Memoirs of fifties Akividu or Akiveedu (ఆకివీడు), and neighbouring villages. Educational, geographical, historical, literary, philosophical,
religious and social postings included. Copyright Raju (PD). (bondadaa@gmail.com)
NEW DELHI — It is one thing to have a theoretical knowledge of
caste. It is quite another to see it in action. A few months ago, I was given a
small, relatively benign glimpse into how this idea of spiritual purity
actually affects people’s lives in India.
I was in Varanasi, India’s most sacred city, conducting
research for a book about Brahmins, the priestly caste at the top of the Hindu
hierarchy. I was speaking at length to a young student who, like his Brahmin
ancestors, was steeped in the study of Sanskrit and the Veda. One day, we drove
together to the village where he came from. Our driver on this five-hour
journey was a voluble man from the neighboring state of Bihar. Along the way,
the driver, the student and I chatted amicably, but as we neared the Brahmin
village, our dynamics swiftly changed.
My father was Muslim, and since religion in India is
patrilineal, my presence in the Brahmin household should have been an
unspeakable defilement. But it wasn’t. I belong to India’s English-speaking
upper class and, in the eyes of my host, I was exempt from the rules of caste.
As we approached the village, he did make one small adjustment: He stopped
calling me by my conspicuously Muslim name, and rechristened me Nitish, a Hindu
name.
The visit was going well. But, as evening fell, and we
finished dinner with my Brahmin host and his parents, a terrific tension came
over the household. Unbeknown to me, the family had made an extraordinary
exception: They had allowed the driver, who was of a peasant caste called
Yadav, lower in the hierarchy, to eat with us, in their house, using their
plates. But now there was something they absolutely could not do.
“I can wash your plate,” my host whispered to me. Then,
gesturing to the driver, he said: “But I cannot wash his. If people in the
village find out, it will become difficult for us.” By the rules of caste, a
vessel that has come into contact with the saliva of another person is
contaminated. At that point, it cannot be handled by someone whose status is
higher than that of the eater. My host wanted me to make this clear to the
driver.
I was mortified. I had never had to tell anyone something so awful. I
froze. I neither had the courage to upset their laws — and get up and wash the
driver’s plate myself — nor the ability to tell him this terrible instruction.
My host must have sensed my consternation, and so he went to tell the driver
himself. The man crumbled at the mere suggestion of this transgression. “You
are like gods to me,” he said. “I would never dream of …” I couldn’t listen. I
walked away. A few moments later, I saw him washing his own plate in the light
of a naked bulb.
Ancient Indian society was divided into four varnas, or
categories: Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants or
traders) and Shudras (laborers). An unofficial fifth varna were the Dalits, or
untouchables, a group so low that its members are assigned jobs like cleaning
latrines, sweeping the streets, tanning hides and handling the remains of the
dead.
These ancient categories are not the same thing as the caste
system, but they undergird it. Caste is a religious notion of spiritual purity
that defines one’s function on earth. It comes alongside strict restrictions on
how a person can live and what a person can eat and whom they can marry. Caste,
or jati, as it is known in Hindi, is a bio-spiritual identity, which has
nothing to do with money or power, and offers no escape save for death or
renunciation. As Octavio Paz, the Mexican writer and onetime ambassador to
India, wrote caste is “the first and last reality.”
India’s last caste census was conducted in the early 1930s,
when the country was still part of the British Empire. It found that while
Brahmins constituted only some 6 percent of the population, the other lower
castes, even without Dalits and the tribal people, who are not part of the
caste system, came to as much as 40 percent.
In 2010, Vinod K. Jose, writing in The Caravan, conjectured
that the shape of society was roughly the same, and “as a block, the Shudras
and untouchables could reach 70 percent of the Indian population.” In 2011, the
government conducted a “socio-economic census,” but its findings on caste were
never released, in part because the issue is so explosive.
The modern Indian state has tried to correct the imbalances
that caste creates. The Constitution bans discrimination based on caste, and
the government has instituted quotas for low-caste people in government jobs
and at universities. But the wound is so deep that even when this form of
affirmative action throws up the odd success story, tragedy can quickly ensue.
