Having commented in the previous article on the role of colonial race science to crystallize the Colonial Conception of Caste (CCC) in pre-independence India, it is perhaps the right time to examine if the theories proposed by scholars in the post-colonial era stand the test of empirical evidence from the medieval and pre-medieval epochs. An area of study that begs for greater attention is the role of colonialism in shaping the identities of people in modern India.

Bernard Cohen notes ^[1]:

“In the conceptual scheme which the British created to understand and to act in India, they constantly followed the same logic; they reduced vastly complex codes and their associated meanings to a few metonyms… India was redefined by the British to be a place of rules and orders; once the British had defined to their own satisfaction what they construed as Indian rules and customs, then the Indians had to conform to these constructions.”

It is fairly well understood that what is often regarded as traditionally Hindu was nothing more than the promise of colonial modernity, which stood for everything that was desirable and progressive. Cultural expressions including language, attire, aesthetics and sexuality underwent a sea change to make the contrast between the ruling and the ruled less jarring. For example, article 377 of the Indian Penal Code was modelled on the Buggery Act of 1533 and was brought into effect in India in 1860, after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. This was clearly out of step with how homosexuality had been traditionally dealt with in the Indian society. Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code (practically used as an anti-blasphemy law) is another case of imposition of British mores on the natives by enforcing alien laws under the pretext of emancipating the backward peoples of the colonized land.

Class Vs Caste

Class, as we all know, refers to the stratification of people in a society according to their wealth and social status. Etymologically derived from the Latin classis, it originally referred to the census takers’ categorization of citizens by wealth so as to determine their obligation to serve in the military. In common parlance, a class is synonymous with the social status of its members and accordingly, the higher one’s class, the wealthier and more influential one tends to be. In any society, stratification seems to be inevitable and therefore, separate classes are spontaneously created. Generally speaking, members of the same class tend to have a greater and a more intimate interaction among them for no other reason than the fact that they share a common vision of the world and are driven by the same set of cultural stimuli.

Caste has a lot in common with Class in terms of how a society tends to stratify into distinct layers of social status, influence and affluence. However, we are informed that a caste does not allow for an individual to move from one layer to another as it is determined not by the economic or political privileges, which are only by-products of the process, but by the ritualistic assignment of authority enforced via legal or religious sanctions. According to this view, other things that distinguish the caste system from the class system are those that make the latter a lesser evil as far as its effects on an individual are concerned – more flexibility, social mobility, equality and so on. Finally, the institution of caste is unique to the Hindu religion, it is asserted.

By the time that the British landed in India, Hindu society had changed profoundly in the preceding few centuries, as any society would over such a long time period. Much of the rigidity that we associate with it today seems to have already set in, not only as a response to the subjugation under Islamic rulers but also due to other intrinsic socio-cultural and economic changes that swept across the land even before they arrived. As the British study of their colonial subjects gained ground in the latter half of the 19^thcentury, they used the intellectual and analytical tools in vogue at that time, one of the foremost among which was Marxism. Therefore, class became the lens through which the jati-varna matrix began to be viewed and it wasn’t a bad choice at all, given their overlapping conceptual foundations. However, this project ran into trouble soon enough for two straightforward reasons:

1. The snapshot of 18^th/19^th century India was carelessly regarded as the social reality prevalent across the ages.

2. There were fatal flaws in Marxism itself that were yet undiscovered.

Before we look at the evidence available for helping us visualize the society in ancient or pre-medieval India, let us make a slight digression into the cognitive biases inherent in the Marxian analysis of caste.

Problems with the Marxian view

In the previous section, we gave a brief commonsensical account of class. Marxist thinkers have furthered a more politically consequential theory of class as per which, the commonality of shared culture gives the members of the same class a well defined ‘Class Consciousness’. With the exception of some important thinkers like Weber, there is a broad consensus among Marxists that there is a tangible attribute called privilege that defines the relationship between members of a higher and a lower class, and privilege is derived from the ownership of the means of production. But Marxism is not simply a theoretical explanation of how society is organized but more importantly, how it ought to be organized. The Marxist ideal is that of a classless society.

