'CASTE PRIDE' AND THE NEED FOR AN EQUITABLE SOCIETY

JOURNALIST-author Manoj Mitta's Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India documents the modern history (late 18th century, with the East India Company beginning to take an active interest in political matters) of India's legal and constitutional efforts to reform Hinduism.

- CP SURENDRAN

Mitta does a monumental job of it, not only bringing between the covers an impressive amount of inflammable information buried in court files, newspaper reports, and Parliament records, but also setting it alight with a readability normally associated with bestsellers.

In any given situation, Mitta is on the side of the victims, the depressed classes. But sometimes his sympathies lead to a kind of purblind situation. For example, in the fascinating chapter, A Wedding Without A Brahmin', which discusses the 'watandar joshis' or 'hereditary office-holder(s), on the exercise and benefit of that office in his assigned locality', the officiating priest is shown for the leech he is, as the layman could not hold 'social and religious events in his family' without the Brahmin in question in play.

The reformist movement against the Joshi practice was led by the likes of Jotirao Phule in Maharashtra and Periyar in Tamil Nadu. And, on the legislative side, it ended up in the framing of the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955. Both Mitta and we are right to dismiss the practice of the ubiquitous Joshis mouthing mantras to sanctify a marriage as parasitic and superfluous.

Surely the Joshi, too, presumably must eat and earn for himself and his family? The subsistence economy characteristic of the community, for all the power it wielded, hardly ever features in Mitta's discussions.

Is there any reliable data on the subject? That might even explain to an extent the persistence of Brahminic exploitation. But that would change the portrait of the villains a little, rendering them human, not just Brahmin.