Recently, I started reading Indian history and got interested in the social structures that have been existing in the country for over three millennia. So, I thought of reading the sociology works that existed in literature to understand them better.
I am not a formal sociology student, but someone who has already read a few Western sociological theories and the Annihilation of Caste (Ambedkar, 1936). I have read more books in Indian history than sociology.
There was always a need to find sociological interpretations of historical events. So, as any normal person, I Googled the top sociology books about India. And Google being Google, suggested a lot of books read. So, to begin with, I started combing through reviews and rankings and found a few books that came over and over in every good list.
So it was reasonable to assume that established authorities wrote these books in the field. The first book I read was “Social Change in Modern India” (1969) by M. N. Srinivas. A quick Wikipedia search confirmed his authenticity:
“In the Frontline obituary, he was described as India’s most distinguished sociologist and social anthropologist” (Menon, 2012).”
So I read the book to gain a deeper understanding of Indian society. Though the book shed light on many aspects of Indian society that I was ignorant of, I was getting uncomfortable with the way he portrayed the caste system.
Even though he wrote detailed accounts of the rules and restrictions imposed on lower castes, he was stating them as mere information, which in no way tarnished the heritage of “the great tradition of Hinduism”, a term he uses again and again throughout the book. He chose not to write much about how evil the atrocities were and how they affected the lives of people who suffered due to the injustice inherent in the system.
Instead, he focused on how the system enabled a small section of castes to have social mobility. However, the overall tone of the discourse was a “very sugar-coated sulking against caste” (Jeevan & Chithra, 2019).
The way he has written about caste sitting on a high privileged pedestal is sickening. It’s either trying to justify why the caste system existed or why it was essential for a harmonious society, or how some communities had social mobility and glorified the dominant castes. He doesn’t try to justify it directly, but only says everything from a Brahmin viewpoint.
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Even an entire chapter was given to explain how the Brahmins had to change and adapt to the process of Westernisation brought by the English rule. All focus is on how Brahmins lost their dominance and privileges (especially purity) than on how unjust the system was in the first place, a way of romanticising the past.
Thus, in Mysore in the early 1930s, priestly Brahmins did not patronise coffee shops, even coffee shops where the cooks were Brahmins. Elderly lay Brahmins also did not like to visit them.
On those infrequent occasions when they did, they sat in an inner room specially reserved for Brahmins and ate off leaves instead of pollution-carrying aluminium and brass plates. Now very few coffee shops have rooms reserved for Brahmins—in fact, such reservation would be against the law. The most popular coffee shops in the city have a cosmopolitan clientele, and few customers bother about the caste of cooks and waiters (Srinivas, 1969, p. 123).
The problem with these writings is that they only give visibility to the voice of upper castes who dominate the fields of academia and get to define what is essential and how to exaggerate it. So only the lives of dominant upper castes are visible, and that of the lower castes are either forgotten or sidelined from the discourse.
While I continued reading, it got worse that he started to justify the caste system. He was shamelessly glorifying one of the worst systems ever in existence that was used to dominate and oppress millions of humans, depriving them of their fundamental human rights and dignity as “tolerant.”
“The caste system provided an institutional basis for tolerance. Living in a caste society means living in a pluralistic cultural universe: each caste has its occupation, customs, ritual, traditions, and ideas. Caste councils, especially the council of the locally dominant caste, are the guardians of such pluralism.”
Is cultural pluralism consistent with the fact that the castes of a region form a hierarchy and that there is also mobility and argument about mutual rank? In the first place, the idea of hierarchy is favourable too, if not reinforced by cultural differences between castes occupying different levels.
Second, only the two ends of the hierarchy are fixed, and in between, there is much argument about mutual rank. When rank changes, the style of life becomes Sanskritized. Again, the caste system made heresy-hunting unnecessary.
Over time, a rebel sector group became a caste, which ensured its continuous existence though at the cost of sealing it hermetically from the rest of society. To complete the irony, in some cases, such a sect reflected in its microcosm the macrocosm of the caste system of the wider society.
Witness, for instance, the Sikhs, Lingayats, and Jains. Occasionally, tribal groups such as the Kotas, Todas, Badagas, and Kurumbas used the model of the caste system to regulate their mutual relations. The tolerance of Hinduism continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Srinivas, 1969, pp. 75-76).
After this book, I read another one by a different author. It was “Caste and Race in India” (1932) by G. S. Ghurye. He was one of the established authors in sociology, being a professor of sociology and the second person to head the Department of Sociology at the University of Mumbai. Again, I expected to gain some insights about caste systems which I failed to gain from my previous attempt.
Unfortunately, what I came across was the reiteration of the same story. Even though he gave a detailed review of practices and rules of pollution followed by these castes, he too failed to describe the degradation faced by lower castes. Again, it was a Brahmin centric approach to describe India’s social life and culture.
Even when you read the descriptions, it feels like glorifying the power the upper caste held rather than criticism on the prevalent inequalities and injustice. More surprisingly, he even tried to bring our attention to an incident where Brahmins were harassed, completely ignoring the harassment suffered by lower castes.
In a village that is a gift to the Brahmins, a Paraiyan is not allowed to enter the Brahmin Quarter, but it is not known to many students that the Paraiyans will not permit a Brahmin to pass through their street.
So much so that if one happens to enter their quarters, they would greet him with cow-dung water. “Brahmins in Mysore consider that great luck will await them if they can manage to pass through the Holeya (untouchables) quarter of a village unmolested” (Ghurye, 1932, p. 11).
