Caste Hierarchies and Social Tensions in Cuttack: 1920

Abstract

The emergence of caste as a key category of classification, enumeration and control under colonial rule has created a refectory taxonomy of administrative categories through officially enforced labelling activities. The census categories made an opportunity to occupy institutional space and promoted identification with caste and stimulated lower caste people, such as the Bauri community, for their rights and representations. The stigma associated with the native agencies, such as Chamars, Pig Herds (Ghusuria) and others in the Hindu stratification, was challenged by the anti-colonial nationalist, who re-signified them as sites of cultural authenticity and collective sovereignty. The government’s passion for labels and pigeonhole, which led to crystallisation of caste system, could hardly tame intractability or ‘vagueness’ of social category in the middle rung and spurred a series of negotiations and contestations among the caste groups across the Hindu hierarchical spectrum. As against, it transfigured in the colonial modernity’s endeavour to grapple with tensions between the universal and particular, normative and stigmatised subjects leading to caste radicalism’s re-exegesis of Hindu religious tradition to produce an original (Adidharma) view of social stratification and the post-colonial state reinforcing it by a rational legal regime opposed to the idea of civic inequality.

Keywords

Caste hierarchy purity pollution transaction

Introduction

Upward moves among caste groups to enhance social status deriving varying degrees of impetus from the nationalist temperance programme and politics was a familiar trend in the early decades of twentieth century.2

Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as a Mahatma’, in Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), 12–14, 38–40; Sumit Sarkar, ‘Conditions and Nature of Subaltern Militancy from Swadeshi to Non-cooperation, 1905–1922’, in Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), 282–83; David Hardiman, ‘Adivasi Assertion in South Gujarat’, in Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984); David Arnold, The Congress in Tamilnadu 1919–1937 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1977), 65; Judith Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 315; David Baker, ‘Non-co-operation in South India’, in South India: Political Institutions and Political Change, 1880–1940, ed. David Baker and David Washbrook (Delhi: Macmillan, 1975), 104; Douglas E. Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India, The Shaping of a Public Culture Surat City, 1852–1928 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 209–10.

The need to create an ethnography of caste after the mutiny, had made it the primary subject of social classification in the decennial census of 1871, resulted in crystallisation of the caste system, which except among the aristocratic caste remained fluid under indigenous rule. In a way, as Bernard Cohn has argued that the British rigidified certain groups and institutions which had been contingent and flexible, such as caste, leading to an avalanche of petitions to the Census Commissioner over caste status, finally to be dropped as a census category in 1931.3

Nicholas B. Dirk, ‘Recasting Tamil Society: The Politics of Caste and Race in Contemporary South India’, in Caste Today: SOAS Studies on South Asia Understanding and Perspective, ed. C.J. Fuller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); W.G. Lacey, the Census Commissioner of Bihar and Orissa, views that ‘by inviting or on inviting a declaration of caste at every census may be said to recognize and encourage these invidious distinctions’, and second ‘caste returns in any case are inaccurate and more or less worthless since members of lower caste take the opportunity of returning themselves as belonging to the communities of higher status’. See W.G. Lacey, Some Aspects of the Census Operations of 1931 in Bihar & Orissa (Patna: Patna University, 1933), 88–89; also see Nicholas B. Dirk, Caste of Mind Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). On crystallisation of caste identities and its rigidification, see A. Sharan, ‘From Caste to Category: Colonial Knowledge Practices and the Depressed Scheduled Castes of Bihar’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review (hereafter IESHR) 40, no. 3 (2004): 279–80. For the process of regimented ordering and fixing, ‘standardising’ and ‘hierarchising’ caste names as series having all India applicability by colonial officials, see Rashmi Pant, ‘The Cognitive Status of Caste in Colonial Ethnography: A Review of some Literature on the N.W. Provinces and Oudh’, IESHR 24, no. 2 (1987): 145–62.

In Cuttack, around the third decade of the twentieth century, there seems to be perceptible organising activities through caste sabhas, for upgradation of status among the lower castes. This happened mainly by forsaking the impure food habits, tabooed by the higher Hindu scriptural prescriptions and practices, redefining the inter-caste transactional mode leading up to conflicts and tension and assertion of group identity through the electoral process. In the meanwhile, the Brahmins also tried to refurbish their caste image by a strict avowal to their ritual practices and the middle-rung castes like sweetmeat maker searching out ways for social uplift by rescuing their group from further economic downslide. The historical narrative has been chiselled in the analytical insights of structural functionalist ethnography, cognitive and structural anthropological writings. The collective nature of stigma of the lower caste as a singular identity defined by the Brahminical or Hindu order has impelled on them a kind of continuous struggle rather than the resolution of difference.

During the colonial period, the caste organisational practices in Cuttack could be discerned in the everyday judicial affairs of the village community. Purely social and caste disputes were settled by caste panchayats though sometimes they were submitted for the opinion of other castes. Infringement of caste rules was punishable with boycotting, the men thus outcasted not being allowed the services of priest, barber or washer men during the period of their excommunication. Boycotting was rigidly carried out particularly by lower caste people, such as carpenters, fishermen and confectioners. Readmission into caste was always accompanied by heavy expenses. In grave offences, pilgrimage to Jagannath was in some cases indispensable, in addition to feasting to Brahmans, different caste people, relatives and friends.4

N.N. Banerjee, Report on the Agriculture of the District of Cuttack, 1898 (Bengal Secretariat Press n.d.), 45–46. Section-8 ‘Village Organization, Village Officials, Village Disputes’. Set in the second quarter of the nineteenth-century colonial India and first published in a book form in 1902, Fakir Mohan Senapati’s Chhaman Athaguntha refers to caste money collected out of the cash contributions in the form of fines imposed by the caste sabha from its erring members and the replacement of this authority by the new court system. See Fakir Mohan Senapati, Chhaman Athaguntha (Cuttack: Agraduta Publishers, 2010), 29–30. Velcheru Narayan Rao pointing to the narrative digressions in Fakir Mohan’s ‘Chhaman’ also discusses this transition. Velcheru Narayana Rao, ‘The Indigenous Modernity of Gurajada Apparao and Fakir Mohan Senapati’, in Colonialism, Modernity and Literature: A View from India, ed. Satya P. Mohanty (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2011).

The Khandaits were the largest caste in Cuttack (5.48 lakh). Cuttack may be aptly called the land of Khandait (swordsman from khanda, a sword or khandapati corrupted to khandait).5

L.S.S.O. Malley, Bihar and Orissa District Gazetteers, Cuttack (Patna: Government Printing, 1933), 60; J.F.W. James, Final Report on the Revision Settlement of Orissa (1906–1911 A.D.) (Bankipore: Bihar & Orissa Secretariat Book Depot, 1914), 4.

The other prominent caste was Chasas who were from the numerous agricultural castes in the district. The Brahmans occupied a position between the two castes mentioned above.6

Malley, Bihar and Orissa District, 60–63; Senapati’s Chaman Athaguntha portrays the local power structure—its caste and class dynamics in the encounter narrative between the overbearing rural landlord Mangaraj and Sibu Pandit. The Pandit bent down horizontally and prayed for the fame, prosperity and long life of Mangaraj to which the latter took no notice and passed—while the Panditi was left to repent the sight of an evil man in the morning. The irony and sadistic parody in the exchanges between Shyam Puhan, the lower caste Bauri, and Mangaraj reveals a kind of complete domination and control by a rural landlord. When at Mangaraj’s insinuation, the servants Gobinda and Padia stripped the parrot-green plot of Shyam of half of its seedlings with the ludicrous logic that the plants could breathe properly, the latter was left to only howling and whining at the master’s feet. Senapati, op. cit.

