Posted January 26, 2007

I do not know why, but many Indian-Americans I have spoken to think that caste is dead in India today.  They believe, and maybe their parents believe, that caste has gone the way of dial-up internet connections.  Interestingly, I have not heard them make the same claim about religion, a claim which would be equally difficult to substantiate.  Or, to put it less mildly, a claim that would be equally preposterous.  For the notion that caste is dead in India today is just silly.

Caste is a hard concept for Americans to wrap their minds around, because it is not quite the kind of hierarchical concept- like class or race- that we are accustomed to.  Since caste is neither class nor race, there is a nagging concern that maybe it does not really exist. 

But no serious analyst of India would ever doubt the salience of caste.  Caste, and the caste system, are very much alive in India today.  Recent polls indicate that even among relatively affluent, educated, urban Indians, a majority would not be willing to marry a member of a lower caste.  At the national level, over 70 percent of Indians oppose inter-caste marriage.  In UP, the two biggest parties in state level politics are the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, both of which have a virtual lock on the caste groups they represent (OBCs and SCs, respectively, but more on that below).  Politics in the state, and consequently a large number of policy outputs, job offers, and goods and services are controlled by caste groups who actively discriminate on the basis of caste.

I am not competent to provide a history of the caste system, or to explain how or why it persists.  But I have always been dissatisfied with even basic explanations of caste that I have seen in the West.  So consider this a primer. 

A caste is a social category.  It may be thought of as akin to ethnicity, in that people of a similar caste share similar names, speak in similar ways, and tend to marry amongst themselves.  It may be thought of as akin to class because castes have traditionally been associated with particular activities, such as priests (brahmins), warriors (kshatriyas), merchants (vaishyas), cowherders (yadavs), leathermakers (chamars), toilet cleaners (bhangis) and so on. It may be thought of as analogous, finally, to religion, since the basis for the caste system is the religious concept of the varna, and contact with the untouchables (technically outside the system) leaves "caste Hindus" in need of purification. 

Then again, caste subverts some of these categories.  Indian Muslims, according to the link between Hinduism and caste, should not have castes among them, but they do.  People of the same caste may work in very different occupations in modern India, may be rich or poor, and may have more or less social power. 

If that basically clarifies (or confuses!) what a caste is, what is the caste system? 

The caste system can be thought of in two ways.  First, there is the traditional caste system. This is the informal system as it evolved prior to Indian independence. There is a great deal of debate about how "traditional" the caste system really is and to what extent the British made it worse or better.  This is more than we need to know for present purposes.  Whatever the case, the caste system has had a certain tenor that predates independence.  When Gandhi protested against the exclusion of the untouchables from Hindu temples because of their impure status, he was protesting against this traditional caste system.  Note that, as per an earlier blog on this very page, such struggles continue today.  Only a few months ago in the state of Orissa, a major standoff ensued over untouchable (now known as "dalit") access to a Hindu temple.  In the traditional caste system, your caste has a very large effect on your social standing and economic welfare. 

The second way to think about the caste system is the evolution of that system since independence as a direct result of government affirmative action policies.  In India, there has been affirmative action, known here as reservation, for dalits since independence.  This has created a new dynamic in India in which many dalits have been able to enter into politics and government, previously the domain of the upper caste Hindus, and exercise power disproportionate with their position in the first caste system (the traditional one).  

If we return to the first caste system, the traditional one, we need to recognize the immense complexity and heterogeneity of that system.  Each of the castes with which we are familiar has many sub-castes.  Each of these varies by state and region in India.  In North India and South India, for example, the caste systems have evolved in different ways.  In Uttar Pradesh (UP), India's largest state, there are over 60 divisions within the "dalit" group of untouchables.  Altogether, UP probably has hundreds of different castes. These castes are, again, identifiable by name, community, speech, job, and social position.

If we turn to the second caste system, it tends toward a less complex and more readily ordered set of categories.  India, according to this second system, may be thought of as divided up between: Upper castes, Middle-upper castes (or Intermediary castes), Other Backward Classes/Castes (OBCs), More Backward Castes, Most Backward Castes, and, finally, the Dalits, or what are also known as Scheduled Castes.  The upper castes are the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas and so on.  The Middle-upper or intermediate castes are debatable.  One caste which is sometimes thought of as an upper caste and sometimes as an OBC are the Jats, a farmer caste in North India. 

This second caste system is fluid, and is bolstered by the existence of state policies which are targeted to each caste subset.  For example, there has always been reservation for Scheduled Castes at the central level in India, but there has not always been reservation for OBCs.  The current Congress-led government has legislated reservation for the OBCs at the central educational level; 27 percent of spots in government-supported educational institutions must go to this caste-group.  Although the federal policy is new, many states have long had reservations at the state level for OBCs. 

One issue which has come up in the reservations debate is whether OBCs should be divided into regular OBCs and the "creamy layer," the amusing term for those OBCs who are economically well off.  The creamy layer concept further complicates the meaning of caste by overlaying it with a class component.  This invites a variety of questions about fairness.  For example, one rarely hears talk about the "creamy layer" of Scheduled Castes, but reservations have actually created an elite class among this group in terms of economic and social power.  Is a non-creamy layer OBC better off than a creamy layer SC?  While such mental gymnastics, replete with cute phrases and a plethora of acronyms, may seem hilarious to an outsider, the issues are deadly serious. And they are not dissimilar from those which societies like America's, Brazil's or South Africa's must confront when applying race versus class affirmative action policy.

Contemporary politics in India, and the evolution of the national reservations policy, suggest that the importance of caste is, if anything, on the rise in India, rather than the decline.  Whether this is a good thing or not is debatable; at a minimum, it gives non-Indians more time to figure out the caste system before it is a thing of the past.