Rising up in Kolkata within the Nineteen Seventies, caste was not a giant a part of my life. You knew it existed after all, from the bride needed adverts and occasional distasteful references to any individual being chhoto jaat (decrease caste) as a proof for his or her ‘misbehaviour’. However principally, we lived within the snug world of Banerjees and Mukherjees, Ghoshes and Boses, Sens and Sahas, barely conscious of the variations in caste.
Caste was unavoidable in JNU. Beginning with a classmate who launched himself and added, brahman, with an ‘r’ creeping into the ultimate ‘n’. He added, such as you. I didn’t have the guts to inform him that I used to be a mere half-caste, a product of a proscribed union.
Caste was all over the place: from very abstruse discussions of the position of caste in Marxist evaluation (not clear) as to if there have been truly hostel mafias that enforced caste segregation (additionally not clear), we talked about it on a regular basis.
That’s once I began to marvel why issues had been completely different in Kolkata, and it occurred to me that in my total college and faculty cohorts, there was nobody whose household identify was identifiably from the scheduled castes. It was virtually absolutely not true — there have been most likely a small quantity however I didn’t know them — which didn’t make me really feel any higher. It began to daybreak on me that in Bengal, the decrease castes are significantly invisible relative to different components of India. A lot later, I discovered an emphatic recognition of this level in Monoranjan Byapari’s searing ‘Interrogating my Chandal Life’, based mostly on the writer’s extraordinary life expertise. A penniless refugee from East Pakistan and member of one of many lowest castes, he made himself right into a author whereas making a residing as a rickshaw puller.
This isn’t as a result of they don’t seem to be quite a few: Bengal has the second highest share of the general scheduled caste inhabitants, after UP and earlier than Bihar. But, not like in UP, the place Mayawati was a number of instances the chief minister, and Bihar, the place Jitan Ram Majhi had a quick tenure as CM as properly, I’m unable to call a number one Bengali politician from Byapari’s world. This consists of the Communists, the place outstanding leaders carried names like Jyoti Basu, Promod Dasgupta, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, Biman Bose, Asim Chatterjee and Kanu Sanyal, all identifiably from the elite castes.
Certainly, earlier than the 2011 publication of ‘Interrogating my Chandal Life’, even somebody comparatively well-read (like me) would have been hard-pressed to call a significant literary piece in Bangla by somebody exterior the same old elite castes, with the one exception of the justly celebrated ‘Titash Ekti Nodir Naam’ (A River known as Titash) by Advaita Mallabarman. In contrast, there is a gigantic physique of Dalit literature in Marathi that appears to be extensively recognized and skim.
Rising up, after we complained in regards to the meals, my mom would usually fall again upon the truth that of their household, they had been anticipated to eat what the cook dinner produced, which frequently turned out to be pithla (see recipe beneath) and bhakri with some palé bhaji (spinach fried with onions) on the facet. I knew this was peasant meals, and now I discover the recipes in Shahu Patole’s fascinating ‘Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada’. My mom’s household was wealthy by our requirements, with a giant home and a large American automobile. The equal household in Bengal might need cooked some Dalit meals infrequently as a part of a culinary journey (shutki machher ambal, a sweet-sour chutney produced from dried fish), however their day-to-day food regimen at all times aspired to one thing extra elaborate and ‘refined’.
That is clearly partly the results of the everlasting settlement and the ensuing focus of cash and energy in a zamindar class, principally additionally higher caste for historic causes. The truth that it was principally rental earnings that didn’t have to be earned meant that they’d loads of time to ‘refine’ their cultural strikes, considering up 50-course menus (panchasbyanjan) for household celebrations, placing distance between the Bengali elite and the remainder. In Maharashtra, against this, a lot of the land was peasant-held, with no overlords (aside from the colonial state).
