I got a strong philosophical foundation to assert my identity, wherever possible, writes Banavath Aravind.

FACEBOOK/ KANCHA ILAIAHVOICES OPINION FRIDAY, JANUARY 08, 2021 – 15:51Banavath AravindFollow @aravind_mnnit

I was introduced to Kancha Ilaiah’s work when I was about 20 years old. He was then in the midst of a controversy for a chapter in his book Post-Hindu India: A Discourse in Dalit-Bahujan, Socio-Spiritual and Scientific Revolution, which termed the Baniya community as social smugglers. During many of his debates, I had come to notice his undeterred fighting spirit in trying to bring up certain fundamental social issues that were hitherto undiscussed. I eventually came across some of his works and started reading them silently. I’m deliberately stressing upon the word ‘silently’ here, as this was the kind of silence particularly associated with sensitive social issues like caste, religion, etc. But, as I write this essay, I feel silences on sensitive issues should be broken.null

Ilaiah opened up an entirely new debate that had the vigour and strength to counter the systemic Brahmanism. His methods of research were also novel in terms of going back to the roots of Dalit -Bahujans, whom Iliaiah refers to as ‘production communities’. In an era, where the gulf between academia and social reality is ever-increasing, he tried to bridge the two, which is the need of the hour. His work majorly revolved around productive masses and their contribution to the nation-building process.

Indian sociologists, mostly coming from the upper caste background, have not examined Dalit lives and tribal lifestyles to document their cultural differences from the mainstream Hindu society. This way of writing texts by overshadowing all such nuances of Indian society has been a major issue. In the context of all such limitations, Ilaiah emerged as a saviour of social sciences with his people-centric research work. His writings were/are devoid of elite jargon and are easily understood by the marginalised sections as well. His contemporaneous scholars tried to limit his reach by refusing to acknowledge his intellectualism, in vain. His first masterstroke against mainstream intellectuals took the form of his book Why I’m not a Hindu. His idea to quote instances directly from the lives of people refects a deviation from conventional ways of writing a book, but protected his work in the long run. 

In his book Post-Hindu India, he refers to Brahmins as ‘spiritual fascists’ and Komatollu/Baniyas as ‘social smugglers’. He consciously separated these castes from the rest to highlight their historical non-participation in the production process. These communities were historically known for ‘‘intellectual discourse” which Ilaiah called a trade of conspiracies. He also added the suffix Shepherd to his name to assert the dignity of labour and to outgrow his local caste identity.null

My understanding of Ilaiah

Ilaiah did not confine himself to abstract ideas, at random. But he worked out a systematic framework to express his dissent. For example, the concept of spiritual fascism (the system that excludes Dalit-Bahujans from becoming priests to have a direct connection with god, according to Ilaiah, is not democratic and is spiritually fascist in nature) has its roots in the idea of unequal birth of different castes, based on the different body parts of Brahma. Certain castes are considered to not even be created by god. 

How could the upper castes accommodate the ‘uncreated’ castes into their structure of hierarchy and oppress them for centuries then becomes a valid question. Well, we do not get answers to such questions. Hindus have created an unintelligible caste system that is self-contradictory by any measure. But, the way we choose to respond to the challenges posed by Vedic writings is a crucial decision to be made. 

Dr BR Ambedkar studied the Vedic texts more than anyone else and wrote a critique of them within the same unintelligible framework, showcasing the shortcomings of the Rig-Vedic period formulations. This has a lot of potential  to survive in the form of challenging the status quo with a counter text rather than completely striking down the system as illogical. This is where Ilaiah differs from Ambedkar in terms of his approach. Ilaiah has come up with an entirely different theory about the existing caste structure with a bottom-up approach. Some misconstrued this as sharpening the divisions within the society. But, he tried to explain the scientificity associated with lower caste occupations, like making leather out of dead animals’ skin, knowledge of food resources passed down by tribals, the surgical sense of the barber, and feminism of the dhobis and so on.

My life after Ilaiah

The inferiority complex associated with my social background started to slowly disappear as I read more of Ilaiah. I got a strong philosophical foundation to assert my identity, wherever possible. The utopian view of society, till then, which was a result of my ignorance was shattered with Ilaiah. I have started analysing the patterns of my immediate student environment. This took some time and mental energy but the process was intellectually stimulating. 

A Telugu cultural organisation with students from all the four years was led by the seniors. In my batch, I have noticed the preponderance of students coming from upper caste backgrounds in the dominant positions of the organisation. Even if there were any from the lower caste, they primarily came from the upper class. To my surprise, I have even found that this hegemonic organisational structure was never questioned by lower caste students even though they were in good numbers. Their historical behaviour of compliance was clearly visible. 

My initial friction with that organisation and members started after I had noticed that their design of any programme systematically excluded the marginalised. They used to link many programmes with monetary aspects and the obvious sufferers were those who studied on scholarships and were from a poor financial background. The upper caste organisers, being rich donors, would command more respect and have their say in the implementation part.null

Several layers of discrimination like religion, region, class, caste were the major factors that determined relationships. After noticing that the majority of the professors come from upper caste backgrounds, I have understood the limitation of such pedagogy. I started searching for my way of overcoming such limitations by reading books written by Ambedkar, Ilaiah, and so on. This broadened my understanding in a tremendous capacity. For an inclusive environment to prevail in the universities, I propose that there should be space for voices such as Ilaiah from historically excluded sections. That space would democratise knowledge generation and dissemination processes which come about when universities have professors hailing from diverse backgrounds with diverse exposure. Ilaiah taught me that intellectualism doesn’t mean incomprehensible writings, but a dissection of social realities with sheer common sense, which is most uncommon.

Banavath Aravind is a post graduate student in sociology at Hyderabad Central University.

Views are the author’s own. 

https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/how-kancha-ilaiah-shepherd-influenced-my-life-and-thought-student-writes-141104

If Westerners are averse to commenting on controversial matters like religion in India, then lend a supportive voice the Shudras to take the lead; learn from their movements and protests for an egalitarian and inclusive India. When the Delhi government laid spikes on the road to prevent Shudra farmers from entering Delhi, the farmers laid flowers on top, singing the songs of a 15th century Shudra saint-poet,

For those sowing thorns in your path, you sow flowers
You will have flowers all the way, but the other will have thorns

The Dwija Indian thought has already influenced the world, but, as the Shudras show today, the lower castes have creative, inspirational, peaceful, and productive contributions to share as well. Allow Shepherd and Karuppusamy to guide you to the path the Shudras have chosen to halt the sinking of Indian democracy and to rebuild their country around its constitutional ethos, democratic character, secular nature, and inclusive spirit.

Grant McFarland works with Truthseekers International, a caste reconciliation movement started by Mahatma Phule (to whom The Shudras is dedicated). He has an M.A. in History from Alagappa University and is pursuing a PhD from the Sam Higginbottom University of Agriculture, Technology, Science

https://countercurrents.org/2021/03/a-book-of-the-farmers-by-the-farmers-and-for-the-farmers/

 

Pragya Thakur’s comment about Shudras echoes what her compatriots say but there is no protest by the Sangh Parivar or even opposition politicians.24 hours ago | Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

Pragya Singh Thakur is a militant and firebrand Kshatriya woman leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).null

She recently said in a meeting of the Kshatriya Samaj in Bhopal: “If you call a Kshatriya a Kshatriya, they do not feel bad; call a Brahmin a Brahmin, they do not feel bad; call a Vaishya a Vaishya, they do not feel bad. But if you call a Shudra a Shudra, they feel bad. Why is it so? Because of ignorance, they are unable to understand.”

Her argument, in other words, is that this is a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ and the society should function according to the Dharma Shastra’s Varnadharma. Shudras should remain slaves as they have been serving Brahmins, Banias and Kshatriyas since ancient Vedic times. The Shudras were liberated from that status only after India adopted the Ambedkar-written Constitution in 1950.

Thakur, meanwhile, also gave a call to Kshatriyas to produce more children and also join the army.More in Politics :Here’s a List of the Most Significant Contributions to the PM-CARES FundAssam: BJP Leader Among 36 Named in Chargesheet in State Police Exam Paper Leak ScamMangaluru Police Violence: A Year on, Muslim Victims Wait for Names to Be Dropped From FIRsWistron Violence: Apple Supplier Admits to Not Paying Some Workers Properly, Removes India VPAP SEC Files Contempt Plea Against State Govt in High CourtHow Meritorious and Inclusive Are Our Institutions of Higher Education?

Pragya Thakur addresses BJP workers in Bhopal. Credit: PTI

Hers is not just fringe talk – it is a calculated ideological argument that comes after the Ram temple judgment and reading down of Article 370 which have dealt with the Muslims. Now the Shudras seem to be the next target.

Nor is she exceptional – these views are the broad understanding of the Sangh Parivaar.

What should be the status of the Shudra and OBC working mass in that structure and also in the Hindu Rashtra? The organisational strength of the RSS and BJP comes from Shudras and OBCs and she too knows that. But, whatever their role be in that network, they have to behave as if they are unequal as they belong to the fourth varna.

It is for the Shudras and OBCs of the nation to decide now. It is true that they need not be ashamed to be called Shudra as an all Indian category. Blacks, the world over, are not ashamed of being called blacks, even though they are a minority in many Euro-American nations. The Shudras are the majority, constituting 55% of the population and they are the productive mass of this nation, with a long history of indigenous existence from the days of the Harappan civilisation.

The real productive force

As of now in different states they are known by different names. On the other hand, the Brahmins are Brahmins, Kshatriyas are Kshatriyas and Vaishyas are Vaishyas in every state and in Delhi. The Shudras will remain regionalised communities if they are not willing to modernise the notion of Shudra with a new definition. If we look at the farmers of all states, they would mainly constitute the Shudra mass. Even in the 21st century, like in ancient and medieval India, they were and still are the real producers of wealth by being the real productive force of India.

The Brahmin, Kshatriya, Bania (Vaishya) who are also known as Dwijas (twice born), in a historical sense, even in the 21st century – they remain outside agricultural production. They do not accept all forms of Indian cultures that emerged out of what is known as agriculture as spiritually dignified.

