A 660-page compilation of essays on a hot-button issue, by academic experts from India and abroad, The Oxford Handbook of Caste could not have been timed better. Its publication fortuitously coincided with the political buzz generated by Bihar’s caste census followed by the Bharat Ratna for its social justice pioneer Karpoori Thakur. Though this treasure trove omits to mention Thakur, let alone his impact on the Hindi belt, one of its 42 essays is titled “Census, Caste Enumeration and the British Legacy”.
School students pay tribute to Karpoori Thakur on his death anniversary, in Patna. | Photo Credit: ANI
Since its focus is, however, on tracing the colonial history of the caste census until the last one that took place in 1931, this essay has nothing about the abortive attempt to revive such enumeration at the national level in the 2011 census, a precursor to the ground broken by Bihar in bringing out its report in 2023. Similar is the omission of any reference to Karpoori Thakur, a member of the lowly caste of Nais or barbers, despite at least two essays being devoted to reservations. One of those essays is specifically on the concept of “backwardness”, the very context in which the former Bihar chief minister happened to be posthumously honoured for introducing reservations in 1978 for not only “other backward classes” (which included dominant castes from among Shudras) but also “most backward classes” (which included some Muslim categories).
An undated photo of Karpoori Thakur. | Photo Credit: PTI
Ambitious effort
To be fair, the omission of such topical aspects of caste does not detract from the credit due to its editors, Surinder S. Jodhka and Jules Naudet, for this ambitious compendium. Topicality can hardly be the yardstick for evaluating a book that is clearly for the ages. Even so, its staggering range of essays does include other topical aspects of caste. Take the section of five essays labelled “Caste and the Religious Realm”, a subject that has gained greater traction in the wake of the Ayodhya temple inauguration. While one of those essays deals with “Hinduism and Caste System”, another delves into “Caste and Hindutva”.
Construction on in full swing prior to the temple inauguration in Ayodhya. | Photo Credit: R.V. Moorthy
The Hindutva-related essay authored by American anthropologist Joel Lee could well be taken as representative of the quality of the insights offered by the compendium. Lee brings out three texts that “illuminate the role played by caste” in shaping both the ideology and practice of Hindu nationalism.
A sadhu meditating on the Ganges in Varanasi. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/istock
The first is A Dying Race, a pamphlet composed in 1909 by retired military officer U.N. Mukerji. To begin with, based on “an uncritical reading” of the previous decennial census, Mukerji concluded that the rate of increase of Hindus compared with that of Muslims was “extremely small”. And then, the bulk of the pamphlet was devoted to what he diagnosed as the ultimate cause of Hindu diminution: “our caste system”. In Mukerji’s view, caste was “an insuperable bar” to the attainment of the kind of unity and solidarity that was exemplified by Muslims.
A roadshow by BJP supporters in Tumkur. | Photo Credit: PTI
The Hindu angle
Lee writes: “In conjoining an argument animated by the enumerative logic of the modern state, a narrative of Hindus threatened by Muslim growth, and a naming of caste division as an existential threat to the Hindu ‘race’, Mukerji articulated a discourse from which Hindu nationalism has continued to draw ever since.”
A Dalit faces discrimination at a public well. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/istock
This is borne out by the text that followed in 1926, Hindu Sangathan: Savior of the Dying Race. Its author Swami Shraddhanand, an Arya Samaj and Congress leader, proposed a Hindu consolidation by replacing the multitude of castes on the ground with the four-fold Varna system valourised by the scriptures. A corollary to such a “return” to an idealised Vedic past was a switch from birth to “character and conduct” as criteria for determining one’s Varna.
This V.D. Savarkar stamp was issued in 1970 by the Indira Gandhi government on the occasion of his 87th birth anniversary. | Photo Credit: The Hindu photo archives
The most influential text is of course V.D. Savarkar’s Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? published in 1923. Savarkar too prized the Varna system although it undermined his contention in the same text that Hindus constituted a single race. If he believed in the “common flow of blood from a Brahmin to a Chandal”, it was because he held that all that the Varna system had done was to “regulate its noble blood”. This is how Joel Lee summed up Savarkar’s endorsement of miscegenation: “Noble blood, that is, is a gift of the higher Varnas to the lower, retained and distributed according to judicious principles favouring the overall health of the race.”
Such fascinating content notwithstanding, it’s not an easy book to read. This is not only because of the sheer volume of information packed into it or the inherent complexity of the subject. The essays are all by academics and for academics – so they tend to be theoretical and abstruse. As the editors put it, they tried to provide “a comprehensive account of the available social science research” on caste in the hope that it would “help orient future research”. All the same, even for laypersons, this tome is a reference book of immense value.
The Oxford Handbook of Caste; Edited by Surinder S. Jodhka, Jules Naudet, Oxford University Press, ₹4,500.
The reviewer is the author of the recently published Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India.
