Shunya's Notes

On Caste Privilege

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

An early goal of British imperialists in India was to create a class of local elites in their own image. They would be, wrote Macaulay, ‘interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.’ An elite class did emerge, not surprisingly from the socially dominant upper-caste Hindus of urban India.

These elites, chin-deep in caste identities, saw themselves as innately superior to other Indians, mirroring the class- and race-based prejudices of the British. No wonder they got along so well. Later, when these Indians opposed the British, they used the same language of political rights and liberalism that the Europeans preached at home but didn’t practice in their colonies. It was this elite class, led by Anglicized lawyers and bureaucrats, that succeeded the British. In the first Indian parliament in 1952, Brahmins, who account for under 5% of the population, cornered almost 25% of the directly elected seats; altogether the upper-castes, about 20% of the population, claimed over 85% of the seats.[1]

In a representative democracy, the idea of ‘representation’ is that an upper-caste Hindu man can fairly represent the interests of the lower-castes, minorities, and women. But one can persuasively argue that this did not happen in the early decades of the Indian republic. Deep disparities along caste lines remained; religious minorities grew alienated; women remained marginal as before. India was effectively a democracy of the few, by the few, for the few.

Since the 70s, India has seen the rise of caste-based politics. Built on the idea that only a member of your own (or proximate) caste can represent your interests, its primary driver was the failure of upper-caste politicians to represent the lower-castes, and the latter realizing the power of their vote. Votes began fragmenting along caste lines, not the least because—besides being central to one’s social identity—caste shaped one’s share of opportunity, deprivation, and discrimination in life.

When the lower-castes began mobilizing and putting up their own candidates, the elites grew anxious and began decrying the rise of caste-based politics and vote banks. ‘So regressive!’ they complained, ‘a betrayal of the spirit and ideals of democracy!’ But of course, with hardly an egalitarian bone in their bodies, they had played a rigged game all along. Their anxiety, above all, came from a visceral fear—fear of the ‘impure’ masses, fear of losing their privileges, fear of being overrun by the boors. In no area is this anxiety more evident than in the debate on caste-based affirmative action, aka reservations, in public sector jobs and college admissions.

Writing fifty years ago in The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon lamented ‘the unpreparedness of the elite, the lack of practical ties between them and the masses, their apathy, and, yes, their cowardice at the crucial moment in the struggle.’ These elites, he wrote, ‘simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the way for the emergence of the current struggles.’

Fanon had in mind the post-colonial elites of North Africa, but his remark is no less apt for the Indians. India needed a real program of socioeconomic justice—via, say, land reform, universal education, and fighting caste discrimination. What legislation the elites did pass they didn’t push far enough. Instead, they consolidated their domination over politics, the economy, education, cultural institutions, and the media—for instance, the richest 10% monopolize more land now than in 1951.[2] Having done quite well for itself, self-congratulation has come easy to this class. In an attempt to restore some balance, this insider, dear reader, will now relate to you its benightedness.

The Minangkabau: Mixing Islam and Matriarchy

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

“In your marriage, who is the boss?” our driver, Arman, asked in a playfully provocative tone, like he was setting up the punchline of a joke.

My partner and I looked at each other, laughed, and shrugged. Arman belonged to the Minangkabau, the society recognized among anthropologists as the world’s largest and most stable surviving matriarchy* (though some prefer to call it a gylany, matrix, matrifocal or matricentric society, or something else to avoid conjuring images of mythical Amazons). Knowing this, I presumed his question was part of a routine entertainment for tourists.

“For us it is the woman who is boss,” he continued, predictably. “The woman has all the privileges; she owns everything. The men, we own nothing.”

I knew that the Minangkabau, like most Indonesians, are Muslims. In May 2009, one of the first things I noticed upon arriving in their homeland—a stretch of volcanic highlands running along the western coast of Sumatra—was that a higher percentage of women here wear the hijab (here called jilbab) than did further north, near Medan and around Lake Toba. In fact, well over half of the adult women covered their hair in public. But here, as elsewhere on Sumatra, the headscarf appears to be as much a fashion statement as a covering for modesty. It’s often brightly colored or festooned with beads, sequins, rhinestones, small brooches, lace, or shimmery ribbons. Many women sport styles with a dainty sun visor in the front. Pretty much anything you can do to a hat is done to the Sumatran jilbab.