Two more castes of the western and the eastern India, Khatris and Kayasthas have now joined the Dwija ranks. The Kayasthas of Bengal, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh seem to have joined the ranks of Dwija more consciously after the emergence of Swami Vivekananda as a modern Hindu saint-thinker who the RSS has adopted as their ideological guru.

The Bengali intellectuals and media constructed concepts like Bhadralok (upper-caste people) which include Brahmins, Kayasthas and Baidhyas, and Chotalok (lower-caste people) which include Shudras, Namashudras and Adivasis of that state. Quite tragically, they never produced their own organic intellectuals who could challenge such a construction. This very language destroys the confidence of the productive mass in a manner that does not allow them to attempt for socio-spiritual equality.null

The same Vivekananda has become the ideological guru of Brahminised writers like Shashi Tharoor (a Shudra from Kerala) too. This is very clear from Tharoor’s extensive quotations from his writings, particularly Why I am a Hindu. Though Vivekananda vaguely talked about Shudra spiritual rights but his main arguments affirmed Varna Dharma that Pragya Singh Thakur is now upholding by undermining the present constitutional promise of equality. And now Vivekananda’s statue has been installed in JNU as a representative thinker of modern Indian thought.null

The Shudras as a historical productive force of India did not theorise their status in the national life. They now depend only on the constitution that Ambedkar so laboriously put in place and the indications are such that not only Pragya Singh, with her Kshatriya assertion, even others like the Gujarat speaker, Rajendra Trivedi, are asserting their ‘Brahmin pride’. “Most Nobel Prize winners from India, including recent recipient Abhijeet Banerjee, are Brahmins, and it was a Brahmin – B.N. Rau – who made the draft Constitution and handed it over to Babasaheb Ambedkar”, Trivedi said at the inauguration of a Brahmin Business Summit. Thus they are also taking away the credit of writing the constitution from Ambedkar. Earlier Arun Shourie too did the same thing by calling Ambedkar a ‘false god’.

The caste system

Amit Shah, the present home minister had said “banias are ‘chatur’ (or clever) people.” Prime Minister Narendra Modi with an OBC identity does not stop these varna-dharma-superior-inferior constructions by his own ministers and MPs.

The Shudras from the RSS/BJP networks and outside do not react. They behave as if they accept their inferior slave status even now. As of now they do not have the right to priesthood in any major temple with a systematic Hindu theological training along with Brahmins. All their Dharma Shastras including Manu Dharma Shastra and Kautilya’s Arthasastra go along the same high and low, inferior and superior theories. Those will be main books as teaching material in all universities now under the supervision of the RSS/BJP academicians.

Not that the Dwijas working in the Congress and other structures are very different. We know what Mani Shankar Aiyer said about Modi being chaiwala just before the 2014 elections. Janardan Dwivedi and Manish Tiwari have consistently opposed the reservation system which is helping the SC/ST/OBCs in education and job sectors. They pretend as if there is no caste system in India.

There is no serious critique to Manu Dharma Shastra from the right-wing intellectuals even if they happen to be Shudras. Mahatma Gandhi affirmed Varna Dharma practice and Sardar Patel, who was a lone Shudra leader in the Congress, did not object. Now Shudra leaders or intellectuals from the RSS/BJP camp do not object to the caste and varna affirmation from the RSS camp, such as by Pragya Thakur.

The Dwijas do not participate in modern production and other agrarian and cleaning labour tasks in spite of the fact that Modi’s government has given a call for ‘Swachh Bharat’ and ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat’. Only Dalits/OBCs/Adivasis do hard labour jobs and they are being treated as unworthy Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis with an undignified image.null

How does this nation generate wealth if the others do not participate in hard agrarian physical labour and continue treating Shudra/OBC and Dalits as inferior as they were treated in ancient India because they do that hard productive work?

If the Shudra/OBC leaders and intellectuals working in RSS/BJP, Congress and in the communist parties remain silent when this kind of humiliating language is allowed to be used against the main productive forces of India, the nation will definitely slip into medieval and ancient varna dharma order sooner than later.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, with an upcoming new book The Shudras — Vision for a New Path co-edited with Karthik Raja Karuppusamy (Penguin).

https://m.thewire.in/article/caste/shudras-casteism-india-pragya-thakur

 

Asaduddin Owaisi’s success in carving out a Muslim constituency will benefit BJP and bleed the Congress

The RSS mode of targeting Muslims as the permanent enemy, and Owaisi’s attempts to organise Muslims electorally, may lead to a national disorientation and gradual disaster.

Written by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd |Updated: December 14, 2020 8:57:26 amAsaduddin Owaisi

The All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) leader Asaduddin Owaisi is poised to become a national leader of the Muslim community. Apart from Hyderabad, his electoral base has now spread to Maharashtra and Bihar, where the AIMIM has won both assembly and municipal seats. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, AIMIM won a seat in Maharashtra, apart from Hyderabad. The rise of AIMIM is in the backdrop of the RSS and the BJP’s politics, which has been steadily isolating the Muslim community in India. According to the 2011 census, Muslims constitute 14.2 per cent of the Indian population. In certain urban pockets, AIMIM could win seats on its own, if the Muslims vote as a bloc.

Asaduddin’s father, Salahuddin Owaisi (1931-2008), was also an MP, representing Hyderabad constituency, but he was not a modern Muslim leader with a national image. But Asaduddin Owaisi is educated in England, and trained as a barrister, with a deep conviction that democracy is a necessary political system for Muslim well-being in India. He broke away from the UPA in 2012, which gave a boost to his national ambitions. It also turned him into a Muslim face that the BJP/RSS has constantly attacked and targetted.AIMIM’s spread has serious implications for the BJP and Congress. His success in carving out a Muslim constituency will benefit the BJP and bleed the Congress. If Muslims move away from the Congress, the BJP’s winning possibilities in every state will increase. Some of the regional parties like the Samajwadi Party and the RJD also stand to lose. So Owaisi’s rise as a visibly Muslim leader is as much BJP’s need as the AIMIM’s.

However, this may have another implication for Muslim life in India. Since a large chunk of the Muslim populace is concentrated in urban areas, their political organisational mobilities will increase and a religious-ideological leadership will emerge. By and large, Muslim masses are also unhappy with secularism, which traps them in a majority-minority discourse in which their Muslim identity is lost.The old slogan of SC/ST/OBC minority unity is also likely to go for a toss now. Though he talks about Dalit-Muslim unity, Owaisi has no language to address the Shudras or OBCs. The RSS-BJP combine wants to expand their base in a state like Telangana by militantly opposing Owaisi. They made inroads in the Hyderabad city by mainly mobilising OBCs against Muslims, as is clear in the recent municipal elections — a politics that they will now take to rural Telangana. Since AIMIM has a history of asking for an independent Nizam state (what they called South Pakistan during Kasim Razvi’s Razakar movement in the 1940s), Hindutva forces conveniently labelled the old city as Pakistan and Owaisi its Jinnah.

In many cities with a significant Muslim population, as in Hyderabad, the Shudra/OBC population have no intimate relations with Muslims. The OBCs are meat-eaters, but many do not consume beef. The RSS/BJP networks want to use these differences and organise Shudra/OBC masses against Muslims. Owaisi’s entry into caste language is recent and his more militant brother treats all OBCs as Hindus.

In fact, no Muslim leader and intellectual has studied the fault line of caste adequately. Their focus has always been the Hindu-Muslim divide. Their understanding of caste contradictions is limited to Alberuni’s Al-Hind. But India has had too long a history of caste oppression from the days of the Vedic civilisation, which predated the beginning of Muslim rule in the 11th century.

The Hindutva nationalism forged by RSS-BJP has challenged the idea of secularism, under which Muslim leaders had a place. Under Owaisi, the AIMIM, too, speaks a Muslim nationalist language. Since Owaisi’s ancestors refused to leave Hyderabad for Pakistan, the AIMIM leaders use their Indian-Muslim nationalism as a weapon against the BJP-RSS’s attempt to brand Muslims as foreign or Pakistani. That is also why Muslims across India may gravitate towards him. But the RSS mode of targeting Muslims as the permanent enemy, and Owaisi’s attempts to organise Muslims electorally, may lead to a national disorientation and gradual disaster.

This article first appeared in the print edition on December 14, 2020 under the title ‘Owaisi Promise & Its Limits’. The author is a political theorist, with an upcoming new book The Shudras — Vision for a New Path co-edited with Karthik Raja Karuppusamy (Penguin)

https://countercurrents.org/2021/02/disha-ravi-is-nations-heroine/

 

in Annihilate Caste — by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

India is a nation of second largest population in the world. China is the first largest populated nation with a land size bigger than India. India’s population according to 2011 census was 1210.2 million and China’s population was 1347.3 million. India’s land size is 3.287 million KMs, whereas China’s land size is 9.597 million KMs. China’s land size is three times bigger than that of India.

Within a small land size with a massive population India has been producing food, goods and commodities that could sustain a population of almost as large as that of China. This means that the food producers of India must have been working harder and for longer hours than that of Chinese food producers.

India feeds more non-food producers than China. In India there are about 7-8 per cent population in caste terms the Brahmins, Banias, Jains, Kayasthas Khatris and Kshatriyas openly who declared that they would not touch agricultural work, which is the main food production source.

There is a spiritual theory that controls their mind that production is pollution and soil is untouchable. The Indian Jains think that tilling the land kills insects therefore they would not do that job as they practice total non-violence. There is no such anti-production population in China. All do production or production related work without any spiritual or any other theory of non-violence that works as hindrance to the life line of human survival, food production. Crafting such theories is easy but sustaining human life is very difficult.

This situation has increased the burden and pain of food producers in India. The physical labour, pain and pleasure are evenly distributed in China. Sweating out to produce food is a universal human cultural and civilizational value and non-participation in production is exceptional human behaviour. Indian Brahminism has produced this exclusionary spiritual and cultural system which has become the main problem of India.

