The long shadow

On the occasion of DNA's first anniversary, the Opinion page is carrying a series of articles on the theme of ‘India and the future.’

André Béteille

Caste has become an obsession with the media.  They turn their eyes in every direction for signs of caste bias.  Where it does exist, caste bias is largely a matter of the mind, and when more and more people become convinced about its open or hidden operation, it begins to rear its head even where it did not exist.  Today caste bias in our public institutions is on its way to becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The prevalent view among educated Indians in the early years of independence was that caste was in decline:  it had its importance in India’s past but it would have little importance in its future.  This was the general opinion in Calcutta where I was a student in the mid-fifties and among economists, historians and political scientists in Delhi where I came to teach in 1959.  The only academics who took caste seriously were the sociologists, and since I was one myself, I became the target of much light-hearted banter from the economists in the Delhi School of Economics. 

When N Srinivas pointed out in his address to the archaeology and anthropology section of the Indian Science Congress in January 1957 that caste was acquiring a new lease of life in independent India, The Times of India commented that he was exaggerating its importance.  Now newspaper writers are falling over each other to show how important caste is in contemporary India.  Their newfound zeal and enthusiasm leaves serious students of the subject nonplussed.

What actually is happening to caste today?  A sober assessment of the evidence will show that, while caste has probably become more important in certain domains, it has also become less important in many others.  In the prevailing circumstances it becomes difficult to determine whether caste as a whole is becoming stronger or weaker.  But those benign optimists who had hoped at the time of independence that caste would disappear by the end of the century have been proved wrong.

If we turn back to discussions of caste in the 50 years prior to Independence, we will find that those who wrote about it pointed to three different kinds of factors as being fundamental to its persistence. One set of authors stressed the ritual basis of caste with its roots in the opposition of purity and pollution.  They pointed to the innumerable restrictions on the acceptance of food and water, and the elaborate procedures devised for the maintenance of purity.  These rules and restrictions have steadily declined in strength, with several becoming obsolete. 

A second set of authors maintained that caste constituted the social basis of the economic division of labour in India.  While the lowest castes are still concentrated in ill-paid manual occupations and the upper castes are more prominent in better paid non-manual ones, the association between caste and occupation has definitely weakened.  Many traditional occupations have become obsolete and they have been replaced by new ‘caste-free’ occupations.  With rapid changes in the occupational system, the association between caste and occupation will weaken further. 

Finally, there are those who argued that the real strength of caste lay in the rules of marriage prescribed by it.  These rules were rigid and elaborate, and, among the Hindus, they enjoyed the sanctions of both shastric and customary law.  While caste endogamy, or marriage within the caste, is still the general practice particularly in the rural areas, departures from it are taking place with increasing frequency.  Particularly in the growing educated middle class.

There is one domain in which the slow but unmistakable decline of caste is contradicted, and that is in politics.  When Srinivas argued that caste was acquiring a new lease of life, all the evidence that he marshalled in support of his argument came from the domain of politics.  In the decades since then politicians of all shades and complexions have learned to make increasing use of caste for the mobilisation of electoral support.  No doubt there are regional variations in this, and, hopefully, not irreversible.  But if caste has acquired an increasing hold on the public imagination, we have mainly our politicians to thank.

All political parties promote caste consciousness by putting forward claims in the name of caste pretending to safeguard social justice.  Even the left parties have become champions of caste quotas, using the disingenuous argument that in India caste is the form taken by class, a theoretical innovation that must make Marx and Engels turn in their graves.
  
The writer is a sociologist.