By O.P. Sudrania
Caste or Class Systems versus India in Global Perspective – CHAPTER NINE & TEN
After the brutal partition of India under British supervision in 1947, Indian society has been erroneously recognised as Hindu society, based on the ill conceived belief of Pakistan having been carved out due to insistence by Jinnah, “Muslims cannot live with Hindus”. This perception of Hindu India needs revisiting. Britain cannot abdicate its responsibility in effecting this avoidable class conflict.
Some of the Indian orientalists during British period were used vilely more as pawns than as true reformers in the Hindu society. Others had tried to be obtusely aggressive to carve a niche for themselves in the name of reformation of the Hindu society. But none of them seemed to have achieved much success towards the actual goals of the so called reformation.
Mere forming some separate societies or deliberate in a select gathering, e.g. Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Swami Dayaanandji; had hardly resulted in any long term tangible results. What was required was a sincere effort to educate the masses, improve agriculture methods and literacy, to distribute the wealth to the grass root level in egalitarian manner, to uplift the living standard of village population, to develop the infrastructure facilities equally all over the nation including roads, health services network, power supply, proper water supply units, sewage system, dust and noise pollution, safeguarding against the environmental degradation, use of biological manure and stopping insecticides and pesticides; but nothing of the sort has been done even after the independence in 1947. This is the worst part and the political godfathers in last sixty three years have proved worst than what they blame the foreign rulers. Very little has been done in that context pari passu with the explosive growth of population and environmental degradation in India.
It is not surprising to hear that India has not yet got its real independence; perhaps they have a point in it! The wealth has been created but distributed eccentrically only to benefit a few select power wielding top notch, while the vast number of the common people, euphemistically called “Aam Aadmi” for vote bank politics, have been left out lurching in despair and frustration since they hardly understand the mens rea and language of the “Uncle Sham”. Caste is being imposed by a few, more than being perpetuated by the masses out of their conscience willingly; an exploitation of innocents by their own people who otherwise should have acted as their saviours. Even now we have some dalits’ white pseudo-sympathisers who also pretend to be Hindu well wishers or apologists and call themselves as Indologists; sounds something as queasy like the Westologists.
Hinduism from its inception had based its primary values on the spiritual life and attaining the spiritual liberation is their ultimate goal that spans till date as opposed to the Western societies who do not regard the spiritual salvation as its true aim for the human life. This has a collossal bearing on the thinking pattern of the two groups of societies – between Hindus and Abrahamic religionists as well as the pretentious secularists.
In examining this issue, many historians point to the British colonial period as a key turning point in changing caste sentiment among Indians.
Colonial administrators began for a host of their own reasons—both imperial and more benign—efforts to systematize, categorize, and delineate castes into a set hierarchy that had never before existed in a formal sense.
Colonial policies, through their structuring and politicization of caste, were one of the direct causes for the incessant and often deadly caste conflict in India today.
The Code, moreover, is riddled with inconsistencies and was probably never literally applied. Davis draws the analogy between the abstraction of western law texts and the “actual practice of law” to illustrate how the Law Code of Manu was probably never used verbatim; Hindu law could be seen as the embodiment of “legal positivism”. Lariviere agrees, writing that law “was a highly flexible and ingenious science in which the standards of orthodoxy and righteousness of a given locale or group could continually be adapted”. Different groups in different regions enforced their own lists of crimes and punishments; the law therefore took on varied form depending on the locale. The British would implement the letter of these formerly flexible dharmashastras as law, exacerbating caste difference and discrimination in the process.
Each Indian had a place in the structure, and each performed a task useful to society. This polity preserved “the liberties and rights, as well as the duties of all groups”. The accusation of ‘Indian despotism’ was false— the power of the rulers was projected through a complex prism of caste and tradition, inevitably moderating it.
Instituting what he saw as ‘normality’ in Indian justice, Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of India employed by the British East India Company in 1772, directed its courts to base their judgments as much as possible on texts such as the Law Code of Manu, to formalize caste law, and to apply it much more literally than the Code had presumably been applied before. Predictably, administering this ‘Hindu justice’ proved immensely difficult and frustrating, as English judges could not read the Sanskrit the laws were written in and had to trust learned pandits to interpret them; the Law Code of Manu was not translated into English until 1794. Rao writes that this effectively ensured a brahminical grip on British India by de facto granting them “the highest posts of power, profit and confidence”. Waligora agrees, arguing that the British were unduly influenced by the brahminical view, creating a self-fulfilling prophesy of caste hierarchy and identification. The full might of the state arrayed behind laws based almost exclusively upon caste redoubled the importance of caste in daily Indian life, and gave the institution governmental legitimacy it had not enjoyed since during the time of Manu, if even then.
