Debashish Mukerji, The Resilient Brahmin: Hardly weakened by Mandalisation, Brahmins continue to dominate the socio-political spectru
Cover Story, The Week, Nov 10 2002 pp. 36 to 38 & 43 to
It was called a watershed in post-independent India’s history. Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh’s decision in 1990 toimplement the Mandal Commission recommendations was hailed and reviled with equal fervour. While the upper castes, especially Brahmins, saw it as the death knell of their aspirations, the backward castes and Dalits believed it was the gateway to a brave new world, free of Brahminical hegemony. Upper caste students demonstrated noisily, immolated themselves in protest, but in vain. Four years later, after an injunction against it was removed following a historic Supreme Court verdict, the Mandal recommendations entered the statue books.
But 12 years after the announcement—and eight since the judgment—both Brahmin fears and backward caste hopes appear to have been belied. Be it in national or north Indian politics, the bureaucracy or elsewhere, Brahmins are far from marginalised. Nine of the 12 years have seen Brahmin Prime Ministers at the helm (P.V. Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee); for five years there was also a Brahmin President (Shankar Dayal Sharma). The current Lok Sabha Speaker Manohar Joshi is a Brahmin, as are the three chief ministers of Uttranchal, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal).
The Brahmin roll call among top civil servants is even more impressive: National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra, Cabinet Secretary Kamal Pande, Home Secretary N. Gopalaswamy, Finance Secretary S. Narayanan and Central Vigilance Commissioner P. Shanker are the leading lights among two dozen Brahmin secretaries at the Centre. The chiefs of the army and the Air Force, Gen. S. Padmanabhan and Air Chief Marshal S. Krishnaswamy, are Brahmins. Brahmins proliferating in top corporate positions, or straddling the heights of the culture and entertainment worlds are too many to name. Why, four permanent fixtures in Indian cricket team—Sourav Ganguly, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble—are Brahmins!
The Brahmin domination of Hindu society goes back a long, long way. The Purusasukta legend—claiming the Brahmin emerged from the (p.36) head of Purusa, the primeval being, while the Kshatriya came out of Purusa’s shoulders, the Vaishya from his thighs and the Shudra from his feet—first mentioned in the Rig Veda, aptly symbolises the unquestioned sway the Brahmin has held for millennia. But in the twentieth century there occurred a curious, sweeping, world-wide reversal of long-cherished values: suddenly elitism—like empire and patriarchy—became a dirty word.
Egalitarianism was the new ideal, and Brahmins, like traditional elites everywhere, found themselves under attack for having suppressed and oppressed the toiling masses. In the first half of the century the scheduled castes asserted themselves under Babasaheb Ambedkar; in south India, particularly Tamil Nadu, the backward castes rallied behind ‘Periya’ E.V. Ramaswami Naicker. Half a century later, with the Mandal announcement, the backward upsurge reached north India.
Simultaneously, Kanshi Ram’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) slowly and painstakingly accreting support for years, suddenly grew wings in Uttar Pradesh, giving the scheduled castes—now renamed Dalits—a voice they had never before had. And as the anti-Mandal agitation failed, as the anti-upper caste, anti-Brahmin rhetoric of the BSP—and to a lesser degree, of the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)—grew shriller, it was believed by many that the Brahmin had had his day. “The upper castes did fee besieged,” said Yogendra Yadav, political scientist and psephologist.
In south India, undoubtedly, lasting changes did occur, rendering Brahmins irrelevant in politics. In the bureaucracy, too, Brahmins have been reduced to a minority, but even that minority—as the list of top bureaucrats reveals—is not doing all that badly. Besides, south Indian Brahmins continue to thrive in the private sector, (p.37) in the arts and related areas, in new fields of technology: the Indian contribution to software development, feted worldwide, is primarily the achievement of south Indian Brahmins.
In the north, Brahmins have held the own even more successfully. In the Hindi belt they still matter in politics, they still dominate the bureaucracy, they still possess sizeable land and economic resources. Indeed, it is their opponents’ fire which has dimmed; the anti-Brahmin sloganeering of the nineties is no longer heard. Even Kanshi Ram and Mayawati now explicitly seek votes not just from the ‘bahujan samaj’ but from all sections of society, including the upper castes. Said sociologist Dhirubhai Sheth of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies: “Brahmins have shown an unexpected degree of resilience.”
How did the Brahmin become so powerful in the first place? Recent research on caste questions if they were, in fact, all that important. The central thesis of Dipankar Gupta’s Interrogating Caste, for instance, is that there was no single caste hierarchy, which was universally acknowledged and accepted by everyone in the caste system. “Every caste has always considered itself superior to every other caste,” said Gupta, who teaches sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. “But the poorer castes, lacking wealth and power never dared to openly say so!”
