Review of 'The Persistence of Caste' by Anand Teltumbde

‘The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’. – Karl Marx

Introduction

Anand Teltumbde’s book ‘The Persistence Of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India’s Hidden Apartheid’ attempts to account for the lingering of, and reformation in the institution of caste in India, paying close attention to recent incidents of caste atrocities such as the mass murdering of dalits in the village Khairlanji located in the state of Maharashtra. The book, at another level traces the historical development of the dalit movement from its post-independence inception itself, with the prominence of B.R Ambedkar and the various political affiliations who bear at least some notion of genealogical moorings of Ambedkarite politics (even if some of them today may be tilted with the stains of a parliamentary populism in the form of the kind espoused by the Bahujan Samaj Party and Mayavati). The book written by a prominent journalist (Anand Teltumbde), appears to pitch itself at a popular audience and not necessarily as an academically inclined inquiry, which is not to detract from the factuality of the work which certainly remains accurate journalistic accounting. The audience entailed by such a product would bear a marked similarity with that of the non-fiction work of Arundhati Roy, who writes the introduction for this book. This ‘target audience’ for the product probably best expresses the real rhetorical and analytical limitations which a book such as this must contend with and constitutes the subject who is the intended or implied reader of this book. The book’s effort hence is the representation of the contemporary phenomena of caste to this entailed reader.

Titled The ‘Persistence’ of Caste, the book’s polemical position keenly re-iterates the very presence of the phenomena of caste up against a discourse of the inevitability of its withering away with the emergence and entrenchment of capitalism and free-market economics in India. The notion that the emergence of capitalism in itself acts as a sufficient solution and pre-emption of the withering away of vestigial feudal forces perhaps remains a distinctly European experience, if it were possible to explain the emergence of capitalism proper, merely locally. The difference in the relation of the emergence of capitalism to feudal forces in India and Europe shall be examined briefly.

Capitalism in Europe and India

The emergence of capitalism in Europe, developing from the Industrial Revolution in England and the privatization of commons into enclosures from the 17th to 18th century provided the effective material conditions for the political emergence of the new social strata – the bourgeoisie. Though the genesis of such a class may have initiated even earlier with the bourgs (walled market towns of central and western Europe) developing into cities dedicated to commerce. The word ‘bourgeois’ in the years prior to the French Revolution was used to denote the rich men and women belonging to the urban and rural Third Estate. From initially being the mediators between the working class and those who owned the means of production in the diminishing Feudal system (the landed aristocracy), the economic role played by the bourgeoisie was that of the managers of the raw materials, goods, and services, hence of Capital produced by the Feudal economy. The antagonism between this emerging bourgeois class and the vestigial Feudal remnants presents itself most forcefully in the English Civil War (1642–51), The French Revolution(1789–99) and The American War of Independence (1775–83) where the Bourgeoisie acting in self interest sought to liberate itself of Feudal social formations (which inhibited bourgeois economic prosperity based as they were in the amassment of wealth via the mere ownership of inherited land and systems of bonded labour). And which also were wars against royal or Imperial encroachments on the emerging notion of personal rights (Rousseau 1789), liberties, commercial rights, and principally the ownership of property.

In India this historical dialectic between an emerging bourgeois social class and the feudal mode of production cannot be thought in terms of a purely ‘organic’ development, given the colonial experience we are all well aware of. Such an understanding is further strengthened given the contemporary situation post the liberalisation of the economy in the early 1990’s where indigenous markets were rapidly adapted to the influx of foreign capital. This crucially bore telling effects on the class character of the national bourgeoisie, which is often looked upon as a comprador bourgeoisie (by various Marxist-Leninist forces). As to the analysis of the comprador character of the Indian national bourgeoisie, this review shall deign to speculate on as it presents an inessential digression, what must be noted however is that such a judgement cannot yet rest conclusively given the recent predatory outgrowth of an Indian capitalism which today commands the buying power necessary to buy out market giants such as Land Rover and Jaguar (which Tata recently acquired) as well as the neo-colonial acquisition of farm lands by Indian investors in Africa .

