Caste, Technology and Religious Conversions in India

Anil S Arora
Dec 21, 2001



Seeing the film on K. Shivarama Karanth’s famous Kannada novel ‘Chomana Dudi’ (‘Choma’s Drum’) in 1974 I was for the first time confronted with that very Indian question concerning a man’s and his commitment to work and vocation.

K.S. Karanth’s protagonist Choma cannot reconcile two essential instincts within him : He does not wish to follow those of his relatives, friends and fellow villagers who have forsaken the Hindu and converted to . Nor does he wish to give up his desire to own and till the land – which, in the historical pre- setting of the novel, a Dalit like Choma is forbidden by orthodox Hindu mores.

This is the quintessence of Karanth’s novel : Choma’s dilemma, that he must give up one of the two elemental ingredients that make up his psyche, personality and individuality. In his anger and angst at being forced to make such a choice, Choma will often seek refuge with his drum in the dead of the night. He is also a drummer by talent and - his - provides him the only escape from the cruel choices of his life.

In the end it is a very reluctant Choma, driven insane as if by his overpowering desire to own and till a piece of land, who finally joins a small group of fellow villagers in front of a Christian mission which promises to sell a small plot of farmland to each convert.

Another story about a low caste artist was re-told by the journalist Jagmohan Naidu, at a 1991 seminar at New . Jagmohan referred to a particular temple in the south whose idol had been sculptured by a local shilpakaar.

The day after the idol was deified and consecrated in the temple, the shilpakaar went to the temple’s priest and confessed that there was a flaw in the sculpturing that the shilpakaar had not been able to identify during the sculpting. But, said the shilpakaar, last night (Murugam) appeared in a dream and told me where I needed to chip the stone’s line a little, for the idol to assume the aesthetics of perfection. So, pleaded the shilpakaar of the priest, let me come at night and work for a couple of hours and rectify that flaw, so that I as a shilkpakaar may have the of mind that I have done my duty by Murugam as best as I could.

According to Jagmohan Naidu’s re-telling, the priest refused to give the shilpakaar the opportunity to make perfect the sculpture. You can’t touch it now, the priest said. Till the day before it was only a piece of stone that you had been sculpting, but now it has been consecrated by puja and installed in the temple, and you, because of your low caste, are not allowed to touch the idol.

These two stories put the finger on two important questions. Firstly, why does the caste hierarchy give a lowly status to a very large number of Hindu communities (in the broader sense of the term) which happen to be working-class communities and whose members are technically skilled? Even when, as in the case of the shilpakaars and temple masons, the humble Hindu also happens to worship the same deity as upper class Hindus.

The second question that arises in today’s socio-economic milieu is : Why is the caste hierarchy so important a belief to upper class Hindus? What does the larger Hindu collective gain, in spiritual and in worldly terms, by insisting that some 'Hindu’ castes are inferior, even 'untouchable', while some others are superior?

To the common man’s thinking, two distinct interpretations of the Caste System are immediately suggested : One, that the Varna caste system defines communities according to the nature of the work they do, the vocation to which their human spirit and their intellectual ability is dedicated. The second, and today the more widely held interpretation, is that one’s caste is hereditary.

Yet, today we also see that there are many instances – indeed, far too many instances – of people belonging to one hereditary caste but pursuing vocations and professions traditionally synonymous with other, even lower, castes.

Critics of the of ’s schedule for the of jobs and posts for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes tend to view the modern day upheaval of vocations and professions from only one, the upper caste/class, end of the social spectrum.

For instance, about ten years ago, in his voluble and forcefully argued essays and pamphlets against the OBC reservations proposed by the Mandal Commission - Arun Shourie, one of the more widely respected intellectuals of the modern Indian elite, asked his readers whether we should accept doctors, engineers, etc, who were not qualified to perform the critical professional assignments that their new status would grant them if the Mandal Commission’s recommendations were implemented?

For Arun Shourie’s target audience, his question assumed the force of a rallying point : Indian society had to be “saved” from the incompetence and the professional maladies which the Mandal Commission’s recommendations would unleash upon .