Gupta maintained that only those Brahmins who had plenty of wealth and land were dominant. “The Brahmins who were simply pujaris were not particularly revered,” he said. The notion of unchallenged Brahmin superiority in ancient and medieval times, suggested Gupta, was a construct of the British. “When they took over the country they wanted to understand and codify the Indian caste system. They turned to the Brahmins, among the few literate groups then, for information. The Brahmins naturally gave them only their own point of view!”
The more conventional position, however, insists that all Brahmins—not only the rich, powerful ones—were accorded immense respect in bygone times. And that was because, trained in ritual, they were believed to possess occult powers. F.E. Pargiter writes in Ancient Indian Historical Tradition: “The original Brahmins were not so (p.38) much priests as adept in matters supernatural, masters of magico-religious forces, wizards, medicine men.” As much as he feared the Kshatriya’s sword, the common man must have been terrified of the Brahmin’s capacity to cast spells.
Whatever their position in the distant past, there is no doubt that Brahmins reached the zenith of their prestige under British rule. “The British needed a class of scribes to man their lower bureaucratic positions,” said Gupta. “In those days the only literate castes were the Brahmins and Kayasthas, and these were the ones the British recruited. These salaried positions gave the Brahmins extraordinary power over Indian society.”
Naturally, other castes, equally wealthy but not so well-read, resented this dominance. Even so, Brahmins may not have attracted so much opprobrium had they not carried their phobia of ‘pollution’ to extreme lengths. As notions of democracy and human equality spread, the inexcusable practice of untouchability towards the Dalits, the unwillingness to dine with other castes considered lowly, evoked an enormous backlash. Ambedkar led the battle for the Dalits; Periyar raised the banner of backward castes revolt in Tamil Nadu. “The castes which backed Periyar were hardly the wretched of the earth,” said Gupta. “They were rich, powerful castes, unwilling to stomach Brahmin superiority.”
The coming of Independence, ad universal suffrage with it, irreversibly weakened the Brahmins’ position. Suddenly this caste had to confront the fact that, for all its influence, its numbers were few: even in Uttar Pradesh, where Brahmins are most numerous, they constitute just 9 per cent. In Tamil Nadu they form less than 3 per cent. When the DMK, an offshoot of Periyar’s Dravida Kazagham (DK) won power in 1967, the writing for Brahmins was on the wall. “Once the DMK took charge it embarked on a severe and systematic programme of reverse discrimination,: said Sheth. “Reservation quotas were raised to such high levels that Brahmins were squeezed out of government-owned education institutions and jobs.”@
Why did retribution take so much longer to reach north India? “In the south, caste battles were polarised between Brahmins and non-Brahmins,” said Sheth. “In north India, not only were Brahmins more numerous, but there was also other upper castes with whom they could ally.” Besides, added Gupta, the jajmani system of village economy lasted longer in the north than in the south. “As long as it existed, the (p.43) power and influence of the landed Brahmin remained. But now that has collapsed in the north as well.”
“The main reason Brahmins, especially in north India were able to preserve their position despite the coming of democracy,” said Satish Deshpande of the Institute for Economic Growth, “was the peculiar naivete and optimism of the Nehruvian era. At the time it was thought that as the country progressed, caste would just wither away. But in fact this approach only led to the perpetuation of inequality. A caste-blind polity also remained blind to the persistence of caste dominance!”
But not for ever. Thanks to reservations and reforms, there has been the rise of a substantial middle class among the scheduled castes and tribes; the Green Revolution of the sixties empowered sections of the backward castes; and finally, V. P. Singh’s fateful decision led to the backward and Dalit assertion of the early 90s. As the frenzy of the anti-Mandal agitation showed, pure panic set in among the upper castes, especially Brahmins.
Yet the deluge never came. The Brahmins of north India have not been washed away. How did they stave off the backward class-Dalit threat? Politically, their sizeable numbers proved crucial. At 9 per cent, Brahmins are the largest caste in Uttar Pradesh after Jatavs (12 per cent). As castes like the Jats and the Yadavs have repeatedly proved, determined minorities can, in the electoral arena, aided by wealth, weapons and proper organisation, overcome the handicap of moderate numbers. Brahmins, too, have not shied away from using strong-arm methods to enforce their electoral will in the past, but defensive after the Mandal upheaval, they have lately restricted themselves, like the Muslims, to careful tactical voting.