The Gauras were mostly pastoral caste and they were chiefly engaged in breeding cows and selling milk and ghi. About 25 per cent of them were also engaged in agriculture. The other caste was the Pans, who belonged to the aboriginal tribes largely found in the western thanas of the district: Salepur, Jajpur and Dharmasala, which were close to Garjat hills.7

Ibid., 65–67.

The Karanas, who were the great writer caste of Orissa, mainly settled in Jagatsinghpur subdivision and worked as settlement amins and mohurirs.8

James, op. cit., 5.

Intermarriage between Karanas, a fairly high caste of Aryan descent, and Khandait, of landed gentry, was also common. Marriages also occasionally took place between Chasas and Khandaits. The caste rules were not stringent but somewhat loose and not fully ‘Sanskritiszed’.9

Malley, op. cit., 61. But this was more particularly so among the upper echelon of the hierarchy.

The servicing castes, such as barbers, potters, etc., were endowed with Jagirs.10

W.W. Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal, Vol. xviii (London: Trubner & Co, 1877), 138–39.

The demographic composition of caste groups in the village varies and constitutes professional castes, that is, Gudiyas (sweetmeat maker), milkmen, etc., reducing the Brahmins, Karanas and Khandaits to a minority.11

Gopal Chandra Praharaj, Bhagabat Tungire Sandhya (Cuttack, 1903) reprinted in Gopal Chandra Praharaj Granthabali Vol.1 (Cuttack: Vidyapuri Publisher, 2005). Praharaj gives a narrative of a village rendezvous in the turn of the nineteenth century: the power structure and the inter-strata interactions that emanate from it.

The association between local power structure and caste made those who sought upward mobility to draw legitimacy from a ‘martial’ (Rajput) tradition and closer association with the upper caste order.12

Senapati, Chaman Athaguntha. Evident in Chaman the way Mangaraj appears to be observing the rituals—ekadasis—going on fast, etc.—the association with the Brahminical scriptural prescriptions and sanctions which he deploys to augment his property. Chhaman, Chapter 1, also see for a discussion Biswamoy Pati, Situating Social History Orissa (1800–1997) (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001), Chapter ‘The High-Low Dialectic in Fakir Mohan’s Chaman Athaguntha: Popular Culture, Literature and Society in Nineteenth Century Orissa’, 35.

The geographical segregation of castes could be discernible in the village layout in Coastal Orissa. Pattern of houses, perhaps, strengthened the kinds of collective existence centred on caste.13

Senapati first describes the Santa Sahi where Mangaraj lived. Next, we are told about the sasan (Brahmin settlement) and then on the western side of the village Tanti Shahi (locality of the weavers). The Dom quarters, some 4 or 500 steps from where the weavers lived, surrounded by the rice field, is described in the subsequent chapter. Chaman, Chapters 9, 10 & 11. Fakir Mohan is aware of the interplay of caste/class dynamics in the social stratification despite the Brahminical ideological domination. Interestingly, the reality of caste only configures in terms of the upper caste reformism in the contributors’ comparative and critical analysis of the realistic and allusive digressions of Chaman Athaguntha. See Satya P. Mohanty (ed.), op. cit. For a general outline of the segregated forms of caste group existence, F.G. Bailey, Caste & Economic Frontier a Village in Highland Orissa (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1964), 34, 41–42.

Getting Rid of Impure Habits

The ideological underpinning of the lower caste sabha efforts was based on the following assumptions, namely, to establish equality among all castes, negation of inherent polluting castes prejudice and equal opportunities to improve their living conditions.14

Lynn Vincentnathan, ‘Untouchable Concept of Person and Society’, Contribution to Indian Sociology 27, no. 1 (1993): 53–82. Here, the notion of equality does not pertain to a liberal democratic egalitarian principle. It only means the idea of caste bereft of the pure/impure discrimination.

Based on the above ideology, the caste sabha organised the meetings in different places during the early twentieth century. According to Utkal Dipika, a newsletter, on 26 March 1922, a meeting of the Bauri community of Darpan was held in the vicinity of Bhagabati Thakurani, Bateswar villages, close to Salepur police station. However, it attracted only less number of people from the neighbouring parganas. Consequently, a second meeting was organised near Chatteswar Mahadeb of Kisanpur on 2 April 1922 and about 400 delegates from nearly forty villages participated. The lower caste sabha meeting was held around the village deity; of course, the only difference was a proximate distance. In other words, the lower caste sabha meeting was organised not close with the village deity but in some distance. The sabha deliberated on a wide range of problems associated with their caste prejudices, such as infringements of rules of inter-caste relations in terms of eating, drinking or smoking, entering house, contracting marriages and also the sub-caste’s dietary rules concerning eating meat or drinking liquor, etc.15

Utkal Dipika, 15 April 1922. A distinguishing feature of similar kind of activities in Utter Pradesh in 1920s was the adoption by Chamars of pure Hindu rites and practices, such as vegetarianism, and the abandonment of ‘impure’ practices, such as eating beef and doing leatherwork, as part of their claim to Kshatriya status. See for a discussion, Ramnarayan S. Rawat, ‘Struggle for Identities: Chamar Histories and Politics’, in Caste in Modern India, ed. Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014), Vol. 2, 445.

Precisely, the important issues discussed in the sabha were about the worsening conditions of the Bauri community. The main concern was their subjection to pollution contact even from an approachable distance. This was due to their habit of taking to ‘inedible’, such as liquor, flesh, etc., which the upper caste looked with contempt. The sabha thought getting rid of these food habits would liberate them from the untouchable taboo. The reasoning was that pollution was not inherent to specific caste groups as all become polluted at certain stage or time, such as child-birth, funerals and menses, which could be purified by rituals and changing habits. Thus conveying a notion of culture as ‘learned and not biologically inherited’.16

Lynn, op. cit., 56. As the Census Commissioner for Bihar and Orissa, W.G. Lacey stated the movement for ‘social uplift’ by the lower caste is not infrequently accompanied by a desire to assert the dignity of their origin and demonstrate their kinship with orthodox Brahmans and Rajputs. Some of the lower castes have resolved to enforce more strictly the ban against remarriage of widows this at a time when the great tendency among higher castes themselves is to show greater liberality in this matter. See Lacey, op. cit., 100 Gandhi also believed that there is no inherent and permanent pollution attached to any caste the logic being that dirty tasks are dirty because they cause with bodily emission or organic life, such as saliva, faeces, urine, etc. See Vijay Prashad, Untouchable Freedom a Social History of a Dalit Community (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), 118–21. Prasad critiques Dumont’s functionalist binary of pure/impure neglecting the historical shift on the issue of untouchability produced by Gandhian movement.

In 1917, resolution of Indian National Congress abolished untouchability which Gandhi and Tilak called a disease antithetical to the Hinduism. During the Non-Cooperation Movement, it continued to be a part of Congress mobilisation.17

Baba Saheb Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, Vol. 9, 296; Dhananjay Keer, Dr. Ambedkar Life and Mission (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1990), 36–37 cited in Arundhati Roy, ‘Doctor and Saint’, introductory essay to B.R Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (New Delhi: Navayana Publishing, 2014), 60, 98. While in western Uttar Pradesh, Chamars in different sabhas passed resolutions against the Congress idea of Swaraj during 1920s and were keen to demonstrate their loyalty to the British government, in Gorakhpur district of eastern Uttar Pradesh, the Congress activists played an important role in communicating the message of nationalism to the lower castes [which] served to widen the influence and role of the Panchayats extending the Gandhian idea of self-purification through abstinence from ganja and liquor to meat and fish. Shahid Amin, ‘Agrarian Base of Nationalist Agitation in India’, in Indian National Congress: Centenary Hind Sights, ed. D.A. Low (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 106–07; Rawat, op. cit., 446.

