"There was this wonderful television programme maker; I constantly forget her name…who made Peking Express. This is what she describes. Three sentences: she went to China and she saw smog. I can imagine it: you can see smog and feel its effects on your eyes and nose. She goes to Russia, and she immediately sees Vodka everywhere. I can imagine it: everybody getting drunk and walking around drunk, and it must be very difficult to drive. But this woman comes to India, probably on a midnight flight. And the first thing she sees is the caste system. For the life of me I cannot imagine how, when you land up at three o’clock in the morning in Bombay or Delhi, you’ll see the caste system. But this woman saw it! Not only she, but every single European traveller in the last 300 years. The first thing they see when they land on the coast of Malabar is the caste system. In all honestly, none of us has seen it."
(The Peking Express is a Dutch/Flemish reality game show, serialised on television, in which couples have to travel around the world without any money.)
When Christian missionaries and travellers landed in the coastal cities of India and visited other cities and states inland each was able to see ‘the caste system’ in India immediately. If it is that easily visible to them, it must also be visible to us, that is, to those who are alleged to live within the ‘caste system.’ While it may not be as easily visible to us as it was to people looking at it from the outside, it does mean, however, that the ‘caste system’ retains its visibility to us as well. The question then is this: Based on which empirical and visible properties can one ‘see’ (or conclude the existence of) ‘the caste system’?
This question is extremely pertinent in India today. Almost all the discussions about the ‘caste system’ refer to or narrate (a) stories of discrimination (or ‘horror stories’) about water wells; (b) physical beatings; (c) denial of entry into the temples; and (d) ‘untouchability.’ (It is not clear what the latter is about though.) Interestingly enough, most early missionaries and travellers appear to have missed seeing these things. Nevertheless, they saw the ‘caste system.’ This leads one to suspect that the travellers and missionaries saw ‘something else.’ So, what did they see? Research on the European travel and missionary reports in our research group has focused and will continue to focus on enumerating what they saw.
There is a second reason why this question is important. In discussions it is never clear whether (a) the above four aspects are the empirical properties of ‘the caste system’ or whether (b) they are the causal consequences of ‘the caste system.’ If they are empirical properties, we need to ascertain whether they are the constitutive properties of the system or not. If they are constitutive properties, then the condemnation of ‘the caste system’ based on these properties could be justified. If they are, by contrast, secondary (or not necessary) properties, then the discussion will have to take an entirely different route.
However, if they are the consequences of ‘the caste system,’ then ‘the caste system’ is something other than and different from these consequences, which are the themes of moral indignation. If they are the consequences, we need to know whether they are necessary consequences of ‘the caste system.’ If it turns out that these are not the necessary consequences of ‘the caste system’ or that other things generate these consequences severally, again, the discussion has to take a different route.
These analyses involve a kind of theoretical research into ‘the caste system’, and into its theories, which is currently being pursued by the research group built by SN Balagangadhara. The practical field work being conducted at CSLC has provided data that have begun to give us a handle on these questions and are showing new directions in research on Indian social structure. That is to say, hopes of achieving some clarity has emerged thanks to the field research.
That the ‘caste system’ emerged as a full-blown social system, simultaneously all over India, some 3500 years ago, is a sociological impossibility. It is equally unlikely that this system emerged simultaneously in several places and converged. To argue any of these is to transform ‘the caste system’ into a miraculous social organisation. No known (or conceivable) social mechanism can help explain any of the above theses. The only reasonable hypothesis is to assume that it emerged in some place at some time.
This assumption, however, has to solve many difficult questions if it has to play the role of a premise in a research. How did it propagate itself? Because we are talking about ‘the caste system’ (in the singular), somebody or something must have enabled its propagation. The possibility that there is no one single caste system, but many caste systems need not be entertained, at least until those who call upon to do so prove it.
If we now consider India of some 4000 years ago (the famous Purusha Sukta, the favourite piece of all Orientalists, Indologists, leftists, etc., is dated thereabouts), with vast distances separating the cities from each other, with huge differences in languages, it is a prerequisite (almost) that some central political, or administrative system imposed this system on society. We know this was not the case. Without such an imposition, however, there is no way, on heaven or on earth, that a system with the same four varnas, with the same four names (with an identical ‘caste of untouchables or whatever else), with an identically structured set of practices (e.g. the four properties mentioned earlier) could come into being from the crest of the Himalayas in the North to the tip of Kanyakumari in the South. The vastness of the region, its multiplicity of languages and dialects, its diversity in practices make it impossible to conceive anything else based on what we know about human beings, societies, social organisations, etc. Yet, it is an established fact that neither the origin nor the propagation of ‘the caste system’ (let alone its reproduction) was due to the existence and efforts of a centralised system.
Instead of asking the question about the origin and propagation of ‘the caste system,’ the mainstream opinion on ‘the caste system’ simply assumes that ‘the caste system’ ‘somehow’ came into being (deus ex machina, as it were), somehow propagated itself, and that it holds the Indian culture as a hostage. It is this fundamental assumption that will be challenged in this research by drawing out the kind of complexities involved in a region of about 250 kilometres of today. If today’s 250 kilometres make it impossible to talk about ‘the’ caste system, what does it tell us about the 4000 kilometres of yesterday?
From another angle
Since the nineteenth century, one of the chief concerns of social thinkers and activists in India has been to fight ‘caste discrimination’. This problem is considered an obvious evil of Indian society. Its illustrations are many. Members of the scheduled castes do not have access to water wells, because they are considered to be ‘impure’. For the same reason, other castes refuse to have food with them. They face discrimination in employment and allocation of resources. In many cases, these groups are even physically maltreated. Given that this problem of caste discrimination has been a major concern for a few centuries now, one would expect its nature to be relatively clear. However, this is anything but the case.
First, when it comes to caste discrimination, two kinds of problems are involved. On the one hand, there is the discrimination and conflict among the different ‘scheduled castes’. On the other, the same thing can also be observed to exist between the ‘scheduled castes’ and the ‘high-caste’ Hindus. Generally, it has been claimed that the chief problem is the second: the ‘higher castes’ discriminate against the scheduled castes. Apparently, this is what ‘caste discrimination’ is all about. As far as similar injustices are committed by different scheduled castes against each other, this is said to be an imitation of the behaviour of the higher castes towards the scheduled castes.
Second, it is still the dominant belief that ‘Hinduism’ is responsible for ‘caste discrimination’, even though the relation between the two is anything but clear. To a large extent, this belief came into existence in the course of a crystallization of Indology. This discipline divides the growth of religion in India into three distinct phases: Vedism, Brahmanism and Hinduism. While ‘Brahmanism’ is alleged to be the degenerate religion of the ‘Brahmin priests’ who imposed the ‘caste structure’ on society, ‘Hinduism’ (a further degeneration of ‘Brahmanism’) is seen fundamentally as a justification of ‘the caste system’. Therefore, fighting ‘the caste system’ seems to require taking recourse to alternatives for ‘Hinduism’. Two such proposals circulate today: contemporary political liberalism as the secular alternative to Hinduism and Buddhism as the religious alternative to both ‘Brahmanism’ and ‘Hinduism’.
The problems about the nature of ‘the caste system’ and ‘caste discrimination’ become more complex when we notice that our current conceptions of both have emerged in the course of the British colonial domination and the subsequent understanding of India, her culture and her ‘religions’. Consequently, one cannot provide adequate solutions to these problems without grappling with the nature and status of colonial ‘constructions’ of Indian culture and society.