History Of Caste

[dhu]

Posting in full,

NOTES TOWARDS THE STUDY OF THE CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA


1. Human individuals are born simultaneously into cultural and natural environments. Both these environments are incredible storehouses of differences. We can look at these environments as ‘spaces’: a natural and a cultural space. However, what the human child learns, also through the process of teaching, are not mere ‘differences’ in these two ‘spaces’, but salient diversities. That is to say, through a process of selection, some differences are bracketed away, some differences are clustered, some are emphasized, etc. This is what I mean by ‘salient diversities’: some structured sets of differences. Accordingly, the task of a configuration of learning is to help an individual cope with salient diversities. Even though this is but a partial explication of the notion of ‘configuration of learning’, it already helps us realise that there is a significant difference between ‘learning’ (‘the process of creating a habitat’; ‘that which makes the environment habitable’) and ‘a configuration of learning’. Since any group that has lived for any significant period of time survives only as a culture (i.e., as ‘a configuration of learning’), each one of us in the world encounters only salient diversities.

1.1. What differentiates mere ‘differences’ from ‘diversities’ and the latter from ‘salient diversities’? What I am trying to pick out from using these three words is a difference in ‘levels’: ‘differences’ pick out, abstractly as it were, the differences between objects, persons, events etc. Some are rooted in our human biology (e.g. skin-colour, differences in length, colour of the hair, etc.); some differences are linked to our biology and the natural environment (heat, cold; textures and colours; etc); some are how we perceive the natural environment (the appearance of trees, their leaves, mountains, etc.) and so forth. To describe the difference between, say, any two objects (at this level of generality), is to provide an exhaustive description of the details. In the realist epistemology (see Putnam’s formulation in his Three Chords…), the differences between objects are already given and the goal of an objective description is to provide a description of the differences that are already there (and objectively given).

1.2. The notion of ‘diversities’ picks out the fact that not all differences are relevant to all societies, but only some are. Such diversities already carry the mark of the cultural: they are not mere descriptions of ‘relevant’ differences, but are already ‘worked-upon’ descriptions. If you like, they indicate the fact that the different human cultures are all human cultures as such. They are, I presume, concepts of a general theory of human culture.


1.3. ‘Salient diversities’ refers to that level, where new properties or new diversities come into being. Our language that describes the world does remain partially responsible to the differences in the world, but also evolves new ways of describing the world. That is to say, the appropriate level of beginning to describe the cultural world is that of ‘salient diversities’ (at least for a comparative science of cultures). Further theory-building might, in the future, enable us to describe diversities and the ways in which they become ‘salient’. For now, this appears the most interesting level at which we pitch our descriptions.

1.4. Of course, these are stipulative definitions. More important than this, is to note that these definitions merely fix the reference of the words. Even more important is to realise the reasons why: it will be the task of a future theory to build a theory about these units. No definition can, or should, decide how the world is like. Our definitions should remain neutral with respect to the future results: let us see what the future theory has in store. At the moment, our basic units should merely clear up the ground where we are going to start working.

1.5. One small example to illustrate what I mean. Age-difference between people would belong to the level of ‘difference’; ‘elderly’ is a diversity; ‘elderly parent’, ‘people above 50’, ‘pensioned persons’, ‘the wise elder’, etc. are ‘salient diversities’. The structuring of the latter gives us the social structures.

1.6. In a way, I do not think that we need to worry much about these words. If, in the process of building a theory about any particular aspect of a culture, and thus about cultural difference, it transpires that ‘diversity’ would do a better job than the notion of ‘salient diversity’, let us just go ahead. It is impossible to determine, at the level of definition, the scope, the breadth and the nature of a partial theory: that is, whether it is a part of a theory of cultural difference, or a part of sociology or a contribution to a general theory of human culture. In other words, I think the development of a theory will itself also indicate the appropriate level of description.

2. I would like to define a social structure as a structured set of salient diversities, i.e., as a set of salient diversities together with a relation defined over these elements. The configuration of learning organises (or structures) the going-about of individuals with one another, and their goings-about the (salient diversities in the) natural environment. The organised going-about is what the word ‘social structure’ refers to. If looked at dynamically, the social structure is an ‘organised going-about’. Statically, it is some ‘structured set of salient diversities’. Why do we need both the static and dynamic descriptions? I will come to that in a moment.

A social organisation, by contrast, is bigger. Its elements are the plurality of social structures (at least two: the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’ salient diversities) and the relation between them. The social organisation can also be described dynamically and statically. As the latter, it is the set of social structures and their relation between them; as the former, it is that which structures (or regulates) the interaction between social structures.

3. To utilise some examples purely for illustrative purposes, we can put it this way. ‘Family’ ‘school’, ‘trade-union’, etc. group different sets of going-about in our daily life. These are the social structures. Who or what groups some sets of going-about as those that belong to ‘the school’, ‘the family’, and ‘the trade-union’, etc? The social organisation. Who or what specifies the relation (if any) between these entities? Again, the social organisation. If you look at these goings-about as interactions, then social structures are organised goings-about. If you look at it statically, they are simply structured sets of salient diversities. (The salient diversities among the family members, for example: the father earns a wage, the child goes to school, they stay in one house, etc.)

4. Summarising: human beings are born simultaneously into a natural and cultural environment, which incorporate at least one social organisation. This organisation contains social structures and organises (or regulates) their mutual interaction. The social structures are grouped (or organised) goings-about. These are enumerable as structured sets of salient diversities.


4.1 How does a social organisation come into being? Through the learning (actions) of individuals. How do these individuals learn? Through the configuration of learning. In this sense, a configuration of learning generates a social organisation through the mediation of individuals. This tells us that a social organisation is a creation of individuals acting and interacting with each other.

4.2 However, what organises these goings-about? The social structures. What ‘teaches’ these goings-about? The configuration of learning. In this sense, the social structures mediate the individuals to the configuration of learning.

4.3 Who or what groups the social structures and regulates their interaction? The social organisation. In this sense, the social organisation mediates the social structures to each other.