Nevertheless, this doesn’t clarify why Bengal is politically so completely different from Bihar and UP, which had been additionally principally zamindar-dominated. My hunch, and it’s not more than that, is that it has one thing to do with the truth that the Bengali elite castes — the brahmins, the kayasthas, the vaidyas and the vaishyas — principally bought together with one another, not less than because the starting of the nineteenth century. There have been different conflicts, for instance, between conservative and liberal Hindus, however not alongside caste strains. That is not like in UP and Bihar, the place intra-upper-caste cleavages are well-documented. Certainly, Mayawati’s profitable 2007 marketing campaign explicitly united the bottom castes with the best, the brahmins, towards the remainder. Maybe this want to seek out allies in a multi-cornered battle has the restricted benefit of bringing some visibility to individuals who wouldn’t in any other case have it, and the absence of overt caste battle in Bengal creates a false sense of unity, the place there may be solely exclusion.
The demand for a caste census, which is now accepted by all main events, is partly a response to this type of invisibility. Because of the Karnataka model of it, we now know that in that state, there’s a huge hole within the schooling ranges of Brahmins, Bunts, and Christians on one facet and the remainder, together with the affluent Vokkaligas and Lingayats. That is useful, particularly when coping with a member of the Indian elite assuring me, normally based mostly on anecdotes, that caste variations are a factor of the previous. Nevertheless, regrettably, these academic gaps get little or no weight in the best way the press reacts to the assorted caste censuses (Bihar, Karnataka, Telangana). These revolve across the inhabitants shares of various caste teams as a strategy to ask whether or not these teams are getting their applicable quota of presidency jobs. Given simply how few individuals have even a reasonable likelihood at these jobs, this may appear to be an odd obsession, particularly given the dimensions of unfairness and violence represented by caste.
Whereas there’s a affordable case for the quotas themselves as a device for mobility in a sclerotic society, the truth that they play such a central position within the coverage response to caste discrimination appears unlucky. The zero-sum nature of quotas and the emphasis on aggressive exams to get these jobs should contribute to resentment and nervousness relatively than constructing solidarity throughout teams. A paper within the American Financial Evaluation from almost 20 years in the past by Karla Hoff and Priyanka Pandey, gives a vivid instance. Karla and Priyanka bought 300+ children throughout quite a few UP villages to unravel mazes for prize cash. The authors positioned some youngsters in teams that mixed high and low castes and others that had just one caste. For among the blended teams, chosen at random, they bought each little one to say their complete identify, together with their caste identifier. In others, it was nameless. It turned out that this made an enormous distinction — the decrease caste children solved 20% much less mazes than the higher caste children as soon as they had been reminded of their caste variations, however not after they had been all nameless. Then again, in all low-caste teams, being reminded of their caste didn’t have an effect on the efficiency of the youngsters. In different phrases, despite the fact that there was no precise competitors, simply the concept of (implicitly) competing with their ‘social betters’ paralysed lower-caste youngsters. Furthermore, high-caste youngsters carried out the perfect after they had been within the blended group they usually knew they had been competing with decrease castes. The necessity to affirm their ‘superiority’ made them attempt tougher.
If the final word aim is a society the place all castes see one another as brothers, then this emphasis on competitors for jobs appears inappropriate. Then again, I’m not ready to think about many large-scale social insurance policies in India that attempt to construct bonds throughout the castes. The closest factor is likely to be the college meals, which are actually roughly common in authorities major colleges. Once they had been launched, there was an important to-do about whether or not the higher castes would permit their youngsters to share meals with the remainder, particularly if the cook dinner was additionally from the fallacious caste. They may even, it was steered, take their youngsters out of faculty, higher illiterate than impure. Whereas the accessible knowledge is patchy (or worse), no matter evaluation I’ve seen, by Jean Dreze and others, means that, regardless of occasional flare-ups, this has principally bought sorted. Who they eat with appears much less of a problem for the youngsters at present than the standard of the meals (ghoogri once more? no eggs?). And as I do know from years of complaining in regards to the meals at MIT to my colleagues, this could be a highly effective bonding expertise.
That is a part of a month-to-month column by Nobel-winning economist.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the writer’s personal.
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