On Caste Privilege

By Namit Arora

An early goal of British imperialists in India was to create a class of local elites in their own image. They would be, wrote Macaulay, ‘interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.’ An elite class did emerge, not surprisingly from the socially dominant upper-caste Hindus of urban India.

These elites, chin-deep in caste identities, saw themselves as innately superior to other Indians, mirroring the class- and race-based prejudices of the British. No wonder they got along so well. Later, when these Indians opposed the British, they used the same language of political rights and liberalism that the Europeans preached at home but didn’t practice in their colonies. It was this elite class, led by Anglicized lawyers and bureaucrats, that succeeded the British. In the first Indian parliament in 1952, Brahmins, who account for under 5% of the population, cornered almost 25% of the directly elected seats; altogether the upper-castes, about 20% of the population, claimed over 85% of the seats.[1]

In a representative democracy, the idea of ‘representation’ is that an upper-caste Hindu man can fairly represent the interests of the lower-castes, minorities, and women. But one can persuasively argue that this did not happen in the early decades of the Indian republic. Deep disparities along caste lines remained; religious minorities grew alienated; women remained marginal as before. India was effectively a democracy of the few, by the few, for the few.

Since the 70s, India has seen the rise of caste-based politics. Built on the idea that only a member of your own (or proximate) caste can represent your interests, its primary driver was the failure of upper-caste politicians to represent the lower-castes, and the latter realizing the power of their vote. Votes began fragmenting along caste lines, not the least because—besides being central to one’s social identity—caste shaped one’s share of opportunity, deprivation, and discrimination in life.

When the lower-castes began mobilizing and putting up their own candidates, the elites grew anxious and began decrying the rise of caste-based politics and vote banks. ‘So regressive!’ they complained, ‘a betrayal of the spirit and ideals of democracy!’ But of course, with hardly an egalitarian bone in their bodies, they had played a rigged game all along. Their anxiety, above all, came from a visceral fear—fear of the ‘impure’ masses, fear of losing their privileges, fear of being overrun by the boors. In no area is this anxiety more evident than in the debate on caste-based affirmative action, aka reservations, in public sector jobs and college admissions.

Writing fifty years ago in The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon lamented ‘the unpreparedness of the elite, the lack of practical ties between them and the masses, their apathy, and, yes, their cowardice at the crucial moment in the struggle.’ These elites, he wrote, ‘simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the way for the emergence of the current struggles.’

Fanon had in mind the post-colonial elites of North Africa, but his remark is no less apt for the Indians. India needed a real program of socioeconomic justice—via, say, land reform, universal education, and fighting caste discrimination. What legislation the elites did pass they didn’t push far enough. Instead, they consolidated their domination over politics, the economy, education, cultural institutions, and the media—for instance, the richest 10% monopolize more land now than in 1951.[2] Having done quite well for itself, self-congratulation has come easy to this class. In an attempt to restore some balance, this insider, dear reader, will now relate to you its benightedness.

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Walk into a relatively nice neighborhood in, say, Ahmedabad, Pune, or Jaipur, perhaps one of the burgeoning gated communities of flats owned by professionals, public sector officials, and businessmen. This demographic will usually speak English, represent under 10% of the population but command far greater power. Notice that nearly all mailboxes have upper-caste names. The average man here might profess to be modern and secular, but don’t be fooled. His is an incipient modernity, without deep roots—more about clothes, gadgets, nuclear family, educating girls, and fewer food taboos. His idea of the individual, each with an equal human dignity, is terribly weak. Nor does he subscribe to the dignity of labor. Indeed, he would recoil at the idea of inviting his sweeper to sit on his sofa to have a chai and samosa as a fellow human. Worse, he would never have wondered why none among his servants, maids, and sweepers share his last name, or what role his caste played in getting him where he is today. What prevents such ideas from crossing his mind is a deeply internalized hierarchy—and therefore entitlement—evident in the way he makes demands on those in his employ, and the deference he expects from them and their kind.

In this social class, middle-aged members might casually observe, ‘I saw no casteism while growing up.’ Of course, it’s harder to see such things from above, analogous to the legions of men who internalize their sexism so well they don't notice it at all. This is the class that is prone to reminisce the ‘unity’ and ‘harmony’ of the olden days. Now it feels cheated by reservations. Not surprisingly, a good many have come to champion the ‘merit-only’ line (that is, only test scores should be considered) and profess to be ‘caste-blind’. The ‘caste-blind’ stance, which perpetuates caste privilege, has wide currency with those who somehow see it as totally fair and impartial.