This corroborative and perhaps subservient tendency of the Indian land-owning and bourgeois classes can perhaps be genealogically traced even earlier, to the British land revenue systems (Zamindari, Ryotwari and Mahalwari), which effectively employed local land owning classes such as the Zamindars to collect revenue from the farmers who worked their land. This revenue would be paid as tax to the British colonists. One can already see here how in India various feudal modes of administration and production were already in service to the booming of capitalism in England via a systematic economic imperialism instituted by first, the EIC and then the ‘Raj’ itself. The strengthening and perpetuation of these feudal vestiges as well as the instituted imperial economic drain significantly diminished (and perhaps delayed) the potential of an emerging bourgeoisie in establishing itself in the Indian sub-continent, perhaps until the struggle for independence itself, spearheaded by the Indian National Congress. This accounts for, to an extent the relative passivity of Indian capitalism to various feudal forces at least until independence as the feudal forces were being actively mobilised in service to the process of primitive accumulation of recourses and revenue in service to English capitalism.

The Context of Caste Atrocities

The prior section serves to provide the necessary context within which the chronicling of caste atrocities which Teltumbde undertakes take place, and perhaps more pertinently to provide some manner of an explanation or response to the explicit polemic of the book. It is after all, in acceptance of its polemical thesis that the effort to provide an analytical basis for some of its propositions is undertaken. The ‘persistence’ of caste and caste atrocities is indeed a phenomena that must be taken cognisance of. One cannot however not wonder as to why it is left to a reader (or additionally a reviewer in my case) to pontificate on an understanding of its existence, particularly in the case in which the polemical heart of the book expresses an indignation at an apparent non-recognition of the phenomena of caste. The book, while admittedly seeking to document caste atrocities is yet aghast at their existence, an outrage expressed in the perpetuation of such a form of derogatory violence is certainly justified, but even granting the mere journalistic aspirations of such a book, is it not worth following up this indignation at the appearance of a brutality with questions such as ‘what’ and ‘why’? The form in which whatever resemblance of an answer to these questions are expressed in the book appear only to be ideological accusations of various kinds. The upwardly mobile middle class seeking to disavow its own caste credentials turns a blind eye to the dirty secret which caste presents to them. It representing to them that hell which they seemingly left behind in the villages from which they once came from, that very ‘nightmare’ of dead generations which it would like to forget. The ‘doctrinaire’ Left, as Teltumbde calls them in referring to the parliamentary leftist parties such as the CPI(M) being for the most part too ‘stuck up’ in its insistence on class as an analytical category to be ideologically concerned about the persistence of caste, often resorting to neo-liberal land grabbing itself and direct violence against dalits as seen in the events of Nandigram, and the Bahujan Samaj Party glowing in its chiefly electoral success, painting for a struggling ‘dalit’ cause the ‘mirage’ of parliamentary political power without being able to leverage it to bring about a real material change. And finally an emerging ‘creamy layer’ of the dalit constituency having amassed a degree of capital and influence today striving to colour the dalit agenda with an identity obsession and a discourse ‘centred on reservation in government jobs and educational institutions’ which do not remotely account for over 90 percent of the dalits who continue to live in villages and urban slums.

These polemical targets themselves are not new to us and constitute prominent figures in the discourse of a public sphere numbering the likes of Arundhati Roy and Anand Teltumbde himself, but also including now popular news channels and television anchors who take up lines of questioning not dissimilar to the one enunciated in this book. What one doesn’t see in such a line of enquiry however is the real movement which struggles to abolish the present state of caste atrocities and the various forms in which they are perpetrated. It is here that one perhaps must ask the dialectical question of what such a movement may materially mean, or in other words what would the end of caste oppression present itself as? The book here does not directly offer any answers for it never actually cares to raise this question, concerned as it is primarily with the reiteration of the ‘persistence’ of caste, but seriously – what would it mean for it not to persist? Ambedkar himself famously provides one outlook with his advocation of a mass conversion to Buddhism, a religion which even in its inception was an ideological critique of the stratified Hindu caste system. What I think must be seen here however is that this was one way in which the dalits at a certain point in time, saw as a means of addressing this very question, of how to struggle against their dalit identity while attacking the institution of caste, revealing itself in the political weapon of an exodus. Ambedkar himself was of course deeply influenced by the teachings of Buddha yet what is important to understand is that conversion itself is not necessarily a remedy (even a conversion to Buddhism for that matter). It is well documented how in India, the institution of caste reforms itself into any religion. The radical departure however from the societal identification of one as a dalit (via conversion, social mobility or whatever such narrative as a circumstance presents), entails the formation of a new kind of collectivity – as seen in the Naxalbari uprising.