on the use of SECC data for rural development, I am convinced that it amounts to an online national registry of good-quality household-level data that can be used to identify beneficiaries for each of the many government welfare programmes separately, without falling into the binary BPL trap. Most of the data are robust and consistent with those available from other sources, at least up to the state level. Also, there is no evidence of large data misreporting, except possibly on land, and if anything, richer respondents could hide much less wealth in the SECC than assessed in the pilot census. The pilot-based exclusion criteria, which eliminate households that meet any one of 14 exclusion indicators, exclude 40 per cent of households in the full data, against only 28 per cent in the pilot. Besides considering possible specific criteria for social pensions and the Indira Awaas Yojana, our committee recommended relaxing the exclusion criteria so that a household would be excluded either if it had any one of five specified indicators or if it possessed any two of the remaining exclusion indicators. This would bring the rural exclusion criteria conceptually closer to those recommended by the Hashim Committee for urban areas and, by reducing the excluded proportion from 40 per cent to about 25 per cent, also be consistent with the National Food Security Act (NFSA). Of course, other options exist, but consistency in exclusion across rural and urban areas and with the NFSA may help the states to complete the already delayed final stage and proceed to the actual use of the data.
 The writer is professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, and former member, Planning Commission.
Written by Abhijit Sen | Published:July 22, 2015 12:00 am -

In Bollywood, storylines remain backward on caste

But Tamil films are refreshingly different.

Just six of the lead characters in the nearly 300 Bollywood movies released over the last two years belonged to a backward caste, an analysis of data by The Hindushows.

In contrast, a substantial number of popular Tamil movies of 2013 and 2014 had backward caste lead characters.

For an insight into the depiction of caste in Bollywood, The Hindu analysed all Hindi movies released in 2013 and 2014 for which information was publicly available, studied the characters’ names and the movies storylines, and used secondary sources of information. Only two movies in 2014 had lead characters who were explicitly from the backward castes — Manjunath and Highway, which starred a Gujjar criminal. Two others had characters who could have been from backward castes — the Madhuri Dixit-starrer Gulaab Gang, loosely based on the life of Sampat Pal, and Hawaa Hawaai, a children’s movie by Amole Gupte.

Mary Kom, based on the life of the champion boxer, has a tribal lead character. Two movies had Christian lead characters, three had Sikh heroes and nine had Muslim lead characters. Among the rest, 66 lead characters were upper caste Hindus, while the remaining were Hindus of unstated caste. In 2013, two lead characters — in Bandook and the Kangana Ranaut-starrer Revolver Rani — belonged to a backward caste, while Ranvir Singh’s character in Goliyon ki Rasleela Ramleela is believed to have been modelled on a Scheduled Tribe person.

Upper caste heroes still hold sway

In Bollywood movies released in 2013, four leading men were Christian, one Jain, three Sikh and 5 Muslim. Of the rest, 65 were upper caste Hindus, while the remaining were Hindus of unstated caste without caste reference. The numbers were the same for men and women.

In the past, Bollywood produced the odd movie with a backward caste lead character. In three such movies – ‘Aakrosh’ (2010), ‘Rajneeti’ (2010) and ‘Omkara’ (2006) — the character was played by Ajay Devgn. However, movies with lead characters who are from backward castes tend to be those that deal specifically with inter-caste issues; characters do not just happen to be from a backward caste.

Lack of diversity

There is a similar lack of diversity among male and female actors themselves; the overwhelming majority of nearly 750 actors and actresses who were in more than five movies over the last decade are upper caste Hindus, followed by Muslims. In contrast, more Tamil movies tend to feature backward caste lead characters. While a systematic analysis of all Tamil movies was not possible on account of the naming conventions used in the south, of the 16 top movies of 2013, seven likely had backward caste lead characters. In 2014, at least one lead character from the top 10 movies was Dalit (Madras).

Several directors and writers whom The Hindu contacted declined to speak because of the “sensitivity” of the topic.

(With additional reporting from Samarth Bansal)

Keywords: Bollywood movies, Bollywood stories, backward caste lead characters

Let us not essentialise the village

Despite the presence of caste in the globalised world of Indian modernity, the belief that caste consciousness is a rural occurrence persists. ‘Urban’ and ‘rural’ continue to be treated as contrasting categories as terms of reference for policy.

