The dominant theories of the caste system endorse the following history of its origin and development. The origin of the caste system is dated back to the Vedic times, when the Aryans are supposed to have invaded India. There three phases in its subsequent growth: (a) the Vedic period, (b) the domination of Brahmanism and (c) Hinduism.[1] The caste system passed through different degrees of rigidity while fixing the status of the four varnas in the caste hierarchy. As the names themselves suggest, the Vedic period was the earliest, and as often considered, the pristine pure part of India’s past. In the next phase, under the dominance of Brahman priests, degeneration of the religion and culture began. The Brahman and the Kshatriya competed for supremacy in the hierarchy. These conflicts coincided with the rise of the anti-Brahman Buddhism. Gradually the Brahmins won the fight through various ways, and began to fortify their position in society. This is the third phase in the development of the caste system. In this phase, under the dominance of Brahman priests, degeneration of the religion and culture began. The masses, who have a yearning for religion, were given a ritualistic and corrupt religion, instead of the revealed texts that the Brahmins possessed. It allowed this priestly group, so the history goes, to dominate the general populace. The present form of mainstream ‘Hinduism’ developed with the complete decline of Buddhism resulting in the complete degeneration of ‘Brahmanism’. This degenerate Hinduism is what the caste system is with a strict hierarchy where the Brahmins are at the top, below them the Kshatriyas and the Vaishyas and at the bottom the Shudras. This is of course a very simplified version of the current dominant theories of caste, but it contains the main elements (Esther #5093).
Much can be said about this history of the origin and the development of the caste system. Besides an historical analysis, in this section we will also analyse this history for its analytical strength.
Historical Evidence for the Caste System
Let us begin with the often-repeated question about historical evidence for the existence of caste discrimination. One of the ways this concern/question is usually formulated is to cite some historical incident as evidence for the claim that the caste system existed in India. Here is one such instance. After giving an excerpt from Vivekananda, Arun Gupta raised a series of questions. Balu replied with a long answer. First, the views of Vivekananda and Gupta’s questions:
“In 1897, Vivekananda remarked in a public address – Was there ever a sillier thing before in the world than what I saw in Malabar? The poor ‘Paraiah’ is not allowed to pass through the same street as the high caste man, but if he changes his name to hodge-podge English name or to a Mohamedan name, it is alright. What inference would you draw except that these Malabaris are all lunatics, their homes so many lunatic asylums and they are to be treated with derision by every race in India until they mend their manners and know better. Shame upon them that such wicked and diabolical customs are allowed.”
“Before we get into Swami Vivekananda’s absorption of the European narrative of India and such like,” asked Arun Gupta, “which of his observations is unfactual?
a. Was this unfactual? Pariah was not allowed on the same street as the Brahmin or Nayyar.
b. Was this unfactual? Conversion to Islam removed the above disability.
c. Was this unfactual? All this was enforced by the rulers of Travancore, Malabar, etc.” (#5184).
Balu’s reply to these questions was rather long, because of, said Balu, the nature of the questions. To a large extent, I use the research done by Willem Derde, one of my students, about Nairs in Malabar which has been one of the most ‘described’ areas in India.
1. You ask whether or not it was ‘factual’ that a ‘paraiah’ was not allowed on the same street as a Nair or a Brahmin. The evidence we have says that a Paraiah was not allowed to be on the same street as a Nair, but it is not clear whether it also applies to the presence of a Brahmin. First, here is some of the evidence.
The Portuguese traveller Duarte Barbosa was among the first to talk about it in ‘The Book’. Though written in 1518, it became known to the European world through the Italian translation in the book of travels edited by Gian Baptista Ramusio. In the English translation, we hear who the Nairs are: ““None may become a Nayre, save only he who is of Nayre lineage. They are very free from stain in their nobility. They will not touch anyone of low caste” [Dames, 1921 #273, 39]. You need to keep in mind that Barbosa does not speak of ‘low caste’, as an earlier footnote by the English editor and translator, Dames, indicates: ““The word used in the text in vilam (villão in modern spelling) corresponding to the English villain in its ancient sense” [Dames, 1921 #273, 30, Footnote 1]. In other words, Barbosa appears to have seen a distinction in lineage or a distinction between the Nobility and the Rural folk when he saw the Nairs and the ‘low caste’ people.