Though there is a difference in consumption levels of Indians and Chinese, the fact that India feeds it people by producing food resources for all of them shows its strength. Where exactly is the strength of its food, goods and commodity production lies? It lies with a social mass within the Indian population called Shudras, Atishudras (Dalits) and Adivasis. The minority religious people like Muslims and Christians also share their labour. But the main component of the labour power to sustain this country’s people’s lives comes from the Shudras and Dalits. On the other hand, the main ruling class of India consists of five castes-Brahmins, Banias, Kayasthas, Khatris and Kshatriyas. They are known as the ruling English educated Bhadralok. They treat the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis as not so competent people to rule India on their own. But the history of Indian civilization tells that the Shudras are the main civilization builders with massive struggle with nature. And over a period of time they built the science and technology of production. For any nation to survive through the thick and thin of natural calamities, human wars and human ignorance keeping the human mass survive the food producers went on playing a key role, after the food gathering stage was crossed.

The Shudras and Brahmins worked as two opposing schools in the process of keeping this nation survive. There were no such diametrically opposite schools in China at any point of time in history. The Shudras were agriculturalists and the Brahmins were anti-agricultural sanyasis, sadhus, gurus, peetadhipathis and so on. They have been working ways and means to survive without participating in food production. The Shudra knowledge of production, construction and building up science of preservation of food resources played main role in civilization building. By the time the Indo-Africans who later have come to be known as Dravidian and in caste/Varna terms Shudras built Harappan civilization without Brahminism being around.

Both the countries have oldest civilization on this earth. The Indian civilization began to be noticed by the world with building up of Harappan city civilization around 3000 BCE. Shimao is oldest civilizational city site in China dated back to 2000BCE. In the recent past the Harappan civilization is being discussed in a big way in the global history and archaeology platforms. Though Chinese so far discovered Shimao civilization as their most ancient civilization it was not as rich as that of Harappan civilization

What is actually a broad definition of civilization?

According to one definition: “A civilization is any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification, a form of government and symbolic systems of communication such as writing. Civilizations are intimately associated with and often further defined by other socio-politico-economic characteristics, including centralization, the domestication of both humans and other organisms (animals, birds and so on), specialization of labour, culturally ingrained ideologies of progress and supremacism, monumental architecture, taxation, societal dependence upon farming and expansionism…Civilization, as its etymology suggests, is a concept originally linked to towns and cities. The earliest emergence of civilizations is generally associated with the final stages of the Neolithic Revolution, culminating in the relatively rapid process of urban revolution and state formation, a political development associated with the appearance of a governing elite.”

Who built this civilization in its earliest form and where it began? As I said earlier in the Indian subcontinent the Harappan civilization is the earliest and there is no dispute about it. For any civilization to be built developing an economy of domesticated animals, de-tribalization of human living, constructing villages and expanding them into urban centres are the key processes. Who built the Harappan civilization? Number of archaeological studies, the recent DNA studies and human migrational studies clearly suggest that the Harappan civilization was built by Ando-Africans, later known as the Dravidian race. Whereas the Chinese civilization was built by the Han race. It is clear that by the time of India building Harappan civilization China had no matching civilization even after thousand years of Harappan civilization. When they built the Shinao civilization it was no match to the Indian Harappan civilization. There was no urban civilization that was as advanced as that of Harappan civilization even 2000BCE.

According to Tony Joseph the third migration to the Indian sub-continent was that of Aryans by 1500 BCE. The Aryans wrote Rig Veda after they settled down on this land as their first book in their language-Sanskrit. The Indo-Africans or Dravidians had their own languages in different stages of development. The Indian society, as Rig Veda tells us, was divided into four Varnas–Shudra, Vaisya, Kshatriya and Brahmin by the time the Rig Veda was written. The Shudras were shown as slave working mass; the other three varna/castes were the Aryan non-working minority that would get food resources from the labour of the Shudras. The whole Sanskrit literature has shown Shudras as inferior human beings. Their existence in modern India is without much change. Whether it was the Congress rule or coalition rule or the RSS/BJP rule Varnadharma system remained the central anchor around which they operated in the post-Independent India.

Even assuming that the Aryan migration theory is wrong, as the Hindutva archaeologists and historians are arguing, the work ethics of the present-21st century Brahmins and other Dwijas–show that they have no participation in deforesting, agriculuralising the lands, taking care of animal and bird economic activity. If the division of labour that had driven them to such non-agrarian activity leaving every agrarian productive activity to Shudras the brahmin history, practice and life style even of 21st century does not show that they have changed. Even now their contribution in civilization building as it is a continuing process is a negative one. If they claim that they built religious organizational structures like temples, mutts, and pittas so on, Brahminism does not show inclusive character to allow collective civilization to emerge in building these structures and institutions. Even in that realm the physical and scientific structural construction of those institutions are done by Shudras. The role of the Dwijas in pre-Independent Indian civilization building seems negative but never was positive and post-Independence democratic India did not change the basic character of Brahminism of the old order.

The Dwija castes have occupied all education; ritual, soft knowledge related institutions and kept tightly under them in a manner that they do not unfold knowledge of production, positive and inclusive human relations. In educational institutions and soft knowledge and religious institutions Brahmins made the Shudras, including Marathas, Patels, Jats, Yadavs, Gujjars, Kammas, Reddys, Velamas, Nairs, Nayakars, Lingayats and so on that their historical civilization building abilities were/are inferior. Their classsical books portrayed the Shudras as unworthy people and they hold that books as the mirror of Indian civilization in the schools and colleges even now. After the RSS/BJP came to power they want teaching only those books but not field work based modern research books as unworthy to teach. In their day today practice they work in conformity with their books.

The Shudras are made to feel that they cannot become priests in the temples, cannot become intellectuals in the larger civil society. Though the Shudras worked for pulling down Babri Masjid and building Ram Temple at Ayodhya or worked to build Tirupathi temple earlier under the guidance of a Shudra king Sri Krishnadevaraya, yet they cannot become priests in those temples. If temples are part of Indian civilization and must be treated as Hindu civilization as the RSS/BJP, secular Congress or communist Dwija intellectuals are arguing, what is the place of the real builders of all these spiritual institution? They are visitors, as bhakts but not the conductors of the Hindu spiritual system. Is there a religion in the world that says that a particular caste, community or race cannot become priests in a temple?

This caste/varna division exists in a much structuralized manner by the time India established constitutional democracy in 1950. China established a communist people’s republic in 1949. But India became independent from the British colonial rule in 1947 and took almost three years to institutionalise proper constitutional democracy. This is a most revolutionary development in the whole of Indian history. The Shudras and Dalits got recognition as voters, as citizens, though several other inequalities do continue. The right to vote was given by the British colonial state for all adult Indians. If it were pure Hindu state or a Muslim state like Mughal state the adult franchise would have come to India even by now.

The Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis of India got political freedom after a long slavish life after the Rig Vedic Varna system was established. At times there were Shudra rulers in small states. But they were under the spiritual and intellectual authority of the Brahmin forces. At no stage in history the Brahmin intellectual authority was overthrown in a long history of the Shudra civilization. Their spiritual and social slavery to Brahminic spiritual authority still continues. In a province like Maharashtra where a Shudra king like Shivaji defeated the Mughals and established his kingdom the Brahmin priests of his time refused to do pujas or prayers on his coronation. But such a valiant hero Shudra king was so afraid of the Brahmin power he went all the way to Varanasi (Kashi) to get Brahmin poojaris and took Kshatriyahood for his coronation. He could not create Shudra priests in his state. Within a short time that province went into the hands of Brahmin Peshwa rulers. By the time Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule came in the mid nineteenth century and rejected the Brahmin authority in all fields the Peshwas were ruling the roost over the Shudra farmers, masses and Dalit labour. Why the Shudra rulers and masses could not assert spiritual and intellectual autonomy is a puzzle that human history has to still uncover. This is not just an Indian issue. It is a problem that global psychologists, sociologists and theologians have to examine. There is a deep psychological trauma among the Shudras and Dalits with fear of Brahmin spiritual authority. Even swords, war elephants could not win over Brahminism. Only education–that English education for all–can win this battle.

The Africans who were enslaved by the white colonials fought against the spiritual and intellectual hegemony of whites. Women across the world revolted against the physical and mental control by men. But the Shudras never revolted against the Brahmins. This spiritual and intellectual hegemony of Brahmin continued from the days of writing of Rig-Veda to my generation in the 21 century. How and why the Shudras allowed this Brahmin hegemony to continue for such long time? This is a major unexplainable historical knot. Perhaps it lies in frozen consciousness of the Shudras of the post-colonial India much more than what their pre-colonial consciousness was. In the pre-colonial era they were not allowed to have access to education even though they were rulers of small states.

Most Shudra rulers were illiterate and depended on the Brahmins for every written word and spiritual speculative knowledge. Even reading of the calendar, epics or Vedas was not their job. The Shudras were not allowed to write books and read any book at all. They were made to live like children arrested in a dark room. The Brahminism destroyed all their creative energies that would have advanced the productive knowledge of India much more than the British colonialism did. If only they were allowed to write their own experience, experiments, strategies and tactics that they used on the production fields the spread of such knowledge far and wide would have made India much more stronger nation than what it is today.

The Shudra knowledge always was in an oral form. The Brahmin and other Dwijas because of their declared superior status with a right to read and write and also leisure in life and their image became divine image among the Shudra productive masses. They were deeply embedded in the karma theory fed by the Brahmins. But in the post-colonial era, even in a changed situation the Shudra inferiority continued, irrespective of their economic status.

Shivaji a very powerful king who defeated the Mughals was a Shudra. He too surrendered to the Brahmin spiritual and intellectual authority. His grandson Sahu Maharaj tried to unsettle the Brahmin authority by giving reservation to Shudra/Dalits. From that period to the last stage of abolition of princely states in the 1970s Shudra kings had political power in several pockets of India. Rulers like Mysore Maharaja and Baroda Maharaja were Shudras rulers of small states politically for quite long time. But spiritually and intellectually they were under Brahmin control. Whereas Brahmin rulers like Peshwa who ruled parts of the present Maharashtra were not controlled by anybody else in any field of life. They were rulers, priests and business conductors, policy makers. Except food production they were doing everything to control the food producers. It was from this total hegemony of Brahmin the first modern Shudra intellectual, Mahatma Jotirao Phule emerged. But the post-colonial intellectuals’ school that constituted only of Brahmins, Banias, Kayasthas, Khatris, totally ignored him in their count of the Indian renaissance thinkers. The post-colonial intellectual school played more negative role than the colonial intellectuals.