Its resolution as a problem of personal hygiene and unfairly degraded labour was a most innovative form of Gandhian nationalist mobilisation of lower caste groups.18

Anupama Rao, Caste Question: Dalits & Politics of Modern India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009), Introduction. The emphasis on cleanliness and the idea of caste inequality as proportionate to the differential hygienic standard of the caste groups emerged as a major concern in the programme of Nayar, Congress men in Malabar. See Dilip M. Menon, Caste Nationalism and Communism in South India: Malabar, 1900–1948 (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 83–88.

The Congress Party in Orissa also emphasised these aspect in their interface with the lower caste groups. Responding to the request of some of the caste sabha members, the Congress Party activists from Cuttack also joined as a symbolic negation of caste distinction. Among other things, they focused on some core issues: (i) the urgency to do away with untouchability, (ii) shunning the habits of having liquor, flesh and other ‘inedible’ and (iii) the consequent immunity that the former would offer from pollution projected from a distance. Though reformative in tone, it betrayed certain upper caste patriarchal concessions.19

Utkal Dipika, op. cit. The translation from the vernacular Oriya text to English is of mine. All subsequent references in the paragraph are from the same source, unless otherwise stated. To pollute through mere external contact, the polluting agent must clearly be stronger than the whole ritual status which pollutes internally, through the consumption of food or water. Even stronger, of course, is the pollution projected from a distance by an unapproachable. For a discussion, see Adrian Mayer, Caste and Kinship in Central India: A Village and Its Region (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 57–58; R.N. Yesudas, The History of the London Missionary Society in Travancore 1806–1908 (Trivandrum, Kerala: Historical Society, 1980), 139–72; Yesudas discusses a highly specified code of respect and avoidance behaviour enforced by the state—the fixed distances to which low-caste person could approach a Brahman.

The desire to possess the symbols of high rank in a traditional set-up assumed that the aspiring caste was aware of wider social horizon than purely local one, which implied contact with hegemonic narratives of the nationalist discourse.20

Lynn, op. cit. Her point about the untouchable conception of society and person based on the field study at Anbor seems to be relevant in the present context. McKim Marriott, ‘Changing Channels of Cultural Transmission in Indian Civilization’, in Intermediate Societies, ed. V.F. Rayed (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1954), 7 cited in M.N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1972), 28–29.

The Bateswar sabha took a vow to spin and wear Khaddar and to ostracise anyone not doing the same.21

Utkal Dipika, 15 April 1922. Here, the popular idioms of nationalist politics were the dominant discourse of the time.

Abstaining from the consumption of liquor and flesh was a significant component of the resolutions of caste sabhas held at Bateswar and Chatteswar. These food items were considered tamasik, that is, sensually stimulating, which supposedly promotes ignorance reversing judgement of right and wrong, etc., thus tantamounting to ‘incoherence’ (adharma) as opposed to the goal of coherence (dharma).22

For a discussion of the triad of strands in human aims, see McKim Mariott, ‘Constructing an Indian Ethno Sociology’, in India through Hindu Categories, ed. McKim Marriott (New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1990). Frederick J. Simson, Eat Not This Flesh (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), 9, cited in Derrick O. Lordrick, Sacred Cows and Sacred Places, Origin and Survivals of Animal Home in India (London: University of California Press, 1989), 2.

Secular public places in the village include the public hall, where people of different castes or religion may gather for deliberation or other purpose.23

Andrian Mayer, Caste and Kinship, 57.

Yaga School hall provided the venue for the annual caste sabha of the Nahakas and Chamars from the villages surrounding the Pakkali Thakurani on Saturday afternoon of 22 April 1922. According to Utkal Dipika, a newsletter by Atal Bihari Acharya, Vice-President of Cuttack District Congress Committee, the sabha empowered the caste associations to ostracise the Nahakas, illegally trading in ganja or other intoxicants.24

Utkal Dipika, 29 April 1922. Ostracisation could be the ‘most severe penalty which can be pronounced by the caste assembly’. Louis Dumont, ‘Home Hierarichus: The Caste System & its Implications’ translated by Mark Salisbury, Louis Dumont and Basia Gulati (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1980),177. Bernard S. Cohn, ‘The Changing Status of a Depressed Caste’, in his An Anthropologist among Historian and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 279.

As a result, they confessed to their wrongdoing and promised to stop the practice.25

Utkal Dipika, op. cit.

Instead, the Nahakas and Chamars decided to wear clothes by spinning indicating a kind of negotiation with and endorsement of the mainstream Gandhian symbolism ‘to create different sub cultural meanings’.26

Utkal Dipika, op. cit. The news piece appearing under the caption ‘General Review of Congress Activities in Kuanpal’ indicated a subtle level of negotiation between the elite Congress domain and the relatively autonomous realm of caste subaltern. Lynn, op. cit. Lynn uses Bakhtin’s insight into mapping out the cognitive universe of the untouchable community. Here, the nationalist idioms—‘khadi’ and ‘spinning’—were the two significant indices in Gandhian discourse: A new site of alternative clothing system where the sociology of real cloth would meet the semiotics of representative clothing, leading to its larger acceptance as a ‘naturalized garment’ of the masses. See Peter Gonslaves, ‘Chapter 2: Barthes: A Gandhian Fashion System’, in Clothing For Liberation A Communication Analysis of Gandhi’s Swadeshi Revolution, ed. Peter Gonslaves (New Delhi, India: SAGE, 2010), 40–71.

In the series of associations and meetings among the lower castes, the Congress presence was registered either in terms of their leaders’ participation or its agenda becoming the main point of reference. About 500 members of Chakradharpur Jati Sabha attended a meeting at Champahat village of Appila Pargana and deliberated for the second day on the ways to get rid of caste taboos and superstitions. It decided to reform the caste group by refraining from taking intoxicants and flesh and imbibing cleanliness, etc., outlined in the nationalist constructive work programme.27

Utkal Dipika, 23 June 1923.

This could be construed a traditional society’s attempt to guard its ideal order ‘by dangers which threaten transgressors’.28

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 3. Here, the danger does not lie in the transgression of the taboos and customary beliefs which was subverted by the Congress propaganda but in the failure to adhere to its new reformist ideals. Stories of retribution following the people opposing Gandhi are an instance in the context (Utkal Dipika, 1921). Also see Amin, ‘Gandhi as a Mahatma’. As Douglas says the danger beliefs are bigger threat which one man uses to coerce another as dangers which he fears to incur by his own lapse from righteousness.

Lynn’s study has shown that the untouchables or lower castes are left to achieve whatever status and self-esteem within their own community by whatever means available. With self-esteem being thwarted in larger society, untouchables are very sensitive about status matter, sometimes rejecting the status criterion, sometimes modifying them and other times using them to their own advantage.29

Lynn, op. cit., 78.

In an atmosphere marked by a general awakening among the untouchables, effort made in this direction was discernible. In February 1923, about 200 persons from the community gathered in the sands of Kathjuri river beach to discuss their social, moral and political rights. Concerns over spread of education and discrimination in job were two key issues in that deliberation. The subaltern classes which include the lower caste in its rank look for an external superior agency to represent them. Braj Sunder Das, a Legislative Council Member and activist of the Oriya Provincial Unification Movement, presided the lower caste meeting, and in a condescending move invoked upper caste sympathy and concern for their upgradation. The sabha resolved to get rid of their low self-esteem by a united campaign on these issues.30

Utkal Dipika, 20 February 1923.

