The Culturalization of Caste in India

Identity and Inequality in a Multicultural Age

Balmurli Natrajan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136647567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In India, caste groups ensure their durability in an era of multiculturalism by officially representing caste as cultural difference or ethnicity rather than as unequal descent-based relations. Challenging dominant social theories of caste, this book addresses questions of how caste survives the system that gave rise to it and adapts to new demands of capitalism and democracy.

Based on original fieldwork, the book shows how the terrain of culture captured by a new grammar of caste revitalizes castes as cultural communities so that the culture of a caste is produced, organized and naturalized in the process of transforming jati (fetishized blood and kinship) into samaj (fetishized culture). Castes are shown to not be homogenous cultural wholes but sites of hegemony where class, gender and hierarchy over-determine the meanings and materiality of caste.

Arguing that there exists a new casteism in India akin to a new racism in the USA, built less on biology and descent and more on purported cultural differences and their rights to exist, the book presents an extended critique and a search for an alternative view of caste and anti-casteist politics. It is of interest to students and scholars of South Asian culture and society.

1 Introduction

Caste is not just appellation, but quality of blood.

(Yalman 1960: 87)

It is not that ‘blood’ does not matter; the danger is that it can become fetishized.

(Bharucha 2000: 67)

It is durable but not eternal!

(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 133)

Ethnic specters of caste, or tolerating caste?

In April 1996 my research assistant Ajay and I (denoted as “A,” for anthropologists, below) had a conversation with Dularuram, a potter-artisan or kumhar¹ (denoted as “K,” for Kumhar, below) in his mid-fifties, in the central Indian region of Chhattisgarh.

A: Why do you not exchange food and daughters with those other kumhar?²

K: Because they are from another samaj.³

A: But are they not also kumhar? Do they not also work the [potter's] wheel?

K: Yes they are kumhar who use the wheel. But they use a stick to rotate the wheel, unlike us [who use our bare hands]. They are the Chaklautiya Kumhar whereas we are Jhariya Kumhar [two local Kumhar castes].

A: So, if they stopped using the stick, would you have [commensal and connubial] relations with them?

K: No. We are from different phirke.⁴

A: What about those other Kumhar who come to your annual samaj convention?

K: No. They are from another region originally. Whereas we are Chhattisgarhi, they are not. They are different. Are they Khumar? They don't even do potting. I hear they do clothing and marble business.

A: You are right. They are from Rajasthan and Gujarat.

K: Anyway, why will they want to exchange food and daughters with us? We are poor. They do not like our lifestyle.⁵

A: Such as?

K: Like … our women, for example, go out on the streets to sell pots. They do not like it. Their women stay at home.

A: OK. How about those other Kumhar [referring to a group of Kumhar who lived nearby but in a different neighborhood or basti]?

K: They are definitely not Kumhar. They raise and eat pigs. We do not.

A: But they call themselves Kumhar, Chakradhari Kumhar.

K: Yes [grudgingly]. Only in name. As I said, they are not Kumhar. They don't even know how to work the wheel. They only make bricks … They are also not from Chhattisgarh [being recent migrants from the Rewa district of the neighboring state of Madhya Pradesh].

A: Still, are they not also Kumhar?

K: Maybe. But, if we start marrying them then what will be the difference between us?

A: But why should there be difference? All are Kumhar after all, isn't it so?

K: Yes, but they are lower than us, although they think they are higher. In fact, we look at the Chakradharis as Harijan.⁶ We do not take water from them. You see it was like this. Jhariya Kumhar are descended from the lineage of King Daksh Prajapati. We used to wear the sacred thread [conventionally worn by upper-caste groups], being also of high caste. But about 30 to 40 years ago, because we could not keep up with the responsibilities of the thread such as doing religious rituals, reading the scriptures, we therefore gave it up. The reason was because these spiritual activities were time consuming whereas the kumhari work was a full time occupation. At that time we had also fallen short of the thread used to sever the completed pot off the wheel and therefore we used the sacred thread for this reason in our production. So we continue to wear it although we use it for our work-related activities. Our ancestors came from the Hindu holy place in the North, Hardwar. They first came to Ratanpur (near Bilaspur in northern Chhattisgarh) since there was a Kumhar community there. From Ratanpur all of them dispersed throughout Chhattisgarh. We are not Harijans like the Kumhar from Rewa, whom we see as untouchables. If they came to our house we wash the place where they sit with water since they rear pigs and eat them too.⁷

A humble potter by occupation, Dularuram was no ordinary man. He enjoyed a good challenge to his ways of thinking and being, found humor amidst the staid and sober, derived pleasure from talking in a mocking fashion in everyday interactions, and was of a philosophical disposition, which enabled him to reflect upon life and the world around him - all qualities that helped him survive amid poverty. People in his basti could frequently hear him humming a relishing mixture of popular Bollywood songs and Chhattisgarhi folk songs while engaged in pottery making. At the same time, Dularuram commanded a degree of author-ity among Kumhar in the basti, having been the local community leader in the past and continuing to exercise some influence. In short, he embodied all the traits of a reflexive and knowledgeable individual caught in the thick and thin of weaving webs of meaning, and narrated these when the opportunity presented itself. The above engagement with Ajay and me was one such opportunity, in which Dularuram showed us glimpses of his life by capturing it in his own narrative. It was not an isolated event; definitely not an initial encounter since Dularuram knew me well enough by then (I was into my fifth month of field-work), and neither was it our last.⁸

