Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (3 page)

What we call the caste system today is known in Hinduism’s founding texts as
varnashrama dharma
or
chaturvarna
, the system of four varnas. The approximately four thousand endogamous castes and sub-castes (
jatis
) in Hindu society, each with its own specified hereditary occupation, are divided into four varnas—
Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (soldiers), Vaishyas (traders) and Shudras (servants). Outside of these varnas are the
avarna
castes, the
Ati-Shudras, subhumans, arranged in hierarchies of their own—the Untouchables, the Unseeables, the Unapproachables—whose presence, whose touch, whose very shadow is considered to be polluting by privileged-caste Hindus. In some communities, to prevent inbreeding, each endogamous caste is divided into exogamous
gotras
.
Exogamy is then policed with as much ferocity as
endogamy—with beheadings and lynchings that have the approval of the community elders.
¹⁷
Each region of India has lovingly perfected its own unique version of caste-based cruelty, based on an unwritten code that is much worse than the
Jim Crow laws. In addition to being forced to live in segregated settlements, Untouchables were not allowed to use the public roads that privileged castes used, they were not allowed to drink from common wells, they were not allowed into Hindu temples, they were not allowed into privileged-caste schools, they were not permitted to cover their upper bodies, they were only allowed to wear certain kinds of clothes and certain kinds of jewellery. Some castes, like the Mahars, the caste to which Ambedkar belonged, had to tie brooms to their waists to sweep away their polluted footprints, others had to
hang spittoons around their necks to collect their polluted saliva. Men of the privileged castes had undisputed rights over the bodies of Untouchable women.
Love is polluting. Rape is pure. In many parts of India, much of this continues to this day.
¹⁸

What remains to be said about an imagination, human or divine, that has thought up a social arrangement such as this?

As if the dharma of varnashrama were not enough, there is also the burden of
karma. Those born into the subordinated castes are supposedly being punished for the bad deeds they have done in their past lives. In effect, they are living out a prison sentence. Acts of insubordination could lead to an enhanced sentence, which would mean another cycle of rebirth as an Untouchable or as a Shudra. So it’s best to behave.

“There cannot be a more degrading system of social organisation than the caste system,” said Ambedkar. “It is the system that deadens, paralyses and cripples the people from helpful activity.”
¹⁹

The most famous Indian in the world, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, disagreed. He believed that caste represented the genius of Indian society. At a speech at a missionary conference in Madras in 1916, he said:

In 1921, in his Gujarati journal
Navajivan
he wrote:

Though Gandhi was an admirer of the caste system, he believed that there should be no hierarchy between castes; that all castes should be considered equal, and that the
avarna castes, the
Ati-Shudras, should be brought into the varna system. Ambedkar’s response to this was that “the outcaste is a bye-product of the caste system. There will be outcastes as long as there are castes. Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system.”
²²

It has been almost seventy years since the August 1947 transfer of power between the imperial British government and the Government of India. Is caste in the past? How does
varnashrama dharma play out in our new ‘democracy’?

A lot has changed. India has had a Dalit President and even a Dalit Chief Justice. The rise of political parties dominated by Dalits and other subordinated castes is a remarkable, and in some ways a revolutionary, development. Even if the form it has taken is that a small but visible minority—the leadership—lives out the dreams of the vast majority, given our history, the aggressive assertion of Dalit pride in the political arena can only be a good thing. The complaints about corruption and callousness brought against parties like the
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) apply to the older political parties on an even larger scale, but charges levelled against the BSP take on a shriller, more insulting tone because its leader is someone like
Mayawati—a Dalit, a single woman,
and unapologetic about being both. Whatever the BSP’s failings may be, its contribution towards building Dalit dignity is an immense political task that ought never to be minimised. The worry is that even as subordinated castes are becoming a force to reckon with in parliamentary democracy, democracy itself is being undermined in serious and structural ways.

After the fall of the
Soviet Union, India, which was once at the forefront of the
Non-Aligned Movement, repositioned itself as a ‘natural ally’ of the United States and Israel. In the 1990s, the Indian government embarked on a process of dramatic economic reforms, opening up a previously protected
market to global capital, with natural resources, essential services and national infrastructure that had been developed over fifty years with public money, now turned over to private corporations. Twenty years later, despite a spectacular
GDP growth rate (which has recently slowed down), the new economic policies have led to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Today, India’s one hundred richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of its celebrated GDP.
²³
In a nation of 1.2 billion, more than 800 million people live on less than Rs 20 a day.
²⁴
Giant corporations virtually own and run the country. Politicians and political parties have begun to function as subsidiary holdings of big business.