‘The psychological need for self-esteem’31

Lynn defines four types of needs of a human being: survival, social ties, cognitive needs for meaning, explanations, logic, structure and consistency and self-esteem.

prompted forty-six pan households of two villages of Kapileswar and Chaudwar to build a pucca house—a community rendezvous under the auspice of Village Reconstruction Sangha Choudwar led by Laxmi Narayan Sahu.32

Utkal Dipika, 3 March 1928 reports about the formation of Gram Sangathan.

Drawing on the ideas of the nationalist constructive work programme, this seems to be an effort by the local educated elite to sanitise the village community by imbibing the ethos of corporate living. In the community centre, they were holding social gatherings each Tuesday evening and at least, they had met six times during a span of one and half months for educating the community on the ways/tools of ritually sanctioned pure ways of living. In this collective effort at upgradation, they all had left eating beef and were disposed to the belief that it was an oxymoron to continue eating beef and wearing Tulsi bead necklace.33

Utkal Dipika, 5 October 1929. This was a report by Alekh Das.

What involved in these moves was surely ‘gains in the vital dimension of self-respect’,34

Cohn, ‘The Changing Status of Depressed Caste’, 250.Douglas, op. cit., 3. Douglas believes that pollution beliefs can be used in a dialogue of claim and counter-claims to status.

by ‘separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgression’, and probably to say after Mary Douglas, ‘impose system on an inherently untidy experience’.35

Douglas, op. cit., 4. Lynn, op. cit., 78. The Brahminical ideas of post-vedic time regarding diet, ritual and certain important religious ideas remain influential in the Caste Sabha ideas.

Redefining the Traditional Matrix

The Bauri community sabha at Kisanpur held on 2 April 1922 took a decision to boycott the thatching and allied works of Chamars, Shithal and Pig Herds who seemed to observe the pollution taboo with them, though the chores performed by the latter were not very ennobling.36

Utkal Dipika, 15 April 1922. The models of purity and pollution running through the caste system are not necessarily an elaborate permeation of the Brahminical idea; it could be discrete and internally varied to different caste groups. See for a discussion Dipankar Gupta, Interrogating Caste Understanding Hierarchy and Difference in Indian Society (New Delhi: Penguins Books, 2000), 77–85.

The interdependent nature of caste hierarchy, at times, could tilt the balance in favour of the lower castes. The upper castes generally depend on the lower ones for the performances of ablution practices on a regular basis. In order to defend their dignity, the lower castes tactically put an end to one of its services so that the upper one could see reason.37

Dumont, op. cit., 17.

The sabha of the Bauri community prohibited carrying palanquin for the middle-rung castes, such as milkmen, potter and fishermen, for their double standard by not obeying the pollution taboo at the time of carrying, while otherwise doing the same: signifying it is not the substance or touch but rank in the transactions is what matters i.e.,‘control of the work defines purity and pollution’.38

McKim Mariott, ‘Interactional and Attributional Theories of Caste Ranking’, in Structure and Change in Indian Society, ed. Bernard Cohn and Milton Singer (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1968), 145; Freeman’s study of Orissa shows that upper caste really do not believe in pollution practice when it becomes inconvenient. James M. Freeman, Untouchability: An Indian Life History (London: George Allen & Kegan, 1979).

The Utkal Dipika (10 May 1924) snippet ‘Vow of the Bauri Community’ revealed its continued resolutions to abstain from liquor and inedible and not to carry palanquin for the backward castes, such as potters, blacksmiths, etc.39

Utkal Dipika, 10 May 1924.

Hostility and prejudice towards the education of lower caste children by the upper caste were discernible trends during the second quarter of twentieth-century colonial rule.40

The incident at Kavitha in Gujarat where the untouchables had enrolled four children in the local school—after the Bombay government ruling in August 1935 permitted them to admit their boys in the school was followed by physical assault, social boycott and other harassments. See for a discussion B.R. Ambedkar, op. cit., 216. Anne Besant in an article in the Indian Review in 1909 had emphasised the habits of exquisite personal cleanliness and intake of ‘pure food stuffs̕ as a precondition for the lower caste boys to be fit to sit along the upper caste boys in the school room.

The Bauri community in Bagalpur village suspected upper caste hand in the burning of an untouchable school, and in protest withdrew their customary services to them. They also shifted out of their secluded settlement cluster in the village to a relatively remote location on a nearby river bank.41

Samaj, 5-March-1930.

These endeavours of different caste groups at status elevation through an adherence to the idioms of high religion had caused a certain kind of tension in the transactional relationship at the middle rung.42

Unlike the overlooking of minor changes in the ritual and style of life of a low caste, punishment was likely to follow from the dominant caste, if the latter refused to perform services—economic or ritual—which it traditionally performed or appropriated an important high-caste symbol. Srinivas, op. cit., 16. Tension is much likely to come up in the interaction among castes, especially in commensal relations. See for a discussion, Mariott, ‘Interactional and Attributional’.

The Utkal Dipika (20 June 1921) newsletter by Sadasib Dhanpati Behera, of Krushnapur, Cuttack, offered an account of the oppression of the Gaura (milkmen) at the hands of the zamindars and the prosperous moneylenders of Kansari caste (brazier) of Bhatimunda village, Kobanda Pargana of Cuttack. The Brahminical text, Manusmriti, has enumerated the Kansaris as an ‘untouchables’ and non-descript (Varna Sankar) caste group. This was probable reason the milkmen caste of the country had prohibited carrying them on a palanquin and eating out from their hearth.43

Utkal Dipika, 2 July 1921. The Census Commissioner Lacey, also, stated about similar trend during 1920s: ‘The Gauras of Cuttack who are striving to get themselves recognized as Yadubansis Kshatriyas have not only assumed the sacred thread but also refused to work as palanquin bearers.’ He further adds:

The Khandaits and Karanas who are generally the most influential, and well-to-do amongst the local inhabitants and whose idea of false prestige combined with an exaggerated notion of Purdah system, has made them the worst sufferers in this respect, have led the opposition and rivalry ripened into actual rioting, at several places in this (Cuttack) district.

The Fortnightly Report Bihar & Orissa for the Second Half of July 1921 stated about ‘strained feeling between the zamindars and Gowla tenants to have appeared in Cuttack’. Home Political Files, 1921.

Acting as a unit, members bearing the same rank in a hierarchy, however important and poor they may be, would do in external matters, the rich and powerful zamindars, held a meeting to prop up their claim to superior ritual status. In an overt gang effort at upward mobility, they called out the Gopalas (milkmen) under their estate and forced to carry them on a palanquin and eat out from their hearth.44

Utkal Dipika, op. cit. A news report in Deshkatha tells about frequent cases of intimidation of milkmen community by the upper caste stratum and punitive measures against the latter were only possible once efforts were made by the Yadav Samit. Deshkatha, 1 September 1930. For landownership, ritual status and caste unit behaviour, see Srinivas, Social Change, 12, 13; Mayer, Caste and Kinship, 17–18.

On their refusal, the Gopalas were intimidated under strong arm to carry out the job and in a symbolic demonstration of their ritual superiority, one Mahajan, Sadai Sahu, was carried on a palanquin up to Sidhamath of Sri Mahapurush Madhavananda Swami (a local monastery founded by one ascetic) and carried back home in the evening. Later, they were forced to dine from their hearth, upsetting the notion of commensal hierarchy in which without any necessary conveyance of pollution through the nature of services, an order of relative highness and lowness could be asserted simply through the transactional idiom.45

Mayer, Caste and Kinship, 34; Mariott, ‘Interactional and attributional’, 14l. The principle was that eating food cooked or served by another caste denotes equality or inferiority and that not to eat denotes equality or superiority.

