Abstract
The Problem of Caste is an excellent collection of select articles from the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) published between 1958 and 2013. It carries 40 essays carefully excerpted into chapters and selected from 467 articles published on caste in the EPW in the last six decades. This book is a great resource for students and scholars interested in researching caste as the collection gives the reader insights into the developments and debates in the study of caste.
The chapters are organised into six thematic sections. Section I on ‘Disciplinary Perspectives’ does well to discern the apathy of certain disciplines (except law, sociology, social anthropology and politics) to the issue of caste. This section has 10 essays which cover some of the key interpretations of caste; Srinivas’s essay in some ways furthers Dumont’s thesis through Sanskritisation while Dipankar Gupta’s intervention emphasises the multiple and discrete nature or hierarchies. Kumkum Roy’s essay on Kosambi’s interest in caste highlights how caste needs to be interpreted beyond religious texts to comprehend embedded class dimensions.
Andre Béteille’s essay does well to raise doubts on the tenacity of caste in present times. Caste is fast eroding in various spheres, suggests Béteille. Thorat and Attwell’s essay on job discrimination in urban labour markets suggests that caste-erasure may well survive caste discrimination in newer forms. Marc Galanter’s essay though dated brings out the persistence of untouchability and the lack of a sympathetic attitude in the judiciary evident in the way untouchability is interpreted. Rajni Kothari’s essay notes the dynamism of brahmanism and the challenge dalit politics poses to the seduction of Sanskritisation.
Gopal Guru’s seminal essay on the theoretical Brahmin and empirical Shudra turns the gaze on academic–intelligentsia instead and comments on the nature of hierarchical transactions in the social sciences. Sundar Sarrukai’s essay is a response to Gopal Guru, which co-implicates the Brahmin—through producing a phenomenology of untouchability. Guru and Sarrukai in some ways return to Dumont in their abstract engagement with untouchability.
Section II has essays classified under caste and class. Sheth suggests that caste is not reproducing itself anymore and refers to the new changes as evident in classifications of caste groups where the Shudras (peasant caste) have moved on to become middle class which align themselves irrespective of social standing. Sheth however distinguishes these new horizontal power relations from Srinivas’s horizontal stretch (referred to as cognate jatis). While Sheth argues that caste has ceased to reproduce itself as it did earlier, Carol Upadhyay’s essay on the Information Technology (IT) industry presents how the ideology of merit and the politics of caste-based networks/hiring reproduce caste privilege.
Anand Chakravarti’s essay suggests that caste continues to be the fundamental basis of social inequality in rural Bihar even as the traditional and new dominant castes consolidate their power. Meena Gopal’s essay engages with the question of caste and gender in the growing informal sector.
Section III on ‘Caste and Politics’ has eight essays. The essays by Gail Omvedt and Mohan Ram on the Sayashodhak Movement and Ramswami Naicker respectively deal with non/anti-Brahmin movements of the colonial period. I.P. Desai’s essay on the anti-reservation agitation in Gujarat argues that the agitation was more of an anti-dalit agitation aimed at defending the moribund Hindu hierarchy under the vocabulary of merit. K. Balagopal offers an impressive class defence against what he terms the Anti-Mandal Mania of early 1990s. Teltumbde engages with the question of violence against dalits. He explodes several myths that he works out including the one of bahujanwad to argue that only the class approach can unite the oppressed.
Baldev Raj Nayar’s is an excellent pick by Satish Deshpande as it highlights the workings of rural democracy for dalits in rural Punjab. In the 1960s, one of Nayar’s Jat Sikh respondents from the Akali Dal explained, ‘SCs too will vote with us [or else] we will stop their fodder’ (p. 183). Against this backdrop Sudha Pai’s essay can be read, which unravels the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and its strategies of political empowerment of dalits. She compares the BSP with the unsuccessful Congress efforts to retain dalit and tribal support in the state of Madhya Pradesh (MP).
Section IV comprises five articles broadly focusing on the vexed relation between caste and state, particularly the way caste rewrites itself into technologies of governance. Padmanabh Samarendra reiterates that the idea of caste was produced out of the colonial census. Despite the flawed nature of modernist [colonial] modes of counting communities/caste, Deshpande and John see merit in counting caste as it could help us deal with the elite morality of caste blindness. Tharu et al. present the foundational role of reservation in recovering politics. K. Balgopal raises a question of underrepresented dalits and their claims for specific representation. The current forced inclusion of certain dominant groups into the category of Other Backward Castes (OBCs) can be better understood by reading Marc Galanter’s seminal essay on the challenge of identifying backward classes.
V. Geetha’s essay explores the centrality of women’s liberation in the Self-Respect movement where citizenship animated not merely claims made on the state, but on society as well and called forth a social commitment to the destruction of caste, wily faith and gender differences (p. 331). The persistence of middle-caste dominance and violence against women and dalits is however better explained in Prem Chowdhry’s essay titled ‘Enforcing Cultural Codes: Gender and Violence in Northern India’. The deep intersections of caste, honour and property that construct the violent control of women’s sexuality among Jats in Haryana has only aggravated with the coming in of the Hindu Succession Act which confers hereditary property rights on women. Anandhi et al.’s study of an exceptional village where dalits form a numerical majority (68 per cent) and are not dependent on the dominant caste for their livelihoods points out that dalit (men) if given the political and economic power too, produce new (hyper) masculinities that affect both dalit and non-dalit women.
The collection, despite its strength of coverage across six decades, faces the obvious limitation of drawing only from the EPW. Much exciting scholarship on caste has also been published outside the EPW. No doubt, missing are essays on caste amongst non-Hindus, caste and the diaspora, caste in Hindutva, caste and food, caste and reflexivity in social sciences. Despite several good essays, much focus on dalits also leaves out the study of Brahmins and the dominant rural castes. The sections are not neatly drawn. This, however, only helps us understand the complex nature of caste and its persistence better. The last section on contemporary explorations raises the questions of self, caste and the complex nature of Indian modernity that remains caste-affected and caste anxious. Befitting to the title of the book, the last essay by Gopal Guru calls for an archaeology of the untouchability-ridden Indian mind and urges us to look for caste where it is difficult to locate.