The darkness that never lifts

This deeply researched book traces the history of India’s long struggle to address perhaps the most inhuman and debilitating feature of its society.

Caste has been debated and written about so much but there is still much to write about it and update our understanding of it. Manoj Mitta, in his excellent book, shows us precisely that by citing much more data on caste unknown till now and providing fresh insights into the working of the caste system.

Caste is so well entrenched in Indian life for centuries that it is present in all areas of life at individual and collective levels and shapes and influences attitudes and events. Mitta examines the endurance and violence of the caste system through the lens of the law and legislation. He goes back over many decades and studies the debates and processes that preceded the formulation of laws on caste in the pre-independence and post-independence periods. The law is the state’s response. But violence has always gone with caste because the community has tried to ensure the enforcement of caste norms. It was often done by force. In fact, the law itself had allowed such violence. Mitta goes into that too.

A matter of mindset

He touches on and explains the main issues and events in the last two centuries which have a bearing on the response to caste and explains them in meticulous detail. He starts with a 1795 incident where the East India Company exempted the Banaras Brahmins from the death penalty in case of a crime, and ends with the 2019 ruling of the Supreme Court upholding life sentences for the eight accused in the Khairlanji massacre in Maharashtra. He throws light on many issues related to caste and places them in their historical context. Issues like intercaste marriages, covering of breasts by women, burning of women and generally the evolution of the law on caste are discussed in detail. The discussions are very revealing. For example, the legalisation of intercaste marriage is discussed in the context of the decolonisation process. Though not surprising, it is revealed that those who were against it were a section of Hindus and not the Britishers. The situation is much the same even today in the case of intercaste marriages. Though the law has changed, the mindset has not.

He notes that the caste reforms legislated after Independence, “have their origin in the pioneering struggle against Hindu conservatives that had been waged under British rule.”

The Special Marriage Act of 1954, made a direct reference to the 1850 law and the Anti-Sati legislation of 1987 under the Rajiv Gandhi government was borrowed from an 1829 regulation but “did not acknowledge these borrowings from (Lord William) Bentinck, despite repeated references.” He describes the debates in the Constituent Assembly on the abolition of untouchability and the insertion of Article 17 and points out that it took five years to criminalise abolition through the Untouchability Offences Bill in 1955. The Bill also subsumed many related legislations. Ambedkar participated in the Rajya Sabha debate on the bill. His suggestions were included in a new bill in 1977 when the Indira Gandhi’s government converted the Untouchability Offences Act of 1955 into the Protection of Civil Rights Act of 1977.

Unsung heroes

Mitta notes that the role of some “unsung heroes” of caste reforms in history has not been recognised and they have not got their due. They include Vithalbhai Patel who introduced the first inter-caste marriage bill in 1918, BV Narasimha Iyer who persuaded the British government to repeal the law for the punishment of lower castes by confinement in stocks, Kalicharan Nandagawali who moved a resolution in 1921 for access equality, R Srinivasan who moved a resolution in 1924 to open public places for “untouchables” and Thakurdas Bhargava whose 1949 Bill validated inter-caste marriage under Hindu law.

The segment on the massacres of Scheduled Castes is also very revealing. Mitta lists some of the worst massacres like Kilvenmani in 1968, where 42 SCs were burnt alive, Belchi (1977), Bathani Tola (1996) and Laxmanpur Bathe (1997). In most of them, the accused were acquitted for lack of evidence. Even when justice was done there was reluctance on the part of courts to admit the caste angle in the violence.

“As I delved deeper into Dalit massacre cases, I began to realise the need to go beyond this manifest violence to understand how different functionaries of the Indian state —investigators, prosecutors, trial judges and appellate judges — could get away with blatant displays of caste prejudice, over and over again,” he writes. “It dawned on me that the surge in the violence against Dalits, and the general impunity for it despite the caste reforms after Independence, was the result of unresolved battles within the Hindu society of the colonial period,” he says.

The book traces the history of India’s long struggle to address perhaps the most inhuman and debilitating feature of its society.

The struggle is still continuing, sometimes giving the impression of whether any progress has been made in the past. The laws are there, the machinery to implement them is there but there are many ways to evade them. The grip of caste is very strong and the law is only one means to deal with it. Mitta has taken great pains to research data in great detail and has presented them well. He is a journalist who has written two excellent books — one on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots which he co-authored with H S Phoolka and another on the 2002 Gujarat violence. Caste Pride is a classic and essential reading on the subject.