[Reader-list] THE REAL WORLD OF CASTE IN INDIA

[Asit Das]

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.in/2014/06/asit-das
-real-world-of-caste-in-india.html


the above is the link of my review note the real world of caste in india
published in a london based left website democracy and class struggle
this was published in june 2014 just after the general election iam posting
it again in the context of Una dalit uprising and the need for ambedkerite
leftist unity as said by jignesh mewani after the una incidents and the
ongoing dalit land struggle in gujrat
ASIT


ASIT DAS : THE REAL WORLD OF CASTE IN INDIA: AN EFFORT TOWARDS
UNDERSTANDING HIRA SINGH’S RECASTING CASTE


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*“Sociologists of the caste have invoked religion, cognition, cosmology,
heaven and hell to find the secret of the genesis, growth, and survival of
the caste and caste system. In the process, they have missed the real
secret of the caste and caste system, which lies in political economy.”*
[“*Recasting Caste: From the Sacred to the Profane*” by Hira Singh]

Joan Robinson, the legendary Cambridge economist, was visiting India after
a tour of revolutionary China in the 1950s. In India, she met E.M.S.
Namboodiripad, a senior leader of the then united CPI. She asked EMS,
despite many similarities between the two countries why there was a
revolution in China, and why it did not happen in India, what was the
problem? “Caste” was the answer given by Namboodiripad. Today, the India
political left is divided, so one need not toe the political line of E.M.S.
Namboodiripad or his later party CPIM. This, however, is not to deny the
existence of caste or caste atrocities in India. Every day one gets the
gory news of medieval barbarism inflicted on the Dalits of the country.
Therefore, understanding the caste system is a serious task for anyone who
is interested in the revolutionary transformation of Indian society. For
communists, it is an urgent task, because the annihilation of caste is
intrinsically related with the abolition of class rule in India.

Orientalists, indologists and colonial administrators had tried to
understand the caste system in India each according to their own
ideological prejudices, predominantly from the colonizers’ mindset of “the
whiteman’s burden” and the “exotic east”. Risley, the Census Commissioner
of British India, was one of the early pioneers to study caste. Later, with
the establishment of the Bombay School, eminent sociologist G.S. Ghurye
wrote “Caste and Race in India”. The book has achieved iconic status with
the 19th reprint done by Popular Prakashan, Bombay in the year 1911. M.N.
Srinivas, a well-known scholar on caste, left his teaching job at Oxford in
the year 1927 to start the first sociology department at Baroda. . After
Independence, caste has been one of the major pre-occupations of Indian
sociologists.

There is no unitary theory of castes. There is a whole spectrum of
perspectives. From the orientalists to the post-colonial, there is a
variety of caste theories. Hocart and Quigley give the kingship theory,
while Morton Klass calls his method as eclectic anthropology. Marxists and
liberals, Gandhians and Dalit intellectuals have also written on caste. So,
Marxism and Ambedkarism are only two red and blue colours in the colourful
spectrum of caste theories. Apart from differences on the “book view” and
“field view”, overall debate on caste within Indian sociology has been pro
or against Louis Dumont. For Marxists, the basic debate is between the
method of D.D. Kosambi and Louis Dumont. “Division of Labour” and property
regimes have been one of the major ingredients of Kosambi’s method. Ursula
Sharma, who also has done her fieldwork in Himachal Pradesh, has done a
fairly good mapping of the caste debates within sociology and social
anthropology in her book “Caste” published early this century. Within the
Marxist tradition, there is this whole debate about “infrastructure” and
“super structure”.  Suvira Jaiswal, Uma Chakraborty, Anupama Rao, Sharmila
Rege, Susie Tharu et al., have written on the intersections of caste and
gender.

Over the years, in my interactions with different young research scholars
in the universities in Delhi, to my surprise I found even a handful of
Marxist talking about the inadequacies of Marxism in understanding the
functioning of caste system in India. As a Marxist, this was a personal
challenge for me to construct a Marxist narrative of the caste system in
India. In my search for Marxist discourses on “caste”, Hira Singh’s book
“Recasting Caste”, which was published this year, has made me proud of the
Marxist tradition in interpreting caste.

