Understanding Caste System

A Survey of Popular Writings on Caste Violence

by Dunkin Jalki

Popular Writings on Caste System

With this hypothesis we can now enter the area of popular writings on the caste system. The popular writings will show whether or not people refer to the higher entity called the caste system, when they talk about the caste violence, in whatever minimal way. By which I mean, the popular writings on the caste problems should be able to fix its references by referring to the overarching structure called the caste system, if not, such writings should be unintelligible to us.¹

One type of writings that I have considered under popular writings is the reports on the caste violence put together by NGOs or the committees appointed by the state governments in India. We will analyze here one such report produced by an internationally known non-government organization based in Secunderabad, called Sakshi: Dalit Human Rights Monitor 1999-2000: Andhra Pradesh (2000). Let us first note the kind of statements that we come across in the randomly chosen two pages of this report.

Page: 7 1. An “untouchable is considered ritually, physically, and spiritually impure.” 2. “Caste system assigns the Dalit all the unclean work such as disposing of carcasses, cleaning latrines, digging graves, sweeping.” 3.Brahmins use untouchability “for the benefit of those dominant castes who have a vested interest in maintaining a permanent servile class who can be exploited and dominated.” 4. “almost every village is segregated into the Dalit colony and the caste Hindu locality.” 5.Dalits “are also denied basic human dignity…” 6. “caste custom dictates that they cannot wear nice clothes or jewelry and that they must take off their sandals in the caste Hindu locality.” 7. “In hotels they have to eat and drink from separate vessels which they then must wash themselves.” 8. “When a Dalit boy breaks caste taboo and falls in love with a dominant caste girl, he is hunted down, beaten and murdered.” 9. “Dominant castes encroach or take outright possession on land that loyally belongs to Dalits. If Dalits try to regain possession of their land, they are brutally attacked by the dominant caste.” 10.“Dalits bear the lion’s share of the country’s low-paid manual and menial labour.” “Dominant castes capture polling booths, rig the votes and engage in bogus voting in order to prevent Dalits from exercising their franchise.” 11. " When they do not vote for the dominant caste candidate, Dalits are attacked and their homes are looted and burned.”

Page 8: 12. “These atrocities are committed against Dalits simply because they are considered ‘untouchables’ and therefore, according to the caste rationale, have no rights.” 13. “Most Dalits are poor” 14. “A Dalit may be economically better off, but…is still looked down upon as an ‘untouchable’…and though a dominant caste person might be poor, he is still looked up to as ‘high’ caste.” 15. “In general the policy makers and civil society…” think that untouchability does not exist”

These statements, at the first glance, seem to be talking about the world in general and caste system in particular. The first sentence, for instance, “untouchable is considered ritually, physically, and spiritually impure” seems to be saying something about the untouchables, and their social condition, if we agree, for the sake of clarity, that by untouchables we refer to certain groups of people and, that by ‘ritually, physically, and spiritually impure’ we refer to their social condition of some kind. But, this sense will dissolve soon upon a closer scrutiny. They fail to say anything about the world or caste system. Why? Because, they lack quantification. That is, as S. N Balagangadhara explains, “it is not clear how to interpret these statements, if they are taken to describe the world: are they about ‘some’ or ‘all’ of the objects under consideration? Unless quantified, no statement can describe the world.”² This is one of the linguistic properties shared by all the statements listed above. They do not specify whether they are talking about all Dalit people or one Dalit person. Further, it is also not clear whether all Dalits are considered impure by everybody in India, including Dalits, or only by all non-Dalit people of India. Such universal quantifications can be proved wrong by producing one instance contrary to the claim. If the quantification in the claim is existential, i.e., if the claim is that at least one Dalit person is considered impure by at least one non-Dalit person, such a claim is trivially true.

