Caste Prejudices in India: A Thing from our Past or Something Suffused in our Contemporary Society?
ARCHIT MUKHERJEE
This year on Ambedkar Jayanti, there was
a lot going on in the world that had to do with his legacy. Ambedkar's grandson-in-law
was being sent to jail, something which critiques have called disrespect to
Ambedkar and suppression of dissent, but let's not dive into controversial
topics and talk about the issue at hand. India and the world are dealing with an
imminent health crisis, and such times are calling for social distancing. And
even in these grim times, news of casteist exploitation and inequality has
surfaced. Lodged at quarantine center, a man has been booked for refusing to
eat food cooked by Dalit village head in UP's Kushinagar district.
Even as these feudal systems exist in
India, in both rural and urban areas, society constantly tries to convince
itself that casteism is a thing from our past.
Upper-caste Indian society has found
numerous ways to refer to caste without explicitly having to mention it. In
everyday language, media and advertising, proxy words like ‘community’ and
‘family background' are used. These proxies carry the full range of meanings
that caste categorisations do, and are used in a variety of situations, from
school and job interviews to a landlord meeting prospective tenants.
This deceive lets Indian society permit
itself the feel-good release of loudly castigating brute incidents of caste
violence.
Still, the caste prejudices exist in our
daily life at a scale we fail to notice. "Love marriages" is the term
we perceive as couples marrying for love but in reality, it's just a euphemism
for inter caste and inter religious unions. The antonym for love marriage, i.e.
arranged marriage is a practice which had been followed since ancient times in
India and is completely based on the caste system. These "love marriages" have
resulted in numerous instances of caste violence, with family members condoning
brutal attacks on kin, feudal rivalry and even cases of riots. Indian media
houses and newspapers love to condemn these attacks on the front pages of their
newspapers and editorials but their revenue thrives on caste based matrimonial. These barriers and caste limits have now even
surfaced in the cyberspace. Matrimonial Websites surfacing in recent years have
turned out to be a huge success as they understood that Indians interested in
marriage would definitely want caste as a metric. This has led to different
castes having their own matrimonial websites and has extended casteism to the cyber
world.
I was born in a Bengali Brahman family,
where we, unlike other Brahman families of modern India, have young Brahmans
inducted into the complex caste system at an early age of 6-12. However, my
family held my sacred thread rituals just out of respect for old Bengali
tradition. My family doesn't believe that people must be discriminated on the
basis of caste, not even remotely, but however, didn't want to give away the
caste identity. I went on to read the works of Karl Marx, Lenin, Bhagat Singh
and B.R. Ambedkar and started rejecting my vast identity soon after being
inducted into the caste pyramid.
However, I often come across people who,
in order to glorify the Vedic pristine culture of India as the greatest in the
world of that time, try and justify classification of humans into castes. A
common notion that a lot of boomers have tried to give me over the years is
that some humans have better brain function and hence should be the scholars
while some are born more physical power, hence they should be the Kshatriyas,
while those with inferior genes must trade and make living and those in the
lowest rung are unfit for any work accept cleaning our dirt. We Indians have
had a long history of trying to prove our mythological stories with modern
science, which is hilarious in certain cases. I need not explain how stupid
that logic is (someone tell this to a Kshatriya friend of mine who is as thin as
a matchstick, despite being “genetically a warrior” as claimed by the boomers)
Disclaimer: We don’t
support any sort of body shaming.
Through the recent surge of Hindu
nationalism, people while trying to glorify the Vedic society, have subsequently
also tried to justify casteism, which is one of the reasons we still haven't
been able to eradicate it from public consciousness.
Post-Independence, it was claimed that
the Indian republic had eradicated the caste problem in the first years of nation-building,
with the abolition of untouchability and landlordism. Caste became almost
invisible in urban middle class contexts until 1990s, when caste was brought
back into public consciousness. The Mandal Commission's suggestions were
enacted by law and several lower and middle class ‘jaatis’ availed the benefits
of preference after 2000 years of exploitation. This sparked riots across the
nation, and questions of caste became a part of daily life once again.
These “Reservations", which
originated way back in 1831 when the British wanted scholars outside the Brahman
community to be listed Into the service, have engendered a slow paced upward
mobility of exploited castes. These Reservations have challenged the age old
feudal orders of Indian society and have brought affirmative change.
Yet the reservation policy has been
constantly attacked by privileged classes as denial of true merit to those who
"deserve" it. In India’s finest scientific institutions, notably the
All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi and the Indian Institutes of
Technology, where the entrance exams are among the most competitive in the
world, reports surface every year about ‘reserved’ category students being
discriminated against by upper-caste students and faculty who feel that the
reservations have denied spots to more deserving students. Indian recruiters
have had a history of using metrics of caste under the garb of 'family
background'. Even universities have often been known to hand separate lists of
reserved and general category students to recruiters. Caste discrimination is
indeed faced by lower castes even in the modern day; it's just that the methods
have slightly changed since the colonial era.
To eradicate this caste system, which is
a primary cause of poverty and backwardness of sections of Indian people, we
need to understand what casteism is in contemporary times. The feudal system
has survived a thousand years of political and religious change, evolving
itself in the process. Yet we still perceive it only through definitions of the
colonial era. The key to liberate the lower classes from exploitation is to
understand the caste divide of modern day India and every day Indian life.
Editor’s Note: In
this modern world, we think everything has changed. We think caste system does
not prevail anymore just because we don’t see it and the media also doesn’t
show it. But look deep down and then you will see the bad face of casteism in
India.
If you also have something to write about or speak
about, do it now. We encourage our audience to be the ‘voice of change’.
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