1. Indians are dishonest and lazy.
2. Indians are immoral.
3. There is religious conflict in India between the Hindus and the Muslims.
4. There is communal strife in India.
5. India is a corrupt country.
6. Bribes are rampant in the Indian society.
7. Untouchability ought to be abolished.
8. Caste system is a curse on the Indian society.
9. The Harijans in India are exploited by the high-caste Hindus.
10. Many social reformers like Ambedkar, Periyar, Phule, etc. criticised the immoral nature of the Indian caste system.
This is a random selection from the common sense of the Indian intelligentsia. In all probability, you also endorse these statements and many more I have not included. Are these statements true because they describe the experience of the Indians or because they are parts (or extensions) of an authoritative body of knowledge? Those who think that these statements describe their experience, those who contest the truth of these statements, those make a living by peddling these statements in books and articles, those who do ‘scientific’ studies to prove the truth of these statements or explain their truth… all of them share what I call colonial consciousness. We do not believe these statements are true because they are a part of some scientific theory or another but because we believe they describe our experience. Scholars in India have made names for themselves by selling some of these descriptions as ‘truths’ about India that have come into existence after Indian independence!
I have often been asked, in reply to my arguments, "Why do we ascribe truth value to these statements in the first place, if it goes against our own experience?" Appearances notwithstanding, this is a question of tracing the history of colonial consciousness. To the extent it requires a philosophical answer, it is deceptively simple: these statements appear to ‘explain’ the experience as well, as long as one does not think about them or the conditions under which such statements can be true.
But, one may ask, is it not the case that the statement that ‘the caste system in India does not exist’ challenges the experience of the Indians? Let us clarify this statement, while presuming for the remainder of this section that we use the word ‘caste’ to translate ‘Jati’.
There are two distinct problems. One is about the existence of castes in India. There are some kinds of practices associated with castes. This is the lived experience of the Indians. This is not being challenged. Then there is a second kind of problem. This problem is not the experience of the Indians. It is a theoretical claim. This says that the castes form a system and that such a system constitutes the social structure of India. Over the decades, if not over the centuries, this second claim has been challenged, for instance, by the Marxists. They claim that social classes (in the Marxist sense of the word ‘class’) constitute a system and that such a system is the social structure of Indian society as well. Then there are those ‘socialists’ who have claimed that both ‘castes’ and social classes’ (together) constitute the social structure of India and that one has to study the relations between ‘caste’ and ‘social class’, if one has to understand the Indian society. Finally, at the other end of the spectrum, there are those who claim that the unique nature of Indian society consists of the fact that the Indian social structure is synonymous with ‘the caste system’. To this group belong the dominant western descriptions and the so-called Dalit criticisms of the Indian society.
When we deny the existence of ‘the caste system’, we are neither the first nor the last to say so. We say that ‘the caste system’ is not a social system but a cognitive (classificatory) system at best.
Of course, in an obvious sense, ‘caste’ is a social unit. (In the sense that there are social groups in India called ‘castes’.) But we do not believe that these castes form a coherent social system, studying which we can understand the Indian society. That is to say, we do not believe that these castes constitute a single social structure, which remains invariant across the length and breadth of India. When we say that there is no caste system in India, we are not saying that such groups do not exist in India. However, we do say that castes are merely social groups. (Trades unions, alumini associations, civic associations, etc are also social groups.) They vary in composition, in nomenclature, in their practices and so on. Saying this does not entail that there is no order in society or that social structure is absent in India. It merely means that looking for a set of invariant principles that are supposed to govern these castes is doomed from the outset.
Finally, our research is also trying to pin down the origin of the belief that the Indian social structure is synonymous with ‘the caste system’. Once this is done, the task is to understand why people believe in this theoretical claim and how this belief can reproduce itself. In this process, we hope to understand the controversies that emerge (the posts about this matter are examples) whenever castes are discussed.
A question: But, I want to know, which Ideology we shall choose: an Ideology that wants us to take back to ‘authentic Indian experience’ or an Ideology that you call ‘colonial consciousness? Both ideologies are subjective; we chose whichever Ideology fits our experience. By saying that we are wrong, you are continuing the colonization: forcing us to believe your stories.