Outlining his alternative approach to caste system vis-à-vis mainstream
sociology, Hira Singh says:

*“The difference between the West and the rest was essentialized in the
dominant discourse during slave trade, colonialism and imperialism
constitutive of modern West. Identification of India with caste and
reduction of caste to its religious essence is a product of the colonial
process of essentialization. Interrogating the [mis]identification of India
with caste and the reductionist view of caste as essentially religious or
ideal going back to the classical roots of mainstream sociology is a
necessary step towards decolonizing sociology of caste. Decolonization here
is not being used to draw distinction between Indians and non-Indians or
between East and West. Decolonization I talk about is not related to
cultural or national identities of scholars or scholarships. Rather, it is
related to an alternative perspective. Sociology of caste has followed the
classical sociological tradition which, as discussed above, originated in
ideological opposition to Marxism in the 18th-century Europe. In extending
that framework to the study of the caste system in India, it had two main
objectives. One, it used the caste system to critique Marxist
interpretation of society and history, the notion of class in particular,
at home. It was simultaneously used to argue that India remained stuck at
the stage of status opposed to contact, mechanical opposed to organic,
lineage opposed to state, despotic opposed to democratic, irrational
opposed to rational, static opposed to dynamic and savage opposed to
civilized modern West. That was the dominant discourse of modern West in
the age of colonialism-imperialism. Dumont extends that, in a reinvigorated
form, at a time when colonialism-imperialism was in the decline, but the
struggle between Marxism and mainstream sociology in the West (and the
East) had acquired new vitality in the background of the ideological divide
of the Cold War. Theoretical-methodological framework used by mainstream
sociology is a hindrance to produce a theory of caste. To develop a theory
of caste, we need an alternative approach that enables us to see the
intersection of economic, political and ideological in the origin of the
caste system, its reproduction, continuity and change in historical
perspective.”*
[Pp. 61-62. “*Recasting Caste: From the Sacred to the Profane*” by Hira
Singh]



This is an extremely important book in the caste debate in the neoliberal
era. In “Recasting Caste”, Hira Singh makes an excellent critique of the
weberian/dumontian/subaltern/post-colonial constructs of caste. The
publication of this book is an important contribution to Marxist theory of
caste and caste politics. This book dispels the myth created by the
so-called new social movements, NGOs and many Dalit groups, that Marxists
do not understand caste. Partly this may sound true because, except for
Marxist historians and rare Marxist sociologists like A.R. Desai, very few
Marxists have written on caste. Only Dr. Anand Teltumbde consistently
writes about the inter-relationship between caste and class. Rethinking the
caste and class inter-connection is extremely important at a time, when
after two decades of neoliberalization and state repression to facilitate
primitive accumulation. We suddenly have a mass murderer at the helm of
affairs, who will sell off whatever is left of India. And these two decades
were also the decades of “social justice”, “Dalit assertion”, the low caste
revolution according to Christophe Jaffrelot which saw OBC and Dalit chief
ministers ruling the Hindi heartland, which determines the course of Indian
politics.

However, with the rise of Mandalite parties like RJD, SP, JDU, etc., and
Mayawati as the symbol of Dalit power, the atrocities on Dalits did not
stop. In fact, they increased, and this was also the era of judicial
impunity – upper caste convicts of dalit massacres in Laxmanpur Bathe,
Bathanitola, Tsundur, etc., were acquitted. The recent election victory of
the fascist Sangh Parivar is quite shocking. One has to see beyond the
veneer of the development mantra and the so-called Modi wave. BJP played
the Hindutva and OBC card openly. The upper castes, the non-Yadav OBCs and
the non-Jatav Dalits voted for BJP. Hence, caste is very much an important
component of Indian politics, and it is a reality which no sensible Marxist
can afford to overlook. Apart from important interventions by Dr. Anand
Teltumbde to combine the caste debate with the class question, not much
Marxist analysis of caste has been made during the Mandal/Kamandal and
neoliberal decades in India. Suvira Jaiswal’s very important book of
“Caste” was published in 1998 after a long intergenum. Hira Singh’s book
“Recasting Caste”, is an important Marxist intervention in caste debate in
the year of BJP’s victory. The most important aspect of “Recasting Caste”
is that it brings in political economy to the centre of caste debate. The
irony of the neoliberal decades in India was that apart from loud
assertions of the tiny microscopic Dalit middle class; nobody talked about
the exploitations of the Dalit landless labourers and *safai karmacharis*.

