Re: [mukto-mona] Bankim and Gandhi on Caste

@ Farida Majid,

Thank you very much for presenting such a nice article. Gandhi ji's inconsistency was also pointed out by Dr. B R Ambedkar. I have found some of the Dr. Ambedkar's writings are very very sharp. For Gandhi it was difficult to engage with Dr. Ambedkar in discourse. Dr. Ambedkar's scholarship and his experienced objective reality was far authentic and rational than Gandhi ji.

Regarding Bankim Chandra, I can remember from my limited reading, that Sri Ramkrishna Paramhansa wanted to make close social relation with Bankim and Vidyasagar. Both of them avoided him. Of course from the ideological point of view.

And the story of "Mahesh" spoiled my score in high school final examination!!! Whenever I read the story I cried. "Mahesh amar testa niye moreche" : simply unforgettable.

Saurav

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 1:39 PM, Farida Majid <farida_majid@hotmail.com> wrote:

The article was published in The Independent (Bangladesh), The Daily Times (Pakistan) and many internet web sites, blogs and magazines. Bamkim and Gandhi on Caste Farida Majid          George Orwell could get the sense of the political posturing of Gandhi and hence he remarked on its "shrewdness" in his 1949 essay, "Reflections on Gandhi." Orwell was born in India, and so he sympathized with her plight under colonization. His essay, "Shooting an Elephant" will forever remain a classic, a most moving testimony to the evil workings of colonization.         Orwell's comments on Gandhi should be taken seriously because of his deep knowledge of the colonial mindset of the British imperialist policy makers and intellectuals, a mindset that he held in utter contempt. He could tell, like none of us can really, how Gandhi was playing the political card of the "untouchables" to the benefit of Gandhi's colonial masters, because Orwell knew the nuances.         As far as I know, Gandhi could not read Sanskrit, and so was unschooled in the vast literature of Hundu Shastras, philosphy and jurisprudence. His sense of the Hindu "caste system" was what he had received about it from the British and other local writers. The imperial British administrators were obsessed with the idea of the Indian system of "caste" and endlessly analyzed it, not so much for the sake of real knowledge of how it actually functioned in the pre-colonial societies without exploitation of lower castes, but in an overall effort to malign Indian civilization. The common people of India were not "plunged into the lowest depths of wretchedness and despondency," as Thomas Babington Macaulay and his colonizing cohorts falsely envisioned them to be before they took over India as a pretext for taking over India.           It is important to have an understanding of how colonial rule actually changed the way caste was structured in India. From the end of 18th century, by enacting a series of laws, the British changed land ownership, revenue collection and other agricultural and commerce laws whereby the peasantry and ordinary laborers were dispossessed and disenfranchised. They then codified the lower castes in such a way that smothered what fluidity in upward mobility the lower castes had in the past. New laws freed the Brahmins from traditional strictures of moral conduct and obligations, making them the group that most benefited from colonial opportunities.           By the time the British left, the caste system of modern India had turned into reality as the one that the British had feverishly imagined it to be " an instrument of extremely cruel social injustice. Bearing little or no resemblance to the pre-colonial economy or the way a hierarchical social arrangement functioned in the past, caste, as it is prevalent in India today, is the biggest system of institutional racism adversely affecting the largest number of people in the world.         Other than the word "shudra," all the words we use today to describe the lower castes are new-fangled, colonial, and Gandhian. Whoever heard of "scheduled caste" or the term Dalit in the 19th century? "Harijan," a gratuitously imposed nomenclature by Gandhi is intended to make lowly people feel proud of being "God's creatures" and that should be good enough! To a writer like Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya, the great Bengali writer writing in the 1870-80's, the word "acchyut" or "untouchable" was an adjective, not a common noun designating a class of human beings.         Gandhi's shrewd tactics with his weirdly passionate ideas about the "caste system" being an integral part of Hinduism is a ploy to carry on the authoritarianism of imperialism even after the British left India. His penchant for the status quo of a racially segregated sociopolitical system was evident in his stint in South Africa as a young lawyer, where he pleaded for the Indians' rights to be treated as non-blacks, closer to being treated as whites, or semi-whites.           