4.4 What does it mean to say that the social structures organise the goings-about of the individuals? It means they teach. What do they teach? The goings-about. (See 4.2 above about the social structures mediating the individuals to the configuration of learning.) In this sense, the social structures mediate individuals to each other. (In my note on Narahari’s response, I had called them the mechanisms of socialisation, which they are in some senses of the ‘social’.)

4.5 Speaking of my earlier article allows me to add the following idea as well, albeit in a compressed form: ‘culturality’ is what the individual ‘gets’ (through both the processes of learning and teaching) from the configuration of learning; ‘sociality’ is what he ‘gets’ from being the mediated entity, i.e., through the mediation of social organisation and the social structures; ‘personality’ is what he ‘gets’ as a mediating entity; ‘cultural difference’ is how he uses the mediating structures. So what makes some ‘difference’, any ‘difference’, into a ‘cultural difference’? It is the how of an individual’s use of social organisation and the social structures. (‘Stories’ are a social structure: this is the static description; ‘story-telling in a particular context and in a particular way’ – or my ‘learning units’– is its dynamic description.)

4.5.1. As I have indicated in my response to Narahari, we perceive cultural differences only at the level of individual interactions. (For instance, one can notice the difference between buildings and their styles of construction. Does this not indicate a ‘cultural difference’? They do not: the styles of construction of the Dutch, German and Belgian houses, say, vary. But the level at which my notion of ‘cultural difference’ operates tells us that these are not the structuring of ‘salient diversities’ that a configuration of learning can account for. In fact, it is difficult to say whether they are mere ‘diversities’ or ‘salient diversities’. Stands to reason: We need a theory about these different styles in order to assess their significance. As I have made clear at the beginning, our definition is not a ‘classification’ but one that merely fixes the reference of the words.) In the same article, I indicated that we could talk of ‘culturality’ of an individual in exactly the same way we can talk about the ‘sociality’ and the ‘personality’ of the said individual. I had not said much about what these three terms could refer to. In the above paragraph, I have given some content to these words.
4.5.2. One of the problems that we often come across is that of the relation between the individual and ‘higher-level’ social entities, viz., groups, classes, social organisations (as it is loosely used) etc. This problem knows of two polarised solutions. (1) A reduction of all macro-entities to the individual psychology: this is the classical story of reductionism, or of methodological individualism, which crowns individual psychology as the queen of human sciences. (Of course, such a scientific psychology would further get reduced to a future cognitive neuro-science.) (2) Either a stubborn defence of the ‘reality’ of macro-structures or a reduction of the individual to macro-entities, like, social structures (loosely used), or ‘ontically higher entities’, like, family, culture, or whatever else.
4.5.3. In my story, we see the true nature of this debate. If it is linguistically equally plausible for us to speak of an individual’s ‘personality’, his ‘sociality’ and his ‘culturality’, the debate about reduction or of the ontological superiority of some or another macro-entity becomes a pseudo-debate. This issue cannot be resolved by reflecting about the concepts used in different ‘theories’ but by building theories that tell us effectively how the problem should be posed and what its solution is. Reduction of the rest of ‘social sciences’ to a future ‘scientific psychology’ becomes hollow because ‘personality’ is but a dimension of the individual. There is nothing obvious about its primacy, it merely rests on a linguistic plausibility, and we can show that ‘sociality’ and ‘culturality’ are equally plausible linguistic usages. Regarding the ontological primacy of macro-entities, the following argument is telling: these are concepts-in-a-theory and, like all such concepts, we need to have a theory that does the work that scientific theories are supposed to do. (‘Electrons’, ‘gravitational force’, etc. are also such entities; but we presume their reality, do we not?) They are concepts-in-a-theory because the individual interactions are ‘seamless’ and cannot be, any more than any other natural process, carved out at its joints. There are no joints either in the cultural environment or in the natural environment.
4.5.4. Actually, I should have better said that ‘stories’ are linguistic structures (whether oral or textual). In a particular culture, they are made into a social structure. This is the passive description. The active dimension requires that it also teaches: In my story, it can teach only within the confines of a particular kind of learning process. Otherwise, stories would teach by virtue of their linguistic structure alone, which they do not. However, that stories become mere linguistic structures have to do with the culture-in-question, where they are seen only as linguistic structures.

4.6 We can now see why both a ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ description of social organisation and social structures were needed. Each is not only a mediated entity, but also a mediating entity. These are the general or abstract properties of both a social organisation and the social structures it comprises of. There is, however, the problem of delimiting them: when could we say that some specific set of structured salient diversities is a social structure? How could we identify something as a social organisation? These questions pertain to empirical enquiry: one has to conduct an empirical investigation into different cultures in order to identify the social structures there. Even though both social structures and social organisations could contain properties that are common across cultures, only empirical investigations can help us answer the question about the properties they might have in common. The reason for this is obvious: what we have are individual human beings acting and interacting with each other and the natural environment in particular ways. As indicated earlier, there are no ‘joints’ in this process of interaction. We slice these interactions in conceptually specific ways, which we call ‘social structures’ and such like, in order to study and understand human beings. However, our ‘slices’ are not arbitrary and subjective. But the only way of demonstrating their ‘objectivity’ is to build a theory that can be subjected to scientific evaluation.

5. As must be apparent from the forgoing, there is a loop (or feed-back) between the four elements, viz., the configuration of learning, the social organisation, the social structure, and the individual. This loop (or feed-back) is precisely the process of historical development. (Bracketing away, for the moment, the difference between ‘history’ and the ‘past’.) The dynamic of historical evolution is the process of feed-back (or the process of loop) between these four elements, however, ‘in circumstances men find themselves in and not as they please.’ (These ‘circumstances’ would be what I call ‘salient diversities’.)

