The dalit in India - caste and social class

Social Research, Spring, 2003 by Sagarika Ghose

However self-important, caste remains an invisible engine of Hindu society, creating subtle social and political linkages, functioning as a closed enclave of common practice and thought and working as a lobby or pressure group that over time creates monopolies over certain professions and businesses. (8)

Caste is today seen to have become "secularized"; that is, caste has become a modern interest group, transformed into small monopolies of economic, political, and cultural interests. (9) Caste steps out from the shadows every time a marriage is arranged or a child is born or a new professional or business opportunity emerges.

Caste is, at its very base, linked to production and occupation. It is a system of labor division from which the element of competition has been largely excluded. "Economic roles are allocated by right to closed minority groups of low social status; members of the high status 'dominant caste' to whom the low status groups are bound, generally form a numerical majority and must compete among themselves for the services of individual members of the lower castes" (Leach, 1960: 5-6). The membership of a caste implies that a person becomes part of a person-based social network that controls insider information about economic opportunities; transmits skills; and provides varied types of human and material support (Panini, 1996: 39).

Caste is by its very definition exclusive and because of the manner in which particular castes channel themselves into particular occupations, it becomes virtually changeless. India's software industry, for example, is dominated by Tamil Brahmins; (10) the civil service by kayasthas from Uttar Pradesh. (11)

In the pre-British period, the jajmani system--by which the blacksmith, carpenter, potter, oilman, barber, washerman, and priest all became linked with the household of the upper-caste landowner and were paid in kind by the landholder for services rendered during the year--helped to ensure the durability of the caste system in the rural countryside (Srinivas, 1962; Leach, 1960). Add to this the principle of heredity and caste soon solidified into a family trade as well as an almost irreversible social category that was maintained as much by social taboo as by economic imperative.

Thus the dalit, the caste that exists outside the caste system, is trapped by his own economic trade. The dalit's pariahness begins with the Untouchable castes becoming associated with those groups specializing in "impure" tasks, such as cleaning out waste, skinning cattle, working in leather, butchery, fishing, and supervising cremations. Leather workers, washermen, scavengers, undertakers, toilet cleaners, toddy tappers, sweepers and rural laborers were polluted because of their work. (12) Their role in the caste-based economic system meant that the modern dalits, descended from the professionals of impure tasks, are heirs to centuries old filth, professional as well as psychological.

Acchut! (Untouchable!)

Myriad practices existed and still exist to denote the pollution of the dalit. Not only could the dalit not enter a Hindu temple or drink water from temple tanks, but he had to live in segregated huts on the outskirts of villages. In parts of south India in the nineteenth century, dalit women were forbidden to cover their breasts. Dalits had to beat a drum to signal their arrival so the brahmin knew where to hide or how to protect his food. The brahmin is most vulnerable to pollution when he is eating, so if a shadow of a dalit fell on his food, the food too became Untouchable. On occasion dalits had to wear a spittoon so that his spittle did not fall on his surroundings and he could never stand in the way of a wind that might carry his smell or breath to a brahmin. In a Jataka story (377. III. 154), a Brahmin cries, "Curse you, ill omened candala [dalit], get to leeward" (Omvedt, 1998).