Of course, both Shourie and his intellectual disciples ignored the empirical data in this regard – that is, the number of recorded engineering and construction scams (including the poor quality of earthquake-ruptured apartment houses in Ahmedabad and Bhuj, in January 2001) and several well-known medical blunders that owed their origin to the doings and misdoings of educated, upper class, upper caste Indians.

Arun Shourie’s populist argument was thereafter to prompt us to wear blinkers regarding the increasing deterioration of professional competence among upper class Indians. Not simply the OBC, the Scheduled Caste or Muslim professional and entrepreneur alone.

Now that Arun Shourie has become one of the intellectuals-in-administration (a minister in the NDA ) perhaps he could do a good turn to society at large by undertaking an empirical collation of data regarding the managements of the Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) that he has to “privatize’ as the Union Minister of Disinvestment.

It would be helpful to the understanding of the equation between Caste and Management-Technical Skills, if we had the data listing the caste-wise identification of all the heads and departmental heads of the “sick” Public Sector Undertakings, over the years. To more fully understand the validity of Arun Shourie’s caste-linked theories about vocational skills, a caste-wise listing of Public Sector chairpersons, managers and senior technocrats should also be collated as essential data.

Only after this empirical data is collected and analyzed can we arrive at an honest evaluation of four important questions: (i) How competent and capable are professional and technological standards prevailing in the country? (ii) Is there a relevance for a Caste-based qualification in the contemporary era, regarding senior-level appointments? (iii) What is the caste-wise division of those senior managers and technocrats of the Public Sector Undertakings who have not worked in the public and the national interest, because they have been guilty of financial mismanagement, misappropriation and misguidance, which has made the numerous public sector units financially unviable, sick, industrial units? (iv) Whether there is a justification in believing that the principle of hereditary caste , ipso facto, imbues those born into certain castes with an intrinsic “superiority” and those born into certain other castes with an intrinsic “inferiority”, as far as human intelligence, competencies and skills are concerned?

There is another, non-populist, perspective of looking at and studying the modern day upheaval of vocations and professions among members hailing from the different castes. At the upper end of the social spectrum we also see a considerable ambiguity in the equation between hereditary caste and professional pursuits. For instance, some contemporary Brahmins have taken to commerce, trading and shopkeeping. Vaishyas can be found working in research laboratories, educational institutions and in administration; Thakurs and Rajputs (contemporary equivalents of the Kshatriya) can be seen working in the arts and the communications , in medicine and engineering, as well as in agriculture.

It is not only some members of the so-called lower castes who have been able to achieve a certain amount of mobility within the vocational structures of the caste system. Among the Suvarna upper castes, too, there is a considerable amount of movement, vertical and horizontal, within the caste-based vocational structure.

Nor is this vocational upheaval a post-Independence, post- phenomenon. Nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, many hereditary Brahmins joined the armies of the East Company as soldiers. Of them Mangal Pandey, the first symbol of ’s First of Independence in 1857, is the most famous pioneer among the now long list of Brahmin-soldiers we have had in recent times.

In the 17th and the 18th centuries, other Brahmins in Bengal and Tamil Nadu were to take employment, in both high and low positions in accordance with their individual merit, in the commercial and administrative services of the East Company and then the British Indian .

Prior to the invasion of by the East Company, the Peshwas of Pune had already proved that Brahmins could not just be first rate scholars, theologians and intellectuals, but they were also capable and effective rulers and administrators.

At the other end of the caste hierarchy we also saw, in the 15th century, that though he was born into the trading community of the Khatri, Guru Nanak emerged as a great devotional saint, poet and a religious philosopher of considerable relevance and charisma. And Kabir – “said to have been the illegitimate son of a Brahmin widow” but brought up by a julaha (weaver) , and so ‘trained in the same lower-caste profession” - grew up to become one of the great poets of Indian .