6. The last sentence (in scare quotes) and the talk of mediation make me want to push this in the direction of Karl Marx. Analogous with the arguments above, one could say that the social organisation structures the way the individual copes with the salient diversities in the natural environment as well. If we follow the logic of the argument developed so far, it means that the individual is also mediated doubly to the salient natural diversities: through the social organisation and through the social structures. This would be the equivalent of the ‘social process of production’. The natural environment gets included in the feed-back process: it sustains, or hinders, or expands the possibilities of more intense loops. That is, the process can be either retarded or quickened. (Obviously, ‘quickening’, ‘retarding’, and ‘intensification’, etc. require a more careful elaboration.) This is the ‘process of social reproduction’. There is, however, no direct or immediate impact on the individual social structures due to the process of social production and reproduction. If there is an impact, it is gradual, slow and is visible only after a long period of time. (That is because of the chain of mediations involved in the process.) A social revolution, then, is the process of adaptation of the social organisation as a result of the feed-back process. I can show that this conceptualisation accommodates many of the properties of the ‘materialistic conception of history’, but that would require more digression. Let me summarise this in the form of an incomplete slogan: ‘culture enables the social’.

6.1. As is evident from the fore-going, the social structures come into being within the ambit of a configuration of learning. A ‘social change’ would then refer to the emergence of new social structures (some existing, or new ‘differences’ get grouped into ‘salient diversities’); or a transformation of the existing social structures (addition or deletion of a salient diversity or a transformation of the existing relations between them); or a destruction of some social structures (either because the salience of diversities disappear or because the relation between salient diversities break down). By contrast, a ‘social revolution’ would not merely imply the emergence of new social structures (and/or any of the above possibilities) but above all the emergence of new patterns of interaction between social structures. Both these changes – within the social organisation and in the social organisation – have the character of discontinuous processes. However, when looked at from the point of view of the individual and the configuration of learning, there is a continuity (of the culture).
6.2. Historians have often observed both continuity and discontinuity in historical processes. Some have characterised it as the difference between two historiographies: the synchronic and the diachronic. Yet others have divided this as: the ‘law-guided’ history (a kind of ‘theological history’ or as a ‘grand narrative’) and the ‘empirical history’, which tracks changes in the minutiae. I suggest that this debate (about these two different historiographies) arises due to a confusion of levels. Cultural continuity enables the social discontinuity, and one has not seen that ‘continuity’ and ‘discontinuity’ in historiography belong to the domain of culture and society respectively. One can track both kinds of changes.
6.3. To see the continuity of a culture (‘the west’, ‘Asian culture’), no grand or ‘meta-narrative’ is required. The theory of cultural difference will do this job nicely, without postulating either ‘the laws of history’, ‘or ‘God’s Plan’ or ‘telos’ of the culture. The requirement that a ‘historiography’ makes ‘the past’ intelligible is met by telling the empirical story about how some individuals continue to become a people (i.e. the story about a configuration of learning, social organisations, social structures, and individuals in their mediating-mediated roles).

7. Could one speak of cultural discontinuity? The immediate problem here is: cultural discontinuity of what? If one wants to pick out a geographical region, say, ‘Europe’, then one is mistaking cultural differences for cultural discontinuity. Of course, one could make sense of the question, ‘Is there a cultural discontinuity between the Pagan west and the Christian West?’ But only under the condition that both ‘Pagan west’ and the ‘Christian west’ refer to the same geographical region, viz., ‘Europe’. In my story, in contradistinction to the popular conception, there is a cultural difference (in the same region, viz., ‘Europe’) between the pagan west and the Christian west. Therefore, it is a question of why these two are culturally different. As I see the issue currently, the difference lies in the fact that neither the Greek nor the Roman culture could develop a configuration of learning. Different learning processes were struggling for dominance and they disintegrated in the face of a religion that was able to generate a configuration of learning. (As I see it now, a configuration of learning is stable.) From the above, it follows that a cultural discontinuity (within a region) implies the emergence of a (new) configuration of learning. If such an event occurs, this means that the social organisation and the social structures (in that region) must change. Where there is a cultural discontinuity, there is also a social discontinuity.

7.1. Now we are in a position to pick up the issue of the famous ‘transition problem’ in Marxist thinking. Two such merit interest: the transition from slavery to feudalism, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Both issues are said to be about ‘social formations’, and as such are considered to belong to the same level. Despite a great deal of research, nothing much has come out except a lot of historical details, which do not tell us any coherent story. In my reconstruction, these issues take the form of two questions that pick out different entities and do not allow of a common ‘theory of transition’, because they belong to different levels. There is firstly the question: How did ‘Europe’ (the geographical region) achieve transition from slavery to feudalism? Ever since I wrote ‘The Heathen..’, I have been convinced that this was not a ‘real’ question, but that it was a Marxist translation of another question: viz., how did Christianity win out against the Roman empire? One can provide historical ‘details’ about this transition, but there can never be a theory about the transition from slavery to feudalism in Europe: as yet, we do not know how to conceptualise social and cultural changes within a region as a result of the (geographical) properties of the said geographical region. In my story, if the issue is not about the ‘victory’ of Christianity about which many narratives exist (from the purely ecclesiastical to the more informed ones), then it is about two other questions: How do human cultures come into being? How do configurations of learning emerge? Both are parts of a general theory of human culture. Insofar as it is about the Christian west, the question is: what were the mechanisms and the processes involved in the emergence of the western culture? The changes in the social organisation and the social structures (namely, the change from slavery to feudalism) will turn out to be a necessary consequence of the cultural discontinuity in the region.

7.2. The second transition problem is this: how did the transition from feudalism to capitalism come about in the Christian west? Or, more generally, how did the cultural continuity of the Christian west enable a social revolution? One can see immediately why the two transition problems do not belong to the same level: one picks out a region, and the other picks out a culture; one speaks of cultural difference and the other presupposes a cultural continuity. That is why, there has not only been no ‘theory’ of transition (nor will there be), but also no satisfactory ‘explanation’ of the second transition either. There is no clarity regarding the object (or the event) that requires to be explained. This suggestion also restricts the scope of Marx’s heuristic, the ‘guiding thread of his study’ as he called it, as formulated in the famous preface to the ‘Introduction to a critique of political economy’. It is not that obvious any more to speak of primitive communism, slavery, feudalism and capitalism as ‘stages’ in the evolution of ‘societies’: it is not at all evident that these terms pick out the same entity, namely, ‘society’. With respect to European history (i.e., the history of a region), these ‘stages’ refer to different entities: one ‘stage’ picks out the events within a region, whereas the other picks out changes in a culture.

