MN Srinivas Memorial Lecture 2016: Outside Caste?

good evening everyone and a very warm welcome on this cold evening to King's College London for the 2016 immense universe lecture my name is critical Paula and I on behalf of the Indians titute at Kings and their own anthropological Institute I'm delighted to introduce this year's speaker professor David Moss David Moss is the professor of social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies he received his DPhil in social anthropology from Oxford University and since 1997 has taught at Sarah's professor Moss gave the Malinowski lecture in 2005 and currently sits on various editorial boards of leading anthropology journals he is the author of several publications including the rule of water statecraft ecology and collective action in South India cultivating development and a stenographer of eight policy and practice the saint in the banyan tree Christianity and car Society in India and numerous other co-authored books and research papers the capacity of development and policy to transform lives and landscapes can be said to form the core of professor Moses work his unique experience of following through a flagship development scheme in sub Linda from his design staged as its resident consultant as well as an anthropologist uninterrupted for ten years led him to query and write eloquently about the relationship between the field and the desk and the nature of anthropological knowledge itself development and mosses work is not simply the project or the scheme or even the policy but a multi-layered system as well as a site of interrogation that encompasses within it over a wide range of vectors of power and change including the state religion international aid agencies beliefs expertise resources theories and models importantly he has shifted the framework for understanding development purely through its from from purely through its discursive power to considering its myriad life and agency as a practice professor Moss is more recent work on caste picks up on his doctoral research particularly in relation to crystal in relation to Christianity in southern India documents transformations to the social structure brought about by historical forces whether through religion statecraft or indeed development he has written about the capacity of Catholicism in rural Tamil Nadu to interrupt the naturalized caste hierarchy and the centrality of the church to new forms of social mobility in providing access to education and jobs but importantly David Moss notes it is the ability of the church to Rhian scribe Dalit communities with ranked honor and church rituals let us have the most profound effect it is this enduring currency of rank and status that I'm sure we will hear much more about today the power of ethnography lies in fact in the fact and I quote was that not only ants purchase but also the texts are active agents in the worlds they describe enlightening action in particular ways and when Srinivas his own work is testimony to the fact of how his key concepts be it sanskritization all then both banks of social change and local power dynamics have gained Cup gained agency of their own I now invite professor David Moss to deliver the 2016 [Applause] thank you first kind words and I'm very grateful to the Kings India Institute of the Royal illogical Institute and to the organizers of the Memorial Lecture and to you all for coming to this lecture this year is the 100th birth anniversary of Professor Phnom Penh Srinivas who we celebrate as the man who founded and institutionalized Indian social anthropology as a field-based comparative and generalizing social science in its post-colonial form this also marks the year of the hundred and twenty-fifth birth anniversary of dr. BR Ambedkar a man who more than any other Indian national leader mobilised a social and political institutional and legal response to social exclusion and injustice and put in place constitutional safeguards the lives of these two men contrasted in some respects the one the Brahman the other adult will submit and parallel each other both exercise to kind of reverse anthropology traveling to another society England or America in order to deeply immerse themselves in the culture thoughts and values of that society grasping its essentials and seeing its flaws and returning home with a desire to know the workings of their own beyond the metropolis the middle class and the book view both in fact lost their books notes and papers and Bettger to a German torpedo and Srinivas to a Stanford arsonist but through lived experience both discovered caste as the key media mediator of human relations in India in round Peru village Srinivas discovered that he could not be other than a Brahmin and more significantly Ambedkar on returning to India experienced painfully that despite every imaginable qualification he could not be other than an untouchable their imperatives were of course different embed katuk his own humiliation as negative of a social system whose origins mechanisms underlying beliefs and effects on millions of Dalits had to be understood in order to be challenged Shrinivas placed his emphasis on social scientific knowledge itself on truthful observation and description of social patterns functions and change through his role as mentor and institution builder and public intellectual has been a - remarks Srinivas was of a generation that had to forge the idea of social science under the sign of the independent nation and this meant two things freeing anthropology first from its heritage as part of the colonial Enterprise and second from a nationalist self-representation derived through a textual view of Indian civilization ratcheted Browns structural functionalism and rigorous fieldwork serve both purposes as he demonstrated in his famous idea of sanskritization civilizational debates would be relocated within observed social processes such as competitive social mobility this lecture is about various reactions and challenges of policy and the politics that work against both dr. Ambedkar's drive to reveal caste as a fundamental fact of history and of power whose effects are to be countered through law and social policy and professor Srinivas his idea of a post-colonial social anthropology of caste these challenges have thought effect on the one hand by enclosing caste within religion and the nation so as to restrict the field of social policy exempt caste from law and limits the social politics of caste and on the other by attempting to reinvent social anthropology in its colonial past so as to dismiss caste as a category of description and social analysis to make my points I'll take the paired cases of caste among non Hindus and outside India in both cases there is sufficient social scientific evidence that caste and it's unequal izing effects in and yet there is marked resistance to public recognition of this fact in social policy and law the first case is the Indian policy approach to Christian and Muslim Dalits and the denial to them of state provisions and protections as Scheduled Castes that's historical victims of oppression and untouchability the second case is the resistance to the implementation of legislation outlawing caste-based discrimination in the UK by Hindu organizations I'll show how in both cases caste comes to be enclosed within religion and internalized to Hinduism this highlights an influential discourse that regards caste is bound up in the sphere of Hinduism and the Indian nation while deal urges amaizing public action on caste and discounting anthropological description beyond this sphere both cases will tell us something about caste as an aspect of the post-colonial character of India's contemporary predicament as Nicholas Dirk's puts it and it's diasporic manifestation in the sense of