Caste, Class, Varna and Race: Social and Political and Cultural Discourses

Caste has a significance: that is its social morphology. The several Backward Classes Commissions established in independent India have noted the division of the Indian society into various castes and communities, with Mr Mandal’s commission listing as many as 3,743 castes and communities. The monumental People of India mission, conducted by the Anthropological Survey of India, has recently drawn public attention to the importance of caste and sub-caste divisions in contemporary India. However, this article deals more with how these divisions and sub-divisions are viewed, especially among the intelligentsia, whose importance in contemporary Indian culture should not be overlooked. 

Caste is not only a kind of identification resulting from birth into a specific group; it also is a matter of consciousness, as is well known. Many people thought that, at the time of freedom, with political and economic growth, a secular Constitution, and the dissemination of knowledge and a scientific perspective, caste consciousness would fade or vanish, at least in public view. It is clear that caste awareness has not vanished, and some may also argue that it has deteriorated. Today, though, we have a very different kind of awareness, with jati taking precedence over varna. I don’t want to imply that jati consciousness or its concept is novel; rather, it has occupied a secondary position in depictions of the caste system.

The classes and sub-divisions of jati must have formed much of the experience of daily life. Peasants, artisans, and labourers may have given no attention to the broader order of life expressed by the idea of varna in the distant past, as well as in the recent past. Today, I’m focusing on India’s long academic history. Within that culture, the literati, those who thought on and wrote about what we now call caste, used the aphorism of varna rather than jati to represent it, whose modern predecessors use a distinct idiom when writing and speaking about it. 

Caste and Varna in Hinduism

Collective representations and the normative documents in which they are encoded shift in lockstep with the social situation on the ground and its morphological framework. The authority of past definitive texts is no longer valid today. Their clout has dwindled, but it hasn’t completely vanished. It’s worth remembering that the late Professor P. V. Kane included the Constitution of India in his monumental dissertation on Dharmashastra culture. The book’s view of Indian society can now be found in a wide range of texts, including parliamentary debates, legal rulings, political manifestos, essays, pamphlets, and a wide range of books.

About ancient and mediaeval sources, caste appears in many of these records, but it is referred to as jati rather than varna. It’s no simple feat to sift through this large and amorphous pool of data for compelling proof of a strong course of progress in the societal view of caste. That is not something that can be done by a single scholar on their own. I’m not sure I’ve made a proper start on a systemic investigation. The only point I’d like to make here is that the most important proof of the change in caste representations can be found in Indian languages, not English.

Only one of those languages, Bengali, is one in which I have some proficiency, and I’ve noticed for some time that Bengalis, especially the younger generation, rarely use the word varna in either speech or writing. Casual inquiries from those who speak Hindi as a first language seem to mean that something similar is occurring there as well. 

The jati social divide has been examined in terms of ‘cultural’ relationships, such as inter-dining, cross-marriage, purity-pollution, and other normative behaviours and perceptions. The fact that the majority of self-sufficient peasants, small-scale artisans, petty traders, and other middle castes in British India belonged to the high castes was ignored, as was the fact that the majority of landlords, large landowners, wholesale traders, moneylenders, and other powerful people belonged primarily to the high castes.

Colonial India and Castes

Those at the bottom of the growing colonial-capitalist social hierarchy (marginal peasants, landless workers, etc.) disproportionately belonged to the lowest castes and ‘tribes.’ In colonial India, the caste system had infiltrated the class system in this way. Without a doubt, all members of the high castes did not relate to the highest echelon of the increasing class system, just as all members of the middle castes did not relate to the middle echelon, and all members of the low castes didn’t relate to the lowest echelon of class structure. However, an examination of Hindu culture confirmed the connection between caste and capitalist social systems. Those who praised British rule in India, on the other hand, ideologically forced the belief that the caste system dominated the society. 

Since varna & caste are both polysemic words, there is a lot of overlap in their meanings. Many writers on the topic believed that the primary sense of varna was colour and that it originated in the contrast between light-skinned Aryas and dark-skinned indigenous people. Mrs Karve, on the other hand, correctly pointed out that the word had other meanings in early religious literature & grammatical works. It’s better to use the term varna in the context of hierarchical hierarchy and refer to four varnas as the four orders of society, as she suggests.