I don’t know whether he conveniently ignored the fact that cow dung water is used as a purification medium and how the upper castes made a game out of this, citing “great luck will await” to those who manage to pass through. Maybe, the author was trying to find at least one piece of evidence where the caste system was causing harassment to Brahmins.
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But, reading these sentences in between pages which go on and on about the inhuman rules and restrictions imposed by these same Brahmins over all those subordinate castes, makes us see this futile attempt by the author as ‘childish overcompensation’.
Just like Srinivas, he also explains in detail every aspect of Brahmin life and the superiority enjoyed by them as if it was an elegant system. His description makes us feel that the superiority enjoyed by Brahmins was willingly crowned on them by the lower castes, who were happy to accept themselves as inferiors.
“Some of the lower castes carry their reverence for the Brahmins, especially in North India, to such extremes that they will not cross the shadow of a Brahmin, and sometimes will not take their food without sipping water in which the big toe of a Brahmin is dipped” (Ghurye, 1932, p. 14).
Then he went on to do something even worse; he started to explain how the lower castes were quite happy with the system designed for their oppression. He started giving examples of how certain events and rituals were allowed to be performed by the lower castes, like making pots for festivals and cooking for some rituals, showing the charity shown to them by upper castes and how they were content with it.
“These and other occasions, on which some of the groups, which were considered to be low castes, could feel their importance, relieved the monotonous depression of these groups, and gave zest to their life even in their degraded condition” (Ghurye, 1932, p. 27).
He goes on to explain that these “specific occasions for enjoying superiority” by lower castes made the village community “more or less a harmonious civic unit” (Ghurye, 1932, p. 27). Saying that the life of suffering led by oppressed castes by the unjust system is “harmonious” shows his lack of sensitivity to the degradation of Bahujan.
This neglect of injustices and human rights violations happens throughout the book.
One chapter is dedicated to how Vedas describe all the rules and rituals that the four varnas should practise in his book. He details all the unjust and unreasonable procedures in these ancient law books, which segregates and treats them as entirely sub-human and undignified, whose existence is only for serving the upper castes.
But, instead of proving how discriminatory and one-sided these laws are, he writes about Brahmin compassion to Shudras, completely ignoring the fact that they made this horrible system of legal oppression. Instead, he tries to justify the system by showing these examples of kindness as allowed in it.
“The Sudra, thus, had no civil or religious rights. Nevertheless, there are sentiments of compassion about him expressed here and there. A master is urged to support his Sudra servant when he is unable to work and offer funeral oblation for him if he dies childless.
Rarely, as in one case given by Apastamba, he is allowed to cook food, even though meant for a religious function, under the supervision of members of the other three classes. This extraordinary tolerance towards the Sudra might have been dictated by the peculiar conditions prevailing in the south during early migration of the Indo-Aryans” (Ghurye, 1932, p. 58).
What strikes me as odd is how he calls this “extraordinary tolerance” because he never uses that adjective to describe the rules of subjugation which is quite disturbing.
After reading the so-called “top books” by these established figures in Indian sociology, I wanted to know why these books were so much respected and represented in the media and internet. So I searched the syllabus of B.A Sociology in many Indian universities found that books by these authors were cited as reference books in almost all Indian sociology courses.
A simple checking was enough to clarify the point further that Brahmin or upper-caste sociologists similarly write most of the books taught in academia. They dominate the narrative on caste and its effects. M. N. Srinivas was also against the system of reservations for affirmative action policies by the Indian Government.
If such people dominate the sociological discourses in academia, the issue of caste will never be discussed from a Bahujan-centred subaltern viewpoint. Moreover, when books written by these glorified figures are considered canonical in the field, the criticisms and rational enquiry from a Bahujan view will be overruled or diminished.
As long as these books remain in the sociology curriculum of universities, the graduates who study sociology will only have a myopic view of caste seen from a Brahmin upper caste perspective.
Most space in sociology and anthropology, even today, is dominated by these upper-caste academics who try to dominate the discourse on how the caste system works by marginalising the voices of people who suffer the atrocities.
It was bright to my attention today that even a book like Annihilation of Caste (Ambedkar, 1936), which was freely available, was taken over and modified as a commodity and remodelled on savarna “knowledge” by adding essays and references of high caste academics who Ambedkar was fighting all his life.
Some people like Arundhati Roy, who wrote an introduction to this book, and many other Messiahic liberals, who identify themselves as saviours of the untouchable, sadly aid them without acknowledging their privilege and thus depriving the oppressed even their right to resist.
“Brahmins oppress them, brahmins revolt for them, brahmins save them. Brahmins appropriate them. The same cycle again and again” (Jeevan & Chithra, 2019). The whole of academia and media is dominated by these savarnas that take away the space to voice the issues from these oppressed castes.
They even make the rules on who gets visibility, which discourse gets recognition and how the Bahujan should resist the oppression. Thus, there are no issues in India other than what these people raise.
References:
Ambedkar, B. R. (1936). Annihilation of Caste.
Ghurye, G. S. (1932). Caste and race in India. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.
Jeevan, P., & Chithra, L. (2019, March 14). Sugar-coated sulking against caste. Retrieved from Cloudwalker.
Menon, P. (2012, August 17). A scholar remembered. Frontline. The Hindu.
Srinivas, M. N. (1969). Social Change in Modern India. Berkeley: University of California Press.