an echoing tension between the liberal critique of tradition traditional oppression and the nationalist critique of colonial intrusion this tension produces competing frameworks of analysis and I'll show our in new ways is in new ways today folded into the strategies of social actors in fields of political contention these claims to caste lessness the denial of caste to non Hindus in India and the denial of the idea of caste by Hindu groups in the UK will comprise the first two parts of the lecture in the third and final part I'll turn to other claims to caste lessness in India today first by the privileged who invest in the idea of a costless world of middle-class merit and second by Dalits in an area of my own fieldwork who respond to the inescapability of the mark of caste with a different kind of eye a different idea of life outside of caste so let me turn to the first of caste and non Hindus in India with the health warning that in all that follows what goes under the label caste would have to be unearthed in each historical and social context when in March last year the BJP government in India decidedly opposed the demand for Christian and Muslim Dalits to have the state the status of Scheduled Castes alongside Hindu Sikh and Buddhist Dalits with all the welfare measures and legal protections of this status entails it underscored the view first that untouchability is a peculiar aspect of Hindu religion the denied quote to the disadvantaged caste the fundamentals of human dignity and second that religious conversion or rather specifically conversion to Christianity or Islam changes the social identity of Dalits so as to free them from caste leaving aside the subsequent exemptions granted to Jains Sikhs and Buddhists as indict religionists this simply restated the position of the presidential order of 1950 which determined that quote no person who professes a religion different from Hinduism shall be deemed to be a member of the Scheduled Castes in the case of direct Christians for the past 50 years church leaders and activists that have objected to this as unconstitutional religious discrimination and have done so only unhappy but certain grounds that it can indeed quote be shown that Dalits suffer from a comparable depth of social and economic disabilities and cultural and educational backwardness and similar levels of degradation within the Christian community necessitating intervention of the state under the provisions of the Constitution that is what the Supreme Court judged had to be proved to win the case when ruling on a 1985 writ petition on the case of a Christian cobbler sousei in Chennai denied provision of a central scheme for Street workers indeed the expansive Ranganath Mishra Commission in 2009 which established the fact of continuing discrimination of Dalit Christians and Muslims in society concluded that quote the caste system should be recognized as a general social character ristic of indian society as a whole without questioning whether the philosophy and teaching of any particular religion recognize it or not its recommendation that Christians and Muslims of equivalent caste should be included in the Scheduled Caste list is the one decidedly rejected by the BJP government in March last year the government here presumed religious identity to be determinant of other identities especially caste and took as real the imagined separate community of Christians which the church claimed but as a matter of historical fact had failed to produce the dilemma that fidelity to a Christian is that while in social reality they are blocked by upper caste others especially in villages from asserting themselves as people other than as defined by their birth and lineage that is as Untouchables the state allows them include them to be nothing but Christian and so disqualified from statutory welfare and protections the state requires that caste be an aspect of religious identity and practice and precludes recognition of cast in Ambedkar or syllabuses terms as the underlying system of social and economic organization when the Indian state privileges religion overcast were not however dealing with a simple case of religions of the governing of governing religious diversity and the category Hindu which admits caste identities is not a straightforward religious identity alongside others Hindu is a default identity including all those not specifically affiliated to religions such as Christianity and Islam moreover Christians and Muslims are not simply adherents to separate religions as Buddhists or Sikhs might be but it distinctively removed from the matrix of Indian society ie caste which is essentially Hindu in other words demarcating the Scheduled Castes draws distinctions between those religions that are internal National Society and caste Hinduism Buddhism Sikhism Jainism and there's the not external Christianity at Islam National Society is Hindu there are several implications as now Nathaniel Roberts argues first since him in a pervasive elite consensus being Hindu is a kind of divinely mandated ethnic patrimony while cannot speak up conversion to Hinduism the Hindu ization of Dalits or animosities is rather a matter of reintegration into the Nation construed by Hindu nationalists as carboxy or homecoming second purpose of him because Hindu religion is foundational for social life then as a matter of normative assumption rather than empirical fact Dalit conversions to Islam or Christianity is taken to rupture relations alienate people to be a potential threat to public order and subject to external manipulation and force and as such requires regulation by law ante conversion legislation has been enacted in seven states between 1967 and 2006 laws which scrutinized the authenticity of belief the spiritual mirror and material motivations of diets who are presumed incapable of genuine conversion in a manner that is entirely inapplicable to programs of hindu ization contrary to the discourse that encloses caste within Hinduism my ethnographic experience and historical research over 30 years in rural Tamil Nadu convinces me that caste has never been understood as Hindu which God's people worshiped the manner of worship the powers they think they take to determine good or ill fortune the affiliations of gurus priests or pastors are not at all fundamental to caste identity or even to cultural values as is widely presumed not just in Hindu nationalist or Nate Roberts points out but also in the modern Western social science dear on religion as culture value and identity upon which this Hindu nationalist thought rests Christianity specifically in the Tamil countryside no matter where the Catholic Protestant or Pentecostal has never understood now despite engagement in increasingly global forms constituted cultural boundary separating its adherents from Indian caste society the question then is how did caste come to be enclosed in Hindu religion and this turns out to be bound up with the question of the religious identity of Dalits in particular the idea that Dalits who converts to Islam or Christianity are leaving the fault rests on a supposed prior common identity of diets as hinders and the hideous a Chinook diets has come to be regarded as a historically contingent outcome of distinct but interdependent processes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries driven by the struggles and pull and political assertions of subjugated Dalits that then intersected with the discourses and exigencies of Protestant missionaries the British administration and later of nationalists this reconfigured religion and caste into its modern relationship in her book the pariah problem historian Rupa Vishwanath shows that before the late 19th century in South India the idea that caste Hindus and pariahs as Dalits were known shared religion