The Indian Express | 2 weeks ago | 22-05-2023 | 11:45 am
The Karnataka elections have produced a result that should lead to a diversification of the ways in which we understand religion and caste as categories of being and believing. In particular, it is important to think of these identities as being about something more than “religion” and “caste” and with pan-India significance.Since the mid-1980s, Gurugram (earlier Gurgaon) has been at the heart of frenzied privately driven urbanisation in the National Capital Region. Multiple mini townships spreading across thousands of acres have become thriving communities. Erratic privately installed infrastructure — roads, water, electricity, policing arrangements — is slowly giving way to more settled arrangements provided by the state. The Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (established in 2008) is in the process of establishing its writ as villages slowly convert to urban localities and panchayat elections give way to polls for ward councillors.As Gurugram’s urbanisation moves further into the Haryana hinterlands, lands are being mapped through satellite technology, for new land markets demand at least the symbolism of “transparency”. Many previously impoverished families have become overnight millionaires, their children newly enrolled in the various “global” schools that dot the landscape. It is a landscape that is home to many luxury SUVs that, when not on display as wedding gifts, raise dust on village roads.The work of modern technology and financial processes upon antique cadastral arrangements (Persian land terminology is still common), bhaichara (shared) property ownership systems and multiple other customary arrangements of everyday life has had an interesting effect. It has strengthened — rather than loosened — the grip of many traditional features of life in the locality. So, for example, attachment to caste and religious identities has deepened even as “global” schools, global capital and global technologies seemingly transform and connect isolated hamlets to transnational urbanism.In December 2022, members of one of the prominent caste communities (there are three in Gurugram: Yadavs, Jats and Gujjars) organised a massive cultural festival to celebrate the “heritage” and historical achievements of their caste. The occasion was one of many where funds for the deepening of caste feeling and caste identity derive directly from participation in the new — globally fuelled — market economies of land. The incursion of global finance and modern infrastructure has also led to just as significant an upsurge – rather than dampening — of religious feeling. In Gurugram’s rapidly reducing rural areas (and further inland), temples to local deities have been refurbished and new, bigger ones, built. The temple of Baba Mohan Ram — of particular significance to the Gujjar community — in Bhiwadi receives a crush of visitors on all days of the week and in “new” Gurugram, Hindu religious feeling is firmly ensconced in new temples inside gated communities.The contemporary deepening of caste and religious feeling in a place such as Gurugram is directly connected to and facilitated by dramatic new contexts of technology, finance, infrastructure, land markets, and aspirations. There is no precedence — and no historical examples —that we can fall back on to make sense of these developments. What we require is thinking about the present through processes of the present. And yet, in so much of our public discourse, we continue to assume that explanations regarding religious identity might best be had through resorting to Gandhian thought and that Ambedkar is the most significant guide to developments in the meaning of religion and caste today. This does both Gandhian and Ambedkar’s thinking great disfavour. For it mistakes the important questions Gandhi and Ambedkar asked about the nature of Indian society as answers.An understanding of the present requires an engagement with the complexities of the present rather than — as is too frequently the case — invocations of historically significant thinkers as holdall guides to it. To make sense of the present, we need to proceed from the vantage points provided by Gandhi and Ambedkar (and others), rather than choose to merely look out from them. The resurgence of caste and religious identities is linked to several processes that simply did not exist in the same way in the opening and middle decades of the 20th century. Their role in contemporary society — including the bigotry and hate they give rise to — requires a new set of questions that might allow us to better understand how modern processes deepen ancient sensibilities.Perhaps the most fundamental set of questions relate to asking how it is that religious and caste feelings gather strength at a time when the world is, apparently, organised through relations of contract and others that are largely impersonal. How is it that those who have suffered most from caste discrimination remain steadfast in their caste identities? And, how is it that new religious identities manifest as hostility towards others of different faiths by those who also champion the virtues of the free market and equality of opportunity within it? Contemporary questions about the nature of religion and caste in India cannot be answered through mere invocations of what the “founding fathers” might have envisioned but what has happened since then.What has happened since “then” relates to the ways in which social media, new cultures of leisure, the globalisation of caste and religious identities, a new turn to the politics of “heritage” and the rise of a new consumer culture feed into the making of contemporary ideas about self and community. The ways in which caste and religious identities were formed “then” is not the same as what is happening now. The fundamental questions raised by Gandhi and Ambedkar remain: What is religious tolerance and how can the structures upon which caste discrimination stand be dismantled? However, a genuine engagement with their thinking would mean treating their questions as those that address universal issues relating to a particular era. The tendency to regard them as directly applicable to an understanding of dramatically different epochs serves little purpose as a way to understand the present. If anything, it leads to a false sense of their inadequacy towards an understanding of contemporary life and obscures the force of their thought. The inadequacy might be our own in not choosing to understand a dramatically altered present where caste and religious identities are no longer the grounds for politics or belief as these were once understood. If a formerly marginalised caste in Gurugram now seeks social mobility through refashioning rather than abandoning caste identity and this, in turn, is accompanied by the adoption of an exclusionary religious identity, how should we understand “caste politics” and “religious belief” now? And what of the altered meanings of caste and religion in a south Indian state that has gone through extraordinary economic and social transformations over the past few decades? To ask these questions is to genuinely engage with the complexities of our times, just as Gandhi and Ambedkar engaged with theirs.The writer is British Academy Global Professor, Department of Anthropology and Sociology SOAS, University of London
Tagged: |