A section of the coopted mainstream Dalit intellectuals also propagate the
idea of Dalit liberation within capitalism, they push extremely dangerous
(and in long-term really very anti-Dalit) concept of “Dalit Capitalism”.
Chandra Bhan Prasad, one of the foremost ideologues of the idea of “Dalit
Capitalism”, had given an interview to Sunday Times of India last year. In
that interview, he said that capitalism provides the space for a Dalit to
purchase a Mercedes and hire a Brahmin driver. This is a very dubious and
dangerous proposition. Ambedkar’s central aim was the equality between
castes, not the creation of a new and exploitative hierarchy of social
relations. The owner of the Mercedes and the driver share a different power
equation; one is an employer and the other is an employee. This goes
against the grain of both Marxist and Ambedkarite views. Dalit capitalism
cannot solve the central contradiction of capital and labour under
capitalism. The absurd logic of Dalit capitalism also means that a Dalit
murderer can replace a Brahmin murderer. The moral of the story is that,
murderers will always be murderers. The land question was totally out of
the Mandalised caste politics. Class was completely out from the academic
works on caste.

For a comprehensive appreciation of Hira Singh’s contribution to the caste
debate in India, one should read his review article in the Journal of
Peasant Studies (April 2008). The title of the article is “The Real World
of Caste in India”, where he reviews Dipankar Gupta’s “Interrogating
Caste”. In that book Dipankar Gupta, apart from critiquing the hierarchy
theory of Dumont and Weber (which is known as the book view of caste in
sociology), he brings in the mode of production dimension into the caste
debate. I find Dipankar Gupta’s “Varna” as Asiatic mode of production, and
“Jati” as feudal mode of production quite problematic. Nevertheless, he
brings in production and property relations into the caste debate. Nowadays
Dipankar Gupta does not call himself a Marxist; in fact, Meera Nanda calls
him a sophisticated liberal. For the past few years whenever Dipankar Gupta
speaks on globalization, he almost corroborates the Congress view that
during the UPA-I and UPA-II many people came out of the poverty line. His
unflinching support for the Anna Hazare movement was also quite
problematic. However, in the early 1980s, Dipankar Gupta firmly called
himself a Marxist. He criticized the eminent Marxist anthropologist Maurice
Godelier, whether caste is infrastructure or superstructure; his position
vis-a-vis Godelier was more orthodox Marxist. Dipankar Gupta’s important
intervention in the 1980s was his polemics with Gail Omvedt on the issue of
renaming the Marathwada University which is popularly known as the Namantar
Movement in Maharashtra. There he criticizes Omvedt’s position as eclectic
Marxism.

For me, reading Hira Singh’s “Recasting Caste” was important because it
reassured me that a Marxist can understand caste, which had been mystified
in the subaltern and post-colonial debates. Hira Singh’s book is extremely
important in an era where academic discourses are getting more and more
detached from the issues connected with real lives of the vast multitudes.
Exploitation, feudalism, capitalism, inequality, etc., are out of
fashionable discourses in academia. With the discrediting of socialism as
an alternative to capitalism, “identity politics” and “social justice”
within capitalism is the solution offered. If one has a serious look at the
state of social science in India, one could see with the rise of a plethora
of post-office theories in the Anglo American academy and their comprador
followers in the third world academia, not only the social science
discourses became opaque, day by day it is becoming anti-working class and
offcourse, totally irrelevant to the social realities of India.

When more and more exotic subjects like cultural studies are proliferating,
knowledge is getting fragmented in the form of super-specialties like
ethno-medico anthropology. Commenting on the state of social sciences
today, Prof. Randhir Singh had said that in the age of super-specialties
more and more people are learning about less and less. Social totality is
an old-fashioned concept; fragmentation of social reality is the order of
the day. Terms like “feudalism”, “capitalism” and “class” have become
obsolete in interpreting social reality; they have been replaced by caste,
gender, ethnicities, cultural world, sexual preference, and so on.
“Governmentality” has replaced “state” and the class character of state. In
the urban studies, nobody talks about the brutalized, miserable “life
world” of the underclass in the sprawling slums, but deconstructed
discourses of “Regimes of Pleasure” in the “ethnoscapes” and “mediascapes”
in the conditions of late (post) modernity are the trend in urban studies.
History has been ethnicized by the post-colonials, especially Nicholas
Dirks. “Civil society” (read NGOs) have replaced the political left as the
emancipatory platform of the oppressed. There is a strange coincidence with
the rise of “new social movements” and NGO as the central flag bearers of
the politics of protest. In these times also, the trend in the
transatlantic academies is that, unless one works on sexy cuttingedge
postmarked theories, getting a tenure becomes difficult.

