Caste in motion
D Shyam Babu, Lant Pritchett, Chandra Bhan Prasad, Devesh Kapur
Posted online: 2010-09-07 20:36:55+05:30
Popular media and academic descriptions of India's rapid economic
transformation in the era of market reforms often come with a 'but':
"But development has also disrupted existing ways of living. It has
strained the social and cultural fabric of the villages."
If any post-Foucauldian social scientist has any insight to offer,
surely it is that the nostalgia of elites is an unreliable guide to
the actual experiences of marginalised social groups. As Ambedkar
recognised more than 6 decades ago: "The love of the intellectual
Indians for the village community is of course infinite if not
pathetic… What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of
ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism?" Precisely those people
and groups the 'cultural fabric of the villages' pressured into social
inferiority generally lack access both to media outlets and to the
technical tools of academia for structuring discourse, both of words
and numbers. Do Dalits' own assessments of the era of market reform
come with a 'but' or with an 'and'?
We add to the existing literature on the evolution of wellbeing during
the era of market reforms using a survey constructed by Dalits,
implemented by Dalits, administered to all Dalit households in 2
blocks of Uttar Pradesh. The blocks chosen are Bilaria Ganj in
Azamgarh District in eastern UP and Khurja in Bulandshahar District in
western UP (hereafter eastern block and western block respectively).
The instrument, uniquely among existing large-scale surveys, asks
specifically about changes since 1990 in a variety of caste practices
at the household and social level. With this data, we can document 3
massive changes in the areas surveyed.
First, there have been major changes in the grooming, eating and
ceremonial consumption patterns of Dalits, signalling their higher
social status by adopting higher status consumption patterns. Dalits
shifted out of low status (but highly calorie intensive) foods like
sugar cane juice and roti chatni into diets containing (unbroken)
rice, fresh vegetables and spices and increased use of high status
foods in social occasions like weddings.
Second, respondents report changes in the accepted behaviours between
castes, with rapid erosion in discriminatory processes that
stigmatised Dalits. By and large in these blocks Dalits are less
likely to be seated separately at weddings, they no longer are
expected to handle the dead animals of other castes, there is a
noticeable increase in births in Dalit households that are attended by
non-Dalit midwives and non-Dalits increasingly accept hospitality in
Dalit homes. None of these practices were common in 1990.
Third, there have been large shifts in the pattern of economic life
both away from and within the villages. There has been a considerable
increase in (mostly) circular migration to distant cities to work,
with nearly half of Dalit households in the eastern block having a
member in the cities.
In the villages, Dalits have shifted into professions (e.g. tailors,
masons and drivers) and businesses (e.g. grocers, paan shop owners).
Agricultural relations have changed such that almost no Dalits
participate in bonded economic ties (halwaha) and many fewer Dalits
even perform agricultural labour on upper caste lands as Dalits now
are much more likely to contract in factors from high caste groups
(e.g. tractors, land) than sell their labour to them.
Inequality in what? For whom?
India's socially marginalised populations suffer from 2 key forms of
disadvantage—social indignity and material poverty— which emerge from
intertwined socially and economically perpetuated inequalities.
Empirical assessments in India tend to conflate the two into measures
of material wellbeing (e.g. poverty or inequality) or 'neutral' social
indicators like education, health or nutrition outcomes. Even if the
distinction between indignity and economic status arises, it is
treated as axiomatic that the first is completely dependent on the
second. Even when attention is turned to 'caste', often the data
compare outcomes on standard indicators (consumption expenditures,
education) across castes, but with almost no attention to how caste
markers, behaviours and practices themselves may have changed.
Many have expressed concern that growth of the market economy in India
unleashes "inequality-increasing" forces. S Mahendra Dev and C Ravi
reach a "clear conclusion" that inequality "increased significantly in
the post-reform period", a conclusion shared by other researchers. But
the exclusive use of consumption expenditures or differences across
castes in a few outcomes as measures of inequality cannot be adequate
in the many parts of rural India where social inequalities—servility,
humiliation, lack of self-respect—are important. Comparing consumption
expenditures-based inequality statistics across states reveals the
incompleteness of the picture they present. The Gini index of
consumption expenditure inequality is considerably greater in Kerala
than in UP, in both rural and urban areas. Moreover, the differences
between Kerala and Bihar or UP are substantially larger than the
all-India changes, so the gap between UP and Kerala in urban areas in
2005 is .044 points versus a total all-India change of .034 points.
