Untouchability lives within boundaries. The boundaries are made of Hindu sacred
texts known as ‘Dharam Shastras’. Untouchability ceases to exist as and when these boundaries are dismantled. This is what Ambedkar emphasised in his proposed inaugural speech at the ‘Jat-Pat Todak Mandal’ of Lahore in 1936. However, he was never allowed to deliver his speech precisely because of its anti-Dharam Shastric contents. Much water has flown since then, particularly after the independence, down the lanes and by-lanes of Indian social structures. But the curse of untouchability and caste related problems has not been totally exorcised. Although the blatant observance of purity-pollution principle has scaled down to a considerable extent after the adoption of Indian constitution, in political space it has taken an altogether a new shape. Caste has never been so assertive in Indian politics as it is today. This has, in turn, led to caste violence in various parts of the country. Punjab is no exception. It has recently witnessed serious caste clashes in rural as well as in urban settings of its Doaba region.
Although caste and untouchability is prevalent throughout the country but it has never been monolithic and unilinear in its practice. Every region has its specific and unique characteristics. In order to understand the phenomena of caste and untouchability one needs to give due importance to the cultural specificities of the different regions. This study is a modest attempt to understand the phenomena of untouchability and caste violence in Punjab. The article is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the sources of untouchability, caste and domination and the state of untouchability in Punjab. It also reflects briefly on the role of the upper caste social reformers in the eradication of untouchability. It is proposed that untouchability has not only been articulated in the sacred Hindu texts but has also received popular support in the writings of Orientalists and British scholar-administrators. In the second part, Ad Dharm movement and the rise of dalit consciousness in Punjab is discussed. In the last part, an attempt has been made to document and analyse caste violence in Punjab.
I
Untouchability and Burdens of History
Before taking up the issue of dalit consciousness, it may be pertinent to probe into the genesis of the logic of a society based on the hierarchical grading of caste. What makes such a probe a difficult task is the most complex character of the Indian Society. In fact, it would be appropriate to call Indian Societies rather than a singular Indian Society. The term Indian Societies is used to refer to academic trifurcation of India into pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial. Pre-colonial India is referred to as pre-modern and pre-British India (Quigley 1999: 123). As far as colonial and post-colonial categories are concerned, their analysis is relatively unproblematic. It is more so in reference to post-colonial than the category of colonial India. Colonial India turns problematic when one takes up the issue of Mughal rule in India. Whether India during the long spell of Mughal rule should be considered as another colonial India, although in a different sense from that of British colonial India, or simply to be studied as a part of the category of pre-colonial India is altogether an independent research theme with significant bearings on the question of caste. However, the pre-colonial India invites more polemics and methodological complexities than one can think of by its customary use. The very prefix pre is vague and indeterminate when juxtaposed with the term colonial in relation to mapping out historical stretch of India’s past. The word colonial has fixed historical as well as administrative connotations which lend it authenticity in reference to time and territory. So colonial India is both temporally and spatially demarcated. It has its objective beginning as well as its stipulated pin-pointed end. But the same is not all about the pre-colonial India. The most controversial about the pre-colonial India is its historical life.
This is most apparent in the current debate on the periodization of Indian history. …It has long been maintained that the Indians were an a-historical people, since there was no recognizable historical writing from the Indian tradition similar to that from Greece and China (Thapar [1992] 2000: 19-20).
Another equally important issue pertaining to pre-colonial India is who were its original inhabitants and to which racial stock did they belong to. This issue has come to assume most important place in the debate on the origin of caste in India (Kosambi 1998: 80-109; Majumdar 1998: 16-32). The main contributions to the debate are different interpretations in the writings of orientalist, European sociologists and anthropologists, dalit scholars, and non-dalit academics (Fuller 1997; Gupta 2000; Schweitzer 1989). Ironically, this debate did not assign equal status of academic merit to the early Indian historical tradition. “Traditional Indian historical writing with its emphasis on historical biographies and chronicles was largely ignored” (Thapar [1992] 2000: 2). Since there has been no authentic historical writing to map out the periodization of ancient Indian history, mythical narratives and fairy tales constitute the historical tradition of pre-colonial India popularly known as the Itihasa-purana tradition. The Itihasa-purana tradition of pre-modern history of India has serious implications in interrogating (Gupta 2000) and interpreting (Quigley 1999), the institution of caste in Indian society. Although in
[t]he historiographical pattern of Indian past, which took shape during the colonial period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries…[t]raditional Indian historical writing…was largely ignored (Thapar [1992] 2000: 2).