7.3. Even though I see a configuration of learning is a stable entity, I am not suggesting by any means that it controls its (external) conditions of production and reproduction. Any configuration of learning can break down, disintegrate or dissolve because of any number of reasons: from natural catastrophes to catastrophes induced by human cultures (from famines through genocides and wars, for example). One of these ‘external conditions’ is the social organisation itself. This is not either paradoxical or contradictory. The western configuration of learning is generated by religion. That is to say, by Christianity in its aspect as a religion. Christianity is also several other things besides being a religion: it is a power centre, a ‘social structure’ (in my definition), a landlord, etc. These are other than and different from the configuration of learning that the western culture is. Similar considerations hold regarding the mediating role of the social structures with respect to the natural environment. It is thus that the social organisation and the social structures are different from, and ‘external’ to the configuration of learning. They sustain the configuration of learning as the external conditions for its production and reproduction. Consequently, following Vivek’s suggestion, one could complete the incomplete slogan formulated above as: ‘Culture enables the social, whereas the social sustains the cultural.’

8. Considered this way, a social organisation should not be seen as a well-oiled machine with all its parts interacting with each other in a precise way. There are two reasons for this. One: it must never be forgotten that it is individual human beings who produce and reproduce a social organisation. This alone rules out any ‘well-oiled’ machine idea. Second: as in the case of any well and tightly knit system, any small (or big) problem could bring the social organisation to a grinding halt and collapse. Should that be the case, no social organisation can ever survive for any period of time. It is best to see social organisation as a fabric: a small tear or even a reasonably big one does not destroy the fabric.

9. If we take the Pagan west and the Christian West, we can see that both organised (some of) their salient diversities in a different way. The Pagan West structured (some of) the salient diversities in terms of (a) cities and (b) political classes. Cities consisted of the traditions of the members of the city, and that was structured further in terms of guilds and cults. Language and territory were also salient diversities, but ones that were subordinated to the salient diversity of the city. A Roman was one who was a citizen of Rome, apart from being the subject of the Roman Empire, who spoke Latin, and above all participated in the festivals honouring the gods of the city of Rome. One did not have to be born in Rome in order to become a Roman. In this sense, cities were social structures par excellence.


9.1. As we know them today, cities are the structuring of geographical spaces. In the pagan Rome, this function was subordinated to its role as a social structure: an institution that taught its residents to become citizens. That is why the state and the city were coextensive. To write a tract about ‘the state’ was to write about (a) its sustaining role and (b) its educative role in a culture. To write about a city was to write about (a) its sustaining role and (b) its educative function. To say that Rome was a great city was to praise the state of Rome. That is to say, the state was embodied as the city.

9.2. In the Middle Age, cities and the state start coming apart. On the one hand, there was the Church, which was seen as the heavenly city: De Civitate Dei, as St. Augustine put it. On the other hand, it was the state as well: it educated people as ‘citizens’ by transforming them into members of the ecclesia. At the same time, there were cities as well: Rome, Genoa, Athens, etc. The social space that a city is gets structured in terms of centres: centres of political power, administrative power, learning and theology. (Why should sustenance come from the centre, and not from the periphery? Why should the city have a centre? I believe that it has to do with the obsession of Catholic theology with centres: man at the centre of the universe, God at the centre of man, the world as a circle with a centre, etc. In other words, I think that it has to do with theo-‘centric’, logo-‘centric’, clerical-‘centric’, thinking in the Catholic West of the Middle Ages.) The Church, as a social structure, had taken over the role of mediating the individual to the other social structures. Of course, other social structures like the family, for example, mediated the individual to the Church, to other families, and so on. But what I want to get at is that the educating role of the City was taken over by the ‘state’ that the Church had become. As a result, the structuring of the space in a city was defined in terms of the Church; the structuring of the space that the Church itself is (among other things, the church too is a building after all), was itself defined by its mediating role. (The vaults, the burial ground, organising the festivals that were once the distinguishing properties of the cities, the gardens, etc.) Because the city is a geographical place, ‘territory’ begins to emerge as a salient diversity in the Middle Ages. Parochiality, being born in a territory, etc., become salient diversities.


10. The Christian West organises (some of) the salient diversities in terms of (a) political and economic classes; (b) ethnic groups; and © religions. Here language and territory are important salient diversities in their own right: someone must be born in a certain place, speak the local language, and learn the local practices in order to be a member of the ethnic group. Only slowly did religion emerge as a salient diversity: first was being a Jew, then a Muslim, then the different Protestant movements, and then the atheistic community. Today, religion has become a salient diversity. Political and economic classes organised the salient diversity ‘occupation’ or ‘profession’.

11. I spoke about ‘the Church’ in the singular above. A nuance is required now. Actually, there are two churches: the ‘visible’ Church and the ‘invisible’ Church. The visible Church drew its authority from the fact that it was a part of the ‘real’ Church, the true Christian Ecclesia, the invisible Church. I would like to suggest that the idea of the ‘invisible Church’ be seen as secularised ‘Church’. That is to say, the notion of ‘invisible Church’ is how the phenomenon of secularisation of the Catholic Church manifested itself in the Christian consciousness of that period. This doctrine about the invisible Church was to play a very important role in defining the ‘true’ Vicar of Christ later, and to settle the issue of the authority of the Church. Does it have a ‘secular power’ or merely a ‘religious’ power? If this is a plausible suggestion (let us see what future research will bring), here comes an intriguing question: Which of the two churches was ‘the state’ or ‘the city’?

