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2000, Economic and Political Weekly
This paper was in response to Javeed Alam and CP Bhambhari papers contesting their views wherein former argues that oppressed have become a community and the later that Hinduism of every variety is present as a reference point among the oppressed. It looks at the pre independence and post independence period engagements of these communities against the Brahmanical system arguing the complications prevalent in the process.
This speculative paper argues that the caste system of India could be seen as a present-day remnant of 'tribal apartheid' which came into being when Indo-European warlike nomadic pastoralists overran and dominated an earlier urban Dravidian peoples. This form of discrimination based on identity is akin to racism. The enduring salience of caste and colour consciousness among Indians forms one of the great modern paradoxes that have resisted Indian governmental attempts to bring about social change. It is a truism that any statement made about India even when backed by some adduced facts can be immediately contradicted by equally probable deductions and countervailing information. This sense of intellectual confrontation has been heightened to painfully shrill levels of late, and everything is now being called into venomous political question and public debate. Paintings, literature, theatre, cinema, and even scholarly works on prehistory are seen as deliberate and malicious insults to one community or other. In such a charged social atmosphere, it is impossible to raise debates on the fraught question of the Indian Caste System without immediately igniting attack. Hence, most Indian scholars avoid exploring this question after routinely passing a comment condemning it, and decrying its continued social observance, though outlawed by law. However, because of its singularity as a socio-religious system, its discriminatory hold over the civic life of over two-hundred million people, and its constant fueling of heinous violence in India, the caste system deserves to be studied with whatever intellectual honesty is possible, and not only through the lens of inflamed bigoted passion, derogatory or defensive.
History: Reviews of New Books
A Review of “Claiming Power from Below: Dalits and the Subaltern Question in India”2010 •
Reflections on Dalits and Minorities Issues: An Anthology(ed. by Prof. Mohd. Mujtaba Khan) brought out by Dr K.R. Narayanan Centre for Dalit and Minorities Studies, Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi in association with Kanishka Publishers, Distributors
Complexities of the Dalit Movement in India2007 •
Over a hundred years or more, Dalits have waged a long struggle for emancipation from the oppressive caste discrimination and the inhuman practice of untouchability. They have also been vocal against economic exploitation and the marginalised political participation of the erstwhile untouchable communities in both colonial and post colonial India. In the recent past the publication of the Mandal Commission report and the subsequent adoption of its recommendations by both the central and the provincial governments of India not only led to a caste Hindu backlash but also raised serious questions about the implications of caste consciousness in secular India. Prior to and soon after independence, there had been major debates as to whether the caste system was conducive or inimical to modernization, economic development, industrialization and democracy. As early as 1921, Max Weber had pointed out that caste system and the Hindu social order would be major impediments to the development of capitalism. After independence, a few scholars had taken the same position. But, a few others have emphasized on the flexible and adaptive nature of the caste system. Interestingly, within a decade following the Indian independence, Selig Harrison had opined that caste served as a basis for economic and political competition and in the process magnified its worst features. Thus, there was a presumption that caste in the absence of well-articulated interest groups would function as a sort of an improvised infrastructure for democracy. Significantly, the early 1990s happened to be one of the most troubled periods in India's post-colonial history. There was also a belief that caste could provide the basis for a platform against communalism and hierarchical order in contemporary Indian society. But the restiveness on the part of the upper castes over the issue of reservation raised serious apprehensions about the divisive impact of articulated caste consciousness in India. The growing incidents of violence, involving the Dalit communities and the upper castes convinced some of the enlightened groups in the Indian society that assertion of caste identity could lead to a destabilization of the political sovereignty of the "nation state". Presumably, it is in the light of these developments that an academic exercise needs to be undertaken over the question of caste identity and that of its role in nation building. Such an exercise assumes importance because since the last phase of colonial rule the nationalists had attempted to reconcile caste identity with the other features of Indian pluralism, ostensibly to lay the foundations of a strong anti-imperialist mass movement. Thus, it becomes imperative to unearth the history of identity formation in the colonial period and the politics of protest associated with it.
History of Dalit politics in Utter Pradesh has been a fascinating topic for academic and public imagination in the recent past. As a part of this process this paper attempts to capture the Dalit politics by examining the ides and activities of associations established by Dalits and for Dalits in colonial and post colonial Utter Pradesh. The main proposition this paper advances is that Dalit collectivist activism was actively promoted by several caste associations established by Dalits in Utter Pradesh. It was this process that actively promoted the identify formation process of caste and class among Dalits. This duel identity process remained to be centrality of Dalit politics in colonial and post colonial India. In sort, this paper attempts to trace the plurality of Dalit politics in Utter Pradesh.
After more than seven decades of India's independence, Dalits, the ‗Untouchables', one-fifth of India's population lives in segregated section of the overwhelming majority of villages and metropolis of India. To this day, in several parts of the country it is risky to walk with footwear on, prohibited to marry girls or boys from other communities and if they dare both are killed in the name of ‗honor killing'; in some parts, the dominant caste communities constructed walls that separates the Dalits in the name of ‗purity-pollution'; do not have burial grounds/burning Ghats and cemeteries for the Dalits in several villages-all in the name of ‗Untouchability'. For all these, caste is the base structure on which others (super structures) hangs on. The root of all is caste in Latin castus, meaning-chaste‖ or-pure‖/‖separated‖. The word has been transliterated in Portuguese casta, which means-race‖ or lineage‖, and was first used in the 1700s in reference to Hinduism's system of social stratification. Hinduism as a religion and caste as its tool thrives and going strong for centuries in the Indian society. Therefore, caste as a social system played the pivotal part during colonial periods and continues to play the most significant role in the post-independent India. Hinduism is effectively and efficiently employs caste by stratifying who should be on top, middle, bottom and outside, legitimizing and reinforcing the societal order-in which slots/rungs one should belong. Therefore, the Indian society is hierarchically stratified. In such a de-humanized top-down social order, the so-called-Untouchables‖-the Dalits fall outside the varna which means color and thus considered as ‗Untouchables'. By virtue of being born in that rung, the Dalit are designated to do certain jobs such as cleaning and carrying the human excreta, burying the corpses and carcasses and removing the skins of the dead animals and working in the leather tanneries. As against the backdrop, one of the major preoccupation of this paper is to delve into Hinduism which plays the pivotal role in propelling, perpetuating and consolidating the system of caste. At the same time, attempts will be made to bring to the foreground the blatant contradictions that the-Untouchables‖ who belong to this land for thousands of years and yet treated as-the Other‖ and-the Polluted‖, during the periods of colonization and even in the post-Independent India. Further, the terrains of the-Untouchables‖ impregnated with anger, insecurity, frustration, hopes and volatility and the magnitude of atrocities meted out by them in recent times become points of reference. As a result, the changes in identity from-Untouchables‖ to Dalits have generated significant transformation from objects of vote bank politics to subjects of their destiny. Notably, employing Dalit Praxis augments Dalit power as resistive and affirmative identity, transforming the Dalits as the subjects of history apparently becomes the core of Dalit Emancipation.
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