Sixty years after independence, the caste question looms large in our consciousness. Far from being abolished, the caste system is at the centre of many debates of the day. Whether it is the larger question of the importance of caste in electoral politics, reservations, whether caste should be part of the census or not or the outrage over the Khap panchayat's actions, it is clear that caste is an arena of contention even today.
There is a part of India which sees caste as an outdated institution that needs to be erased from all our calculations. It sees caste as a blight on modernity, a pathogen that infects us, and keeps us from moving on. Caste binds us to a collective rooted in the past and imposes on individuals a destiny that is not of their making. Caste hierarchy makes our future contingent on our birth, and those less fortunately born are condemned to a life more ordinary. What makes this more complex is the accelerated attempt to reverse history by the device of reservations which allocate opportunities purposively to the lower castes. This makes the distaste for caste even greater in the educated middle class, who see it as an instrument created for use specifically against them. The advantages that have accrued to this group have been internalized and naturalized and only the disadvantages loom threateningly, particularly as the lower castes accumulate political power.
It is interesting that the distaste for caste and its classification as a social evil has such wide currency. If the underlying purpose, that of ensuring that birth does not determine destiny, and that the individual must begin with a clean slate in building one's life, were indeed that important, then the idea of inheriting property should be seen as being equally unfair. After all, in today's world, nothing determines our life's trajectory as much as money. The fact that opponents of caste-based reservations are open to using economic criteria suggests that even they accept the unfairness of birth-determined wealth. Why is caste such an anachronism and inheritance such a modern idea?
The idea is made to seem natural in the myth that markets create- that everyone can aspire to becoming wealthy, and uses as its poster children, the lucky few who have built empires from scratch. We can admire them, but to argue that because some people are able to overcome constraints imposed on them by circumstances, no attempt should be made to level the playing field is not an argument that stands up to scrutiny. It would then seem that our distaste for the past is selective. The class that protests caste but celebrates inheritance is the one that has nothing left to gain from caste and everything to lose if property rights are reformed. Of course, the larger market discourse makes this selective discrimination seem legitimate and modern.
Perhaps the larger truth is that it is impossible to shake off one's past. Both caste and class are the ground on which we have been cultivated; we can till this land, fertilise it or leave it fallow but we cannot disown it. The world does not begin and end with us; it is our individual consciousness that gives us the illusion it does. We are all born somebody, and we seek to belong to groups larger than our single selves. The basis for this belonging changes- instead of belonging to a community we may choose to belong to a football club many thousand miles away, in most cases with little reason and a lot of passion, but belonging anywhere involves a loss of self.
What has changed is that the world is unified by a single eye. Knowledge has made our lives visible to all and the awareness that we all live in the same times creates a need to build a single unified context. We are turning the now into the here and vice versa. We evaluate others based on a single yardstick- one which comes to us from the dominant cultures of our time. Seen from this eye, caste is 'backward' but rooting for Chelsea is not. All cultures are now getting asked the same questions in the name of modernity and when they reply in their own terms, we see them as being insufficiently modern. By virtue of seeing the world as a flat surface, devoid of topographical variations and geographical nuance, we assail our past as if it were an aberration, which we must exorcise ourselves of. In this view of the world, we constantly attack ourselves with borrowed visions of what our present should look like and make little attempt to understand the layers and depths of the past in which we are rooted. The past is what we think with and this makes it difficult for us to think about it.
For a small part of India, caste is intruding into politics, but for a much larger section, as Rajni Kothari pointed out many years ago, politics is a new instrument of caste. For all of us, caste is a reality that we have inherited. Even when we apparently disown this category, we cannot escape it entirely. Our names carry our castes, and we have made no attempts to cast those aside. Just like a fruit displays no sign of the roots that gave birth to it, we do not see the role that caste has played in bringing us where we are. Of course, caste discrimination cannot be part of the vision we have for India. But change is much likelier to come out of understanding and acceptance than out of a red-blooded desire to disown the past and pretend that we can built a future unrelated to it. And it will come slowly.
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