Stop seeing caste from western lens. Move away from ‘Sanskritisation’ to ‘Vaishyavisation’

In Caste as Social Capital: The Complex Place of Caste in Indian Society, Professor R. Vaidyanathan’s intellectual debate acquires a new sharp edge.

Jyotirao Phule (in picture) and Ramaswami Naicker attacked caste as a racist institution. Their present popularity as analysts of caste remains high despite their vociferous support of the British rule | Commons

If there is one thing that defines our country and at the same time differentiates us from others, it is the institution of caste. We call it varna, jati and other words. Many argue that it is enshrined in the metaphors embedded in the vedas; our epics certainly have plenty of references to them; the unfortunate Manu who is hardly ever read, we are told, was obsessed with Jati; the Portuguese introduced their word “casta” with its own categories of bloodlines and class distinctions; the British tried to methodically record “native” categories as they saw them and ended up creating a completely messed up social and political scene. The result is that today, in the parlance of our elites, expressions like caste, casteist, and casteism are derogatory and deemed to have a flavor of wicked primitivism associated with them.

Once again, the elites have it wrong. Literally millions of Indian voters disagree with the elites.

They want a caste census and have forced the so-called anti-primitive Leftists to cave into this demand. More and more groups demand to be given the honorific “backward”, so that this enables them to get access to reservation and quota. Our moderately competent psephologists keep telling anyone who cares to listen, that caste vote banks are central to our political life. So, we have the strange phenomenon: caste is dead; long live caste.

There is a parallel with the global Leftist encouragement of victimhood and grievance-mongering on the part of many groups who are then supposed to oppose some ill-defined set of hegemonic oppressors. In the west, white Christian males oppress all other groups who acquire a distinct minority status. In India, upper caste Hindu (Brahmin, Rajput, Bania) Groups oppress all others who are minorities, even when they don’t think of themselves that way. The parallels across continents are fascinating. Till 1960, Blacks in the US supposedly wanted to become “like whites”; during British rule, caste associations in India lobbied to get tagged as upper/forward. Today, the advantages of claiming victimhood through one’s colour in the US or through one’s “backwardness” in India are just too tempting.

The intellectual discourse in modern times on the subject of caste has a distinguished tradition. The Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj rejected caste. Jyotirao Phule and Ramaswami Naicker attacked caste as a racist institution. Their present popularity as analysts of caste remains high despite their vociferous support of the British rule, which might have made them unpopular if their robust views have not stood the test of time. Narayana Guru and Ambedkar took a different approach. While the former managed to make the case for transcending caste within the bhakti and agama traditions, the latter argued that caste could be done away by adopting Buddha traditions within the Indic paradigm. The enigmatic Mahatma was as always difficult to fit into any category. He relentlessly attacked untouchability but made anodyne statements about liking the varna system.

It is interesting to note the strong parallel between Gandhi and the Sanskrit scholar Bhandarkar on the issue of untouchability. Ram Manohar Lohia was perceptive in his recognition that caste could be used for political mobilisation. My friend, the late father John Correia-Afonso, the Jesuit historian, was once talking to me about the prevalence of caste among the Christians of Goa. He perceptively said: “Indians drink in caste with their mother’s milk”. Which brings us to our agnostic Fabian socialist Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He was quite comfortable with his countrymen calling him Panditji and foreigners referring to him as Pandit Nehru. After all, it is generally admitted that even among status-conscious Brahmins, the Pandits from Kashmir and the Namboodris from Kerala think of themselves as a tad higher. As a practising democratic politician, Nehru might have figured out that his title was helping and not harming his stature.

The academic exploration of caste started in the late 1700s with the French missionary Abbe Dubois, who spectacularly failed to convert Hindus and lost several members of his flock to Islam due to Tipu’s not-so-gentle persuasion. Dubois’ unique contribution is something that we still live with. He did not see caste as a social phenomenon with multiple dimensions. He saw it as a wicked Brahminical conspiracy. Today’s academic world is comfortable with this conspiracy theory and other variants — Brahminism (a completely vacuous and ill-defined expression), Brahminical hegemony, Brahminical patriarchy (as if this is unique, there being no Shinto, Han, or Jewish patriarchies), Brahminical orthodoxy and so on.

In the twentieth century, another Frenchman, Louis Dumont coined the expression “homo hierarchicus”. The not-so-subtle message has been that Indian society is inherently and perhaps even primordially committed to social hierarchies and is therefore distinct from the egalitarian spirit of the European enlightenment, so loved by liberals.