was hardly acceptable hardly accepted it was she writes common for pariahs to address caste as Hindus a term used in contradistinction to themselves well into the 20th century the term Hindus applied to upper castes of any religions so when in 1936 upper caste Catholics in Trichy and Tamilnadu appeals to the colonial authorities against the Bishop's decision to allow Dalits access to the main church building for mass they did so as Hindus arguing that if contravened they're established custom as per Hindu Christians of castes to be forced to sit next to a body of a Diedre Vedas Dallas composed solely of scavengers and cobblers and flares unquote which burn off gives historical to their death to what is clear in the ethnographic record namely that Dalits were an excluded section of society subject to enforced landlessness slavery and agrestic servitude they were a constitute a constitutive outside so that the spaces of society that counted as the village the Tamil or the common or the Hindu presumes the exclusion of diets and the public rituals of temple tank or village enacted Dalit exclusion or subordination further articulated in ideologies of impurity and untouchability prior to the Hindu ization of the Dalek plight no caste person was in the least concerned about their religion if indeed Dalits were regarded as capable of religion at all nay Roberts points out that when British census takers used religion as in Hindu Muslim and so on to categorize people they departed from usual practice so in the late 19th century native census workers had to be persuaded to record those barred from temple entry the dullest as Hindus and incidentally in significant contrast the Brahmin census takers that Julia complet accompanied in his ethnography at the 2011 census report until it says Hindu even when they themselves told him they were not the large-scale adoption of Christianity among Dalits across South India from the 1870s is not properly understood as movement of religious conversion in the sense of leaving the Hindu fold but Vishwanatha argues as the forming of a pariah missionary alliance in the context of antagonistic relationships between enslaved laborers and landlords mostly initiated by the dull 'it's rather than the missionaries who were themselves as disconcerted to be solicited by groups they had overlooked as to be overlooked by the elite groups they have sought to influence Dalits had wrought the missionaries partly because the colonial government denied the existence of Indian slavery and held a self-interested view of rural servitude as a benign moral economy and to politically reinvented as the judge money system offering little protection from abuse Protestant missionaries on the other hand made interventions against relations of slavery for example enabling dunnit freedom from debt bondage their acquisition of house sites or resettlement zone agricultural waste labs but in order to avoid the accusation from home supporters and critics that their converts were materially motivated rice Christians evidently political and economic change was construed as spiritual transformation and Dalits as victims of spiritual slavery within a Hindu religious system so Rupa Vishwanatha convincingly argues even though this distinction between the material and the spiritual would have meant little to dyes themselves the missionary logic that rendered caste and other depression as a matter of spirit and religion then acquired further significance first given the British governing principle of non-interference in matters construed as the native religion which administrators increasingly took to include caste and second given that this gave landlords a new language with which to resist an object to missionary interventions in support of their dependent laborers namely as interference in customary and religious practice this was solidified in the courts through which in effect landlords obtained from the state a religious right to dominate annex dulles whose claims were correspondingly invalidated as fishermen out sums it up religion emerged as the favorite language of contestation and the judgment on missionaries shifted from being a threat to caste privilege that's to say abetting diet insubordination to being a threat to Hindu religion and its social system by contriving inauthentic conversions however this narrative of the threat of religious conversion only gained forced nationally rather than in local conflicts from the 1930s again in response to Dalit assertions but now in the context of representative legislative councils and other tactic of British governance and the new politics of identity demographics it is just published book to be cared for subtitled the power of conversion of the foreignness of belonging it in an Indian slum nathaniel roberts places MK Gandhi at the very center of a project to incorporate Dalits as Hindu aims significantly as a defense against dr. embed cos movements identifying untouchables or Backward Classes as a separate element in the nation with separate interests and constituting a separate electorate on the basis of their caste and economic oppression that is though in treated as Outsiders and without natural alignment to the upper caste Hindu nationalist leadership paradoxically Gandhi sought to claim Dalits as Hindu by rendering ritual untouchability as definitive of Dalits and as a distinctively Hindu form of humiliation this effectively replaced the unfree labor and socio-economic oppression of Dalits with theories of pollution and embed cos political empowerment and land reform with symbolic remedies Ambedkar was himself clear that the oppression of caste could not be treated as a religious matter separate from society and economy it's well known how critical he was of the Hindu scriptural sanction of caste and Verma but he rejected the idea that untouchability was just a cultural or religious matter he was offended the British colonial government refused to address what were clearly Civic disabilities such as diet children being refused entry to schools on the grounds that they that they the government could not intervene in matters of cultural or religious tradition he proclaimed that Dalits held civic rights and the universal right to equal treatment and so he was equally offended by the Hindu reformers who felt that welfare work for Dalits was as Gandhi put it quote a penance which the Hindus have to do for the sin of untouchability and equality making him to reform the sole means of recovery of selfhood and identity as Gandhi proposed involved two internalizing effects first as noted Dalits would be integrated into the nation through internalizing their distinctive condition untouchability as Hindu and second in consequence rendering other remedies including the action of missionaries as illegitimate intrusions into the internal affairs of Hinduism from this historical moment think Roberts argues arises the currently pervasive Indian and diaspora elite consensus on caste nation and religious conversion conversion is construed as a form of self alienation and betrayal of one's ancestors and the religious affiliation and the souls of Dalits endure as matters of national concern but equally because of this nationalist discourse conversion itself has acquired the novel capacity to symbolize culpable alienation by the state and thus to be used as a political strategy as in the well-known Dalit mass conversions to Islam in the Solent a mobility of inaction burrow in 1981 the same processes that produce this politics of Dalek conversion and untouchability as a historical disability of Hinduism also marginalize attention to caste as a continuing structural cause of poverty and place caste outside the purview of the mainstream economic and development planning of the secular state these are