- By Divya Dwivedi
- and Shaj Mohan
Pages 123 to 133
The contemporary image of India is that it is the land of the people who gained independence from British colonial rule through a great freedom struggle under the leadership of the Congress party and the spiritual guidance of M. K. Gandhi. Today, India projects and propagates its culture as the sum of Hindu religion, yoga, peace, and Gandhi as their mascot. This image was produced through concerted efforts such as the Oscar winning propaganda film Gandhi made by Richard Attenborough and the National Film Development Corporation of India in 1982. We know that everything gets complicated once we begin to wander the texts and the streets of each country. Behind this image is hidden away and continues, unopposed, the millennia old oppression of nearly 90 per cent of the population in India, the lower castes people by the nearly 10 per cent upper castes people.
Constitutionally, India is still a secular and socialist republic of a union of states. The government data shows that it is a country of a Hindu religious majority. Today, it is ruled by Hindu nationalists who want to change the secular constitution and declare it a Hindu nation. Many would think of this word ‘Hindu’ as the name of an ancient religion. The fact, however, is that it is the most recent of religions, of the twentieth century to be exact. What is designated by this term ‘Hindu’? Achamaenid Persians used the term ‘Hindu’ in the 6th century BCE to talk about the geographical region around the Indus river (also known as Sindhu) which is the north-western region of the Indian subcontinent. Alexander’s army would call this region Indus, from which the modern name of the subcontinent and the name of the country ‘India’ are derived. The Arabic variant ‘Al Hind’, too, referred to the geographical region, and it is from this term that ‘Hindu’, as the name for the non-Muslim and non-Christian populations of Al Hind and the regions beyond it, came into usage. In the nineteenth century, Indologists and British colonial administrators were the first to use ‘Hindu’ in a loose but consistent fashion to refer to the people of the whole of the Indian subcontinent; and, more rarely to speak about the customs of the upper castes, especially the Brahmins.
From being the name of a region where diverse groups of people had many customs and practices of their own, how and when did ‘Hindu’ become the name of one religion for a large population nominally combining all these diverse groups—this is the story of the recent invention of this religion for conserving ancient social hierarchies in a modern political milieu.
The ancient oppressive caste order
The birth of ‘Hinduism’ can be understood only if, when studying this recent period of history, we do not lose sight of the most glaring and obdurate fact: the oppressive caste order has been the only invariant of the Indian subcontinent for millennia. The caste order is maintained through strict ceremonial endogamy. The notion of ‘purity’ of touch and sight maintain the distance between castes and severe punishments were prescribed for their breaches. Any threat of miscegenation is punished with death even today. The caste system observes caste-rules as the means in order to repeat the system as the end generation after generation. That is, the caste system does not permit the exchanges between means and ends. The means and ends given to an individual is to perform his caste duties, which is the message of the text Bhagavad Gita. We have called the general principle of such systems as calypsology elsewhere. [1]
The ground of the caste order was described as early as the Puruśasūkta in the Rgveda (1000–800 BCE). Also called the varnāśramadharma (office assigned according to skin colour), it was presented as the essence of the socio-cosmic order in several Brahminical texts including the Manu Smriti (200–400 CE). It stratifies society into the hierarchy of ‘Varnas’ in which the upper castes are Brahmins (priestly class), Kshatriya (warrior), and Vaishya or Baniya (trader), and form less than ten per cent of the Indian population. Below these three are the Shudra (worker) and the untouchable castes (who in the twentieth century began to call themselves Dalits or ‘the oppressed’), and these lower castes together constitute the more than 90 per cent of India’s population.