One of the more extensive descriptions of Nairs is to be found in Le Grand Dictionnaire Géographique et Critique of Bruzen la Martinière, a French writer, in 1726. Speaking about Malabar, he says: “The Malabarians are divided into two orders of people; the Nairs of Nairos and the Poliars. The former carries weapons and the others are tradesmen, workers or fishermen. The Nairos are proud of their nobility and they do not marry. The sport with the wives of other men as much as it pleases them, so much so that passionate women are free to do what they want in this land… The rest (of the population) may not even speak to them (the Nairs). If a poliar meets a Nair on the street, he withdraws himself away with much respect.” About Cochin, he says: “The Naires, or the Nobility…have big ideas about their nobility because they think that they have descended from the Sun. They do not recognize anyone as their superior except the Portuguese…They have a great disgust for the caste of the heathens one called ‘Poleas’. If Polea were to come so close to a Nair that the latter can smell the former’s breath, then the Nair feels polluted and is obliged to kill the polea; because if the king came to know that the Nair did not kill the polea, then the king would kill the Nair or, if he decided to spare the Nair’s life, he would sell the Nair as a slave…In order to prevent this from happening, the Poleas continuously shout out their presence when they are in the fields so that the nairos would not come close to them…” And, much more generally, about the Nairs, says Bruzen, “these Naires are esteemed so highly that when they pass the streets, people hide themselves or withdraw until he has passed them. That is why these Nairs buy servants who could announce the coming of their masters loudly when they walk the streets”.
Ludovico di Varthema compares Nairs also with the Nobiity: “The fifth class are called Poliar, who collect pepper, wine, and nuts. The sixth class are called Hirava, and these plant and gather rice. These two last classes of people, that is to say, the Poliar and Hirava, may not approach either the Naeri or the Brahmins within fifty paces, unless they have been called by them, and they always go by private ways through the marshes. And when they pass through the said places, they always go crying out with a loud voice, and this they do in order that they may not meet the Naeri or the Brahmins; for should they not be crying out, and any of the Naeri should be going that way and see their fruits, or meet any of the said class, the above mentioned Naeri may kill them without incurring any punishment: and for this reason they always cry out. .” (Badger (1863), 141-142)
Vasco Da Gama speaks about the Nairs as a “race of gentlemen, refined in blood’, who are distinguished from all other ‘low people’.
So, yes, there is some factual evidence that Paraiahs were not ‘allowed’ to be on the same street as the Nairs and, one supposes, the Brahmins, in Malabar region.
2. You ask whether conversion to Islam removed this ‘disability’. Well, yes. But listen to how Vasco Da Gama ‘describes’ this fact; you call it ‘removal of disability’ and he calls it ‘the diabolical way the Moors converted people into Islam’: “from this trade the Moors were very powerful, and had so established and ingratiated themselves in the countries of the sea ports, that they were more influential and respected than the natives themselves, so that many of the heathen became Moors, in such manner that they were more people than the natives, by a diabolical method which the Moors found; because in this region of Malabar the race of gentlemen is called Nairs, who are the people of war: they are people who are very refined in blood and customs, and separated from all other low people, and so much do they value themselves that no one of them ever turned Moor; only the low people tuned Moors, who worked in the bush and in the fields. And these people are so accursed that they cannot go by any road without shouting, so that the Nairs may not come up suddenly and meet them, because they kill them at once, for they always carry their arms, and these low people may not carry arms to defend themselves; and when they go along thus shouting if any Nair shouts to them they at once get into the bush very far from the road. The Moors, understanding that it was a good way to increase their sect, said to the King, and to the rulers of the places in which they traded, that they met with great difficulties with their merchandise, because they had not got labourers to cart it from one point to another, because the labourers, being low people, could not go amongst other people, as the Nairs would kill them whenever they met them, and therefore they would esteem it a favour if those of the low people who might turn Moors should be able to go freely wherever they pleased; since, being Moors, they would then be outside of the Malabar religion and usages, and that they might be able to touch all sorts of people; because if this was not agreed to they would not be able to transport their goods to sell them in their provinces. At the same time giving some fees to the magistrates and confidantes of the King, they succeeded in getting this consented to. On which account these low people [desired] to enjoy so great an advantage, because they were such accursed people that they lived in the bush and in fields, where they ate nothing but herbs and land crabs, and by becoming Moors they could go where they liked, and gain their livelihood, and eat as they pleased. When they became Moors the Moors gave them cloths and robes with which to clothe themselves, and so many of them became Moors and were converted to the religion of Mohammed, and they increased so much in numbers that all the country became full of them; which caused these Moors to be very influential and powerful by their trade through all the countries, and especially in the country of Malabar, and above all in this city of Calecut, where they had their principal port for shipping pepper and drugs…” (Stanley (1869), 155-156) The reason why Moors could move around the streets freely is because “theu would then be outside Malabar religion and usages”, quite apart from their ‘powerful’ position.