Indeed, in the hierarchy of purity/pollution, an element of power had a role to play in case of an asymmetrical positioning of caste and class in the social hierarchy.46

Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘The Original Caste: Power, History and Hierarchy in South Asia’ (summarised argument of his book, The Hollow Crown, 1971), in Mariott (ed.), India Through Hindu Categories, 62. Against the Dumontian overarching model of purity/pollution as the primary relational coordinates endowing hierarchy with its meaning and substance, Dirk introduces concerns with power, hegemony and history into the structure of thought open to the circumstantiality of everyday life in which relationships and ways of life are always open to multiple interpretations and indeterminacy. Raheja, op. cit., 80–114. For a critique of the Dumontian synthetic notion of caste, see Partha Chatterjee ‘Caste and Subaltern Consciousness’, in Subaltern Studies, Vol. 6, ed. R. Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 169–209.

The confrontation between the Kansaris and Gopalas which was a veritable power struggle prompted the latter to trace the genealogical origin of the Kansari caste group in order to show them their place. The Gopalas also solicited the authority of their circle organisation (seba samant mandal) to remedy degenerative caste practices and uplift the caste to a higher pedestal.47

Utkal Dipika, 2 July 1921. The report was in the form of a newsletter.

Clarity in definition and internal differentiation differed among caste groups across the geographical region. While the upper thrust (Brahmins or Khatriyas) were fairly clearly structured, those in the lower rung especially sharing a status inferior [to the first two] but above untouchables were likely to be less-structured.48

R.E. Enthoven, Tribes and Caste of Bombay (Bombay: Govt. Central Press, 1920), Vol. II, 243 cited in Henry Orenstein, Gaon: Conflict Cohesion in an Indian Village (Princeton: Princeton University, 1965), 124. Orenstein discusses this process among the servicing caste, such as water-carrier, potter, barber, etc., in Chapters 7 and 8. On the geographic variation in the characteristics of milkmen, see Malley, Bihar and Orissa District, 65. Malley writes the same caste while carrying palanquin in Cuttack, do not do the same in Balasore and there is a sub-caste called Gopajpuri where women do not wear nose ornaments.

According to Utkal Dipika, a joint meeting (Jatiya Mahasabha) of the milkmen and barbers was held at Bastari Math, Baxi Bazar on Wednesday, 11 April 1923. About 600 people including the leading luminaries from both the communities participated and decided to constitute a committee comprising members from both the communities for removing confusion and conflicts in the performance of their respective caste duties.49

Utkal Dipika, 21 April 1923.

This could be possibly due to caste ranking functioning as a continuum, blurring the boundaries, because of uncertainty in ranking in the middle rung.50

Orenstein, Gaon, 137.

The venues selected for the meeting were the monasteries (Math) and village deities, signified the epistemic existence of the village community with the school becoming an additional secular rendezvous.

Caste tensions emerging out of the quotidian existence had led to a violent clash. While fishing in a pond in the upper Barsian village of Jaipur subdivision, the cultivating Khandait caste and the Pana got into open rioting and injured about seventeen people. After hearing the case, the sub-divisional Magistrate sentenced the guilty for 2 months and also slapped a `15 fine each.51

Utkal Dipika, 7 July 1923.

The incident seemed to point that a predominant Khandait population was matched by the presence of a large number of Panas in the particular subdivision of the district.52

The pans are found in large number in the district. Malley, op. cit., 60, 65–66.

Fishing in the village pond provided an occasion for the village community to plunge into the water in several groups churning and splashing it from different directions for the fish to move into the nets spread over about 3–4 m length and held tight at both the ends by two people from the bottom of the pond to a little over the water level. Despite the low social status of the Panas in the caste hierarchy with strict pollution taboo vis-à-vis the Khandaits who rank only after the Brahmin and Karan, the catharsis in the idea of a bumper fish harvest could have produced an atmosphere of ‘communitas’ blurring distinctions of caste, creed, age, etc., leading to overcrowding in the pond in a bid to fish in the same space, ensuing clashes and collusion.

Civic Institutions and Assertion of Identity

Caste activities acquired a new fillip in the context of the possibility for nomination of the depressed castes or untouchable communities in the non-official category to the Legislative Council, Zilla Board, etc., after the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms announced increasing Indian participation in the governance of the country. ‘The colonial government’s view of Indian society influenced not only relationship between bureaucratically defined groups, it also affected the inter-group relations’ and to quote Lucy Carroll at length: ‘the prizes [of] government patronages, jobs, and political appointments stimulated competition along communal lines’.53

Lucy Caroll, ‘Colonial Perception of Indian Society and the Emergence of Caste Associations’, Journal of Asian Studies xxviii, no. 2 (1998): 238.

Canvassing in the press through newsletter had led to the crystallisation of community solidarity and consensus, bestowing legitimacy on the nomination of a choicest candidate.54

Utkal Dipika, 26 February 1927. A letter signed by about twenty people from the Bauri community had proposed Ramachandra Rath’s nomination for a Zilla Board member and expressed happiness over the selection of Sridhar Samal, a Zilla Board member to the Bihar and Orissa Council.

In this process, a prospective nominee Sri Ramachandra Das from Salepur P.S the district had drawn attention towards an effective and welfare-oriented use of the caste fund, generally frittered away in the annual community feast after meeting the dues of the community priests and Beharas (workers/messengers). The fund collected in the form of pecuniary punishment for violating caste rules, in contrast to the modern method of annual subscription, was deposited with one or two leading members of the sabha. Das, in his newsletter, hinted at a more edifying use of the caste fund under his supervision through the construction of a Srimad Bhagabat Gadi (a shrine-centre for the recital of Srimad Bhagabat) and the formation of a Kirtan Mandali (collective singing group) at Mundal village of Salepur P.S. He emphasised the importance of annual participation of the caste fraternity in the Bhagabat Sammilani and informed about the efforts made at Padmapur and Yaga to found another Srimad Bhagabat Gadi.55

Utkal Dipika, 12 February 1927. Das was the leading luminary from the Bauri community. Srimad Bhagabat Gadi is a shrine form: a structure raised from the ground in a cylindrical form around which the religious discourses and activities of the community is organised. For a general overview of the Bauri caste organizational structure, see K.C. Shasmal, The Bauris of West Bengal (Calcutta: Indian Publications, 1972), 79, 88. Shasmai writes: Besides settling disputes among individuals, families and maintaining peace and order among the communities, the traditional village council of the Bauris was also concerned with socio-religious matters: such as fixation of the date of worship of a particular deity, rate of subscription to be paid by each family on occasion of such worship and other festivals.

Bhagabat, the doctrine of devotion, does not recognise the traditional division of society; a devotee has in mind the least distinction between high and low castes, between male and female, between rich and poor and between learned and ignorant.56

Professor Bhaskar Chatterjee, ‘Social Perspective of Chaitnyaim’, in Sri Chaitnya in the Religious Life of India, ed. H.C. Das (Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1989). This is a view which accorded well with the attitudes of a sect which felt they were beyond the bounds and standards of ordinary, structured society, resembling to a kind of devotional ‘communitas’. Turner develops the concept of ‘communitas or withdrawal’ in his case study of Chaitnyite Vaisnavism in Bengal. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, Structure and Anti-structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969), 19, 158. William R. Pinch points to the liberating influences of the renunciant Ramanandi sampradaya’s Vaisnava beliefs and practices in the generation of high-status Kshatriya identity among semi-independent cultivating jatis, such as Kurmi (Kurmi Khatriya), Koiri (Kushavaha Kshatryiya), and Goala (Yadava Kshatriya), through a historicisation of Vaisnava culture and belief during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See William Pinch, Being Vaisnava, Becoming Khatriya: Culture, Belief and Identity in North India, 1800–1940 (PhD thesis, University of Virginia, 1990), 8, 296–97. Anupama Rao notes the oppositional consciousness developed by caste groups through political critique as well as forms of religiosity and self-fashioning refusing caste stigma and imagining alternative forms of community.Rao, op. cit.