Several years ago, I witnessed a key moment in a rural primary school in Allahabad district of Uttar Pradesh. It was defining in that it revealed how casual educational planning in India is in the pursuit of long-term social aims. I was in a Class V room, sitting at the back and watching an old, experienced teacher and the children. The class strength was at least 50. It was a cold morning and many of them had neither shoes nor socks. I knew that while the government distributes a free uniform to schoolchildren, shoes are not a part of it. And in any case, socks are a complicated matter. Somehow, planners have never accepted socks to be a basic need for children.

The lesson that morning was a poem. It was a patriotic piece of verse with plenty of scope for explaining difficult words and their spelling. That is what the teacher was doing when he noticed that someone was standing at the door and holding a piece of paper. The teacher went over and looked at the paper. Then he turned towards the class and said, “All the SC [Scheduled Caste] children, stand up.” Ten to 12 children stood up. The teacher told them, “Go to the office. Your scholarship has come.” They left and the lesson continued.

‘This is a village’

As far as the teacher was concerned, there was nothing unusual in calling some of his students as “SC children”. Highlighting their caste background was part of a routine necessity. It was official work — that’s all. What about the rest of the children? When I put forth this question to the teacher during the half-day break, he smiled and said, “They are general.” That did not answer my question, so I repeated it. He said, “This is a village. Everyone knows everybody’s caste here.” And then he added, “This is not a city where no one worries about caste.”

A recent visit to Allahabad revived the memory of the incident, the teacher and what he had said. This time I had some work in the university. On the way from the station to the guest house, my host updated me with some news. He told me that the process of filling up the hundreds of vacant teaching posts had again stopped because the vice-chancellor had resigned. Many key departments were functioning with less than a third of their sanctioned staff strength. This was a familiar story — a sort of national dirge. But something else my host said that morning reminded me of my visit to the village school in Allahabad district. He said that the university functions under the pressure of three main lobbies: the Brahmin group, the Thakur group and the Kayastha group. They actively compete for influence over every major decision, and, most avidly, over the process of selection for new appointments. After all, their future depends on continuous recruitment and proof of success in keeping up their pressure.

If there is one city in north India where one might expect caste consciousness to have diminished as a result of modernisation, it would be Allahabad. There are several historical reasons. To begin with, the university located at Allahabad is among the oldest in India, and it was not merely an examining university. Set up in 1887, it had existed earlier as the Muir Central College. With special patronage given by the British to several modern institutions in Allahabad, the university progressed rapidly and it became, in popular perception, the “Oxford of the East”. As the historian, Christopher Bayly, who passed away recently, has pointed out, the town area of Allahabad had a higher proportion of literates in English than any other town west of Calcutta. With the establishment of the Indian Press in 1884, Allahabad became a major centre of publishing and literary activity in Hindi.

The Indian Press launched Saraswati in 1900, a monthly magazine that became Hindi’s foremost platform for social and literary debates. As the new century progressed, other journals were born, such as Premchand’s Hans and Mahadevi Varma’s Chand. Remarkably different in their concerns and discourses, these, and other magazines, deepened the reach of modern ideas in every sphere of social life. The university flourished in the middle of a vast amount of dynamic, intellectual, literary and political activity.

Resurgence of caste

While the decline of Allahabad University has a wider, systemic context, the rise of strong caste-based groups inside it is a more specific phenomenon, demonstrating the resilience of the caste system and its identity-giving role. The popular assumption that urban modernity will weaken the power of caste was apparently based on a narrow view of the many functions it serves. Caste continues to be a major social force governing matrimony, socialisation of children, social status, and, in many cases, occupation. Political measures such as universal franchise and reservation were expected to make caste hierarchy irrelevant. Perhaps that did happen, but only to a limited extent and not in every region. Modern living, travel and communication were also supposed to usher in a social order where the individual could practise and enjoy the freedom of choice in all matters. When we look at the growth and number of caste and sub-caste communities that inhabit the Internet, we realise how innocent our great expectations from modernity were.

Caste mobilisation on the Internet reminds us of the desperate search for identity that Indians continue to make, tapping every possible resource — from nation and religion to caste and sub-caste. Apparently, virtual localism provides the same kind of solace in a globalised environment that a visit during the holidays to one’s native village provided to earlier generations. It can also be seen as solace for the physical loss of the village where one’s grandparents once used to live or perhaps are still living.