11.1. While exploring the strictures against idolatry in the Jewish, Christian, and the Islamic religions, in ‘The Heathen …’, I had argued that their virulent attacks against idolatry were not merely scriptural or theological. I drew attention to the process of creating a secular-religious world and suggested that this process ‘reinforced’ their hatred of paganism. I am extending this line of thought in the above paragraph. As Christianity secularised itself as a dechristianised Christianity, the results of this process emerged as a problem within Christian theology. That was the problem of the relation between the secular and the religious powers: the Church did not merely have the religious power to attend to the religious and spiritual state of its ‘flock’; it also had the ‘secular power’ in so far as its ‘flock’ consisted of emperors, kings, the nobility, and the ‘subjects’ in a kingdom. The Christian ecclesia at any given moment of time was merely a part of the ‘total’ Christian ecclesia: the latter consisted of nothing short of all human beings hitherto and of the future (the cut-off point being the ‘day of the judgement’), who were Christians. The ‘real’ kingdom was the kingdom of God and until it was established on Earth, the Church represented the ‘ultimate’ authority on ‘religious’ matters and, as it historically turned out, on ‘secular’ matters as well for a considerable period of European history. The doctrine about the ‘invisible church’, a theological doctrine, is the presence (in theology) of the secularising moment of Catholic Christianity.

11.2. The Church is the body of Christ; and that body also happened to include the ‘body-politic’. In fact, the extension of the metaphor of ‘body’ to a ‘republic’ (used very loosely here) came about because of what the Church was: the bride as well as the body of Christ. Because the Church was the ‘State’ (the ‘state’ as an expression of the secularisation of the Church), both the Church and the ‘State’ (i.e. what the Church is, what the State is, and what the relation between the two is) emerge as problems within the Christian theology of the Middle Ages. To the extent this relation was problematised independently, we have the political philosophy of the Middle Ages that tries to pose a theological problem in a secular guise.

11.3. As the ‘State’ became independent of the Church, what we have is this: the secularising of the Church, which is the ‘State’; and the continued existence of the Church as a social structure. In a full-blooded dialectical formulation: The ‘Church’ separates itself as two opposing moments: the ‘church’ and the ‘state’, each as the ‘other’ of the ‘self’. There is, however, nothing fanciful about the formulation. It portrays the historical process: a conflict that took centuries, between the two dependent processes of ‘proselytisation’ and of ‘secularisation’, to arrive at this separation. But this was no true separation because what was ‘secularised’ was the ‘religious’ moment, of course.

12. In other words, what I am saying is this: the modern day ‘state’ is the secularisation of the Church, a secular ‘translation’ of the notion of the ‘invisible Church’. (The ‘church’ as Catholicism understands it – extra ecclesiam nulla salus, ‘there is no salvation outside the Church’.) The ‘Nation’, by contrast, is the secularisation of Ecclesia as Protestants understand it. Even though this is a conceptual division, this should not be taken to mean that such a neat division is also to be seen in political philosophy: Hegel and Hobbes, as two examples should suffice. (Needless to say, future research should explain how exactly it must be taken then.) Should this idea appear workable, we can then begin to come to grips with both the antagonism and the affinity between ‘statehood’ and ‘the nationhood’.

12.1. The Protestant Christianity is subject exactly to the same process: it exhibits the moments of ‘secularisation’ and ‘proselytisation’ as well. It secularises its notion of ‘ecclesia’, a Christian notion as well: but the ‘invisible church’ of Protestantism is the ‘modern’ idea of the Nation. This notion has as venerable a lineage as the earlier idea of the ‘State’: in already the Old Testament Bible, we read that the Jews are a ‘nation’. In Europe, where the Catholic and the Protestant religions fought for supremacy, both the problems (‘the problem of the state’, ‘the problem of the nation’ and the relationship between the two problems) retained (and continue to retain) their urgency and relevancy. In America, for instance, where the Protestant movement did not fight against the Catholics, the problem of ‘Nation’ retains its power. The conflict between the ‘nation’ and the ‘state’, in political thought, shadows the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism. The secular conflicts appear to track the religious conflict. Issues like tolerance, the role of the state, etc. are the issues that confront the secularised Protestant ‘ecclesia’, viz., the ‘nation’: its religious counterpart fights the mediating Church and its authority in religious matters. (We should not succumb to the classification of ‘libertarian’ versus ‘communitarian’ thinking in political thought. The Protestant idea of ‘ecclesia’ does not track this classification. While there is no mediation possible between the individual and God, the Protestant ecclesia is a ‘unity’ when confronting the heathens, the Muslims, and the Catholics.) In other words, we can start making sense of how the ‘virtue’ of tolerance could so easily get accepted as a ‘secular’ doctrine of immense importance to human kind, while it is merely a Protestant doctrine about the relation between the individual and God.

12.2. This idea does justice, I think, to the differing perceptions of the theme. There is the idea that ‘nation’ and ‘nation-building’ is a typical project of ‘modernity’. At the same time, there is the perception that ‘nationalism’ has to be distinguished from ‘nations’ and from ‘nation-states’. The hyphen between the ‘nation’ and the ‘state’ in ‘nation-state’ is not a mere linguistic practice; it suggests that different historical processes underlie this hyphenation. We can even anticipate the Marxist claim about the relation between capitalism and the ‘nation-state’: the creation of ‘nation-state’ was necessary in the earlier phase of capitalism; but it ends up becoming a fetter because ‘capital’ cannot be restricted by the boundaries of the ‘nation-state’. The capitalist market is the true ecclesia, the ‘real invisible church’, the most complete secular ‘translation’ of the Protestant ecclesia. Its ‘market’ is still subject to the constraints of the ‘nation’ in exactly the same way the Protestant ecclesia is surrounded both by the Catholics and the heathens and the pagans. No wonder Marx called ‘Protestantism’ as the religion best suited to the needs of Capital. (Again, quoting from memory.)