3. You ask whether the rulers of Travancore, Malabar, etc enforced this practice. I do not know about ‘etc’ (do you mean to say, the “whole of India”?) but, yes, the rulers in Malabar (the Nairs) enforced the practice of Nairs.
4. However, what follows from this? We can indeed notice that in Malabar and Cochin the servants of the Nairs announced the arrival of their masters such that the paraiahs and ‘others’ would hide themselves from the sight of Nairs. Does it indicate ‘caste discrimination’ or the better-known attitude of ‘the nobility’ towards those who do not share this lineage? In many places in the world, the ‘criers’ used to announce the arrival of dignitaries, nobility and so on such that those who did not ‘belong’ would fall on their knees, hide their faces, run away and so on. Today, the wailing sirens and police escorts clear the streets when ‘dignitaries’ travel the roads we use. I suppose this is the modern version of an older practice, even if we want to justify it as a preventive measure against ‘terrorist attacks’. Even if this justification is ‘allowed’, is this not the same action as that of the crier of a Nair in Malabar of yesteryears?
5. The ‘faciticity’ of an alleged fact depends on how it gets described. Describe the above fact as having to do with ‘the caste system’, it becomes a ‘caste-related’ fact; describe it (as these citations indicate) as a more familiar ‘nobility-related’ fact, we can become the all too familiar bourgeois who looks down on ‘the feudal privileges’. Describe it as the paranoia about ‘terrorism’, it becomes a fact of today’s political world. Make it a question of ‘usage and custom’, it remains restricted to the people of Malabar of yesteryears; make it ‘caste-related’, it becomes a damning indictment of Modern India. So, you see, Vivekananda’s fact is just about as worthless as the language in which he describes this story about Malabar: even if what he says about Malabar is ‘true’, it remains undeniable that this story about the Malabarians and Nairs was repeated ad nauseaum for more than 350 years by any number of foreign travellers and merchants before Vivekananda talks about it. Why, I wonder, did Vivekananda have nothing to say about Calcutta, Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore? Why Malabar? Why not Chitradurga or Gurgaon? (Balu #5185).
From the Historical Facts to the Caste System
Some of the facts stated in these kinds of historical documents are not wrong. The question is not which fact is verifiable and which fact is not. The question is rather, what lends a pattern to the facts. How does one extract stories about Indian caste system from historical facts? The following five points made by Jakob De Roover in one of his posts (#4169) explains this issue in detail.
1. As is the case in any society, there have been many injustices in Indian society before, during and after British rule. Let us also accept that some groups were more often the victim of injustice than other groups. This must have generated a variety of emotions and attitudes in those groups: indignation, anger, a sense of powerlessness, resentment, envy, concern, resistance, indifference, the desire and determination to fight injustice in society, etc. Some of these ethical emotions and attitudes lead to positive acts and movements of resistance. Some are very negative emotions and attitudes that simply reinforced the resentment and hatred towards other groups. These usually end up in violence and more injustice.
2. The Protestant account about Hinduism and the caste system was and is an extremely negative story that is constituted by a negative normative judgement about a culture, its traditions and its social structure. In the case of the missionaries, this story gave shape to their emotions and attitudes towards Indian society: they hated the Brahmins, all things Hindu, caste practices, etc.; but they loved the sinners who were responsible for all of this, since these could still be converted from false religion to the true God. In the case of the secular colonials, the negative judgement and the classical account about Indian society remained in place, and any positive attitude was projected into the past, to the "golden age of Hindu civilization." Today, however, the social structure had to be replaced by western normative values. One step further, Indian thinkers like Ambedkar and Phule adopted the classical account and its negative normative judgement about Indian society and the "Hindu" civilization. By now, the positive attitudes of the missionary had disappeared completely from the equation.
3. There is no doubt about the fact that people like Ambedkar and Phule really experienced injustice in Indian society and wanted to change something about it. However, this experience and the feelings and attitudes generated by it were soon attached to the Protestant story about the Hindu caste system and its wholesale negative judgement about the Indian culture and its social structure. This story selected certain events from the experience of Ambedkar and Phule and began to interpret them as a confirmation of the horrors of the caste system. It did so by also linking up negative feelings to this interpretation. The story attached itself to negative emotions like animosity, resentment, envy towards other groups in society. It began to systematically reinforce these emotions without end.
