6 - Caste debate and the emergence of Gandhian nationalism

Summary

INTRODUCTION

By the early twentieth century, caste had acquired real meaning in the lives of most if not all Indians. It was still too diverse and fluid a phenomenon to be thought of as a single all-powerful ‘system’. Nevertheless, the concept of the pollution barrier and the Brahmanical ideal of purity were familiar to more people in the subcontinent than had been the case in past centuries. These strong though still disparate jati and varna norms had taken shape against a background of complex economic and political change. In addition, even for the poor and uneducated, these experiences of caste often reflected the themes of regional and pan-Indian controversies in the ‘modern’ public arena. Furthermore, as the power of the state continued to grow, manifestations of caste in the more intimate areas of everyday life came increasingly to reflect an awareness of what the law-courts and the bureaucracies might say or do. This could hardly have been otherwise since government had acquired the authority to define entire ‘communities’ as criminals, and to stigmatise other named caste groups as practitioners of ‘primitive’ marriage customs which made them too lowly in jati and varna terms to be recruited into the colonial army.

Today, through the workings of law, administration and even the university system, the state still plays a large role in sustaining the reality of caste, even though the Indian Republic has experienced fifty years as a mass electoral democracy with an egalitarian or ‘secular’ Constitution. Both this chapter and the next therefore concentrate on the laws and powers of the Indian state from the pre-Independence period to the 1990s.