But the institution of caste and the large body of ancient text, otherwise pejoratively referred to as mythical, reflecting on the origin of caste, remain the most reliable literature for the writings of orientalists.
Whatever seemed alien to the European perspective of contemporary India was often visualized as a survival from earlier times and the presumed continuity was imbued with historical authenticity. More frequently the social institutions from the past were believed to persist virtually unchanged into the present and made it legitimate for those studying contemporary Indian society to concern themselves with the text of earlier periods (Ibid.: 23).
This approach leads to represent caste as a permanent, timeless and ‘traditional’ socio-cultural institution which in fact did not exist in ancient Vedic India (Gupta 2000: 204).
Descriptions of caste are almost as old as recorded history itself. Greek scholars travelling with Alexander the great in 4th century BC not only commented on it but had themselves been made aware of its existence by the accounts of even earlier Greek adventurers associated with Persian expeditions into northwestern India. Greeks subsequently connected with the Seleucid court and the Bactrian small kingdoms that succeed Alexander rendered accounts of it. So did Chinese-Buddhists pilgrims centuries later and European travellers during the mercantilist age. British civil servants during the Raj wrote volumes on India’s dominant social structure. And what is remarkable of course is how consistent such descriptions were over more than two millennia (Gould 1987:2-3).
In fact, what has provided permanency to caste which did not exist in the pre-colonial Vedic India was the wide spread currency of the theory of Oriental Despotism (Wittfogel 1970). The central themes of this theory were the unchanging nature of society, absence of change, self-sufficient village communities, divine origin of the King, absence of private property in land and the despotic orientation of governance.
Inevitably, the major historians of the late nineteenth century in India, who also happened to be the administrators, assumed the correctness of the theory as a pre-condition to their understanding of the Indian past (Thapar [1992] 2000 : 7).
The long historical time span of pre-British India was projected as being static with no transformation in its social patterns, political processes, and economic transactions. If there were any change it was “an occasional change of dynasty” (Ibid.: 14).Social fabric of the society remained static.
So strong was the pre-conception of the unchanging character of Indian society that the generalizations based on the sources of Vedic period (1000 BC) were considered adequate for the pre-colonial period upto the eighteenth century AD (Ibid.:55).
The presumed static nature of pre-colonial Indian society helped caste structure to remain intact over such a long period of time.
Who were the beneficiaries of the above discussed system of the immutability of caste ensconced in a static social system? As far as the internal social set up of the Indian society is concerned, it was the pure castes as against the untouchables (Polluted and who can pollute others) who stand benefitted from this peculiar arrangement. It also went a long way in favour of British rulers who garnered tremendous support from this system in the form of Aryan theory to legitimize their rule. The theory of Aryan race equally benefited the new middle class elite in India who accosted the British taking over of India as “a reunion of parted cousins, the descendants of two different families of the ancient Aryan race” (Keshab Chander Sen as quoted in Ibid.: 87). Even this in turn further differentiated the new middle class elite from the lower classes who, in accordance with the logic of Aryan theory were believed to be non-Aryan (Ibid.: 29).