[Karl Marx, 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883]

It is interesting that the method prescribed for achieving the ideal state of classlessness is not the blurring of class boundaries by encouraging a common culture that surmounts these boundaries but rather a counterintuitive accentuation of the differences between classes. This, it is hoped, promotes class conflict and leads to the much desired revolution that overthrows the bourgeoisie (ruling class) and empowers the proletariat (labour class). Although history repeatedly testifies to the success of the endeavour to promote conflict, it is not so forthcoming with evidence with regard to the achievement of the goal of the revolution, viz. a classless society. Nevertheless, the effort must go on ceaselessly, for even defeats serve the larger purpose of rendering the process of social change more economical and more efficient.

Marxists, it must be remembered, are self avowed revolutionaries, and not interested in merely describing social phenomena. As Nirmal Kumar Bose writes ^[2]:

“For [Marx], the primary duty of a philosopher is not merely to understand, but to change. Marx thus used the concept of class as an operational instrument rather than as a descriptive term which would cover a wide range of camouflaged and un-camouflaged class antagonisms.”

Rather unintentionally, we have arrived at the source of the classic dissonance between the pursuit of truth for its own sake and the active promotion of a certain vision of social justice. It is safe to say that their ideological commitment to promoting class conflict puts all Marxist scholars in a different kind of conflict – a conflict of interest with the one sacred goal of scholarship: uncovering the truth.

Nature of the state

It is a widespread but erroneous notion that modern democracy is an entirely western innovation and that its seeds were sown solely by the Greeks. The pre-Christian cultural exchange between India and Greece was quite voluminous and it is implausible that the ideas of a republican form of government, regardless of where they first appeared, remained somehow confined to Greece. Indeed, as data from the accounts of various travellers at the cusp of the new millennium indicates, large parts of India were organized as largely sovereign proto-republics. Taking into account the Indian sources like Kautilya’s Arthashastra, Panini’s writings, Buddhist canons and Jain literature, it becomes clear that the land was politically divided into a complex mosaic of autonomous republics and monarchical territories.

Steve Muhlberger concludes his illuminating paper ^[3] with:

“It is especially remarkable that, during the near-millennium between 500 B.C. and 400 A.D., we find republics almost anywhere in India that our sources allow us to examine society in any detail. Unless those sources, not least our Greek sources, are extremely deceptive, the republics of India were very likely more extensive and populous than the poleis of the Greeks… The existence of Indian republicanism is a discovery of the twentieth century. The implications of this phenomenon have yet to be fully digested.”

As Muhlberger says, the implications of this phenomenon on many other assumptions are still mostly unknown. We will try to explore if it adds anything to our understanding of caste.

Power sharing in Indian republics

According to the narrative of Kautilya’s Arthashastra, there were two kinds of janapadas (republics): military and economic. In the former, those who commanded the most warriors were deemed to be the most worthy of power, while in the latter it was the communities that contributed the most to economic activity that earned a role in political decision making. The political power exercised by a community was also not a stagnant fact of life and depended to a large extent on the importance of a particular trade or skill to the overall economy as well as the changing nature of technology. For instance, in the post-Mauryan period, the change in preference for building material from wood to stone saw a decline in power of carpenters and a rise in the status of stone masons. ^[4]

In popular imagination, all of India was ruled by mighty kings who held absolute power over people. This raises the question as to why the nature of pre-Islam Indian society was so fundamentally different, and in many respects, morally superior to the rest of the world. Slavery, for example, was non-existent in stark contrast with the rest of the world. Possibly, the explanation lies in the strength of the republics, which forced a degree of accountability on rulers and curtailed their powers. In fact, this was often seen as a weakness by the thinkers of the day much in the same vein as people lament the cacophonous sluggishness of Indian democracy compared to the decisive urgency displayed by our undemocratic but surely more efficient neighbour to the North.

Muhlberger explains:

“The theme that has most attracted the attention of scholars is the constant danger to republicanism, and its ultimate failure. Much of what we know about the sovereign ganas of India derives from stories of attacks upon them by various conquerors. Yet it is remarkable that for several centuries, the conspicuous successes of monarchs, even the greatest, had only a temporary effect on the sovereign republics and very little effect indeed on the corporate organization of guilds, religious bodies, and villages. The reason is, of course, that Indian kings have seldom been as mighty as they wished to be, or wished to be presented. Conquerors were not in a position to restructure society, to create states as we visualize them today. Rather they were usually content to gain the submission of their neighbors, whether they were other kings or republics. These defeated rivals were often left in control of their own affairs, merely required to pay tribute and provide troops for the conquerors next war. The great emperors of ancient India, including Chandragupta Maurya and Asoka, ran rather precarious realms. Once the center weakened, these unraveled very quickly, and society returned to its preceding complexity. Rival dynasties revived, as did defeated republics.”