Mill’s 1817 canonical History of British India, required reading for generations of newly minted East India Company officials, condemns the native customs of Indian in the strongest terms.
In the course of describing Indian Muslim society, he praises its rejection of caste, an “institution which stands a more effectual barrier against the welfare of human nature than any other institution which the workings of caprice and of selfishness have ever produced”.
Indians then could only ever decrease in worthiness as they violated caste principles, polluting or being polluted by other castes. This attitude among British officials towards caste remained fairly consistent throughout the colonial period. Writing in 1932, Molony blamed caste discrimination on the “mentality of India” for “in the Hindu religion there is no expectation or desire for a conscious individual immortality.”
British took virtually no action to try and dismantle caste. Instead, they took quite the opposite course. Some officials worried that India would fall apart without caste. Whether correct or flawed, the view that caste was inseparable from Hinduism itself remained unchallenged until Gandhi’s (unsuccessful) attempts to separate the two in the 1930’s. One of the only views Ambedkar likely shared with Risley, the 1901 Census Commissioner, as well as other British authorities was that their writings made no distinction between caste as a system and Hinduism as a religion.
Bougle attributes British reticence to take concrete action against the caste system to laziness, noting that Raj officials were concentrated on efficient cost-cutting administration. Attempting to enforce caste legislation would have put too much of a strain on government.
Rather than putting an end to discriminatory attitudes, Molony explains that the government did its best to appease and accommodate the lower castes by digging them separate wells, setting up “special” schools and employing “judicious” reservation policies. While the British praised such efforts, they were merely working around, rather than removing, caste conditions their rule had in fact helped to sharpen.
Pointing out that British consideration of meddling with local social and religious sensibilities sparked both the Vellore Mutiny in 1801 and the great Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, they became “so panicky that they felt that loss of India was the surest consequence of social reform”. The mutinies rendered the British more compliant towards the strictures of the caste system. At the start of their reign over India until the Mutiny, the British army was the enthusiastic employer of large numbers of the lowest castes and untouchables.
Western society seems obsessed with the caste in Indian communities, more so in Hindus and keep such publications alive. The motive can be gauged easily. More at: click here
Chapter Ten: Impact of Gender and Class/Clan in British Society:
“Rex non potest peccare” as the Latin maxim expresses – king can do no wrong. The same ideology has become applicable to the one time ruling English monarchy despite the well known sexual adventures of the longest reigning British Queen Victoria and her famous boyfriend from the Indian city, Agra – Abdul. This was at the time when the women were treated in the British society as second grade citizen; so were the average common people.
The Western English society was deeply ridden in the class divisions which are very well signified by certain examples noted here. ‘Pamela or Virtue Rewarded’ is an epistolary novel by Samuel Richardson, first published in 1740. It tells the story of a beautiful 15-year old maidservant named Pamela Andrews, whose nobleman master, Mr. B, makes unsolicited advances towards her after the death of his mother, whose maid she was since age 12. Mr. B is infatuated with her, first by her looks and then her innocence and intelligence, but his high rank hinders him from proposing marriage. He abducts her, locks her up in one of his estates, and attempts to seduce and rape her.
More at: here
The history of Ballochmyle Hospital, Mauchline, Scotland and its Mansion House which belonged to the noble Alexander family had a deep trench dug out on the front landscape connected with its backyard and to the passage on the village side meant for the use of the family servants. The trench must have been about ten feet deep opposite the front main entrance so that the heads of the servants will not be seen by the noble family and remain well inside the trench. This has been now filled up sometime perhaps in the 1980s. It is another stark revelation of the ‘Master-Servant’ relationship in the modern British society. The Mansion House is also connected to the memory of Robert Burns, the celebrated Scottish national poet and his famous work – Auld Lang Syne and Bonny Lass O Ballochmyle.
http://www.northkirk.co.uk/htmfiles/history_ballochmyle.htm
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/296832
Then there are the Ilfracombe Tunnel Beaches in North Devon where the males and females had to use separate bathing beaches built in 1823. The gender segregation was enforced very strictly by employing guards to prevent any stealth trespassers on either side. But they were opened to both sexes in 1905 only. For the picture and more details peruse the link below.
More at: click here
http://www.devonhistorysociety.org.uk/2010/11/ilfracombe-tunnels.html
For photo of the bathing people of both genders. Follow the link below:
http://www.tunnelsbeaches.co.uk/attraction36.html
… Ilfracombe’s award-winning beach and must-see tourist attraction! As bathing and the ‘art of swimming’ became increasingly popular in Victorian times, local entrepreneurs employed Welsh miners to hand carve six tunnels through the Ilfracombe hillside, to enable access to a beautifully rugged coastline (four tunnels are still open to the public)… It could be said that the tunnels are the main reason Ilfracombe exists! The coastline and landscape remains virtually unchanged from its Victorian heyday… More at: read here
Victorian era was a conservative period and the status of the females from the present standards was far below par in the British society. It is exemplified by the saga of the most learned lady writer who had to use a male pseudonym to attract a wider readership only because the society in those days did not consider writings by female authors seriously. Mary Anne Evans, who wrote under the pseudonym George Eliot, was born on November 22, 1819, at South Farm, Arbury Hall in Warwickshire.
