Epistemology is a very essential part of the
rule of any modern state. By bestowing upon a certain group of people the
responsibility to administer a society, that group is immediately given the
power to acquire knowledge about the society. As the popular quote goes,
“knowledge is power”, it is only through knowledge that the state gets the
power to rule. However, this same quote could be reframed and understood as
power creates knowledge. ‘Knowledge’ is a relative term, to each its own.
However, the powerful institutionalize knowledge and escalate it to the stature
of ‘truth’. Then perhaps we can say that the state being the most powerful
institution of society has the ability to create knowledge and institutionalise
it as the ultimate truth.
By the 17th and 18th
centuries, in European countries, this quest for knowledge had moved outside
the state borders and into stranger lands. The impression was that the knowledge
of more lands would result in the acquisition of more power to rule. In the
words of Nicholas Dirks, “colonialism was all about knowledge”.
However, when it came to ruling the stranger lands, Europeans had to face two
kinds of struggle in the process of knowledge acquisition: the struggle between
the ruler and the ruled and the struggle between the outsider and the insider. But
in the course of colonial knowledge acquisition and rule, it was realised that
the distinction between the ruler and the ruled; outsider and insider, had
become watery. The outsider could acquire knowledge about the insider only with
the help of the already established powerful from among the insiders. What
colonialism left behind was an instrumental and established system of knowledge
which the powerful and the powerless among the natives had to deal with in
their infantile attempts at rebuilding the state.
The above comments come from my experience of
being an Indian citizen and hence I would not want to extend the same logic to
all other countries that had experienced European colonisation. In India
though, the knowledge system left behind by the British has played a
significant role in determining the governing strategies. Our system of law and
order, education, civil services, is very much based upon the knowledge that
the British acquired and left behind. Immediately after independence, the new
government had to bring together under one banner, a large number of
linguistic, ethnic, cultural and social groups. The only thing common to all
these groups was the British rule and so the newly formed Indian government’s
immediate response was to fall back upon the detailed systemic knowledge and administrative
tactics left behind by the colonial state.
This was hardly a surprise since as has been
emphasised again and again by scholars, India is a colonial project. However,
this not to suggest that the knowledge system left behind by the colonisers was
a creation out of the whims and fancies of the colonisers complemented by
certain modern techniques. The British were strongly aided by the dominant
section of Indian society in creating this knowledge base. In the post independence
period too, it was the powerful from among the colonised that created the
administrative structure of India. Therefore, instead of calling India a
colonial project, I would call it a residue of power relations which acquired
and continues to acquire sanction from the colonial past.
In my paper, I will locate one aspect of our
administrative system, that is the reservation system and elaborate upon how it
is based upon the epistemology left behind by the British rule and how it was
understood and utilised by Indians in the post independence period. Finally I
will throw light upon how contemporary Indian society grapples with the
paradoxes and contradictions posed by the reservation system.
At the initial period of British colonial
rule, India was more of an economic project. The East India Company was mainly
interested in deriving economic benefits and hence the first efforts at
analysing Indian society were done with the motive of revenue collection.
Efforts were made to map and standardize agrarian lands all over India. (Appadurai,
1993) (Cohn, 1987). Large scale efforts were also made to enumerate the
population of the various regions (Cohn, 1987).
This process of enumeration had a particular
value of ‘essentializing’ (Appadurai, 1993) and ‘objectification’ (Cohn, 1987)
attached to it. By attaching numbers and values to the landscape of India, the
colonizers were able to instrumentalize their policies. The colonial landscape
was made into an object onto which various methodologies could be experimented.
Numbers also fulfilled the purpose of ‘disciplining’ (Appadurai, 1993) both,
natives and the lower level colonial officials. Most importantly however,
enumeration helped in rationalising, making scientific the exoticism of the
colonized landscape which baffled the colonisers.
However, it would be wrong to say that
enumeration was a practise that colonisers were making use of for the first
time in India. By the nineteenth century, statistics had become an important
scientific tool in Europe. (Porter, 1986). The use of statistical tools of the
physical sciences to understand and regulate human and social sciences was
being propagated by scholars like Adolphe Quetlet (Porter, 1986). Therefore, it
should hardly come as surprise that the colonisers were making use of similar
techniques in which they had been trained at home, to understand the outside
world. However, at home, statistical data collection did not have the same sort
of ‘justifying’ and ‘disciplining’ role attached to it.