Dularuram reconstructed his everyday life habits within a cultural “logic” during the conversation. In particular, this was the logic of “caste as culture.” For him, caste relations and identity are derived from underlying and (what he perceives to be) “essential” cultural differences, such as food habits, the appearance and roles of women, or the meanings and values around “work.”⁹ Caste, in other words, is not simply an insistence upon arbitrary ascriptions. This is his logic until he is forced to reflect upon and further defend his practice of social differentiation. Whereupon he readily admits that these “cultural” differences do compete with other kinds of differences such as “ethnic” difference (such as region of origin and language markers). Ultimately, even this gives way to the ever so lightly concealed prejudices and practices of ascribed status, social prestige and honor (in this instance, marked by the extremely degraded condition of untouchability). Dularuram then admits that caste relations, far from being derivative of cultural differences, are a priori ascriptions of ascribed status based upon birth and “blood.” Or, in the idioms of Kumhar everyday life, caste, which is frequently made out to be about khan-pin rahan-sahan (cultural differences), ultimately turns out to be about unchh-neech (a priori ascriptions of “higher-lower” status based upon birth and purported purity of “blood”). Culture drops its mask to reveal caste as fetishized blood. Dularuram's candid admission allows us to interrogate the relationship between caste, culture and ethnicity to ask: What “ideological work” is done by popular, scholarly and official representations of caste as simply difference, identity or ethnicity?

Dularuram's discourse of “caste as culture” is registered in contemporary social theory, almost too easily, as the “ethnicization of caste,” best captured by anthropologist Chris Fuller as that process wherein a “vertically integrated hierarchy decays into a horizontally disconnected ethnic array” (Fuller 1996: 26; see also Jaffrelot 2000; Mayer 1996; Washbrook 1982). Presented thus, ethniciza-tion of caste appears as a fait accompli, an accomplishment which needs to be celebrated as the death of an abhorrent caste system that “frees” individual castes to operate now as an array, a horizontal set of discrete entities.¹⁰ Other scholarly pronouncements are variants of the ethnicization of caste thesis. These include the argument about the end of a “relational” and hierarchical caste system and emergence of “substantialized” castes without a caste system (Gupta 2000, 2004), and the modernization and democratization of caste into “paracommuni-ties” of caste (Rudolph and Rudolph 1967).

Simultaneously, official state discourse in its rush to showcase “diversity” as a strong indicator of postcolonial India's democratic credentials, adds another level of legitimation of the ethnicization of caste thesis. Thus, in 2007, the then Commerce Minister in the central government cabinet spoke proudly of India's diversity by including in the list of languages and religions of India a glowing mention of its “4635 largely endogamous communities” - a direct reference to the approximately 3990 caste groups and 645 “tribal” groups in India.¹¹ Such a positive rendering of the large number of caste groups, and their easy comparison with the far more culturally and structurally distinct “tribes,” becomes possible only by viewing castes as cultural diversities in the context of a global and national discourse of multiculturalism. Such discourse not only valorizes cultural difference, but tends to view all differences and inequalities as if they were cul-tural differences. As policy, multiculturalism thus arguably enables caste to be publicly performed, expressed and recognized as culture or ethnicity enriching the tapestry of Indian social diversity.

In an era of global cultural rights, the stage seems set for castes in India to seek political “recognition” as cultural identities, a claim that brings together the demand for “respect” along with protection of their individual “cultures” as contributing to cultural diversity.¹² For conditions now exist for culture to be the sine qua non of difference and deference, tolerance or respect. Consequently, within a liberal political culture, one shows how tolerant one is to the Other by showing deference to the Other's culture which is assumed to be different, in this case due to caste. Indeed, Dipankar Gupta, a leading theorist of caste, has described what he calls “caste pride” in positive terms as a need to celebrate the “discrete” nature of castes as identities that have trumped the hierarchical system (Gupta 2000, 2005).¹³ What goes unquestioned here is the production of much of this difference due to the problematic practice of social differentiation in the first place. Must we then begin our celebrations of castes as “cultures” and “ethnicities” and speak about the inevitability or desirability of the old notion of “caste patriotism” or the new one of “caste pride” and very modern dramas of “asser-five caste identities”? Such is the “ethno-future” that caste as culture offers, and this sets up the major question that animates this book: How does caste survive under the forms of democracy and capitalism in contemporary India?