No, I do not speak of an authentic Indian experience of any kind. I am merely suggesting that you look at your own experience critically. To help you in this process, I give you the beginnings of a sign-post: among other things, the notion of ‘colonial consciousness’. Assume you reject this and claim that you are not afflicted by this; I shrug my shoulders and say ‘amen’. My stories are meant to help you and they can do this only as long as you are willing to test whether it helps you or not. If you are not willing to test it to see whether it helps you, I cannot do much; there is not much I can do if it does not help you either unless by listening to you to find out where and why it failed. For that to happen, you first need to see whether my stories help you or not. (Balu #3461)
‘Caste System’ as an Experiential Entity of the West
Can we say something more about the claim that the ‘caste system’ is an experiential entity of the West?
This is a question that needs more elaborate research. Yet, let us take a look at some of the constitutive elements of caste theories and how they could be related to a specifically Western cultural experience:
(1) The descriptions of India in terms of the caste system presuppose (i) the presence of a set of principles; (ii) the presence of (a set of) texts that contain these principles; (iii) the presence of a body of people (an authority) that preserve these principles and look after the reproduction of the social structure according to these principles.
(2) In general, the descriptions of the caste system are clear on what these are in the Indian society: (i) the set of principles are ‘the caste principles’, which determine everything in the lives of the Indians, from eating, drinking and marriage, to one’s occupation, one’s sitting and standing, one’s travelling, etc. (ii) the texts that contain these principles are the ‘religious texts of the Hindus,’ and especially the ‘Law of Manu’ (some trace the earliest origins of the caste system to ‘the earliest Vedas’, others to the ‘later, more ritualistic Vedas or to the Brahmanas’). (iii) The body of people, identified as monitoring and as having invented/created all this, are the ‘Brahman priests’.
The research that is being done in our group shows that from the early travel accounts of the 15th – 16th century onwards, the Europeans used a limited conceptual framework (the concepts and the relations between them) to understand Indian culture and society. This conceptual framework gradually crystallised into the theories and descriptions of India and thus determined the theories about the caste system: The duplicity of the priests who tried to oppress the masses; the finding of the original religion in the Vedic texts; the degeneration of this Vedic religion into Brahmanism; etc. This conceptual framework shows very significant similarities with the Christian theological framework: its ideas about the nature of human beings, how principles (beliefs, norms) guide human behaviour, about the universality of religion and the role of religion in the world, etc. Moreover, a large part of this framework also seems to be thoroughly determined by the Protestant criticisms of Catholicism and the Catholic Church, especially about a greedy priesthood, who try to function as intermediaries between man and his God and who force their false upon the people, thus preventing them from being able to practice the true religion; etc.
Thus the consensus in the first fully-fledged theories about the development of the caste system took the following form: In a distant past, the Aryan Brahmins formed one group, who immigrated into India and brought with them their Vedic religion. Confronted with the indigenous peoples and their religions, they tried to preserve their religion and group identity by imposing a caste system upon the whole of society and placing themselves at the top. Over time, their religion became contaminated with indigenous influences and their group lost coherence. Yet, the caste system was kept in place to preserve the unity and powerful position of their group. This account still determines our understanding of Indian society today: ‘the Brahminical domination,’ the true Vedic religion, the ritualised popular religion versus the pure textual religion, etc.
Further research needs to try and understand the descriptions of the caste system as a specific cultural experience, namely that of the West. Therefore it needs to show the relation between the Christian theological framework and the theories about the caste system and how Christian theological beliefs about the world became part of our common sense and scholarly understanding of the Indian culture.
Are you saying that caste is a western invention or construction, a la Dirks?
There are two points where I differ from the points where you agree with and repeat Dirks’ arguments: (1) The caste system is a conscious invention of the Europeans, invented with the intention to suppress the South Asians. (2) The caste system is a social construction of the Europeans.
