TRADITIONAL CASTE EQUATIONS LOSING THEIR GRIP ON SOCIETY
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(Andre Beteille is a great scholar and researcher on the social issues, chiefly of India. Following is his speech as reported in the Times of India dated 30-12-2011.
What do our readers think of his views expressed here? Please respond.
We shall be happy to publish them. - Editor)
“New caste-free occupations are emerging rapidly, driven by technology, economic growth and the gradually weakening hold of traditional caste equations over society”, eminent sociologist Andre Betelle said in Chennai on 29th December.
“But in the domain of election politics, the caste factors are all important with television news breaks sensationalizing every incident in villages, encouraging politicians to capitalize on caste vote banks”,. he said.
While the emergence of computer programmers and software professionals is liberating people from the caste matrix, on the other side, TV channels show caste conflicts, arising out of unequal access to education and employment, to be on the rise, he said, delivering the annual Besant Memorial Lecture on ‘Caste in Contemporary India.’
The caste obsession is now seen more in cities as it is linked to reservations in jobs and education, he noted. “On the social side, inter-caste marriages involving subcastes within communities are increasing with removal of legal impediments over rights to property”, he said, adding, “young men are much more timid in these matters than young women.”
“In most parts of India, no party can afford not to take caste factors into account but while there is identity politics in play inother countries, such as Irish-Italian-Jewish clout in New York city, what is unique to India is the scale of it,” pointed out Beteille, who is professor emeritus of sociology at Delhi University and a Padma Bhushan awardee.
He recalled that at the 1957 Indian Science Congress Prof.M.N.Srinivas rang the first alarm bell arguing that democracy would give a new lease of life to caste, evoking censure from economists then who believed that caste as they understood it in the tradition ‘Chaturvarna system’ of Brahmin-Kshatriya-Vaisya-Shudra would go away as the country modernized.
However, over the years while the ‘Varna’ scheme that determined choice of professions based on birth had “become obsolete”, “jatis”, communities of sub-castes within the four classes. had mushroomed independent of the traditional religious groups.
In India, Beteille said, there could be “no simple overview” of the caste system as the “jati dynamics”, which had transformed the ethnographic map, evolved differently in various states challenging the egalitarian constitutional provisions.
“Now the contemporary jati language of social justice is about forward, backward and more forward and more backward and marriages between adjacent castes and sub-castes are on the rise,” he noted.
