Thus the dominant view of caste as congenital, based on the varṇa-hierarchy and notions of ritual purity, and the lesser but leavening view of caste as determined by behaviour, born no doubt of various challenges such as Buddhist and other criticism, not to speak of the everyday realities of political expediency etc., continued side by side through the centuries. Before the advent of modernity, there was an influential vernacular ‘movement’, or more properly, a swelling mood, that attacked the privileges and discriminations of caste ‘from below’, that is, from a popular base among ordinary people. This has been called Sant-Mat, the View of the Sants or poet-saints, who became prominent in a broad arc from east to west mostly in the central and northern regions of the subcontinent from about the late thirteenth century. Recall that earlier in the south, from about the sixth century onwards, there is evidence of devotional Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva practices, such as the traditions of the Tamil Āvārs, and the Śaiva Siddhānta and Nāyamārs, respectively (mentioned in Chapters 4 and 6), in terms of which people of non-twice-born status were accorded the highest respect as true devotees of the deity.
It was thus possible in Hinduism, for one reason or other, to challenge the spiritual privileges of caste hierarchy. The dynamic of this challenge, however, was different, from that of the south, in the northern half of India in the period leading to the rise of Sant-Mat. This was because of increasingly potent Muslim presence in the region. With the rise of the Delhi Sultanate at the beginning of the thirteenth century, Hindu rule and its support of Brahminical learning and social norms gave way to state patronage, under Muslim rulers, that favoured Muslim institutions and religious groups. There was an exodus of Kṣatriyas to the countryside, and the rise of non-Brahminical castes, like wealthy Vaisya communities, in such pilgrimage centres as Benares. ‘Other forms of religious leadership in North India came from the Sants, whose dissent against Brāhmaṇical Hinduism was voiced from among their lower-caste membership of weavers, cobblers, tailors, and goldsmiths’ (Saha 2007:300–1). Saha goes on to say:
By the time Akbar ascended to the Mughal throne [1556], the already busy religious scene of North India became even more complex. ūfīs, Tāntrikas, jogīs, ulamā [Muslim scholars], Brāhmaṇs, Vaiṣṇavas, Śaivas, and various streams of the Sant tradition ranging from the followers of Nānak and Kabīr (fl. fifteenth century) to Dādū (1544–1603) and Malūkdās (1573–1671) all found themselves offering competing worldviews under the watchful eye of an empire that used patronage to ensure that religious communities would be in the service of the state.
(Saha 2007:303)
Sant-Mat was not a homogeneous trend, yet it was characterized by a general tendency to (i) underplay or reject Brahminic notions of caste and precedence, as well as sectarian boundaries and the worship of images; (ii) instruct orally in short, verse compositions (mostly in the north-Indian vernaculars); (iii) call upon the Name of God in non-sectarian terms (though there was a preference for Vaiṣṇava epithets), and to regard this Name as embodying the divine, saving power; and (iv) reckon true religion as a matter of the will and heart, rather than of birth, theology and ritual. We have given an example of Sant devotion to the saving power of the divine Name from the so-called Untouchable poet Ravidās (fifteenth–sixteenth century), in Chapter 3. Indeed, many of the Sants, some of whom were women, came from low castes, and a number were Untouchables (we shall deal with Untouchability, especially in modern times, presently).
The Sants did not take kindly to the idea that ritual purity and caste status determined access to salvation. Sant religion was a religion of the heart, accessible to all. Here is a typical poem from Kabīr, whom we have met earlier, on caste. He asks the Brahmin pandit derisively:
Pandit, look in your heart for knowledge.
Tell me where untouchability came from,
since you believe in it ...
Eighty-four hundred thousand vessels decay into dust,
while the potter keeps slapping clay on the wheel,
and with a touch cuts each one off.
We eat by touching, we wash by touching,
from a touch the world was born.
So who's untouched?