Caste as a socio-cultural institution enjoyed the most favoured status of being commented upon across the millennia by the authors of Dharmasastras (Shrirama 1999); foreign travellers and pilgrims (Dahlquist 1962; Beal 1957; Weeler and Macmillan 1956; Kaul 1979; Woodcock 1966; McCrindle 1877; Legge 1886; Sachuau 1964); and offices of the rulers who came to rule this sacred and fabulous land, at different intervals during the last two millennia, popularly known as India. Amongst the various commentators on caste two deserve serious consideration by virtue of their significant contribution not in terms of understanding the institution of caste but helping it further getting entrenched in the Indian society. Dharmasastra literature constitutes the earliest legal commentary on the institution of caste which led to its ancient consolidation in the form of legally sanctified system of stratification. To quote Emile Senart “…`Hindu society is regulated by religious custom and the law-books are essentially collection of religious precepts’” (1930:91 as quoted in Beteille 1997:155). The second group of commentators consisted of orientalists and British officials, popularly known as ‘scholar administrator’ “who had long and extensive experience in the Indian Civil Service and had not found their arduous activity incompatible with scholarship” (Bougle 1971: IX). They had contributed to the collection of Census data and produced seminal works on caste and tribes in India (Hutton 1946; Ibbetson 1883; Nesfield 1885; Risley 1891, rpt. 1908; and Senart 1896, rpt. 1930). According to Andre Beteille
[c]olonial administrators wrote a great deal about caste, and much of what they wrote was biased as is indeed the case with official writing anywhere. For a hundred years they set about identifying, enumerating, describing, classifying and ranking the different castes and communities in the subcontinent. The decennial censuses played some part in bringing to public attention the division and ranking of castes. It is for this reason that it was decided not to enumerate castes in the censuses after the new Government took office on Independence ( Beteille 2002).
Ancient Indian historiography, as constructed by orientalists and British officials, was motivated by colonial designs (Dirks 2002: 8, 28-42). Colonial historiography gave birth to a pre-colonial India which lacked social and historical change and had neither historians nor historical records. In other words, a timeless India became a pre-colonial India which had come to assume peculiar connotations suitable to alien rulers as well as to the emerging Savarna new middle class elites (Fuller 1997: 4-12; Quigley 1999: 12-20; Thapar [1992] 2000: 23-59). Similar attempts had already been made in the ancient times through the writings of Dharmasastras and Smritis. The main postulates of the Dharmasastra discourse and the colonial discourse were to project hierarchical structure of Indian society based on the unchanging principle of purity/impurity in consonance with disjunction between status and power (Dumont 1988). Thus the Dharmasastra tradition and the colonial discourse came together to provide theoretical inputs to the institution of caste based on the opposition of pure and the impure. Dalits were born out of this discourse.
Caste and Culture of Domination
Here caste is taken as a category of a social set up, organized for the purpose of providing comforts, and socio-economic and political advantages at one end; and squalor, subjugation and humiliation on the other. Although social divisions of such kinds may not be ruled out across different civilizational and cultural settings the world over, but the magnitude in which such distinctions and segmentations are internalized in Hindu civilization is a unique case in its own form (Bougley 1971; Risley 1891, rpt. 1908; and Senart 1896, rpt. 1930). What makes it further a distinguished case to be analysed rather more analytically, is the contextual distinctness of the category ‘caste’ in the Indian society.
The social set up based on its hierarchical structure is pre-colonial which makes it different from various other core issues clinging to the bosom of colonial and post-colonial Indian polity and society. Although caste was not the only institution to reflect on the social organization of pre-colonial India, as there were many other political institutions (Heesterman 1985; and Hocart 1950), caste has come to assume the status of dominant explanatory framework for the understanding of hierarchical structure of Indian society (Inden 1986; 1990; Dirks 1987; Quigley 1999). In fact the caste in Indian context is not only the theme of society, it is also, rather more significantly a theme in polity, ideology and economy. As far as economy is concerned a protracted debate is on in India on class-caste frontiers. For the Marxists, class provides a rational platform for the analysis of social, political and economic settings of society. Whereas caste obfuscates such an analysis, nevertheless, class-caste framework is an important issue (Gould 1987: 29-72; Gupta 1981; D’Souza 1967:192-211) but of scope of the paper we could not take it further.