By the time Ambedkar returned to Baroda state in 1917 to serve as per his agreement with the king, the Shudra kings had no social power in their hands. Ambedkar got a job in Baroda state. But the king had no power to provide him accommodation to live as that would enrage the Brahmin officials and priests. The king must have thought that even the Shudra masses would support the Brahmin priests and officials and overthrow him or curse him. The notion of Brahmin curse having a power of killing people, overthrowing kings or causing wars was strong weapon in the belief system that the Brahmin spiritual system put in place. The Shudras and Dalits are believed to have no such cursing power. These belief systems were shaking the mightiest kings in the war fields and were begging for Brahmin blessing. Such was the power of casteism and Brahminism in the early twentieth century. A Shudra king who supported the education of a Dalit scholar till his highest level of education in America and England, the Baroda king could not give him a living place along with a secure job. Not that he was opposed to giving him a house in Baroda but the Brahmins were opposed to that and he was scared of their spiritual power.

If only the Shudra kings were to train the Shudra priests within their states to conduct the temple rituals, peoples family ritualistic activities like child birth, marriage, death, house warming and so on the Brahmins would have been jobless. They would have been forced to take up productive jobs. The cultural environment of the nation in such a situation would have been different. The problem was the fear of Brahmin became more serious to the Shudras than the fear of God. This in turn multiplied the problems of the Dalits. At the instance of the Brahmin the Shudras oppressed the Dalits further down. Todays atrocities against Dalits by Shudras should be traced to this weakness of Shudras. The social and spiritual disconnect between different productive layers of the society increased. If the Shudras who were spread out into many fields were to get into spiritual thought, the Shudra priests would have become a connecting link between all layers of the society. As the Shudras constituted the largest number of people all along the living history of the nation, they were situated in varied occupations. But Shudra rulers were always under the spiritual authority of the Brahmin. They lost out on philosophy front as the inferiority complex crushed them. They have now reached to a stage that studying philosophy is not their field. They want to become doctors, engineers but when it comes to the domain of spiritual philosophy they feel that they cannot handle it. They have a deep sense of fear of philosophy.

No Shudra ruler thought of declaring spiritual autonomy and train Shudra priests and intellectuals with a fear of Brahmin shapam (curse) and with the fear that Hindu gods that were said to have completely under the spell of Brahmin pooja, yagnam, yagam and so on would not be accessible to them without the Brahmin mediation. If the same pooja, yagnam or yagam were to be done by Shudra priests or spiritual gurus the communal disconnectivity between Shudras and Dalits would not have been so deep. Gradually Dalits would have become priests and gurus and whole communities would have had social intercourse in the temple system. That would have put an end to human untouchability.

Once you become a priest or teacher you read book and write books. When you read and write philosophy your acceptability becomes wider. If the Shudras were to do reading and writing throughout the history of Brahmin monopoly this much control of Brahmins over a very critical area of reading and writing would not have been continued. Any caste person would have become priest, teacher, reader and writer. The Indian philosophy, like the Chinese philosophy of agriculturalism, would have developed on different course. The agrarian production would have come fully into the domain of philosophy. That would have put the Indian development on altogether a different path.

Post-Colonial Shudraism

The post-colonial priesthood, teacher job, (whether in the school or college or university), guruhood, reading and writing confined to Dwijas and that caused enormous socio-spiritual stagnation. The Shudras who built the Indian civilization from Harappan days to present are made mere followers of Dwijas. At best like in the times of the princely rule in the states, they are allowed to hold positions of political power in the states but they lost sight of Delhi even in politics because they cannot reach there with a philosopical vision and all India connectivity. Spiritual power establishes deeper social connections across the country but not the political power. Political power keeps people around day today life struggles in the economic and political domains. Unless the Shudras get deeply involved in spiritual power and the philosophy which would give more serious ideas to organise humanity, they cannot control political power with authority. The Brahmin writers created a world of mysticism where the Shudras did not dare to think that they could challenge them with deep involvement of book reading and book writing.

The very same Brahmin writers wrote several texts which would tell such stories of brahmin rishi shapam and destruction of kings and their powers. Once the rulers themselves in modern times are afraid of brahmin power the ordinary Shudra masses were/are more afraid. They thought that a Shudra becoming a priest even after learning Sanskrit mantras, slokas and texts would not undo brahmin power and would not satisfy Hindu gods. During the freedom movement the Hindu Mahasabha and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh were established by Brahman thinkers. The Shudras did not understand the Brahman strategy. Even if somebody understood their strategy they were spiritually dead sacred of life here on this earth and moksha hereafter. The communist Brahmins and other Dwijas though know that all this Brahmin spiritual power is a myth but did not want to attack it because such an attack would also delegitimize their control over the communist movement and organizations. Thus they helped the Hindutva Brahminism to sustain and grow. Similarly the Brahmins and Dwijas around the Congress and other liberal political forces knew that their hegemony on soft power, wherever they were/are, lies with the spiritual power they did not allow the Shudras around to understand that critical domain. They know that the religious philosophy and institutions are completely under their authority. The Shudra educated were also not conscious of what was controlling them.

What played more powerful role in controlling the Shudra forces is the domain of post-colonial intellectuality. Universities, colleges, schools, research institutions played a very important role to continue the pre-colonial Brahminic authority by not allowing the Shudras to get into mass English education and get into intellectual domains. The pre-colonial Muslim rule had its own Islamic spiritual domain which did not get out of its own fold. The Islamic spirituality had /has no liberation agenda. They were interested only changing the name and form if some Shudras converted to escape the Dwija hegemony. They replaced Sanskrit with Arabic which is also not a productive language in India. Field and spirituality got equally separated in Indian Islam as they were separated by Brahminism. The Shudras have not shown any interest in such Islam. The Hindyutva Dwijas uses their muscle power against Muslim quite cleverly.

The spiritual intellectuals and the so called secular Dwija intellectuals have a common cultural basis to divert the Shudra attention. The Shudraism remained a mind numbed agrarian operational force within small localities without even thinking about the nation and its future and their role in the nation. They did not think that the Gandhi-Nehru combination was Bania-Brahmin combination with a mixed ideological agenda. The only Shudra leader in that team was Vallabai Patel who never played an ideological role with a direction to liberate the Shudras from the historical hegemonic authority and control of Brahmanism. He simply remained a follower of Gandhi’s Bania vegetarian gyana marg (path of knowledge).

In post-colonial India what the Dwija intellectuals did was that they deployed what is known as the post-colonial discourse on India. One of the main characters of this discourse was making colonialism responsible for everything. They said caste hierarchies were also created by colonialism. The Shudra numbness was such that they did not understand why such theories were being cooked up. While blaming colonialism for everything whenever the Shudras asked for priesthood rights in the temples they said the Agama Shastras do not allow that to happen. Who wrote Agama Shastras and when?

The Agama shastras are more than two thousand years old. They were written by Brahmins in such a way that the Shudras would never get equal spiritual rights according them and other books like Manudharma Shastra and Vedas. The problem of Shudra history is that they never aspired for equality and never thought of giving equality to Dalits. What the Nrahmin priest said was/is divine word. Shudraism thus is an ideology of production and hard labour but it has deeply embedded in inferiority and ignorance and lack of spiritual and social consciousness. It never realised that the same British colonial masters allowed the African Black slaves to become pastors, bishops in Britain, America, and South Africa so on. The Shudras did not ask a simple question why they cannot become temple priests even after the British left India. Even when the British were there how were they stopping the Shudras admitting in to the Sanskrit gurukulas when they were being defined as Hindu? The same Gandhi whom Patel and other Shudras nationalist leaders and cadres were following as a God sent Vaishnava leader who was repeatedly saying Varna gradation is non-negotiable in Hinduism. Once Varna system is non-negotiable how do Shudras, whether they are land lords or landless labourers become equal in post-colonial spiritual and social citizenship rights? Political equality does not mean spiritual equality. The right to vote does not guarantee the right to equality in the temple and does not guarantee moksha in heaven. Most criminals become big politicians, become ministers but criminals cannot get moksha in the Kingdom of God. The judgement of God is not the same like our caste centred courts.

Even the rich Shudras never focussed on the leisure centred intellectual domain beyond agrarian landlordism and crude power base over the labour in the villages. They never thought of soft power issue that had much to do with reading and writing books. This weak point of Shudra civilization-that is non-focusing around soft power-made India weaker than China from time to time. A constant upgradation of the consciousness of the productive force is a necessary condition of national development and an egalitarian spiritual system that plays a critical role in this upgradation of philosophical knowledge.

Shudra intellectual and spiritual rebellion against anti-production Brahminism would have kept the world at a different plain. If only the Shudras who contited such huge numbers were to produce intellectuals who could command every field of science, technology and spiritual system the world would have gained a lot. The post-colonial Shudras had this task at hand. But they have not produced enough intellectual leaders to lead the philosophical and social discourse and defeat Brahminism without any fear of intellectual black magic. The Brahminic intellectuality has produced enough black magic.

By 2020 there is a vast difference between the development of India and China. China has the second largest economy of the world by 2020 and Indian economy is way behind which is not even 1/3^rd of Chinese economy. The only thing to boast about India is that it is world’s biggest democratic nation, with constant elections. Not that it doesn’t have the potential to change the Indian nation’s development path with the constitutional democracy being what it is, but what the Shudra mass should do is that they should gain grip over everything, including the spiritual system and higher education structures.

Post- Colonial Shudra Intellectuality

Post-colonial India has rigidified caste. The secular Dwija intellectuals have hidden every inequality under the carpet of secularism. The process of national independence was made an instrument of English educated Brahmin, Bania, kayastha, khatri and Kshatriya monopoly. The Shudras who had a history of building a massive civilization through their labour power lost out on spiritual and educational fronts and hence became mere followers of the Dwija leaders. During the colonial times under the Brahmin leadership the Dwijas gained access to the British administrative institutions like collectorates, courts and safeguarded their Brahminic spiritual control over the Shudra productive masses in the villages and towns. The Dwija hegemony was also intact during the Mughal regime because lot of Brahmins and other Dwijas learnt Persian language and they worked as administrators at lower level, though at higher level only Muslim officials were running the system. In many places like Kashmir and Gujarat Brahmins and Banias got converted to Islam and entered into higher administration. Such converted Dwijas safeguarded the interests of the Brahmin-Banias outside Islam. Allama Iqbal, a Kashmiri Brahmin convert and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a Gujarati Bania convert, who worked as top nationalist Muslim leaders are the best examples. Though they worked out divisive nationalist policy at the far end of the freedom struggle by proposing a two nation theory, because of serious disagreement between the same Dwija Congress leaders and also Muslim leaders–Gandhi on the one side and Jinnah on the other–their overall grip on the two nations more so on India remained very strong. They essentially managed the caste- class elite system even in Pakistan.