4. In this way, a link was established between any experience of injustice and the fight against social injustice on the one hand and the hostility and resentment against other groups in society on the other hand. This generated a type of movement for social justice that is propelled by very negative attitudes and emotions; a movement that claimed that the only route to more justice is to eradicate the very social structure and those groups that keep it in place. This was no longer counterbalanced by the love the missionary had for the sinner (and the potential convert) or the interest the colonial administrator had in the stability of society. An unbridled animosity towards certain groups (the so-called "upper castes") became the motor of the movements for social justice.
5. This type of social movement will inevitably degenerate because it feeds on the ugly hatred; from resentment it degenerated into greed (e.g. dreaming of a white Mercedes Benz); from defending the interests of a particular group it degenerated into the pursuit of the interests of a few individuals. Still, this corrupted movement for social justice could get support from the western-Christian world: here it was seen either as the expression of the desire of the sinners to turn to God or of the pursuit of social justice in a fundamentally inferior civilization. Such movements can perhaps get money from donor agencies and moral support from the EU and US, but they cannot contribute anything noble or worthwhile to a society; they will only increase injustice and hatred.
British Colonialism and the Caste System
This draws our attention to another interesting issue about the emergence of our dominant modern views with regard to the caste system. The conception of the Hindu traditions as ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Hindu religion’ came into being long before the British colonized India. This conception emerged when the early European travellers to India began to describe their experience of the Indian culture and its traditions, from the 16th century onwards. (Most probably, a very similar description, which does not use the word ‘Hinduism’, will also be found in earlier Islamic sources.) Soon after, European scholars began to reflect on this experience and produced elaborate accounts on the nature and growth of Hinduism. They mistook these reflections on the Western cultural experience for a description of the Indian reality. Hinduism, then, is a description of a pattern in the experience of the Europeans; ‘Hinduism’ refers to this pattern.
The same goes for the caste system. It did not at all start with the British; this conceptual structure emerged gradually when the Europeans began to describe and reflect on their experience of system exists as a pattern in the Western cultural experience and ‘caste system’ refers to this pattern. Again, the pattern was mistaken for a description of the Indian society.
When the British colonizers began to classify the Indian population, they did so according to the patterns identified by two centuries of European descriptions of India. They did *not* construct Hinduism or the caste system as categories to organize and control Indian society. Rather, their classification reflected the patterns of their cultural experience of India. So, to gain insights into the nature of Hinduism and the caste system, we need to examine the shaping forces and dynamics of the Western culture, which compelled it to see India in this way (Jakob #2859).
Consequently, between the eighteenth-century British and those from the twentieth-century, an explanatory gulf is almost non-existent. The non-existence of the explanatory gulf has partly to do with the nature of the selected facts. When one speaks of, say, the presence of ‘sub-sub-castes’ among the Sikhs, this fact is not theory-neutral which all subsequent theories has to explain. The data is gathered by using a theory that suggests that ‘the Indian caste system’ is hierarchically ordered.
Perhaps, one can understand why the British saw the operation of such a hierarchy in India. Where they could not see such a hierarchy so clearly, they wrote such problems off as the consequence of "local complications". When they said that nothing about "the Indian religious and social system is simple", they were not noticing the poverty of their explanations or the complexity of the culture they tried to understand. Actually, it carried a value judgment about the Indian mind: it was neither logical nor consistent because it even violated its own ‘principles’ and ‘rules’.
More important than their value judgment is the fact that most Indian intellectuals (and many, many ‘Dalit’ movements) repeat and reproduce the hypothesis that the British entertained as though it is their daily experience. That is to say, such people say that the British descriptions are true of the Indian society and culture and suggest that this truth is borne out by their own experience of the ‘reality of the caste system’. This is the majority view. I believe that this view hints at a problem about the nature of ‘our experience’ instead of being a true description of the Indian society and culture. How can the experience of the Indian society and culture of the eighteenth-century British be continuous with our experience of our own culture and society today? What does this tell us about the nature of our contemporary experience?
Were I to formulate the above paragraph In terms of alternatives, this is how I would do it: It could be the case that the descriptions that the British (merchants, military officers, bureaucrats, etc.) gave of India were scientific, which is why they remain true of our contemporary experience. Or, there is something very, very problematic about our experience. The majority picks the first alternative. My research is about the second (Balu #2878).