Manusmriti sets the tenor of divisive society which in a downward spiraling affect led to the extreme social segregation of a part of our society and further reduced it into pariah and asprustha. Kingsley Davis rightly said
…the Hindu social order … is the most thoroughgoing attempt known in human history to introduce absolute inequality as the guiding principle in social relationships. Such an attempt cannot completely succeed, any more than an attempt to introduce absolute equality . (Davis 1951:170).
But caste has become an integral part of Hindu society which in turn occupies a prominent space in the cultural milieu of Indian subcontinent so much so that even other religious communities could not but get soaked into the inegalitarian mode of Hindu caste structure (Ibid: 165-66). The Mazhbis of Punjab is a case in point.
The Mazbis take the pauhl, wear their hair long, and abstain from tobacco, and they apparently refuse to touch night- soil, though performing all the other offices hereditary to the Chuhra caste …. But though good Sikhs so far as religious observance is concerned, the taint of hereditary pollution is upon them and Sikhs of other castes refuse to associate with them even in religious ceremonies(Ibbetson [1883] 1970: 294).
Even the conversion of a Shudra into Muslim religion hardly relieves him of his humiliations (Ibid.: 300; see also Bagha 2001:19; and Hutton 1963:39 & 204).
Moreover, in the initial years of proliferation of Christianity in Punjab, the curse of caste on the shudras remained unabated. It was they (shudras) who had to approach the missionaries for converting them into Christianity than the other way round as in the case of upper caste (Juergensmeyer 1988: 184). Christian missionaries thought of the lower castes “…as beyond the reach of the method they preferred – intellectual arguments and moral persuasion” (Ibid.). What came in the way of the missionaries not to make use of moral persuasion and intellectual argument as methods of approaching and winning the confidence of lower castes seem to be probably the prejudice on their part that the lower castes were really incapable of rational orientation and unamenable to moral appeal. To quote Juergensmeyer
…lower caste requests for conversion not only baffled the missionaries but embarrassed them: they saw no sensible or moral reason for keeping the lower caste out, yet feared that allowing them in would sully the Church’s reputation. In a brisk exchange of letters between the mission field and various denominational head offices, a number of missionaries warned about the consequences of ‘raking in rubbish into the Church’ (Ibid.:184).
The indignation of being a shudra continued to follow the entry of lower caste into the Church. The upper caste converts were distinguished by the title of ‘Convert’…”whereas recruits from the lower caste were known as mass movement Christians or simply Christian” (Ibid.:187). To quote him further
it was only these lower caste Christians who adopted foreign names such as Samuel, Paul Masih… and the like; upper caste converts retained their ties to the caste system by continuing to use their Hindu or Sikh names Ibid.: 187-88).
In other words, the adoption of foreign names by the lower castes has doubly affected the identity of these converts in the sense that they could be easily singled out by the natives as belonged to the shudra caste by virtue of their new names which only low caste had taken on. As far as the Christian missionaries were concerned, they could also, by the same logic of foreign names, easily identify who was shudra convert. Another way of distinguishing the upper caste converts from that of the lower caste was the mechanism of sitting arrangement in the Church, whereby the upper caste converts were allowed … “to sit at the front of the Church so that they would use the communion implements first, before they became polluted by the Christians of lower castes” (Ibid.: 188; See also Chandra et al 1999: 448).
The British rulers and their predecessors did not consider it appropriate to take measures to improve upon the social conditions of colonial India. On the contrary, the main thrust of colonial state was on maintaining law and order rather than social transformation in the colonial settings (Suresh 1998: 94).
Colonial rule attempted to restructure the brahminical caste into anglicized neo-brahminism and created structures to sustain the essential caste relations in a modified form. While it attempted to break several brahminical practices like ‘Sati’ and the prohibition of widow re-marriage by introducing new laws, it did not attempt to break the caste system (Ilaiah in Chatterjee 1998: 268).
