India

by Shashi Tharoor

  It didn’t. Soon after the door had closed behind the peon, the black phone on the clerk’s desk jangled peremptorily. “Yes, saar. Yes, saar,” he said, perspiring. “No, saar. Not long. Yes, saar. At once, saar.” He had stood up to attention during this exchange, and when he replaced the receiver there was a new look of respect in his eyes. “Collector-saare will be seeing you now, saar,” he said, with a salaam. “You didn’t explain who you were, saar.” The five-rupee note re-emerged in his hand. “You seem to have dropped this by mistake, saar,” he said shamefacedly, handing it to Balettan.

  “Keep it,” Balettan said, as mystified as I by the transformation in the man’s attitude. But the clerk begged him to take it back, and bowed and scraped us toward the imposing doorway.

  “Obviously Bombay’s ad world counts for more than I thought with these government-wallahs,” I whispered to Balettan.

  “He’s just happy to be able to speak English with someone,” Balettan suggested.

  The clerk opened the door into a high-ceilinged office. The Collector rose from behind a mahogany desk the size of a Ping-Pong table, and stretched out a hand. “It’s so good to see you again, Neel,” he said.

  It was Charlis.

  “Charlis!” I exclaimed, astonishment overcoming delight. “B-but — the name — the IAS —”

  “You never did know my family name, did you? After all these years.” Charlis spoke without reproach. “And yes, I’ve been in the IAS for some time now.” The Administrative Service, too, I found myself thinking unworthily, offered one more of the quotas Kunjunni-mama liked to complain about. “But this is the first time I’ve been posted so close to Vanganassery. I’ve barely got here, but once I’ve settled in, I’m planning to visit the village again soon.” He added casually, “It’s part of my district, after all. That’d make it an official visit, you see.”

  He seemed to enjoy the thought, and I found myself looking at Balettan. I didn’t know what I expected to find in his expression, but it certainly wasn’t the combination of hope, respect, and, yes, admiration with which he now regarded the man across the desk.

  Charlis seemed to catch it, too. “But what is this? We haven’t even asked Balettan to sit down.” He waved us to chairs, as tea appeared. “Tell me, what can I do for you?”

  We explained the problem, and Charlis was sympathetic but grave. The law was the law; it was also just, undoing centuries of absentee landlordism. In our case, though, thanks to Balettan’s inattention (though Charlis didn’t even imply that), it had been applied unfairly, leaving Balettan with less land than his former tenant. Some of this could be undone, and Charlis would help, but we would not be able to get back all the land that had been confiscated. Charlis explained all this carefully, patiently, speaking principally to Balettan rather than to me. “Some changes are good, some are bad,” he concluded, “but very few changes can be reversed.”

  “Shakespeare or Rudyard Kipling?” I asked, only half in jest, remembering his little notebook.

  “Neither,” he replied quite seriously. “Charlis Thekkote. But you can quote me if you like.”

  Charlis was as good as his word. He helped Balettan file the necessary papers to reclaim some of his land, and made sure the files were not lost in the bureaucratic maze. And the week after our visit, knowing I would not be staying in Vanganassery long, Charlis came to the village.

  I will never forget the sight of Charlis seated at our dining table with the entire family bustling attentively around him: Rani-valiamma, on leave from the school where she was now vice-principal, serving him her soft, crisp-edged dosas on Grandmother’s best stainless-steel thali; Kunjunni-mama, honking gregariously, pouring him more tea; and half the neighbors, standing at a respectful distance, gawking at the dignitary.

  But the image that will linger longest in my memory is from even before that, from the moment of Charlis’s arrival at the village. His official car cannot drive the last half-mile to our house, on the narrow paths across the paddy fields, so Charlis steps down, in his off-white safari suit and open-toed sandals, and walks to our front door, through the dust. We greet him there and begin to usher him into the house, but Balettan stops us outside. For a minute all the old fears come flooding back into my mind and Charlis’s, but it is only for a minute, because Balettan is shouting out to the servant, “Can’t you see the Collector-saare is waiting? Hurry up!”