themes for separate discussion what I want to turn to now is a parallel effort to enclose caste within Hinduism also in response to an bed provides direct mobilization against caste discrimination but this time outside Asia here in the UK it's well known that when they leave India and live in countries like the UK do let's can't shed their caste any more than when leaving Hinduism in India even though when recontextualized in the UK and partly articulated through separate religious identities such as Ravi dossier or Valmiki cars takes different and varied forms cause prejudice sometimes amounting to discrimination in work bullying in schools and the demeaning use of caste names are all documented in independent academic and UK government commissioned research there are also cases of discrimination in health services and social care such as when a social services care worker after having seen a picture of Guru rabid-ass in the bedroom of an elderly Punjabi woman refuses to assist in bathing her modern British Asian music and culture have not been freed from caste pride other than the case with non Hindus in India in the UK there is no means to recognize and redress caste-based discrimination this prompted a decade-long campaign for change in the law join together streams of activism led by embed Krait ravi dasya Valmiki and other diaspora diet diaspora organizations joined with the UK Dalits solidarity network the umbrella international international network and the India based groups especially the national campaign for Dalit human rights and support from Labour and liberal Lords and MPs including Jeremy Corbyn these campaigners brought the issue to the attention of Parliament which to the surprise of many voted to make caste-based discrimination illegal thus in April 2013 and the enterprise and regulatory reform Act was passed section 97 of the Act requires government to introduce a statutory prohibition on caste discrimination into British equality law by making caste an aspect of the protected characteristic of race in the Equality Act 2010 in light of this the equality and Human Rights Commission the eh RC and contracted a team of researchers of which I was one along with Annapurna Barbara and Bennett under who led to develop secondary legislation a by undertaking socio legal research on British equality law and caste so as to identify issues of principle legal definition exemption and public sector Duty relevant to the implementation of this law and B by conducting experts of stakeholder workshops to identify the range of experiences of opinion relevant to implementation these took place late in 2013 however the scheduled formal consultation on implementation of the law that were to follow have not taken place the legislation remains unimplemented by the current Conservative government which has been strongly lobbied by Hindu organizations to repeal the legislation the government has recently announced a public consultation not on implementation but on whether legislative change is needed at all many aspects and factors of this stalled legislative process are of interest but I am concerned here with just one but a crucial one namely the public response of Hindu organizations to the proposed legislation because I see it as a parallel case of the enclosure of caste within religion in brief a position was taken by Hindu organizations by which I mean those including the Alliance of Hindu organizations Hindu forum of Britain Hindu Council UK the National Council of Hindu temples Hindu lies Association the National Council of Hindu priests whose published and publicly stated views and those of certain individuals I will call in shorthand a Hindu position this position held first that legislation is unnecessary because caste discrimination does not exist and second that legislation of public debate on caste produces prejudice against the Hindu religious minority in Britain I'm not going to discuss the claim that caste discrimination does not exist suffice it to say that at the stakeholder workshop we organized this was not a claim that could be sustained face to face with dulles reporting their personal experience as an instance of the second claim on anti Hindu prejudice on the 20th of March 2014 the Alliance of Hindu organizations wrote to the chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on british hindus to say that the EHR see report which it needs to be understood emphasized that caste was not inherently religious or hindu that this report quote is overly prejudiced against brick the british hindu community and that it is publicly funded research at the expense of the reputation and harmony of the british hindu community and beyond this that caste itself is a negatively charged and inherently racist word its use in British legislation an act of anti Hindu racial and religious violence and Prejudice of the highest order and probe this present day discursive enclosure of caste in Hinduism in the trope of Hindu hurt I'll suggest occurs in two distinct moves which I treat in turn first is an externalization of caste the racist idea onto specific arts second is the internalization of caste as Hindu Association first then the external externalization of cast as idea UK Hindu organizations have given their signature to a position appearing in a series on a series of online articles blogs and recently a book in which Pradesh are a lecturer and quad law and law at Queen Mary and co-director of the newly formed dharmic ideas policy foundation states that the proposed UK legislation on caste discrimination the public debates and the concept of caste itself represents an Orientalist theological form of knowledge about or a framework interpreting Indian institutions originating in the twinned purposes of a colonial domination and rule on the one hand and the moral denigration of Hinduism by missionaries in the service of Prophet ISM on the other leaders to say sha and the hindu general sikh bodies he speaks for i'm not much interested in what mainstream social science or historical research reveals about caste or the various colonial and contemporary processes and socio-economic forces shaping its modern forms and effects their concerns specifically is to explain him discredit the link between castes and inequality hierarchy and discrimination this being the result of a Mis recognition and negative moral evaluation produced by Western normative ethics and cultural framings of Hindu institutions which falsely maps in Indian cultural ideas such as Varna IATI Bradbury are also cast in this view it's not the diet experience of discrimination that motivates the introduction of caste into UK equality law but as persisting missionary colonial cultural imagination that verifies Hindus and unnecessarily exposes them to litigation presuming that they practice car discrimination being firmly bolted to this cult colonialist moral evaluation I need to do with inequality and discrimination the language of caste itself especially if built into law is offensive to British Hindus in more direct terms such as K Sharma general secretary of the National Council of Hindu temples writes in an open letter ahead of last year's general election more on which in a moment quote for the avoidance of any doubt we ritually reiterate that the fluid and equitable dharmic non-hereditary norm and dogmas social structures which are repeatedly detailed in Hindu Sikh and Jain scriptures in no way match the caste system which was created by the despotic medieval Pope's in Europe then exported by colonial missionaries to the Empire it's ironic he continues that this same concept is nowadays so favored by its philosophical parents the evangelicals as the bete noire with which to globally denigrate the derma Communities the legislation is tantamount to religious