Caste analysis and its reading today

There is an apparent opacity of caste now, which requires fine-grained and multi-dimensional study

Twenty years ago, at the dawn of the new millennium and after the ‘Mandal decade’ of the 1990s, it looked as though the institution of caste had become legible in a new way ( See “Caste and social structure”, The Hindu, December 6-7, 2001). The break with the past seemed decisive; a code had been cracked, and caste could be ‘read’ like never before. Like any newly literate person, we took it for granted that the change was permanent.

But the new age of caste clarity lasted barely two decades. Today, in the mid-Modi era after the novel coronavirus pandemic, we are struggling to come to terms with the perception that caste has become opaque again — the code has changed. What has changed? And how has it affected our understanding of caste?

To begin with, the perception of the ‘we’ has changed. It can no longer remain an unmarked universal ‘we’ that speaks for everyone, but must be acknowledged as upper caste. Specifically, this is the vantage point of the overwhelmingly upper caste liberal intelligentsia, a group that certainly has a caste location with its biases, but is more a spectator than a player in the game of caste. Unlike players (who must strategise to win the game while taking account of possible moves by opponents and allies), the spectator tries to map all possible moves by all players.

The other changes can be divided into two kinds — those that are internal to the caste structure itself and those that are located in the larger context. Leaving the contextual changes for later, the internal changes are taken up here, initially in relation to the largest group, the Other Backward Classes (OBCs).

The re-orientation of caste in the new millennium happened largely because of the arrival of the OBCs on the national stage. The OBCs were good to think with for several reasons.

First, the OBCs helped to place caste the right side up. From the Nehru era until the 1990s, the dominant ideology had presented caste as the exception and casteless-ness as the rule. The OBCs forced us to recognise that the upper castes were a minority rather than the ‘general’ or universal category. Second, because they were an intermediate group, the OBCs invited closer attention to the notion of backwardness and the interplay of graded privilege and disprivilege in different caste clusters. Third, because they were defined as a residual category — neither in the Scheduled Castes (SC) or Scheduled Tribes, nor in the upper castes — the OBCs highlighted the pros and cons of categorisation and the challenge of internal disparities within large groupings. The OBCs were also important in themselves because of their demographic weight and distribution. They were present in most parts of the country and formed a large (usually largest) segment of every class group, from the poorest to the richest. That is why they had a special affinity for federalism and were instrumental in introducing coalition politics at the national level.

Is this way of reading caste still valid for caste analysis today? The short general answer is yes; but it is the particulars that matter for the more useful long answer.