Caste in India: Unraveling Structural Inequalities and Dilemmas

In January 2001 an earthquake happened in Gujarat – a state on the western coast of India – where more than 300,000 people were declared dead and one million were left homeless. According to the Human Rights Watch organization which was present on the scene : “While the government has allocated equal amounts of money compensation and food supplies to members of all communities, Dalit and Muslim populations did not have the same access to adequate shelter, electricity, running water and other supplies available to others.

”. In Hindi, the word “Dalit” means “broken” or “scattered”.

This word is used throughout India to designate the persecuted and discriminated part of the Indian population. The Dalit community in India is suffering from structural inequalities because they have been historically oppressed and because they are completely ostracized from the Indian society. The cast system is not something natural, that has always been there. It is human-made, it has been reinforced with multiple factors over time and therefore results in segregation related to housing, healthcare, employment and education.

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We could think that it is only a matter of religion and beliefs, but I want to put forward the fact that these inequalities are structural, they are rooted in the Indian system and that various institutions and organizations are playing together a role in maintaining a disadvantage for this community. Firstly, I am going to contextualize casteism in India by enouncing the key variables that are shaping this issue. Then I’ll identify the overarching dilemmas surrounding it by showing why they are central to the understanding of structural inequalities.

And finally, I’ll end this paper by describing what has been done against it, the down sides of these policies and what I would further recommend.

The caste system in India is considered like one of the longest surviving form of social hierarchy. Caste systems are organizing a division of the population into different groups where rights are determined by birth, are fixed and hereditary. In India, the caste system is established on sacred texts and on the belief that the distribution of the social status is not random. People get to be born, to live and to die in a certain cast respectively of their karma which is the sum of a person’s action in the actual and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences. Thus, their position in the Indian society is determined by their actions in their previous lives and untouchability is therefore considered like a punishment for previous sins.

This tradition is at the root of social inequalities in the country for the reason that it divides people into four hierarchical groups (also known as varnas) based on different parts of the body of Brahma - the god of creation - with castes ranked from highest to lowest depending on their position from head to toe : at the top the Brahmins (priests, intellectuals), then the Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), then the Vaisyas (moneylenders and traders) and lastly the Sudras (traditionally performing menial jobs). Those who fall at the bottom rung of the system (more than 200 million people) don’t even have a place on Brahma’s body. They are considered outcasts and are seen as impure and lesser human being; thus, Indian people consider that they have the ability to pollute individuals from other castes and are therefore designated as “untouchables” and are allocated to them the worst and unclean jobs.

This religious text is framing the life of the Indians by laying downs laws on marriage, occupation, property and even food. For instance, if a Brahmin consume food prepared by a Shudra or a Dalit, people believe that he’d be born a pig in his next life and this kind of fear is at the root of violences against lower casts. In April of 2019, an Indian Dalit man was killed for eating in front of upper-caste men at a wedding. One’s caste dictates almost every aspect of one’s religious and social life by stating how people earn a living and whom they marry but also the quality of the education or economic opportunities that one’s would receive.

Casts were institutionalized in the mid to late 19th century through census by the British empire as an act of convenience and simplification. According to Oliver Mendelsohn & Marika Vicziany (1), “for the British, India was not merely a land to be conquered and exploited, it was also a society to be puzzled over”. Censuses are an efficient tool to classify, to name and to control every parts of the population. Hence, they took advantage of the already established cast system and turned it into something way more organized and universal by exercising this ethnographic practice all over India. In the lecture “Colonialism: Long-lasting Hegemony ?” with professor Takamura, we saw that colonial hegemony is responsible of political, economic but also social issues by institutionalizing differences and by being at the source of a normalization of power disparities and a creation of formal ethnic-based identities group.

Once implemented, these categories and entities become unchallengeable and real. Before colonization, the boundaries between the different castes were not really defined. In such manner, the British took care of the confusion by managing to fit the entire Hindu population into these four categories. A lot of British colonies were ruled with the method of the indirect rule, a system of governance used by the British to control parts of their colonies through pre-existing indigenous power structures, and India was one of them. The main benefactors of this kind of rule throughout the population were the upper castes which maintained their hegemony and influence over the government long after the independence.