This will be in line with European usage, which referred to the social orders as the three tiers or estates. The use persisted in the English language until the late 1800s; Adam Smith, for example, used the term “orders” instead of “groups.” In reaction to significant developments in society, the principle of hierarchy was replaced by that of classes only in the nineteenth century. The definition of varna was generalised to a wide range of groups, according to N. K. Bose. ‘The classification into varna is not limited to human society; it is well established that even land or temples are graded as Brahmin, Kshatriya, and so on,’ he wrote.

He had previously focused on the division of the temple into varnas. ‘In essence, we should consider the varna scheme as a specific method for classifying different kinds of phenomena, starting with human society,’ he concluded. In other words, Hindu cosmology developed the preeminent social classification system. 

The concept of caste is also ancient, and it has been used to refer to jati for a long time, alongside the concept of varna. However, the two have always had very different connotations. The word jati refers to the system’s constituent groups, such as castes and populations, rather than the system as a whole. It didn’t have the same kind of foundation for social classification as Varna did. The jatis, unlike the varnas, were not considered to be conclusive in a formal way. We’ve known that the Dharmashastra names four varnas and claims that there isn’t a fifth.

You cannot make a comprehensive list of all the various jatis and claim categorically that none other than those mentioned remain. New jatis could still be included. New Varnas, however, cannot. For a long time, the word jati has probably been used more often than the term varna. It’s also a polysémie concept, and the central argument of this piece is that it can now be extended to fit a wide range of units. For example, it would be unusual to refer to Muslims as a varna or a part of a varna, when they are often referred to as a jati, and their subgroups, whether of sect or caste type, are often referred to as jatis.

Since there is no set number of jatis, the term may be used to refer to both a category and a subdivision of it. Whereas varna is concerned with order and classification, jati is concerned with birth and social identity conferred by birth. It is considered a natural kind whose participants share a common material, though the meaning of this varies based on how broadly the collective is conceived. Unlike groups, jatis are considered organic divisions that self-generate and reproduce. If anything, the word jati is more amorphous than its equivalent, varna.

It may refer to a small community, such as a sub-caste or sub-subcaste, or it can refer to the whole human race. Bengalis refer to the Sadgope or Kayastha jati, as well as the manabjati or manushyajati. In modern Bengali usage, the word can refer to Europeans, Germans, Americans of African descent, Muslims, Madrasis (South Indians), and Punjabis. The premise is that members of a caste share certain characteristics that give them a distinct identity that is present even though it is not apparent. Men and women can be referred to as jatis—strijati and purushjati, respectively—but not capitalists and jobs. 

Conclusion

In a shifting and unpredictable world, we should not overlook the moral power of the sense of protection that connection to caste & community provides to a person. In one of his later essays, a superb essay on the motley array of castes and cultures that build up the city of Calcutta, N. K. Bose referred to this. He represented the numerous castes among Bengali Hindus—Kayasthas, Kansaris, Namshudras—who lived side by side with Oriyas, Sikhs, Urdu-speaking Muslims, Bengali-speaking Muslims, Gujarati Baniyas, and many others, all of whom saw themselves as so many different jats and were seen as such by others.

Since there aren’t enough jobs to go around, everybody clings as hard as possible to the occupation for which his ethnic group is associated, and relies for monetary assistance on others who speak his language, his co-religionists, members of his caste, and fellow caste members.

The inability of civil society organisations to take hold and develop in independent India is reflected in the continued strength of the group identity. To mediate between the citizen and the larger society of which he is a member, civil society includes a combination of open and secular establishments, universities, hospitals, public corporations, technical bodies, and various types of voluntary associations. It was hoped that these transparent and secular bodies would give form and substance to governance in India while also driving back caste and group consciousness at the time of independence. They have fallen short of expectations, and it is no wonder that older types of cultural identities not only have held their position but have grown more assertive.