Indian academic interest in caste started with Professor G.S. Ghurye at the Bombay University. He has been pretty much forgotten by contemporary sociologists because he is seen as having a benign view of caste. His student M.N. Srinivas coined the now famous expression “Sanskritization”. Despite the subsequent Nurul Hassanian Marxist takeover of sociology in India and the post-modernist takeover of “South Asian” Studies in western universities, it has been difficult to completely displace Srinivas.

With the recent publication of Caste as Social Capital: The Complex Place of Caste in Indian Society by Professor R. Vaidyanathan by Penguin Random House, the intellectual debate on caste acquires a new sharp edge. If M.N. Srinivas had coined “Sanskritization”, here is Vaidyanathan coining “Vaishyavaization”. I venture that this expression is going to gain importance in years to come.

Vaidyanathan is a retired Professor of Finance from IIM-Bangalore and an impressive statistics guru with a master’s from the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta. Given this background, Vaidyanathan has no need to kowtow to Marxist sociologists or to suck up to editors of comical Post-modern journals. He is free to discuss various reports on caste in India with the Arjuna eye of a statistician. He is able and willing to wade into the crucial area of capital market access and its resulting consequences. He can look at caste without the emotional baggage that pre-determined political positions forced on us. He is an economist with a scalpel and addresses political economy matters that other academics dare not even look at.

Vaidyanathan makes several points even as he meanders over large distances. Given below are some of them that reverberated with this writer:

1. In British India, castes tended to split into sub-castes. In independent India, sub-castes tend to come together to become a bigger caste as numbers matter in democratic politics.
2. “Backwardness” has become a political matter, not a social or economic one. The sacrosanct nature of census numbers has pretty much been forgotten. There might be fewer backward caste persons than even their proportion in the population. But they, and especially the “creamy layer” among them, have successfully created an environment where they can corner the bulk of the reservation goodies.
3. The entire reservation battle is being gamed.
4. Indians are being encouraged to fight over dwindling jobs in the state sector and over educational opportunities in courses which are increasingly less relevant for acquiring useful skills.
5. The case for establishing reservation in the private sector is weak. In any event, even if this gains political popularity, on the ground its illusory benefits are bound to be gamed away.
6. Instead of wasting time, attention and resources on “jobs”, the country might be better off focusing on grassroots entrepreneurship as the appropriate place to occupy rather than employ citizens. (Incidentally, state sector jobs are cherished both for their job security and for the opportunities they provide for added income through bribes).
7. The so-called “unorganised” sector consisting of proprietorships and partnerships is the dynamic one in the country and is a significant source of optimism. Backward caste and Dalit citizens are active participants in this sector, on occasion in disproportionate numbers. Instead of “Sanskritizing” the so-called lower castes may actually be “Vaishyavizing” themselves. Incidentally, even upper castes are busy Vaishyavizing leading to an unintended convergence. Brahmin and Rajput entrepreneurs are busy entering the space supposedly prescribed for Vaishyas. The government of the day may wish to focus on its “Kshatriya” responsibilities of defending the country and maintaining law and order. The citizens may on their own, all become Vaishyas.
8. Caste is no longer about occupational segregation or hierarchies. It is about social groupings. While we keep spending time on looking at the political power of these groups or their vociferous demands for reservations, we are not appreciating the glue of networking, trust, lower transaction costs and superior information that caste groups can and do provide. When we tilt our lenses in this direction, caste ceases to be in the automatic “bad” category into which we have banished it. Caste becomes a positive institution which provides social cohesion, economic lubrication and above all what he refers to as Social Capital, which provides positive energy and reduces dysfunctionality in the country.
9. The understudied phenomenon of vigorous geographic clusters of economic activity have within them caste contours, which breathe life into these clusters. Caste as social capital involves not only “bonding” within caste groups, but also “bridging” between groups leading to a national community which would have had the approval of Burke and De Tocqueville. The example of the leather cluster in Dindigul in Tamil Nadu demonstrates bonding within Muslim, Hindu and Jain castes and bridging across them.
10. As a country, we might be more prosperous if we redirect caste consolidation energies away from college admissions and state sector jobs toward entrepreneurship.
11. Because caste-based entrepreneurship clusters largely inhabit the unorganised proprietorship and partnership world, they face difficulties in the paperwork and delay-ridden world of formal institutional finance. But they use the “trust” factor within caste networks to get over this handicap.
12. Perhaps caste should be celebrated as a useful social lubricant and not denigrated as a backward phenomenon.

At one stroke, Vaidyanathan moves caste away from the moaning, groaning, complaining and grievance-mongering paradigm into one which has a dynamic and a positive role to play in the nation’s economy. Truly, it might be appropriate to say: Long live caste or at least long live some aspects of caste.

