Makers of Modern India

by Ramachandra Guha

  From its beginnings in 1925, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh had set itself in opposition to the Congress. It saw that party as too sympathetic to the Muslims and its leaders as too appreciative of the West. It stayed apart from the campaigns against colonial rule conducted by the Congress. Our next maker of modern India, on the other hand, was for very many years a member of the Indian National Congress. After Independence, however, he left the party and became an uncompromising critic of the policies of the party’s leader and the country’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

  This rebel and heretic was named Rammanohar Lohia. Lohia was born in 1910 in the town of Faizabad, in present-day Uttar Pradesh, into a family of hardware merchants. He was educated in Bombay, where he picked up Marathi; in Calcutta, where he learnt fluent Bengali; and in Banaras, where he may have been most comfortable, since Hindi was his mother tongue. By the time he reached his teens, he was a convinced nationalist—thus in 1928, he took part in demonstrations against the all-white Simon Commission for constitutional reforms.

  Lohia then went to Berlin for higher studies. Watching Gandhi’s Salt March from afar, he wrote a doctoral dissertation, in German, on the economics of salt. His supervisor was the great sociologist Werner Sombart (the author of, among other works, a classic study of why the United States has no indigenous socialist tradition). Lohia left Germany just as the Nazis were coming to power. Had he stayed, he would surely have fallen foul of the new rulers on political, if not racial, grounds.

  Lohia returned to India in 1934, an anti-imperialist and socialist. He was an early recruit into the Congress Socialist Party. In 1936 Lohia became secretary of the Congress’s new department of foreign affairs, where he became very interested in the fate of Indians overseas and in freeing the enclave of Goa from Portuguese rule.

  Lohia was jailed in 1940 for his speeches against British rule. Two years later, he became a hero of the Quit India movement, operating underground for a year and nine months, issuing pamphlets and letters from his secret locations. He was finally arrested in Bombay in May 1944 and taken to Lahore Fort, where he was tortured and kept in solitary confinement. Released in 1946 as part of a general amnesty, he went to Goa to campaign for its freedom. He was arrested, tortured and deported back to British India.

  After India became independent, the socialists in the party left the Congress to form their own organization. In 1952 the Socialist Party merged with the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party (founded by the veteran Gandhian J.B. Kripalani) to form the Praja Socialist Party (PSP). Lohia served briefly as general secretary. In 1955 a radical group led by him left the PSP. The two factions were reunited in 1964 to form the Samyukta (or United) Socialist Party (SSP). In 1965 the party split again—Lohia’s group kept the SSP label, while his critics started a fresh PSP.

  In and out of British jails, Rammanohar Lohia was also arrested several times in independent India—for opposing tax laws, for entering the restricted areas of the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) without a valid permit, for protesting a rise in prices. Once, in 1964, he was even arrested in the United States of America, for defying the laws of racial segregation in Mississippi and entering the all-white section of a hotel.

  After several unsuccessful attempts, Lohia entered the Indian Parliament through a by-election in 1963. Here, he made many provocative speeches against the Congress and against Nehru and his legacy. He believed that the ruling party and its leaders had deliberately distanced themselves from the people of India, economically, linguistically and sartorially. They were a new elite, brown in colour, but white in language, customs and manners.

  On the economic front, Lohia was a critic of both capitalism and communism. He argued, precociously, for a third way, for a new political and economic system based on the decentralization of political power, on the use of small-scale technology and on fulfilling the basic needs of the poor rather than on the creation of wealth per se.

  Lohia was both brilliant and sectarian. His critics within the socialist movement accused him of fostering a personality cult around himself. One can see him, with qualifications, as an Indian Trotsky—scholarly, well read, articulate in many languages and with a deep interest in literature and the arts. Like Trotsky, he attracted the attention and devotion of many gifted writers and artists. Like Trotsky, for much of his life he was marginalized by politicians he believed to be greatly inferior to himself. There was one notable difference, however—while Trotsky was unashamedly elitist, Lohia affected a love of the popular and the demotic.

  Rammanohar Lohia died in 1967, aged fifty-seven.