For the sake of clarity, it must be pointed out that the decision makers in the republics were not chosen from one or two castes by a decree issued by temple priests. Instead, the assembly comprised of representatives of all the major guilds and factions that significantly contributed to the power and wealth of the state. Therefore, a wealthy Shudra artisan could have had as much of a say in the running of the state as a Kshatriya general. In fact, ritual sanction of their authority was often a post-hoc act of rationalization to back their practical authority with theoretical legitimacy. Vijaya Ramaswamy, in her detailed study of epigraphic evidence from the temple towns of medieval south India, remarks that a community of craftsmen could be classified as anuloma (born of an upper caste father and shudra mother) or pratiloma (born of a shudra father and upper caste mother), depending on the nature of the job, thus providing ritual sanction to the pre-existing socio-economic differentiation. ^[5]

Caste as a function of Class

In view of all the above, it becomes apparent that caste is not, as is often regarded, a closed class system that arrests social mobility through religious sanctions. Sociologists, like MN Srinivas, place their theory in the Marxist paradigm, as they explain the lack of class conflict between the castes as a product of the Brahmanical ‘myth’ of their own holiness and a widespread belief in the law of Karma. Religious indoctrination and usurping of authority by the upper classes is what Srinivas believes to have been the key to retaining the status quo.

However, as seen above in the case of Vishwakarma craftsmen, there does not seem to have been a systematic attempt to keep the lower classes poor and defenceless, insofar as there is no conspiracy to keep a daily wage earner poor in today’s times. Just as poverty today is determined by the value that the society attaches to one’s skills, which are in great measure dependent on how much wealth one inherits, a class of people in earlier times could gain or lose privilege according to the broader realities – socio-economic and technological – of the times. It is also remarkable that Brahmins, in spite of being the most powerful caste, were not traditionally inclined to amassing wealth as frugality and austerity were their guiding principles, at least in theory and which is quite strikingly depicted by playwrights of different eras, whether in the persona of Charudutta in Mṛcchakaṭika or Sudama in Mahabharata.

The unique socio-political make-up of Indian society called for unique institutions and mechanisms to preserve and protect these arrangements. The guru-shishya parampara (teacher to disciple transfer of knowledge) was one such mechanism in which knowledge, ranging from esoteric rituals to high philosophy to artistic craftsmanship to mundane skills, was transferred in a decentralized manner from one generation to another. The gurus, depending on their expertise, belonged to any of the four varnas and the more prominent among them received state or temple patronage. ^[6]Devadasis attained the dazzling heights of artistic expression only because they were encouraged to pursue excellence by freeing them of the routine social obligations that common citizens had to fulfil. So, when the institution fell on bad days and got associated with prostitution, the primary reason for the same was the fall of the temples from their status of being cultural and economic centres. The fall did not happen overnight. It began with the Islamic invasions but the final nail in the coffin of the Devadasi institution was the ban imposed by the British government in 1924, which snatched the remaining vestiges of dignity from this once proud fraternity. Today, no one associates artistic excellence with the institution and it is widely regarded as a social evil.

The metamorphosis of Devadasis from being independent women of high learning to vulnerable prostitutes is indicative of how other institutions and social arrangements drastically changed character. In the context of caste, this is not to say that everything in India was hunky dory before the Britishers arrived or the Turks invaded but it must be said unabashedly that it was not too bad either. It can be confidently said that a classless society is a Marxist pipedream because a natural stratification of classes is a social inevitability. Class was not a function of caste in pre-medieval India but to a certain degree, it was the other way around and most importantly, it had little to do with the way in which the state was run and collective decisions taken. As it turns out, a lot of the confusion about caste comes from perceiving what was for the most part descriptive as an overpoweringly prescriptive tool.
References / Footnotes

[1] Bernard Cohen, Colonialism

[2] Nirmal Kumar Bose, Class and Caste published in The Economic and Political Weekly, July 1965

[3] Steve Muhlberger, Democracy in Ancient India

[4] Vijaya Ramaswamy, Vishwakarma Craftsmen in Early Medieval Peninsular India

[5] Vijaya Ramaswamy, Vishwakarma Craftsmen in Early Medieval Peninsular India

[6] Vinayak Sridhar, Devadasi – The Fallen Idol