The Muslim society both in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh even now is based on the old caste-class feudal hegemonic hierarchy. Bangladesh actually is a nation of most Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi converts. But few Brahmin and Kayastha converts control power in Bangladesh even now. Caste is a coronavirus like social structure it would not leave once its enters the society. Once it takes roots in the social body no religion could undo it once for all. We need to discover an anti-caste vaccine. That requires rigorous research by Shudra/Dalit scientists. As of now there are no such social scientists in India.

The Shudra labourers and landed farmers or even the landlords followed the Dwija leadership and believed whatever they told at any time. The roots of caste structure and the Brahminic inequalities are so deep in this land that whether Islam or Christianity so far could not undo that structure. Since some of the native people converted from caste cultures the same inequalities got into Islam and Christianity. The only fundamental difference between Hinduism, Christianity and Islam is that the priesthood is allowed to all male persons in those religions.

With the anti-Muslim and anti-Christian campaign of the RSS/BJP during last several decades the Shudra consciousness was more blunted. They deploy the Shudra muscle power in anti-Muslim and anti-Christian campaigns. The Shudras are ready to do muscle work not mind work. Thus the RSS has become the main organization that safeguarding the Dwija interests in the era of advanced capitalism and political democracy.

While the post-colonial pure class theory of left liberal intellectuals kept Shudras out of the English language and higher educational structures the focussed anti-Muslim Hindutva nationalist campaign of RSS/BJP deformed the Shudra consciousness much more. They have reached to a stage of no ambition of acquiring global knowledge. They have no ambition of acquiring intellectual leadership in any field of life. That is the most tragic part of Shudra post-colonial existence. They were illiterate all through the medieval and the pre-medieval times and they became English illiterate in the modern post-colonial times. How do they rule the nation as English illiterates when the Dwijas became global intellectuals and political leaders, even ruling America (Kamala Harris, vice-president) and United Kingdom (Rishi Sunak present finance minister and so on) while telling the Shudras to remain in the regional language education. The Shudra leaders are too willing to obey them.

During the colonial period many Brahmins converted themselves to Christianity and became Christian educationalists in English language. But they again taught English to non-Christian Brahmins and other Dwijas. In Kerala, TamilNadu, in Bengal such converted Brahmins played a key role in educational development of non-Christian Dwijas, what they now call Hindus. During this entire educational expansion period the Shudras remained tied down to land, cattle economy and producing food and supplying to Dwijas. Some of them are landlords and regional rulers. Buth they have no philosophical ambition. Whatever their Brahmin guru advises they follow without question.

During the British colonial times a very small number of Indians entered into schools in the village setting because the British English medium schools were around towns. The Brahmins and other Dwijas were the most urbanized people by those times. The Brahmins, Kayasthas, Khatris were around book centred operations; the Banias were around business even in colonial times. Both these activities were mainly operating from urban areas. Agriculture on the other hand was spread out into the rural areas and most cases to semi-forest zones. The Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis were located in such disconnected village locations where education was completely shutout to them. Even during the whole of British colonial period the villages remained illiterate as they were during the Muslim rule and earlier because of non-availability of schools or even family education centres.

Prior to the Muslim rule in Hindu period the Shudras were not supposed to learn Sanskrit. The Shudra political rulers since were under the spiritual control of Brahmin priests or gurus they were given Kshatriyahood and were taken out of Shudra social connectivity. At every stage the educated Brahmin played a new trick with the Shudra agrarian mass so that they could not become educated. In Indian caste system there is no culture of neighbourhood child education practice by home teachers. The Brahmin family teaching centres called gurukulas were out of the reach of Shudras whether they were rich or poor. Hence the Shudras could not become teachers till the British opened schools and reservations were given to them by some small Shudra rulers like Sahu Maharaj or Mysore Maharaja during the colonial times. The fact that Savitribai Phule was the first Shudra teacher– female or male– shows the historical educational deprivation of Shudras.

In the post-colonial India when the new schools and colleges and universities came up hardly any Shudras were there to enter these institutions as teachers, Government officers, clerks and so on. High end universities were filled with Brahmins, Banias, Kayasthas and Khatris. These castes historically were either around Hindu priesthood where book reading played an important role or working in the revenue departments as clerks, patwaris where reading and writing played a very critical role. Banias were exclusively around business where some basic reading and writing of accounts was needed. During the colonial times they went into English education. Mahatma Gandhi, Rammanohar Lohia and historians like K.P Jaiswal went abroad and studied.

The Shudras thought that their job was food production, cattle rearing, artisanal instrument making but not reading and writing. The Shudra landlords were happy with their power the village labour. The Brahmin priestly forces also told them that God does not allow the Shudras to read and write. This was most heinous divine principle that they evolved and repeatedly propagated.

How could intellectuals emerge from Shudras in that situation? Their notion of religion was not book centred but idol centred and when they began to be defined as Hindu during the freedom struggle they were depending on the Brahmin to read and recite books for them. They could not even read astrology or Panchangam (the book of horoscope and book of time and space). It did not matter whether they were landlords or landless labourers. The nationalist period very systematically brought all the Shudras under the grip of Brahmins, who maintained the Brahminic Dalit untouchability intact. Mukul Keshavan writes in NDTV blog, while writing about Kamala Harris hiding her Brahmin background, that his own grandfather used to have a purifying bath if he sees a Dalit from distance. That was a nationalist Brahmin. (https://www.ndtv.com/opinion/is-kamala-harris-suppressing-her-tambram-origins-2283536).

The nationalist Brahmins treated Dalit sight as untouchable and a Shudra touch as unacceptable, but the Shudra labour was acceptable even within the house. A Shudra for a nationalist Brahmin was like a black slave in American white house. In fact, lesser than that. Black slaves were allowed to work within whites’ houses and they were touchable as well. Whereas the Shudras–a Nair, Naykar, a Mudaliar, a Kamma, Reddy, Lingayat, Vakkaliga, or Maratha, Jat, Patel and so on were working in Brahmin houses to do household tasks but they were not touchable humanly.

No Brahmin at any point of time in the post Vedic history worked on fields along with Shudras. There was no area where the Brahmins and Shudras could touch each other except perhaps in sexual engagements of Brahmin men, as it happened in the Nair society of Kerala. The Nair women were working as sexual concubines of the Brahmin men. Even in other areas Brahmin and other Dwija men using Shudra women for their sexual gratification was not treated as major problem by the Shudra men also. Because a Brahmin is treated as equivalent to god and any crime by a Brahmin is treated as divinely accepted process. Once a criminal act of Brahmin and other Dwijas is treated as divinely accepted the legal dimension does not come into focus. The Shudra women were never accepted as a legal wife but a sexually usable commodity.

The female sexuality was touchable for Brahmin but not the working body as a human being. The Shudra women had lost out in education even in the post-colonial period much more than dwija women. Thousands of dwija women are educated in English medium schools after the post-colonial constitutional governance began. Even before India achieved independence many Dwija–particularly Brahmin women- got educated in English medium schools. Sarojini Naidu (born in a Bengali Barahmin–Chattopadhyaya family– but married to Shudra Naidu of Andhra), her daughter Padmaja Naidu, Vijaya Lakshimi Pandit and Indira Gandhi and so on had advanced level of English medium school education in India and England and played a critical role in high end political structures. Indira Gandhi would not have become the Prime Minister of India but for her English education and global exposure. We have hardly any Shudra women of that stature whether they came from landlord family or middle class family. The question of landless labour Shudra women getting English medium education is out of imagination. This legacy was extended to post-colonial higher educational institutions. Since the rural settings were not allowed to have English medium education the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi men and women were forced to confine to regional language education which did not give them scope to confidently get English medium higher education. The Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis living in urban areas were also forced to confine to Government regional language schools and or remained illiterate labouring mass.

C V Raman (a Tamil Brahmin) was the first Nobel Prize winner after independence. His father was a school teacher in pre-independent India, Har Gobind Khorana (a Khatri from united Punjab) the second Nobel winner, though he was Non-Resident Indian. His father was a Patwari in Western Punjab. Amartya Sen (a Kayastha from Bengal), his father was a professor undivided Bengal. These professions were not available for Shudras in pre-independent India.

In post-colonial India the Shudra regional language educated, even though were the children of village landlords, could not compete with English medium educated Dwija forces in higher educational institutions. Added to this the Shudra houses had no book reading culture. Unless a spiritual need forces people to read books human beings normally do not get to know the spiritual philosophical issues in normal course of life.  Unless God is said to have commanded one to read books the working houses do not take off time to read books. There was no notion of holiday mandatorily allocated for educational purposes or a rest day in the Shudra history. The nationalist Brahmin priest did not provide such a rest day which would have given them leisure time to think of reading a book once the regional language education reached them, if not English. The post-colonial Shudra was leading a primitive life, as usual around his farm, cattle either as a worker or as manager. This in itself does not provide a globally or nationally synthesised philosophy unless one is educated and takes time to read and write. That road was/is blocked to Shudras irrespective of their landed wealth or poverty.

Poverty in itself does not block acquiring spiritual philosophy or social philosophy. Poverty in itself does not stop a big mass of humanity acquiring the skills of reading and writing. Many poor across the world became great thinkers and writers. For example, the twelve disciples of Jesus who spread the spiritual philosophy of Jesus and Bible were not rich or big land owners. Similarly the Brahmin saints or rishis who were said to have written the Brahminic books or propagated them were not big moneyed or landlords but were people of interest to sustain Brahminism as a religion. They were determined to spread the ideas of anti-Shudra, anti-labour ideology and keep them bonded to land and labour, as the Brahmin keeps handling the soft knowledge power. This was lacking among the Shudras. They would have fought for it but as a race and community they were so intimidated for millennia that they lost the historical confidence in themselves except in performing labour and land related tasks. The general communist theory that economic equality or achievement solves all other problems of inequality, including that of spiritual, social and philosophical inequality, is absolutely wrong. India is a critical example to disprove the economic determinism of communist thinkers of the world and India.