  Caste and Class

  In 1956 Lohia and B.R. Ambedkar met to discuss the possibility of their parties collaborating for the next year’s general elections. Unfortunately, Ambedkar died soon afterwards. But, as the following excerpt shows, Lohia’s thought had much in common with Ambedkar’s, notably in its identification of caste, rather than class, as the chief organizing principle of Indian society. In this essay of 1958 Lohia brilliantly analysed the continuing hold of the higher castes in independent India.1

  … Castes have endured over thousands of years. They have bred certain traits and aptitudes. Some kind of a selection has taken place that is socially as significant as a natural selection. Certain skills of trade, craft, husbandry or administration or handling of principles have become hereditary. A real break-through is almost always the work of a genius. With such caste-wise determination of skills, one might expect great advantages to flow out of such age-long selections. That would have been so if all skills fetched an equal social status or monetary reward. They obviously do not. Some skills are believed to be unbelievably superior to others and there is an interminable series of steps in the ladder. Castes of inferior skills are downgraded. They congeal into an almost lifeless mass. They cease to be the reservoir from which the nation may refresh and renew itself. Numerically small castes of the most superior skills are the habitual providers of the nation’s leadership. In order to maintain their most unnatural dominance, they become a seething mass of chicanery but surfacially most smooth and cultured. The masses are lifeless, the elite are chicane. Caste has done that …

  The system of castes is a terrifying force of stability and against change, a force that stabilises all current meanness, dishonour and lies. An unholy fear prevails, lest if some meanness or lie were to tumble, the whole structure might topple. Post-freedom India is but a strict continuance of British India in most essential ways. The Indian people continue to be disinherited. They are foreigners in their own land. Their languages are suppressed and their bread is snatched away from them. All this is done for the alleged sake of certain high principles. And these principles tie up with the system of caste, the great chasm between the few high castes and the four hundred million of the lower castes. These high castes must maintain their rule, both political and economic and, of course, religious. They cannot do it alone through the gun. They must instil a sense of inferiority into those whom they seek to govern and exploit. This they can best do by turning themselves into a select caste with speech, dress, manners and living of which the lower castes are incapable. The attitude of India’s political parties is governed by this supreme consideration of having to instil a complex of inferiority among the mass of the people. Peoples’ languages are undeveloped, their housing and general styles of living incapacitate them from good or great action and their mind is not worth considering. So must the high castes weave the net of illusion. Current political opinions in India, because they reflect the false and unnatural interests of the high castes, are not worthy of consideration.

  The political behaviour of the lower castes is amazing. Why they should become a willing part of this conspiracy is beyond understanding. One reason is clear enough. Caste gives them insurance, indeed, on less than an animal level, more than it does to the high-castes. They would feel helpless without it. Oft times, one gets the impression about these lower castes as though their strenuous labour of the day were but a preparation
for the caste feasts and rituals that are to follow. They are the real thing and all else is but a shadow. Anything that interferes with them must appear to them as highly undesirable. They have in fact legends and myths that justify their lowly situation and transform it into a symbol of sacrifice and lustre. The Kahars, variously known as Mallahs, Kaivarts, Naviks, who probably number more than a crore, tell stories about their mythical ancestors, who were simple, ungreedy, brave and generous and who lost to other ancestors of Kshatriyas and other high castes because of their greater greed, wiliness and deceit. Taken so, their current life of misery must appear to the lower castes as an unending succession of sacrificial acts for the sake of high principles …

  The political behaviour of the lower castes would appear to be a little less inexplicable on the assumption that a long tradition of ideological subjection has made them stagnate. This assumption is wholly founded. Centuries have instilled into them a meek acceptance of the existing, aversion to change, sticking with the caste in times of adversity as of good luck, and the search for high life through worship, rituals and general politeness. This can change. In fact, this must change. The revolt against caste is the resurrection of India or, shall we say, the bringing into being of a unique and a hitherto unrealised occasion, when India shall be truly and fully alive. Is such a revolt possible? Scholars may … deny it. Men of action will continue to affirm it. Some hope of success arises at the present time. The attack on caste is not single-barrelled. It does not climax into a shrill cry devoid of action. It is in fact as political as it is social. From the political attack on caste, in the sense of drawing the nation’s leadership from all the castes in the country, may come that revolution which gives to all Indian society the solidarity and reinsurance now given to smaller groups by caste.

