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The National Versus the
Sectarian
Braj Ranjan Mani
 Knowledge-production,
reproduction of culture, and historiography in contemporary India —
with some exceptions of challenging attempts in recent years —
remains deeply biased and brahamanical, despite the dazzling
democratic façade and politically correct vocabulary. Contestations
to the dominant discourse and meta-narratives of the past and
present by the marginalized majority — dalits, adivasis, other
backward classes (OBCs), Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and other
suppressed ethnic and regional communities — remains confined to the
margins; while brahamanical hegemony continues to overwhelm the
intellectual domain. In place everywhere are refurbished,
replenished brahamanical canons and constructs which are blithely
flaunted as ‘Indian’ and ‘national.’ So much so, that the
modernization of brahamanical tradition easily becomes the
modernization of Indian tradition.
The Indian
elite’s winning trick, right from the colonial nineteenth century to
the present, is to selectively cull from the modern European ideas
and institutions, and ingeniously align and integrate them with the
brahamanic structures of caste, class, and gender. The basic design
behind such ‘change with continuity’ is to preserve and innovate
upon traditional dominance over the masses. As in the past, so in
the present, the over-all objective is to mislead, exploit and
exclude the majority.
 India
remains the most iniquitous society on the earth. The more things
change, the more they remain the same. Extreme disparities in terms
of wealth, health, and education have given birth to a new form of
two-nation theory — the shining India, and the suffering India. Just
over ten percent of the population, mostly from aggressive castes,
with different levers of power in their hands, make sure that the
rest continue to live in material and mental subjugation, and
provide the ‘nation’ their cheap labour. While all wealth generation
and development are taken up in the name of empowering the poor,
such ‘nation-building’ leaves the poor more demoralized, more
marginalized. They still struggle for food, drinking water,
sanitation, education.
Who are these
people? More than ninety percent of them are adivasis, dalits, OBCs,
and Muslims. Their representation in the booming market economy,
business and industrial domain, information technology, and
entertainment industry is next to nothing. However, the embedded
brahamanic media and academia presents the growth without equity as
development with a humane face. Caste as institutionalized
discrimination, both at material and ideological-cultural levels,
continues to cripple the lives of millions in several overt and
covert ways.
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These leaders who struggled for the deconstruction of Brahmanism
and demanded socio-cultural reconstruction have been dismissed
in the dominant discourse as sectarian, caste representatives;
while those who variously defended Brahmanism under the fig leaf
of cultural nationalism are glorified as national leaders of
vision and integrity. |
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Caste has for
centuries been the major civilizational fault-line in the Indian
subcontinent. To cut a long and complicated story short, the
supposed divine division of labour and harmony of caste has always
dazzled its creators and beneficiaries, while the demoralized
majority condemn it as a vicious system of brahamanic colonialism —
the colonialism that drains away the cultural, social, and economic
resources within the nation from the productive majority to the
parasitic few ensconced at the top of the caste hierarchy. The toxic
genius of caste hierarchy and its creators is to divide,
disintegrate and dehumanize the toiling majority. Fragmented into
hundreds of hierarchically arranged castes and sub-castes, each
sparring with each other for meager resources, the productive people
fail to build a broader solidarity against their common exploiters.
Birth-based
caste provides a breeding ground for mutual animosity, thus keeping
people divided and weak for exploitation as well as making common
activity and effort for the greater good impossible. It was for this
precise reason that the caste culture has been patronized and
promoted by authoritarian kings and feudal-aristocratic forces of
many stripes, including the medieval Mughals and modern British
colonizers who saw in caste and Brahmanism a uniquely effective tool
to subjugate and rule the masses. Colonialism in India, contrary to
the dominant belief, was wedded to the forces representing caste and
Brahmanism.
This colonialism
was founded on the collusion, collaboration; and mutual interests of
British and Indian ruling classes and intelligentsia. The native
political and intellectual elites not only provided crafty,
selective knowledge to the British about India and things Indian,
but also controlled the Raj machinery at the local and intermediate
levels. They oiled the wheels of colonialism, playing the role of
the intermediary between the British rulers and Indian masses.
Self-strengthening and modernizing themselves with this
collaboration, the Indian elites gradually found confidence to build
their own brahmanic-casteist nationalism, pretended to represent all
Indians, demanded and got a greater share of power within the Raj,
and finally launched the movement to kick out the British.
Nationalism
enabled the aggressive castes to project the Vedic-brahmanic culture
and consciousness as the basis of Indianness. Their selfish ideals
and interests became the national ideals and interests. Despite a
variety of formulations — from the nineteenth century pioneers of
socio-cultural regeneration such as Ram Mohun Roy, Dayananda,
Vivekananda, to the rightist and leftist leaders of the Indian
National Congress like Tilak, Gandhi, Nehru — the common denominator
and trajectory of all of them was to selectively accommodate
modernity within the traditional caste-class structure, thus
maintaining the high caste privileges and dominance over the masses.
The most successful, in concocting this brahamanical synthesis of
continuity with change, was Gandhi who deftly straddled the worlds
of politics and religion, playing the double role of a half-naked
saint and a ruthless politician working at the behest of the rich
and the powerful. The wily Brahmans and allied castes knew the value
of Gandhi from the very beginning. They gratefully handed Gandhi the
supreme leadership and put him on a pedestal so high that his real
face remained invisible to the masses who mistook him for their
Mahatma.
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The most successful, in concocting this brahamanical synthesis
of continuity with change, was Gandhi who deftly straddled the
worlds of politics and religion, playing the double role of a
half-naked saint and a ruthless politician working at the behest
of the rich and the powerful. The wily Brahmans and allied
castes knew the value of Gandhi from the very beginning. They
gratefully handed Gandhi the supreme leadership and put him on a
pedestal. |
It was this
monolithic-brahmanic nationalism that came under frontal attack from
leaders of the lower orders, the founders of anti-caste or
non-Brahman movements that erupted in many parts of the subcontinent
during the colonial period. Aligning themselves with the long non-brahmanic
traditions of resistance for equality and freedom of all, they
argued that the brahmanic religio-social system was more sinister
than British colonialism, and therefore its annihilation must
constitute an integral part of nation-building.
Notwithstanding
the multiplicity and diversity of articulations depending on time,
space and regional variations, what the anti-caste leaders
unmistakably stressed and struggled for, was social justice and
social democracy. They fought pitched battles for doing away with
caste and social barriers. They took to the streets for civil and
human rights of the caste-oppressed. They stood for a new society
based on non-brahmanic and democratic values. These leaders who
struggled for the deconstruction of Brahmanism and demanded
socio-cultural reconstruction have been dismissed in the dominant
discourse as sectarian, caste representatives; while those who
variously defended Brahmanism under the fig leaf of cultural
nationalism are glorified as national leaders of vision and
integrity.
 Braj
Ranjan Mani is an independent researcher and social worker whose
path-breaking book “Debrahmanising History: Dominance and Resistance
in Indian Society (Manohar, 2005) challenged the larger brahamanic
paradigm of society that the official Indian establishment is in
love with. No study of India’s caste-based strategy of
discrimination based on birth can now be complete without reckoning
with the arguments that Mani has marshaled. For feedback, write to
worldsikhnews@gmail.com
25
November 2009
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