The vagueness of the statement that an “untouchable is considered ritually, physically, and spiritually impure” is also due to the use of the term ‘untouchability’ as an explanatory unit in the sentence. It is not clear as to what the word untouchability refers to. By untouchability if we refer to such practices as not-dining together, not-marrying etc., it is still not clear why a practice of not-marrying between two scheduled castes, such as Madigas and Pariayas cannot be called untouchability. Or consider the following instance from the report, Caste Clashes in Southern District of Tamilnadu: An Overview (1997: p. 3).

[T]here also have been instances where in places where the Dalits were the dominant community they had practiced a kind of reverse untouchability against Thevar community. It was alleged by Thevars that in some places in Srivilliputhur taluk [of Tamilnadu] where Thevars passing through Dalit villages were made to carry their footwear on their heads and to get off the bicycles and wheel them along.

If incidents such as not allowing certain community people into a temple, or making them use separate vessels in a hotel are taken as the typical examples of untouchability, by the extension of the same logic, the above instance is also an instance of untouchability. However, not many people will agree with this argument. The report – it is to be noted, does not deny such incidents – names it as an instance of ‘reverse untouchability’. And, despite quoting this and similar instances of ‘reverse untouchability’ a few more times in the discussion, it emphatically concludes that the causes for caste clashes in Tamil Nadu is the casteist ‘attitude of caste Hindus’ (pp. 1-3). The question that we have to ask here is this: Why not consider the instances of ‘reverse untouchability’ as problematic as, what is called, ‘the casteist attitude of caste Hindus’? The report, it should be obvious to us by now, is selectively distributing the weights to the facts that it has observed. However, what is not clear to us is, what is the justification for this selective emphasis?

Untouchability

How should one understand the concept of ‘untouchability’? In the reports and popular writings on caste, this word refers to some specific groups of people in the Indian society. That is, certain practices are called the manifestations of untouchability only when it is practiced by certain specific caste people vis-à-vis some other specific caste people. What needs to be clarified, then, is who and how does one decide what groups can be called untouchable groups. Needless to say that there is no clarity on this issue. Political battles have been fought over which caste should be called an untouchable/lower caste and which should not. The newspaper reports in India are replete with the examples of these political clashes.³

Nevertheless, barring all the controversies, majority of the people have agreed upon a core list of communities who can be called untouchables. One such list is the list prepared or accepted by the Constitution of India as ‘scheduled castes’. And, in the light of the general stance of the Sakshi report, we can understand this statement – (An “untouchable is considered ritually, physically, and spiritually impure”) – as saying this: all ‘scheduled caste’ people are considered impure by all ‘non-scheduled caste’ people. First of all, such a statement is absurd. However, to give a more generous reading, we can agree that this statement is saying something like this: all ‘scheduled castes’ people are treated as untouchables by all ‘non-scheduled castes’ people. If such is the case, we can produce one instance of ‘reverse untouchability’, or one person from ‘non-scheduled castes’ who does not treat anybody as untouchable, and discredit the arguments about untouchability.⁴ The statement therefore cannot assume such a universal qualification, especially when it claims to be an empirical report of the situation in Andhra Pradesh. This statement, thus does not prove anything, instead it assumes a story, a priori.

1 See S.N Balagangadhara’s unpublished writings on stereotypes for more on inability of the stereotypes in fixing their references.

2 See Balagangadhara’s unpublished article on stereotypes.

3 For instance let me draw your attention to the controversy created by the rejection of Venakataswamy Committee or Backward Class Commission by the Government of Karnataka, headed by Ramakrishna Hegde, in 1986. The strange thing is that the Committee was appointed by the same government. Chidanand Rajghatta reporting in the 1986, 24 October issue of The Telegraph observes that the Venakataswamy Committee “recommended that the Vokkaligas, a politically powerful land owning community, be dropped from the backward classes list enlisting them to reservations.” Ramakrishna Hegde, the then chief minister of Karnataka, not only rejected the recommendation of the committee but also increased reservations to 92% population.

4 It is because a theory has to be shunned as soon as an anomaly crops up. A single occurrence that contravenes the common law that a scientific theory proposes is enough to discredit the theory completely.