Thank you Karthik and the Ambedkar King Study Circle for initiating
this series and naming it boldly. Yes, we
need to talk
about caste with the aim of annihilating it.
No doubt, this is easier said than done. But
part of
my objective today is to show what we need
to do in order to make this possible, since
this
project goes way beyond the domain of law
and into the heart of our social lives. It
calls for all
of us to participate, plot, plan, be vigilant,
and work together.
I wanted to begin with a point about social
science – especially since many of the audience
members maybe from science and engineering
fields (fields that I have worked in for few
years
before becoming an anthropologist). Social
science may appear odd or weak in its analytical
toolkit in comparison to say physics, biology,
or engineering. This is because the study
of society
and human action come with its own challenges.
It can afford to be neither a precise science,
nor become a tool of social engineering. Unlike
particles, things or sedated animals,
people talk
back. They are not robots – they improvise,
and they cannot be studied in controlled
conditions. Yet, people act in patterned ways,
and do somewhat predictable things. This makes
human action tend to reproduce to a large
degree the existing social relations (or what
we call -
social structure) from one day to another.
Thus, we ‘normally’ expect that when we
wake up,
the basis of our existence has not changed
dramatically. This normal expectation is itself
dependent on one’s social position and how
much one can take things for granted. Of course
there are periods of crisis (one of which
we are currently living in) that bring about
dramatic
changes in the economic, political, social
and cultural aspects of a society. So social
science has
the challenge of capturing a dynamic and only
somewhat patterned subject in ways that help
us
grasp how, when, where and why the change
occurs. That is tough. And it becomes tougher
for
that kind of social science that seeks to
not only understand reality, but desires to
change it.
I hope you will appreciate the nature of this
task on its own terms.
My focus today is on how to conceptualize
casteism in order to attempt to annihilate caste.
I deliberately begin with casteism – not caste.
To be provocative, let me suggest that no
one has
actually seen a caste. There are about 4000 odd jatis in India – which is what is referenced
when someone speaks of caste. This makes an average of 325,000 persons in a caste (assuming
everyone in India is born into a jāti – a
good assumption to make). Obviously, one has
to
imagine such a reality and it is a very rare
and gifted person who can claim to have ‘seen’
one.
Castes are therefore imagined social groups based on purported descent. I emphasize
imagined and purported, because these are
claims; they are powerful ideas. At best only
a few generations are actually traceable for most families
This is what we call as lineage
(or vamsh).
Many lineages make up something called a clan
(gotra), which are represented by a fictitious
entity, usually a person – 
who is seen as a symbol or totem for this clan.
Native Americans use
birds or animals as totems. A caste is a collection
of clans. So, we are clearly in the realm
of very tall claims at this point. Therefore,
we need to think of ‘castes’ as claims
made about an imagined group.
Like nations, they exist only
through their symbols – caste flags, caste
associations, and communicative technologies
that seek to mobile the group.
In contrast, if we consider casteism, we find
that it is something that we have all seen,
felt, and
materially experienced, even viscerally.
For casteism is about human actions that are related to
that imagined entity called caste. These actions
could be banal & benign such as asking
someone their family history in a particular
manner, seeking to know if meat is cooked
in their
mother’s kitchen, trying to read something
into people’s names, the way they dress
or where
they live, intuitively choosing friends who
are ‘like you’ but without ever asking
what the resemblance is, or asking for one’s gotra at a temple.
Or they could be more overt and brutal actions
such as preventing someone from using
a well or drinking from a shared cup or
tumbler, excluding someone from a group, not
giving credit to someone or paying someone
less for the same work, humiliating someone, or
attacking and killing someone for sporting
a moustache,
for riding a horse at their wedding, having a particular ringtone about Ambedkar on their phone,
or sexually violating someone
for daring to be successful, for passing an
exam or for finishing a degree.
Casteism is then these
set of practices. I use the word practices
– to capture
the fact that human actions are many times
habituated action, things we do not necessarily
think about, but do nonetheless. It is the
‘common sense’ and ‘take-for-granted’
part of our
lives. This is because we learn them from
very early age and tend to develop cognitive
schemas
that dispose us to act in particular ways
without us realizing it for the most part.
Practices thus
reflect social structure. Focus on practices
make us view acts of discrimination as a subset
of the larger set of practices.
Discriminatory practices then are just those that can come within a legal purview.
I would like for us to keep
this in mind as I make 4 points today about casteism,
and draw 2 implications for annihilation of caste
[slide show]
So how can we think about casteism and caste?
1. Casteism is the monopolization of power
and wealth on the basis of status claims
a. Status is about prestige and honor.
People live and die and kill for status. Status
claims are made in overt or covert ways but
they follow a pattern. Any status claim
begins with an act of separating
(Into Them and Us, usually by claiming some difference between the two).
