Harvard University Press Chapter Title: KEYWORD: CASTE Book Title: Lord Cornwallis Is Dead Book Subtitle: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India Book Author(s): NICO SLATE Published by: Harvard University Press. (2019) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvckq5m3.7 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Harvard University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Lord Cornwallis Is Dead This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Fri, 10 Apr 2020 08:35:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms PART II This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Fri, 10 Apr 2020 08:35:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Fri, 10 Apr 2020 08:35:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms KEYWORD CASTE The millions of untouchables in India might as well regard the negroes [sic]strug gle for equality and human dignity as their own strug gle. It may be that the American negro is fighting not only for himself and for his brethren in Amer i ca but for all the submerged castes, for all the blacks of the world whether they be in Amer i ca or in India. — “The Freedom March,” United Asia, 1963 BRAHAM LINCOLN STOOD on the banks of the Ganges surrounded Aby Brahmins. The crowd chanted, “He is a Brahmin, he is one of us!” A horde of Kshatriya warriors fought their way into the circle, clanging their swords and yelling, “He is a warrior; he is one of us!” The merchants, the Vaisyas, also tried to claim Lincoln as their own, as did the Sudras, “the mechanics and laborers.” But when Lincoln spoke, it was to the humblest that he turned: “the scavengers, the Pariahs, the outcasts, the men from the dust of the dust.” So imagined the Amer- ican poet Nicholas Vachel Lindsay in 1929 in a short story entitled, “A Vision, Called: ‘Lincoln in India.’ ” Lindsay’s vision is one of many color ful episodes in the history of Amer i ca’s obsession with caste in India, an obsession that was ultimately about caste in Amer i ca.1 In Lindsay’s story, next to India’s Brahmins stood “the rich from all the world who consider themselves Brahmans.” Thus, Lindsay suggested that class was a form of caste and Amer i ca was itself caste- ridden. Like Lindsay, This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Fri, 10 Apr 2020 08:35:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms many Americans used the word caste to decry the gap between the rich and the poor. Indians did likewise. Lala Lajpat Rai found something akin to caste in the American “industrial system,” which he compared to feu- dalism and branded “cruel and crushing and demoralizing.” “Amer i ca is doubly caste- ridden,” Lajpat Rai concluded in 1917. In addition to class, Lajpat Rai found caste in another pillar of American in equality: race. Like the comparison between caste and class, analogies between caste and race worked to expose Amer i ca’s own forms of caste. But the race / caste analogy could also be flipped to oppose caste in India.2 Less than a de cade after Abraham Lincoln was gunned down in Ford’s Theater, the anticaste activist Jotirao Phule deployed his knowledge of American racism to attack caste in India. Phule had been moved by reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “Anyone who reads this book,” he declared, “ will have to cry with shame in public like the Marwadi women drawing the pallu of their saree over their heads and wil l have to sigh and sob.” In 1873, Phule published his own book about slavery. At least, that was its title: Slavery. The subject of Phule’s book was better known by an- other name: caste. Phule dedicated the book “to the good peo ple of the United States” who had strug gled against slavery. He hoped “their noble example” would help spark “the emancipation” of India’s oppressed castes “from the trammels of Brahmin thraldom.” In his dedication, as well as in the title of his book, Phule equated slavery and caste. But his knowl- edge of slavery was limited. His gratitude to the “good peo ple of the United States” presented emancipation as the end of a happy story. He said nothing about the continued plight of African Americans. In the bold- ness of his vision as well as its limitations, Phule epitomized the long tradition of race / caste comparison.3 Most historical figures who juxtaposed race and caste were more in- terested in one than the other, and tended to oversimplify race or caste or both. Concerned with the po liti cal impact of race / caste analogies, they ignored what was lost in translating messy identities into the words race and caste and then again translating between these words. The danger of such a double translation is epitomized by the limitations of the word caste. From the Portuguese casta, the word caste conflates two separate forms of identity: varna and jati. Varna is the division of Hindu society into Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Sudras, a hierarchical system that excludes those once known as “untouchables” and now more commonly called Dalits (from the Marathi for “broken” or “crushed”) as well as the 102 Caste This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Fri, 10 Apr 2020 08:35:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms indigenous peoples known as “Tribals.” Jati refers to the hundreds of endogamous groups, sometimes associated with a specific occupation, that have come to be the primary social identifier for many Indians. While distinctions of varna and jati exist throughout the subcontinent, their meanings vary between regions and in relation to other social divisions such as class and gender.4 The complexity of caste complicates transnational comparisons. The same could be said of race. Both are power ful words that are applied to widely divergent social categories. At their best, comparisons between race and caste empowered tho se fighting to create more demo cratic and inclusive socie ties. But the complexities of the se identities did not pre- vent one- sided critics from denouncing the wrongs of others while ig- noring injustice closer to home. Unlike Jotirao Phule, who criticized racism and casteism, or Vachel Lindsay, who denounced “Brahmans” throughout the world, many Americans attacked caste without acknow- ledging the hierarchies of status and power that divided the United States as well.5 Boston Brahmins In his poem “Indian Superstition,” Ralph Waldo Emerson attacked caste and the vio lence with which he believed Brahmins maintained caste. “In the mid path to Honour’s glittering shrine,” Emerson wrote, “Stands the stern Bramin armed with plagues divine.” Lest his readers fail to under- stand the link between caste, vio lence, and the Brahmin, Emerson pro- vided a note: “The following paragraph alludes to the degradation of the lowest caste in India and the punishment which attends an attempt to alter their condition.” Emerson’s critique might have resonated with an anticaste activist like Jotirao Phule. But Emerson’s poem was less a sharp attack on caste in equality than a blunt assault on Hinduism in general. Rather than recognize that the United States had its own forms of caste, Emerson distinguished between the “degradation” of India and the egalitarianism of the West.6 Emerson’s attack on caste would prove rare among Transcendental- ists, most of whom romanticized caste. Even Emerson himself lat er referenced the Brahmin positively in his poem “Brahma.” But it was Tho- reau, the staunch critic of social hierarchies, who embraced caste with Caste 103 This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Fri, 10 Apr 2020 08:35:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the most surprising ardor. In January 1843, The Dial published Thoreau’s translation of passages from the Laws of Manu, a canonical text for many Hindus that is often credited with formalizing the idea of caste. The as- sociation between the Laws of Manu and caste is so strong that anticaste activists have publicly burned copies. But according to Thoreau The Laws of Manu expressed “what is deepest and most abiding in man.” “It belongs to the noontide of the day,” he wrote, “the midsummer of the year and after the snows have melted, and the waters evaporated in the spring, still its truth speaks freshly to our experience.” It is telling that Thoreau chose natu ral meta phors to express his esteem for the Laws of Manu. Praising the work as a force of nature allowed him to separate the text from its social and po liti cal significance and thus to ignore its embrace of caste hierarchy.7 Walt Whitman cut out and kept several of Thoreau’s passages on the Laws of Manu. Like Thoreau, Whitman approached caste not as a con temporary social real ity, but as a myth that might be deployed for literary ends.