IB World Religions 4.6.2. Caste as a Contemporary Controversy: Law, Purity and the Diaspora Notes

4.6.2. Caste as a Contemporary Controversy: Law, Purity and the Diaspora

Jati and the purity logic

1. Caste in daily Indian life operates through jati, the local birth group into which a person is born, of which there are thousands. Varna, the fourfold classification of the texts, is the wider frame that jatis are ranked against.
2. Two rules have historically held jatis apart. Marriage takes place inside the jati, and rules about who may cook for and eat with whom mark the boundary at every meal.
3. What makes this a religious question rather than only a social one is shaucha (purity). Ritual purity can be lost and regained, and occupations dealing with death, waste, leather and human remains were classified as permanently polluting.
4. That classification is what produced untouchability. Groups doing such work were placed outside the varna scheme altogether and excluded from wells, temples and streets on the ground that their proximity transmitted impurity.
5. Scholars disagree about what generates the system. The anthropologist Louis Dumont argued that the pure and impure opposition is its whole principle, while critics including Nicholas Dirks argue that British census and administrative practice hardened fluid local groupings into the rigid system now visible.
6. Hindus disagree just as sharply. Some hold that purity rules are ritual technicalities that were later abused socially, while Dalit writers argue that a ritual grading of human beings cannot be separated from the humiliation it produced.

Untouchability and Indian law

1. The Constitution of India, adopted in 1950, addressed the question directly. Article 15 forbids discrimination on grounds including caste, and Article 17 abolishes untouchability and makes its practice in any form a punishable offence.
2. Criminal law followed. The Untouchability Offences Act of 1955 was strengthened and renamed the Protection of Civil Rights Act in 1976, and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act of 1989 created specific offences and special courts.
3. The 1989 Act itself became contested. In 2018 the Supreme Court added procedural safeguards against what it saw as misuse, Parliament amended the Act within months to restore the original provisions, and the Court later recalled its directions.
4. Alongside prohibition sits compensation. Reservation sets aside places in public education, government employment and legislatures for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes.
5. Its scope has been fought over repeatedly. The Mandal Commission recommendations were implemented in 1990 amid mass protests, and the Supreme Court upheld them in 1992 while capping most reservation at half of available places.
6. The law has not ended the practice, and Indian courts and government reports say so plainly. Tens of thousands of cases are registered under the Atrocities Act each year, and surveys find that marriage and close friendship still follow caste lines for most Hindus.

Ambedkar and Hindu responses

1. Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891 to 1956), born into the Mahar community and later chief drafter of the Indian Constitution, argued that caste could not be reformed out of Hinduism because Hindu scripture authorised it.
2. His 1936 text Annihilation of Caste was written as an address that the inviting reformers declined to have delivered. It argued that inter-dining and inter-marriage campaigns were useless while the texts that justify graded inequality remained authoritative.
3. He acted on that conclusion. In October 1956 at Nagpur he formally became a Buddhist along with a very large gathering of followers, and the Navayana Buddhist movement he founded remains a major Dalit religious presence.
4. Gandhi argued the opposite case. He held untouchability to be a corruption that Hinduism must expel while defending varna as a division of labour, and the two men clashed publicly, most sharply over separate electorates in 1932.
5. Reform inside Hinduism has a long record. The Vaikom Satyagraha of the 1920s opened roads around a Kerala temple, the Travancore Temple Entry Proclamation of 1936 opened the temples themselves, and Narayana Guru taught one caste, one religion and one God for humanity.
6. Contemporary Hindu organisations continue this line under the banner of samarasata (social harmony), holding shared meals and installing Dalit priests. Dalit critics respond that harmony without redistribution of land, temple control and political power leaves the hierarchy intact.

Contemporary cases in India

1. The death of Rohith Vemula, a doctoral student at the University of Hyderabad, in January 2016 followed his suspension after a campus political dispute. His letter became a national text on caste in higher education, though official inquiries disputed his caste status.
2. In July 2016 at Una in Gujarat, men from a Dalit community were flogged in public by cow-protection vigilantes for skinning a dead cow, work their community has traditionally done. The video circulated widely and triggered large Dalit protests across the state.
3. The death in 2020 of a young Dalit woman in Hathras in Uttar Pradesh, after an alleged assault by men from a dominant caste, drew national attention when police cremated her body at night without her family present.
4. Manual scavenging shows the same pattern in economic form. The work of cleaning sewers and dry latrines by hand falls almost entirely on particular Dalit communities, and the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers Act of 2013 has not ended deaths in sewers.
5. Change is visible too, and it is often religious. Tamil Nadu has trained and appointed archakas from communities that were previously excluded, so temple ritual is now performed by priests of non-Brahmin and Dalit background.
6. That change is itself litigated. The Supreme Court held in 2015 that such appointments are permissible provided they conform to the agamas, the ritual manuals governing a temple, which leaves the question turning on how those manuals are read.

Caste in the diaspora

1. Caste travelled with migration. Hindu communities in Britain, North America, East Africa, the Caribbean and Fiji carried jati identities that continue to shape marriage, temple management and community associations.
2. Diaspora Hindus disagree about how much survives. Many report that caste means little beyond marriage preference, while Dalit organisations report exclusion from temples, harassment at work and pressure to conceal their origins.
3. British law has moved slowly. The Equality Act 2010 included a power to add caste to the protected characteristic of race, legislation in 2013 turned that power into a duty, and in 2018 the government decided to rely on case law instead.
4. The case law came from an employment tribunal. In Chandhok v Tirkey, decided in 2015, the Employment Appeal Tribunal held that caste could already fall within ethnic origins under existing race provisions.
5. Hindu bodies and Dalit bodies took opposite sides in that consultation. Organisations including the Hindu Council UK argued that naming caste in statute would brand Hindus collectively as discriminators, while the Anti Caste Discrimination Alliance and CasteWatchUK argued that only statute would give victims a remedy.
6. The same argument is now running in the United States. Several universities have added caste to their non-discrimination policies, Seattle passed a municipal ordinance in 2023, and a California bill on caste discrimination passed the legislature that year and was vetoed by the governor.

Arguments Hindus make

1. The scriptural case for caste rests on a small number of passages. The Purusha Sukta in the tenth book of the Rig Veda describes the four varnas emerging from the body of a cosmic person, which has been read as divine warrant for the order.
2. The reformist reading disputes that inference. The Bhagavad Gita states that the fourfold order was created according to guna (quality) and karma (action), which Vivekananda, Dayananda and Gandhi all took to mean that varna follows aptitude rather than birth.
3. A third position separates the two systems entirely. On this account varna is a scriptural ideal and jati is a social formation that grew up beside it, so present day caste discrimination has no textual authority at all.
4. Ambedkarite writers reject each of these moves. They argue that the dharma texts prescribe graded punishments and graded duties in detail, and that a tradition cannot disown rules its own authoritative literature spells out.
5. Secular and religious reasoning now run together in the argument. Hindu organisations cite the Constitution when condemning atrocities, and Dalit activists cite scripture when demanding entry to temples, so neither side argues on one register alone.
6. What both sides accept is that the question is unresolved. Caste discrimination is illegal in India, prohibited by most Hindu bodies in principle, and widely reported in practice, and Hindus differ over whether that gap is a failure of society or of the tradition itself.