The annual Srimad Bhagabat Sammilani includes in its recipe recital of the text Srimad Bhagabat accompanied by an ecstatic musical concert (Sankirtan), a kind of celebratory exordium culminating in a feast for the entire community. Thus, Das’s suggestions and references to the use of caste fund for Bhgabat Sammilani were clearly meant to emancipate his caste brethren from the hierarchical model based on the Brahminical idea of purity and pollution.57

Nandin Gooptu discusses fund-raising activities among rural untouchable migrants in early twentieth century for temple construction in the urban centres. She mentions about their regular session of devotional singing of bhajans and kirtans in associations with the saints in the heterodox devotionals of nirguna bhakti tradition conveying an egalitarian religious message resistant to hierarchical Hinduism. Nandin Gooptu, The Politics of Urban Poor in Early Twentieth Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 149–51.

‘Representation [of them] in the legislature that are to be set up under the new constitution’, as the Census Commissioner for Bihar and Orissa W.G. Lacey stated, was the centre of activities that ‘public interest was focused on’.58

W.G. Lacey, Some Aspects of the Census Operations in Bihar & Orissa (Patna: Patna University, 1931), 10.

‘Censuring the Hindu caste order stifling the path to progress for the seven crores untouchables in India’, Ramchandra Das, in a letter to Utkal Dipika, appreciated the British dispensation making provision for nomination of the untouchable community to Assembly, Zilla Board and Municipality. He was happy over the nomination of Sridhar Samal, the first graduate from the untouchable community in Orissa, to the Bihar and Orissa Council putting a break to the practice of upper caste representing seats reserved for the lower caste—and appealed to the judiciousness of colonial officialdom in Orissa in nominating a member from the untouchable community to the Zilla Board.59

Utkal Dipika, 12 February 1927.

A newsletter in Utkal Dipika, signed by about twenty lower caste members, appealed to the departmental commissioner, District Collector and the Zilla Board authorities for Ram Chandra Rath’s nomination to the Zilla Board as a depressed caste member. It claimed that Rath had exhibited great enthusiasm and activism by generating uplift awareness among the Bauri community through meetings and write-ups in the newspapers. It also expressed happiness over the nomination of Sridhar Samal from the untouchable community to the Bihar–Orissa Legislative Council.60

Utkal Dipika, 26 February 1927.

A write-up captioned ‘Zilla Board Depressed Class Member’ from Sri Jogendra Mohanty, Adambu Patana drew attention to the idea of only nominating a University graduate to Zilla Board membership, espoused by the officialdom. Emphasising wide use of native language in Zilla Board functioning, Mohanty mounted pressure on the colonial officials by proposing Ramchandra Rath, a literati with native linguistic skills and known for upgradation work among the Bauri community for a Zilla Board nomination.61

Ibid.

In the series of campaign, on 26 February 1927, a meeting of about 200 Bauris at Seba Village, Cuttack, expressed happiness over the representation of an untouchable to the Council and unanimously proposed nomination of Ram Chandra Rath to the District Board. 62

Utkal Dipika, 9 April 1927. This campaign had its parallel in Uttar Pradesh. Owen M. Lynch in her study of the Jatav community of Agra city mentions about lobbying by Jatav Men’s Association for inclusion of one of their member in the State Legislative Council in Uttar Pradesh and the District Board of Agra during the 1920s. This was to help them both to have a voice to make the community’s demands known and a position of structural observability over actions of other castes. See Owen M. Lynch, The Politics of Untouchability (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 78–81.

Refurbishing Caste Image

Efforts at caste upgradation activities among lower castes by undergoing certain purificatory practices prescribed for the top rung probably led the Brahmins to reinforce the semiotics of their superior caste status. This made them to uphold the cause of nationalism, community education and vedic scriptural prescriptions. In a weekly congregation of the village committees of the Brahmin Samit, Banki, the Secretary, Sri Madhab Chandra Misra inspired by his master’s booklet ‘Guru bakya’, vowed for Swaraj.63

Utkal Dipika, 23 July 1921. ‘Guru bakya’ means the master’s words.

In a significant move at community welfare, arrangements were made for opening up a school by the Brahman Samiti formed 15 years ago with the help from Raja of Madhupur.64

Utkal Dipika, 14 May 1923.

The Brahman Samiti suggested that the ‘Brahman is clearly pre-eminently the source of everything else’—the repository of ritual knowledge and guardian of caste order—still at a ‘lower level kings must protect and sponsor Brahmans, in order for them to exist, as gods on earth’.65

Nicholas B. Dirks, The Original Caste, 59–60.

A Brahmin Samit comprising the twenty-eight sasan (Brahmin villages) surrounding Baldebjiu, the presiding deity of the locality had been formed in Kendrapara subdivision. The objective was to get the Brahmins rid of their superstitious habits and as the upholder of caste hierarchy and its rules, to see to the welfare of other caste groups.66

Utkal Dipika, 16 June 1923.

In a meeting in Jajpur subdivision, the Brahmins had resolved to devoutly adhere to a code of conduct appropriate to their position in the caste hierarchy and not stoop low by visiting jajman’s house without prior invitation.67

Ibid.

In a similar effort in Kujang, about 5 to 700 Brahmins had collectively decided to strictly abide by the Vedic scriptures, hold meeting in each sasan and prevent the sale of cow to butchers. It indicated about the sacred position cow occupies in the Hindu scripture and the prevailing mood during the cow protection activities.68

There are quite a few references about formation of gausalas (asylum for cows) and initiative to prevent their sale to butchers in Utkal Dipika during the 1920s. See Subrat K. Rout, ‘Cow Protection Activities; Cuttack: 1920–29’, Paper presented both in Modern India Section & Odisha Panel on History & Present: Rethinking Society, State, and Region in Orissa, Indian History Congress 74th Session, Cuttack, 28–30 December 2013.

To uplift the community, a Brahmin Samit had also been formed in Painda.69

Utkal Dipika, 17 November 1928.

The continuous avowal to Vedic sacred rules was suggestive of the conscious expression of the holistic notion of caste in one language, that is, ‘the language of priests’.70

For a cogent statement of Dumont’s position, see his essay ‘A Fundamental Problem in the Sociology of Caste’ in his book Religion Politics and History in India, Collected papers in Indian Sociology (Paris: Mouton Publishers, 1970), 61–62. For an exposition of Dumont’s view and a critique of this synthetic notion of caste, see Partha Chatterjee, ‘Caste and Subaltern Consciousness’, in Subaltern Studies, Vol. VII, ed. Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Enhancing family esteem among the milkmen caste group took an interesting turn when Mahuri Taluka’s milkmen had resolved in a meeting ‘to prohibit their women folk going out for selling milk and curd’.71

Utkal Dipika, 5 May 1923. The Utkal Dipika reproduced this piece from ‘Asha’. The District Gazetteer mentions a similar trend. The young women of both different sub-castes of milkmen prepare butter and ghi which the older ones take round for sale with their milk. Field labour of all kind is eschewed by Gaura women. Malley, Bihar and Orissa District, 65. The attempt to redefine caste status and resistance against caste oppression had transfigured into a sort of class conflict as the milkmen belonged to the ordinary class of tenants, whereas their upper caste tormentors could belong to the class of Zamindars. The Fortnightly report for the First Half of July 1921, Bihar & Orissa also tells about ‘the Goala Movement, causing strained feeling between the zamindars and tenants, to have appeared in Cuttack in 1921’. Home Political File, July 1921.