13. Let us contrast the Pagan city as a social structure and the modern city as a cluster or a congregation of people who merely live (or only work) there. When the state has neither its embodiment in the city, nor have its centre in there, where does it go? (After all, the government merely has its ‘seat’ in the city.) It becomes ‘disembodied’. It does not have any ‘place’. I think that the Marxist (and earlier) ideas about the detachment of the ‘state’ from the ‘civil society’ can be fruitfully tackled not only as problem in political philosophy, but also as a problem of the structuring of space in the Christian West. More important than that, a story about the structuring of space (or ‘modern cities’) will provide evidence in a debate about the nature of modern ‘state’.

14. How is it with respect to India? The answer is, we do not know. That is what we have to investigate. We need to find out what (some of the) salient diversities in India are, and how they are organised. With respect to ‘caste’ as a grouping of salient diversity, in a way analogous to my study of religion, we have to first show that there is no ‘caste system’, whether conceived as a social structure or as a social organisation. We have to show that the creation of caste-as-a-social structure has to do with the way the Christian Europe organised what they thought were the salient diversities. Once this is done, there arises the question: were they totally hallucinating or did they see something? They will have seen something, without doubt; but to say what it is requires becoming clear about what they constructed.

15. Here is where I have to propose the background hypothesis to the study of the caste system. Let us suppose that (some of) the salient diversities in India are organised around ‘tradition’ and ‘Jati’. That is to say, these two social structures are two different ways of organising the same set of diversities: one organised by one set of people and the other by another set of people. These salient diversities are: ‘birth’, ‘lineage’, ‘commensality’, and ‘marriage’. There will be and there are more, but I do not want to be detained by them at this juncture. The internal differentiation in one structure took the form of multiple traditions (divisions) within the tradition; in the other, it took the form of hierarchical organisation of Jati’s, the emergence of new and sub-Jati’s. However, what are Jati’s? This is not an issue of definition but one of the problems our theory has to solve. I am simply using the word ‘Jati’, because many people in India use this ‘native’ term to identify themselves or some others. In other words, again, I can give an ostensive definition of Jati (‘Badiga’ and ‘kumbara’ are Jati’s) and that is all we need do at this stage.

16. As societies evolve, and as they get invaded by other peoples, etc. new social or political movements emerge. They have to induct members from the existing pool of individuals. Depending on where the newly recruited members come from, the new movements take their ‘form’ accordingly, i.e., they take over the way (some of) the salient diversities are structured from the newly inducted members. If its recruits came from the ‘traditions’, the new movement itself becomes another tradition. If they come from the Jati’s, the new movement itself becomes a Jati, and any further internal differentiation takes the form of sub-Jati’s or the emergence of new but hierarchically subordinated Jati’s.

To give an empirical example, to show the bias of this hypothesis: Both the existence of ‘Sampradaya’ or ‘Parampare’ and the existence of Jati’s among the so-called scheduled castes seem to be empirical pointers in this direction. That is why the Lingayats, Muslims, and the Christians have so many Jati’s, whereas the Dvaita-Advaita divide (the ‘smarta’ and the ‘mudre’) takes the form of two different traditions that do not allow for a hierarchy. Not only that. These traditions themselves are further differentiated internally along the lines of ‘parampare’ or ‘sampradaya’.

17. Because of the interaction between these two structures, both begin to ‘speak’ (not follow) each other’s language without, however, surrendering their properties. One speaks of different ‘Brahmin Jati’s’ without, however, introducing a hierarchy amongst them. The other speaks of ‘tradition’, but by restricting strictly within the confines of a single Jati. That is, in the latter case, ‘tradition’ becomes an intra-Jati property that merely picks out the fact that the Jati in question has history (or ‘past’).

18. This begins to set up the problematic of the creation of the ‘caste system’ in India. One internal aspect: the western missionaries recruited primarily from the groups with ‘Jati’s’. Their virulent anti-Brahmanism (something that the Muslim and the Lingayat movements share) forced them to seek recruits from these Jati’s and, consequently, could see the salient diversities only in terms of Jati’s. Not only that. Their own society was vertically classified: the hierarchical classification of some of these Jati’s reinforced their idea of a hierarchically classified social structure (or, social organisation, as they saw the issue). All salient diversities were ‘seen’ as being organised around ‘the caste system’. That is, the presence of Jati’s in Indian Christianity partly led to their belief in the existence of ‘the caste system’ in India. The metaphor of Purusha Sukta illustrates the bias of such an interpretation. Why should human body be ‘seen’ as a vertical hierarchy with ‘top’ and bottom’ that are correlated to the ‘higher’ and the ‘lower’? (Expressing also the moral evaluation that the ‘higher’ is better than the ‘lower’.) Nowhere in Purusha Sukta does it say that the primeval man was standing straight-up when he was sacrificed. Not a trivial matter, because if the body is lying down (besides, a favourite position for sacrifice), there is no ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ any more than there is a vertical hierarchy. There is simply a horizontal division of different body parts. However, this non-obvious interpretation of the famous verse got added to the totally unrelated issue of ‘untouchability’. (Because, ‘untouchability’ is an inter-individual relation and not an ‘inter-caste’ relation.) Thus, we have three things, unrelated to each other that come together in the creation of the caste-system: the organisation of some salient diversities as Jati’s by some people In India; an anti-Brahmanism that basically confined Christianity (and Islam and the Lingayats) to a recruiting base comprised of those having Jati’s; a forced interpretation of the Purusha Sukta, that was driven by their own vertically organised society and the internal hierarchies among some of the Jati’s.