It was during this process of enumeration for
the sake of revenue collection that the colonial officials realised that a
religious and social order was present in Indian society and that in order to
efficiently map out the physical and human landscape of India, they had to take
into consideration this religious and social order. In these earliest censuses,
the foremost problems faced by the colonial officials was the fact that
economic categories of agriculturalist, labourers and so on were over lapping
with social categories of caste. (Cohn, 1987). However, the complication was
that there was no uniformity in the various regions with regard to the
overlapping of occupational and caste orders. Thus the tendency among data
collectors was to “report the numbers in a particular caste as if all members
of the caste followed the culturally assumed occupation, even though it was
frequently known that not all Brahmans worked as priests and not all Rajputs
were warriors and landlords” (Cohn, 1987; pp. 238).
It was decided that the first modern census
recording the entire population of India would be held in the 1840s. However,
the revolt of 1857 was a major interference in the Company administration of
India. The revolt of 1857 strengthened the view that a distinct religious and
social order pervaded all of Indian society. Further, after the revolt, the
administration of the Indian subcontinent passed from the hands of the East
India Company officials on to the British Crown. The colonial rule in India can
be neatly divided between the pre and post 1857 period. Before 1857, India was
mainly an economic concern. Once the Crown took over the administration, it
transformed into a political project. The most distinct transformation that
took place during this period was the increased intrusion of the British
government into the Indian social life, not to regulate and transform, but to
gather information. It was realised that for better and undisturbed
administration, a more detailed knowledge of Indian social life was required.
Another transformation during this period was the decision that a certain
dominant section of Indian society has to be consulted and also trained in
western knowledge system to serve British interests. T.B. Macaulay’s famous
minute on Education (1935) had stated the following
it is
impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of
the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be
interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons,
Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and
in intellect. ( Macaulay’s “Minute upon Education”).
This aspect of
the Minute was realised more rigorously after the mutiny of 1857.
The first
decennial census was announced to take place in 1871 and caste was made to be
the basis of this census. The structuring of the census data collection had two
levels. In the first stage the supervisors collected the data and then the
enumerators put them together on the basis of the information provided by the
supervisors. The supervisors generally consisted of the landed elites of the
region (Cohn, 1987). When the officials faced the problem of classifying and
ranking the castes, they decided to consult the learned section of the Indian
population. The learned section of the Indian population almost exclusively
consisted of the Brahmans. They pointed out to texts and scriptures which they
believed to be essential to the Hindu religious order and emphasised upon the
hierarchy embedded in the Hindu social structure. This hierarchy consisted of
four broad levels and included in them were several intermediate levels.
At this, stage
I wish to emphasise upon the fact that the Hindu religious system is unlike
other known religions of the world. Several theologians have refrained from
calling it a religion and preferred to use the phrase ‘a way of life’ instead.
The texts and scriptures which the Brahmans pointed out to the colonial
officials were essential to the Brahmanical order rather than Hinduism.
However, Brahmans being the learned and socially dominant section of society in
collaboration with the superior colonial rulers institutionalised this
knowledge system of the Brahmans and made the Hindu religious order along with
its embedded forms of hierarchy the essential and all pervasive truth about
Indian society. Such institutionalisation served the interests of both the
colonial officials and the dominant section of Indian society. By understanding
the Brahmanical order to be the pervasive force binding Indian society, the
Brahmans could emphasize and maintain their status quo. The colonisers on the
other hand, made a derivation out of it which helped them justify their rule. They came to the conclusion that Indians were
enslaved to caste cantered values and that they did not have the rationale
required for modern administration ( Bayly, 1999, pp. 99).
The 1901 decennial census was conducted under
the efforts of H.H. Risley. He did not just categorize castes, he also ranked
them in the census and sent them out to various educated Indians “to express
opinion on the correctness of the arrangement” (Cohn, 1987, pp. 246). He
received large number of responses pointing out to the actual status of their
own castes. Most of them referred to sacred texts and legends, learned pundits
and Sanskrit scholars, which were again Brahmanical sources to corroborate the
changes in ranks they were demanding.
