Race and caste

Sir, - Andre Beteille's article, `Race and Caste' (March 10), underscores the need for a national debate on the issue of race and caste, particularly in the context of the United Nations Convention against Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Though Beteille argues that the conflation of caste with race is contrary to established scientific opinion, by which he means anthropological research, anthropology tells us that the word caste is derived from the Portuguese `casta', an early sixteenth- century word which embraced several meanings, not the least significant of which was ``purity of blood'', which has since been applied to describe the specific form of institutionalised discrimination on the subcontinent, as well as its application to the two levels of groups, the jatis, roughly about 3,000 or more and the four varnas.

On how ``scientific'' the notion of race is, social theorists like Guillaumin and the more recent findings of the Human Genome Project bring into serious question the validity of earlier anthropological assumptions on race, Boas et al.

The contentious area, clearly, is the application of the team race to caste - for Beteille and also for the Indian Government - along curiously similar lines. India's Report on the CERD, dated April 29, 1996, while celebrating racial diversity as the quintessence of Indian society, describes caste as a social distinction originating in the functional division of ancient Indian society, and further that though CERD refers to descent- based systems, ``it is obvious... that the use of the term `descent' in the convention clearly refers to `race'... Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are unique to Indian society and its historical process''. The Indian Government is clearly borrowing heavily from the ``scientific'' traditions of colonial anthropology.

While Risley and Guha did attempt a ``scientific'' racial classification of caste, from their respective locations within colonial administration, their research was inconclusive, not because race did not exist in India, but because race is centrally about ideologies of domination, not about biological types, as they quite naturally assumed. If instead, one looked at the use of the word casta and its semantic field in comparison with the semantic field of race historically, the similarities between caste and race would be more than obvious.

Is it political mischief to say that blacks and Dalits share a history of subjugation, and that both must have recourse to common instruments of redress? Or is it invidious neo- conservatism to say that the assertion by Dalit groups to bring caste-based discrimination under the ambit of international instruments is no different from the assertion of superior rights by some groups claiming Aryan blood?

Kalpana Kannabiran,

Hyderabad

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Opinion
Previous : Mockery of democracy
Next     : Twisted logic