19. But these alone are not sufficient to create ‘the caste system’ with all its sub-castes as an overarching social organisation in India. More things were needed. First, it required that (some of) the salient diversities in the Christian West were organised along the lines of ‘profession’ or ‘occupation’. Thus, the first element that went into the creation of the caste system was the element of profession. However, this was projected into the dim past, and provided as an explanation for the emergence of the caste system. Not only in the sense that the ‘Brahmin’ was associated with the ‘priest’, the ‘Kshatriya’ with the ‘warrior-king’, etc. (the classic Varna story), but also in the sense that the origin of the ‘lower castes’ was explained in terms of their ‘earlier’ profession. The divergence between the ‘classes’, as they knew in the Christian west, and the ‘caste system’ that such an explanation yielded, was explained away as the degeneration of the caste system itself. This means to say that ‘occupation’ was not a salient diversity in India: it must be possible for us to historically show that most ‘professions’ could be exercised by anybody. Any group could set up its own temple and members from their own Jati could officiate as ‘priests’. The same applies to the ‘class’ of intellectuals and to the ‘class’ of merchants and kings. A ‘Brahmin’ did enter different ‘occupations’ (or ‘professions’) without losing his ‘tradition’. Quite obviously, not all the ‘Brahmins’ were ‘occupied’ as priests. Equally, there is no way all the ‘Kshatriya’s’ were either warriors or kings. They too could take to different ‘occupations’. That some kinds of ‘professions’ remained within the dynasties does not prove the existence of the caste system either: that crafts pass from father to son is one of the most universally observed phenomena in human societies.

20. Consider the phenomenon of commensality. This pertains to the domain of ritual purity and is as such significant only within its confines. This was a salient diversity in the Indian culture. Let us assume as true that one did not eat food with everyone (but did so only within the confines of a ritual) and in all families. To the Christian west, the salient diversity could only make sense within the confines of the ‘caste system’. In their own culture this was not a salient diversity, even though not everyone dined with everyone else. That it was not a salient diversity in the West (whereas in India it was) could only be morally understood by them as a prohibition against commensality between the caste-groups.

21. What we are seeing, in other words, is the emergence of a classificatory system. The Christian West was trying to understand the partial glimpses it had of different social structures by grouping them into one social structure. This attempt at organisation ultimately took the form of Census reports: the classification of Indian society in terms of castes and sub-castes. It is beyond discussion that any classification reflects the interests of the classifier: it is done for one purpose or another. What was the purpose of the Christian West? To go-about with the Indian people. The travellers’ and other reports indicated to those from the west (indirectly) how they should go-about with the Indian people. But because they believed that how one goes about depends upon the knowledge of what there is, their reports (the fruition of which is the Census report) took the form of what they thought there is. That is to say, that the caste-system is a classificatory system (this must be shown convincingly) proves that they are indirect instructions for action but that they are disguised as descriptions of the world. Caste system, in this sense, is an oblique instruction for action. ‘Priest’, ‘Warrior King’, ‘untouchables’ etc. are stereotypes (in my explanation of the term) and the caste system is a classification of such stereotypes. In fact, the formulation of the classic ‘varna’ story already betrays this: Brahmins are priests, Kshatriya’s are warrior-kings, Vaisya’s are merchants, Shudra’s are the tillers of the soil. Each of these exhibits the characteristic linguistic structure of stereotypes.

22. The third and the most crucial element is not yet specified. And that took place in Europe. The domain that brought these different phenomena together, and allowed them to cohere as a ‘system’ is the moral domain. The process that provided the required coherence (as a structure) was the very same process they had undergone and were undergoing: the monasticisation of daily life. That is why, from its inception, the discourse on ‘the caste system’ in India became hopelessly moralised. (As distinct from the earlier reports about ‘caste’ in India, which merely noted the distinctions their authors saw, without moralising them.)

22.1. The Protestant reformation comes closest to being a ‘cultural revolution’. (This concept requires to be very carefully worked out in order to distinguish it from ‘cultural discontinuity’.) In some senses, and only in some senses, its impact on the western culture has been every bit as profound as the impact the earlier revolution had on the Pagan culture. The Reformation absorbed the medieval religious world, the (Catholic) secular-religious world and created a Protestant religious and a Protestant secular-religious world. How did it do so?
Firstly, it appealed to the very same entity (namely, Christianity-as-a-religion) in order to carry out this massive destructive-cum-reconstructive process. It was Christianity (as a religion) that had generated the configuration of learning; consequently, an appeal to this entity by the Protestant reformation could not destroy but only strengthen this particular configuration of learning. Secondly, as Christianity, Protestantism embodied the same Christological dilemma, which had impelled Catholic Christianity forward. Finally, as a religion, Protestantism exhibited exactly the same dynamic of universalisation of religion (secularisation and proselytisation).

22.2. This revolution ‘abolished’ Catholic Christianity by merely generalising its structures. As Marx formulated it, with a great insight, so long ago “Protestantism abolished the priesthood only by making everyone into a priest” (I am quoting from memory, so it might be a bit inaccurate.) Even though Protestantism ‘won’ (due to empirical circumstances), Catholicism did not disappear. (The conditions which feed one, feed also the other.) In other words, if the Protestant Reformation was a non-Christian, or a non-religious movement, there would have been a ‘cultural discontinuity’ between the Christian West and the Post-Reformation world.

23. However, what kind of ‘generalisation of structures’ are we talking about? Here, let me focus only on ‘morality’. As I have said in discussions already, the process of conversio (or ‘conversion’) was the process through which Christians became Christians. Developed only in the monasteries, for the benefit of the monks and priests, this process was the answer to the oft-heard question ‘quid sit Christianum esse?’ (‘What is it to be a Christian?’) Noteworthy is the fact that this was not a question raised by a non-Christian, but one which was passionately thought about by the Christian religious figures, about themselves and their fellow-brethren. This was an asymptotic process (‘one really did not ever fully become a Christian’), focussed not just on the ‘ten commandments’ (or their Catholic equivalent) but on the spiritual, and religious state of the Priest.

24. The Protestant reformation targeted, among other things, this Priest-figure and the monastic life associated with it. Its attacks were vicious because it found that these ‘priests’ could not be the mediators between the lay believer and God. In so far as Protestantism is itself a Christian religion, what it did (the talk about ‘Protestantism’ in the singular is for convenience alone) was to ‘empower’ the laity: indeed, anyone could become a priest. ‘It abolished priests by enabling anyone to become a priest’. By the same token, it also remains true to its character: as a Christian religion, it does still revolve around the priests. It continues to be a religion of the priest, including the lay believers, who are all potential priests now.