This book views recent transformations (over the last century) as an “ethnic specter of caste” haunting democratic possibilities and radical caste politics in India today, rather than complacently as the “ethnicization of caste” or a cause for celebration of India's democratic modernity.¹⁴ It is about how the terrain of “culture” is captured by a new “grammar” of caste that revitalizes and gives new meanings to caste groups now as a cultural communities or samaj, social entities that fall far short of and are far less benign than idealizations of ethnicity. Heeding Anthony Appiah's cautionary observation in the context of race and ethnicity in the USA, that unlike “race,” which could wither away, “ethnic identities … seem likely to persist so long as … people are raised in families” (Appiah 1990: 499), this book begins with a dissatisfaction with the view of caste as ethnicity since this view assures caste of its own durability. Viewed as ethnicity, conflicts between caste groups tend to become “normalized” as cultural or ethnic-identitarian conflicts, which in turn become standard problems for the “management” of diversity within a liberal framework of equality in law rather than as political problems of inequality and discrimination. Such a pessimistic view of ethnicity is borne out by the fact that whereas concerns exist about ethnic group conflicts and discrimination the world over, the presence as such of ethnic groups is largely treated as given or even viewed positively in many societies, resulting in calls for greater tolerance and respect but not challenged as fundamental problems of social organization, differentiation, identification and inequality.¹⁵ As ethnicity, caste does not need to be “shamefaced” but can actively seek to be noted and counted, not only for the benefits of state policies of positive discrimination (or “reservations”), or as one of the key axes of mobilization of political parties competing in India's electoral politics, but also publicly to normalize itself as a legitimate axis of group formation contributing positively to India's famed diversity.

Following Louis Dumont who noted that “the caste, unified from the outside, is divided within” (Dumont 1980: 34) this book focuses on the internal dynamics of a caste group when the caste system (as we know it) is in decline. It proceeds as a critique of “culture,” “community” and “ethnicity” as idioms of reconstruction and legitimization of caste in twenty-first century India. By using the ethnographic case of transformations in caste among Jhariya Kumhar of central India, it challenges dominant theories (scholarly, official and popular) by arguing that far from transforming into ethnicity, castes have claimed “culture” as their key mode of reproduction and stability, thereby enabling caste and casteism to adapt to new demands of capitalism and democratic politics. Its central thesis is that caste elites invoke “culture” to legitimize and renew caste, by attempting a transformation from the historical form of jati (a social group based on fetishization of “blood”) to the relatively newer form of samaj (a social group-in-formation based on fetishization of shared “culture”). This attempt demands the “culture” of a caste to be produced, organized and naturalized in the process of forming samaj. Extending an idea from Comaroff and Comaroff (2007), this book shows how castes in India, far from ushering in a positive era of modernity and contributing to ethnic diversity, have “branded” themselves as ethnicities in order to market their existence in a world where cultural identity is now a “utility function” and where ethnicity as a political claim is frequently conflated with ethnicity as a cultural substance (ibid.: 7). I call this process the culturalization of caste wherein caste groups (led by caste elites) attempt to (re)construct and (re) present themselves as cultural groups such that caste comes to be viewed, narrated, embodied, and performed by social actors simply as pre-existing “natural” cultural difference or identity rather than as socioculturally constructed relations of ascribed status and antagonism (inequality, domination and exploitation). It follows that despite the general disavowal in Indian discourse of caste as jati or descent-based or “blood-based” relations of inequality, a new form of casteism has arguably been normalized through culturalization of caste. Extending insights from the discourse on new forms of racism in Euro-American contexts (Balibar 1991; Taguieff 2001; Winant 1997), I view this form of casteism as cultural or differentialist casteism, which performs the historical functions of casteism through conflating status discrimination with cultural discrimination and caste identity with cultural identity. Parallels can be seen in the argument developed by Berel Lang when he recalls the words of English diplomat and author Harold Nicholson: “Although I loathe anti-Semitism, I do dislike Jews” (Lang 1997: 23), an ideological justification of racism that appears to be anti-racist.

In positing the existence of cultural casteism, I follow sociologist Randall Collins’ work on status groups (1979, 1986) to argue that casteism be viewed primarily as a set of monopolistic practices that use modes of exclusion, domination, exploitation and stigmatization (including acts of humiliation) based upon identification of individuals and groups in society on the basis of their purported “caste.” Such an understanding of casteism, coupled with the notion of cultural casteism as a new form of casteism, avoids the tendency to portray assertions of caste identity, especially by historically oppressed caste groups, in benign ways. In a recent argument, sociologist Javeed Alam suggests flatly that “appeals” to caste (by oppressed groups) are far from casteism since such appeals are “for unification of similar jatis into larger collectives, and their political mobilization for power, so as to subvert the very relations of varna order” (2004: 56). Such a representation of caste identity however begs the question of how such appeals to caste contribute to both a perpetuation of caste-based hierarchical relations and patriarchal practices within and between caste groups derived from the power and need to secure caste identities (a point acknowledged by Alam later in the same text but not theoretically integrated with his position that such appeals are not casteism), and a perpetu...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• The Culturalization of Caste in India
• Routledge contemporary South Asia series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates, figures and tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Artisans
• Part I Identities
• Part II Inequalities
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index