ANNIHILATION OF CASTE: WHY AND
HOW
Anand Teltumbde
(An edited transcript of the
online speech delivered on 17 April 2026 at the seminar on Brahmanization at
Jadavpur University)
Long ago, while speaking about
the annihilation of caste to the audience like you, I put forth my view in the
form of a paradox:
Annihilation of Caste is not
possible without a revolution. And revolution is not possible without the
Annihilation of Caste.
It may sound as a clever
formulation, but it is not. It succinctly captures the reality of what ailed
India as a civilization. It is a living, breathing description of the trap that
Indian society finds itself in. It will tell you why every movement for social
justice in this country has either stalled, been co-opted, or been strangled
before it could walk.
I may use this paradox as a
framework for today’s discussion too.
So today, I want to do two
things. First, I want to make the case for why caste must be annihilated — not
reformed, not managed, not accommodated, but annihilated. And second, I want to
speak about how — not through the comfortable illusions of reservation politics
or constitutional tinkering, but through the far harder, far more demanding
work of structural and psychological revolution.
Before we can talk about
annihilating caste, we must understand what caste actually is. And I submit to
you that most people — even those who oppose it — do not fully understand it.
As you all know, I have been writing on these issues for over five decades and
have seriously gathered this impression. I published a book recently, “The
Caste Con Census” to explain what caste is.
Caste is typically described as
a system of social stratification. A hierarchy. A ladder with Brahmins at the
top and Dalits at the bottom, with everyone else arranged in between. Ambedkar
analogized it as a multi-storey tower without a staircase connecting the
storeys. This metaphorical description is not wrong. But it is radically
insufficient.
It depicts caste as a stagnant,
fossilized, frigid system without life. This understanding still informs much
of anti-caste activism which starts and ends with abusing Brahmins and
selectively citing Ambedkar. No, caste have evolved and they are still evolving,
Castes are not what they were in Buddha’s time. They are not what they became
in Mauryan period or Gupta period or in medieval times or in colonial times.
Castes are not even what they were spoken or written about or fought against by
Ambedkar. Our contemporary castes have since evolved. They are largely shaped
by the Constitution and the post-colonial political economy. That is why I
called them as “constitutional castes”. You may see it in my book, “Republic of
Caste”. They are the contemporary castes that we are faced
with.
A simple way to understand caste
is to see it as a structure that is homomorphous with Indian society itself.
What does homomorphous mean? It means that caste does not merely exist within
Indian society as one institution among many. It means that caste and Indian
society share the same form. The same shape. The same skeleton. To say that
caste is homomorphous with Indian society is to say that if you were to remove
caste from Indian society, you would not have Indian society minus caste. You
would have something fundamentally, structurally different. Something that has
never yet existed.
Think about what this means. It
means caste is not a feature of Indian society. It is the architecture of
Indian society. It is not something that sits in Indian society. It is
something that Indian society sits in.
Look at the economy. The caste
division of labour is not incidental to Indian economic organization. The
hereditary assignment of occupations — the fact that certain communities were
confined to sweeping, to tanning leather, to carrying night soil, to washing
clothes, to fishing, to farming — this was not a market outcome. This was not
voluntary specialization. This was a forced economic architecture in which your
birth determined your labour, your labour determined your income, your income
determined your life chances, and your life chances were deliberately kept
asymmetric to reproduce the hierarchy across generations.
Look at land. Land ownership in
India has always been, and continues to be, substantially a caste phenomenon.
The agrarian structure of this country — who owns the land, who tills it, who
is landless —still follows caste lines with remarkable consistency. When you
see Dalits being denied land rights in villages across UP, Bihar, Rajasthan,
Tamil Nadu — you are not seeing isolated incidents of prejudice. You are seeing
the economic structure of caste reproducing itself.
Look at marriage. Endogamy —
marriage within the caste — is the biological mechanism by which caste
reproduces itself across generations. This is what Ambedkar identified as the
key to caste. Not untouchability. Not pollution. Not even hierarchy. Endogamy.
Because as long as people marry within caste, caste reproduces. As long as
caste reproduces, everything else that flows from it — the economic asymmetry,
the social hierarchy, the cultural contempt — reproduces with it.
Look at religion. The ritual
order of Hinduism — as it has been historically practiced, not as it is
sometimes theoretically described — is a caste order. Who can enter the temple.
Who performs the puja. Who reads the scripture. Who interprets the law. The
entire ritual architecture of mainstream Hindu practice has been, for
centuries, architecture of caste privilege.
Look at politics. The vote bank.