Urban-rural polarity

Despite this pervasive and vigorous presence of caste in the globalised world of Indian modernity, the belief that caste consciousness is mainly a rural phenomenon persists. “Urban” and “rural” continue to be treated as contrasting categories, not merely in popular parlance but also as terms of reference for public policy. The growth of education seems to have strengthened the view that caste — as a system of values and beliefs — now prevails mainly in villages. This stereotyped perception privileges the urban over the rural, making the former a symbol of progress, and the latter a symbol of stagnation. This simplistic division has distorted public policy and distribution of financial outlays. Towns and cities claim a disproportionately larger share of attention and money. They represent the future of the nation. On the other hand, villages are believed to represent the past. Occasionally treated as objects of reverence and concern, they receive mainly subsistence or, at times, compensatory grants from public funds.

Whether it is caste or any other marker of continuity, the ideology of associating it with rural life is highly problematic. This ideology has imparted an ominous ring to the term “rural development”. As practised today, rural development means pushing the village to copy the town. This vision has no other image of the future to offer to a village except to become urban-like. This kind of mono-modernism is doomed to fail as indeed it already has. The persistence of caste and its resurgence in modernised spaces proves that policies based on rural-urban polarity are mistaken. Such policies are likely to exacerbate the wider crisis that we can witness across towns and villages in various forms, both in the natural and the social environment. It is a false belief that caste-based identities are a rural preserve. It would be equally erroneous to think that gender bias is found mainly in villages. Such ideas are remarkably popular among those responsible for shaping and implementing state policies, such as civil servants and teachers.

If the only future we can see for villages is to turn them into towns, it would be no future worth aspiring for, considering the shape our towns are already in. The late Raymond Williams, a historian of culture, had pointed out that the country and the city are not two rival states of human reality, but rather a continuum with many intermediate forms and overlaps. By essentialising the village, we merely display the limitations of our capacity to acknowledge a general crisis that the agenda of modernity faces.

(Prof. Krishna Kumar is Professor of Education at the University of Delhi and a former Director of NCERT.)

second opinion - Caste one's lot

Jug Suraiya





How India marches ahead by going backwards

India is a unique country in many ways. And one of the uniquer ways that it is unique is that in order to get ahead it goes backwards, literally.The National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC) has asked the government's permission to sub-categorise OBCs ­ other backward classes ­ into three separate divisions: the merely backward, the even more backward and the most backward.
The reason is that there is growing apprehension that the so-called `creamy layer' among the OBCs are benefiting disproportionately from the 27% job quota reserved for backward castes at the expense of the most backward. So if all goes according to the NCBC's plan, the country will see a multiplication of OBCs: the backward, the backwarder and the backwardest.
Similarly, among dalits there are the regular dalits and then there are the mahadalits, who are supposedly more dalitical than the ordinary dalits. Ever since Mandal, the politics of what might be called competitive backwardness has gained momentum with not only more and more people wanting to claim backwardness, but more and more people claiming even greater backwardness.
Backwardness has become a prized commodity, like gold or diamonds, and everyone wants a chunk of it. For instance, the Jat community ­ which is known for its assertive forwardness in getting its own way in all manner of things ­ is aggressively pressing its demand to be classified under the OBC rubric. Demands have also been raised that Muslims and Christians too should be given backward quotas within their respective folds, which is all the more intriguing in that many converted to these faiths in order to escape the caste system.
With everyone racing in reverse gear to get backward ­ and then even more backward ­ status, India will witness a boom in backwardness, which will become one of the fastest growing industries in the country . Indeed, backwardness has made so much progress that in some places so-called upper castes, like brahmins, are laying claim to be designated as backward.
If this trend continues, we can pride ourselves on having devised the world's only society that is truly back-to-front.

Groom For Groom

There is need for mutual understanding between anti-caste and queer groups.

The Mother of a gay activist places a matrimonial advertisement in her local newspaper in Mumbai. She is searching for a groom for her son. This is extraordinary because all other ads are searching for brides for grooms, and grooms for brides. Apart from the same-sex requirement, this advertiser has other expectations of the groom. He should be well placed, animal loving and vegetarian. And caste is no bar but he should preferably be an Iyer, a Hindu Brahmin.
This ad is a welcome new disruption to the popular imagination of heterosexual marriage in India. It portends the possibility of a matrimonial alliance between two men or, in other words, of same-sex marriage. It was so threatening to some newspapers that they refused to publish it.

Newspapers routinely carry matrimonial ads. Most are for heterosexual marriages and they disclose information like age, occupation, height, religion and caste. Often, these ads are clustered under caste categories, which implies that matrimonial alliances are sought within those categories only. Some ads mention their caste preference explicitly. Others declare caste and their openness to matrimonial alliances from any caste.