These observations, and Arman’s good humor at his lack of patrimony, made me wonder how I should understand the Minangkabau matriarchaat (their word, borrowed from the Dutch). What truce had been struck between Islam and matriarchy?

§

In the small villages surrounding Mount Merapi, which lies at the center of the Minangkabau creation myths, Arman lead us down tangled lanes lined with traditional Minangkabau homes. Many of these were great wooden structures, some as much as 300 years old, tattered or rotting in places, patched or expanded upon over the years. These traditional homes are long, each enclosing a broad rectangular hall over an empty ground floor, once used to house livestock. Their roofs are arched to suggest the horns of a buffalo. There were newer dwellings too, without the ground floor for livestock, with SUVs parked out front, satellite dishes growing like mushrooms of modernity from balconies and awnings.

Between Heaven and Earth

A most excellent article by Ronald Aronson on the false choice between god and science: 

It is as subjects, indeed social subjects, that we know, we decide on truth, and we judge right and wrong. As social subjects we decide on the rules of “communicative action” in which these activities take place. And these rules include the existence of such a thing as objective truth, and the active belief that people are capable of arriving at it. If we are truth-seeking animals, we might of course ask how we got that way, but we must also ask what our truths are and what are the rules for arriving there.

This of course entails giving up any pretense to absolute knowledge. It entails allowing oneself to enter into discussion, to submit what one says to the judgment of others, to be proven wrong by them, to be seen as fallible, and thus to realise that any particular piece of knowledge is always tentative, always demanding verification. This in turn implies a commitment to a communicative process in which we are always in dialogue with others, and in which they are always looking over our shoulders and commenting on what we claim to be true.

Truth shifts historically and is framed according to one’s disciplinary standpoint. It is never absolute but is objective. It is never raised above humans, but always takes place with, for, and about others. This is even, or especially, true of science. Its knowledge is necessarily provisional, it can be challenged and even overturned – which makes it dramatically different from the supposed “absolute knowledge” conferred by religious faith. But this also places science within a larger human project, rather than supporting any scientific claim to ultimacy.

Tariq Ramadan on Muslims in the West

I liked this Al Jazeera interview by Riz Khan, in which Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University, talks about a range of issues that relate to the experience of Muslims in the West. (via 3QD)

Joothan: A Dalit's Life

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

A review of a memoir by an ‘untouchable’ starting in the 1950s in rural Uttar Pradesh.

I grew up in the central Indian city of Gwalior until I left home for college. This was the 70s and 80s. My father worked as a textile engineer in a company town owned by the Birla Group, where we lived in a middle class residential quarter for the professional staff and their families. Our 3-BR house had a small front lawn and a vegetable patch behind. Domestic helpers, such as a washerwoman and a dishwashing woman, entered our house via the front door—all except one, who came in via the rear door. This was the latrine cleaning woman, or her husband at times. As in most traditional homes, our squat toilet was near the rear door, across an open courtyard. She also brought along a couple of scrawny kids, who waited by the vegetable patch while their mother worked.

My mother often gave them dinner leftovers, and sometimes tea. But unlike other domestic helpers, they were not served in our utensils, nor did the latrine cleaners expect to be. They brought their own utensils and placed them on the floor; my mother served them while they stood apart. When my mother turned away, they quietly picked up the food and left. To my young eyes this seemed like the natural order of things. These were the mehtars, among the lowest of the so-called ‘untouchables’. They worked all around us, yet were ‘invisible’ to me, as if part of the stage props. I neither gave them much thought during my school years, nor recognized my prejudices as such. I, and the kids in my circle, even used ‘untouchable’ caste names as playful epithets, calling each other chamaar and bhangi.