After the independence in 1947, the Indian constitution recognized the disabling effects of caste on historically disadvantaged communities. Anyhow, one of the main factors of the current situation in India is the anchoring of this system in the thoughts and mentalities of the people. Everything from the family ties and cultural traditions to educational and economic opportunities are settle based on the cast system. The biggest problem when it comes to casteism is the fact that these structural inequalities reinforce over time and that their roots are incredibly deep.

According to Mahbub Ul Haq, an international development theorist, “The real wealth of a nation is its people. And the purpose of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives”. The caste-system prevents Dalits from developing their capacities to the maximum and therefore hinders India’s access to development. This idea goes in the same direction as those of Amartya Sen who thinks that “poverty, deprivation and social isolation goes hand in hand”. Indeed, the untouchables are engaged in the most unclean and menial occupation and many of them have interiorize their conditions and the concept of adaptive preferences explains their behaviors.

This is a phenomenon in which people adjust and form they preferences in response to their restricted options. Intuitively, because Indians from low-castes don’t have a lot of capabilities and because their lives are dictated to them, they follow the system by wishing and doing only what is allowed to them and what is within their reach in the society. The way that casteism presents itself in today’s Indian society is “the legacy of historical conditions of extreme inequality (that) give rise to expectations of prejudicial treatment and hence to behaviors that tend to reproduce the inequality” according to Priyanka Pandey and Karla Hoff in “Belief Systems and Durable Inequalities: An Experimental Investigation of Indian Caste”.

This is the main reason why its effects have persisted for all these years. In addition, belief in reincarnation also plays a major role as it is said that the untouchables who follow scrupulously the restrictions could be rewarded for their “good” behavior by being promoted to a higher caste in their next life. So, in my opinion, one of the main obstacles surrounding untouchability is to end the belief of purity and pollution. Hindus pay particular attention to cleanliness and I think that the reason why the dwellings of the untouchables are apart, the reason why an untouchable can get killed for drinking water from the village’s well, and why they are forbidden to enter temples, is extremely related to the fear of impurity and to the fact that even the untouchables think themselves as untouchables.

Caste plays a huge role in the political system in India. By distributing different economic power to different castes, the caste system has an influence over people’s access to power because in developing countries economic and political power are extremely linked. In India, the political system built itself upon deep foundations of clientelism and patron-client ties (two practices that rely heavily on the caste system). Moreover, when people of a same caste don’t vote “en bloc” during elections, they are always more attracted by a candidate of their caste, independently of his merits.

Another thing is that it’s a common belief that Brahmins are more intelligent and that therefore voting for them is a good strategy. So, caste serve as a strong determinant of voting patterns because sometimes candidates are chosen on the basis of their caste and when political parties choose candidates, they bear in mind the caste composition of their voters. Low cast people and especially untouchables people are afraid of retaliation and increased abuse if they complain. Even with laws, there is no change in behaviors and they are still victims of violence and discriminations.

Dalits endure segregation in housing, schools, and access to public services. They are denied access to land, forced to work in degrading conditions and are routinely abused by the police and upper-caste members. Dalits suffer discrimination in education, healthcare, housing, property, freedom of religion, free choice of employment, and equal treatment before the law. Dalit children face continuous hurdles in education. They have to sit in the back of classrooms and endure verbal and physical harassment from teachers and other students. The effect of such abuses is confirmed by the low literacy and high drop-out rates for Dalits.

By speaking up, they risk different forms of violence like murder, individual and gang rape, physical assault, verbal abuse, naked parading and so on. One should also underline the situation of Dalits women who face double backlash for the sole reason of being born both Dalit and a woman in a country which is every year designated as “the worst country to be a woman” . The Indian society is tainted by deep patriarchal mentalities and women are the one bearing the family’s and the community’s honor. Hence, these women are very targeted as people believe that humiliating a Dalit woman is similar as humiliating the entire Dalit community.