How Shudra Consciousness is encircled by Brahmanism

At the national level the Dwijas encircled the high end institutions in all sectors in three package forms: the secular liberal, Hindutva and left. In every package the same Dwija forces were/are there to checkmate the Shudra/Dalit path into those institutions in various ways. They went on changing institutional definitions. When the Shudras/Dalits were reaching one stage of the institutional target they went on raising the bar with a definition that becomes advantageous to the Dwija youth. The top layers of Shudras who were defined as ‘dominant’ castes by the same Dwija intellectuals did not understand the game at all. The productive Shudra masses could not even go beyond the issue of reservation. Shudras who are outside the reservation category could not compete with Dwijas in many fields. The idea of Shudra and Dwija forces competing at the same level in higher education and high end jobs was/is very misguiding. The Dwijas have a common spiritual thread among them with long family history of education, whereas the Shudras have no such history. The main role at the national level in encircling the Shudra consciousness was/is played by Brahmin, Bania, Kayastha and Khatri communities. The Kshatriyas have little role in this post-colonial deceptive role because they too had no long history of English medium education.

Very few Kshatriyas, who in northern Indian today are known as Rajputs, Thakurs have entered these institutions because they thought that they were high end rulers with landed estate ownership and hence they need not spend time in schools, colleges, universities and offices. Even today there are not many high end Kshatriya bureaucrats and university professors and top business families, though some have come up in politics. They are hardly there within hardware or of software business or in the high end economic activities.

The post-colonial modernity was linked to English language education and it was kept in private domain in metropolitan cities and Kshatriyas have not focussed much on English education. Not that that they do not have money but do not have the aptitude to learn English. Colonial modernity has become a Dwija preserve. The Kshatriyas, of course, are catching up very lately.

The Shudra position was/is much worse. Jats, Gujjars, Yadavs, Patels, Marathas, Reddys, Kammas, Lingayats, Vakkaligas, Nairs, Nayakars, Mudaliyars and so on, though had landed property did not enter into educational and administrative institutions at national level with a grip on English language. Their presence in regional institutions is of course is visible because of regional language education. The gap between people who are educated in regional language in Government schools and those who are educated in English medium private schools is enormous. The post-colonial life is dependent more on education–that too on English education– than on land.

Globalization made the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi life more disadvantageous. The farmers’ life became more unequal and they have not yet realized where their spiritual and social location is. Their place in the globally interactive business is almost zero. Except that they buy some cell phones, TV sets, cars or other gadgets but their control on globalized economy is zero. Few farmers or landlords or political leaders could buy cars and good modern houses but that is no sign of modernized development. In spheres of soft knowledge production they are totally absent. They could neither become priests in the temples, professors in the universities, scientists in the high end labs of India or leaders of globally networking organizations or Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), nor could they become national level mass leaders and industry owners. The so called rich Shudras can only handle the regional political institutions and small economic institutions.

The Shudra artisans, cattle herders, shepherds, Dalits and Adivasis all over India couldn’t have handled even the regional political institutions and financial institutions as they remained uneducated for generations. In post-colonial times they were not allowed to learn English which is the key language to handle power structures with efficiency. Many of them are still in the forest zones. They are not even capable of educating their children in regional language schools. Their children were/are farm hands, cattle grazers and cultivators for wage as they keep growing. The British were replaced by Dwijas in all post-colonial institutions. The Shudras remained post-colonial farmers, cattle herders, tillers of soil. Some Shudra upper layer castes hoped to gain neo-Kshatriya status without even understanding the Kshatriya status in post-colonial times itself has no meaning. They themselves are not in good position without having modern English medium education as much as the other Dwija communities have. They themselves have not produced high end intellectuals and philosophers and in such a situation what do Shudras achieve even if they are given the Kshatriya status. The only use of that in ancient and medieval India was to become kings. Now because of Ambedkar’s constitution they can become the Prime Minister, President of India by remaining Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi.

Post-Colonial Shudras and Nationalism

In the post-colonial world nationalism became a major theoretical discourse issue. The Shudras were outside that discourse. Once they were outside English education and university presence the Dwijas controlled the nation and nationalist discourse. The Shudras remained as field intellectuals. They were studying the nature, forests, mountains, rivers, animals, birds, seeds and instruments of production but were not entering into the book reading and writing domains, where the nationalist discourse plays its game. Book reading requires a motivation slightly different from agrarian operational motivation. For Dwijas the spiritual system itself was motivational factor for reading and writing. The only Shudras who write books in English by claiming themselves as staunch Hindu like Shashi Tharoor present themselves as more fundamentalist Hindu than Dwijas themselves. He tells about his father’s ritual practice in graphic way in his book Why I am a Hindu.

He says “I grew up in a Hindu household. Our home always had a prayer room, where paintings and portraits of assorted divinities jostled for shelf and wall space with fading photographs of departed ancestors, all stained by ash scattered from the incense burned daily by my devout parents. I have written before of how my earliest experiences of piety came from watching my father at prayer. Every morning, after his bath, my father would stand in front of the prayer room wrapped in his towel, his wet hair still uncombed, and chant his Sanskrit mantras”. (Why I am a Hindu. Aleph, 2018). How many generations of Nairs in his own family did this prayer and how many generations did till the land, grazed cattle, roamed in the forests studying nature? He does not tell us. He tells the story of his father and mother as if he had no grandmother and grandfather and great grandmother and great grandfather. What were they doing? Were they praying Hindu deities as he and his father did?

Tharoor, a Nair (rich Shudra from Kerala) became later a diplomat, a politician, but if he were to decide to become a Hindu priest to run a Hindu temple, he would have been thrown out. It was this lack of spiritual right to become a priest as an individual and denial of it even though one wants to take that most important job up in a religion based on his caste background made Shudras what they are today. This is the issue on which the Shudras lost out their civilizational contribution in a nation that they built with their sweat and blood. Millions of Shudras educated or uneducated worship like Tharoor did the Brahminic deities, but they never become an equal to a Brahmin with all spiritual rights in life. Yet they do not rebel but surrender to the Brahmin. A rebellion against Brahmin and Brahminism by the Shudras would havereformed Hinduism and made India equally capable like China is in many fields, including in science and technology. Because when entire population gtes education at the same level and treated equal in all fields including in spiritual system human knowledge level expands.

The Shudras built the sub continental civilization as Indo-Africans 1500 years before the Brahmins wrote their Vedas. They brought the Indian society out of tribalism. They domesticated cattle, stored meat and milk products and generated material surplus, which is an essentially pre-condition for building civilization. They built villages, expanded them into cities. Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Dholavira and so on are their contribution to the world much before China built such advanced civilization. But now under the leadership of the post-colonial Dwija intellectuals where is India and where is China?

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political Theorist, Social Activist and Author. His new book The Shudras–Vision For a New Path co-edited with Karthik Raja Karuppusamy being published by Penguin will come out soon

https://countercurrents.org/2021/02/disha-ravi-is-nations-heroine/

 

KANCHA ILLAIAH SHEPHERD

 Good that the farmers are fighting for their right to dignified living by facing the Delhi powers. The ruling establishment is trying to ensure that monopoly capitalists become global rich capitalists by robbing the farmers across the country.

The farm laws of the government can be justifiably characterised ‘ Farm Rob Laws’. The law of social smuggling has now got the stamp of the Indian Parliament.

When I characterised the Bania business as ‘Social Smuggling’ in my book Post-Hindu India there were protests and that book was dragged to the Supreme Court and also many local courts in Telangana. Fortunately the Supreme Court of Indian dismissed their petition and said that the free speech of the writer cannot be taken away.

The farm laws that the centre enacted essentially legalise big business smuggling with parliamentary approval. The present farm laws basically shift the controls from the town level sahukars to the big business barons who can then rob farm produce without accountability.

The Indian sahukar system does not have any morals or empathy for the poor farm hands. The Indian monopoly capitalists would not follow even capitalist morality towards tillers of the land.

As of now the grain markets are under the control of local sahukars who exploit, cheat, hoodwink the farm producers, who are mostly Shudras/Dalits and Adivasi toiling masses. Majority Sahukars have no social and cultural relationship with Shudra/Da lit/Adivasi farmers in any mode. Their food and bed cultures are different.Yet the local governments and state governments would try to negotiate between the farmers and the middlemen as the electoral democratic structures force them at the local and regional level to do that much.

Now Delhi directly deals with markets and the monopoly capitalists control Delhi through election finances. And rob the farmers all over the country with the help of the new farm laws.

The farmers are treated as a source of market wealth and nothing else. Their well being is never of concern. These business men are ruthless monopoly sahukars. They have entered into every business in a big way. Their glittering malls in the cities have finished the small survival economies of galli shop owners.

In the name of ‘farm to home’ business the monopoly sahukars are changing the crop patterns and giving small advances to farmers to invest in crops that suit their national and international business. The interest rate calculations they do have the same old multiple interest rates. By the time the crop comes to the farmer’s hand nothing remains. The entire crop moves from ‘farm to homes’ of the urban middle class.

The reservations have created a small middle class of Shudra/OBC/Dalit/Adivasis who now live in urban and semi urban centres and buy service commodities in the high end malls. But the vast masses cannot buy anything in these big malls. Once the grain markets also go into the hands of this high business chain the farmers will be robbed without any checks and balances from the local political forces.

Already the successive Governments have transferred agrarian lands that belong to small farmers to the big business houses in the farm of Special Economic Zones. This process started during the UPA regime. The Manmohan Singh Government also preferred transfer of agrarian production and control from small farmers to big business houses as part of their globalization and liberalization agenda.

During the UPA period the finished product market has spread to deeper rural areas and the traditional commodity use has been replaced by globalised market goods almost in every village. That process has destroyed the rural artisanal economy. It was through that process China goods entered every village.

The displaced artisan masses were slowly settling down in a repositioned agrarian economy. The Employment Guarantee Scheme that the UPA brought in saved many such displaced artisans turning them into daily wage earners in the village setting. Slightly improved agrarian produce, in spite of middlemen robbery continued to sustain the rural masses by allowing them food on their plates. The new farm laws will attack the small, middle and rich farmers because the big business buyers will change the crop system to suit their national and global markets.