The doors of economics departments are closed for the Marxist economists.
Likewise, Adivasis, Dalits, women, ecology, etc., have become sexy and hot
issues for funding for NGOs and academic research projects. As some
perceptive observers of the autonomous women’s movement have said that NGO
funding finished off the autonomous women’s movement, so also the
NGO-isation of Dalit issues. After the Durban Conference on racism, funding
for the Dalit NGOs has increased exponentially; there is another important
linkage here. Funded Dalit middle class activists and NGOs are extremely
anti-communist. That, however, does not mean that caste and caste
atrocities are not social realities, but imperialism and class exploitation
are also important social realities. This is not the question of
privileging caste over class or vice versa, but having a Marxist framework
of the intersectionalities and coterminalities of class, caste and gender.
Communists should be in the forefront in the fight against caste, gender,
racial, national and ethnic oppressions. One need not miss the wood for the
tree. In the light of above arguments, Hira Singh’s book “Recasting Caste”
is a serious Marxist intervention in the contemporary caste debates.

In the post-Soviet world, where any political imagination towards an
alternative to capitalism is derided as “metanarrative” and totalitarian,
study of castes and ethnic groups assumed added importance in search of
truth in “micro narratives” like multi-culturalism in the west. In India,
in the era of Mandal and Kamandal politics, caste has assumed an
overwhelming importance both in politics and in the Academia. While
caste-based parties are proliferating, specialization in caste and
ethnicity is on rise in the Academia. The post-colonials have muddled the
waters further for their exotic extolling of the “ethnic chic”. The
metropolitan middle class loves to pick up ethnic jewellery from the state
sponsored handicraft exhibitions. The primitive rebel has been commodified
beyond recognition. If one has a close look at the politics of social
science from the colonial era, anthropology was used to understand the
natives in order to control and co-opt them. Today in the Gaudy academic
supermarket, the more one speaks about dispersed, picturesque essentialised
social identities with hardened cultural boundaries the more one is
accepted in the academic careers, they have become the sole representations
of social reality. Class, political economy, imperialism and production
relations in the context of understanding social reality is shun as
economic determinism and reductionist vulgar Marxism and so on.
“Difference” with a big “D” is the in thing, all apparent inter-connections
in the different social power play is totally lost.

The academic factory churns out pre-programmed jombies for the neo-liberal
job market. Their intellectual guilt forces them to consume more and ethnic
artifacts and discourses, they do all these while paying the EMIs and
holidaying at Bangkok. Rising commodification of life, immiserisation of
broad masses of people, amidst the glittering glass and steel towers are
sick indicators of the famous post-modernist dictum “I shop so I exist”.
With the rise of identerianism in politics, where the ruling class parties
push the primordial ties to the hilt to build up their respective caste
vote banks. On the other hand, universities with their ethnicisation of
social realities are producing  generations of disinterested and
depoliticised students, who prefer to shut themselves in their own
‘ethnoscapes’  in the gated communities happily consuming a fast
macdonalised culture. If one seriously looks out the depoliticized,
co-opted products churned out by the sociology, anthropology, and political
science departments, then in the larger interest of society and social
change, I would argue that those departments should be immediately locked
up until a thorough review of their curriculum is done.

Caste is the leading theme in academic publishing industry, everyday a new
book on caste is in the market. It is really difficult to keep track of the
caste debate. There is a glut in the discourse on caste and ethnic
identities; on the other hand, the invisible hand of the market ruthlessly
appropriates the surplus of the subaltern masses. The stock exchanges are
exuberant.