Risley was best known for incorporating
ethnography in caste data collections. By mid nineteenth century, ethnography
as a social science had established itself all over the world. Risley argued
that the caste system was based on race and that the higher castes had evolved
out of the ‘Aryan race’ and therefore had descended from the same racial stock
as the white Europeans (Bayly, 1999, pp. 129). Such an understanding of caste
was worrying since it taught that only the higher castes had the intellect,
similar to the Europeans, to govern Indian society. Therefore, they were once
again reinforcing the power system already existent in Indian society and
giving it an institutional sanction like never before.
These findings on caste were utilised for
purposes like military recruitment and also for recruitment of agricultural
labourers by colonizers. Characteristics associated with a certain caste were
assumed to be true for all members of that caste. Apart from the religious
texts and scriptures cited by the Brahmans, even proverbial speech by the
higher castes and stereotypes assigned to different castes in these speeches
were taken to be true and utilised in constructing a caste discourse (Raheja,
1996).
Three aspects of the census data collection
needs to be emphasised. Firstly, the British were not using census for the
first time in India. Census as a means of data recording had become popular in
Europe by this time. However, the important differences were that (i) the basis
of British data collection was territorial and occupational rather than ethnic
or racial, (ii) in England, the census was linked to the politics of
representation, and (iii) in England, the data collection was reserved for the
social margins, the poor, the criminals, the lunatics etc. In the colonies, the
entire population was brought under such data collection as they were thought
to be different (Appadurai, 1993, pp. 317). Secondly, the British were not at
all the first ones to collect data in India. The subcontinent had been ruled
over by outsiders before as well, the most recent being the Mughals. In fact a
large number of practices associated with the British census were borrowed from
the Mughal rulers. However, the important difference here is the
comprehensiveness of the British census reports. Never before had the entire
population of the Indian subcontinent brought under such extensive data
collection and never before had these findings been associated with
administration and recruitment. (Bayly, 1999) (Appadurai, 1993) The Mughal
rulers used data collection for land recording and revenue purposes.
Thirdly, and most importantly, it needs to be
emphasized that caste was never the creation of the British census data recording.
Social categorisation based on caste was definitely a reality in the Indian
subcontinent and hierarchies based on caste were a distinct feature of ancient
Indian texts and scriptures. However, the census did two things. Firstly, it
enlivened the caste spirit which was henceforth a dormant factor in Indian
social life. By calling on to people to name their caste and their sub caste
and then attaching social characteristics and rankings to these castes, the
people of India were made most aware of their place in society being based upon
their rank in the caste hierarchy. (Cohn, 1997) Secondly, it reinforced the
power of the dominant and learned sections of society, in particular the
Brahmans, by holding up their knowledge system as the pervasive truth about
India.
There was another transformation that the
census generated. While it gave a certain degree of institutionalised power to
the higher castes, the census operations also gave a democratic tendency to be
adopted by the lower castes, which was hitherto not possible in the traditional
and dormant nature of the caste system. ( Ahmad, 1971) By asking the people to
name their castes and by ranking them on the basis of responses from the Indian
population, the census operations opened the doors to the lower castes to
rigorously plead for a higher social standing. By early twentieth century, a
large number of caste associations came to dominate the Indian subcontinent. When
the Montague Chelmsford reforms (1918) were issued for India, these caste
associations realised the need to make their voices be heard. The Montague
Chelmsford reforms “recognised India to be potentially a dominion and
established the British government in India to a policy of establishing
self-government on the British model”. (Ahmad, 1971, pp. 188) Afraid that this
transfer of power might take into consideration exclusively the voices of the
higher castes, the lower castes decided that they need to come together demand
status of a separate community with separate political powers. Dr. B.R.
Ambedkar was the foremost pioneer of separate political representation for the
lower castes. His vociferous efforts finally culminated in the allotment of
separate electorates for the lower castes, now grouped under the name
“Scheduled Tribes”, in the Government of India Act (1935).