This is followed then by an act of incorporating (relating Us & Them hierarchically; or saying
Us is above Them in some way).
Separating & incorporating or making difference
and making hierarchy are at the
heart of status claims. They go together.
b. Status claims are built upon deriving pride
about one’s own group, but
simultaneously holding the other in a humiliating position or contempt. This is what
Ambedkar calls graded hierarchy or graded
inequality with
an ascending scale of hatred and a descending scale of contempt.
c. Status claims require legitimation – they need to be justified. This is usually done
through “naturalizing” the status (perhaps
using religion, or other cultural reasoning
to justify the status claim). More on this later.
d. Once status claims are made and legitimized
in some manner, then the action of
monopolizing proceeds. The situation in
which two people or few individuals meet
is transformed into one about groups: Us-es
and the Thems. The key move here is
that those who do the separating and incorporating
then control the situation in
such a manner that the Us benefits at the
cost of the Them – the two are connected.
Casteism enables the Us to monopolize power
or the ability to control and dominate, and
monopolize wealth or the ability to garner
and hold onto resources. Status claims thus
lead to monopolies of power and wealth.
This is casteism.
2. Casteism is consolidated in sites of everyday
life, including the workplace and the family
a. Workplace recruitment practices and educational
credentialism (ranking institutions
and stamping people for life from those institutions
as having abilities or lack thereof
– something we are very good at)
are standard casteist practices.
This ensures that monopolies continue unabated.
b. Further, the monopolization is complete
when the power and wealth is shared only
within the Us over generations through ensuring
endogamy or marriage only within
one’s jati. So, far from being a private
matter, arranged marriages which are usually
within the Us, enables casteism – by aiding
the reproduction of monopoly of power
& wealth through patriarchy.
c. Other sites such as housing, credit networks,
healthcare access, informational capital
(where does one get one’s information from), and more mundane sites such as
markets, shopping malls, restaurants, transportations, and of course places of
religious worship – all are also part of
the reproduction of casteism.
3. Casteism operates through inherentist & essentialist bias
a. Status claims are based on two particular habits of thought that shape action: the
first is inherentist bias - the á priori
identification of individuals as members of
social groups with traits or attributes. That person
then is not an independent individual
but only a marker of a group. John Doe ceases
to be John Doe (an individual who is
complex), but is simply a Dalit (a category)
with particular group traits. The second is
an essentialist bias - the assumption that
groups have unchanging or essential traits.
This operates interestingly across caste groups.
For example, in an empirical study
by Prof. Mahalingam in Madurai, Brahmin men
and women were shown to think in
far more significantly essentialist ways than
Dalits.
b. In the Cisco case, the initial action of
‘outing’ John Doe establishes the separation
and incorporation of John Doe as different
from others, and in some way as inferior
to them (due to inferences about ‘merit’).
This follows inherentist and essentialist
bias. In turn, the workplace becomes a place
for enacting a series of actions by John
Doe’s bosses that aid their own relative
monopolization of power and wealth. If you
are with me thus far then,
here is my fourth point about casteism.
4. Casteism increasingly justifies itself
as cultural differentiation
a. Here is a trick question: What is the difference
between any two castes? If you are
thinking in terms of difference in behavior
or looking for different abilities in the
different caste members, you have fallen for
the trick. Picking any one of these
options only legitimizes or rationalizes casteism.
This is because of two reasons:
i. there is enough variation within any caste
group (all behaviors and abilities
can be assumed or shown to be distributed normally)
so it is difficult to
say that a behavior or trait is what characterizes a caste group.
ii. there is a deeper reason: casteism demands
the production of difference
(remember how status claims assume difference,
and then make that
difference matter). 75 years ago Ambedkar
had noted that that social
distinctions recognized by Hindus in their
everyday lives “are the result of the
Hindu instinct to be different from his fellow
which has resulted from the
belief of people being innately different.”
It is a much neglected insight since
Ambedkar actually presaged some of the social
science perspectives on the
construction of identities. So, the only difference
between any two castes is the claim that they are different.
It is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Nothing else.
b. This notion of ‘difference’ aids the justification of casteism. No casteist admits to being one.
So, as more and more people challenge
casteism, a new way has emerged over time
to justify it mask casteist practices as cultural differentiation.
Thus we can hear, “I am not casteist; I
just do not like your culture”.
What is missed out from this refrain is: “But you do not
like my culture because of my caste. is this
not so?”. For example, since it is difficult
to openly state that Muslims and Dalits
need not apply, the sign ‘vegetarian only’
for apartments acts as a camouflage for
casteism and communalism. Now, how is someone
identified as a vegetarian or
meat eater? But of course by their caste or
religious identity! This is thus a vicious
cycle. My colleague Suraj Jacob and I have
shown using large datasets that every
group has significant variation within it,
including Dalits and Muslims. About 1/3 rd
Brahmins eat meat and about 1/3 rd Dalits are vegetarian.