Thus, despite substantially lower inequalities in human capital in
Kerala relative to UP in the early 1980s as well as two decades later,
in 2005 Kerala had more unequal consumption inequality. Simply
comparing consumption expenditures or consumption inequality alone
would lead one to conclude that Kerala is more unequal than UP. But
such a conclusion would contradict the findings of a host of studies
extolling the greater commitment to equality of the Kerala model of
development. The reason is that the cognitive and social aspects of
inequality—self-respect, servility, full participation in social and
political life— need to be factored in to make an adequate comparison.
As elsewhere in rural India, in rural UP caste has played a key role
in structuring individual identity, limiting economic choices and
reinforcing patterns of consumption consonant with the identification
of Dalits as social inferiors. In evaluating the evolution of
wellbeing of Dalits and other socially excluded groups during the era
of market reform—a period that also coincides with increasing
political empowerment of Dalits in UP—one cannot simply assume how the
complex interplay of economic, political and social has played out. As
Neera Chandhoke points out, "the link between redistribution (of
material resources) and what has come to be known as recognition
(development of feelings of self respect)" has "proved to be more
tenuous than originally conceived by egalitarians" especially since
recognition "is not so easily commanded by politics". Passing a law
against discrimination will not make an upper caste invite a lower
caste person into his house, or, even if he does, to offer him
something to eat and drink. Conversely, perhaps an increasing
penetration of markets may increase income/consumption inequality
overall, but the move to arms length market transactions may have
socially egalitarian consequences in the 'recognition' dimension. This
could be much more important in rural India as social inequalities
shape the daily lives of marginalised populations. Improvements in
self-respect in daily interactions may matter more to rural Dalits
than income inequality from increases in wealth of Mumbai
industrialists or Bangalore IT tycoons. But before the changes in
caste differences can be evaluated, they must be measured...
Freedom from social inequality as development
The results of this unique survey reveal very substantial shifts in
Dalits' lives consistent with a growing sense of empowerment and
opportunity and declining ability of others to impose social
inequalities. The changes in grooming and eating are both consistent
with a deliberate attempt to shed consumption patterns that reproduced
social exclusion through the rapid adoption of 'elite' consumption
patterns—much faster than can be explained by economic variables
alone. The changes in the traditional stratifications in the social
life within the village have also rapidly eroded. No one would argue
Dalits have achieved anything like equality, but it is certainly the
case that many practices that reflected social subordination and
routine humiliation of Dalits have declined considerably. In a large
majority of the villages in this survey, Dalits no longer lift
non-Dalits' dead animals; Dalit babies are often delivered by
non-Dalit midwives; Dalits are rarely seated separately at weddings;
and it is no longer uncommon for non-Dalits to accept foods in Dalit
homes.
Economically, there has been a rapid shift out of traditional Dalit
economic relationships into local occupations and professions,
migration and changed agricultural practices.
Our analysis suggests that for the surveyed Dalits... prosperity
raised the standard of living and the social and cultural fabric of
the village has changed, much for the better. Debates about the
effects of economic reforms on inequality in India based on changes in
consumption inequality have so far been completely missing these much
larger changes in social and cognitive inequality. The good life, as
Hegel argued, is fundamentally dependent on being held in regard by
others, and approval and recognition are crucial to this. The arrival
of modernity in western societies ruptured existing social
hierarchies, replacing them with a universal language (even if not
practice) of dignity and self-respect. In India, questions of dignity,
self-respect and humiliation were at the core of the nationalist
discourse. But as Gopal Guru has perceptively argued while Indian
nationalists were deeply cognisant of the racial humiliations
resulting from colonisation, they were much less so over caste-based
humiliations...
Even if we limit the implications of our study just to the state of UP
(as caste has played out very differently in different regions and
states of India so we claim no generality across India) there are
roughly 32 million Dalits just in UP, which is comparable to civil
rights for African-Americans in the US (the 'black alone' population
of the US in 2004 was 36 million) or the end of apartheid in South
Africa (the 'black' population of South Africa is roughly 38.4
million).
Moreover, in the present work we make no attempt to distinguish among
the potential driving causes of these shifts by disentangling the
political (the rise of the BSP in UP), economic (market-oriented
reforms and rapid growth), exogenous social (e.g. exposure to media)
or technological (introduction of tractors and irrigation)
explanations. But what needs emphasis is that during this period, as
per their own self-assessment, the social well-being of large numbers
of Dalits advanced even faster than their material well being.
Certainly this additional human freedom should count as an 'and' in
assessing the achievements of the market reform era.
This is an extract from a working paper originally published in EPW.
Devesh Kapur is with the Center for the Advanced Study of India,
University of Pennsylvania; Chandra Bhan Prasad is an independent
researcher and columnist; Lant Pritchett is with the John F Kennedy
School of Government, Harvard University; D Shyam Babu is with the
Rajiv Gandhi Foundation
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