The mother has to be lauded for her openness, courage and conviction in placing this ad. Yet this disruption is narrow, and limited to same-sex matrimonials. It does not disrupt the caste characteristic of matrimony. On the contrary, it explicitly declares a preference for Brahmin Iyers. In defence, the activist son has clarified that his mother is only trying to find somebody similar to their own culture and there is nothing discriminatory about it. But the language of discrimination can be coded with words like culture and preference for The Constitution prohibits discrimination on the basis of caste, among other grounds. Matrimonial ads are common tools of caste discrimination, yet they are ubiquitous and unchallenged. There is something new and old about this same-sex matrimonial. It is a bold new step towards the advancement of gay rights in India, but it is also an old and well-known form of caste discrimination. It is telling of the caste composition of gay rights and it is saying that caste Hindus are preferred, Dalits keep away.

Dalit translates in English as broken, downtrodden or crushed. It is a figurative usage that calls out centuries of injustice based on caste and stares that subordination in the face. Dalits were considered to be polluted and unclean, and deemed “untouchable”. Some of these sentiments of untouchability and discrimination still flourish. Cleaning tasks are typically assigned to Dalits. “Manual scavenging”is a euphemism for cleaning sewers and dry latrines by hand. Residential areas in rural India are segregated on caste lines. Although urban India allows for greater anonymity, it is easily compromised by caste-oriented surnames like Iyer, Sharma, Menon, Dixit, Ghosh, …vegetarians.

Movements are not radical anymore: Arundhati Roy

The writer-activist observes that the Left needs an intellectual re-evaluation of the role played by caste in Indian society.

The fortunes of the Left in India are not going to change dramatically just by effecting a change in its leadership.

Writer Arundhati Roy, who was in Chennai to receive the “Ambedkar Sudar” award conferred by the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, was pessimistic about the chances of the Left emerging as a credible opposition to the politics of the Hindu Right, which has sought to combine communal polarisation with corporate-driven economic development.

As the Hindu Right seeks to appropriate B.R. Ambedkar even while pursuing the campaign of ghar wapsi, she observes that the Left needs an intellectual re-evaluation of the role played by caste in Indian society.

“The Left has failed to intellectually deal with the issue of caste. By saying that ‘caste is class,’ the Left — be it in West Bengal or Kerala — has checkmated itself and made itself irrelevant. In this regard, the rift between Dr. Ambedkar and Shripad Amrit Dange, an important member of the Indian trade union movement in the late 1920s, on the issue of mill workers’ rights in Bombay is important. Ambedkar rightly pointed out how there is no equality within the workers where Dalits would only get lower paid jobs. This has been the case since the inception of the Communist party in India,” she claims.

The fight against caste is a complex one, she remarks. “Philosophically speaking, subordinated castes have to take pride in their identity and have to assert that pride to fight caste oppression. But then there comes a tipping point at which that radical positioning is used against itself, in order to promote a kind of isolation, and it suits the privileged to keep that going.”

Not new

She identifies the ghar wapsi campaign by the Hindu Right, which seeks to “take back” the converted Muslims and Christians, as an effort to bring the subordinated castes into the ‘big house but keep them in the servant quarters.’ “The ghar wapsi campaign is not new. It was begun at the turn of the 19th and 20th century by Arya Samaj and the Shuddhi movement to purify the impure and bring converted castes into the Hindu fold.”

It was an ingenious counter-move, she claims, by the Hindu Right to influence the demography as politics of the Empire turned into politics of a representative government. “Until then, nobody cared when subordinated castes embraced Islam, Christianity or Sikhism. Then, suddenly, the demography became important. In this history, which included that of groups like the Arya Samaj — and Gandhi was an heir to that tradition — there was a lot of talk about untouchability, but no talk about caste itself. No talk about entitlement — the access to land, to wealth, to certain kinds of work — that is the real basis of the caste system. Now they have resurrected it because it is not just about Dalit communities as even the Adivasis are being fought over,” she says.

While mainstream commentators have prescribed globalisation and hyper-capitalism as a cure for caste and other inequalities, Ms. Roy warns that the caste structures ‘won’t break down’ by embracing capitalism, but will only be further strengthened.

Toxic alloy

“The fact is that it hasn’t happened significantly. Thomas Piketty in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows how those who have inherited wealth have the best chance of succeeding in the capitalist economy. That makes caste the mother of capitalism because caste is about inherited entitlement supposedly ordained by divine mandate. Caste and capitalism have fused into a toxic alloy. Privatisation will destroy the little foothold that Dalits have in the Establishment because of reservation.”