Two Dominant Varieties of Historical Explanations of the Caste
There are two dominant theories about the caste prevalent in the Indological discourse. Ronald Inden (1990) calls them a racialist theory and the idealistic one. Both these theories attempt to explain the origin of Caste by assuming its antiquity. Let us try to understand these two theories by understanding its stance with regard to a question that had preoccupied the Indologists for a long time: How did Indian culture and civilization survive those umpteen numbers of foreign invasions, right from the days of Aryan invasion to the British colonialism? Inden himself subscribes to an answer, which he calls a part of the Indological discourse as was the question: “The answer discourses on India have given ... has been ‘Caste’, that institution considered peculiar to India, and particularly to India’s distinctive religion, Hinduism” (1990: 56).
Both the theories attempt to explain the origin of Caste by assuming its antiquity. There is, firstly, ‘the empiricist’ theorizing about the origin of this institution; secondly, there is the ‘idealist’ speculation about its emergence. Rejecting the story about the cosmogonic creation of the four groups (from the brahmin to the sudra) as an explanation for the genesis of ‘Caste’ in India, the empiricists (which counts mostly the British colonial administrators, utilitarian thinkers like James Mill, and so on) went in search of a possible mechanism that could account for its origin. One of the favoured hypothesis was the interaction and intermingling of races - the Aryan with the native, the Dravidian. To the idealists, the cosmogonic story about the birth of four varnas constitutes the fundamental explanation of what ‘caste’ is. Inden also sketches the ideas of some dissenting voices: from Hocart through Weber to Dumont. “Nearly all, however, have continued to look on their version of caste as a post-tribal society of ‘natural’ ties that constitutes the distinctive essence of India” (83).
More or less among similar lines, by referring to appropriate authors, Inden provides a critical look at the other pillars that constitute the other pillars of the Indological discourse: the belief that understanding Hinduism is to grasp the nature of the Hindu mind (Inden 1990: chapter #3); that the essence of India is in her villages (chapter #4); and that the oriental despot provided the key to understanding her political structure (chapter #5).
Reconsider the two dominant theories prevalent in the Indological discourse. Apart from their cognitive inadequacies as explanations of social phenomena, their status as theories gets discredited if it turns out that what they explain never existed, i.e., if Caste does not have such an antiquity at all. Inden, in fact, states as much by referring to his early work on the Bengali kinship:
(T)he distinctive institution of Indian civilization does not appear until the thirteenth or fourteenth century, at the earliest; and castes are not the cause of the weakness and collapse of Hindu kingship, but the effect of it (p. 82).
Such a discussion about object-level accounts are both productive and important. But Inden wants to push the discussion one step further and go to the ‘roots’ of these images themselves. Such would be possible, if these images have some one foundation. My suggestion is that they do not.
To appreciate this suggestion better, consider the fact that the Indological discourse over the last few hundred years does entertain the image of Caste dominated India. How has this image sustained itself? Why is there such a wide-spread acceptance of this ‘datum’ among intellectuals? Here is one way to account for this state of affairs. Thinkers from succeeding generations have read either the books of previous generations or have read/heard in the media that Caste is a non-dynamic social fossil, or whatever. Some among them treat this as a fact requiring explanation, build their theories to do so; subsequent generations look at the earlier, unsuccessful theories and try to improve upon them, and so on. Thus, over a period of time, a common sense claim crystallises as a fact - now it is also a fact of these theories.
This possibility shall definitely have occurred to Inden and, perhaps, he rejects it because it is too banal. He tries to look for a ‘deeper’ explanation and finds it in the ‘metaphysics of essences’. However, this is no explanation at all, deeper or otherwise. Why not?
First, an empirical example. Marcus Olson jr. wrote a book a few years ago titled The Rise and Decline of Nations (Yale University Press, 1982). He is neither an anthropologist nor an Indologist, appeals to the writings of Nehru among other things, but one of his problems too is: how to account for the social fossil that Caste is supposed to be? Nehru, as Inden argues, may have been a prisoner of the metaphysics of essences; Olson, by no stretch of imagination, is. Olson’s explanandum happens to be Nehru’s fact as well as the Indologist’s characteristic description. Olson merely takes it as a problem requiring a solution without enquiring into the process of how it was made into a problem. In fact, Olson even believes that the power of his theory could be measured by the number of problems it solves including the unsolved problem of explaining Caste. So do the sociobiologically oriented sociologists like Pierre van den Berghe (The Ethnic Phenomena, Elsevier, 1981) for instance. Individuals active in one field of social science take over ‘problems’ (which might later turn out to be pseudo-problems) and ‘facts’ from their colleagues active in other domains whenever they believe they have built a theory which can successfully solve a number of problems hitherto unsolved.
[1] If it is difficult to believe this claim, check the entries on Hinduism in popular websites such as Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinduism), encyclopaedia entries on Hinduism and of course most of the well-known books on Hinduism.