The ruling party is interested in their massive election funds in the form of bonds from these companies but not the sustainability of masses in the village setting.Election management through big business capital entered into a new phase in Indian democracy with this model. Business houses are handling elections directly in this era. Only the Punjab and Haryana farmers seem to have realised the gravity of the situation. Most of the farmers of the Hindi belt constitute Shudra/OBCs while the agrarian labour is largely of Dalits.

There are more cow protection lobbyists in the current dispensation than farmer protection lobbyists. The business interests are dominant in those structures with top leaders having fingers deep in the business pie. The farmers movement has to gather nationwide momentum otherwise the powers in Delhi will not budge.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political Theorist. His new book The Shudras–Vision for New Path co-edited with Karthik Raja Karuppusamy, is soon to be published by Penguin.

Cover Photo Bloomberg

https://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/en/NewsDetail/index/4/19691/Why-the-Farmers-Were-Left-With-No-Choice-But-to-Protest

 

Why I am Not a Hindu Woman’ review: The ‘othering’ of women, Dalits and savarna trauma

G. SampathNOVEMBER 28, 2020 16:54 ISTUPDATED: NOVEMBER 29, 2020 08:00 IST

Drawing on lived experience, Wandana Sonalkar explains the concerns about Hinduism as it is practised today, including misogyny, caste and violence

Repudiation of a religion by a person born into it is a sub-genre by itself. Wandana Sonalkar’s Why I am Not a Hindu Woman invokes titles such as Bertrand Russell’s Why I am Not a Christian, Ibn Warraq’s Why I am Not a Muslim, and Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd’s Why I am Not a Hindu.null

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This book stands apart by virtue of being penned by a woman. This is significant not least because every major world religion discriminates against women. For Sonalkar, a retired professor of gender studies, the starting point of critique is her own life as a Hindu woman born in a family of Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhus, a small community of ‘almost Brahmin’ upper castes. Reflecting on her formative years, she notes that her privileges — of caste, class, and location — may have helped her recover, but they did not protect her from the lacerations of growing up in a dysfunctional family whose dysfunction was rooted in brahminical patriarchy, also known as “Hinduism”.

Sonalkar was a little girl when her father starts an affair with a family friend. She writes, with devastating brevity, of the contrast in how the affair affected her mother, as opposed to the extended household. “My mother withdrew into even more lengthy puja rituals and more frequent fasts, eliciting outbursts of contemptuous anger from my father,” but “the extended Hindu family offered neither solace nor support… My father enjoyed the same respect and affection as always.”

Negation of equality

Comparing Hinduism to other religions, she finds it to be “inherently misogynist, where most religions are male-centred” and “as a religion, it does not believe in universal ethics or morality.” While some have argued that dharma is a universal Hindu ethic, she points out that it is “always determined by one’s social status and one’s gender… In Hinduism, dharma for the Brahmin is not the same as dharma for the Shudra.” It is partly thanks to this negation of equality at the core of Hinduism that a supremacist ideology such as Hindutva finds ready acceptance among so many Hindus, and “our liberal-democratic principles remain academic, they do not enter our hearts.”

If there is no universal belief system that defines a Hindu, then what makes one a Hindu? According to Sonalkar, “identification as a Hindu requires a performative act” such as visiting a temple or actions “that simultaneously announce one’s religion and one’s caste”. Hinduism does not have a singular belief system precisely because “Hindu identity is always a caste identity.”

Through the book, as Sonalkar switches between the personal and the political, she unravels the links between the violence of Hindutva and “the deep roots of violence in a caste-patriarchal Hindu social order”. Why does Hindu society tolerate violence against women, Dalits and Muslims, asks Sonalkar. She suggests that it is because of the different forms of ‘othering’ at work — the ‘othering’ of Hinduism’s internal inferiors (women and Dalits), and of the external enemy (Muslims). She contends that this dichotomy of interior/ exterior set against a common dynamic of ‘othering’ is the reason violence against Muslims is sought to be legitimised, while that against Dalits and women is sought to be invisibilised.

Insofar as anti-caste memoirs are over-populated by Dalit-Bahujans, this first-person account by a savarna intellectual is a welcome addition that has plenty to offer those seeking to understand the currents of divisiveness gaining ground in India.

Why I am Not a Hindu Woman; Wandana Sonalkar, Women Unlimited, ₹350.

https://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/why-i-am-not-a-hindu-woman-review-the-othering-of-women-dalits-and-savarna-trauma/article33191568.ece?homepage=true

 

By: SAIKAT MAJUMDAR

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

In this column, Saikat Majumdar discusses books from India that haven’t received due attention.

Over the last few decades in India, a denuded secular public sphere has been besieged by a sharply militarized Hinduism. Books were among the first things to get caught in the battle. Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History, a philologist’s history of the religion, has sparked a stormy response. Much attention has also gone to the book Why I’m a Hindu, by leading politician and public intellectual Shashi Tharoor, which takes pride in the syncretic and tolerant dimensions of the religion and places it at a distance from the truculent Hindutva that has increasingly taken over the Indian state.

The controversies surrounding these volumes — both of which feature the word “Hindu” in their titles — takes me back to a slim book published in 1996, Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd’s Why I Am Not a Hindu. Declined by mainstream publishers, the book was released by the Calcutta imprint of a small press. Under a Communist-led government, the city used to be a safe place for such books — as opposed to Bombay (which also housed an imprint of the same press), where, the writer says, the book would have certainly caused violence and anger among the ruling right-wing government.

Indeed, Shepherd’s book has not so much suffered neglect as it has fought a long battle of suppression. Given where India stands today, the battle is clearly a losing one.

As the critic Susie Tharu has pointed out, Why I Am Not a Hindu has a lot in common with Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. It is a vitriolic account not only of oppression and the infliction of suffering, but of something far trickier for the privileged to grasp: exclusion. Complete oblivion. The very opening lines strike this numbing note: “I was not born a Hindu for the simple reason that my parents did not know that they were Hindus … My illiterate parents, who lived in a remote South Indian village, did not know that they belonged to any religion at all.”

The volume manages to achieve a remarkable number of things. What is perhaps the most striking is the way it constructs a Dalitbahujan identity — Shepherd’s syncretic name for Hinduism’s caste-oppressed communities — for social groups at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, and even those excluded from it. This identity stands in stinging contrast to the Brahminical Hinduism that has been the dominant image of the religion, now weaponized by the current political regime.

Brahminical Hinduism establishes itself as a transcendental faith that enshrines elite forms of knowledge and practice, from priesthood to statesmanship. The Dalitbahujan religion comes to life as earthbound, thethered to the soil tilled by its practitioners, and to the health and livelihood of the community. Morality and immorality in this culture, Shepherd writes, “is not based on a divine order or a divine edict,” but rather understood “in terms of the harmony of the families.” Brahminical Hinduism believes in the karmic ladder of lives after death; for Dalitbahujans, “life is a one-time affair.”

This makes for a curiously worldly religion, rooted in skills valued in the community: “A Kurumaa man would have discovered new areas of sheep-breeding … A Kurumaa woman would have added to the skills of spinning wool.” Indeed, “for a Dalitbahujan body, labour is as habitual as eating is to the stomach,” and were it not for the joy their minds derive from the labour, “Dalitbahujan bodies would have died much earlier than they do.” Small wonder, therefore, that the most popular Dalitbahujan goddess in Andhra Pradesh (where Shepherd is from) is Pochamma, who cures diseases and occupies an intimate and quotidian place in the villages.

The figure of Pochamma offers a sharp contrast to the pantheon of gods and goddesses in Brahminical Hinduism — the subject of Shepherd’s most revolutionary critique. Brahminical gods, he argues, thrive on violence, often targeted at demonized Dalitbahujan bodies. The most celebrated narrative is that of The Ramayana, where the Lord Rama becomes the agent of destruction of Ravana, whmo Shepherd reads as a “Dravida Dalitbahujan ruler.” The violence is upheld by the dominance of Brahminical patriarchy, which makes a mockery of the powerless goddesses who symbolize virtue without any real agency. Thus Saraswati, the goddess of art and learning, does not create any art or thought herself, nor does she ever speak of women’s education. “How is that,” Shepherd asks, “the source of education is herself an illiterate woman?”

So much of what seems venerable or beautiful in this world remains underwritten by violence. Myths, Roland Barthes wrote, make such violence invisible. Shepherd’s reading of the divine iconography of Hinduism is a radical revelation of historically effaced violence. It remains the best answer to a question forced upon him by Indian power elites: why is he not a Hindu?

¤

Saikat Majumdar is the author of three novels: The Scent of God (2019), The Firebird (2015), published in the US as Play House (2017), and Silverfish (2007). He has also published a book of literary criticism, Prose of the World (2013), a general nonfiction book on higher education, College: Pathways of Possibility (2018), and a co-edited collection of essays, The Critic as Amateur (2019). He has taught at Stanford University, was named a Fellow at the Humanities Centre at Wellesley College, and is currently professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/another-look-indias-books-kancha-ilaiah-shepherds-not-hindu/

kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is known for his sartorial adventures, but on Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s 145th birth anniversary on 31 October, he gave his outfit an unusual touch. He wore a panama hat over his standard kurta-churidar while attending events of the day, from addressing IAS probationers and inaugurating a seaplane at the tallest statue of Patel (which he had commissioned as Gujarat chief minister) to standing at the feet of the statue and peering, mask-less, at a fully-integrated nation. (It is BJP’s claim that after the abrogation of Article 370 last year, Iron Man’s dream was fulfilled.)

Modi’s sartorial choice should be taken seriously. For, against Sardar Patel’s statue clad in a cultivator’s attire—loose dhoti-kurta and shawl over shoulders—and his own kurta-pyjama, it struck an odd contrast. The choice of attire is perhaps explained by the BJP and Modi’s politics and their connection to Sardar Patel’s background. Patel’s father was a farmer, and, according to the traditional varna hierarchy, he belonged to the Shudra category. As we know, Modi’s family also has a small-business heritage from the same state, Gujarat. The social groups categorised as Other Backward Classes by the Mandal Commission also fall in the Shudra category, such as the Patel, Jat, Maratha, Gujjar, Yadav, Kamma, Reddy, Nair, Lingayat, Nayakar and Mudaliar caste groups in different states. In other words, by today’s yardstick, Sardar Patel would probably be viewed as an OBC leader on the national stage.