Max Muller, a great orientalist was of the opinion that
(c)aste cannot be abolished in India, and to attempt it would be one of the most hazardous operations that were ever performed in a political body. As a religious institution caste will die; as a social institution, it will live and improve (Muller 1869).
However, the overall proliferation of modernization irrespective of its underlying ideology led to the germination of awareness among the deprived groups as a result of which caste conflicts became a regular feature of Indian social set up, especially in Maharashtra, South India and Northwest India.
Untouchability and Power Dynamics
Untouchability has invariably remained attached with the notion of power in its varied dimensions. The concept of power in India needs to be seen in a peculiar sense as far as its socio-political and economic aspects are concerned. Power was seen as a sacred category. Its sacredness depends ultimately on something which has to be excluded from the purview of its sacred boundaries. Power sails between the boundaries but its affects are felt within the boundaries. Untouchability has provided – in a metaphorical sense – the building blocks for such boundaries. For a dalit to cross such boundaries amounts to committing blasphemy. They were simply asked to be continuously shut within their ghettos. In fact it was the sacred facade of power which led to the evolution of untouchability rather the other way round. Untouchability is the offshoot of power. The sacred structure of power led to its institutionalization. It was not that untouchability provided stanchion to power. Untouchability has been projected as antithetical to power. Since untouchability is profane, it can not be the custodian of power; power being a sacred. In other words, the structure of power which emerged in India keeps no space at all for the dalits to share that power. Their position somewhere resembled that of the slaves in Aristotle’s Athens. Hence they have to be condemned to bear the shocks of power. In such a unique sacerdotal notion of power one need not be an entrepreneur of power. One needs to be a custodian of purity and sanctity. In ancient India the Brahmin held the key to power by way of projecting himself as the epitome of purity. Interestingly his purity has something to do with his projection of himself as a person who voluntarily abnegates (Schweitzer 1989; Thapar 2000 : 876-945; Gupta 2000). The more the renouncer you are the more purer you would be. More the purer you are the more powerful you would be. The institution of “Raj Purohit” in ancient India is a case in point. Even in contemporary India one can find such a phenomenon in existence where Gurus, Saints, and Babas shower blessings for the acquisition of power. What these Babas have been doing in India the Pope used to do the same in the West until the Treaty of Westphalia. But Pope need not be the renouncer in the similar sense as the sacred men in India used to be. The sacred connotation of power and its being surrounded by purity and abnegation was so powerful that even the efforts on the part of the dalits to break the fetters of untouchability required them to put on the mask of purity emanating from abnegation. Tukaram, Chokhamela, Ravidass, Balmiki, to name only the most prominent, were the dalit renouncers who made significant contribution for the amelioration of the down trodden. In other words, even the sufferers of untouchability had to follow the route similar to that of upper castes to fight against their odds. These dalits turned renouncers and gurus were the progenitor of the voice of protest and reforms against hierarchy based on purity-impurity. They were the initiators of the dalit consciousness. Their voice was heard not because of their being the leaders of the dalit community but for their being renouncer and so holy-men.
Untouchability in Punjab
Untouchability in Punjab is unique in comparison to its observance in other parts of the country. The Brahminical tradition of social stratification has never been so effective there. The word Brahmin did not carry a sacerdotal connotation in Punjab. It was used, rather, in a derogatory sense (Saberwal 1976: 10; Tandon 1961: 77). The Jat-Sikhs, who otherwise have been Shudra as per the Varna system, considered themselves socially superior to the Brahmins. Brahmins, whereas in rest of the country, enjoyed the highest status in the Hindu caste hierarchy. The down play of the Brahmins in Punjab by the Jat-Sikhs might have diminished the purity-pollution practice to the benefits of dalits (Saberwal 1973:256). However, it did not, in any way, help the dalits to improve their socio-economic status.