In these contending discourses on caste, Hira Singh’s book “Recasting
Caste” is a serious Marxist intervention in understanding the contemporary
issues of caste and class conflicts and helps us to conceptualize the ways
to understand the structural  relations between caste, class and
capitalism. The importance of Hira Singh’s book is not that it brings in
political economy to study castes, but locates caste in political economy.
According to Hira Singh, this book is an invitation to a debate on caste
such that one can understand the contemporary dynamics of caste conflicts
and delineate a strategy for a classless and casteless society. He says in
the concluding paragraph of the Preface in “Recasting Caste”, “In my
writings on caste spread over several years, I have suggested that there
are serious issues - theoretical and methodological - in the study of
caste, which call for debate (Singh 2008)”. When it comes to caste studies,
there are there two solitudes: (1) mainstream sociology, and (2) Marxism.
The former shuns history and studies caste mainly at the level of ideas in
isolation from material conditions. Marxists, on the other hand have, by
and large, stayed away from studying caste.

According to sociologists, Marxists do not study caste because they
consider it as “superstructure” determined by “infrastructure”; hence,
secondary and less important. That is not even vulgar Marxism, rather
vulgarization of Marxism. The question whether caste is infrastructure or
superstructure is redundant. It is both, infrastructure and superstructure
intersect in caste. However, in their ideological battle against Marxism,
sociologists have erred on the other side, focusing on the superstructure
to the exclusion of the infrastructure. This is most clearly the case with
Louis Dumont.  Critics of Louis Dumont from within mainstream sociology
have not adequately addressed this critical issue. The other serious
problem in sociological studies of caste is the neglect of history.
Finally, mainstream sociology has dubbed Marxism as ideology, but it does
not recognize its own ideological orientation and how that has shaped its
perspective on caste. (Hira Singh, “Recasting Caste: From the Sacred to the
Profane. Sage, New Delhi 2014.) Purity and pollution has been the dominant
model defining the caste hierarchy in India. Endless debates have been done
by sociologists on this issue, but almost everyone has mystified it.

The signal contribution of Hira Singh’s book has been to demystify the
whole discourse on purity and pollution in understanding the caste system.
Commensality and endogamy are the defining features of the caste “life
world”.  Cooking and dining are important features of inter and intra caste
inter subjectivities, food plays an important role in the caste discourse.
Hira Singh’s book unravels the mystery of food production and consumption
debate in the cast discourse. He raises the pertinent questions about food,
which non-Marxist sociologists deliberately ignore. His book points to the
politics of food production and consumption debate in the caste discourse.
Hira Singh raises the issue about who produces the food grains and who
appropriates it and the centrality of labour process and the production
relations in food grain production. Hence, caste cannot be understood
without explaining the class exploitations, land ownership and different
hierarchies created by different property regimes.


As a Marxist, I would go by the eleventh thesis of Marx, i.e., it is not
enough to understand caste system and caste exploitation; but if caste is
an abominable, unjust and undignified system, one has to find ways and
means to annihilate it. It is here that the Marxist and Ambedkarite project
of ‘annihilation of castes’ converge.  Having said that, I would like to
stress the inadequacies of non-Marxist perspectives on the caste system and
the strategies to abolish it.

It is in this context of emancipatory political praxis of the underdog,
Hira Singh’s contribution in the caste debate assumes extreme importance.
His article in the Journal of Peasant Studies, “The Real World of Caste in
India” should be read with his book “Recasting Caste”. In this Journal of
Peasant Studies article, critically reviewing Dipankar Gupta’s
“Interrogating Caste”, Hira Singh points to the inherent limitations of
liberal ideology to solve the caste question in India. He raises the basic
ontological issue of the “wretched of the earth” in his search for
liberation. Taking a cue from Marx Engels and Lenin that working class “in
itself” cannot liberate itself without becoming “class for itself”. If one
looks at the politics of social justice, Dalits and OBCs as “caste in
itself” have become “caste for itself” in their militant assertion in the
electoral arena and to some extent in is the real “life world”. But this
assertion has not removed the class exploitation of a vast majority of
Dalits, OBCs, Adivasis and Pasmanda Muslims as the working class they are
ruthlessly exploited and humiliated by the neoliberal regime in India.
Hence, to the complete the trajectory of emancipation “caste for itself”
has to transform itself to “class for itself”, otherwise the project of
liberation of oppressed identities in India will be incomplete and will be
co-opted by the ruling classes by creating a greedy self-centered middle
class from the marginal groups.