Vaidyanathan includes a lot of statistics and tables even as he points out that the data we have in our country tends to be all over the place. But his approach gains color, life, and immediacy best when we get to the anecdotal tidbits about our own country which our academics and media tend to ignore:

1. Did you know that the bulk of the electrical appliance stores in Bangalore are run by Mewaris (Yes, Mewaris, not Marwaris) and that the “helpers and assistants” they employ and who tend to be from Mewar, frequently go on to set up their own businesses? Clearly, the Mewari network out here appears to be superior to business schools in training entrepreneurs.
2. The Dravidian political parties talk of being against caste and yet, two of the most successful and fascinating caste clusters are the Gounders of Tiruppur, who are today a global force in the manufacture and supply of knitted garments and the Nadars of Sivakasi, who dominate the national market for match boxes. Many thriving centers of economic activity in India — Surat for diamonds, Namakkal for truck-building and borewell services, Rajkot for engineering, Jamnagar for brassware and Agra for footwear have caste networks as their foundation. Incidentally, all these centers have been founded by persons without much formal education and have grown without the active presence of MBAs. Perhaps they have grown precisely because of the paucity of MBAs. Incidentally, these entrepreneurs almost always belong to castes which were in earlier times associated mainly with farming. The vertical social mobility that prevails is astonishing. In the truck business it is not unusual for drivers and cleaners to become business owners; it is also quite common for diamond polishers to become big traders.
3. Did you know that the kite-making business in Gujarat, which had a top-line of 35 crores rupees in 2001-02 is now up there at 800 crore rupees? The state government’s active promotion of the Uttarayan festival has been a critical factor in its growth. Did you know that Muslims are involved as entrepreneurs and workers and 70 percent of these workers are Muslim women?
4. Did you know that Vaishyavization has picked up strongly among Dalits? The Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry has among its members many successful men and women. Vaidyanathan makes the case for individual agency within Caste groups. Some individual Dalits have benefited from reservations; some have benefited from entrepreneurship; some have benefited from both; it is important to transcend the either/or paradigm.
5. Did you know that most of the plumbers in our metro cities belong to OBC castes from Kendrapara District in Odisha? And plumbers operate not just as workers, but as entrepreneurs in their own right! The far-sighted government of Odisha (Surprise, surprise! Some state governments are on the ball) has started a State Institute of Plumbing Technology in Kendrapara.
6. Did you now that the microscopic Chinese minority (another Caste, I guess) pioneered the Beauty Parlor business in the country and today this business and the related spa business is dominated by Northeasterners, especially Khasis from Meghalaya?

M.N. Srinivas had enunciated the idea of “dominant castes” in specific districts and regions and their impact in the realm of politics in the post-1952 world of adult franchise. Vaidyanathan has looked at the caste-based political parties in different states in the country. He has explored the issue of the scarcity of land, especially commercial and industrial land, rather than financial capital being the principal source of rentier income collected by these parties. He has theorised that given the minimal accounting associated with party funds, even caste allegiances may be insufficient to ensure that the “trust” factor prevails. Hence the need for control by families. Even here, sibling rivalry does erode trust and disputes over the control over finances creates surface political differences. While Vaidyanathan does raise interesting questions, the information tends to be scattered and episodic. A more robust discussion of the politics of caste-based parties, along the lines he has done with business clusters and entrepreneurship, still needs to be done.

Readers of this essay will be intrigued to discover that there is an emerging small but possibly significant movement where some caste groups are demanding that they not be referred to as backward and that they not be given reservations. Their plea is that they wish to avoid being stigmatised and that they are confident in their abilities to make it on their own merits without any handouts. It is interesting that one of the early examples of this phenomenon has emerged in the state of Tamil Nadu, traditionally known as the most vociferous bastion of caste-based reservation. The caste group known in recent times as Pallars, who have been accorded Scheduled Caste status and are today categorised as Dalits have taken up a public position that their name and status have been wrongly listed by British census officers and this mistake has continued to this day. Their correct traditional name is Devendra Kula Vellalar and they want their SC status eliminated and they want to compete with no reservations. One swallow does not make a summer. But this could very well herald a reversing trend in our country’s social and political history.

As we move from the erstwhile world of Sanskritization to the contemporary world of Vaishyavization, my key takeaway is that it is high time we stopped looking at our deathless institution of jati (let us stop even calling it caste and let us remember that whether we like it or not, it is part of our mother’s milk) through the condescending lenses of western scholars who are conceited about their so-called liberal enlightenment values. Instead, we should have our own intellectuals explore the contours of what is at the end of the day a complex, society. A society that doubtless has warts, but one which is also possessed of strengths that are our own.

Jaithirth Rao is a retired businessperson who lives in Mumbai. Views are personal.

(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)