For millennia, a great wall has stood between the world of the upper caste minority and the lower caste majority. Through this wall, certain limited transactions advantageous to the upper castes are allowed, including the manual labour of the lower castes for the upper castes and the transfer of the excreta of the upper castes towards the lower castes. The only relation the lower castes have had with this wall, and for most purposes still have, is that they are forced to look up to it and thereby remain beneath the upper castes in terms of wealth, power, knowledge, and above all to surrender their dignity to it. The lower castes were never allowed near the temples of the upper castes, which is not very different from today. They are not allowed to eat in front of the upper castes, even today. They were not allowed to even listen to the very Vedas that prescribed their inferior social position. The punishment prescribed for it in the Manu Smriti was to pour molten lead into the ears of the lower castes who listened to the recital of the Vedas. The heroes of the Sanskrit epics were exemplary in punishing with death the Shudras who tried to transgress this knowledge barrier. The Shudra and the untouchable castes were never allowed to have knowledge of the goings on in the world of the upper castes.
The revalation of the real majority
For millennia, the upper castes have been the minority that controlled the majority of the land, the labour of the lower castes, and all cultural, bureaucratic institutions. The caste based oppressive social order and the population differential between the upper caste minority and lower caste majority became apparent only during the British colonial rule. When the census operations began in 1872, the officers found that there were too many religions and too many castes in India. There was certainly clarity regarding the religious denominations of Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Parsis. But the population that was none of the above was not classifiable without complications. This population was made up of groups adhering to several localised religions, or sects and cults as they were called, including Shakta, Shaivism, Vaishnavism, Lingayat, Aalvaar, Nayanar and so on. Further, people often recorded the name of their religion and of their own caste as the same term— religion? Brahmin, caste? Brahmin. This is not surprising since a caste is a group that is socially and ritualistically endogamous. Caste observances determine most domains of life, worship, kinship, land-ownership, judicial functions, labour, and relations to other castes in the hierarchy.
The 1921 Census of India Report noted that ‘No Indian is familiar with the term “Hindu” as applied to his religion’. In 1911, the census commissioner E. A. Gaits issued a circular with certain questions to help the census officers to determine the viability of ‘Hindu’ as the religion common to all those disparate groups. Most of these questions pertained to the wall of separation between the castes. For example, the circular asked all castes to answer if they had access to the upper caste temples; whether they had access to a Brahmin priest for the ceremonies in life such as weddings; whether they were familiar with the gods of the upper castes. If it could be demonstrated that the disparate caste groups shared, at least occasionally, the same cultural spheres and activities, then there could be a case for a single religious category encompassing them all. The answers recorded for these questions made it obvious that this was not the case, and that the upper castes were then a small minority in the subcontinent. The upper castes soon saw the danger, protested against the circular, and forced it to be withdrawn. Their leaders expected that similar circulars would be used again. They therefore proceeded to invent the very customs and enforce the very practices which would be able to meet the Gaits criteria in the future, including temple entry programs for the lower castes, which are euphemistically called ‘social reforms’. These cosmetic changes left the material conditions such as land ownership and political power of the lower castes unchanged, which was of course their goal. Hence, the very criteria that had failed in the ‘Gaits’ circular’ would form the basis for the new ‘Hindu’ religion.
The subsequent census operations of the Raj, especially the 1921 and 1931 census, made the demographic difference between the upper and lower castes even more apparent. Even the Muslim religious minority were found to have outnumbered the upper castes. This fact would not have had any special sense if not for the modern legal and electoral procedures that were being introduced by the Raj, such as the ‘Caste Disabilities Removal Act’ in the mid nineteenth century, the increasing devolution of government to elected Indians in 1919 and 1935, and separate electorates for lower castes. Thus, under the colonial introduction of reforms, religious conversions, modern democratic electoral processes, and laws criminalising caste-based discriminatory practices in the early twentieth century, the lower castes had an opportunity for the first time in millennia to become visible as the claimants of public good, and to seek freedom and equal rights. These freedoms were not spectacular but as quotidian as the right to walk the same streets as everyone else, the right to drinking water of a village, the right to education, and the right to ask for a wage for the labour performed.
However, these freedoms are still not available to the majority of the people.