Explain the premise of positive discrimination and see eyes roll. ‘We don’t treat them badly anymore,’ one aunty told me, ‘what are they agitating about?’ Mention the benefits of diversity and question narrow ideas of ‘merit’, only to see hateful fear mongering spew out. ‘Oye, what if a scheddu civil engineer built a bridge that collapsed?’ (‘Scheddu’ is a derogatory reduction of Scheduled Caste, the administrative term for Dalits, formerly ‘untouchables’.) ‘What if a scheddu doctor killed a patient?’ The instinct is to associate low-caste with congenital stupidity. It doesn’t occur to them that the beneficiaries of reservation have to pass the same coursework and training as all others. Besides, they have no empirical data on how many fallen bridges were built by scheddus, nor do they know that Dalit children routinely die due to discriminatory practices by ‘merit’ doctors.[3] What, if not prejudice, makes them assume that scheddus build bridges that fall, rather than corrupt upper-caste engineers who steal public funds and use inferior materials? Nor do they hesitate in sending their own under-performing kids to shady engineering and medical institutes that have proliferated—the so-called ‘capitation fee’ colleges—where the sole criteria for admission is money, not ‘merit’, including obscure colleges in the former Soviet block countries cashing-in on the obsession this class has for ‘foreign degrees’.

Awed by the pop culture that trickles down from the West, this class knows little about the rest of India, nor has anything but disdain for its tribal and folk music, dance, and drama.[4] Of much greater concern is India’s image in the West, the health of the IT sector, new consumer goods, the peril from Pakistan, emulating China. Utterly materialistic in its values, it equates education with technical training, success with money, and sneers at the arts, social sciences, and the humanities. Its nationalistic pride is now yoked to its pride in Hinduism. Members of this class may feel irked by Dalits decamping to Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, but they know ‘the problem’ Dalits have: their problem is one of underdevelopment, to be fixed by more aggressive ‘inclusive development’. Pieties and slogans aside, the members of this class make absolutely no demands on themselves. They never look at the mirror and see that they are squarely at the heart of ‘the problem’.

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At a recent dinner party, a Brahmin friend, a graduate of the elite IIT system, criticized reservations on the grounds that they are socially divisive and instigate disharmony. I had to laugh. Isn’t the caste system all about social division, using graded notions of superior and inferior blood? Caste identities have been strong for ages; even today over 90% marry their own. If caste now also shapes political consciousness, it’s because, in part, its members share the experience of discrimination and inherited disadvantage. If the decibels have gone up, it’s because the lower-castes no longer tolerate the oppressive ‘harmony’ of the past. They want a piece of the pie, and they are seeking it via the ballot box. In another country, with the kind of inequities India has, the masses might have resorted to violent revolution long ago.

Why pursue reservations, he argued, when urbanization and industrial development are doing far better at defeating the inequities of caste. This is true up to a point, and a myth beyond. It is true that cities offer greater anonymity and a diversity of jobs unrelated to traditional caste occupations, thereby weakening many, perhaps even the worst, forms of rural casteism. An office-going Brahmin is unlikely to worry about being polluted if he brushes against a Dalit in a crowded bus, or object to eating out lest a Dalit prepared the meal. But even as many old caste abuses have vanished or weakened in the face of urbanization, others have arisen or evolved into malignant forms. Industrialization is a turbulent force working upon the caste system, but it is not in itself a socially progressive force. Introduced in a society with entrenched inequities, capital and industry build on preexisting social privileges and discrimination, as in India.[5]

As many historians of caste have noted, caste in the urban milieu has morphed to behave more like an ethnic community, whose members not only harbor notions of ‘ethnic’ distinctiveness but also a strong consciousness of rank vs. other caste communities. This continuing lack of egalitarianism then poisons urban civic life. It impacts hiring decisions; access to rental housing, health care, and public services; response from law enforcement; judicial verdicts; etc.[6] In our age of economic liberalization, even the Indian private sector oozes discrimination from all its pores. A recent and extensive study, Blocked by Caste, decisively dispels the belief that the private sector is mostly caste-blind and hires based on ‘merit’.[7] It shows that equally qualified Dalit and Muslim résumés are much less likely to get selected than upper-caste ones, and exposes other ‘hidden nuances of caste prejudice in the language of globalisation that contemporary India speaks.’[8] The obvious question this study raises is: why shouldn’t affirmative action be part of the strategy for equalizing opportunity in the private sector? It also shows that the beneficiaries of reservation can travel only so far in the presence of entrenched discrimination in public life. (Read this excellent survey of the reservations debate by Jayati Ghosh. [9])

Notably, my friend supported income- and gender-based reservations. A votary of a technocratic idea of ‘merit’, he was nevertheless willing to trade some ‘merit’ for other social goods, except when it came to caste. He saw the disability of poverty and gender, but minimized the disability of caste, refusing to see how common it is even in urban life, let alone in rural India, where most Indians live. I wondered if he had ever really pondered the sting of casteism, or what Indian society might look like from Dalit perspectives, urban and rural. He seemed to embody all the ignorance, doublethink, and moral myopia of the social class we both belonged to. I saw in him the same empathy deficit that I had been ashamed to discover within myself.

