Race and/or caste: What is at stake?

Abstract

This brief response raises a few key questions emerging from Suraj Yengde’s lecture and suggests a critical direction they can be steered towards. It considers in what sense caste may deserve an epistemology of its own. It suggests that we must look at what is at stake in answering the conundrum of which framework to use as primary, though a comparison between anti-racism and anti-casteism is preferable to one between race and caste. A continuing challenge is to bear witness to the experience of the subordinated. What is at stake is the intellectual and political consensus necessary to move towards action – to bring about an institutional or social change. Therefore, what is at stake is the power of the concepts deployed to communicate with and convince agents of change, principally, the activists. During these trying times, revisiting conceptual histories to provide a fresh perspective is immensely challenging; Suraj Yengde has done well to bravely undertake this challenge.

Dr Suraj Yengde has undertaken an ambitious project of examining the complex, interpenetrating conceptual journey of two key notions – race and caste – in US sociology. My comments here will raise a few key ideas emerging from his lecture and suggest a critical direction they can be steered towards.

Yengde juxtaposes well-worn philosophical terms in unexpected ways. For example, he coins the term ‘caste epistemology’: ‘The segmentation of racial and cultural politics that we see today in the US has centred the dominating discourse of body-politic colour-coded perception. This has provided an uneven and thinly scattered analysis of caste epistemology’ (Yengde, 2024: 4) and he uses ‘ontology’ in an interesting way: ‘the peculiarity of the caste system is that is scatters its ontology’ (Yengde, 2024: 5). The formulation ‘caste epistemology’ seems to be hinting that the knowledge of caste is only captured weakly if we remain caught in applying the ‘colour-coded perception’ of race to caste. Ways of knowing caste are more complex than that and perhaps caste deserve an epistemology of its own. The matter of the ‘peculiarity of the caste system’ follows from its epistemology: when one knows it from the inside, one has the experience of ever multiplying intra-caste divisions, the castes-within-castes, which no simple binary can capture. It would be opportune to note the words of Berreman:

Caste systems are living environments to those who comprise them. Yet there is a tendency among those who study and analyse them to idealize or intellectual caste, and in the process to squeeze the life out of it. . ..in addition to being a structure, a caste system is a pattern of human relationships and it is a state of mind (Berreman, 1967: 58).

I want to suggest that we must look at what is at stake in answering the conundrum of which framework to use as primary (caste or race) to apply to the other (race or caste): that is, in asking the question, should racial divisions be understood as caste-like divisions or should caste/varna/jati/gotra divisions be understood as racialised divisions, we must step back and ask: What is at stake? Why are we concerned with the question of the primacy of framework? There are, of course, strong voices suggesting that the two frameworks are so incommensurable that any comparison between the two is pointless. Without the background of why these discussions took place, or what was at stake, the scholarly divide remains a puzzle.

Yengde’s starting point of the Oliver Cox/Gerald Berreman debate, is a familiar one (Dhanda, 2015). I have noted Berreman’s emphasis that caste systems are characterised not by consensus but by conformity. They are maintained not by agreement but by sanctions. This is close to Dr Ambedkar’s view that the caste system in not ‘natural’ but enforced. While overall, Yengde is sympathetic to this point of view, he seems to be critical of Berreman for being stuck with the ‘non-nuanced’ dichotomy of ‘touchable and untouchables in India’ because, allegedly Berreman wanted to compare this with the dichotomy between ‘white and black people in America’ (Yengde, 2024: 5). It is worth asking: Can one not make a partial comparison of significant elements of the operation of race/caste, even if beyond a certain point the analogies break down?

For context, compare the discussion of the race/caste/class frameworks in the extraordinarily rich symposium in 1966 discussing ‘the general nature of caste segregation and racist ideologies on a comparative basis’ between Berreman, Dumont, Leach, Myrdal, Tambiah, and others (De Reuck and Knight, 1967: vii). Significantly, Berreman notes that ‘we would have a very different view of the caste system in India if the people writing about caste and those talking to foreign observers about caste had been those we now call Harijans’ (De Reuck and Knight, 1967: 25). So when Yengde asks the question: ‘Who are the perceived informants and scholars upon whom Cox and Berreman have relied on to make their points?’ (Yengde, 2024: 8) he is right about the limitations of Cox, but not quite right about Berreman whose intention it was to bear witness to the experience of the subordinated. Yengde is right, though, to point out the ubiquitous lack of reference to anti-caste writings in the scholarly debates he has analysed.