How much did Gandhi really know about Hinduism? How much did any ordinary person know? It was an easy job for him to present himself as one dedicated, out of the goodness of his heart, to alleviating the misery of these lowly people born in their lowly station. Being born as low caste is an inescapable fate -- with a hint that such birth was due to some bad "karma" that could not be helped and is due to an implied innate flaw of the low caste person himself or herself.          In sharp contrast, we read the writings of Bankim, a superbly versed Sanskrit scholar, immensely proud of his scholarly Brahminical lineage and the numerous Bengali pandits' contribution to the body of Nayashastra, and other branches of philosophy, Sanskrit literature and juridical commentary. He was not himself a practicing, ritualistically observant Brahmin. Though obviously trained in his Brahminical studies, he pursued, as we all know, a newly devised weighty regimen of modern secular, Eurocentric education and was the first distinguished graduate produced by the newly established Calcutta University. As much as he was a produce of colonialism, he was also of the generation that was face to face with British imperialism. His was a genuine voice of anti-imperialism that boldly empathized with the dispossessed peasantry and the workers of Bengal, both the Hindu and the Muslim, due to colonial rule!       Bankim detested Varna! He wrote against it with unmitigated scorn. And he wrote against it in a language that I have rarely seen any other writer express. There are many writers who wrote heart-wrenching tales of injustice due to caste discrimination. The Bengali novelist Sharatchandra Chattopadhya was certainly one of the greatest of protesters against social injustice due to caste. His novels are marvelous studies of subtle manipulations through established, rule-governed Hindu social practices, and how a small section of the society undermines the other, larger section's basic humanity.        But Bankim is the one who actually stated that Varna is the cause of all the backwardness and wretchedness of today's India. Unlike the British, and unlike Gandhi, Bankim does not talk about caste in essentialist terms. He talks about Varna in developmental terms through history, and concludes that the ‘varna' system ended up being no good for any body, not even the middle-tiered castes. He reserves his sharpest barbs for the Brahmins. Those Brahmins who created the great epic and romance literatures, laws and philosophies of India have gone astray, their mental faculties now as fallow as a desert, he laments.  Since the traditional structure of the Hindu society is Brahmin-centered, and now, in the colonial era with the gaping blank at the center, I'm sure, Bankim would have seen no use for preserving the caste system.            Had Bankim been alive to witness Gandhi's political maneuverings, his costume drama (of wearing the langhoti, pretending to be one with the harijans, with his captive audience being the colonial Masters), he would have died in shame. Bankim was modern enough as a secular but proud as a Hindu, as a progressive 19th century Indian intellectual, as an internationalist or a 'multi-culturalist' as we call them these days, to have enthusiastically supported the abolition of the caste system. It is such a pity that there was only Gandhi at the table, no Bankim or any representation of his legacy bearer, when leaders of the Independence movement, including Ambedkar, Periyar and others approached Gandhi about the abolition of the caste system, and Gandhi steadfastly refused the proposal.         Isn't it ironic that Gandhi is being upheld as the hero of the "untouchables," hailed as the ‘Mahatma', and Bankim is being heralded as the "flag bearer" of the mean and contemptible brand of Hindutva goondaism?             In the unswerving pursuit of truth and in possessing piercing insights into the follies of the domineering powers, Bankim was a precursor of Orwell. Like Orwell, he too would have been certain to have detected the pretensions of Gandhi and protested loudly against the preservation of the cursed caste system.                                           ©2005, Farida Majid

--
Saurav Shome
Research Scholar
Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
V. N. Purav Marg
Mankhurd, Mumbai, India, 400 088
shomesaurav@gmail.com, saurav@hbcse.tifr.res.in
www.sauravpeace.wordpress.com
www.continuinglearning2teach.wordpress.com
www.pblteachers.wordpress.com
Phone: (O) 022 - 25072220 (M) + 91 - 9969872306

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