(See Hess 1987:155–6)2
Though Sant-Mat was hardly institutionalized, this does not mean that it did not exert considerable influence in undermining Brahminic views about caste and birth. Today, many can quote verses from one Sant composition or other. Cassettes and CDs of bhajans or devotional songs based on poems attributed to well-known Sants of the past have a large market not only in India but also in Hindu communities around the world. The leading exponents of these bhajans perform to busy globe-trotting schedules, and enjoy star-rating in the media. The lives of many ordinary Hindus have no doubt been touched by the liberating social and religious teachings of the Sants, but when it comes to the crunch, age-old counter-influences of institutionalized caste-practice and ‘Sanskritizing’ tendencies among the lower castes to win social respectability by imitating upper-caste beliefs and practices, come powerfully into play (see, e.g. Lorenzen 1987:281f.). Still, Sant-Mat has always retained considerable socio-religious transformative potential, sometimes with far-reaching consequences, as we shall see in the context of our inquiry into the reforming roles of Gandhi and Ambedkar with regard to caste discrimination.
These counter-challenges to the dictates of traditional caste hierarchy through the centuries combined circumstantially with egalitarian Muslim, Sikh and especially Christian and Western secular ideas under established British presence in India, to set the scene for the genuine possibility of the reform of caste in modern times (viz. from about the beginning of the nineteenth century). A pioneering contribution in this respect was made by Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), whom we have introduced in Chapter 4. Ram Mohan, himself a Brahmin, was opposed not so much to the institution of caste (as varṇa) as to its inhumane practices and chronic divisiveness in the form of jāti. Early in life, he came under the influence of Muslim teaching, since for historical reasons there was substantial Muslim presence, both politically and culturally, in his native Bengal, and this, coupled with ongoing exposure to Christian and secular Western teaching, gave him the intellectual confidence to fight for the social and religious reform of his ancestral faith. In the context of the beginnings of a new transnational outlook, Ram Mohan thought that his compatriots, especially the Hindu India of the great majority, could not take their place among the peoples of the world and acquire the self-esteem needed to counter the incoming, disruptive cultural challenges from abroad, unless they entered into a dialogue with the West. Isolationism would only hasten India's ruin, degraded as Hindu culture had become by the evils of casteism, priestcraft, ritualism, polytheism, idolatry, infanticide, discrimination against women and so on. One can detect from this list that Ram Mohan had accepted many of the criticisms against Hinduism made by non-Hindu critics in the land. For Ram Mohan, dialogue was the only way forward for India, especially Hindu India, to emerge purified and strengthened.
It is of importance to appreciate that Ram Mohan sought to renew Hinduism from within.3 This is what motivated all his attempts at social and religious reform. To achieve his goal, Ram Mohan began the process of reinterpreting, for readerships in both English and Bengali, the pervasive action-concept of dharma. For Ram Mohan, dharma was no longer primarily a concept bound up with dogmatic socio-religious taboos for the individual or circumscribed community. It became the cultural expression of a rationalist ideal, a universal norm based on egalitarian principles of altruism and good-will under the presiding rule of One, True, divine Reality – ‘God’ for the theists, and the Vedāntic ‘Brāhmaṇ, albeit with a non-dualist complexion, for the Hindu. All humans have equal access to the Supreme Reality, and the religious destiny of every human being is the same, though not all may be socially equal. Ram Mohan hardly envisaged a classless society; the social norms of his political masters and the ingrained heritage of varṇa made that an unrealistic ideal. But he envisag
ed the elimination of all inhumane discrimination based on birth and sex, and the new order to which age-old Hindu norms and practices would now have to conform would be based on rational rather than on dogmatic principles. Ram Mohan's views, variously emphasized and interpreted, lived on in an organization he founded in 1828, which came to be called the Brahmo Samāj (‘The Society of Brāhmaṇ’). Unfortunately, the Brahmo Samāj became more and more fragmented as the century wore on, yet in its hey-day it produced a number of outstanding thinkers and activists, and was one of the most potent instruments of social and religious reform for Hinduism during the nineteenth century.