  Elsewhere may be found extracts from the Constitution and the annual report of the Calcutta Club.2 This club is the top meeting ground of the Calcutta bourgeoisie, which is the largest segment of the Indian bourgeoisie. Its main activity centres around wine bibbing, while its patron is the President of the Republic. India’s Republic is pledged to the policy of prohibition with very considerable police repression as a consequence in certain areas. That the President of an alcohol-repressing republic should be the patron of an alcohol-drinking club, is a measure of the fraud and perfidy which India’s higher castes are practising upon the country and themselves. The President, but more so the government which advises him, are guilty of treason against the republic in a yet more major way. Europeans in India are one in three thousand and more of the population. Of Calcutta’s population, they are surely no more than one in four hundred. They enjoy far greater comfort and security than any section of India’s population. And yet they are accorded equal representation on the committee of this club. This equality of representation is guaranteed by the club’s statutes. The club continues to think that England’s monarch still rules India through her viceroy, although the President of the Republic is its patron. Some may be inclined to pass this over as a relic of the past which has escaped notice. These acts are in reality the result of deliberate design. India’s bourgeoisie is ever imperilled. A vast sea of miserable humanity surges around it. It clutches at all kinds of symbols old and new and all kinds of authority both substantial and empty in order to keep itself afloat. India’s higher castes and their government have therefore to practise continually treason against their Republic …

  Foreign rule set the Hindu against the Muslim, but that does not rub out the discord which native religions had created in the country. The policy of divide and rule, which governments pursue, must fasten on already existing elements of division. British rule in India had made use of the element of caste in the same manner that it made use of the element of religion. As the divisive force of caste was not nearly as strong as that of religion, the effort met limited success. The Maratha Party in Western India and also that of the Scheduled Castes, the Justice Party in the South and the mission-led block of Adivasis in Eastern India were fruits of this effort. To them must also be added the block of native princes and big landlords in Eastern India, which followed the lead of foreign rule and, during its last days, appeared discredited beyond recovery.

  At the time the British made this effort, they were justifiably condemned. Foreign rule habitually accentuates and widens differences; it does not compose them. It must be condemned. But such condemnation does not remove the ground on which differences originate and thrive. British rule has ended but the caste parties that it gave birth to have continued into free India and are enjoying fresh access of strength. The Workers and Peasants Party and the Republican Party of Western India, the Dravida Munetra Kazhagam of South India and the Jharkhand Party of Eastern India alongside of the Ganatantra and Janata parties are not only regional parties but also caste parties. In fact, they represent and embody regional castes. These regional castes are decisively numerous in their area. The Adivasis of Chhota Nagpur are the life-blood of the Jharkhand, the Mahars of the Republicans, the Marathas of the Workers and Peasants, the Mudaliars but also other non-Brahmins of the Dravida Munetra, and the Kshatriyas—though not nearly as much—of the Ganatantra and the Janata3 …

  The castes that want to form the Maratha, Justice or Scheduled Caste parties suffered ill-treatment from society. The British rulers made use of this sense of grievance and injury, a very bad use indeed, but they did not and could not have created it. That is why the problem has persisted. In some cases, the caste that has suffered the injury and that which has caused it have changed places. But that does not solve the problem of injury. Furthermore, numberless castes have yet to make themselves vocal and effective and are today content to play a passive or a subsidiary role to the contending giants. This is the chief source of injury and injustice.