How has this affected traditional caste networks? Some argue that caste has insulated Indian society and prevented it from fragmenting and atomising like Western society did after the Industrial Revolution.
²⁵
Others argue the opposite; they say that the unprecedented levels of urbanisation and the creation of a new work environment have shaken up the old order and rendered caste hierarchies irrelevant if not obsolete. Both claims deserve serious attention. Pardon the somewhat unliterary interlude that follows, but generalisations cannot replace facts.

A recent list of dollar billionaires published by
Forbes
magazine features fifty-five Indians.
²⁶
The figures, naturally, are based on revealed wealth. Even among these dollar billionaires the distribution of wealth is a steep pyramid in which the cumulative wealth of the top ten outstrips the forty-five below them. Seven out of those top ten are Vaishyas, all of them CEOs of major corporations with business interests all over the world. Between them they own and operate ports, mines, oilfields, gas fields, shipping companies, pharmaceutical companies, telephone networks, petrochemical plants, aluminium plants, cellphone networks, television channels, fresh food outlets, high schools, film production companies, stem cell storage systems, electricity supply networks and
Special Economic Zones. They are:
Mukesh Ambani (Reliance Industries Ltd),
Lakshmi Mittal (Arcelor Mittal),
Dilip Shanghvi (Sun Pharmaceuticals), the Ruia brothers (Ruia Group),
K.M. Birla (Aditya Birla Group),
Savitri Devi Jindal (O.P. Jindal Group),
Gautam Adani (Adani Group) and Sunil Mittal (Bharti Airtel). Of the remaining forty-five, nineteen are Vaishyas too. The rest are for the most part Parsis,
Bohras and Khattris (all mercantile castes) and Brahmins. There are no Dalits or
Adivasis in this list.

Apart from big business,
Banias (Vaishyas) continue to have a firm hold on small trade in cities and on traditional rural moneylending across the country, which has millions of impoverished peasants and Adivasis, including those who live deep in the forests of Central India, caught in a spiralling debt trap. The tribal-dominated states in India’s North East—Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya, Nagaland and
Assam—have, since ‘independence’, witnessed decades of insurgency, militarisation and bloodshed. Through all this,
Marwari and Bania traders have settled there, kept a low profile, and consolidated their businesses. They now control almost all the economic activity in the region.

In the 1931
Census, which was the last to include caste as
an aspect of the survey, Vaishyas accounted for 2.7 per cent of the population (while the Untouchables accounted for 12.5 per cent).
²⁷
Given their access to better health care and more secure futures for their children, the figure for Vaishyas is likely to have decreased rather than increased. Either way, their economic clout in the new economy is extraordinary. In big business and small, in agriculture as well as industry, caste and
capitalism have blended into a disquieting, uniquely Indian alloy. Cronyism is built into the caste system.

Vaishyas are only doing their divinely ordained duty. The
Arthashastra
(circa 350 BCE) says usury is the Vaishya’s right. The
Manusmriti
(circa 150 CE) goes further and suggests a sliding scale of interest rates: 2 per cent per month for
Brahmins, 3 per cent for Kshatriyas, 4 per cent for Vaishyas and 5 per cent for Shudras.
²⁸
On an annual basis, the Brahmin was to pay 24 per cent interest and the Shudra and Dalit, 60 per cent. Even today, for moneylenders to charge a desperate farmer or landless labourer an annual interest of 60 per cent (or more) for a loan is quite normal. If they cannot pay in cash, they have to pay what is known as ‘bodily interest’, which means they are expected to toil for the moneylender from generation to generation to repay impossible debts. It goes without saying that according to the
Manusmriti
no one can be forced into the service of anyone belonging to a ‘lower’ caste.

Vaishyas control Indian business. What do the Brahmins—the
bhudevas
(gods on earth)—do? The 1931 Census puts their population at 6.4 per cent, but, like the Vaishyas and for similar reasons, that percentage too has probably declined. According to a survey by the
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), from having a disproportionately high number of representatives in Parliament, Brahmins have seen their numbers drop dramatically.
²⁹
Does this mean Brahmins have become less influential?

According to Ambedkar,
Brahmins, who were 3 per cent of the population in the Madras Presidency in 1948, held 37 per cent of the gazetted posts and 43 per cent of the non-gazetted posts in government jobs.
³⁰
There is no longer a reliable way to keep track of these trends because after 1931 the Project of Unseeing set in. In the absence of information that ought to be available, we have to make do with what we can find. In a 1990 piece called “Brahmin Power”, the writer
Khushwant Singh said:

The statistics Khushwant Singh cites may be flawed, but are unlikely to be drastically flawed. They are a quarter of a century old now. Some new
census-based information would help, but is unlikely to be forthcoming.