persecution of Hindus Sikhs and Jains and it is in breach of the human rights of the minority Darmok communities ensure those who now constitute themselves as representatives of UK's direct communities attempt to embrace Hindu Jain and Sikh regard caste as a mistaken and offensive category of analysis for the various types of association or marriage or even manifestations of sex and love based violence misconstrued as caste atrocity and further see in the proposed legislation the missionary colonial idea of caste continued as a project to regulate and control the Hindu religious minority in the UK the terms of the debate have been termed it's no longer about caste prejudice but prejudice about caste cast is enclosed within Hinduism through what ed Simpson and others have argued is an intellect project of the hindu rights to quote shift the basis of ethical judgments and insert the trope of hindu hurt within British politics and reconfigure the nature of political identities end quote this reframing of an issue of social justice and equality in terms of the colonized and the colonizer shifts the target and target of attention away from direct experience itself towards Western or Christian ideology if anti-discrimination legislation is construed as an attack on a Hindu religious minority it is indeed conceived as an attack by Christians the province of church leaders especially the former anglican bishop of Oxford Lord Harris who introduced the caste discrimination provision into Parliament in 2010 not only affirms to Hindu organizations the presence of a theological imagination behind the caste legislation but also an hour's discovery of a specific Christian purpose in it so in a further enclosure of caste religion the ultimate purpose of the UK law it's claimed relates not to cast at all but to religious conversion in this Hindu representation the aim is through having caste discrimination recognised outside India and beyond Hinduism among members of any religion and in the UK's legal system to bring pressure to bear on the Indian government's to extend its legal provisions for sheduled castes to the presently excluded Christian and Muslim diets so as to remove or remove an obstacle to Dalit Christian conversion the UK anti-discrimination legislation is thus portrayed as being in the service of Christian proselytism aimed in turn an increasing Christian demographic presence in India to serve Western geopolitical interests and the desire to divide and we can India church involvement in international campaigns on direct human rights which is in fact and historical consequence of connections arising from a direct majority in the churches and their experience of castes oppression signals for sharp quote transnational activism for proselytism being quote the key reason why caste has emerged in the discourse of the church's Dalit organisations and Parliament and quote the discursive transformation of caste into religion through exteriorization is pretty much complete the Hindu objection to UK public discussion of caste in fact extends beyond the law the big formal complaints to the BBC the debate on caste involves quote very hostile and derogatory views about Hindus and Hindu faith and when a conference on caste inequality and development for development professionals funders and policy makers was organized through the so as South Asia Institute in September last year it's director received a letter from professor Oscar director of the dharmic ideas policy foundation objecting to its critical stance on caste imputing a motive of proselytism to NGO co-organizers and so as his association with christian orientalist UK caste legislation through its AHRC were the proposition that legislation on caste discrimination in the UK is quote continuing foreign interference in the in India's internal affairs is intriguing the link to Indian reservations policy of proselytism is factually groundless but what's interesting is the manner in which the UK caste law debate has produced on an offline platforms for Indian Hindu nationalism and its representatives not only to provide the terms in which UK legislation is contested such as Dalit conversion as well as the terms which global Hindu identity is articulated involvement by the election of Narendra Modi a figure figured as a leader of the global Hindu community a lion coming out to fight for Santa Darmok values but also to become a presence in British politics so in the run-up to the UK election in May 2015 two events such as a conference on Dharma rising there was appealed to dharmic voters to respond to the threat of caste legislation supported in the manifestos of labour and the Liberal Democrats who was one statement put it if reelected would effectively introduce a caste system here in the UK because that's what the Bishop Harry's law is designed to initiate end quote public speeches realigned British Hindu political allegiances from long term support for labour in places such as Leicester to David Cameron's Conservative Party now credited with build building relationships with the Modi government as well as strengthening business links with India putting forward a budget majority Hindu candidate Priti Patel take a stand on Kashmir erecting a statue of Gandhi and Parliament's where all along side the commitment to repeal the Hindu denigrating legislation on caste discrimination the Dharma sever / of a buck share a forum for political mobilization of a common Hindu Jain Sikh Front produced a flyer picturing the word caste branded on the foreheads of a mother and child above the headline why dharmic voters need to vote for a Conservative government and implied that under Labour quote every parent and child living today and forever will be branded a casteist the direct appeal to vote conservative in an online open letter on the 3rd of May four days ahead of the election crossed a line and got the Leicester based National Council for Hindu temples in trouble with the Charity Commission and the appeal was removed website so the Hindu organizations response to an international mobilization of Dalit rights activism has brought an Indian Hindu nationalist agenda into UK politics including the frankly eccentric imagination of UK anti casts discrimination legislation has been all about driving Indian reservations policy and Christian religious conversion of course as it's been put to me articulating the issue of caste UK caste legislation in the Hindu now in Hindu the Hindu nationalist terms of Christian conversion builds connections to powerful allies whose voice has a salience in British politics which will no doubt only increase post brexit the discursive enclosure of caste in Hinduism I suggested occurs through two moves first the externalization just explained but also second through an internalization of caste that renders caste as an internal matter of the Hindu religion and freedom of association in this respect the eh RC studies insistence that caste was not a Hindu Association could not be entirely in Brit embraced we turn them from the external representation of the legislation issue to reading it's perceived internal effects for the same context let me note that the EHR C report concluded on balance that quote many experts and stakeholder groups saw the legislation against caste discrimination is having an overwhelmingly positive protective preventive and and she could have effect as well as empowering those who today feel discriminated and silenced it was argued that anti-discrimination legislation would reduce the taboos surrounding caste reduce discrimination and help bridge building for community cohesion within Asian communities and quote Hindu organizations regarded the legislation's producing quote untold harm to the associational and economic freedoms of South Asian communities they