The reform measures of the colonial administration were met with extreme reproach by the upper castes who were fighting for ‘transfer of power’ under the leadership of the coalition of interests that was the Congress party. They anticipated that the social hierarchy of the caste order would not survive in a constitutional democracy based on principles of political, material and social equality. Under the Congress coalition, upper caste leaders including Gandhi launched agitations against these very reforms. But they were also confronted with the growing agitations from the lower caste people; in 1924 in Kerala, the lower caste people began their agitation for their right to walk on all streets including those in front of the temples which considered them as ‘polluting’. In 1927 B. R. Ambedkar led the agitation of thousands of Dalits in Mahad (a place in Maharashtra) to drink water from the public tank. When the upper castes opposed it with the use of force, the Bombay High Court had to intervene and rule in favour of the lower castes.
The fabrication of the false majority
The pinnacle of the confrontation between the upper and lower castes was between 1930 and 1932 when three roundtable conferences for constitutional reforms in India were held by the British government. B. R. Ambedkar demanded in the first conference that separate electorates should be provided for the lower castes peoples and the Congress party predictably walked out of the conference in protest. Separate electorates for the lower castes would have changed the destiny of the subcontinent. It would have given the lower castes political power through representational democracy for the first time; it would have revealed and established the fact that the upper castes are a minority, smaller than the Muslim population.
The Congress party and Gandhi stubbornly opposed the demand of the lower castes. In a letter to the British prime minister Macdonald in 1932, opposing the introduction of separate electorates for the lower castes, Gandhi wrote, ‘I sense the injection of a poison that is calculated to destroy Hinduism’. By ‘Hinduism’ Gandhi certainly meant the reign of the upper castes over the lower castes. In a statement to the press in the same year Gandhi admitted that he did not know the religious criteria by which the untouchables were to remain in ‘Hinduism’; he wrote, ‘There is a subtle something— quite indefinable—in Hinduism which keeps them [the lower caste people] in it even in spite of themselves’. The horror of this ‘subtle something’ which folds the lower castes into the ‘Hindu’ ‘in spite of themselves’ is quite evident. It is the very same ‘subtle something’ which folded the African slaves of America into slavery and the Jews of Nazi Germany into the Nuremberg laws ‘in spite of themselves’. Seeing the insistent demands of the lower castes, Gandhi threatened to kill himself, or as the euphemism goes, commit ‘satyagraha’ unto death. Fearing the backlash from such an event, Ambedkar and lower caste peoples were forced to relent. Their surrender to Gandhi and the upper castes closed off the possibility of freedom for the majority of the subcontinent.
From the early twentieth century the upper caste leaders had invested in the process of creating a majority under the category of religion which they could then represent on the basis of scriptural and traditional authority. The term ‘Hindu’ served their need. Gandhi and other upper caste leaders like Lala Lajpat Rai had to convince the Brahmins to accept the term ‘Hindu’ which they found repugnant as it was of Arabic origin, or a ‘mlechcha’ (foreign or impure) sound. Further, they had to direct the lower castes—who were agitating for their right to use the streets in front of the temples, but not quite interested in these temples themselves—to enter them and be part of this new religion. In the state of Kerala, the temple entry movement would eventually be presented as the generous and condescending reform offer of the upper caste people.
The majority of the ‘Hindus’ would come to know about their own membership in this new religion and what they lost through this membership only years after the declaration of independence.
The false problem in politics: Hindu Right vs Hindu Lite
The construction of the false religious majority instituted a false problem in Indian politics. The primary enabling condition for the deflection, as we found earlier, was the setting up of a demographic opposition between the new ‘Hindu’ identity and Islam resulting in the partition of India. India’s political discourse in the mainstream had been suffused with Pakistan as the external enemy and the Muslims of India as internal enemies. Since 1947, the politics, cultural developments, and intellectual and academic praxis participated in this nationalised deflection. The majority of academics, and what passes for ‘the left’ in India, discuss Hindu-Muslim religious harmony alone as an ‘Indic’ definition of secularism. They plead with this false ‘Hindu majority’ to not be majoritarian, and remind this fictitious entity of its fictitious better self in the past where ‘Hindus’ were a non-violent people. We can call it the opposition between Hindu Right and Hindu Lite.
