Everybody’s premise when discussing Hinduism or Sanatan Dharma is that it has an oppressive caste system. Pratap Bhanu Mehta (‘Tradition and Its Discontents’, IE, September 5) also latches on to this premise when castigating the BJP for what he sees as its divisive and discordant defence of Sanatan Dharma after it was attacked by Udhayanidhi Stalin, who advocated for its annihilation. A few days later, RSS Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat chimed in, arguing that caste-based reservations should go on until caste oppression no longer exists. Despite any differences in Stalin’s, Mehta’s and Bhagwat’s views, there is a remarkable consensus on one problem: India’s oppressive caste system. This comment focuses specifically on Mehta’s comment but necessarily draws on this consensus about the caste system, which reflects a conventional wisdom about India.
I got into the study of the caste system after legislation on caste discrimination became a real prospect in my home country, the United Kingdom. There, as elsewhere – we now see a similar move happening in the United States – there is a kind of unreality about the discussion on the laws on caste discrimination. The big test case against the tech firm Cisco that preceded the California legislative proposal collapsed earlier this summer, it being fairly clear that the charges levelled by the Civil Rights Department against the defendant firm and its managers were bogus. Likewise, in the United Kingdom, nobody actually proved that discrimination is present among Indians living there. In these Western countries, campaigns to have laws to cover caste discrimination have been driven by a vocal set of Indian expatriates often attacking other Indian expatriates. The dominant parts of society generally side with those claiming caste discrimination and opposers are rarely listened to. The presumption that Indians have taken their oppressive caste system abroad plays a big role.
India has the caste atrocities legislation as part of its criminal law and reservations in university places, jobs and electoral positions which vary nationally and state-wise. Both mechanisms effectively constitute forms of birth-based discrimination because both disqualify those deemed non-victim groups from accessing them. Although the matter has never been tested, such discrimination violates international human rights law. Both are constantly expanded to cover more and more areas (and groups) as authorised by the judiciary, the legislature or merely by policy. All of this is presumably justified by the spectre of Sanatan Dharma’s oppressive caste system.
The Indian discussions are also plagued by a miasma of falsity, which tend to be transmitted to other countries. Take the question of caste atrocities which Mehta flags as one of the features of Sanatan Dharma’s caste system. The Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 is ostensibly there to combat the suffering of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes from a greater degree of violence that emanates from higher caste groups. In an article he wrote in a special journal issue of this year, which I edited, Nihar Sashittal shows clearly that nothing can be further from the truth. His statistical analysis demonstrates that the Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes suffer from a lower incidence of violent crimes than those outside those categories. The figures are based on India’s national crime records. India’s legal system is, therefore, in the strange position of presuming a special target group in its criminal law whose members are less likely to suffer from violent crimes.
Although many facts — such as those found in the crime statistics — indicate that its presumed features or consequences are not as claimed, the myth persists that there is an oppressive caste system. This story is repeated endlessly by the intelligentsia in India and abroad. Doubts are pushed away by ad hoc explanations. Partly, this is a consequence of a poverty in Indian social-science research. But even that poverty can be explained by the phenomenon referred to as “colonial consciousness” by the Indian philosopher, SN Balagangadhara.
Look at the other terminology used by Mehta: The caste system is vile, ritually oppressive, and immoral, and its atrocities traumatic. It is “the oppression at the heart of various versions of Sanatan Dharma”, whose practitioners lack empathy. This he considers is behind the divisive and discordant defence of the Sanatan Dharma offered by the BJP. Look closely at what Mehta says about the caste system: “We can debate its theological complexities, the periodic revolts against it and its transformation during modernity.” But what he leaves out is whether we can debate the existence of the caste system itself. Why is this question important?
India has inherited a conception of its social structure which is not of its own making. It was made by a Christian culture, primarily the British, but echoed across Christian Europe, as an important book, India in the Eyes of Europeans (2022) by Martin Farek, exposes well. Its missionaries combined what they described as Hinduism with the oppressive caste system which they said lay at its foundation. These descriptions went into secular theorising about Indian culture by people who also came from this Christian culture, and to whom the facts of the caste system made sense. That India has a caste system based on Hinduism became the common sense of Europe.
Mehta’s “’metaphysics’ in which caste is embedded”, is actually none other than this European story of India, not Sanatan Dharma. As Mehta’s choice of words shows, it is this account that has spread wide and deep in India too because of the influence of colonialism and its various institutions. The description of India with its hierarchical, oppressive social structure needed a Christian background, and it needed colonialism to convince Indians that that was, indeed, a true description of their culture. It has largely succeeded, not only because colonial agents transmitted this story, but because Indians have unreflectively carried on with it.
That is why the options Mehta gives about how we should discuss the caste system are too limited and miss out an important element. Almost 50 years ago, V S Naipaul wrote an account of India as a wounded civilisation. The caste system story is part of this wound. It is a wound introduced by an abusive culture which made the abused believe that the abuser’s reasons for their continued abuse were true. This abuse today manifests not only in the retention of the caste-system story but all the self-harming paraphernalia that have been erected around it: the constant abuse of Brahmins or upper castes; the caste atrocities laws; the reservations system; the false cases in India and abroad and so on. They will never address the caste system because the caste system does not exist; only the belief in it does. It is part of the colonial consciousness of India.
The writer is a Reader in Culture and Law at Queen Mary, University of London. He is author of Against Caste in British Law (Palgrave, 2015) and co-editor of Western Foundations of the Caste System (Palgrave, 2017)