claim the law would seek to ban such key religious events as Navaratri on the grounds of alleged caste discrimination would generate prejudice against South Asian employers require the monitoring of caste as a protected characteristic or unleash vexatious caste discrimination cases now I can't discuss these concerns here all we're eventualities considered reviewed and debated in the EHR see work on how the law Parliament had already passed should be implemented without being regarded realistically as obstacles rather I want to suggest that to make sense of the Hindu organizations response it seems necessary to understand that the objections arise from a social project of employee of a different kind from that of Dalit organizations that's the safe first it's not about caste discrimination per se but rather about identity formation and in particular protecting the space for a religious identity as British Hindus well now dharmic religion is rather than British Asians which is itself a product of the importance of religion as a mediating discourse for state institutions in multi-ethnic UK with its shifting mix of concerns with multiculturalism community cohesion and religious militancy and second that it's not just a contest over law but over the categories of description that social science offers to law and their perceived effects the notion of caste in public discussion at law seems potentially disruptive of the Hindu social project of identity making if as John Szabo suggests during on James Clifford diaspora identity involves quote identifications outside the National time-space in order to live inside with a difference then the characterization of that difference is crucial the assertion of a positive Hindu religious identity requires of negative ascriptions including cast especially where cast already exists as a critical representation of Hinduism itself as well as being internally dividing politically disruptive and the very opposite of the kind of civic virtue British Hindus seek to promote through ideas such as socially responsible service or saber which Sabbath sees folded into big society ideas which Hindus who become multi citizens in the UK but if cast on any link with Hindus is best forgotten why mobilize so publicly and noisily on the question of caste as Hindus this is just a different kind of argument also from the Diaspora literature namely that public assertions of a unified Hindu tradition and beyond this as the Dharma community are important or become so precisely because of the continuing significance of differentiated caste GRT identities evidence evidence also in the current controversy itself that is the importance of caste to family status marriage community leadership voluntary organisations business and other networks especially among Hindu migrants from East Africa where according to Steve vert affect corporate caste groups had crystallized as associations for the purposes of liaison with the government authorities as against for instance those from Trinidad with histories of indentured labour that eroded caste but in the different circumstances of Britain where religion provides the privileged means for the public identify family the public the emotion negotiation of identity the development of an ecumenical composite british hindu community requires that caste GRT networking while of continuing importance is protected as an inner domain in partha chatterjee terms to which entry is guarded and which cannot be exposed to outsider regulation through legislation for fear that as the city hindus network put it in invent in 2013 quote community organisations jardine ERT based groups such as those many of us have been exposed to since a young age may well find themselves acting illegally and quote the anxiety does comes as some are left to wonder whether it will be will always be possible for caste affiliation to be distinguished from cost discrimination and as the language of law turns on the ambiguous boundary between the inner privates and the outer public meanwhile for those subject to the discrimination or stigmatizing effects of invisible eyes cast networks and exclusions the Dulles law allows recognitions and redress the strength of feeling in this debate arises from the constitutive capacity of law its ability to construct categories and shape self conceptions it seem to be about how people make the identity of themselves and of others as bearers of rights including in the eye of the state law is expected to have an educational role but is also given an ideological role it offers a public articulation of the social which some regard as restricting freedoms and others as enhancing them now the proposed law is unable to inscribe particular identities the naming of castes has no part in it its purpose is not to criminalize or remove caste only to address discrimination but it would allow an aspect of community hitherto of the inner domain reproduced while being invisible to the public eye to become subject to public discussion claims and cases the question here is not so much about how law social identities but under whose control is the legal sensibility that will be deployed in matters cast in the UK if cast as a set of ideas and practices is open to the law it falls to influences beyond the control of particular groups this is either an incursion into-into inner community spaces or for those is inescapably marked by in theorized identities who suffer invisible judgments about their worth the cast idea is the outing of prejudice that offers the guarantee of protection and the law as Ambedkar understood right now the effects of the new legislation and the degree of litigiousness around caste is quite unknown all they're suspected to be limited at this stage this is a meta contest about who can allow or disallow the language of caste itself at critical junctures and derivatively about the categories of description interpretation and explanation of the social these are epistemological struggles concerning claims and counterclaims to knowledge and about being known or unknown as such they are also a public engagement with anthropology as a generalizing discourse that makes the social available for public debate and for law and engage with the places social groups in a very different relationship to that social science while Hindu organizations aim to detach their sociality and associations from anthropology in its categories of caste provincial eyes Daz Western colonial theology and unintelligible to the society to which it is applied dönitz in their struggle for justice place their experience in the house of generalizing frameworks cast Christian or Buddhist social ethics law and human rights of course these contentions themselves have already changed the public discourse and meaning of caste in the UK in the simplest terms we have here a historically anticipated contestation between claims to freedom from caste discrimination on the one hand and claims to the freedom of caste association in the name of religion on the other and this is tied up internationally with the struggle for global freedom from caste versus the freedom of the Indian nation to resolve the matter of caste as an internal matter unique unique it both inform and solution to India there's a post-colonial nation and it's social policy in this regard of course the Indian government has made stringent efforts in the past decades to ensure that the issue and language of caste or caste-based discrimination does not enter the agenda of the United Nations treaty bodies and that India does not have monitored accountability to the UN for its record on caste inequality and discrimination earlier this year a report on caste-based discrimination by the UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur for minority issues was objected