The work of challenging the degradations of the traditional caste-structure was continued, this time with its influence impacting largely in the upper half of the subcontinent, by Swami Dayananda Sarasvati (1824–1883), who has also received prior attention, in another context, in Chapter 4. His views on caste, which continue to have influence, deserve comment. Dayananda made a powerful if somewhat ambivalent plea for reinterpreting caste according to an individual's qualities rather than birth. The plea was powerful because it sought to bypass the convolutions of history. Caste, Dayananda taught, should be determined only in terms of the traditional varṇa categories; the innumerable jātis or birth groups that had mushroomed in the land should be dispensed with as a disabling and cluttering obstacle to self-growth and progress. This teaching was ambivalent, because varṇa-placement was to be determined by the wise (vidvān) – no doubt informed by the teachings and backed by the authority of his movement, the Arya Samāj – after due examination of the individual's ‘qualities, actions, and nature’ (guṇa, karma and svabhāva). The age for this examination should be 16 for females and 25 for males.
Problems about the workability of the scheme abound, and it never really took off. In particular, what should the mutual relationships between ‘qualities, actions, and nature’ be, as criteria for determining one's varṇa? Is ‘nature’ something changeable? By the Swami's referring to it as svabhāva or ‘own being’, this hardly seems to be the case. If it is, have we reverted to some hereditary criterion of caste? Can ‘nature’ be overruled by ‘qualities and actions’? May one be re-examined later in life and so have one's caste status changed on the basis of acquired qualities and their actions? Dayananda's ideas on reforming caste were hardly practicable, and so it has proved. But for those prepared to consider his views, there is incentive enough to question the rationale of the traditional caste order, and to act accordingly. I have encountered a number of Arya Samājists who tend to sit lightly to caste, at least to its dictates on ritual purity and pollution, if not to a felt need to marry within certain caste parameters.
Dayananda's stance on caste broadly reflects his understanding of the concept of dharma. For him as for Ram Mohan, dharma has universalist dimensions, no longer to be swallowed up whole by the ritualistic and other minutiae of traditional Hindu practice. Rather, it signifies a religio-moral way of life, and in some contexts carries the connotations of the term ‘religion’. For Dayananda, dharma stands for right morality, or on occasion for true faith or religion. One's own religious faith is dharma, another's is their mat, viz. point of view (for this usage, see, e.g. the Preface to Chapter 13 of Dayananda's Satyārth Prakāś). Dharma is best lived out, of course, within the boundaries of the Swami's own teachings.
Before we go on to consider the approaches of two of India's greatest protagonists on the challenge to caste-discrimination in modern times – ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi (1869–1948) and Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891–1956) – we need to understand the everyday reality of caste during this period in terms of jāti, for in the context of modern discourse about caste, this is the term usually used rather than varṇa. Note, however, that in the traditional Sanskrit texts there is little if anything said specifically about jāti; jāti is a term used much more often in vernacular, especially modern vernacular, literature. The term ‘jāti’ comes from the verbal root jan, janati/-te in Sanskrit, which means to beget or produce, and refers not only to origin but also to the group or class to which something belongs; in modern times it has been used also to refer to ‘race’ or ‘nation’, e.g. the Hindu jāti.
For our purposes, jāti and its equivalents in the vernaculars (e.g. jāt in Hindi and Bengali) is the social stratum, the birth group, to which someone belongs. One's jāti is generally fixed by birth, and has traditionally been associated with an interrelated, socio-religious hierarchy in which the various strata must live their lives within allocated boundaries of commensality (‘eating together’), endogamy (‘marrying within determinate groups’), ritual purity, diet, occupations, movement and on occasion even dress, and in which ‘superior’ is determined by avoidance of contact in received ways with ‘inferior’ in matters of physical proximity, food and drink, and marriage. This is the traditional understanding of caste as jāti.
One can easily guess from this description that the system of jāti, as it now obtains in India after many centuries, is immensely complex; whilst there are only four varṇas, there are thousands of jātis that have developed over time across the length and breadth of the subcontinent. Indeed, even within a particular varṇa, jātis can be found whose mutual relationships are governed by elaborate rules of commensality and marriage, often dictated by local tradition. Thus one can come across situations in which men from one Brahmin jāti are permitted to marry into another Brahmin jāti, without the reverse being allowed, i.e. without men from the latter jāti being allowed to marry into the first; this maritally asymmetrical relationship indicates the ritual superiority of the first or wife-taking jāti. Note that whatever the origins of jāti may be in terms of a hierarchy of ritual purity and pollution, in this case the question of one caste polluting another hardly arises – both castes belong to the Brahmin varṇa; it is a matter, rather, of observing the traditions of genealogical purity, of authority and precedence in the system. Maintaining caste status is therefore not always a matter of avoiding ritual pollution.