  I catch Charlis’s eye; he smiles. The servant pulls a bucketful of water out of the well to wash Charlis’s feet.

  * * *

  This story is about change, democratic change, the kind that India has sought to promote for fifty years since independence. It has worked better in Kerala — where successive Communist governments have sublimated their revolutionary zeal in favor of evolutionary change — than elsewhere, but change has occurred all over India. Some seventy of India’s 365 districts are headed by IAS administrators who, like Charlis, belong to the Scheduled Castes or Tribes. And the most striking change in my story is in the one institution that most foreigners still associate with India, caste.

  Caste, like Hindu and curry, is a word invented by outsiders to describe what Indians understand without precise definition. This ancient system of dividing society was rejected by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian nationalist movement as entrenching discrimination, but it has persisted in Indian society nonetheless. Caste began, quite simply, as apartheid; the original term for it, varna, meant “color” in Sanskrit, and the caste system was probably invented by the light-skinned Aryans who invaded north India in about 1500 b.c. to put down the darker-hued indigenes. A verse of the Rig Veda enshrines the original fourfold caste division: when God made Man, the verse says, the learned, priestly Brahmin emerged from his forehead, the warrior Kshatriya from his arms, the farmer-merchant Vaishya from his thighs, and the laborer-artisan Sudra from his feet. The Untouchables lay even beyond this caste classification, and were therefore literally outcasts; one outcast group, the Parayans of Kerala, gave the English language the word that best defines their condition — pariah. (And, to make matters more complicated, within each caste are innumerable subcastes, for instance subcastes of potters, of scribes, of tanners, and so on.)

  Over centuries of intermixing, which have given India perhaps the world’s most hetero-hued population (with skin color often varying startlingly even within a single family), color gave way to occupation as the determining factor of caste. Members of the same caste usually worked in the same profession, married and ate within their caste groups, and tended to look down (or up, depending on their place on the social ladder) on other castes. Caste rules acquired rigidity over millennia: Brahmins would not eat food cooked by non-Brahmins; Untouchables, who performed such “polluting” tasks as disposing of waste or handling carcasses, could not draw water from wells reserved for the upper castes, or live in upper-caste areas; Brahmins would feel obliged to bathe afresh if the shadow of an Untouchable fell across them; only caste Hindus could worship at the village temples; in some states, only upper-caste men could twirl their mustaches upward; in others, lower-caste women had to bare their breasts before their betters. Intimate contact, let alone marriage, across caste lines became unthinkable, except in the context of a master-servant relationship.

  The lower castes also tended to be exploited (for their labor, their services, and sometimes their bodies) by the higher ones, who taught them that their inferior status was part of the natural order of things, that conformity and good behavior might lead to their being reborn in a higher caste in their next life, and that in the meantime they were to do as they were told. This was their dharma, the code of right conduct in accordance with which each Hindu must live. Only by honoring caste rules and fulfilling the dharma his caste enjoined upon him could a good Hindu hope to be reincarnated in a better life. Interpreted literally by the unimaginative, this would mean that caste oppression was good because it upheld the natural order.

  Looking at the prohibitions imposed by caste, and the prej
udice and discrimination it permitted, it is easy to see why Gandhi and the more enlightened of India’s nationalists, anxious to unite the country against the foreign colonizer, campaigned passionately against the caste system. They were hardly new in this: Siddhartha, the Buddha, had preached against the iniquities of caste in 500 b.c. But caste survived his attempts at reform as it did those of Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, and two thousand years later the efforts of Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. Even Christian missionaries found themselves adapting to the realities of caste: Portuguese churches in Goa reputedly have two doors, one for Brahmin Christians, the other for lower-caste converts. Reform movements within Hinduism ranged from the Brahmo Samaj of Rammohan Roy in the early 1800s to the lower-caste spiritualism of Kerala’s Sree Narayana Guru nearly a century later; Gandhi crusaded against caste, and Ambedkar, himself an Untouchable, outlawed Untouchability as the principal drafter of free India’s constitution. But still it has persisted, though its hold on educated urban Indians is slipping.