to by the Indian permanent representative to the UN in Geneva as quote in breach of the Special Rapporteurs mandate caste being covered be not being covered under issues of minorities that is national ethnic or religious minorities before the Dalits were self identifying as such this is only the most recent of a series of standoffs following repeated efforts by diluted human rights organizations to internationalize identity of caste in the legal language of race descent and human rights most notably tabling the issue of caste discrimination at the 2001 World Conference against racism in Durban these efforts have consistently been blocked officially in some men this enclosure of caste within the nation in response to transnational campaigns on Dalit caste doncaster metallic writes parallels the first explained enclosure of caste within Hinduism in response to embed cos movement in the 1930s that excluded non Hindu Dalits from state protection Scheduled Castes and the policy enclosure of cast outside hinduism then corresponds to its refusal outside India at the enclosure of caste within Hinduism here in the UK as a response to law on caste discrimination I come now to a third and final set of claims to live outside caste which characterized the contemporary social life of caste in India such claims to caste lessness of course differ radically with social position among members of a privileged with the privileged car castes or middle class the idea that cast is misconstrued as to do with inequality injustice and discrimination and need not will no longer need be regulated by law is today a common view in India to the rising tide of opinion against reservations policy is clear but as throt points out in a recent DPW article on prejudice against reservations policy the arguments against reservations on such grounds as poor outcomes creamy layer benefits or inefficiency are simply not supported empirically while a swell of recent economics research clearly refutes the notion that reservation is no longer necessary because unequal opportunity or market and non-market based discrimination in diverse forms is a thing of the past it is not in India caste itself is not usually denounced as colonialist theology by the privileged critics of reservations but it is understood as having been transformed by forces of economic mobility and democracy so that what remains of caste is benign or beneficial caste is a valued social asset as Ballmer only Natarajan explains the View cars provides networks of trust for business casters community or cultural identity casters part of the vitality of Indian democracy normal cast snapdragon points out is anyways seen as a private domestic matter that really has no place as the subject of public policy and reported cast atrocities or a brutal abnormality of normally benign cast in any event as in the UK curb case cast is stripped of its relationality and therefore of the character of inequality or discrimination caste is enclosed as cultural belonging apart from economy and society even scholars such as under pate and fuller a Narasimhan whose book on Tamil Brahmins quotes him say that quote cast has ceased to play an active part in the reproduction of inequality at least at the upper levels of the social hierarchy but it would be more accurate to say that caste only ceases to matter and achievements are a matter of merit if one discounts or the class and caste based cultural capital the networks or language that allow people to get to the point at which caste does not count and it's becoming clear just how important such modern class caste capital is it's unsurprising that those benefiting from accumulated caste capital from opportunity hoarding and from the operation of prejudicial norms relating to stereotypes may be feared out groups which produce over all a privileged capacity such as - pending argues to translate caste capital into modern capital that's to say property higher education professions etc it's unsurprising that these beneficiaries of caste would want the work of caste to be accomplished unnoticed behind self passion fronts of caste less merit modernity and middle-class Ness as dish Pandey says quote while upper castes are able to in cash privilege as castus Meritor may claim to private or public resources as unmarked citizens without any requirement actually to abandon caste others Dalits can only mobilize for rights or resources or justice by deploying caste politically in ways that firmly identify them with their caste because the way reservations policy works Deshpande continues quote upper castes are guaranteed anonymity in preserving advantage born of caste while lower castes become hyper visible in their claims constitutionally and legally caste Wars and is only a source of disadvantage and never a source of privilege because itself becomes delegated to the support ins who become the accused purveyors of caste adjunct us subrahmanyam suggests this is true both in India and in the case of the UK aunty caste legislation controlled through a politics of concealment caste is construed as a supporting formation as much as a colonial one of course these processes are relational subrahmanyam notes that upper caste claims to middle-class Maris meritocracy can be threatened by lower caste political assertions which might expose the caste privilege behind marriage and so interrupts the conversion of caste capital into modern capital the threat to undercut general cultural religious or class identities by exposing caste within privileged groups has always generated contestation Deshpande points to the extension of reservations to a broad category of the other backward castes in the 1990s as exposing the general category as essentially upper caste and I'm explained how the introduction of caste into UK equality law is resisted as a threat to render caste to public scrutiny and brand cosmopolitan Hindus with the caste label while damaging their incorporated image in the UK market for identities at least as a boss puts it in the UK in quote Hindu identity through dialog with other diasporic identities unquote and at this juncture the direct caste discrimination legislation movement is the opposition against which the Hindu community has sought institutional cohesiveness a new public articulation of its identity and political position now I've given much attention to the perspective of privileged groups and their enclosures of caste and their claims to caste lessness I want to end by turning attention to the attitudes and experiences of caste and discrimination among diets beginning with those expressed in a survey carried out by my long-term collaborator and Dalit residents of the Tamil village of Allah Purim em7 and in a series of recorded interviews in the same communities carried out by delete activists and Jesuits celebrate our own oven as part of a collaborative project my aim is to set the denial of cast among privileged the privileged against what appears to me to be an emerging aspiration to cast lessness of a different kind more akin to dr. Ambedkar's annihilation of caste and his idea of fraternity grounded in common humanity and as as he put it the transformation of the social conscience at least among some Dalit communities with whom I am somewhat familiar these abusing aspirations expressed by people across age gender or religious affiliation as Hindus Catholics Protestants or Pentecostals I can only give a very brief summary of some of the key findings here one is that these diets place the life of slavery untouchability and humiliation in the past and believe in the rise of civility and equality of treatment from earlier work in this locality I was aware of to socially distinct kinds of response to historical caste subordination the first was framed by a Dalit discourse upon