It’s possible that I first reflected on the idea of untouchability only in college, through art house cinema. Even so, upper caste Indian liberals made these films and it was their viewpoint I saw. It is hardly a stretch to say that the way even the most sensitive white liberals in the US knew and described the black experience of America is partly why one had to read Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and other black authors. A similar parallel holds for Native Americans, immigrants, and women, as well as the ‘untouchables,’ now called Dalits (‘the oppressed’), numbering one out of six Indians. In recent years, they have begun to tell their own stories, bearing witness to their slice of life in India. Theirs is not only a powerful new current of Indian literature, it is also a major site of resistance and revolt.

Joothan by Omprakash Valmiki is one such work of Dalit literature, first published in Hindi in 1997 and translated into English by Arun Prabha Mukherjee in 2003 (she added an excellent introduction in the 2007 edition). It is a memoir of growing up ‘untouchable’ starting in the 1950s outside a typical village in Uttar Pradesh. Told as a series of piercing vignettes, Joothan is also a remarkable record of a rare Indian journey, one that took a boy from extremely wretched socioeconomic conditions to prominence as an author and social critic.

"Final Solution" by Rakesh Sharma

The 2002 communal riots in Gujarat may well go down as the darkest chapter in the first decade of 21st century India. An estimated two thousand Muslims were murdered, many burned alive. But what makes this a particularly dark event is the fact that it was methodically planned ahead and actively supported by the state government of the Hindu nationalist party BJP, led by Narendra Modi, still popular and in command in Gujarat. As this Human Rights Watch report, published a month later, notes: 

Between February 28 and March 2 the attackers descended with militia-like precision on Ahmedabad by the thousands, arriving in trucks and clad in saffron scarves and khaki shorts, the signature uniform of Hindu nationalist-Hindutva-groups. Chanting slogans of incitement to kill, they came armed with swords, trishuls (three-pronged spears associated with Hindu mythology), sophisticated explosives, and gas cylinders. They were guided by computer printouts listing the addresses of Muslim families and their properties, information obtained from the Ahmedabad municipal corporation among other sources, and embarked on a murderous rampage confident that the police was with them. In many cases, the police led the charge, using gunfire to kill Muslims who got in the mobs' way. A key BJP state minister is reported to have taken over police control rooms in Ahmedabad on the first day of the carnage, issuing orders to disregard pleas for assistance from Muslims. Portions of the Gujarati language press meanwhile printed fabricated stories and statements openly calling on Hindus to avenge the Godhra attacks.

In almost all of the incidents documented by Human Rights Watch the police were directly implicated in the attacks. At best they were passive observers, and at worse they acted in concert with murderous mobs and participated directly in the burning and looting of Muslim shops and homes and the killing and mutilation of Muslims. In many cases, under the guise of offering assistance, the police led the victims directly into the hands of their killers. Many of the attacks on Muslim homes and places of business also took place in close proximity to police posts. Panicked phone calls made to the police, fire brigades, and even ambulance services generally proved futile. Many witnesses testified that their calls either went unanswered or that they were met with responses such as: "We don't have any orders to save you"; "We cannot help you, we have orders from above"; "If you wish to live in Hindustan, learn to protect yourself"; "How come you are alive? You should have died too"; "Whose house is on fire? Hindus' or Muslims'?" In some cases phone lines were eventually cut to make it impossible to call for help.

I had long heard of Rakesh Sharma's Final Solution, the acclaimed documentary film about the riots. A few months ago I found it on Google Video and I can't praise it enough. It is an outstanding record that expanded my understanding of the riots—from the political rallies before the riots, to the minds of the Hindutva ideologues, to their many grassroots organizations in the Sangh Parivar. Using eyewitness accounts, Sharma reveals how the events then unfolded, how the madness spread, and the stories of the people caught in its wheels. A must see for anyone interested in the politics of hate that grips humanity from time to time (duration: 150 mins).

The Blight of Hindustan

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

An egalitarian ethos is not a prominent feature of Indian civilization. The Indians have long held it to be self-evident that all men are created unequal. The anthropologist Louis Dumont considered hierarchy to be so central to the Indian identity, whether in the family, the workplace, or the community, that he went as far as calling the Indians homo hierarchicus. Indeed, a host of hierarchical relationships—framed by traditional norms of deference, authority, and obligation—shape most Indians throughout their lives. In the Indian social realm, the primary institution of hierarchy is caste, or jati, of which thousands exist today. But where does caste, a blight of modern India, come from? 

