Philological Angst

RUKMINI BHAYA NAIR (DELHI) Philological Angst Or How the Cognitive Categories of Census, Caste and Race Still Inform the Narrative of 21st Century India The terms ‘race’, ‘caste’ and ‘census’ constituted, so to speak, an unholy trinity in Indian colonial annals. The insight that the confl ation of these concepts may thus have contributed to an almost indelible conceptualization of ‘Indianness’ is by no means new. Indeed, it is by now almost a truism to assert that the fl uid categories of caste in the various regions of India were ruthlessly homogenized by the strategic instruments of the ‘civilizing mission’ of colonialism such as census counts.1 Fur- ther, it has been reiterated that naming and codifi cation were part of an apparatus of conquest whereby evidence of territorial ownership could be established ‘by writ’.2 Finally, the question as to whether caste and race are epistemological cousins in that both led to similar forms of social stratifi cation pace Weber and Durkheim3 remains to this day a standard one on almost all university examinations in the sociology of South Asia, indicating that these concepts are somehow ‘naturally’ entangled. Whereas historical accounts tend to emphasize the hegemonic perspec- tive of the colonizers and sociological explanations stress class and other structures of stratifi cation that underwrite the intertwined narratives of ‘caste’ and ‘race’ in India and the West, there have, however, been relatively few studies that have in- vestigated the philological origins of caste and its racial penumbra in 19th century colonial texts and discourse. In this essay, I suggest that the confusing semantic identifi cations effected in colonial/pre-Independence India between ‘race’ and ‘caste’ on the one hand and the ‘racial’ distinction adumbrated between the ‘Aryan’ North and the ‘Dravidian’ South on the other still continue to haunt Indians today. What, then, were the epistemological contours of the crucial conceptual category of race in 19th century India? How were its expressions infl ected so as to contribute to foundational im- ages of ‘self’ and ‘other’ that seem diffi cult to erase from our collective conscious- ness even in the present mordantly self-refl exive postcolonial times? As we know, the English word ‘race’, already laden with its own heavy etymological burdens of hate, fear and suppressed desire4 was from the 18th century onwards, following the philologically motivated ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit announced by William Jones in 1789, roughly correlated with the notion of ‘caste’ which in turn functioned as the rough translational equivalent of the haute Sanskrit words jati and varna. Ironi- 1 Cf. Appadurai 1983, Cohn 1984, Kaviraj 1993. 2 Cf. Said 1978, Dirks 2001, Harvey 2001. 3 Cf. Berreman 1972, Bottero 1995. 4 Cf. Young 1995, Nair 2002. 56 RUKMINI BHAYA NAIR cally but not surprisingly, the deep psychological confl ict that ensued from these ambivalent lexical choices was illustrated in the idiom of the colonized as much as that of the colonizers. Just as politically explosive a term at the beginning of the 19th century as it now is at the start of the 21st, the word ‘race’, it turns out, was used with abandon not just by the colonial administration in India but by several prominent leaders of the Indian nationalist movement. From Rabindranath Tagore, poet of burnished Brahmin ancestry, to B.R. Ambedkar, chief framer of the Indian Constitution and unquestioned leader of the ‘untouchable’ castes, the mysterious ‘problem of race’ was identifi ed early as perhaps India’s most pernicious social evil. Intriguingly, though, the word ‘race’, as it was used by both Tagore and Ambedkar, primarily served to address not so much the visible difference between ‘white men’ and oth- ers but the ineffable, internalized differences between the manifold castes of India. Tagore, for example, proudly defended the ancient practice of caste on the Western proscenium as India’s unique solution to the race issue while simultaneously con- demning in local/national forums the shameful epistemic as well as physical vio- lence infl icted by caste hostility.5 In a similar vein, Ambedkar, who also tended to use the words ‘race’ and ‘caste’ as roughly synonymous, wrote that it was unfair to demand of the majority of the Indian population, who were Hindus by birth, that they give up a belief in caste and its ritual rules of embodied pollution because that would amount to asking them to give up their religion.6 But this stark insight put Ambedkar, who himself belonged to the community of Dalit (meaning ‘crushed/oppressed’) ‘broken men’, in a moral cleft stick. The various ‘depressed’ castes and tribes had to be faithfully listed in the Constitution so that they could be ‘assisted’ to ‘rise’ but this very move would do no less than reify and perpetuate the caste hierarchy. And prophetically enough, the ‘races’ of India have grown apace since Ambedkar’s time and many ‘backward classes’ added to the original Constitutional list. The supreme irony in fact is that, although caste was deliberately not included as a category of self-classifi cation in any offi cial Indian census since India became independent in 1947, it has now – as recently as in 2011 – been brought back into the census framework. An ongoing country-wide survey on the caste affi liations of every Indian is currently in progress. Why has caste come back into the picture so vividly today in the world’s largest democracy – if indeed it ever went away? In the rest of this paper, I will attempt to answer this question by following a ‘road less travelled’ in refl ections on caste in India – namely, I shall pursue a semantic route towards understanding the interplay of caste distinctions and racial categori- zations on the basis of a few critical texts pertaining to 19th and early 20th century India. A cautionary note, though: in this paper, ‘19th century India’ sometimes inhab- its a very longue durée, spiralling back at times to 4th century Athens and sometime 5 Cf. Tagore 1917. 6 Cf. Rodrigues 2002..

Load more