By mid twentieth century therefore, while the
country was reeking with nationalism and demand for independence, a political
power struggle was also coming to the fore in the form of the hitherto
powerless strata of society demanding more recognition in the Republic that was
soon to be born. The acquisition of separate electorates for the lower castes
was not a smooth process. The demand was contested on several grounds, the most
prominent being that which was laid out by Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi was also an
ardent sympathiser of the lower castes. However, he suggested that Hinduism
needs to be reformed from within and that by granting separate representation
to lower castes, the upper castes would lose the motivation to reform the
inbuilt injustices in the Hindu social order. While Ambedkar’s demand for
separate electorates was met in the 1935 Act, and it did indeed bring to light
a lot of injustices meted out to the lower castes, sixty-seven years post
independence, and despite a number of other affirmative programs established
for the upliftment of the Schedules Castes, India continues to struggle within
caste politics, now of a different nature. N. Jayaram very correctly describes
the situation in the following words:
It appears that India is caught in the
whirlpool of caste: the more it seeks to overcome caste through caste based
compensatory discrimination, the more it gets entrenched in caste. (Jayaram, 2011,
pp. 85)
As the Tricolour waved goodbye to the British
Crown, the makers of modern India came to the realisation that the Constitution
of India has to be formulated which gave visibility to the diversity within the
country and yet levelled them out into equality. As I had mentioned in the
beginning of the paper, the only thing common to these diverse ethnic,
linguistic, religious and social groups was the British colonial rule. Hence
going back to the epistemology left behind by the British government was the
best compromise formula available to the makers of modern India.
Unlike
Pakistan, India decided that it would not proclaim any one religion as the
national religion. The Constitution of India was framed around the ‘fundamental
rights of citizenship’. ( Jayaram, 2011) (Bayly, 1999). Thus, rights were to
inhere in an individual rather than any ethno-religious community. The
Constitution also promised to transform India into a casteless society. The Preamble of the Indian constitution proudly
claims India to be secular Republic.
Paradoxically, this same secular constitution
does require state agencies to recognise the existence of caste, through
provisions for the advancements of the Scheduled castes and tribes. Firstly,
articles 15 and 17 of the constitution endorse the view of caste as a structure
of corporate ‘disability’ which subjugates the ‘unclean’ or the ‘untouchable’
to forms of physical exclusion. (Bayly, 1999, pp. 268). Article 17 abolishes
untouchability. Secondly, the much debated Article 46 of the Constitution says
the following:
The State shall promote with special care the
educational and economic interests of the weaker sections of the people, and in
particular, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and shall protect them
from social injustice and all forms of exploitation. (Bayly, pp. 269)
Moreover, the Constitution also refers to an
open-ended category of socially and economically backward classes of India who
need to be uplifted.
While the Constitution abolished the practise
of any kind of injustice against the lower castes, it also gave special
benefits to them in the form of reserved seats in public employment and
privileged access to higher education. Articles 330 and 332 make special benefits
to these groups in forms of separate electoral provision. In 1951 when the
reservation privileges were being decided, the census lists were utilised and
the State came to the conclusion that 55.3 million people, that is, 20% of
India’s population would be brought under reserved categories. However, state
level politicians soon started demanding higher percentage to be included as
the lower castes had become an important vote bank and by 1960s, reservations
were being demanded for as much as 50-90% of the country’s population (Bayly,
1999). As of 2014, the total percentage
of seats in any government service reserved for the Scheduled Castes, Tribes
and the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) is 49.5%.
Yet despite these privileges, the State also
had to adhere to the promise of making India a casteless society and hence, the
use of caste as basis for census was abolished in 1951. However, since these
special privileges were given on the basis of caste, the recognition of which
groups were in need was very difficult. Instead of means-testing, the State was
expected to decide which castes were in need of special benefits. Therefore,
most of the times they went back to the archives left behind by the Colonial
census documentation in order to reach this conclusion. (Bayly, pp. 274). This
way, even though caste was abolished in the Constitution, the caste spirit was
kept alive by referring to the Colonial understanding of caste.