and aimed at challenging exclude and subordination in relation to public space land education and religion including within the church the second aimed at inner transformation and a break with an untouchable past and through forms of cultural revaluation rebirth ollege izing and the reshaping of various service roles what seems to be clear is that there has been a marked weakening of the first discourse of honor along with socioeconomic change and the legally backed prohibition or practices of caste discrimination or exclusion in public places such as the street shop tangas temple as well as the church instead of an emphasis on struggles for status and against upper caste domination across the board people emphasize change characterized as a process of civilization a growth in civility that is public forms of respect standing in line work on the ticket for negotiated rates roles and services reframed in the idiom of the market leaving behind a time of denigration and disgust on a clear this juncture is imagined between now and the era of slavery and untouchability Christianity might be aligned to these changes without being their cause and most didn't credit the church with changing cars to practices the second overarching finding is that although Dalits by and large in this way felt they lived in a changed world without extreme caste in equality and clearly expected equal treatment from other institutions like schools and colleges civility was not assured freedom from caste was uncertain and there were several reasons for this for one thing caste prejudice is suspected but is undiscernible it exists unseen as a state of mind or a mental attitude requiring attentive attentive Nagar creation of social life to avoid humiliation likewise Suryakant what more a describes a Hindu politeness in rural morass TRO the might accompany hidden disgust that could be withdrawn at any time to expose Dalits to violence second poverty exposes people to caste prejudice and humiliation just as civility and social respect bend towards money and power third although invisible in social interactions caste is pervasive in its effects probing into the experience of searching from work education or business opportunities reveals life's constrained in new ways by caste reworked as the private connections and cultural capital necessary to secure jobs or other things alongside statements of change 82% of those asked felt caste was an obstacle or barrier to their families advancement fourth and finally in theorized identity is inescapable in majority those surveyed expected as dulles to experience ill treatment and disrespect and could not imagine escape into castus anonymity and rural society significantly was the poorest and women who are most incentivized by the experience of ill treatments to try to conceal their caste often when laboring in distant places for example Lilly a 32 year old Christian Dalit explains quote when we went to journey for bricks work yeah where we work there were cheery houses cheery meaning here both slum and stud colony the upper caste people were speaking about them as inferior so we said we were Galindez ananda let caste but they let's also spoke of the fear of being discard and in some cases gave this is a reason for not not to undertake migrant labour repeatedly for the same employers 60 year old Christian recalls quote we went to a village for paddy harvesting beyond ever Kotik we were working for a color because house and hiding outcasts we didn't say pariah we said we were Weaver people they thought we were upper caste people they treated as well gave us meals inside the house and we were sleeping inside the house for two harvests we went there after that we didn't go we were afraid that they will come to know our cast many interviewed blamed the state were making caste inescapable for Dalits since all have to declare shideok our status and Hindu identity as the condition of state support as Catholic direct our own Road said as soon as we are born we're baptized at the same time caste is written as this friendly put thumbs up up quote upper caste identity is such that it can be completely overwritten by modern professional identities of choice whereas lower caste identity is so indelibly engraved that it overrides all other identities and quote expectations of civility which cannot be had in face of experiences indelibly marked by caste and it's harder to see effects produce not expressions of renewed struggle for diet honor but rather an ideology of caste less humanity summed up in the aphorism we're human beings with one blood the persisting power of hidden caste in shaping opportunities is met with three denials of the logical denial caste has no truth it's a human invention with temporal denial causes are raised by modernity and civility and with social denials with the aspiration to cast lessness this represents a direct response to caste quite at odds with with birth dunnit activist assertions Anstey banker Gupta and others idea of the assertion of identity over hierarchy since it's the persistence of the power and inequality of caste not to mention exposure to violence and humiliation that removes value from identities of past that nonetheless remain inescapable claims to cast lessness amid the pervasive unexpressed experience of cast determining life chances is something even more evident in urban duller communities Nate Roberts explains this in his terrific ethnographer ethnographic accounts of Pentecostalism in the Chinese slumber Naga who she cast the slit even further here Pentecostals do do not construe themselves as Dulles in relation to upper castes but rather as those with true humanity despite being central to their daily experience castes are raised from Pentecostals accounts of themselves Robertson first because Robertson first because of the deep hurt and shame of untouchability that shadowed uhlet's flight from untouchability in the village to mere poverty in the city when unburnable Pentecostals insisted in reality they have no caste like our Purim Dalits they are saying that caste has no truth in it but they go further as does dr. Ambedkar in insisting that caste is nothing but the denial of humanity by hoarding caste others found it is unique to India indeed slum dwellers drawn together by common poverty and common humanity caring and worthy of being cared for imagine themselves as an end claim trapped within uncaring caste India this idea of being humanitarian Outsiders within caste India creates a distinctive valuing of the North Indian foreign imagine and realistically it has to be said as places and peoples of true humanity and home to loving allies the notion of India as a negative moral space involves for Dalits a corresponding foreignness of belonging belonging discovered in the utterly foreign divinity and hope beyond experience and beyond words as in Pentecostal glossolalia and this of course is the precise inverse verse of the Hindu nationalist discourse on Christian conversion the Dalit aspiration to cast this humanity takes us to dr. Ambedkar's final stance his conversion to Buddhism not to worship different gods or any God but as an embrace of the idea of humanity beyond the social order as a member of a social category dehumanized by that order and as anthropologists of India it takes us to immense shrinivas's emphasis on the importance of attending both to the changing nature of relations of caste but also to the distinctive terms or discourses in which these are represented whether Varna sanskritization or now varied forms of caste lessness and claims to live outside caste you

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Keywords: king's college london, india, india institute, society, caste

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Published: Wed Dec 14 2016