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.
