Caste Matters

by Suraj Yengde

Capitalism, as Anupama Rao has observed, took Dalit existence’ outside the culturalism of caste’.18 On the other hand, Balmurli Natrajan reassesses the cultural dogma that inhibits the cessation of casteism. His theory purports to revisit caste as a system and caste as a functionality. Natrajan argues that the cultural aestheticism attributed to the caste system is a modernist concept that at times ends up ethnicizing an identity which then comes across as ‘positive’. This idea supports the conclusion that since caste is a cultural thing, there is no necessary hierarchy or oppression in place, only a tension of intercultural wars; that it is merely a fundamental part of India’s intercultural diversity. This presents to us an untenable ‘paradox’ of multiple misunderstandings: whether the caste system can be improved within the existing structure or it should be eliminated to achieve the sanctity of a religious society, or if caste is needed to maintain historical identity. Such sanitized versions of casteism are made all over by various stakeholders—the state, civil society, in sacred and secular, private and public spheres. This attribution of the ‘cultural’ promotes the value of caste as that which upholds culture. Thus, the caste system becomes something to be preserved and not destroyed. Many public spaces echo these amplified iterations of casteism. The ‘difference’ that persists in the hierarchical form is renamed so as to tamper with the formations of caste-based hie...