Caste in India Its- Nature, Function and Origins

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MUCH has happened in India since Caste in India was first published. The arrival of independence and a purely Indian government has made possible legislation which would have been improper even had it been possible to an alien administration, and the leaders of thought and policy in India seem generally to have come to the decision that the caste system must go. If that be indeed the case it is perhaps partly on the ground that the caste system is a hindrance to industrial development and economic advance, but more particularly under the urge of an altruistic and humanitarian desire for an improvement in the condition of the depressed classes, and a feeling that the caste system is bound up with the untouchability of the exterior castes and is discreditable therefore to a modern society. Legislation then has been undertaken in an attempt to deal with this situation.

In 1981 it was reckoned that the exterior castes numbered over fifty million; in 1951 nearly fifty-two million untouchables were counted; in 1960 the scheduled castes are spoken of as numbering fifty-five million. The Indian Constitution makes special provision for the scheduled castes, and in 1955 the Indian parliament enacted the Untouchability (Offences) Act, which laid down severe penalties for anyone acting on ancient custom to prohibit to excluded castes the use of temples, wells, schools, shops, eating-houses, or theatres, or to treat them as in any way separate or inferior. In the agencies of central and of state governments one post in eight of those filled by competitive examination is reserved for them, and standards and age limits are adjusted to their poorer education; government scholarships are likewise reserved for students from their com-munities. Caste Hindus are encouraged by the offer of free board and lodging to enter hostels intended to accommodate exterior castes, and all hostels accepting government aid are required to take in a minimum complement of such castes, and seats are reserved for them in the central and state legislatures. There are at the time of writing 76 exterior caste members in the Lok Sabha; the Cabinet Minister for Railways is of their community, and the Chief Minister of the state of Andhra Pradesh also. It is not easy to see what more can be done towards abolishing untouchability by legislative action, particularly as it is still practised by many of the exterior castes as between themselves. The experience of Japan, where some similar discriminations against certain castes were abolished in law eighty years ago but still subsist in practice, suggests that such an end can only be attained by very slow degrees and the continued pressure of advancing education and rising standards of living.

Most writers on caste do seem to regard untouchability as inseparably bound up with the caste system, and some as a necessary condition of the survival of Hinduism, but I cannot see it in either of these aspects myself. One writer says: 'It seems that members of a multi-stratified society must feel supe-rior to one group, and assert that superiority if their subservience to another is to remain tolerable. And this apparently human need finds full and inhuman expression in untouchability. It is possible that this is so, and that the bottom group of all has to take it out in superiority over dumb animals, but the untouchability of certain groups as groups does not apply to the majority of graded castes and cannot therefore be essential to the system. It is a principle which can be observed also in non-Hindu societies which are not graded to anything like the same extent, while societies stratified in some degree at any rate have existed throughout history without it.

However that may be the intelligentsia of India today seem to have made up their minds that the caste system should be got rid of, though it seems clear that in general they fail to comprehend the difficulties, and perhaps the dangers, of such an under-taking-one indeed which would, if carried out at a stroke, wreck the edifice of Hindu society and destroy a growth of some three thousand years or more. In the autumn of 1955 an Indian Conference on Social Work organized a 'Seminar on Casteism and Removal of Untouchability' in order to suggest concrete measures for the removal of untouchability and to combat the ubiquitous menace of casteism'.

It is probable that some sort of an apology is needed from anyone who is bold enough to add to the great mass of literature that already exists upon the subject of Indian caste. A recent Indologist in America claims to have compiled a list of over five thousand published works on this subject; so obviously some justification is needed for adding to their number. Nothing like that quantity, however, will be found in the list of works cited in this volume, which does not claim in any sense to deal exhaustively with the subject. Only an encyclopaedia could do that. It does attempt, however, to offer a brief conspectus of the various aspects of caste, since, when trying to give to my classes a general idea of the nature of the problems involved, I was unable to find any single book of moderate size to which I could send students for what I regarded as a satisfactory outline of the subject. Two compact books in English there certainly are, both fairly recent and each admirable after its kind; they have been freely cited in this volume, particularly in chapter VII. But the one deals merely with existing phenomena omitting, generally speaking, questions of origin and of wider significance; the other has its treatment of origin based on theories of race which are no longer valid in the light of present knowledge, while its treatment of existing facts is limited to northern India, though the caste system is probably found at its strongest in the south. In this outline some attempt has been made in brief not only to consider origins, but also the place of caste in the social and economic order of Hindustan.

Besides the two authors referred to above there are a number of others whose works have been quoted freely. All will be found in the bibliography at the end of the volume. Even where facts referred to are within my own observation and experience, I have, wherever I could, given a reference to some printed authority in which the matter can be followed up.

An apology is also perhaps required for certain inconsistencies in the pages that follow... In the text I have [not often used diacritical marks] but in the glossary I have endeavoured to mark all long syllables where a knowledge of the quantity is needed to afford some approach to a correct pronunciation. Again, the termination -an in South Indian caste names is sometimes re-placed by the honorific ar, or the final n may be omitted; and there are almost inevitably inconsistencies in transliteration from Indian alphabets into Roman. But the inconsistency which has proved the most disconcerting to the proof-readers in the University Press has been a tendency to fluctuate between singular and plural forms for the names of castes, and above all my unpredictable and unrepentant practice of using singular and plural verbs indiscriminately where the subject is the name of a caste.

As however 'caste' is a collective noun I hold that I am entitled to use either number in the verb that follows, and I have deliberately declined to be unnecessarily (as it seems to me) consistent in this matter. If the reader is offended thereby, I offer him my apologies-proforma. I have to acknowledge the kindness of the Government of India in giving me leave to reproduce as appendices to this volume an appendix (11) and a chapter (x1) from my report on the Indian census of 1981; the two together form part tv of this volume. I have to thank Mr J. Brough, of St John's College, Cambridge, now of the British Museum, for his important help in the matter of pravara, and Rajkumar Sahib Prafulla Chandra Bhanj Deo also for some assistance in the same field. Dr Alma Wittlin has helped me in the matter of references, but I have to thank in particular Miss Maureen O'Reilly for reading my proof sheets and still more for the laborious and exacting work of verifying almost all the references and checking my bibliography. I must thank Professor Raymond Firth also for very kindly reading through my proofs, and not the least of my acknowledgements are due to my friend Dr Mary Edwards, but for whose kindly and persistent instigation I should probably never have set my hand to plough this furrow at all.