The failure of Parliamentary Dalit and Mandalite outfits like BSP, RPI,
RJD, SP, JD(U), Apnadal extra is a stark reminder of this incomplete
project of emancipation of the lower castes. Writing about the limitations
of ‘caste for itself’, Hira Singh in his JPS article says, “Eliminating the
subordinate position of labour castes in the Brahminical hierarchy will not
be achieved simply by their becoming a “caste for itself”, but rather by a
broader process: the recognition of the contribution made by their labour
power to the making of Indian history and society. This is the empowering
discourse made by the black population of the United States, and the
political lesson that the sociology of caste has to learn from the
sociology of Race.” (*see* Hira Singh: Real World of Caste in India.
Journal of Peasant Studies, April 2008.) Drawing our attention to the
limitations of understanding caste by non-Marxist sociologists, Hira Singh
says, “The sociology of caste does not address the question of production
relations: land is for the most part, a taboo subject notably absent from
the vocabulary of sociologists who dissect the caste system. As a result,
not only does sociology not have the right answer about the origin and
development of castes, but it does not even have the right question.
(*see* Hira
Singh JPS 2008.)

Since only interpreting the caste system is not enough, our aim is to
annihilate them, Hira Singh draws our attention to the limitations of Dalit
liberation within the capitalist electoral system, he endorses Dipankar
Gupta’s views on the limitations of Dalit political parties and caste
mobilization for creating a society without class and casts oppression:-
“That scheduled castes, historically deprived of access to material
resources  have been unable to realise their political objectives in this
regard is an affirmation  of this basic principle at work: the strong and
enduring connection between economic and political power in a liberal
democratic system. The chances of scheduled caste voters changing the
Indian power structure by means of the ballot box is about the same as
those of the working class in the liberal democracies of metropolitan
capitalist societies: that is to say, negligible. Hence, the centrality of
the question: why does the working class keep on electing governments that
continue to protect and perpetuate the rule of the capitalist class? The
mere fact of voting is designed not to transform the existing
socio-economic structure, but rather to perpetuate the rule of the
propertied over the non-propertied. As with class so with caste. The
inference is not that class is irrelevant in liberal democracies - far from
it - but that the political transition from “class in itself” is not just
crucial but also difficult to resolve. In much the same way, a “caste in
itself” is not necessarily a “caste for itself “(Hira Singh JPS 2008). The
lesson one draws from the above quote is that for the ultimate dream of a
society without exploitation in India that if “caste for itself”, i.e., the
Dalit and OBC assertion, it has to transform into “class for itself” to
transcend capitalism, only then the ultimate project of a society where
human beings do not exploit other human beings can be realized. And it is
here that the political project of Ambedkarites and the political left
converges.


The above argument, however, does not mean that caste and caste atrocities
do not exist in the real “life world” of people. They do exist, and have to
be resisted and eliminated. One need not wait until the “revolution” to
resist them. But the fight against caste oppression will be incomplete
without taking up the land and wage questions. To fight for the land, wage
and dignity of Dalits, and the urgent task to put a robust resistance
against the shameful gangrapes and the sexual exploitation of Dalit women.
There is an urgent need for a principled joint front of Dalit
organizations, the women’s movement, the democratic rights movement and the
political left. This principled joint front should be based on mutual
respect for each other, which also includes respecting for each other’s
politics and worldviews. The Ambedkarites just cannot go on ranting against
Marxists, while blaming them of not understanding the caste issue. They
should seriously read the literature on caste question by the political
left and the political left also should seriously engage with the writings
of Ambedkar.

And finally, going by the politics and political economy of knowledge
production and consumption, I would like to clearly state that if the
weberian/dumontion/subaltern/post-colonial/Ambedkarite versions of the
caste system have a democratic right to represent the ‘truth’. Going by the
same democratic principle of “truth claims”. We Marxists have the equal
democratic right to weave a Marxist narrative of ethno politics and caste
question. Hira Singh’s just published book is an important intervention in
this endeavor. I strongly recommend it for anyone who tries to understand
the caste question in India.

*References*
1.      Hira Singh: Recasting Caste: From the Sacred to the Profane. Sage,
New Delhi, 2014.
2.      Hira Singh: The Real World of Caste in India - a review article.
Journal of Peasant Studies, April 2008.

*~ Asit*

Email: asit1917 at gmail.com
Blog: www.stormingthewinterpalace.blogspot.com