The caste arithmetic. The fact that in most Indian elections, caste is the
single most powerful predictor of voting behaviour. The fact that political
parties are essentially caste confederacies dressed in ideological clothing.
The fact that even parties that claim to oppose caste organize themselves along
caste lines to gain power. You cannot ignore the caste maths in India’s
electoral politics. Look at the rise and fall of the Bahujan Samaj Party!
Look at the family. Look at the
kitchen. Look at who can sit where. Who can touch whom. Who can draw water from
which well. Who can wear what clothes. Who can ride a horse at their own
wedding.
Caste is everywhere. It is in
the economy, in the polity, in religion, in marriage, in the family, in the
kitchen, in the body. It is not a system that operates within society. It is
the operating system of society itself. And that is precisely why it is so
devastatingly difficult to dislodge.
But structure alone does not
explain the full tenacity of caste. If caste were merely a structural
arrangement — if it were merely a matter of who owns what and who does what —
then it could theoretically be dismantled through redistribution, through land
reform, through economic restructuring. Difficult, yes. But conceivable.
What makes caste something
qualitatively different — different from all other stratification systems that
necessarily existed in all ancient societies but in course of times
disappeared-- what makes it perhaps the most formidable system of social
control ever devised — is that over centuries of conditioning, it has embedded
itself not just in social structure but in social psychology. It has colonized
not just the body but the mind. Not just behaviour but belief. Not just
practice but identity. Here comes the role of Brahminism that masquerades as
Hindutva today!
The genius of caste — and I use
the word genius with full irony and full horror — is that it persuaded its own
victims of its legitimacy. It created, in the oppressed, what Ambedkar called
the graded inequality — a system where each level of the hierarchy had just
enough superiority over the level below to give them a stake in the system. The
Shudra could look down upon the Atishudra. The lower OBC could look down upon
the Dalit. The Dalit could find someone even more marginalized to distinguish
himself from. And so, the pyramid held, because everyone in it had something to
lose by its demolition.
There has been incessant
internecine struggle for superiority among castes within their vicinity that
kept the overall structure unchallenged. That explains the longevity of the
caste system. That is why this evil system becomes the longest living man-made
system in the world.
This is social psychology that
became automated social control. It’s conditioning is so deep that the
oppressed become the enforcers of their own oppression.
And this conditioning does not
spare the oppressor either. The upper-caste individual who has internalized
caste — who genuinely believes, at some level, in the naturalness of the
hierarchy, in the ritual logic of purity and pollution — is not simply a villain
making a rational choice. They are also a product of centuries of conditioning.
Their humanity has been deformed by caste just as surely as their victims'
humanity has been denied by caste. The deformation takes a different form, but
it is deformation nonetheless.
I say this not to excuse
complicity. Complicity must be confronted and held accountable. I say it
because if we misunderstand the depth of the psychological problem, we will
prescribe insufficient remedies. And insufficient remedies, in a crisis of this
magnitude, are worse than no remedy at all. Because they create the illusion of
progress while the structure remains intact.
Some of you might identify what
lacked in the communist movement: They stressed structural revolution but
ignored to deal with the social psychology shaped by Brahminism. The similar
may be said of the Dalit movement that problematized the social psychology but
ignored the structural constitution. They have to be conjointly dealt
with.
The Paradox equates Annihilation
of Caste with the Revolution. And by revolution, I mean radical
transformation, as Marx conceived through the culmination of class struggle.
The million-dollar question is what is this class struggle.
Constitutional reforms like
abolition of untouchability, right to equality, positive discrimination in
favour of the Dalits and OBCs created an illusion in peoples’ mind that they
were revolutionary measures. Yes, in a historical process, they were important
but they were certainly not revolutionary.
I would not dismiss Constitution
as a bourgeois device. Taking stock of the extant balance of forces, I think
only that much was possible. However, even within the bourgeois framework,
there was an opportunity to set the directions in the Constitution so as to
propel the country on the path of reforms like weakening castes, lessening
inequality, building capability of people, and so on, as has been done in many
countries. But what is done in the Constitution is reverse; it strengthened
castes. It accentuated inequality and impaired peoples’ capacities. The
constitution making, so much eulogized by the people, was an exercise in
self-deception. I can only touch upon it. Those who want my explanation, may
see my latest book- “Dalits and the Indian Constitution” and the forthcoming
book: “We the Non-People of India.”