The dominant Indian paradigms of academic research are continuous with the politics of Hinduness. Postcolonial theory is a revisionist project that seeks to criticise the colonial element in contemporary India and at the same time recover the lost ‘native’ elements of the past of the upper castes. Subaltern theory studies the ‘failure’ of the modern legal system to accommodate the caste obligations of the Savarnas (upper castes). In her classic example of the subaltern who cannot speak, Spivak discussed a Brahmin woman’s obligation to wait till her menstruation to commit suicide such that her family would not face the dishonour of gossip about extramarital pregnancy. But since the mid-nineteenth century, the majority of India, the Dalits and lower castes had rejected and opposed these ‘native’ Vedic, Brahmanical traditions for the sake of emancipation, egalitarianism, constitutional values, human rights, the sciences, English and modern education. In what are called ‘Eurocentric’ values—sciences and reason—the lower castes find the replacements for the values of their oppressor. They do not, nor should they, fit the figure of the subaltern constructed by the Subaltern school, which did not address caste oppression in most of their writings. Despite suppressing the real problems of the real majority, both postcolonial and Subaltern theory have been the reigning paradigms for ‘South Asia’ in both USA-UK-Australia and in India for the past three decades. In this sense, the international academic community has been unwittingly participating in the oppression of the majority of India. The upper castes have manipulated both the Darstellung (representation as speaking about and classifying other people) and the Vertretung (representation as speaking for and in the place of other people).
After 1931, the Indian state has refused to make public the caste composition of the population due to the fear that the numbers of the upper caste will be exposed as dangerously low. Since then, there have been ongoing struggles and agitations to make these numbers available to the public. Based on the available government data, ‘If the OBC numbers are about 60 per cent of the total population and the SC/ST, the only known figures, are 30 per cent, the upper castes can only be 10 per cent of the population’. In 2011, due to pressure from the lower caste political parties, a caste census was conducted, but the present government refuses to publish its report. Meanwhile, untouchability persists across India; 71% of Dalit farmers are landless; 65% of all crimes are committed against Dalits; less than 9% of jobs in the national media are held by lower castes; Dalits and the tribal people account for less than 9% of the faculty in the branches of India’s prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and Indian Institute of Management (IIM). There are hardly any lower caste members in the present central government, and hardly any Dalits in provincial governments. The upper caste minority is still ruling over the lower caste majority using the state machinery, the judiciary, and the police as instruments. All this ensures that the voices, the cries for help, the political aspirations, and the theoretical inventions of the lower castes are never heard in the national media, with notable exceptions such as The Caravan Magazine.
The upper castes and the lower castes have opposite attitudes towards the colonial era, English language, ‘Eurocentrism’, the sciences, and modernity. The lower castes consider these very terms, which the upper castes reject through postcolonial theory, to offer a new set of values that can displace the old oppressive values of ‘dharma’ and ‘karma’. The aggressive ‘Hinduisation’ (also called ‘Saffronisation’) taking place today in Indian academic institutions and their counter-parts in the west is working to avert the low caste majority from the ‘other’ future which they have been accessing through ‘Eurocentric’ categories. The ‘left’ academics are promoting education in ‘Hindi’ and ‘vernacular’ languages in order to keep ‘English’ and what is called ‘western education’ away from the low caste people. The hypocrisy of this postcolonialist gesture is that most of these academics and politicians place their children in private schools and western universities where they get ‘western education’. But the majority have been alert to the false problem and the deceptions. Their protests have not ceased since the mid- nineteenth century, since the efforts of Phule, Periyar and Ambedkar; they are intensifying. The Hindu Right-Hindu Lite model is nearing its end today
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