In Bengal, there are reckoned to be three main upper ‘castes’: the Brahmins, the Baidyas and the Kāyasthas. Whilst there is an undisputed Brahmin varṇa in Bengali society with various sub-divisions and even a developed sense of socio-religious hierarchy within these in some respects, it hardly makes sense to ask to which varṇa the other two castes belong. Some claim that the Kṣatriya and Vaiśya varṇas have been defunct in Bengal for generations, others that the Baidyas are ex-Brahmins and the Kāyasthas are Śūdras. Yet Kāyasthas have claimed the right to wear the sacred thread (the mark of the twice-born), and have even gone to court to enforce this claim. These are contentious issues and make a mockery of the ‘fit’ between varṇa and jāti in this context. Yet these three groups regard each other as the three highest castes of Bengali society, with the Brahmins indisputably at the top, and apply traditional codes of practice in their mutual relationships, which often extend to intermarriage, without reference to formal varṇa placements. As one researcher in the field has remarked in more general terms: ‘The disparate assemblage of clans, sects, castes, tribes, religious communities and linguistic groups that can all, according to context and situation, pass as jātis fits at best awkwardly into the clear and symmetrical design of the four varnas’ (Béteille 1996:171). In numerous instances around the land, Brahmin family priests determine to their clients’ satisfaction the varṇas to which the latter can lay claim, so that various rites can be performed for them on request. Focusing on a particular area, one researcher has pointed out in a modern study:
In general, the pāṇḍās [Brahmin family priess] fit the different castes and sub-castes [in Hardwar] into the varṇa scheme and then into an order which they consider determined from antiquity by criteria of purity. In interactional terms, they distinguish Brāhmaṇs from Kṣatriya and Vaiśya, the twice-born from Śūdra, and Śūdra from Untouchables.
(Jameson 1976:25)
There are two lessons that may be learnt so far: (i) that the Brahmin/non-Brahmin d
ivide has its own importance in the Indian context (a point to which we shall return), and (ii) that on occasion it may be easier to affect the consequences of one's varṇa than of one's jāti!
It is clear that the various categories of our discussion, viz. varṇa and jāti (including the status of ‘Untouchable’), were in place from ancient times, and were well entrenched when the Portuguese arrived in south India, several centuries before British rule. In 1575 the Portuguese Jesuit Visitor (i.e. ecclesiastical authority) to the east, Alessandro Valignano, described a major obstacle to the Portuguese mission in India when he observed tendentiously:
The second obstacle, which is the most essential of them all, is a diabolical superstition to which they cling, of that division by birth which they call caste ... in which they are so rooted that no argument can make them change ... because not only may they not intermarry, but they may not even touch one another, nor eat, nor pass together through a street. And these castes are further divided according to their occupations ... If they touch one another or eat together, those of the higher caste are defiled in dealing with those of the lower castes and thus lose their caste.
(quoted in Strathern 2007:91)
Strathern goes on to show how this apparently rigid system could be manipulated for ulterior ends by both Indians and Portuguese. However, manipulation occurred within the parameters of the system, and its internal flexibilities, as touched on in the earlier part of our discussion, did not undermine its basic categories. Recent research indicates that it was during the period of British rule in India that the caste system, with its socio-religious stratification and attendant practices, extending to Untouchability, was developed and consolidated (see, e.g. Fuller 1996:Introduction). British rule did not create caste, as is sometimes claimed by those with little knowledge of the ancient traditions, but it did enable caste to be articulated in a certain way. We cannot expatiate on this here. No doubt the introduction of the decennial Census by the British in India with its unprecedented implications for social and religious classification and its consequences, e.g. community definition in order to respond to the implementation of a money-based economy and professedly egalitarian legal system, and government offers of concessions of various kinds to those adjudged to be disadvantaged in certain ways, played a large part in bringing about the modern articulation of caste. By the first half of the twentieth century, a complex, stratified caste system, in which relationships between the various strata were active both ‘vertically’ and ‘horizontally’, had become entrenched.
Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (The Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices) Page 24