Caste and ClassGail Omvedt CASTE: THE EMERGENCE OF THE SOUTH ASIAN SOCIAL SYSTEM By Morton Klass Institute for the Study of Human Issues, Philadelphia, 1980, pp. 212, price not stated. VOLUME V NUMBER 6 May/June 1981 Morton
Klass’s book is perhaps the most important analysis of the Indian caste system
to come out of western scholarship in the last thirty years. It comes at an
opportune time - when the economic and social crisis of Indian society has
reached the point where caste divisions among the labouring masses have become
a major weapon of the ruling classes and ‘atrocities against Harijans’ have
leaped into the front pages of all daily papers. From brutal landlord attacks
and gun battles in the more feudal areas of Bihar (Belchi, Pipra) to
kulak-engineered mass campaigns in the more capitalist areas (Kanjhawala), from
mass pogroms against dalits in western India's ‘land of saints’ (Marathwada)
to the land of Gandhi where riots have recently broken out over the issue of
reservations, no part of India is immune from the poison of casteism.
Klass, as an academic anthropologist safely ensconced in
the comfort of an American University, is perhaps little concerned about such
events. But the fact is that they have forced the Indian Left which is deeply entrenched among the
masses affected by caste divisions and caste oppression—to rethink the issue. Major theoreticians of
almost every left party are publishing pamphlets on the issue of caste; new
political trends are emerging from dalit and socialist backgrounds that talk
of ‘combining caste and class struggle’; and there has even been a communist
organization, the Satyashodhak Communist Party, formed around this issue.
This indicates that the Indian revolutionary movement is
reaching a point where it cannot go forward without confronting the problem of
'caste. Though there have been brilliant historical works by such scholars as
D.D. Kosambi and Deviprasad Chattopadhyay, there has been almost no theoretical
analysis of caste by Marxists that does not dismiss the phenomenon as super-structural
maya. The previous tendency among Marxists has been to reject all talk of caste
as simply a western academic conspiracy, to see it only as a ‘weapon’ of the
ruling class without analyzing what the objective basis is that makes it
possible to use that weapon, to describe it simply as a survival of feudalism
which is relevant today, and to argue that organizing on common economic
issues will be sufficient to bring a bout class unity and that caste will (like
women's oppression) more or less automatically disappear with the achievement
of revolution. All this ... Table of Contents >> |