  The political inter-play of castes has unfolded itself fascinatingly in Maharashtra and the drama is not yet over. Until 1930 and a little after, the Maharashtra scene was bafflingly simple, and its backdrop was Brahmin versus the rest … The Maratha was the spearhead of the revolt against the Brahmin in Maharashtra although other downgraded castes assisted him in varying degrees. The revolt was pro-British in the beginning, because the Brahmins were on the whole anti-British, but the nationalist movement proved strong enough to absorb it. The Maratha entered the party of nationalism, the Congress Party, and almost took it over. The phenomenon of caste exclusion was witnessed again, with the roles changed. On the one hand, the Brahmin began gradually to lose his monopoly of political power and, on the other, the Maratha did not share his new found authority with the other downgraded castes … They [the Marathas] proved to be as greedy for power and monopolistic as any. They used the revolt of the downgraded castes for the assertion of their own supremacy and not for the destruction of castes as such and the injustice that goes with them. Ever and ever again, the revolt of the downgraded castes has been misused to upgrade one or another caste rather than to destroy the entire edifice of caste …

  The exclusion of the high caste from political power does not necessarily imply their exclusion from economic and other types of power. In the first place, such political exclusion has nowhere been total, not even in the South. The Brahmins have in recent years, as the sole representatives of the high caste, been increasingly eliminated from legislative and administrative power in Tamilnad. Even so, they still occupy a fantastically privileged position. Although only four per cent of the population, their share in the gazetted services of the administration must be around forty per cent. At one time, it was nearly seventy per cent. A second, more remarkable, development is the acquisition of economic power by the Tamil Brahmin. He has increasingly been buying up Mount Road from the retiring British. It would therefore be not correct to describe the high castes in terms of any general decline or to bemoan their fate in any part of the country …

  Three distinct types of opposition to caste may be noted, one wordy, the second low-level and mixed, and the third real. The wordy opposition is the l
oudest in respect of such generalized condemnation of caste as leaves the existing structure almost intact. It condemns the caste system as wholly evil, but would equally condemn those who resort to active steps to destroy the system. It sanctifies the principles of rising standards of living and of merit and equality of opportunity as solvents of caste. Raise everybody economically; give everybody an equal opportunity! So say these false advocates of destruction of caste, as though rising standards and opportunities would be restricted to the low caste. When everybody has an equal opportunity, castes with the five-thousand-year-old traditions of liberal education would be on top. Only the exceptionally gifted from the lower castes would be able to break through this tradition. This is what India’s political parties, Congress, Communist and Praja Socialists, under Mr. Nehru’s leadership have in mind. They would want men and women of exceptional ability from the lower castes to join their ranks. But they would want the structure as a whole to be kept intact. They are themselves drawn overwhelmingly from the higher castes. They have no hesitation in denouncing their caste or the distinction of high and low castes, so long as their social group based on traditions, ability and manners is left unaffected. If anybody qualifies in ability and manners from among the lower castes, he is welcome. But how many would qualify! Very few. It would be the battle of five thousand years of oppressive training and tradition against an individual talent. Only the genius or the exceptionally able would win in this battle …

  A vested-interest socialism talks of political and economic revolution alone, meaning the award of increased wages or bonus on the lowest level and the destruction of private property in factories and the like on the highest level. Even in the Europe of changing classes, such a revolution would keep intact the distinction between manual workers and those with the brain. In [an] India of fixed castes, this distinction would spell ruin to the health of society. Workers with the brain are a fixed caste in Indian society; together with the soldier caste, they are the high-caste. Even after the completed economic and political revolution they would continue to supply the managers of the state and of industry. The mass of the people would be kept in a state of perpetual physical and mental lowliness, at least comparatively. But the position of the high-caste would then be justified on grounds of ability and in economic terms as it is now on ground of birth or talent. That is why the intelligentsia of India which is overwhelmingly high-caste, abhors all talk of a mental and social revolution, of a radical change in respect of language or caste or the bases of thought. It talks generally and in principle against caste. In fact, it can be most vociferous in its theoretical condemnation of caste, so long as it can be allowed to be equally vociferous in raising the banner of merit and equal opportunity. What it loses in respect of caste by birth, it gains in respect of caste by merit. Its merit concerning speech, grammar, manners, capacity to adjust, routine efficiency is undisputed. Five thousand years have gone into the building of this undisputed merit. A true doctrine of equal opportunity would have to undo the work of five thousand years by giving preferential treatment to the lower castes over a period of at least a few decades …