But Protestantism also secularises itself. That is to say, it makes ‘everyone’ (not just the Protestant laity) into a priest. It is this process that I call ‘monasticisation of daily life’.

25. What we call ‘ethics’ today, i.e. the normative structure that governs almost all discourses today, is the secular equivalent of the monastic process of conversio. (It will take me too far away to work this out here: besides, my present book is about ‘ethics’.) Suffice to note that the moral process is structurally isomorphic with the process of ‘conversio’, and that the ‘moral agents’ are the secularised priests that Protestantism has generated. This is but one aspect.

26. The second aspect concerns both the potential priests and the secularised priests: how ought they to live? To the extent they are priests, one without a monastery and the other without the religion in question, to both the answer is the same: as priests. That is, they ‘ought’ to practice asceticism in daily life. It is here that we see the power of Weber’s insight in ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’. He appreciated, as no one before him nor many after him, that Protestantism had a crucial role to play in the development of capitalism. However, he did not grasp the overall picture: this ‘ethic’ of capitalism was part of a much bigger process; the daily life was being monasticised through the secularisation of the process of ‘conversio’. To some Protestant groups, a scriptural sanction was found for this asceticism: God’s commandment to earn bread by the sweat of the brow and the doctrine of predestination, and such like. To the ‘others’, an ‘ethics’ without a foundation was all that was left. However, we can appreciate attempts to develop a ‘sociology’ of morals: the attempt, that is, to capture the notion that ‘ethics’ is somehow related to social classes as well. The secularisation of Protestant commandment to both kinds of priests appear not only to be organically related to the ‘bourgeois’ morals, but also to the overriding drive of early capitalism to “accumulate! Accumulate! This is the Moses and the Prophets” (again from Marx, again from memory). It appears to me that they are all circling around the same idea: the emergence of morals in the modern society in a form that was not evident in the Middle Ages. Given that there is some kind of a relation between Capitalism and Protestantism, the attention focuses either on the Protestants or on the bourgeoisie. Neither is ‘wrong’: only they fail to see the larger picture that makes sense of both perceptions, while providing them with another foundation. Of late, the great insight of Weber has been reduced to the notion of ‘Protestant work-ethic’. It is, however, both broader and deeper: that the social revolution that capitalism was, was enabled by the ‘norming’ of the daily life, and that this was the contribution of the Protestant reformation.

26.1. This process too locates itself in the double dynamic of religion. The Protestant reformation, in the first movement, universalises itself: this movement is the generalisation of the structures of Catholic Christianity over the whole of society. Characteristic of Catholicism was that it was a religion organised around ‘priesthood’. Protestantism is Christian: the priests continue to be central; only every one is a potential, if not an actual priest. This movement consists of two separate processes: secularisation and proselytisation. The moment of proselytisation transforms each Protestant into a potential minister of the Church. As such, each member is and, therefore, must live like a priest, i.e., frugally and earn his bread with the sweat of his brow. The strictures against conspicuous consumption of wealth and the moral imperative to invest it (or the labour) productively, which were so crucial to the early process of capital accumulation, was scripturally founded. This is the Protestant ethic that Weber talks about.

26.2. The interesting point about Weber’s discourse is also the fact that it was an ethic. Not merely in the sense, this is my story now, that it was a particular set of moral rules that some religion accepted, but that they were moral rules at all. The process of secularisation of the Protestant religion lies in the fact that its ‘moral imperatives’ emerged as the moral imperatives of capitalist development. This is how Protestantism transformed ‘every one’ (and not just the Protestants) into a priest: thrift, productive investment, and a relentless thirst to accumulate became his ‘cardinal’ virtues.

26.3. How was this possible? Because these are the twin faces of the process of universalisation of religion, viz., the transforming of ‘conversio’ from a process that priests underwent to a process in society itself. This process transformed society into a monastery, people in it to priests, and subjected them to moral imperatives. So, we get two kinds of priests: priests without a monastery (these are the members of the Protestant churches, including the ‘potential’ priests, and the laity of the Catholic community,), and priests without religion (this refers to the rest of society, excluding the Christians). This process of universalisation enabled to bring all aspects of the social organisation under the scope of the activity of ‘norming’. Stands to reason: the process of ‘conversio’, a normative process, envelops the entire life of the monk and monastery.

26.4. In sum, what we see is the enriching of the notion of ‘universalisation of religion’. The more we talk about historical movements like the Catholics, the Protestants, etc., the double dynamic of religion becomes richer, more complex, and multi-dimensional. Each of these religions is subjected to the same movement: but the way they concretely exhibit this dynamic expresses the ‘commonality’ between them (they are all ‘Christian’ religions) as well as their ‘differences’ (each is ‘Christian’ in a different way).


27. The third aspect is already implicit in the fore-going. This secularisation of the process of ‘conversio’ meant three things: (a) emergence of new social structures, alterations to the existing ones and a changed social organisation; (b) bringing all these under the scope of the ‘norming’ activity; and © emergence of the ‘science of morals’. That means, earlier salient diversities either disappeared or effaced; if they were retained, they were subject to new relations; new salient diversities and their groupings came into being; new interactions between old and new social structures developed. I do not want to suggest that the process is over, but merely suggest a way of looking at it.

28. The creation of ‘the caste system’ in India was a result, partially, of these developments in Europe. In the final analysis, it will show that Europe went-about in India in that way and in this or some other way, and going-about in that way tells us something about the European culture. Thereafter, we can try to say what exists in India, and we should be able to understand it.



29. That we are still under the grips of our colonial experience is proved by the fact that we take this disguised instruction for action, this classification of stereotypes, as a description of our world. Being a post-colonial, here as elsewhere, requires that we understand our own experiences and move beyond the colonial experience. This is the task for the future.

Balu 23/4/02