Philosophically speaking, the stake in the comparative analyses of race or caste (though, I prefer comparison between anti-racism and anti-casteism) is the ability to use the strength of an existing consensus on the evaluation of a social stratification/system (race or caste) and to apply it to a different one, to draw out a similar evaluative judgement. Further, what is at stake is the intellectual and political consensus necessary to move towards action – to bring about an institutional or social change. Therefore, what is at stake is the power of the concepts deployed to communicate with, and convince, agents of change, principally, the activists. Agents of change need to think about how solidarities might be forged in rebelling against racial/casteised capitalism to thwart the deteriorating conditions of living – social, political, and material–created by these oppressive systems.

In the UK we talked about casteism as an aspect of racism, in the run up to the expansion of the Equality Act 2010 to cover caste discrimination. Unsurprisingly, the ‘don’t compare race and caste’ advocates, beginning from the ones that stymied the inclusion of caste at the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, in Durban in 2001, to the present-day detractors, simply do not want any institutional change to disturb the ongoing operations of caste or casteism. In his ruminations on race and caste, Yengde has drawn up a global canvas, and in it, the example of Brazil is quite instructive. Note that despite accepting and practising miscegenation, Brazil has not eliminated racism. Afro-Brazilians are much more likely to be manual labourers, unemployed, victims of police violence, and incarceration than white Brazilians.

The caste-like system in Brazil is a ‘legacy’ of an inherited social structure as a former Portuguese colony, which received 12 million Africans as chattel slaves. That is the element of racial capitalism we need to bear in mind. It is a simple step to argue that just as ‘racism is the organizing element of social ills in Brazil’ (Prof Silvio de Almeida cited by Diamba, 2022) casteism as we know it, is similarly the ‘organizing element’ of social ills in India. One response to the ills faced in Brazil is the mandatory quota policy for Afrodescendents in federal universities instituted about 11 years ago, which has increased their access to higher education by 400%, just as similar policies have done in India for many more decades. Note that Bolsanaro had opposed this policy, calling it ‘mistaken’, just as in India, we’ve had repeated attempts to interfere with the functioning of quotas for Scheduled Castes (SC), and Scheduled Tribes (ST) students in public HEs, for example, recently, by introducing quotas for Economically Weaker Sections (EWS).

If casteism is systemic, it necessarily affects everyone born in the caste world, regardless of an individual’s self-conscious awareness of their privilege or lack of it. Yengde is right that the caste practice of distance and segregation is a ‘confirmed, educated choice’, and it is based on ‘localized information enforced strongly by the protocols of dominant castes’ (Yengde, 2024: 7).

This brings us to the point about the imperative of forging solidarities, building bridges, and collective action on which I have written in detail elsewhere (Dhanda, 2022). Here, I want to flag up an illuminating book by a fellow philosopher. In Elite Capture: How the powerful took over identity politics (and everything else) Olúfé.mi O. Táíwò reminds us that the term ‘identity politics’, popularised by the 1977 manifesto of the Combahee River Collective, an organisation in the USA of queer, Black feminist socialists, was supposed to be about ‘fostering solidarity and collaboration’. The book explains that what derails the project of coalitional politics, is not ‘identity politics’ itself, but the use to which it is put by ‘elites’. Coalition projects face the risk of being hijacked by the advantaged few, who steer resources away from the service of the many towards their own narrow interests because ‘almost everything in our social world has a tendency to fall prey to elite capture’ (Táíwò, 2022). As a beneficiary of birth-ascribed caste privilege, mindful of ‘elite capture’, I would argue that in the casteised world we inhabit, everyone, personally and collectively, has a moral and social responsibility to dismantle systemic casteism. Ignorance of the systems of caste may be an excuse temporarily. Lack of experience is not an excuse. There are many horrible conditions we have not personally experienced, but we would stand up against (the relentless, violent attacks on Gazans, for example).

In the 80s we used to be enthused by the slogan – Think Globally, Act Locally, but now the corporate smothering of local economies, the ‘global business revolution’, the ‘public-private partnerships’, which give profits to the private sector, and the burden of risks to the state, the social media connectivity riven with filth from troll farms, and the biased global world order – or shall we say ‘disorder’ – meekly overseen by structurally compromised international institutions like the UN, has made the slogan ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’ cruelly poignant for the diaspora. During these trying times, revisiting conceptual histories to provide a fresh perspective is immensely challenging; Suraj Yengde has done well to bravely undertake this challenge.