In the 20th century, the dogma of a hereditary caste intellect is also disproved by the birth of Maithali Saran Gupt, the first major poet of modern Hindi as we know the today, in a mercantile of rural Jhansi. And the dogma that religious beliefs determine vocational preferences is disproved to this day by the fact that in Chennai’s in cow hides, Tamil Brahmins constitute a sizeable section of the ’s entrepreneurs.

One school of Indian historians believes that, over the centuries, the interaction between members of the different castes has not always been rigid and segregationist, but has varied from time to time in Indian history.

The caste equation in the 21st century opens on a critical note : Will Indian politics continue to sustain itself through the of caste differences, conflicts and tensions? Or will the ‘new ’ of contemporary aspirations accept the premise that caste divisions and tensions have to be resolved if Indian society as a whole is to realize its economic potential?

One way of arguing in favor of the mitigation of caste conflicts is to accept that the Varna caste system should be re-defined according to individual merit and accomplishment; not merely on the basis of a hereditary definition. By way of illustration, going back to the instance of Arun Shourie himself, and quite removed from the issue of one’s agreement or disagreement with Shourie’s beliefs and views : Can we say that Arun Shourie as an intellectual has been performing the role of a Brahmin and a scholar for the Indian Right? Or are we to forget his intellectual accomplishments and insist that because he is a Khatri by birth, he remains a “trader”? We also have, on the other hand, instances in north of underworld dons who happen to be Brahmin by birth!

Hindu theologians and intellectuals tend to accept the easy way out of the discussion on this issue. They both accept and avoid the discussion.

The great devotional poets and sants have, for instance, been accepted in the theological hierarchy, but the social views of sages like Sant Dyaneswar, Kabir and Guru Nanak have not been assimilated within the fold of orthodox social theory. Perhaps the most enigmatic instance of all concerns the Buddha and Buddhism. Orthodox theologians accept the Buddha into the Hindu pantheon, as the Tenth Avatar of Lord Vishnu. But the ground reality is that many traditionalist Hindus are unwilling to accept Buddhists socially; specially the so-called “neo Buddhists” who converted to Buddhism following Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s lead.

However, the state of caste division and caste conflict in Indian society is, in my humble opinion, not beyond resolution. The “educated” urban Indian has inherited a of social reforms from the ‘Indian renaissance’ of the 19th century. The Indian renaissance was brought about by upper caste Hindus : personages such as Sane Guruji, Ram Mohan Roy, Ramkrishna, Swami Vivekanand, Swami Dayanand and, in Maharashtra most strikingly, by Mahatma Phule, Ahilyabai Holkar and Maharishi Karve. In Maharashtra, the concept of social reforms has assumed the nature of a continuing movement and in 2000 A.D. a mass ceremony was conducted at Pune by priestesses () in defiance of the dogma!

The question of resolving caste conflicts is now directly related, in my opinion, to the more visible conflicts between Hindus (the majority community of ) and the minority communities of the Muslims and the Christians. For the simple reason that the overwhelming majority of Indian Muslims and Indian Christians have converted from the traditional lower castes; though exceptions exist in central Kerala as also in some parts of Rajasthan.

Moreover, it is important to remember in these days when ‘economics is all’ that many of those who have left Hinduism over the years and converted to become followers of or are people who come from communities of the traditional Indian working class : Traditional craftsmen, weavers, musicians, sculptors and painters, masons and stone carvers, handicraft artisans and other workers. These are communities whose traditional skills to this day produce works of the highest international quality and aesthetic standard. The members of these communities represent the best of ’s traditional arts and crafts. But their social is deemed to belong to the ‘lower castes’ in the Hindu social hierarchy.

As an Indian (and a Hindu) who is both proud and not so proud to be ‘an Indian of today’s era’, the post- era, I wonder whether my society will ask itself the question : Why did large groups of the ancestors of skilled traditional artists, craftsmen and artisans decide to leave the fold of Hinduism and convert to either or, later, ? I wonder whether my society will reconsider some of its old social practices and value systems, and accept that some of the most intricate and precious products produced in the Indian tradition is the work of artisans and craftsmen who, being condemned to be lowly because of their hereditary caste, are not given their due as skilled professionals?