Many would say the Prime Minister’s frequent costume changes represent his vanity, but aspirational Sudra/OBC voters, who are seeking a new identity for themselves in Indian politics, may also see in Modi’s dress codes a colourful version of nationalism. Therefore, it assumes significance that the Prime Minister has snatched Patel and his legacy from the Congress party and co-opted him into the NDA fold. In fact, the Congress seems to have relinquished control over Patel. For example, it is Modi’s followers who wrote in the national (English language) press and in regional newspapers about Patel’s greatness during the recent anniversary. They also appeared on TV channels to speak about him. Modi’s new iron lady follower, Kangana Ranaut, celebrated Patel’s anniversary by launching twitter attacks on Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru and praising Patel to the skies. In the Telugu press, two key articles were written; by Himachal Pradesh Governor Bandaru Dattatreya and Minister of State for Home Affairs G Kishan Reddy. (Both belong to the Shudra/OBC category.)

It is another matter that BJP leaders have forgotten Patel’s real legacy, which was to organise farmers and fight for their rights. Ever since the Centre passed three over-centralising farm laws, farmers across the country have been agitating, but they have no Patel by their side, nor any of Patel’s modern-day followers.

We must also recall that even within the ranks of the RSS and BJP, nobody fully understood why Modi had built the tallest statue for Patel and not Syama Prasad Mookerjee or Deen Dayal Upadhyay, two icons that the Hindu right can claim as its own. Perhaps Modi’s choice of wearing a western-style hat can offer an explanation: they are part of his attempts to identify himself with Patel and build him into an icon, but the overall aim is to influence aspirational OBC voters, who, Modi’s party hopes, would be drawn to his flamboyance.

Like the BJP on the national stage, the regional parties that represent Shudra/OBC interests in states do have the capacity to independently mobilise votes within their regions and states. They are in sufficient numbers to combine and change the outcome of any popular election. No doubt, in North India, the political forces representing these sections have been weakened by the BJP’s growing hegemony. However, they are trying to regain their strength in time for the 2024 general election.

So, the actual mystery is why the Congress refuses to use portraits or cut-outs of Patel in its election campaigns. It would, after all, need Shudra/OBC voters too—of whom a large number have migrated to the BJP over the last two election cycles. Patel would have been a natural choice for the party to prop up; a national leader who can represent Congress party’s future plans and be remoulded for aspirational Shudra/ OBC youth; even as a counterpoint to the BJP-RSS’s aggressive nationalism.

Instead, the Congress’s campaign cut-outs consist of Gandhi, Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi. Obviously, in this family pack there is no Shudra/OBC leader. Modi has been calling out this parivar pack at national and state-level elections, and the rhetoric against family rule does appear to be influencing a section of voters.

When it comes to regional parties, the problem is they, too, are family affairs—and therefore, like the Congress, caste affairs—and during elections they propagate campaign material and cut-outs primarily of their families. Meanwhile, it suits Modi that Sardar Patel’s family has been forgotten. After all, he has distanced himself from his own family, while Patel has nobody in politics or in the high-end intellectual circles, which Modi calls “Khan market gang” or “Lutyens club”.

In the Indian political pantheon, Gandhi is represented by his grandsons including well-known historian Rajmohan Gandhi, former Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi and so on. Nehru’s genealogy in politics is being continued by Sonia Gandhi and her children. Along comes Modi, slowly turning himself into Patel’s grandson, wearing many hats to charm OBC youth, a raj rishi-type figure who rages against the Congress’ Harvard-educated dhoti-clad leadership, who signify those who look crumpled but possess plenty of wealth. In ten years as Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh dressed in the same pyjama-kurta and blue turban, not to forget his serious demeanour. Is it not true that he wrote on economic theory, but hardly a few know about these writings? He was, in a sense, a walking cut-out himself, speaking so softly that his voice hardly travelled beyond the ears of the Congress leadership. But Modi’s Mann ki Baat is full of glib sermons on economics, political science, sociology, geography, mathematics and whatnot, even as the real economy tanks—his high-pitched “bhaiyon and behno” echoes everywhere.

At yet another level, Modi’s panama hat was incongruous against the long white beard he now sports. But this incongruity is not a reflection of the PM avoiding the barber due to the Covid-19 pandemic. No—his current bearded appearance is meant to fan a crisis in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leadership as well. He has started to appear more like a Hindu hermit, a contrast against the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat.

The panama hat Modi wore is not an item of clothing normally accepted by the RSS. According to them, “western” wear does not represent Indian cultural nationalism. But it can represent youthful aspiration. Even during the freedom struggle, neither Congress leaders nor Hindutwadis were seen wearing panama hats. Then and now, if the Congress brand was the Gandhi topi, while the Hindutva cap was—and is—a semi-military saffron (now black) affair. The only leader who regularly wore a hat during the freedom struggle was Dr BR Ambedkar. He accompanied it with full western attire and the fact remains, he was often targeted for wearing his suit and hat, especially by those who stuck to the dhoti-kurta attire.

The author is a political theorist. His new book co-edited with Karthik Raja Karuppusamy, The Shudras—Vision for a New Path, is soon to be published by Penguin.

https://www.newsclick.in/Does-Politics-Lurk-Behind-Hats-PM-Modi-Wears

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

America is a global power. Even though China is trying to challenge the US, it may not succeed in the near future. The world will be governed by American democratic moralism, highly-advanced capitalist wealth and technology for years to come. As the US continues its global dominance, a person of Indian origin — Kamala Harris — becoming the first woman vice-president with the Black badge on her sleeves is definitely a pride moment for all Indians, especially for Indian women.

Kamala Harris carries many first flags as she enters the White House vice-president office — first American woman, white or Black; first Asian; first person of Indian origin. She comes from a Black and Brahmin background, another rare and unusual combination.

The transformation of an Indian Brahmin to Blackhood in a country known for racial discrimination is a rarest of the rare occurrence. Indian Brahmin men, let alone women, for a long time in history, refused to travel across the seas because it was considered ritual pollution.

Indians and their fight for citizenship

It took a court order in 1910 for Bhicaji Balsara — a Parsi from India who had migrated to the US — to become a naturalised citizen. The court had noted that a Parsi being white could be granted the right to citizenship. Before Bhicaji, some Sikhs had migrated to America as labourers, and for decades worked as ‘unlawful migrant labourers’ without getting citizenship.

Around 1913, A.K. Mozumdar became the first Dwija with an Aryan racial heritage to attain US citizenship. That was also through a court order. In the court, Mozumdar argued that he was an Aryan by race, hence an equal to the Caucasian American White race. The judge agreed with that argument. Back then, American racism was as deep as Indian casteism. Kamala Harris’ grandfather, P.V. Gopalan, came from a conservative Tamil Brahmin family.

Brahmins and migration

The migration of middle-class English educated Brahmins began as a protest against Periyar Ramasamy Naicker’s anti-Brahmin movement in the 1940s and 50s.

In the 1950s and 60s, very few young Indians who migrated to America for higher studies settled there. And hardly any women students went for higher studies. Shyamala Gopalan, Kamala Harris’ mother, went there for higher studies in science in 1958 and got married to a Black economics teacher, Donald Jasper Harris at Stanford, who had migrated to the US from Jamaica. Generally, Tamil Brahmins are conservative Vaishnavites with a ‘pure’ vegetarian food culture. For Shyamala, overcoming that background and marrying a Black man whose cultural heritage was totally different was a revolutionary step.

Perhaps she was an exceptional young woman who had the support of her father in those days. Although the marriage did not last long, Shyamala Gopalan with her two girls — Kamala and Maya — continued her life as a Black civil rights activist, carrying on her husband’s legacy. This is another rarest of rare feat that could be expected of an Indian, that too a Tamil Brahmin. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement was at its peak with Martin Luther King leading the agitation across the US. Shyamala became an activist for it.

Shyamala Gopalan became a protestant Christian, which was her husband’s religion, but occasionally used to visit Hindu temples. Young Kamala became a good choir singer and it was this Protestant Christian background that later helped her in her fight for the attorney, Senate and vice-presidential elections. Joe Biden is a Catholic Christian. He must have picked Kamala because of her Indian-Black-protestant background to win the election.

Kamala Harris and her American success

What contributed the most to her success? Was it the success of her grandfather or her mother or the English language education her family received for three generations? Imagine if they had been confined to Sanskrit, which was their mother tongue, historically. Where would they have been now? Having become the vice-president, Kamala Harris now has a clear shot at becoming the President of the US in the years to come.

For us Indians, there is a lesson in Kamala Harris’ emergence, not as coloured Indian or Asian, but as a Black with a Brahmin background, who is committed to human equality with a religious belief that ‘god created all human beings equal’ irrespective of gender, race, caste or class. After Barack Obama, she will definitely go down in history as someone with exceptional achievement in the democratic world.

Indian women will have to take a leaf out of Kamala Harris’ mother’s life — if a woman decides to work for abolition of caste and racial discrimination, they should be able to do it with more audacity.

What does Kamala Harris’ stay in the White House mean for India? What kind of relationship will develop between the Indian government and the Biden-Harris administration in the next four years? Harris and Biden have a different view on the Kashmir question from the Trump administration. Kamala Harris being of Indian origin is one thing, her administration’s stand on the Narendra Modi government’s policies would be another.

Modi as Prime Minister has made many undiplomatic statements on American soil — “Abki bar Trump sarkar” in Houston being one of them. In India, in the American election year, Modi had organised a public rally at Ahmedabad to drum up support for Donald Trump. However, despite all these pro-Trump gestures, the US president could not make a comeback.

After the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the Modi government’s moves on internal and foreign policy issues have pushed India into crises. The economy is in its worst shape. It all depends on how the Modi government repositions itself on human rights issues. Kamala Harris may not be lenient just because she is of Indian origin.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is political theorist, social activist and author. Views are personal.

https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/kamala-harris-journey-from-brahmin-to-blackhood-is-rarest-of-the-rare/ar-BB1aR03d?li=AAgges1&srcref=rss