Let us consider the so called
most revolutionary measure of the Constitution: The Abolition of
Untouchability. It is the recorded fact of the history that all the upper caste
reformers, who came in contact with western civilizations, felt ashamed of the
inhuman custom of untouchability and wanted to abolish it. But never by mistake
they spoke against caste. Gandhi famously represented this trend. Naturally,
when the opportunity came while writing the Constitution, they unanimously
abolished untouchability. Only three members, ironically all from Bengal where
‘touch-me-notism’ form of untouchability was weakest in India, spoke against
it. The first was Pramath Ranjan Thakur, the great grandson of Harichand
Thakur, the founder of the Matua movement and the first barrister from the
Dalit community. He said that he did not understand how untouchability could be
abolished when the castes lived. Two more Bengalis, both Bhadralok, supported
him. Barring them none uttered a word and relished in contributing to the
self-congratulatory chorus.
Was caste abolition not
possible? There was a tacit argument that perhaps silenced the SC members,
which is that if the castes were abolished, their reservations would go away.
Was it true? Reservations were instituted by the Government of India Act 1935
on the basis of an administrative category created by the colonial rulers,
“Scheduled Caste”. It was not a Hindu Caste. Therefore, the Hindu caste system
could have been very much abolished if they wanted to do so without affecting
the extant reservations. No, they did not want to let the caste go off. Caste
and religion had proved their prowess in Britishers’ divide and rule strategy.
The post-colonial rulers would not like to lose them. Castes were preserved
with above intrigues and the religion was preserved with the skilful dodging of
true secularism. Notwithstanding the impression that the Constitution has given
us secularism, its text does not have this word beyond the Preamble, which also
was an illegitimate insertion in 1976, during the Emergency.
Even reservations could have
aided the project of annihilation of caste if the rulers had the honest intent.
They only had to upend the rationale behind it from being a helping hand to
uplift Dalits to be a countervailing force against the prejudice the society
bears against them. It would have rightly pushed the onus on society to correct
itself so as to do away with this exceptional policy at the earliest. The
present provision implicitly stigmatized Dalits as a disable lot. But instead
of doing such a thing they proliferated reservations to “Backward Castes” with
an awkward criterion of “social and educational backwardness”. In a country
like India, which even today ranks among the most backward societies, which
community would not meet such a criterion? No wonder, there is no community
that has not staked claim to reservation as socially and educationally backward
community.
The key to understand all this
lies in the fact that the post-colonial rulers adopted the entire colonial
state apparatus that served colonial purpose in suppressing people. Some
positive looking changes like universal franchise, justiciable fundamental rights,
and non-justiciable directive principles were incorporated in tune with the
ethos of times but they were overwhelmed by the larger structural logic. The
constitution that was created with much hullabaloo also borrowed most of its
contents from the 1935 Act and validated colonial infrastructure of the state.
The constitutional state therefore was the colonial state plus Brahminic
cunning, the perfected machine to suppress Indian people, which is what we
empirically experience today.
Take the case of very radical
provision of universal franchise. Its entire positive essence is lost in the
choice of the election system: First-Past-the-Post (FPTP), which structurally
loses most votes while maintaining the illusion of popular participation. No
party that ruled India touched even 50 per cent datum of popular votes but
still claimed invincibility. What does it mean? It means that more than 50
percent voters at any point did not give their consent to the rulers to rule.
Except for the election rituals, the people do not have any recourse to
participate in the democracy. In fact, the FPTP election does not have a
minimum datum and hence it is not the peoples’ votes that matter but the
political strategies of political parties in the Indian democracy.
Was there no alternative? When
the election system was proposed by the Montague-Chelmsford Reforms in 1919,
the Proportional Representation (PR) system was suggested by the Select
Committee considering India’s diversity. Obviously, nothing was done and the
Westminster FPTP system was adopted for the Indian elections as default. Since then,
all Indian politicians were accustomed to this system. During the
constitution-making, however, the issue of election system was hotly debated
and its proponents, mostly Muslim members and even many non-Muslim stalwarts
supported the PR system. But it was ignored. None other than D R Gadgil, the
famous economist and senior Congress leader, supported the PR system but
revealed that the Congress leaders, whom Granville Austin called oligarchy
would never accept it because they wanted a single party strong government at
the centre which only could be guaranteed by the FPTP system. The single
biggest merit of the PR system is that it is a customisable system whereas the
FPTP system is a rigid system. One could configure it to have near perfect
democracy as per one’s polity. In the context of caste, the PR system would
have dampened the caste politics to a great
deal.
After the initial decade of
Congress dominance—sustained by its aura from the freedom struggle—shifts in
the political economy reshaped the polity and made electoral competition more
intense. In this context, caste-based vote banks emerged as a central axis of
electoral politics, effectively giving caste a renewed instrument.