  Most educated Indians, proud of their country’s record in opposing racial discrimination in South Africa and elsewhere, are embarrassed by a part of their heritage that enshrines bigotry. Today a significant proportion of the matrimonial advertisements placed in India’s English-language newspapers state that “caste [is] no bar” to an otherwise suitable alliance (looks, finances, career prospects, and class have outstripped caste among the considerations favored by the spouse-hunting middle class). In any case, India’s teeming cities offer inconvenient ground for the petty prohibitions of caste; it is hardly possible to know the caste of the straphanger rubbing shoulders with you on the bus or jostling past you on the street, or for that matter of the cook who made the meal you ate in an anonymous restaurant. Modern life obliges you to shake the hands of, lunch with, and (thanks to India’s extraordinary affirmative-action program) take orders from people of lower castes, or of no caste at all. Education and economics, not caste, account for today’s inequalities, and the stigma of caste is disappearing more rapidly in Indian cities than that of race in the United States. (As the Indian sociologist André Béteille once pointedly told an American interviewer, “Your blacks are visible. Ours are not.”) Urban India — and India is increasingly urbanized; some 26 percent of the population live in cities today, a more than 50 percent increase since 1961 — has made giant strides toward achieving Gandhi’s dream of a casteless society.

  Which is not to say that the crushing reality of caste oppression has disappeared from the Indian countryside. Despite fifty years of freedom, well-trained and enlightened administrators, and politically correct rhetoric at all levels, caste continues to enslave village society. Each week brings a new horror story into the national press. A Dalit woman is stripped and paraded naked through the streets of her village because her son dared to steal from an upper-caste Thakur; she is then forced to have sex with the offending boy before a sneering audience of Thakurs. A highborn Jat girl falls in love with an Untouchable boy and is caught trying to elope with him; they and their accomplice, another Untouchable, are caught, beaten, tortured in front of their families, and hanged, and their bodies are then burned (the girl is not immediately killed by her noose, and is still alive when the fire is lit; she tries to crawl out, but is thrown back into the flames). In one village, twenty-two “uppity” Untouchables are gunned down in an upper-caste massacre; in another, four hundred Dalit families are burned out of their huts for daring to demand the legal minimum wage for their labors. These are not isolated incidents, in that dozens like them are reported every year. But on the other hand they are not cause for despair about the prospects of social change in rural India. Indeed, they are evidence of resistance to change rather than of the impossibility of it. The victims of these crimes had dared to challenge the proscriptions of the traditionalists; they had tried to lift the dead weight of the ages off their backs. As political equality, guaranteed by the vote, brings democratic clout, the lower castes are inevitably demanding social equality as well, and increasingly obtaining it. For each one who fails, a dozen, across India, are succeeding in casting off their shackles.

  At the same time, it is important to realize that the incidents I have described are not simple acts of criminality committed by people from whom society should be protected. In fact, the greater horror lies in the fact that they are people who might not otherwise commit any crime and who believe that, by their actions, they are upholding society rather than endangering it. Such people must be brought to justice and punished for their crimes, but the real solution to the attitudes they represent lies in their increasing irrelevance. Change has already come to India, and it is accelerating. A recent seven-year-long study by the the Anthropological Survey of India has strikingly demonstrated the extent to which the link between caste and occupation has been broken in independent India.

  At the same time, politics has inevitably transformed caste. It is amusing for an Indian to follow the impassioned debates about affirmative action in America, when all it involves is a pale shadow of the world’s first and most rigorous affirmative-action program, written into the Indian Constitution by a former Untouchable, the Columbia University-educated lawyer and statesman Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. (Ambedkar himself led his followers in a mass conversion to Buddhism, to escape the stigma of Untouchability within Hinduism.)

