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Of Life in Brahmanical India
Braj Ranjan Mani
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With his
path-breaking revolutionary book “Debrahmanising History:
Dominance and Resistance in Indian Society (Manohar, 2005)
Braj Ranjan Mani has emergedas one of the top thinkers who
has dared to challenge the larger brahamanic paradigm of society
that the official Indian establishment is in love with. Mani’s
book was the first major step in contemporary times to move
towards construction of an emancipatory pedagogy. No study of
India’s
caste-based strategy of discrimination based on birth can now be
complete without reckoning with the arguments that Mani has
marshaled.
The World
Sikh News hails the fact that an author like Mani, currently
a Fellow at the prestigious Indian Institute of Advanced Study,
Shimla, has appreciated the casteless construct of society in
Sikhism and given it due prominence in his earlier work,
focusing in a major way on Guru Nanak’s and Sikhism’s role in
standing as a bulwark against casteist forces. In his
just-released book, “A Forgotten Liberator: The Life and
Struggle of Savitribai Phule”, the first such effort in English
to focus upon one of the greatest names who fought against the
tyranny of caste in nineteenth century India, Mani has once
again counted Sikhs as among the communities oppressed by the
Indian Nation State, and called India as “the most iniquitous
society on the earth”. The book, co-edited along with Pamela
Sardar, is a collection of essays and also includes one by Gail
Omvedt, another leading voice in India
that speaks for the marginalized and lowered classes.
We present
here a few excerpts from the introduction to the book, written
by Braj Ranjan Mani. |
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 Knowledge-production, reproduction of culture, and historiography
in contemporary India — with some exceptions of challenging attempts
in recent years —remains deeply biased and brahmanical, despite the
dazzling democratic façade and politically correct vocabulary.
Contestations to the dominant discourse and meta-narratives of the
past and present by the marginalised majority — dalits, adivasis,
other backward classes (OBCs), Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and other
suppressed ethnic and regional communities — remains confined to the
margins; while brahmanical hegemony continues to overwhelm the
intellectual domain. In place everywhere are refurbished,
replenished brahmanical canons and constructs which are blithely
flaunted as ‘Indian’ and ‘national.’ This, so much so, that the
modernisation of brahmanical tradition easily becomes the
modernisation of Indian tradition. The Indian elite’s winning trick,
right from the colonial nineteenth century to the present, is to
selectively cull from the modern European ideas and institutions,
and ingeniously align and integrate them with the brahmanic
structures of caste, class, and gender. The basic design behind such
‘change with continuity’ is to preserve and innovate upon
traditional dominance over the masses. As in the past, so in the
present, the over-all objective is to mislead, exploit and exclude
the majority.
 India remains
the most iniquitous society on the earth. The more things change,
the more they remain the same. Extreme disparities in terms of
wealth, health, and education have given birth to a new form of
two-nation theory — the shining India, and the suffering India. Just
over ten percent of the population, mostly from aggressive castes,
with different levers of power in their hands, make sure that the
rest continue to live in material and mental subjugation, and
provide the ‘nation’ their cheap labour. While all wealth generation
and development are taken up in the name of empowering the poor,
such ‘nation-building’ leaves the poor more demoralised, more
marginalised. They still struggle for food, drinking water,
sanitation, education. Who are these people? More than ninety
percent of them are adivasis, dalits, OBCs, and Muslims. Their
representation in the booming market economy, business and
industrial domain, information technology, and entertainment
industry is next to nothing. However, the embedded brahmanic media
and academia presents the growth without equity as development with
a humane face. Caste as institutionalized discrimination, both at
material and ideological-cultural levels, continues to cripple the
lives of millions in several overt and covert ways.
 Caste has for
centuries been the major civilisational fault-line in the Indian
subcontinent. To cut a long and complicated story short, the
supposed divine division of labour and harmony of caste has always
dazzled its creators and beneficiaries, while the demoralized
majority condemn it as a vicious system of brahmanic colonialism —
the colonialism that drains away the cultural, social, and economic
resources within the nation from the productive majority to the
parasitic few ensconced at the top of the caste hierarchy. The toxic
genius of caste hierarchy and its creators is to divide,
disintegrate and dehumanize the toiling majority. Fragmented into
hundreds of hierarchically arranged castes and sub-castes, each
sparring with each other for meager resources, the productive people
fail to build a broader solidarity against their common exploiters.
Birth-based
caste provides a breeding ground for mutual animosity, thus keeping
people divided and weak for exploitation as well as making common
activity and effort for the greater good impossible. It was for this
precise reason that the caste culture has been patronized and
promoted by authoritarian kings and feudal-aristocratic forces of
many stripes, including the medieval Mughals and modern British
colonizers who saw in caste and brahmanism a uniquely effective tool
to subjugate and rule the masses. Colonialism in
India, contrary
to the dominant belief, was wedded to the forces representing caste
and brahmanism. This colonialism was founded on the collusion,
collaboration; and mutual interests of British and Indian ruling
classes and intelligentsia. The native political and intellectual
elites not only provided crafty, selective knowledge to the British
about
India and
things Indian, but also controlled the Raj machinery at the local
and intermediate levels. They oiled the wheels of colonialism,
playing the role of the intermediary between the British rulers and
Indian masses. Self-strengthening and modernizing themselves with
this collaboration, the Indian elites gradually found confidence to
build their own brahmanic-casteist nationalism, pretended to
represent all Indians, demanded and got a greater share of power
within the Raj, and finally launched the movement to kick out the
British.
Nationalism
enabled the aggressive castes to project the Vedic-brahmanic culture
and consciousness as the basis of Indianness. Their selfish ideals
and interests became the national ideals and interests. Despite a
variety of formulations — from the nineteenth century pioneers of
socio-cultural regeneration such as Ram Mohun Roy, Dayananda,
Vivekananda, to the rightist and leftist leaders of the Indian
National Congress like Tilak, Gandhi, Nehru — the common denominator
and trajectory of all of them was to selectively accommodate
modernity within the traditional caste-class structure, thus
maintaining the high caste privileges and dominance over the masses.
The most successful, in concocting this brahmanical synthesis of
continuity with change, was Gandhi who deftly straddled the worlds
of politics and religion, playing the double role of a half-naked
saint and a ruthless politician working at the behest of the rich
and the powerful. The wily brahmans and allied castes knew the value
of Gandhi from the very beginning. They gratefully handed Gandhi the
supreme leadership and put him on a pedestal so high that his real
face remained invisible to the masses who mistook him for their
Mahatma.
It was this
monolithic-brahmanic nationalism that came under frontal attack from
leaders of the lower orders, the founders of anti-caste or non-brahman
movements that erupted in many parts of the subcontinent during the
colonial period. Aligning themselves with the long non-brahmanic
traditions of resistance for equality and freedom of all, they
argued that the brahmanic religio-social system was more sinister
than British colonialism, and therefore its annihilation must
constitute an integral part of nation-building.
Notwithstanding
the multiplicity and diversity of articulations depending on time,
space and regional variations, what the anti-caste leaders
unmistakably stressed and struggled for, was social justice and
social democracy. They fought pitched battles for doing away with
caste and social barriers. They took to the streets for civil and
human rights of the caste-oppressed. They stood for a new society
based on non-brahmanic and democratic values. These leaders who
struggled for the deconstruction of brahmanism and demanded
socio-cultural reconstruction have been dismissed in the dominant
discourse as sectarian, caste representatives; while those who
variously defended brahmanism under the fig leaf of cultural
nationalism are glorified as national leaders of vision and
integrity.
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