Confining women to the domestic space becomes important within the precincts of the peasant’s moral universe, sanctified by the mythic cult images of Sati, Sita and Savitri with chastity held as an exceptionally sacred attribute. Women susceptible to voyeuristic pleasures remain vulnerable to patriarchal social surveillance, masculine gaze with its pervasive underlying sexuality; as typified in the proverbial epithet: the poor man’s wife is sister-in-law to everyone, denoting the juicy part of a jocular relationship.72

The association of gender and caste beyond the land/caste relation is illustrated in Biswamoy Pati. In the chapter ‘Murder of Banamali’, the killing of an extortionist naib (revenue official)—in the adjoining Puri district, Pati in the section Caste, Class, Gender and Popular Culture based on court proceedings—depicts how Panchu and Uccab (both accused) and upper caste banias went over to the Nuagaria tank on the day of the murder and made fun of Chanda Bewa (the Baurani outcaste labourer) by throwing mud on her head as she was carrying earth from the tank. See Biswamoy Pati, op. cit. 71.

Ensuring ‘the social invisibility of women’, considered ‘secrets of men and household’ meant that they belonged ‘to the realm of forbidden and should therefore, from men’s point of view, be covered and unseen’.73

For a discussion on the application of ‘honour scale’ to the peasant families, see El-Sayed El –Aswad, ‘Cosmological Belief System of Egyptian Peasant’, Arthropos (1994), 20 September, vol. 89, 416, 365; R. Guha, ‘Chandra’s Death’, in Subaltern Studies, Vol. V (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). Since the prestige of a caste was higher or lower according to the degree of its purity—the physical constitution of women as well as their cultural construction as objects of male lust made them in men’s ideas potentially the more vulnerable of the two sexes—a maiden’s virginity, a widow’s chastity and wife’s sexual fidelity to her husband were all highly valourised by a Samaj. Cynthia Ann Homes, in her article ‘Becoming Male Salvation through Gender Modification in Hinduism and Buddhism’, argues that eventually, women’s chastity was equated with ‘purity’, which came to be viewed as a proper substitute for female education. A man’s status became closely related with his wife’s purity/chastity, increasing further need for greater control of women’s sexuality. See Sabina Petna Ramet (ed.), Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures (London: Routledge, 1996), 25. Hetukar Jha also depicts the visual susceptibility of the milk-women going around for selling milk and their male’s resolve to stop it. See his ‘Lower Caste Peasants and Upper Caste Zamindars in Bihar 1921–1925’, IESHR xiv (1977): 556.

Caste identity and consciousness seemed to take a competitive turn with each community trying to upgrade its status by diagnosing the cause of its malaise and finding out ways to remove it. Open letters in Utkal Dipika by Bhubanananda Das and Gopal Praharaj in solidarity with caste sabha of the Gudia community (sweetmeat maker) of eighteen parganas organised by Laxman Sahu and held at Khangar, Cuttack, emphasised the constitution of a permanent committee for the harmonious growth of the community. While Bhubanananda pondered over the economic decline of the caste—the sad fall of a community—of big sweet-stall owners to vendors of cheap confectioneries and found embroilment in litigation tangle as the chief cause, Praharaj lamenting the degradation of the community to the status of a Sudra stressed the sabhas to educate the people out of their conservatism and bring about welfare to the entire community. The letter pointed out to the obvious gender bias of caste meeting being entirely a male affair where even the food served was cooked by male members only, excluding women from the uplift focus. 74

Utkal Dipika, 14 May 1928. Gopal Praharaj is a famous humorist among Oriya writers.

The tenor of the meeting suggested that an enlightened outlook and economic status are the two main indices determining position in the caste hierarchy. While enlightened outlook suggested purificatory practices, economic status could hint position in the power structure.

The spate of caste sabha activities, especially among the lower castes pointed to a distinct, moves towards ritual upgradation after the Brahminical puritanical model, propelled by a civic discourse of egalitarianism centring around the Gandhian programme of anti-untouchability, community welfare and Khadi in the nationalist public sphere in Orissa. This further had led to resistance against slighting or short changing in the transactional process between the caste groups or high handedness of any self-proclaimed upper caste as seen in the conflict between the Kansaris and Gopalas and, most prominently, in the inversion of hierarchical model in the fish pond riot between the Panas and Khandaits. The institutional modernity brought about by the democratic legislative bodies and registering caste opinions in the print media fostered a kind of solidarity and civic equality transposed into egalitarian religious cult of Bhgabatism. Finally, the Brahminical response with its avowal of ritual superiority and other caste groups pondering over their social plight indicated a kind of invocation of community, history and solidarity.

Concluding Observations

In retrospect, one may ask to what extent did the upgradation moves by the lower castes and their purificatory efforts with its tension and conflicts owe its explanatory logic to the well-known and much-debated concept of sanskritisation, elucidated by M.N. Srinivas. He defines ‘sanskritisation’ in the following manner:

Sanskritization is the process by which a low caste, or, tribal or other group, changes its customs, rituals, ideology; and way of life in the direction of a high, and frequently twice-born caste. Generally such changes are followed by a claim to a higher position in the caste hierarchy than that traditionally conceded to the claimant caste by the local community. The claim is made over a period of time, in fact, a generation or two, before the arrival is conceded.75

Srinivas, Social Change, 6, 7–8. This is a modified definition of sanskritisation which takes into account the various criticism made of his original statement. Recently, Dipankar Gupta has viewed sanskritisation as ‘a reassertion in an extraverted form what was till then an introverted expression of caste’s overall rejection of the position given to it by hierarchical rules as governed by the twin principles of economics and politics’, thus underplaying the cultural valences in the process (See Gupta op. cit., p.133). In the interplay of principles of power, economy, and purity and pollution model in the determination of caste hierarchy, there seems to be a slick difference between Dumont and Gupta as the latter continuously concedes that Dumont has discursively incorporated each of the points in his hierarchical model. See Gupta, op. cit., 137 and passim. Anupama Rao’s critique of the homeo-static nature of Srinivas model of politics resonates with latter’s confession: ‘the mobility associated with Sanskritization results only in positional changes in the system and does not lead to any structural change’. Her observation that ‘sanskritization’ and ‘westernization’ describe parallel forms of upward mobility—one is ritual and the other is secular, one mimics the idealised power of Brahmins and, more importantly, the other, the coloniser—needs to be qualified as it loses sight of the fact that in sanskritisation the subordinate castes do not necessarily mimic the idealised power of the Brahmin; it could be any dominant social group and the process could be a potential move towards economic and social dominance; and similarly, westernisation could be the quest to acquire the insignia of modern industrial civilisation. Srinivas, op. cit., 7. Yoginder Singh, Modernization of Indian, Tradition (Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 1986), 7–8, 12. Anupama Rao, op. cit., 17 ‘Stripped down to the basics’, as M.S.S. Pandian argues: Srinivas’s much-hyped concept about sanskritisation within a comparative framework claims that the lower caste sanskritises and the upper caste westernises. The teleology move from the lower caste practices of sanskritisation to upper caste’s westernisation. It is a teleology that sees caste as the other of the modern. M.S.S. Pandian, ‘A Step Outside Modernity’, in Sarkar and Sarkar (eds), Caste in Modern India, 371.