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It is often said that caste is to India what race is to America. Yet, the attitudes of the dominant social class in the two countries couldn’t be more different (it is instructive to compare them without subscribing to a singular conception of modernity). Since at least the 60s, debate on racial prejudice has been mainstream in America. Civic institutions began combating it as a social evil; whites confronted other whites in the public square;[10] Hollywood, the media, and the elites made it uncool; law enforcement cracked the whip on race crimes; diversity and multiculturalism became priorities. Whites widely read black authors who write about their social milieus. Blacks are highly visible in popular culture, including sports, music, and films, and are fully integrated in the military. White majorities routinely elect black mayors, senators, and governors; a politician can be destroyed by the merest racial slur (recall the ‘macaca’ incident?).

Not so in India. Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, continues to thrive after calling the Dalits ‘mentally retarded children’ who gain ‘spiritual experience’ from manual scavenging. The media has little interest or insight into Dalit lives, nor hires low-caste journalists.[11] Major atrocities against Dalits still go unreported. Law enforcement is often indifferent or worse. There is no effective prosecution for discrimination in employment and housing. A Dalit politician can’t get a majority of upper-caste votes even in South Mumbai. Even among those few elites who read books, how many have read a single novel or memoir by a Dalit? In what is perhaps the most diverse country in the world, there is no commitment to diversity in the elite institutions that decide what is worthy art, music, and literature, or what is the content of history textbooks. In book after book of stories for children, both the protagonist and the implicit audience are elite and upper-caste.[12] Much the same is true of sitcoms, soap operas, and commercials on TV. Dalits are invisible from all popular culture that gets any airtime. The Indian army still has many upper-caste-only regiments. There is nothing like an Indian ACLU. Or a Dalit history month on public TV, or exhibits in museums, that seek to educate the upper-castes about a long and dark chapter of their past (and present). Unless a sizable proportion of elites, benumbed by privilege, open their eyes and learn to see both within and without, can there be much hope?

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Also consider reading my three related articles from earlier this year:

• The Blight of Hindustan: a brisk overview of the caste system—its origins, spread, and some historical attitudes and debates.
• Joothan: A Dalit’s Life: a review of a memoir by an ‘untouchable’ starting in the 1950s in rural Uttar Pradesh.
• The Dance of Indian Democracy: Why did democracy take root in India against all odds? What are some of its peculiar features?

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Notes:

1. Rajendra Vora, Suhas Palshikar, ‘Indian Democracy: Meanings and Practices’, Sage Publications, 2004, p 25 (OBCs got 10%, Muslims 2%).
2. Manpreet Sethi, ‘Land Reform in India: Issues and Challenges.’
3. Sanghmitra S. Acharya, ‘Access to Health Care and Patterns of Discrimination: A Study of Dalit Children in Selected villages of Gujarat and Rajasthan’, 2010 (download).
4. An example comes from Professor Subramanium, Chennai Academy of Music, who said the following during a classical music recital: ‘There is folk music and classical music. Carnatic music is scientificallv organized, folk music is not so ... people who are not properly trained just sing out of emotion, enthusiasm. Folk music can be sung by any child. Quacks! Carnatic is not like this, you need a talent.’ (source)
5. Amy Chua, ‘World on Fire’, a very good study of many Asian, African, and Latin American countries (not India but lessons apply) that shows how neoliberal economics can worsen ethnic strife. Here is a review.
6. Such crippling negative discrimination can stymie most positive discrimination policies. But even for the blacks in the US, whose situation today is much better than that of Dalits, a ‘results gap’ continues to exist. This article by Orlando Patterson in the Nation explains why.
7. Madhura Swaminathan, ‘Caste & the labour market’, The Hindu, Mar 9, 2010. Among older studies is one by MN Panini, who showed that during the 'permit raj' era, the private sector was far from caste neutral or ‘merit based’ and routinely tapped into its caste networks.
8. Latha Jishnu, ‘The economics of caste inequity’, Business Standard, Dec 18, 2009.
9. Jayati Ghosh, ‘Case for Caste Based Quotas in Higher Education’, EPW, June 17, 2006.
10. A terrific example here is Robert Jensen. Check out his writings on race and white privilege. 
11. Siddharth Varadarajan, ‘Caste matters in the Indian media’, The Hindu, June 3, 2006.
12. Deeptha Achar and Deepa Sreenivas, ‘Storybooks for a Plural World’, Himal Southasian, May 2010. Here is another article from 2001 on the bias in many school textbooks in UP.

Image:

Source: Mahabharata and the Caste System.

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More writing by Namit Arora?
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