Author: Andre Beteille
Publication: The Hindu
Date: March 4, 2002
Is there a secular trend of decline
in the strength of caste in Indian society? My assessment is that there
is, although one cannot be categorical because there are many counter-currents
that act against the main current. Further, I believe that the trend of
change towards the weakening of caste began during the British rule around
the middle of the 19th century and has continued, with many ups and downs,
till the present. This view is at odds with the current enthusiasm for
identity politics in which signs of the growing importance of caste are
seen as indications of a progressive movement towards the attainment of
social justice.
In the early years of independence,
forward-looking Indians had their minds on development and modernisation,
and when they thought of caste, they thought of it as an obstacle. Liberal
and radical intellectuals alike believed that caste belonged to India's
past, not its future. Marxists were particularly scornful of those who
undertook to study and write about caste. They believed that it was a fit
subject for bourgeois sociologists but not for those concerned with the
real contradictions in society. They believed that caste consciousness
was an obstacle to class formation.
But we cannot for that or any other
reason wish it out of existence. Caste continued to receive the attention
of sociologists and social anthropologists in the 1950s and 1960s, and
they were joined by small numbers of political scientists and others. It
was M.N. Srinivas who more than any other scholar pointed to the continuing,
and in some respects increasing, importance of caste. Without taking anything
away from Srinivas's foresight, it must be pointed out that in making his
case about the resurgence of caste in independent India, he took all his
examples from the field of politics. If we focus our attention on the political
process alone, we are likely to conclude that caste has grown stronger
and not weaker since the time of the Emergency. Caste is now used more
extensively and more openly for the mobilisation of political support than
it was ever before.
If our objective is to assess long-term
trends of change in caste, it will be a mistake to concentrate solely on
politics, and that too on electoral politics. A serious weakness in the
scholarly writing on caste in the last 25 years and particularly since
the time of the Mandal agitations has been the neglect of all aspects of
caste other than the political. The association between caste and occupation
has weakened, slowly but steadily, while restrictions on marriage are still
observed, the rules of endogamy are enforced far less stringently than
before. As to the ritual practices of purity and pollution, which many
regarded as the very cement of caste, all the evidence shows that they
are clearly and decisively in retreat.
The changes that have been taking
place in caste since Independence began at least a hundred years before
Independence, under colonial rule. If the Constitution is a landmark in
the history of caste, an earlier, though less conspicuous, landmark is
the Removal of Caste Disabilities Act of 1850. Until then the life of a
Hindu was so deeply embedded in his caste that expulsion from it amounted
virtually to civil death.
Colonial administrators, like administrators
everywhere, were inclined to take more than their due share of credit for
bringing about beneficent changes in the country they administered. They
exaggerated the rigidity and oppressiveness of the traditional social order
and their own role in establishing liberal ideas and institutions in India.
Many of their acts did indeed lead to the weakening of caste, but some
also led to its strengthening. On balance, however, the long- term consequence
of colonial rule was the weakening rather than the strengthening of caste.
Many British administrators took
an obsessive interest in caste, and their interest was not based only on
natural or benign curiosity. Some of it arose from the desire to show how
backward Indian society was and how incongenial it was for democracy. But
we must not judge the British too harshly for, Dr. Ambedkar himself had
said in the constituent Assembly that "democracy in India is only a top
dressing on an Indian soil that is essentially undemocratic".
Having learnt about the divisive
possibilities inherent in caste, the British were not slow to use it for
their own political and administrative ends. Here they were only showing
the way to the rulers of independent India who have outclassed their British
predecessors in using the loyalties of caste for mobilising political support,
particularly after 1977. And if our present leaders say that they are using
caste only in the interest of social justice, the British too said that
their main interest was to ensure fair treatment for the minorities, the
depressed classes and the backward communities.
Colonial administrators wrote a
great deal about caste, and much of what they wrote was biased as is indeed
the case with official writing anywhere. For a hundred years they set about
identifying, enumerating, describing, classifying and ranking the different
castes and communities in the subcontinent. The decennial censuses played
some part in bringing to public attention the division and ranking of castes.
It is for this reason that it was decided not to enumerate castes in the
censuses after the new Government took office on Independence. But while
the censuses and ethnographic reports may have created a new sense of rivalry
among castes, the institution of caste itself had deep roots in Indian
soil.
For all its fascination for the
enumeration and classification of castes - inherited to some extent by
our present census takers and official ethnographers - colonial rule loosened
the soil in which caste had been rooted for centuries. It introduced new
economic forces and a new legal and social philosophy. It established a
new educational system and a new occupational system based on principles
antithetical to the hierarchical principles of caste. It is true that the
creation of new institutions under colonial rule was not a painless process;
but those institutions helped carry India forward into the modern world.
It has now become increasingly common
to represent colonial rule as the source and origin of every economic,
political and social malady in contemporary India. Some smart American
historians have even floated the idea that caste as we know it today is
basically a creation of colonial rule, and that idea has naturally found
many subscribers among Indians. There is no need now to whitewash colonial
rule; but there is no need either to deny the advances in Indian society
that started under it.
Today historians of the Left seem
to vie with those of the Right in depicting colonial rule in the darkest
of colours. This is completely contrary to the historical perspective of
Marx who took the view, essentially correct in my judgment, that on balance
colonial rule was a progressive force in 19th century India. We cannot
get the history of independent India right if we are so wrong in our reading
of what happened in the hundred years before Independence.
