Caste

Until now, in international conferences on apartheid and racism India saw itself as a fighter of freedom and was the official advocate condemning racism, colonialism, apartheid. Suddenly this great role is being threatened, and from within. India is being condemned in the name of universal freedoms as a violator and for what we all along glibly thought was 'an internal affair', caste. Why is caste like race? What are the claims for entry and the objections? What is the method and manner of the argument? And will the move to get caste discrimination to be read as racial discrimination succeed as politics?

The nexus that exists between class power and the state compounds the continuing oppression of the 'underclass' in Bihar. State operations further perpetuate the connections between caste and class. Thus land reforms ostensibly designed to benefit the disadvantaged are subverted by vested interests who dominate the state's politics and administration. Any attempt on the part of the underclass to politically mobilise has been met by brutal state repression by dominant caste militias. The all-pervasive gender bias that allows the exploitation of women, and the raging illiteracy that afflicts the underclass accentuates this oppression.

Unlike Sanskrit, there are no scriptural injunctions against the learning of English; English is theoretically as accessible to dalits and women as it is to the 'dwijas'. However, the brahmanical classes have monopolised the use of English (as also other symbols of western modernity) and have justified the denial of the same to the dalits, sometimes even reading their 'faulty' use of the language as acts of resistance/rejection of colonial modernity.

It is one of the tragic dilemmas of the colonial situation that the national revolution and the social revolution in a colonial society tend to develop apart from one another, Jyotirao Phule represented a very different set of interests and a very different outlook on India from all the upper caste elite thinkers of the so-called Indian Renaissance who have dominated the awareness of both Indian and foreign intellectuals. The elite expressed an ideology of what may be described as the "national revolution"; it was the nationalism of a class combining bourgeois and high caste traditions. Phule represented the ideology of the social revolution in its earliest form, with a peasant and anti-caste outlook.