Journalist-author Manoj Mitta’s Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India documents the modern history (late 18th century, with the East India Company beginning to take an active interest in political matters) of India’s legal and constitutional efforts to reform Hinduism.
Mitta does a monumental job of it, not only bringing between the covers an impressive amount of inflammable information buried in court files, newspaper reports, and Parliament records, but also setting it alight with a readability normally associated with bestsellers.
In any given situation, Mitta is on the side of the victims, the depressed classes. But sometimes his sympathies lead to a kind of purblind situation. For example, in the fascinating chapter, ‘A Wedding Without A Brahmin’, which discusses the ‘watandar joshis’ or ‘hereditary office-holder(s), on the exercise and benefit of that office in his assigned locality’, the officiating priest is shown for the leech he is, as the layman could not hold ‘social and religious events in his family’ without the Brahmin in question in play.
The reformist movement against the Joshi practice was led by the likes of Jotirao Phule in Maharashtra and Periyar in Tamil Nadu. And, on the legislative side, it ended up in the framing of the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955. Both Mitta and we are right to dismiss the practice of the ubiquitous Joshis—mouthing mantras to sanctify a marriage—as parasitic and superfluous.
Surely the Joshi, too, presumably must eat and earn for himself and his family? The subsistence economy characteristic of the community, for all the power it wielded, hardly ever features in Mitta’s discussions. Is there any reliable data on the subject? That might even explain to an extent the persistence of Brahminic exploitation. But that would change the portrait of the villains a little, rendering them human, not just Brahmin.
The spine and heart of Caste Pride is Untouchability. While the chapter on ‘Temple Entry’ of the depressed classes is as detailed and dramatic as ever, the section titled ‘Impunity For Violence’ narrates incidents like the mass killings of Harijans (42 burned alive in 1968 in Kilvenmani, Tanjore); the Belchhi killings (11 killed in 1977 in Bihar), prompting the then PM Indira Gandhi to ride to the spot on an elephant to negotiate the monsoon floods, the photo opportunity marking her return to power; the Bathani Tola incident (20 Harijans and Muslims killed in 1996 in Bhojpur); and the police shooting in Ramabai Nagar (named after B R Ambedkar’s wife) in Bombay which ended the lives of 10 Dalits in 1997.
Mitta does a first-rate job of turning his meticulous research into gripping narration, the details themselves contributing to the drama, transforming facts into live theatre.
Mitta’s thesis is that an inherently casteist and status quo-driven judiciary of a free country denied the depressed classes justice despite a Constitution that swore by it. Yes. But it did strike me that there must be at least a few cases where the underprivileged fought and got justice. I imagine listing them would not fit in with Mitta’s generally subaltern scheme of things.
Have we moved far enough from our atrocious, casteist past? In all probability, the depressed classes have never been so sought after as now by politicians. Yet, last fortnight, the DMK leader Udhayanidhi Stalin said Sanatana Dharma must be ‘eradicated’; he compared it to an epidemic. Prime Minister Narendra Modi responded that a ‘proper answer must be given.’
Well, a proper answer is a more equitable society, politically and socially. The founding fathers of this country faced a problem of priority. The upper caste-led Congress Party thought political freedom was the first priority in its fight against the British. This was why social legislation took a back seat, and the British could play their divisive game, playing one community against another. That politics still continues in one form or another. A revival of Hindu values, as seems happening now, may not help correct the imbalance ingrained in the anti-colonial fight either.
One of the intellectual giants who dissented from the Congress party’s view then was Dr B R Ambedkar, whom both the BJP and the Congress have been competing to co-opt posthumously; a dead Ambedkar would be more useful than a live one. Both parties deceive themselves.
In his 1936 address as the invited president of Jat-Pat Todak Mandal in Lahore—the convention where he was going to give his address never took place owing to his differences later with the Mandal—the things Ambedkar says about Hinduism some 90 years ago still cannot be told without fear of consequences: ‘But the worst evil of this code of ordinances (or Sanatana Dharma) is that the laws it contains must be the same yesterday, today, and forever. They are iniquitous in that they are not the same for one class as for another. But this iniquity is made perpetual in that they are prescribed to be the same for all generations …The objectionable part is that this code has been invested with the character of finality and fixity. … I have, therefore, no hesitation in saying that such a religion must be destroyed, and I say there is nothing irreligious in working for the destruction of such a religion.’ (The Annihilation of Caste).
Mitta’s book ‘traces the legal history of varna’, and is ‘very much about the current affairs of Hindus’. So it is. But if we follow Dr Ambedkar’s logic to its conclusion, there is likely to be no Hindu religion at all because he will have no varnas.
It occurs to me that neither the prime minister nor the president of this country is from the upper caste. But at the same time, there certainly is a Hindu revival. Are we moving forward in a backward fashion? Or backward in a forward fashion? The next two volumes that Mitta has promised in the series might attempt an answer. One hopes it will not be too late by then.
C P Surendran
Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer. His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B