(1) To describe the caste system as a conscious invention of the Europeans turns all Europeans into immoral oppressors. Such an explanation describes a whole culture as immoral: it does not allow for an understanding of those portions of European society who were genuinely interested in understanding another culture or those who were critical of the act of colonization. Criticizing the invention of the caste system only becomes interesting if we pose the following questions: why did such a varied group of Europeans (those that were against and those that supported) colonization, describe the Indian society in terms of the caste system. These descriptions turn the Indians into immoral and idiotic. Why then did even admirers of the Indian culture describe India in terms of polytheistic religion and the caste system? You can also see how such claims do not tell us much, by asking for instance why they invented a caste system and not something else, what the benefit of this invention would have been, and why, if it had anything to do with imperial goals or power, the Muslims did not invent it and the British did.
(2) I’m not sure what you mean by ‘construction’. However, when using this term, you should be aware of some of the main points in the discussions about social construction (be it of Hinduism or of the caste system) and of how Nicholas Dirks uses the word. A social construction implies that something has been constructed, not merely in books, theories or in one’s imagination, but also as a social phenomenon. Nicholas Dirks’ book contains such a hypothesis: according to him, the caste system, which was a theoretical invention by the Brahmin priests, was extended over the rest of India (and was thus constructed as a system), as the result of the British attempts at collecting knowledge in order to gain power over the Indians.
Let us have a look at some implications of such a story. Knowing that the British only used the caste system as a category in their censuses for a period of 30 years, Dirks’ story would imply that a handful of British were able to transform the structure of Indian society in an extremely short period. This would mean that the British not only were immoral to invent and impose this social structure but also that they had the vision and strength to do this. It would also mean that the Indian society was moldable and passive to such an extent that only a few British were able to radically transform India’s social structure merely by describing it. If this would be the case, it would mean that Indians are a bunch of imbeciles and that the Indian society not only was receptive of such an immoral social system, but also that it had a soil that was fruitful for the growth of the caste system.
What is problematic in his story is that (among other things) the British only used caste as a concept in their censuses over a period of 30 years. Another question that we can pose in this respect): how strong and visionary should the European culture have been, if Europe was to impose such an immoral social structure upon the Indian culture? Furthermore, how flexible should the Indian society have been to implement something as vast and thoroughly influencing as the caste system, merely because the British used it in their descriptions of the Indian society?) If this would be the case, the Indian soil must have been very fruitful for such a growth.
What we need to show, from within the Balu’s research programme, is that, even though the British interpretation of Indian society in terms of the caste system did have some impact on society (such as the implementation of reservation policies, etc). This doesn’t mean that the Indian social structure was changed into the caste system. We need to understand why the British and other Europeans thought that Indian society was structured by a caste system. We must show how, irrespective of what there was in the Indian reality, the European experience of India was written down as if it were (scientific) descriptions of India and that this was taken over by the following generations of both Western and Eastern intellectuals. Thus, the descriptions of Asian culture tell us more about the European culture than about Asia.
Hence, rather than ‘blaming the big bad wolf’, we need to show that these so-called social scientific descriptions reflect the European cultural experience rather than the Indian by showing what the structure of this experience is. As becomes clear from Balu’s The Heathen in his Blindness and from further research within this research programme, the conceptualization of Indian society in terms of the caste system strongly gained in importance in the latter half of the nineteenth century (before, the caste system plays a far less important role: people talked about different groups in terms of ‘castes’, but there was no conceptualization of a caste system, determining the whole of the Indian society). Important in the conceptualization of the caste system are the Protestant theological ideas about the corrupting interference of the priesthood and about the consequences of the growth and persistence of false religion. In this manner, we can argue that what is problematic about the understanding of Indian society in terms of the caste system is that its conceptualization rests on Christian theology, rather than on a scientifically or empirically proved object in the world. As a result, a comparative science of cultures will need to develop an alternative understanding of the Indian society (and of the European).
But, I have often been told, it is immoral to claim that the caste-system is a colonial imagination, a Christian ghost that needs to be exorcised. Why it is immoral? Because, they say, denying our claims entails denying my dignity, my agency. Suggesting that ‘the caste system’ is created and imposed by the ‘Brahmins’ on the rest of society denies agency to you; to suggest that the British ‘constructed’ makes it even worse: what were you doing when the British were busy constructing ‘religions’, ‘the caste system’ etc. in India? Sucking furiously on your thumbs? I do not say that the British ‘made’ any of these things in India. I say they simply described their own experiences.