The same week that my driver in Varanasi was forced to wash
his own plate, the issue of caste roared back to the forefront of Indian
political life.
Rohith Vemula, 26, was a Ph.D. student at the University of
Hyderabad, in southern India. He was active in student politics, and part of a
Dalit organization that frequently clashed with a Hindu nationalist group on
campus. In August 2015, he was accused of assaulting a member of the student
wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Hindu nationalist party that now
controls the government. The group wrote a letter, which eventually made its
way to the education minister, accusing Mr. Vemula of “casteist” and
“anti-national” activity. The next month, Mr. Vemula, along with four other
students, was suspended. In December, the university decided to uphold the
suspension.
In January, Mr. Vemula, who had once hoped to become a science
writer in the tradition of Carl Sagan, committed suicide, hanging himself from
a ceiling fan. The suicide inspired protests across the country and forced
Indians to once more confront this fundamental inequality.
Mr. Vemula should have been part of a national healing. Here
was a student from among the lowest castes, attending one of India’s most
prestigious universities. His story could have been about the country’s success
in putting this terrible history behind it; instead it became a testament to
its inability to do so. In a suicide note, he wrote that he could not move past
“the fatal accident” of his birth.
The 2014 election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his
B.J.P. emboldened every variety of Hindu nationalist group. The primary aim of
these groups is an aggressive form of nationalism. But there is a contradiction
at the heart of this ideology: As Mr. Paz wrote in 1995, the idea of the nation
itself is “incompatible with the institution of caste.” It was not possible to
want everyone to be homogeneous while at the same time believing them to be
fundamentally unequal.
The contradiction presented by caste and nationalism was never
clearer than in the searing
images that emerged from Mr. Modi’s own home state, Gujarat, in July. They
showed Dalit boys being stripped and beaten with iron rods. They were accused
of killing a sacred Indian cow. But they claimed they were only skinning a cow
that was already dead, work that is typically reserved for people of low caste.
The irony could not have been more stark: It was caste on one hand that had
forced this occupation upon them, and it was caste that was degrading them further.
Modernity should be the natural enemy of caste. And, in many
ways, it is. Urban life, apartment buildings, restaurants — even something as
simple as municipal water and housing — have the power to erase the
prohibitions under which caste functions. Democracy, too, is an enemy of caste:
The low-caste groups form a powerful voting bloc, and so politicians are
obliged to be responsive to them. But by upsetting hierarchies, modernity can
also exacerbate old tensions. It can make the higher castes, whose numbers are
small, insecure about their place in the world and drive them to reinforce it.
The spread of modernity in India has certainly undermined
caste, but it has also made the need to assert it more vehement. And the
unfolding story in India is not one about the disappearance of caste, but
rather of its resilience. Brahmins still have an outsize presence in
intellectual life; the armed forces are still dominated by the martial castes;
a majority of rich businessmen and industrialists are still of the mercantile
castes; the lower castes still do the least desirable jobs.
In the cloistered, English-speaking world where I grew up,
caste seemed hardly to exist. As a child in Delhi, I could no more tell a
Brahmin name like Mishra or Sharma from any other. And even if I could, I would
not have held it in regard. Our only category was class, and it was determined
by privilege, education and how well one spoke English. But there are some
categories so deep that they hold without needing to be enforced. What I didn’t
realize was that in one very important respect, caste did exist among us:
because the lowest castes were not represented.
For the last two years, I have been speaking with a Brahmin
from Bengal, a philosopher and a teacher of ancient logic, a man conversant
with both Eastern and Western intellectual traditions. I admire him in many
ways — his immense learning, his defense of tradition in the face of Western
influence — but when I questioned him about the prohibitions of caste he gave
me an answer that turned my stomach.
“If a person is suffering from a communicable disease, you
would not let him touch your utensils,” he said. “You have this one idea of
contamination, but you refuse to accept that there might be certain spiritual
conditions …” His voice trailed off. He seemed to know that he had lost me. As
if wanting to clear the air, he said: “You have to understand that modern
European culture is based on the idea that all men are born equal, and later
become differentiated. The Indian idea is different. We believe that men are
born unequal, but we are all — Brahmin, sage, cobbler, outcaste — heading
toward the same destiny.”
