Development Anthropologist

Caste is a social reality that structures human relationships. It serves as a framework for managing interactions among individuals and a platform for organising political, social and economic reforms. The caste system, with its complex histories and multifaceted institutions, encompasses social, economic, cultural, and religious aspects of human life. It guides and sometimes forces people to live ina complex social, cultural, political, and religious milieu.

- BY JAYANTHA PERERA

Bundles of rules and values that have emerged from various locations within religious, social, and political traditions and actions sustain them. A caste system, over time, becomes an engulfing culture that helps organise people and their communities into a rigid system of relationships, hierarchically organised, and sometimes, sanctioned by dominant religions, such as Hinduism.

As a rigid hierarchical system, caste thrives on systemic a priori inclusion and exclusion modalities. Ambedkar aptly summarised the roots and the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion as follows:

The outcaste, a term used to describe those who are considered untouchable and outside the caste system, is a byproduct of the caste system. There will be outcasts as long as there are castes. Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except by the destruction of the caste system. Nothing can ensure their survival except the purging of the Hindu faith of this odious and vicious dogma.

Ambedkar’s tireless advocacy for outcaste (Dalit) communities to adopt his visionary ideals of liberty, social justice, and equality helped to take caste out of parochial village spaces and premise it ina broader public sphere. According to him, national and regional Hindu dominance in India blocks the opportunities that the Dalits also can occupy to achieve a more just society. Ambedkar rejected Gandhi's Harijan Seva Sangh because it was a paternalistic mechanism that reinforced Hindu dominance rather than empowered the Dalits.

Moreover, the Harijan Seva Sangh denied the lower castes an independent expression of their authentic social identity, thereby tacitly claiming their acquiescence to an inegalitarian social and ethical value set. Ambedkar recognised the embeddedness of the caste system in Hindu society and the economy. He wanted to ‘annihilate’ the caste system because nothing can emancipate the outcaste without first destroying the caste system.