Caste, in its double sense of an occupational-endogamous community as well as rank-ordered and ritually-legitimated varna, has come to be thought of in social science literature, as the one and unique social reality of the sub-continent: India is caste and caste is India.
This is false. Social Science does not mean shit taught in the Sociology department by cretins like Aloysius to drooling imbeciles. India is a nation whose national economy and defence and diplomatic arrangements are worth studying by sensible people.
Roland Inden in his seminal work
shat the bed because he was a shithead. Still, he was an American shithead and America, being rich, can afford to pay shitheads to stink up useless Academic Departments which offer sheepskins to gullible imbeciles. This is a typical Capitalist Ponzi scheme based on information asymmetry.
has pointed out that 'Caste is conceptualised
by shitheads for shitheads
as the peculiar Indian essence that distinguishes the country from every other and particularly the Western',
Caste is a Spanish/Portuguese term and featured south of the Inden's country's own border though, no doubt, some American 'Social Scientists' have found the phenomenon in the US itself.
and again 'Caste has become essentialised and turned into the substantialised agent of history'.
Varna, for Indic religion, is an essence- i.e. true in all possible worlds- iff there is no Maya or Sunyata- i.e Sankara and Nagarjuna were wrong and the message of Vedanta and of Buddhism were merely metaphorical or imperative in nature. Material reality is characterized by caste determining subtle particles which have 'aashrav' (ingress) at the time when vicious or virtuous acts occur or at the time of 'antarabhava' or determination of birth qualities by the Gandharvas.
Essentialisation for Inden, 'is the idea that humans and human institutions, for example, the individual and the nation-state are governed by determinate natures that inhere in them in the same way that they are supposed to inhere in the entities of the natural world'.
Inden is wrong. Essences are things which exist in all possible worlds.
In other words essentialising caste means considering it as 'an unchanging ideal that precedes human history and stands outside it' (Inden 1990, Chap. 2).
No. It means positing subtle 'karma-binding' particles or else committing to an Occassionalist metaphysics.
A meta-historical caste
could be an economic explanation of why it exists. However, in India, we know the thing exists as a political instrumentality. Meta-history is the discourse upon which Historical discourse supervenes. For Marxists, this is the economic substructure. For Political Scientists, it is stuff that Prashant Kishore used to get a lot of money for analysing.
would exhibit at least three characteristics: timelessness, all-pervasiveness and changelessness.
No. That is a 'transcendental' or 'a priori' conception of caste. Aloysius studied at JNU. His brains turned to shit. Now he fills the head of shitty students with shit. Manual scavenging- i.e. carrying shit in a pan balanced on your head- is one thing. Filling your brain-pan with shit is another thing entirely.
First, since caste in India is recognised to have existed since Vedic times,
amongst Vedic people- sure. But there were plenty of non-Vedic people with similar social systems.
it also has through sacred association become a time-immemorial entity; second, its operative nature is considered monolithical and co-extensive with the entire Bharatvarsh;
American 'activists' claim it is alive and well in Silicon Valley. Did you know Kamala is a Brahmin? That is why she hates Muslims and Dalits. Vote for Trump if you don't want Brahminical supremacy to triumph in America.
third, the main elements of caste are supposed to have survived more or less unchanged down through history.
No. Don't be silly. The Vedic view is that once upon a time everybody was a Brahmin and spent a lot of time praying. Then morals deteriorated to a point where you needed soldiers and policemen and Kings- which is when Kshatriyas appeared. Since then things have just kept getting worse which is why a half Brahmin like Kamala or Rahul could end up ruling two of the biggest democracies on the planet.
Such an essentialised view of caste is held most often unconsciously, particularly when the term is used as a shorthand in academic discourse to describe social and group relations.
Academic discourse in non-STEM subjects is stupid, paranoid, shite. It is a source of mischief only tolerated, indeed subsidized, because it creates a 'circular firing squad' on the Left.
It also runs parallel very often to more critical considerations of the subject. Sociological and historical studies of caste, starting off from either a single Sanskritic text or village-level micro-studies, do not hesitate to predicate generalised conclusions for the entire sub-continent.
Yes they do. They would be laughed at if they suggested otherwise.
Curiously enough both those who attribute near total determinacy to caste as well as those who deny it in absolute terms subscribe to this same meta-historical vision.
This would be curious if it were true. It isn't.
It does not require uncommon intelligence to point out that a reified caste is strikingly similar to the other, equally reified, referents of our discussion, namely, religion and nation.
These aren't 'reifications', these are strategic 'instrumentalities'. Nobody thinks Ambedkar saw his role as that of a Mahar watchman or soldier. He used Dalit identity as a political instrumentality just as Aloysius is using caste as an epistemic instrument so as to pretend he isn't utterly useless and stupid.
Still, it must be said, Aloysius's English has improved since he published his illiterate 'Nationalism without a Nation' in 1998. There, in the very first sentence he claimed that 'two generations had passed' since Independence. What he meant was 'two generations have been born' since then. I hope the lad continues to make such progress. Perhaps, something has rubbed off on him since he started teaching in Gujarat. Personally, I blame prohibition. If I had to live in Surat, I too might start writing sensibly.
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