Ms. Roy slams the new Land Acquisition Bill, tabled by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Parliament, dismissing the notion that it will result in more jobs.

“The corporate land grab is the fundamental drive of the new economy. Whether they are IT, coal or steel companies, the first move is to take over and then control land and water resources. The notion that you must allow them to do it and that will generate jobs is a myth. The statistics say that we are only seeing ‘jobless growth.’”

She further adds that the economic and social conditions of 10 million workers in the industrial belt of Delhi, who, she says, are “show windows for the new economy” belie the notion that corporate-driven industrialisation will result in improving the quality of life of the workers. “They live in abject poverty and in absolute terror of their employers as well as their landlords.”

She rues the fact that the debates around land, when compared to the 60s and the 70s, are not “radical” anymore.

“When the Naxalite movement began and the Jayaprakash Narayan-led agitations occurred, a critique of Indira Gandhi was in full flow, what were they talking about? They were talking about social justice, redistribution of land, ‘land to the tiller’ and so on. Today, even the most ‘radical’ movements are only demanding that the lands of Adivasi people be left alone.”

Keywords: Arundhati Roy interview, Ambedkar Sudar, Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, Indian Left, Hindu Right, caste in Indian society

Jul 15 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

Ancient caste system worked well: ICHR head

Akshaya.mukul

New Delhi





Discussing the caste system, newly-appointed chairman of Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) Yellapragada Sudershan Rao wrote in a blog in 2007, “Positive aspects of Indian culture are so deep the merits of ancient systems would be rejuvenated.“In the blog-article titled, `Indian Caste System: A Reappraisal', he wrote: “The (caste) system was working well in ancient times and we do not find any complaint from any quarters against it. It is often misinterpreted as an exploitative social system for retaining economic and social status of certain vested interests of the ruling class.“
He added, “Indian caste sys tem, which has evolved to answer the requirements of civilization at a later phase of development of culture, was integrated with the Varna system as enunciated in the ancient scriptures and dharmasastras.“ New ICHR chief Yellapragada Sudershan Rao’s views on the caste system have triggered a debate.
Historian D N Jha said, “Rao’s article is reflective of his primitive mentality. It is gross revivalism. If the ancient caste system is justified in modern context, why not have a brahmin PM instead of Narendra Modi. Rao has been appointed by an OBC PM.” Rao made a distinction between the caste system and the varna system. He said while the caste system classifies the community, the varna classifies the functions of an individual. “Varna leads one to moksha (the liberation of the soul) while caste system is meant for the material and human resource management of a civilized society.” Rao said questionable social customs in India pointed out by English-educated Indian intellectuals did not exist from ancient times but “could be traced to this period of Muslim rule in north India spanning over seven centuries.” For the full report, log on to http://www.timesofindia.com

Jul 15 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

Ancient caste system worked well: ICHR head

Akshaya.mukul

New Delhi





Discussing the caste system, newly-appointed chairman of Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) Yellapragada Sudershan Rao wrote in a blog in 2007, “Positive aspects of Indian culture are so deep the merits of ancient systems would be rejuvenated.“In the blog-article titled, `Indian Caste System: A Reappraisal', he wrote: “The (caste) system was working well in ancient times and we do not find any complaint from any quarters against it. It is often misinterpreted as an exploitative social system for retaining economic and social status of certain vested interests of the ruling class.“
He added, “Indian caste sys tem, which has evolved to answer the requirements of civilization at a later phase of development of culture, was integrated with the Varna system as enunciated in the ancient scriptures and dharmasastras.“ New ICHR chief Yellapragada Sudershan Rao’s views on the caste system have triggered a debate.
Historian D N Jha said, “Rao’s article is reflective of his primitive mentality. It is gross revivalism. If the ancient caste system is justified in modern context, why not have a brahmin PM instead of Narendra Modi. Rao has been appointed by an OBC PM.” Rao made a distinction between the caste system and the varna system. He said while the caste system classifies the community, the varna classifies the functions of an individual. “Varna leads one to moksha (the liberation of the soul) while caste system is meant for the material and human resource management of a civilized society.” Rao said questionable social customs in India pointed out by English-educated Indian intellectuals did not exist from ancient times but “could be traced to this period of Muslim rule in north India spanning over seven centuries.” For the full report, log on to http://www.timesofindia.com