Suraj Milind Yengde dismantles the myth of caste as uniquely Indian and traces its hierarchies, solidarities, and fractures across histories, diasporas, and movements, from Ambedkar to Black Lives Matter
How feudal was Indian feudalism? The question continues to be passionately and sometimes acrimoniously debated among historians regarding the extent to which Indian feudalism corresponded to European feudalism. The famous historian Ram Sharan Sharma argues that Indian feudalism — while mirroring the broad contours of European feudalism — had its own specifics. Along almost similar lines, Suraj Milind Yengde, in Caste: A Global Story (Penguin Random House) seeks to argue that despite the centrality and entrenched embeddedness of the caste system in India, it is not uniquely Indian or South Asian.
A social system based on hierarchy, inequality, segregation and oppression exists across the globe. With this basic assumption, he proceeds to understand the dynamics of the caste system and anti-caste movements across the globe in general and in India in particular, and analyses these in relation to movements like Black Lives Matter.
He seeks to comprehend the agency, consciousness, and autonomy of the oppressed; the solidarity which got/gets forged but which also got/gets frayed and fragmented; and how strategies involved in anti-caste movements have changed through time, space and across generations. In doing so, Yengde employs a comparative approach and combines history with ethnography and archival research, leavening them with his personal experiences, interactions, and insights.
Colonial modernity, and Sahanubhti versus Swa-Anubhuti
In regard to caste scholarship, there were non-Dalit scholars who regarded caste as abhorrent. Yengde argues that their accounts were bereft of the victims’ voices, and it was only with the advent of modernity that a strong, autonomous written Dalit perspective emerged to provide a concrete rebuttal of the caste system. Colonialism — to begin with — sought to paper over the autochthonous existence of Dalits, and through census operations, it went on to do what Yengde so aptly calls, “hegemonize Hindus by homogenizing castes.”
This categorical neatness suited administrative convenience. But at the same time, colonialism released forces and opened vistas that made possible the actualisation of emerging Dalit narratives. Needless to say, these were not a single narrative but manifested themselves in multiple forms and ways, despite the fact that BR Ambedkar remained the most towering presence. After Independence, a variety of Dalit organisations, with varying modalities of Dalit resistance, came up; but “a common position has been that of reinterpreting history and bringing it to the service of the Bahujans (subaltern majority).” Yengde also points out that various modalities of Dalit resistance were not oblivious to international solidarity expressed in the 1970s.
Dalit literature and international solidarities
Sahanubhti or sympathy is superficial at best and it could be dubious or counterfeit at worst. Swa-Anubhuti (felt experiences) is an organic feeling and Dalit literature — steeped in felt experiences — has been genuinely organic, inclusive and representative of their plight and predicament and their sense of resistance and aspirations. Yengde goes a long way in putting together an impressive list of literary works of the latter category.
He points out that after the demise of Ambedkar, the Dalit leadership felt rudderless. This vacuum made the urban class of Dalits take recourse to literature and public protest by blending the two and making literature a vital part of the protest movement. He identifies three aims of this literature: one, to produce original writings for the Dalit publics; two, to characterise the state as an oppressive, casteist order; and three, to form a political consensus on Dalit liberation and anti-caste practice.
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In tune with telling the global story of caste, he seeks to explore the relationship between Dalit resistance and black struggle abroad where Dalit literature and anti-caste tradition reached. Ambedkar’s scholarship was meant for an international audience too and after him, Dalit literature referred to Black struggle as part of their struggle for justice, manifest most notably in the birth of the Dalit Panthers. However, Yengde rightly refrains from romanticising this relationship and argues that the Dalit appreciation for the Black literary culture was largely one-sided.
Diaspora, caste and identity
As part of the global scope of the book, the author discusses at great length the caste system in relation to the colonial indentured system and devotes an entire chapter to a case study of Trinidad. Importantly, among the indentured labourers were counted not only those who later came to be known as Dalits but also members of dominant castes.
Yengde’s findings provide rich sociological insights. First, despite the perpetuation of caste as an identity, old hierarchical divisions with concomitant inequities were difficult to reproduce. Second, the common conditions of the diaspora proved to be a unifying factor in terms of shared Indianness. Third, uprooted and deracinated, and later under the influence of preachers of Brahmanical Hinduism in Trinidad, an overarching Hindu identity tended to move to the fore. Fourth, the descendants of Dalits identify themselves as Hindus, and caste is no longer mentioned in everyday conversations.
This prompts the author to make an extremely important point: “The example of Trinidad may indeed support the view that caste society does not need an outcaste body as an active agent for it to exist. Without Dalits, the caste system can imagine its preferred nature by placing flexible hierarchies in vertical chambers operating in the background as a reference point without creating the models of the Varna order.”
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As to the United States and the West, the author notes that the sense of emphatic assertion —characteristic of anti-caste movements in India — does not inform diasporic Dalit experiences. Their working style favours passive change and gradual intervention. Also, Dalit diaspora Ambedkarite organisations are not deeply invested in anti-caste movements back home. Notwithstanding such limitations, the politics of diasporic anti-caste activism that began in the 1960s culminated in several legal cases in Western societies. In contrast to the Western experience, working-class labourers in the Middle East are more focused and closely associated with the process of political change in India.
Calling a spade a spade
The author raises a very significant question about the dominant castes in India and the US, who have sided with the Black movement like Black Lives Matter. He questions their attitude to the caste system as it is practised in India. Yengde engages in some sharp plain-speaking, arguing that the dominant castes “need to recognise that they are carriers of a social and religious creed that cannot tolerate human equality … their opposition to the racism of white people merely consolidates their own elite position.”
Overall, this is both an ambitious and an interesting venture and it should be read for a good number of reasons. Here is both an activist of pro-equity movements and a scholar at work and it must go to his credit that he doesn’t allow the passion of the former to interfere with the rigour and objectivity that genuine scholarship demands. His academic inquiry takes him places and he reports things as he finds them. This demarcation between the two domains — of an activist and of a scholar — is not easy to maintain at the best of times.
Further, Yengde researches and writes with diligent attention to nuances and brings them to light. In the process, he doesn’t attempt to propose grand theories or overarching frameworks. An interdisciplinary, comparative approach serves the book really well. In the process, he debunks many myths and provides great insights about how caste cannot be limited to the South Asian landscape: “Caste reveals how localized institutions provided a basis for the imaginative impulses of caste to survive amidst amorphous forms. Caste, therefore, is a journey, an itinerary of global identities and demographics. Caste is a global story.”
