In defense of caste
Previously printed by the Pioneer as one side of a debate. Here is my side
and here's the other side of the debate:
Here's the full text of what I wrote: Nothing wrong with caste Birth and berth -- Rajeev Srinivasan | Public affairs commentator It has become a conditioned, Pavlovian reflex for Indians to condemn the entire idea of caste unthinkingly. It has become a cliché to rail against caste, but jati and varnam are just a codification of the fact that all humans are not born equal in their endowments: Some are tall, some are fat, some are musically talented, and so on. We cannot escape the ruthless Bell Curve. The very term 'caste' is not proper, because it is a European Christian distortion of the ideas of jati and varnam, which the colonialists condemned out of ignorance and prejudice. Yet, given the widespread notions about caste, I am forced to use the term. What is deplorable is not caste per se, but casteism, or discrimination based on caste. This is similar to the rightly abhorred discrimination based on other inescapable biological facts: Race, gender, or age. Casteism must be condemned in the strongest possible terms, but that does not mean caste has to be thrown out, baby with bath-water. Caste is a convenient organising principle. Being social animals, humans need to belong to groups. There is a tendency to manufacture in-group/out-group differences and mythologies. However, if groups are roughly equal, we end up with collective bargaining where a group member has a better chance than an unattached individual. This is the reality in India today: Caste as trade union, attempting to grab more than its fair share of the fairly small pie. But caste is part of every human society, although they might call it by other names - 'class'. For instance, European Christian societies are infamous for lack of social mobility - your accent, your hometown, etc, brand you for life, making it practically impossible to change to another 'class'. Even in supposedly classless America, it is rare for the child of a wealthy investment banker to become, say, a janitor. Or for ersatz royalty like a Kennedy to marry an poor immigrant from, say, Lithuania. 'Class' persists. Allegedly egalitarian Communist states, too, have their elites: Rulers' offspring get the plum jobs. Not too many children of Polit Bureau members toil in the gulags of China, or have their organs harvested on demand. In Muslim societies, too, there are obvious hierarchies: Women are defined to be inferior. Among men, Arabs are top of the heap; among Arabs, Prophet Mohammed's tribe is superior. In that tribe, Mohammed's family members are more privileged. The big problem with caste in India today is rigidity. Jati, as originally practiced, was a guild of people in particular trades. Jatis were fluid in nature: Entire castes moved up and down the hierarchy as their value to society changed. For instance, when land records became important, scribes became important; today, if there were a jati of venture capitalists, they would surely be at the top of the pile. The rigidity of caste as we know it is yet another 'contribution' - as are very many of modern India's ills, such as dowry - of Christian European imperialists. They capriciously decided that the Manusmrti was the rulebook of Indian society, and used their census to arbitrarily assign jatis to varnams. The objective of the imperialists was simple: To divide and rule. Today, their lineal descendants, the Communists, have latched on to the same idea as a way of subverting India. The truth of the matter is that jati is an entirely satisfactory construct for most members of a particular jati, so long as there is no overt discrimination against them. It is not as though people are just dying to get into a 'higher' jati. They are content with their existing in-group, even if they belong to a relatively 'low' jati. It is belonging that matters. Finally, caste makes Indian society robust. It is a system theory axiom that a centralised, monolithic system is vulnerable to a single-point failure. But a distributed system, which has many smaller, independent, nodes, is far more difficult to destroy. Castes have functioned as these distributed nodes, and thus no attacker could overthrow the system. Caste, in a fundamental way, has been a reason for the longevity of Indian civilisation. Surely, the distortions in this perfectly sensible construct need to be removed, but it is not per se inappropriate.