  Independent India’s determination to compensate for millennia of injustice to its social underclasses meant that, from the very first, the “Scheduled Castes and Tribes” (so called because the eligible groups of Dalits and aboriginals were listed in a “schedule” annexed to the Constitution) were granted guaranteed admissions to schools and colleges even where their grades would not have justified it; 22.5 percent of all government jobs, both in officialdom and in the public-sector industries, were reserved for them; and, uniquely, they were assured representation in Parliament, where 85 seats out of 545 are set aside for members of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes to ensure their representation in the legislature. This last is an extraordinary provision in the annals of democracy, because it means that a caste Hindu (or, for that matter, a Muslim or a Christian) from an area that falls into a reserved constituency cannot seek to represent his own neighbors in Parliament, because only Scheduled Caste candidates are eligible to contest the seat.

  The Scheduled Tribes, also known as the Adivasis, or “original inhabitants,” include some four hundred aboriginal communities, mainly inhabiting remote and forested areas of the country. In the 1991 census they amounted to some 66 million people, just under 8 percent of India’s population. The Scheduled Castes were twice that number, and occupied the lowest economic and social strata of Indian society, living in segregated areas in many villages, and suffering discrimination and oppression. The newest beneficiaries of affirmative action, the “Other Backward Classes” (known to everyone, with the Indian penchant for acronyms, as the OBCs), are as numerous as the Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes combined — indeed, depending on who is doing the counting, they may constitute a majority of the Indian population. (No one can be entirely certain, since castes have not been counted by Indian census takers since 1931, i.e., in the last seven censuses). The OBCs are the thrusting lower middle castes of Indian society, whose claim on reservations (quotas) and similar benefits was supported by the Mandal Commission in 1980 and upheld by the Supreme Court in a landmark judgment in 1992. The decision of the V. P. Singh government to implement the Mandal recommendations in 1990 sparked a wave of upper-caste protests and self-immolations that was as intense as it was short-lived. Today the Mandal recommendations are state policy, and the protests are forgotten, except by the grieving relatives of the protesters. And “backward” and Dalit politicians have not just come to power in an unprecedented number of states — with an Untouchable woman, Mayawati, of the Dalit Bahujan Samaj (“Majority People’s”) Party, briefly ruling India’s most populous and tradition-bound state, Uttar Pradesh, in the Gangetic heartland — but they also contr
ol the central government for the first time. The twenty-one-member cabinet of United Front prime minister H. D. Deve Gowda (himself a “backward” of the Vokkaliga or ploughman subcaste, who herded sheep as a child and learned his lessons by candlelight) contains only two members of the upper castes.

  India’s brand of affirmative action guarantees outcomes, not just opportunities, and yet it has aroused far less open hostility within the country (prior to the anti-Mandal agitation) than the far more modest, and far more recent, American equivalent. Indeed, so complete was the country’s acceptance of the principle of affirmative action that the clamor to join the bandwagon of reservations grew, and led to more and more groups wanting reservations of their own. The addition of the “backward classes” as recommended by the Mandal Commission has now taken the total of reserved jobs in the federal government and national governmental institutions to 49.5 percent, and in several states the local reservations are even higher, extending to some 69 percent in Tamil Nadu. Increasing literacy is making its own contribution: if the lower castes are only 35 percent literate, that is still more than triple the figure in the 1961 census, and reservations at schools and colleges continue to raise those figures.

  Despite these constitutional protections, inequalities persist between the upper castes and the former Untouchables. Affirmative action, perhaps inevitably, benefited a minority of Dalits who were in a position to take advantage of it; independent India has witnessed the creation of privileged sections within formerly underprivileged groups, as the sons and daughters of rich and influential Scheduled Caste leaders get ahead on the strength of their caste affiliation. Caste Hindus have increasingly come to resent the offspring of cabinet ministers, for instance, benefiting from reservations and lower entry thresholds into university and government that were designed to compensate for disadvantages these scions of privilege have never personally experienced. Even the Supreme Court has muttered its disquiet about the benefits hogged by the so-called creamy layers at the top of the bottom ranks of society. But since the objective of the affirmative-action program is justice and representation in an almost cosmic sense, rather than equity here and now, such resentment can be, and is, disregarded by the authorities.