It was a valiant attempt at a defense, but in the end absurd.
It would mean that millions of lower-caste Indians, like Rohith Vemula, had to
forfeit the aspirations of this life in exchange for the promise of some
ultimate destiny, many lifetimes away, in which all differences would be
obliterated.
Aatish Taseer is a contributing opinion writer and the author, most
recently, of the novel “The Way Things Were.”
This
engrossing study identifies secrecy as a ‘very British disease’, exploring how,
as the empire came to an end, government officials burned the records of
imperial rule
British
colonial secretary Iain Macleod (centre left, holding hat) attends a reception
in Rurungu, Kenya, in 1959. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images
Thursday
6 October 2016 15.00 BST Last modified on Saturday 8 October 2016 00.05 BST
Britain’s
retreat from empire is remembered in a popular iconography that contains only a
little violence. Gandhi goes on hunger strikes and performs acts of
passive resistance; the Suez debacle calls time on our pretensions as a world
power; Macmillan heralds the wind of change in Africa. All
is done and dusted in the space of 15 years. For a postwar generation like
mine, too young for national service and a troopship to the colonies, most of
it happened inside the local Regal or Odeon. Movietone footage would show
Princess X or Prince Y standing on a podium to witness a ceremony of national
independence, smiling at the native dancers as fireworks explode overhead. This
book supplies a more troubling image: as the sun sets on the greatest empire
the world has ever seen, long columns of smoke fill the tropical skies. In a thousand
bonfires, Britain is burning the historical evidence.
At first,
the process was rather carefree. When Britain quit India in 1947,
a colonial official noted that “the press greatly enjoyed themselves with
the pall of smoke which hung over Delhi with the mass destruction of
documents”. By the time of Malayan independence in 1957, the authorities were
learning discretion. British soldiers drove cratefuls of papers in a civilian
truck from the colony’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, to what an administrator
referred to as “the Navy’s splendid incinerator” in Singapore. This 220‑mile
journey to a secret burning exemplified the “considerable pains” taken by the
colony “to avoid exacerbating relationships between the British government and
those Malayans who might not have been so understanding”. Four years later, in
1961, the colonial secretary Iain Macleod laid down some groundrules for British
territories preparing for independence. No documents should be handed over to
the successor regime that might embarrass Her Majesty’s Government or its
police, military and public servants; or that might compromise its sources of
intelligence or be used “unethically” by the country’s new government.
Bonfires
alone were too blunt a method of concealment. A newly liberated country might
wonder why it inherited so few archives, while Britain might need to retain,
for sentimental or other reasons, documents that in the wrong hands could
damage its interests. The Colonial Office devised a system known as
“Operation Legacy” that worked on the principle of parallel registries.
Reliable civil servants, which in the government’s eyes meant only those who were
“British subjects of European descent”, were given charge of identifying and
collecting all “sensitive” documents and passing them up the bureaucratic
chain. This meant that when the moment of independence came, if not before,
they could either be destroyed on site or removed (“migrated” became the
official term) to the UK. As to the so-called “Legacy” files that the colony’s
new government would inherit, it was important that they gave an impression of
completeness, either by creating false documents to replace those that had been
weeded out or by making sure there was no reference to them in the files
that remained.
This
purging of the record happened across the world, in British Guiana, Aden, Malta, North Borneo,
Belize, the West Indies, Kenya, Uganda – wherever Britain ruled. In the words
of Ian Cobain, it was a subversion of the Public Record Acts on an industrial
scale, involving hundreds if not thousands of colonial officials, as well as
MI5 and Special Branch officers and men and women from army, navy and air
force. All of them, whether they knew it or not, were breaking a legal
obligation to preserve important official papers for the historical record, in
the expectation that most would eventually be declassified. The British
government took extraordinary measures to make sure that the fate of these
papers remained a secret, whether they had been “migrated” to the UK or
destroyed abroad.