The Origins of Caste

How the institution of caste took root and spread is still a hotly debated question among scholars, but its story begins c. 1500 BCE with the arrival of the Indo-Aryans into what is now Pakistan. Data from disciplines like linguistics, philology, and archaeology strongly suggests that these bands of nomadic pastoralists came from further west. Upon arrival, they encountered long settled rural communities, which were perhaps divided into subgroups based on occupation, much like guilds—in the sense that the subgroups were not hierarchical, hereditary, or endogamous. The Indo-Aryans, whose culture became dominant, introduced into the region their social pyramid with three classes, or varnas: the Brahmins (priests and teachers), the Kshtriyas (warriors and rulers), and the Vaishyas (traders and merchants). They added a fourth varna after their arrival: the Shudras (laborers and artisans). All four varnas appear in the earliest known Indo-Aryan text, the Rig Veda, and were no doubt a feature of the emerging Vedic society.

As the settled indigenous communities became part of the early Vedic society, they also adopted its principle of hierarchy, turning their own occupational subgroups into castes, or jatis. The principle of hierarchy, proposed Dumont, had to do with ritual ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’ that members of each occupational subgroup were assigned at birth. The highest ‘purity’ points went to those with religious, intellectual, and administrative pursuits, the lowest to workers associated with dead bodies, human waste, tanneries, butchery, street cleaning, and such—most of these were in fact deemed too low to be part of the varna system at all, i.e., they were considered outcastes. Stated differently, ‘purity’ became a means of codifying social power relations using Brahminical ‘knowledge’.

As this new social order spread in the first millennium BCE, it encountered more settled peoples as well as forest dwelling clans. Whether by force, persuasion, or mutual advantage, more groups were brought into its fold. They too found themselves plugged into its hierarchy, perhaps loosely at first, and gradually gave up their more egalitarian ways. In doing so, they used the same principle of relative ‘purity’ to make jati and varna decisions for various units within their own societies, and by extension, to divide power and resources.[1] To sweeten the deal, the Vedic social order became flexible enough to absorb indigenous gods into its ever-growing pantheon—including perhaps even gods like Shiva and Krishna—giving rise to a syncretic religious culture. In some cases, a whole endogamous tribe could become one jati, often regarded as outcastes. The Laws of Manu, written about 2,000 years ago, mentions many such communities: the Medas, Andhras, Chunchus, and Madgus who live off ‘the slaughter of wild animals’, the Pukkasas by ‘catching and killing [animals] in holes’, etc. 

Many modern thinkers, including Tagore, have argued that while not at all perfect, this was back then a practical way of bringing together highly diverse peoples, through which ‘men of different colors and creeds, different physical features and mental attitudes settled together side by side.’[2] By assigning religious, political, and economic power to three different classes—the Brahmins, the Kshtriyas, and the Vaishyas—the system prevented their concentration in a single dominant racial or ethnic group, thereby creating a basis for cooperation and avoiding far greater friction, open slavery, and even genocidal wars.

Thapar on the Indo-Aryan Migrations

Here is a transcript of a 1999 lecture by Romila Thapar. She examines quite well the substantive evidence for the Indo-Aryan migrations into the Subcontinent in the second millennium BCE. Definitely worth a read for anyone interested in the topic (transcript has a few typos). Also see my earlier post, which I hope to turn into a more polished article, incorporating all that I have learned since about the topic.

Let me begin by saying the obvious, that the Aryan question is probably the most complex, complicated question in Indian history. And it requires very considerable expertise in handling both the sources and the questions that arise. The expertise consists of knowing something about at least four different fields, first of all archaeology, because a lot of the remains, of almost all the cultures, come to us from excavations and there is the continual attempt to try and identify such cultures with the Aryans.... I mean that it is not enough simply to say that you pick up a list of items from excavated sites and say that the Rigveda has some items, therefore … they are identical cultures. When I talk about archaeology I am also talking about the way in which the total society functions and how these elements are integrated.