“Across much of north India, Brahmins have joined forces with castes like Rajputs and Banias, to form broad based upper caste coalitions,” said Sheth. “This is a recent development. In the past, before the backward classes became politically conscious, these upper castes, especially Brahmins and Thakurs, were the main rivals for state power.” Such a coalition so augments their numbers that no political party can ignore them. But the upper castes have done ore. “They have been very clever at exploiting the political and regional fragmentation of the backward castes to their advantage, “observed Yogendra Yadav.
“Dalit intellectuals, mostly city-based, continue to rail against Brahmanvad,” said Dalit intellectual Chandrabhan Prasad. “That is because they are in government service, or their Dalit friends are, and often suffer minor humiliations at the hands of upper caste officers, especially Brahmins. But the bulk of Dalits in the villages has realised that the man enemies of Dalits are not Brahmins. Their real oppressors are the intermediate and elite backward castes, who are the powerful landowner today. Agreed Sheth: “That is why an upper caste-Dalit coalition, though unstable, is at least possible, as we have seen in UP. It is proving more tenable than a backward-Dalit coalition.”
Beyond politics, in the professional world, the Brahmin’s main survival weapon has been their legacy of edu (p.44) cation. “Earlier Brahmins had status power,” said Sheth. “Now that has gone. But the benefits they obtained on account of that status in the past—the education they received down several generations, in some cases vast amounts of land and money they came to possess—remain with them still.”
From memorising mantras to memorising equations and formulae is, after all, not that large a leap. “Ingesting large amounts of data, doing well in exams, articulating a point of view cogently: these are all skills,” said Deshpande. “Brahmins through centuries of practice, possess these skills. The recently empowered castes are finding that such skills are not easy to acquire.” A recent study on social mobility in the Economic and Political Review showed that “men from salaried backgrounds had far superior chances of reaching salaried destinations themselves than did men from any other background”.
A good number of second generation employees do indeed owe their success to their hereditary academic ability; but not all. Like all other castes in India, Brahmins, too network tireless to protect and promote their own. Brahmin bureaucrats denied it, insisting that the relationship between fellow Brahmins was usually one of rivalry rather than co-operation. But R. S; Khare’s study of Kanakubja Brahmins of UP, The Changing Brahmins—which could well apply to all Brahmins—showed this is just not true. Khare cites a marvellous example of how a poor Kanakubja schoolteacher goes through five other Kanakubjas to finally approach the commissioner of his division, also a Kanakubja, an obtain a small-time job for his son.
What of the future? Brahmins may have held out so far, but they were far from optimistic. “It is still early years for the Mandal entrants,” said a top BJP politician. “Ten years from now the upper castes will be finished in the north Indian bureaucracy as well.” As soon as their confidence is won, upper caste bureaucrats embark on stories about the inefficiency and venality of backward caste and Dalit officers. “In coming years efficiency will plummet, the country will suffer terribly. I’m trying to send my children abroad,” said a Brahmin joint secretary.
“Anti-reservation feeling is much stronger now among the upper castes than in the past, “ said Yogendra Yadav. “Some of the horror stories of poor performance may be true,” admitted Dipankar Gupta. “But the other castes are also learning fast. The second generation of educated backwards and Dalits will be much more capable than the first.”
Of course, there is always the private sector. As long as reservations remain confined to state-owned services, Brahmins can rejoice: for the private sector is expanding, while the state sector is shrinking. It may be mere coincidence, but the move away from increasing state control began in 1991, one year after the Mandal agitation. As second generation and third generation economic reforms follow, as ore and more areas are privatised and more and more PSUs disinvested, Brahmin hegemony is likely to get a fresh lease o life. By the time the backwards and Dalits get to rule the state empire, they may find, like the later Mughal emperors, that there is little of the empire left to rule. (p.46).
@ This happened to me personally. I wanted to do M.A. Tamil as I am interested in Tamil. But in the National College in which I studied they don’t have B. A. Tamil. So I studied B. A. Economics, but scored good marks in Tamil paper. Only those have B. A. Tamil degree alone can get the M.A. seat in the college. However one seat was allotted as college cotta which they could give any deserving student who does not have B. A. Tamil degree. I am the only one applied for that cotta and the Tamil department also approved it. But when my application went to Madras University, they rejected my application on the ground that though it is a Brahmins College they cannot give that college cotta to any high caste student but only to an OBC or Dalit. As I didn’t apply for M. A. Economics, I couldn’t continue to my post graduation by missing the M. A. Tamil seat due to reservation policy by the government. In our time getting a government job for a Brahmin was almost impossible .
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