Another problem that these affirmative
programmes gave rise to was the fact that it was in a way ignoring the other
religious minorities of India. Since caste hierarchies as understood by
colonial officials in collaboration with the learned elite, in particular the
Brahmans, was deemed to be a feature of the Hindu order exclusively, the special
privileges given to them in the Constitution of India, gave benefits to the
Hindus. On the other hand, while keeping up with the secular spirit of the
Constitution, they ignored the other religious minorities like the Muslims,
Christians, Sikhs etc. Apart from creating religious antagonisms, these caste
based privileges promoted the view that the other religious minorities of India
were not worthy of state protection.
There can be no doubt that these privileges
did indeed throw light upon the social problems which were part and parcel of
Indian social life. In the absence of modern democratic institutions, the lower
castes had remained suppressed and even when they did raise their voices, due
to lack of any institutional mechanism, the voices remained unheard. The
Census, by virtue of its systematic, institutional mechanism could give an
opportunity to the lower castes to demand equality and the doors for equality
were eventually opened for them.
However, in the long run, these same
privileges led to other kinds of social problems. I have already pointed out to
the religious antagonisms it gave rise to. Apart from that, the programs based
on positive discrimination eventually led to three further problems. Firstly,
they created inequality within the lower castes with benefits eventually going
to the economically stronger sections of the lower castes alone (Bayly, 1999).
Secondly, it led to violent caste wars in contemporary India of the nature
unheard before. Thirdly, caste based affirmative programs had the exact
opposite effect of what the Constitution had desired in the form of a casteless
society. In order to acquire benefits from the state, aid seekers must affirm
their caste origins, thereby further institutionalising caste and making it the
ultimate truth of Indian society.
William Dalrymple’s book “Age of Kali” begins
with a chapter on North Indian politics and it is perhaps one of best examples
of the kind of problems that the reservation system led to. Dalrymple begins
with the description of violence between two caste groups in a village of the
North Indian state of Bihar. His book came was published in 1998. He mentions
that till the 1980s, high politics in India lay exclusively in the hands of the
higher castes. However, from the mid 1980s, the lower castes started rising up
the political ladder and most of the Indian states started getting presided
over by ruling parties that consisted people from the lower castes. He takes
the example of Bihar. The state was marked by backwardness and poverty at this
time. By the 1990s, it came to be ruled by Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav,
who openly claimed his low caste birth and in his speeches remarked upon how he
faced injustices and abuse at the hands of the higher castes during his
childhood days. When he came to power, he had a large number of corruption
charges against him. His term of being the Chief Minister of Bihar did not
necessarily lead to economic prosperity to the lower castes, but it did give
self confidence to them. This self confidence expressed itself in practically
revenge against the higher castes for the past years of social injustice and
ill-treatment they had to go through. The result was the violent and
terrorizing caste wars in Bihar which had become a regular feature of Indian newspapers.
In his interview to Dalrymple, Lalu Prasad Yadav said the following:
All my childhood
I was beaten and insulted by the landlords. For no reason they would punish me.
Because we were from the Yadav caste we were not entitled even to sit on a chair.
They would make us sit on the ground. I remember all the humiliation. Now I am
in the chair and I want those people to sit on the ground. It is in my mind to
teach them a lesson. (Dalrymple, “Age of Kali”)
By making caste, rather than meritocracy, the
basis on which political recognition could be claimed, the reservation system
gave a free ticket to the criminal members of the lower castes to rise up and
dominate the Indian political scene. This is never to say that all members of
the lower castes were incapable. However, due to the easier access to
incentives, the corrupt were able to rise up faster. Secondly, it also
unleashed a lot of suppressed aggression against the higher castes, leading to
chaos in the country.
I mentioned in the beginning of the paper that
I consider India to be a residue of power struggles. What began as the power
struggle between the coloniser and the colonised gradually transformed into a
struggle between the various sections within the colonised. This hierarchy
within the colonised was not created by the British. However, the British rule
did play the role of a catalyst in enlivening it. Today, the power struggle
continues to acquire sanction from the same knowledge system created by the
colonisers along with the higher castes. The lower castes rose to power not by
creating a knowledge system of their own. They pointed out to their servile
treatment in the same sources that the colonizers and the higher castes had
created together, in order to rise up. Therefore, I shall conclude by saying
that while power created knowledge, this same knowledge was utilised by the
powerless in order to claim power, thereby throwing India into this vicious web
of power relations.
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