Indeed, only Jains seem to be homogenous as a group.
So, if the Dalit person insists that they are vegetarian (a very plausible fact), other reasons will be
found to not permit them into the flat. So
the cultural reason that is given – that
is, vegetarianism - is a red-herring. I have
called this the phenomenon of culturalization
of caste. It makes casteism appear as
a benign preference or ‘taste’ for people like us.
We are now in a position to draw out 2 major implications
of such a view of casteism for the annihilation project.
1. Casteism (the practice) produces caste (the group or identity).
The two go hand in
hand.
One cannot exist without the other. Annihilation
therefore cannot mean that we retain
caste identities but somehow get rid of casteism.
That is an impossibility.
a. Casteist practices produce the phenomenon
of a caste. Status claims which are the
heart of casteism conjure up the idea that
such a social entity as caste exists with
a
set of inheritable and essential attributes.
Subjecting John Doe to casteism produced
Dalit as a category with meaning.
Casteism (which is an action, or like a verb) then is the cause, and caste (the group, or the
noun which references a social group or
identity) is its effect. Casteism makes ‘caste’
matter. Where one exists, the other too
comes into existence.
b. So, you cannot have caste identities without
casteism. This is why Ambedkar called
for an annihilation of caste. It means an
annihilation of caste identities. This radical
call by Ambedkar does not mean that we simply
forget about caste in order to
annihilate caste. Many of us have heard the
refrain: “Why do you keep talking about caste?
Does it not keep casteism alive?”
That is the caste-blind approach to caste
(adopted by many liberal savarnas). Neither
will capitalism simply destroy casteism
or patriarchy for that matter (a position
adopted by many left savarnas, not all).
Caste-blindness is not anti-caste. It actually
keeps casteism in place.
c. Annihilation of caste instead requires
caste-conscious anti-caste perspective.
It tells us to annihilate the multiple sites that are the causes of caste.
For example, caste associations are sites where casteism is reproduced faithfully.
Many such organizations exist in the US such as the
Brahmin Samaj of North America, KANA,
and almost every other caste cluster.
Despite their usual justification for why they exist, caste associations are not just celebrating
caste identity – they are actively
producing caste identity.
Annihilation of  caste could begin here by asking: how do caste associations enable casteism?
Here is one point where all caste associations will come together – to demand in the US
diaspora – that they be treated as part
of
the great American cultural diversity or multicultural
caravan.
A project of annihilation of caste, would however need to show that this is casteism in the guise
of culture, or the culturalization of caste.
2. All caste identities are relational identities (no caste exists independently).
For Dalit identity to be part of the annihilation of caste, it needs to be viewed as an anti-caste identity, not a caste identity.
a. Defining the Other as different helps to
define the Self. All caste identities are
always
relational. No caste can exist simply on its
own. Its identity is derived from the fact
of separating from another caste. Caste identities
then are always part of a caste
system based on casteism as graded inequality.
b. This means that we need to view Dalit as
a political label for an anti-caste identity,
and not a caste identity. What brings Dalits
together is not any set of attributes or
culture (for, all culture is contested internally
within the group, and Dalits are as
heterogeneous as any other group). But Dalits
are Dalits because of experiencing
casteism and untouchability. Experience of
casteism is what brings Dalits together.
It is a political identity, not a cultural
or caste identity. This needs to be kept in
mind
since annihilation of caste demands annihilation
of caste identities.
c. We can go further. Dalits are arguably
the only group that is by definition designed
for annihilating caste and the caste culture
that comes with it. The anti-caste identity
is rooted in Dalit experience.
But Dalits cannot do it alone. That experience of casteism needs to resonate with all other castes.
For that to happen, we need to build a caste-conscious,
multi-caste, and anti-caste movement. Caste-consciousness
is needed to combat caste-blindness; multi-caste
formation is needed
so that Dalits do not bear the burden of annihilating
society of casteism and caste root and branch.
This is along the lines of what Anand Teltumbde wrote long ago:
“...castes cannot be annihilated by Dalits alone”. It requires the active participation of all castes, especially savarnas.
Finally, the anti-caste perspective needs
to be foregrounded and sharpened to prevent
Dalit from being incorporated into a caste
identitarian logic. One cannot seek to preserve
caste identity while seeking the annihilation
of casteism. To tweak Ambedkar’s famous
phrase: Caste is a monster that will not be
contained. It will rear its ugly head until you kill it.
I hope to have enabled a conceptualization
of casteism that makes annihilation possible.
Thank
you.
Jai Bhim! Lal Salaam! Neel Salaam!