Punjab is a Sikh majority state. The Sikhs constitute 63 per cent of its total population. Among them the percentage of Jat–Sikhs is the highest. About 72 per cent of the Sikhs live in rural Punjab. Although Sikhism does not assign any place to the institution of caste in its ‘doctrinal principle’ but the same is not true in its ‘social practice’ (Puri 2003: 2693). “Caste as occupational division of labour was, and is, very much a part of village life” (Kaur 1986: 229). Sikh religion is not an exception. In the Punjab censuses between 1881 and 1921 there were more than twenty-five castes within Sikh community (Verma 2002:33). Among the Sikhs, Jat-Sikhs, Khatri Sikhs, Arora Sikhs, Ramgarhia Sikhs, Ahluwalia Sikhs, Bhapa Sikhs, Bhattra Sikhs, Ramdasia Sikhs, Ravidasia Sikhs, Rahtia Sikhs, Mazhbi Sikhs, and Rangreta Sikhs are some of the most distinct caste communities.
The Jat-Sikhs in Punjab substituted the Brahmins.
The Jat is in every respect the most important of the Pánjab peoples…. The Jat of the Sikh tracts is of course the typical Jat of Pánjab, … Politically he ruled the Pánjab till the Khalsa yielded to our arms. Ethnologically he is the peculiar and most prominent product of the plains of the five rivers. And from an œconomical and administrative point of view he is the husbandman, the peasant, the revenue-payer par excellence of the Province. … But as a rule a Jat is a man who does what seems right in his own eyes and sometimes what seems wrong also, and will not be said nay by any man. … The Banya with his sacred thread, his strict Hinduism, and his twice-born standing, looks down on the Jat as a Sudrá. But the Jat looks down upon the Banya as a cowardly spiritless money-grubber, and society in general agree with the Jat. (Ibbetson 1883, rpt. 1970: 102-103).
Jat-Sikhs are primarily agriculturists and land-owners. They are mostly concentrated in villages. They have also diversified into transport business and considered employment in the armed forces as prestigious. “The Jat might be employed as a school teacher, or service in the military but he sees his primary role as that of an agriculturist; his connection with land is what he holds most dear and what identifies him” (Kaur 1986:233). Jat-Sikhs are the backbone of the Punjab peasantry (ibid.). Although all the ten Gurus belonged to the Khatri caste, they found majority of their followers in the Jat caste (Ibid.: 225). According to 1881 census, 66% of Sikhs were Jats followed by Ramgarhias (6.5%) and Chamar Sikhs (5.6%). Khatris’ share was only 2.2% (Mcleod 1976: 84 as cited in Ibid.). Although Sikhs are prominently identified by a set of diacritical features which they are supposed to follow according to Rahatnama ( the Sikh code of conduct), the Jat Sikhs do not always observe them strictly. Majority of them trim their beard, cut their hair, and many often smoke or chew tobacco; very few wear the kirpan (steel sword), kachh (knee length drawers), karra (steel bangle or bracelet) and kangha (comb). They rarely visit Gurdwaras (Kaur 1986: 222-23). Majority of the Jats are non-baptised Sikhs. However, the baptised ones faithfully observe all the injunctions mentioned in the Rahatnama. Jat-Sikhs are generally liberal in observance of Rahatnama. In spite of their lackadaisical approach towards the Khalsa discipline, Jat Sikhs in their own eyes and in those of others remained Sikhs (Mcleod 1976: 98). The Sikhs who strictly followed Rahatnama belong to the lower class of north Punjab (Singh 1953: 179).
Within Sikhism, dalit Sikhs are divided into two segments. The dalits whose profession is scavenging and cleaning are called Mazhbis and Rangretas. Mazhbis and Rangretas were chuhras who converted to Sikhism (Ibbetson 1883, rpt. 1970:294). “Of course a Mazbi will often have been returned as chuhra by caste and Sikh by religion; … Mazbi means nothing more than a member of the scavenger class converted to Sikhism” (Ibid.). Mazhbi Sikhs are almost confined to the Majha sub-region of Punjab. They make good soldiers and some of the regiments in British army were wholly composed of Mazhbis.