Mary Anne Evans’s transformation into the fiction writer George Eliot began in 1856, when Mary Anne decided to try her hand at writing novels. In 1858, George Eliot’s second novel, Adam Bede, became a critical and popular success; soon after, George Eliot’s identity as Mary Anne “Lewes” became known. Though this disclosure did not threaten her writing career, she was forced to put up with an increasing amount of personal criticism as her literary fame as George Eliot grew.
Encouraged by her success, Eliot began exploring continental and political themes in her next works: Romola (1863), which was set in Renaissance Italy, and Felix Holt, The Radical (1866), which depicted the political controversy surrounding the Reform Bill of 1832. Mary Anne began writing Middlemarch in 1869. The novel was serialized through 1871 and 1872, and became a great success, making George Eliot (and Mary Anne) even more famous. … George Lewes and Mary Anne became very social and popular as her writing continued to make a great deal of money for the couple. They continued living together until 1878, when Lewes suddenly became ill. Lewes’s death in November of 1878 was heartbreaking for the writer, and she began a period of intense mourning that lasted more than a year.
John Cross, the couple’s “business manager” of sorts, became very concerned about Mary Anne’s well-being during this trying period. He proposed marriage to her several times until she finally accepted in 1880. Their union was one of companionship rather than romance; Cross was more than 20 years younger than Mary Anne, who turned 61 soon after their marriage. In December 1880, after only seven months of marriage, Mary Anne became seriously ill. She passed away in her sleep on December 22, 1880, and was buried next to her lifelong companion, George Lewes. More at: click here
The status of women in the Victorian era is often seen as an illustration of the striking discrepancy between the United Kingdom’s national power and wealth and what many, then and now, consider its appalling social conditions. During the era symbolized by the reign of British monarch Queen Victoria, women did not have suffrage rights, the right to sue, or the right to own property. More at: click here
A common man had no right to stand for Member of Parliament seat independently. This is why Lord Macaulay had to fight his first election in England from a pocket Borough in London. “In 1830 the Marquess of Lansdowne invited Macaulay to become Member of Parliament for the pocket borough of Calne. His maiden speech was in favor of abolishing the civil disabilities of the Jews. However, Macaulay made his name with a series of speeches in favour of parliamentary reform. After the Great Reform Act of 1832 was passed, he became MP for Leeds. In the Reform, Calne’s representation was reduced from two to one; Leeds had never been represented before, but now had two members.” More at: click here
The Representation of the People Act 1832 (commonly known as the Reform Act 1832 or sometimes as The Great Reform Act) was an Act of Parliament (2 & 3 Will. IV) that introduced wide-ranging changes to the electoral system of England and Wales. According to its preamble, the act was designed to “take effectual Measures for correcting divers Abuses that have long prevailed in the Choice of Members to serve in the Commons House of Parliament.” Other reform measures were passed later during the 19th century; as a result, the Reform Act 1832 is sometimes called the First, or Great Reform Act. More at: click here
The Representation of the People Act 1867′, 30 & 31 Vict. c. 102 (known informally as the Reform Act of 1867 or the Second Reform Act) was a piece of British legislation that enfranchised the urban male working class in England and Wales.
Before the Act, only one million of the five million adult males in England and Wales could vote; the act doubled that number. In its final form, the Reform Act of 1867 enfranchised all male householders and compounding was also subsequently abolished in the process. However, there was little redistribution of seats; and what there was had been intended to help the Conservative Party. More at: read here
In the United Kingdom, the Representation of the People Act 1884 (48 & 49 Vict. c. 3, also known informally as the Third Reform Act) and the Redistribution Act of the following year were laws which further extended the suffrage in Britain after the Disraeli Government’s Reform Act 1867. Taken together, these measures extended the same voting qualifications as existed in the towns to the countryside, and essentially established the modern one member constituency as the normal pattern for Parliamentary representation. More at: click here
The Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. This act expanded on the Representation of the People Act 1918 which had given some women the vote in Parliamentary elections for the first time after World War I. It widened suffrage by giving women electoral equality with men. It gave the vote to all women who paid rates to the local government on the same terms as men.
This statute is sometimes known informally as the Fifth Reform Act or the Equal Suffrage Act. More at: read here.