According
to official instruction, the waste left by bonfires “should be reduced to
ash and the ashes broken up”. If burning was thought to be too difficult or
unsuitable, then the sea offered an alternative. Officials in Kenya were told
that documents could be “packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and
current-free waters at maximum practicable distance from the coast”.
Governor
general Lord Mountbatten salutes India’s National flag alongside his wife,
Edwina, and prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru during India’s first Independence Day
celebrations in New Delhi, 1947. Photograph: AP
Most of
the files that survived – the concealed “migrated archive” – found
their way to Hanslope Park, a country estate just off the M1 near Milton
Keynes, where the Foreign Office maintained an enormous cache of documents
under the title “Special Collections”. By Cobain’s reckoning, 15 miles of
floor-to-ceiling shelving was packed with files that dated from the 17th
century to the cold war and the Troubles in Northern Ireland –
files so numerous that their catalogue entries measured the metres of shelf
space they occupied. Officially, none of these documents existed.
Some
discreet research by the Foreign Office in 1979 showed that only two (Kenya
and Malta) of 37 former colonies were aware that their annals had been secreted
in Britain or destroyed. The truth, so far as we now know it, emerged only
because personal injury lawyers and the American historian Caroline Elkins
pursued the evidence of a far crueller British response to Kenya’s Mau Mau
insurgency than the available public records suggested. In 2011, the FO finally
conceded that it had somehow “overlooked” its secret documentary hoard at
Hanslope Park, where the Kenyan files alone took up 60 metres of shelving. Two
years later more than 5,000 Kenyan claimants received £19.9m
in compensation and expressions of regret from the then foreign secretary William Hague. “We believe there should be a
debate about the past,” said an FO official. “It is an enduring feature of our
democracy that we are willing to learn from our history.” But that particular
lesson had never been intended.
Why were
British governments so determined to obscure and bowdlerise their country’s
colonial record? Some reasons are understandable: to spare individuals from
embarrassment or prosecution; to help secure the loyalty of successor regimes
during the commercial, military and political competition of the cold war. But
Cobain goes further: Operation Legacy was intended to ensure that “the British
way of doing things” would be remembered with “fondness and respect” – that the
conduct of its imperial retreat would be seen as exemplary. To go to such lengths
of deception for something as intangible and imponderable as a place in
history’s good books may seem unlikely, but it was surely for these reasons,
rather than any security concern, that, for example, British officialdom asked
its servants to destroy or return to Britain any papers that “might be
interpreted as showing religious intolerance on the part of HMG” as well as
“all papers which might be interpreted as showing racial discrimination against
Africans (or Negros [sic] in the USA)”.
There is
something else. We like secrets. Cobain recounts the history of British
state secrecy from 1250, when the members of England’s Privy Council first
swore to keep their proceedings private. The oath has remained unchanged for
the nearly 800 years since, while secrecy as a habit has grown via legislation
(particularly the Official Secrets Act of 1911)
and the confidentiality clauses contained in the humblest contract
of employment. Cobain refers to it as “a very British disease”, and
while he makes no comparison with other modern democracies – it would have been
helpful to know, for example, how seriously the French state takes the duty of
transparency – his conclusion that government secrecy in Britain is not “just
an occasional necessity but the fiercely protected norm” is hard to refute.
In the
1950s, the distinguished American sociologist Edward Shils decided that the
explanation lay with a ruling class that was “unequalled in secretiveness
and taciturnity”, whose members were so close and comfortable with one another
that they had little fear of hidden secrets. Cobain largely supports this view.
Class deference combined with a relatively benign and trusting view of the
state’s behaviour may explain “why the peculiarly uncommunicative nature of the
British state does not provoke greater resentment and unease among the British
public and media”.
Edward Snowden is a case in point. When his
disclosures about the UK and US governments’ practice of mass electronic
surveillance were published (first in the Guardian) in 2013, the reaction in
Britain was mild compared with the outrage expressed in many other countries.
Inter-newspaper jealousies, the conservatism of the BBC,
the rightwing nature of the British press: all these may have played a part in
muting our concern. But it may also be that as a society we continue to believe
in secrets and the people who make and guard them, despite everything Cobain
reveals in this engrossing book.