In , the segregation of human ability and skill from one’s social status has perpetuated an imbalanced perspective about how economic processes work for society at large. In the contemporary business world, for instance, Indian industrial ideologies place marketing way, way ahead of manufacturing abilities. Modern industrial entrepreneurs will not, therefore, follow the Japanese model of the post-1945 period and invest in the improvement of quality manufacturing or technological innovation.

It is because of the outdated caste-based parameters about the status of those communities who have manufacturing skills that the Indian is unable to compete with other Asian economies which, like the Chinese, emphasize manufacturing skills.

We have persisted with this blinkered perspective of the economic process for so long that the alumni of our “best’ and most expensive educational institutions aspire to pursue work lines that are more relevant to the economies of North America and Europe (and the Euro-American colonies in urban ) but are increasingly alienated from the technological requirements of seventy per cent of Indian society. Have we, for instance, been able to innovate, re-design and improve (and then market a superior model of) the traditional plough used by such “a large market of consumers” among ’s agriculturists?

Secondly, since the focus is on imitating (and not innovating) technological skills, and on marketing, “educated ” seems also to have lost the ability to see how things are done, or can be done better.

Having observed ’s intellectual and world for some 35 years now, I sometimes fear that we, in urban , have become a people who can no longer recognize a first rate idea or innovative concept any more. Therefore we accept, applaud and celebrate that which is not first rate at all – or, as the American poet Ezra Pound said, is “ninth rate”! In for instance, can we say that the best contemporary Indian writers have the caliber of Subrahmaniam Bharati, Rabindranath Tagore, Munshi Premchand and the many other great writers of 19th and early 20th century ?

is accepted as one of the classical measures of a society’s level of civilization, because it represents a combination of and , of engineering, artistic and aesthetic vision, technological abilities and skilled workmanship.

If an architectural evaluation of what we have constructed in the last half century is made in comparison with the edifices constructed in any of the three major historical periods of the past – the , medieval and ancient – it should seem undeniable that despite the glitz and razzmatazz of post- , none of our public monuments, or temples, gurudwaras, mosques or churches, compare in architectural or artistic terms with the edifices built in the past. There seems to be a greater availability of money today; but a comparative paucity of workmanship, technical innovation and aesthetic finesse.

Let me illustrate this argument by referring to two famous and massive contemporary temples of modern : the Birla Mandir at New and the J.K. Temple at Kanpur. Neither of these compare, architecturally, with the famous temples of our ancient past – at Mahaballipuram, Tanjore, Kashi, Puri or Bhubaneswar, to mention a few examples. For that matter, none of the public constructions we have built in post- can even compare with the architectural layout of the old ghats along the River Ganga.

Why has this sense of beauty, grace, technological and architectural skill evaporated from contemporary ? Is it because in the rapacious, loot-like for money (of any currency) we have forgotten that manufacturing and technical skills contribute as much as marketing to the strength of the as a whole? As a theistic believer, I see so often in my time that many of us seem to believe that large marble slabs and gold plating in the temple can substitute the blessings of .

The historian Romila Thapar says that in the period between 1-2 A.D. “the educational system split into theoretical knowledge confined to the Brahmins (and those whom they wished to teach), and practical and technical knowledge, which remained the preserve of the professionals.” However, it was only after 800 A.D. that Brahminical writings “attack professions where technical knowledge was essential”, handicrafts were regarded as a low and “mechanical work was a minor sin, and this category of work included the construction of bridges and embankments to control the flow of water. (A History of , Vol. 1).

This was also the era when the feudal economic structure began to entrench itself for the first time. The feudal administrative structure had taken root before the establishment of the first Muslim dynasty in north . The various Muslim administrations of medieval were to continue with the practice of feudal economics and administration. Nor can the British Indian be acknowledged as having ushered in a non-feudal administrative structure outside the industrial and commercial townships they set up.

