Posted: Fri, Jun 18 2010. 1:00 AM IST Published on page 4
Home
THE CONTEMPORARY MEANINGS OF CASTE
Satish Deshpande
People who read the pink papers are often perplexed by caste. There
are good reasons for this. An ancient, complex and adaptable
institution that continually discovers new sources of sustenance is
surely a worthy puzzle. But a more obvious reason for our bafflement
is that, for people like us, caste seems far from experience. It may
have been the homeland of our ancestors, but to us, it is just a
foreign country. Finally, in a moral climate where it is treated like
an embarrassing disease, we don't "get" caste because we don't want to
get it.
As a guide to the perplexed, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein offered a
robust rule of thumb: The meaning of a word, he said, is to be found
in its use. So one way to answer a question such as: What is caste in
21st century India? is to ask another: What does caste do in today's
world? The latter question has the virtue of bypassing definitional
debates and fast forwarding our encounter with the empirical world.
But as we set out on this voyage of discovery, we must remember that
we will mostly be meeting people who are, at first glance, very unlike
us.
In terms of its uses, caste today is at least four things: it is a
powerful idea; an important identity; a resilient form of community;
and a type of material resource or capital. Though these use-based
meanings of caste are closely related and sometimes morph into each
other, it is still helpful to think about them as being distinct.
As an idea, the heart of caste is hierarchy, which is itself defined
by notions of separateness and inequality. Caste is a relational thing
and it maps the world in terms of relations of graded inequality.
People must decipher this complex map and use it to locate themselves
in the world, and Indians internalize it effortlessly. The colloquial
Hindustani word aukaat best expresses the idea of caste; it is about
relative standing—about who is above or below us, and to what degree.
Unlike the abstract and mostly unspoken idea of aukaat, identity is an
explicit form of recognition, whether chosen, imposed or "found".
Caste remains an important form of contemporary identity and the most
visible arena in which it finds play is politics. However, one should
not be misled into thinking of "casteism" as having corrupted
politics. Caste identities long pre-existed modern politics; with the
coming of universal franchise, politics has entered caste to mobilize
its identities for electoral purposes. Given their relative numbers,
lower caste politics tends to be noisy and direct, while upper caste
politics is usually forced to be silent and devious.
Caste is also used to define community, or the boundaries and norms of
social intimacy that shape our personal lives. Caste as community is
most clearly present in the field of kinship and marriage. Caste
endogamy or marrying within one's caste is a remarkably resilient
practice as matrimonial advertisements continue to demonstrate even in
the age of the Internet. This sphere is crucial for the practices that
shape the structures of exclusion and inclusion so central to caste as
an institution. While some lines, such as those within the upper
castes, may have grown blurred, others— such as those separating
Dalits from all others—remain as sharp as ever, as shown by the
"honour killings" in recent years.
Last but far from least, caste is a crucial form of capital. Only
partially captured by the popular term "social capital", this aspect
of caste relates to the wide variety of skills, attitudes, knowledge
and networks that one acquires by virtue of membership in a
caste-community. The most visible form of this inheritance is, of
course, property of various kinds such as a lawyer or doctor's
practice or the good will accumulated by a neighbourhood shop. Because
these kinds of inheritances are mediated by the family, and because
they also have a class character, the caste element can often be
invisible.
Survey data show a puzzling gap in the levels of living across castes
even after the usual economic variables are controlled for. Within the
same occupations, at the same educational levels and in the same
geographical regions, there is often a 15-30% difference in per capita
consumption expenditure across caste groups. It is these differences
that caste-as-capital may help explain. Apart from intangible skills
or competences, an important element is the presumption of competence
or incompetence that attaches to individuals by virtue of their caste
membership and is, at least initially, quite independent of actual
ability.
These contemporary meanings of caste need to be contextualized in
terms of two further factors. The first has to do with the peculiar
history of caste as the only pervasive social institution that
independent India vowed to abolish. How precisely does one "abolish" a
way of life? Nehruvian India, led by well meaning upper caste leaders,
chose the path of caste-blindness, which meant constitutional
abolition of caste plus a ban on public discussion. This legal, oral
and moral ban remained formal—it was not accompanied by serious
attempts to abolish the substantive privileges and disprivileges of
caste. Caste inequalities continued unchecked and even worsened in
some spheres, while the rhetoric of a casteless society lost all
credibility and was rightly denounced as a fraud.
The second factor is a direct outcome of the first; this is the
widespread belief among the most privileged sections of the upper
castes that they have no caste. By the third generation, privileged
upper castes nurtured in a caste-blind society found that their caste
was a ladder they could safely kick away since it had already done
everything that it could for them. One of the crowning ironies of 21st
century India is that claims of being casteless are today the
unmistakable signs of an upper caste identity.
The author teaches Sociology in Delhi University.
This is the last of a five-part series on the changing role of caste
in a globalized India.
To read the stories in the series, go to www.livemint.com/caste
------------------------------------
----
INFORMATION OVERLOAD?
Get all ZESTCaste mails sent out in a span of 24 hours in a single mail. Subscribe to the daily digest version by sending a blank mail to ZESTMedia-digest@yahoogroups.com, OR, if you have a Yahoo! Id, change your settings at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTMedia/join/
PARTICIPATE:-
On this list you can share caste news, discuss caste issues and network with like-minded anti-caste people from across India and the world. Just write to zestcaste@yahoogroups.com
TELL FRIENDS TO SIGN UP:-
If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTCaste by sending a blank mail to ZESTCaste-subscribe@yahoogroups.com OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/join/
Also have a look at our sister list, ZESTMedia: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTMedia/Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
ZESTCaste-digest@yahoogroups.com
ZESTCaste-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
ZESTCaste-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
No comments:
Post a Comment