In the activities and organisation of caste sabhas, inclusive of both the lower and upper, though one finds a distinct bearing of the Brahminical or puritanical model by way of purificatory efforts: the lower castes getting rid of the habits prohibited by the Brahminical textual tradition and the latter strictly monitoring its caste attributes, no attempt to claim a tangible higher position in the caste hierarchy by the former was perceptible. This was more so as disjunction between caste and traditional occupation was steadily emerging. ‘With advancement of education & growth of cosmopolitan views’ as W.G. Lacey has observed, the tendency to stick to traditional occupation has totally disappeared in towns where at present the profession of a man is purely one of his choice or his guardians. But in distant mufassil, the adherence to traditional occupation has been determined more by economic necessity of the villagers than by sanctity of custom or restriction of caste government or opposition from other caste and communities.76

Thus, though a son or two of a washer man or barber or a carpenter may stick to traditional occupation of their forefather, the other son generally go away to Calcutta or some such distant parts for their livelihood and take to any profession they can lay their hands on. Lacey, op. cit.

The conflicts and tensions within the hierarchy were mostly ‘interactional’ or ‘transactional’ rather than because of a very definitive attempt to acquire the status of an upper caste. They were motivated to redefine the transactional matrix within the receiver/giver binary in order to uphold self-esteem in everyday social intercourse. It may be said that by adopting a way of life akin to that of a high caste, the lower castes were claiming equality of status with high-caste Hindus.77

David Hardiman, ‘The Coming of Devi: Adivasi Assertion in South Gujarat’, Subaltern Studies, Vol. III, ed. Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), 196–230.

Some semblance with certain elements of ‘Revitalisation Movement’ could be discernible: expression of group solidarity and acting as they did, as David Harriman has remarked in another context: ‘the lower classes revealed understanding of the relationship between values and power; values possess that elements of power which permits dominant classes to subjugate subordinate classes with minimum use of physical force.’ He further adds, ‘the Brahminical notion of purity has provided a most potent means for the continuance of the supposedly impure subordinate classes of India. By appropriating and then democratizing such values they [lower castes] sought to deprive them of their power of domination.’78

The Adivasi efforts to adopt purifying practices by forsaking intoxicants are indicative of it. Hardiman, op. cit., 217. As Dumont very crisply put: to legitimise force into power is to cover it with principles or value. Dumont, ‘Religion & History in India’, 6. Dipankar Gupta taking cue from Talcott Parson argues that hierarchy of the most minimal kind—but hierarchy nonetheless—is inescapable with every judgement of value, thus difference becoming the basis of hierarchy. Gupta, op. cit., 6–7.

The assimilation of dominant values provided a certain meeting point between the lower castes and certain progressive members of the upper caste—for instance, the nationalist intelligentsia espousal of the cause of the caste sabha.79

Ramnarayan Rawat disagrees with Nandin Gooptu and Owen M. Lynch understanding of Jatav protest in Agra and surrounding rural areas as effort to claim ‘higher status and respectability in the Khatriya caste category through “sanskritization”’—and favours David Hardiman’s analysis that the protesting lower caste and tribals appropriated the value system of upper class in order to deprive them ‘of their power of domination’. In Uttar Pradesh, Arya Samaj provided the meeting point between the lower caste and the values of great tradition. Rawat, op. cit., 452. But both Lynch and Gooptu are also aware of the limitation of the sanskritising process. Lynch points to the contradiction and anomalies in the attempt by Jatav community to sanskritise them to Khatriya status as they stuck to the traditional stigmatised and highly visible occupation of shoe-making and fought to be included as scheduled caste in the census enumeration to avail concrete benefits. Owen M. Lynch, The Politics of Untouchability (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 67–85. Nandin Gooptu, also, factors in (i) ‘the resurgence of heterodox devotionals (bhakti) among the poorer untouchables, conceived as an egalitarian ideology opposed to the caste hierarchy; (ii) the Adi Hindu ideology claiming back the ancient racial origin of untouchables with their original rights and power; and (iii) the likelihood of dismissal by the upper castes and classes attempts at upgradation of social status by the lower caste migrants in urban Uttar Pradesh in the early twentieth century. Gooptu, op. cit., 150–52.

In short, it can be said that the caste organisations and activities were movements to enhance social esteem than any attempt at sanskritisation in the direction of any definite upper caste. Caste— ‘the other of the nationhood and modernity’ variously called as ‘an enunciatory disorder’, ‘an aporia in the inscription of nationhood’, ‘a gate-keeping concept’ and ‘a surrogate for the civilisation as a whole’80

M.S.S. Pandian points to the irony that caste as the other of the modern is coded forever solely as a characteristic of lower caste, as the history of the slavery been of the Black. The refusal to concede the demand of the Indian upper caste modernity to hide and at once practice caste has ensured the subaltern counter-public to stay in constant antagonistic dialogue with the modern civil society’s authorised public sphere. Pandian, ‘A Step Outside Modernity’. For the various aphorisms on caste, see Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 126, 129. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Theory in Anthropology: Centre & Periphery’, Comparative Studies Society and History 28, no. 1 (1986): 357 cited in Ganguly, Caste, Colonialism and Counter-modernity Notes on a Post-colonial Hermeneutics of Caste (London: Routledge, 2005), 53.

—has vital presence in the performative space of the nation and its multifarious fragments of everydayness (electoral process, jobs and imbibing democratic values), resists incorporation into and is a supplement to the accumulative teleological pedagogy of the nation state: though could be explained within the discourse of law, rights and progress, could not be contained within it.81

Debjani Ganguly, Caste, Colonialism and Counter-modernity, 8. See for a discussion on the tension between universalism and liberalism of modernity and the differential and unwieldy singularity of caste identity. Anupama Rao, op. cit. Chapter 3, ‘Dalit as a Political Minority’. Recently, Indrajit Roy interrogates the origin of ideas of modernity with the associated notions of social justice, and equality exclusively in the elitist political and economic sphere of Indian state and demonstrates how subaltern classes dismiss the idea of hierarchy and value ideas of equality and social justice without necessarily drawing on the statist vocabularies in a study of untouchable Mushar agricultural labourers. See his ‘Equality Against Hierarchy: Imagining Modernity in Subaltern India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 50, no. 1 (2016): 80–107.

This tension also had figured out in Vijay Prasad and Kancha Ilaih’s reading of Dalit Movement in terms of the principle of ‘democratic pluralism’ and social revolution in subaltern studies and the post-orientalist representation of caste in Ranajit Guha, Gyan Prakash and Partha Chatterjee as the relations inhabiting a field of power not to be subsumed in the narrative of capital or modern state and ‘pure and impure’ binary, but to be seen in terms of worlding the experiential life world of stigmatised selfhood that exceeds question of social justice and modernisation.

Acknowledgements

The article is part of the larger area I worked for my PhD ‘Peasant Protest & Nationalism; Cuttack District 1920–29’ Department of History, University of Delhi, 2004. I thank my thesis supervisor Sumit Sarkar for comments on earlier drafts. An invitation for a Conference on ‘Communities and the Nation: Dalits & Adivasis in Colonial and Post-colonial India’ at the Department of History, University of Calcutta, 22–23 March 2006 helped me to rework on the article. The article was substantially enriched from the comments of two anonymous reviewers of the journal. I thank Nasir Tyabji, the former editor for advice, and Velayutham Saravanan, the present editor for valuable editorial contribution.

Caste Hierarchies and Social Tensions in Cuttack: 1920–30

Abstract

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Getting Rid of Impure Habits

Redefining the Traditional Matrix

Civic Institutions and Assertion of Identity

Refurbishing Caste Image

Concluding Observations

Acknowledgements