For nearly 1200 years Indian society did not give social respectability to those communities and castes which earned their living through mechanical work and the hand crafts. (And most communities of the Indian Muslim belong to these groupings and sub-castes).

Now, in the global of the 21st century, social priorities have been reversed. The elite modern professions are primarily those involving mechanical and technical work: engineering, computer engineering, medicine, manufacturing of one kind or another. Intellectually oriented practices have also assumed a technical specialization of their own, as for instance in marketing and advertising, and business management is being treated as a in itself.

The traditional Indian concept of segregating theoretical knowledge from practical and technical knowledge is no longer valid. In practice it is not adhered to, either, by upper caste urban Hindus.

If we accept the of modern day technologies, it becomes easier to understand why large numbers of people from the traditional Indian working classes decided to leave the fold of Hinduism and convert to and, in later times, to .

As the industrial-age sociologist understands, there is an element of human creativity involved in the accomplishment of even the simplest mechanical work. The (human) creativity involved in the making of a large number of traditional Indian handicrafts and textiles must have been and continues to be enormous. For such creative communities to be continuously subjected to the perils of a low social status would have been extremely humiliating – decade after decade, century after century. To the creative individual, the social recognition of his creativity is perhaps as important as the financial remuneration. He is in a sense a devotee of the Goddess Saraswati, which is why he is capable in the first place of executing works with high skill.

Not being allowed entry into the main Hindu temples, many of these communities had evolved their own religious affiliation to local deities. Later, the advent of into the subcontinent was to perhaps offer them a new means of gaining some social respectability. Despite the largely medieval world-view of the orthodox Ulema (clergy) we have to accept that some of the principles of are very ‘working class’ in nature; which may have been one of the reasons why Guru Nanak, for instance, inter-acted so extensively with Sufi pirs.

According to the modernist Islamic commentator Sultan Shahin, the attendance at the prayers in the mosque follows a democratic procedure: Those devotees who come first, get to stand in the first row at namaz, irrespective of their economic status. Moreover, at the namaz the faithful are supposed to stand shoulder to shoulder irrespective of class or caste. According to Sultan Shahin, this ‘democratic” sense of at prayers has been, perhaps, the most important argument that attracted persons from ’s traditional working classes to accept .

Many historians, such as Percival Spear, also believe that it was not so much the Muslim rulers of medieval who forced mass conversions, but the teachings of (among human beings) which were preached by the Sufi pirs. It is an argument that seems more plausible, because we see in the post- period that some Dalit sub-groups have left the fold of Hinduism and converted to Buddhism. (Incidentally, as he said in an interview to The Hindustan Times over a year ago, the popular Right-wind intellectual Arun Shourie has also become a Buddhist.)

In the light of this continuous trend, and no matter how small this trend may be in terms of percentages, it seems to me – as a theist Hindu – that Hindu theologians and intellectuals must face up to and answer the question: Why does Hindu society not grant social respectability to those communities and sub-castes who do mechanical work and who have technical knowledge?

We must also try to understand and analyze why traditional working class sub-castes suggest, on occasion, that they are not comfortable within the Hindu social hierarchy.

Another kind of “conversion” seems to be taking place among Indians during the last twenty years and more – of Hindus who are very much committed to Hinduism the , but who do not wish to live in Hindustan. They are Hindus of Indian origin who are either renouncing their Indian passports (i.e. their Indian nationality) or are unwilling to return to live in .

These “non-Indian” Hindus, of which a very large and very visible has grown in the and Canada, retain their cultural and religious ties with their land; but they prefer to visit and Indian society as visitors. They can be said to be rejecting Indian society in a way. They are in fact ‘converting' to become of other lands – again, because they are unwilling to accept the social and economic milieu that prevails in .

Can these people, who are mostly white collar workers and professionals and who primarily hail from upper caste Hindu families, be more justified in renouncing their land and their citizenship, than the poor and lowly treated traditional craftsman and artisan whose families have left Hinduism but not ?

For both classes of Indians, the turning point would appear to lie in the status accorded (or, rather, not accorded) to in traditional Indian society.