The second area of expertise is linguistics and here I would like to emphasize, very strongly, that it is not enough merely to know Sanskrit to be able to say that you can handle the questions that come up in the interpretation of the Vedic texts. There is now, since the last thirty years, there has developed a huge body of information which comes from a discipline called linguistics. Those in this discipline do comparative studies of different language structures...

The historical context, this relates to a whole series of questions, how society is defined in the past — agro pastoral, agrarian, urban… What is the meaning of these terms? What is the interaction between ecological, social, economic, cultural, religious forms? These are all aspects of a historical problem and when you are studying a total problem like the so-called the Aryan question you have to go into the interaction of all these different aspects. Is there a difference between a cattle rearing society and a society which carries out overseas trade? And these are fundamental questions in historical analyses. You cannot avoid them. You cannot just say there is reference to cattle in the Rigveda and cattle are depicted on the Indus seals therefore there is a similarity. It is the function. The function, both the actual function, the ritual function, the role that cattle play in a particular society in terms of its economy, its rituals and so on.

And the fourth discipline which I think is important ... is social anthropology...

The Other Swastika

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

When I visited India the summer I turned 9, my grandmother took my siblings and me to a jeweler to select pendants to bring back to the US. My brother and sister chose the gold-tipped tiger claws, still available easily and guilt-free in India in the 1970s. But I found the tiger claws too “gee whiz”; I wanted something that was meaningfully Indian. So the jeweler trotted out his line of large, bright silver pendants shaped either as Om or swastika. I was drawn to the pleasing aesthetics of the swastika designs, with their symmetry and regularity of line; the Om was alright, but it didn’t do much for me. Still, I had a difficult time deciding to bring home the swastika, waffling on the matter until it grew late and even the jeweler was losing patience with me. In the end, I came away with the Om, which languished never-worn in my dresser drawer for years until I simply lost track of it. Something about the entire episode never sat quite right with me, but as a child I couldn’t puzzle out why.

I was probably in high school before it first dawned on me just what it was that kept me from the swastika that day: Growing up in an observant Brahmin household in the US (from which I’ve long since recovered), I felt an emotional dissonance around the symbol, which I associated with something like serenity, nurturance, and cosmic benevolence, and at the same time with “evil,” hatred, and genocide.

The word swastika can be translated as wellbeing (from the Sanskrit su, meaning good, and asti, meaning to be, plus the diminutive suffix, ka) and in most of the world the identical symbol (by whatever name) has long been associated with wellbeing and good luck. In South Asia, the swastika is found on artifacts dating back 4,500 years to the time of the Harappan Civilization, where it frequently occurs as a character in their symbol system. Even as Harappan culture faded into obscurity, the swastika was carried forward, becoming strongly associated with Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist religious traditions, an association that persists to this day throughout Asia. Especially in India, the swastika is the most ubiquitous of religious symbols.

What Would You Do?

The Indian caste system has long violated some of the most basic tenets of human dignity, inflicting untold misery, humiliation, and injustice on too many for too long. In recent years, perhaps for the first time, those on the lowest rungs of the social pyramid defined by caste have begun to write and tell their own stories, bearing witness to their slice of life in India. These include the Dalits (‘the oppressed’)—formerly ‘untouchables’—numbering one out of six Indians. Theirs is not only a powerful new current of literature, it is also a major site of resistance and revolt. Here is a poem by Omprakash Valmiki, a Dalit writer best known for his autobiography, Joothan, which I plan to review soon.

What Would You Do?

If you
Are thrown out of your village
Cannot draw water from the well
Are abused
In the screaming, echoing afternoon
Told to break stones
In place of real work
Are given leavings to eat
What would you do?
If you
Are told to drag away
Animal carcasses
And
Carry away the filth
Of a whole family
Given hand-me-downs to wear
What would you do?
If you
Are kept far from books
Far from the threshold
Of the temple of learning
If you are hung up like Jesus
On a blackened wall
In the light of an oil-lamp
What would you do?

The poem continues here.  Also watch this harrowing video on the plight of Dalits, I'm Dalit, how are you?