By G Waugh aka Jeeva P
Those who introduced me to reading were all people who had no prior experience in non-fiction. As a result, my early reading habit centred around nothing other than fiction. Jeffrey Archer, Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens were my first three authors. By this time (in 2011) when I was 23, I had decided that reading was going to be my lifetime passion, a habit none of my peers or relatives had shared. This gave me a feeling of proud exclusivity in my circle but I was yet to chart a course for myself along the reading path. My friend who introduced me to reading too was not quite proficient then with respect to what to read next.
As I had mentioned in one of my previous essays, just like how I had picked films belonging to the genre of ‘Noir’ as my ‘early specialization’ or my first step into the world of films in order to develop a passion for the medium, I decided to pick genres relating to Marxism or ‘class struggle’ to show me the way into the world of reading. My next novel was John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, an American best-seller that was written by a communist that centred on the struggles of the poor and the dispossessed during the Great Depression of 1929-33.
This book was the place where I was introduced to something called a ‘commune’ where people live as a community without any hierarchical divisions among them. Everyone must clean the toilets taking turns, everyone must participate in cooking regardless of gender or other pre-defined roles and the most important aspect of ‘communes’ such as these was the absence of a higher law-enforcing authority like the police. People must be mature enough to police themselves and in a place where there are no economic or social divisions, crime is assumed to have absolutely no place. Grapes of Wrath in one of its defining chapters describes lives of the protagonists in one such commune and those chapters are the only areas in an otherwise largely bleak novel which offer the reader hope and consolation regarding the future.
It was only my father who then immediately told me that Steinbeck had not written something that was wholly fictional and the entire episode on the communes could have been inspired by the Paris Commune experiment of 1871. Karl Marx was heavily inspired by the experiment and based his ground-breaking theory of Communism(from the word ‘communes’) on that phenomenal event in history.
If you think you have seen or heard about the idea of communes somewhere recently, you can jog your memory and if you had seen Pa Ranjith’s Natchathiram Nagargiradhu, you might be able to easily locate the place from where all those waves of déjà vu in your head are emanating from. Rene’s drama troupe that shares a community to live is completely based on the Marxist idea of communes and Ranjith introduces the viewer to the absence of hierarchies in such a society in the very first scene itself where Arjun is asked to sweep the floors of the theatre.
Jayakanthan in his beautifully involving memoir, OruIlakkiyavadhiyin Arasiyal Anubavangal also writes about his life in communes as long as he was part of the Communist Party of India in the early 1950s. I am not sure whether the practice of community-living is still in vogue in the Party circles but a majority of post-Independence full-time Communist cadre were asked to live in such conditions by the Party.
The reason why I dwell on this concept of Communes was not only because of my fascination with such a hierarchy or a division-free society but also because it was only a work of fiction that had first taught me the meaning of an ideology whom I had assumed I had already enough acquaintance with until then. The novel Grapes of Wrath also helped me witness and realise vicariouslythe immense human suffering that had happened in reality in the United Statessome ninety years ago just like how it was the Schindler’s list and Roman Polanksi’s Pianist when I was 24,that gave me a peek into the real intensity of suffering endured by Jews and Communists under the Hitler Regime.
My passionate involvement soon with the suffering of the Jewish races, trade unionists and socialists through these films ushered me into the world of Nazi Germany through a non-fiction book titled The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich written by William J Shirer. Whatever I had witnessed with passion, feeling and emotion through the simulated worlds imagined by Spielberg and Polanski came in a dispassionate, journalistic format with deep insights into how easy it is for a toxic ideology to get into the heads of the masses and leave them poisoned for at least for a generation. Just like many other works of non-fiction that I would later get introduced to, William Shirer’s work was a simple and well-researched matter-of-fact commentary on the rise of Nazism and how the rest of the world dealt painfully with its menace.
My interest in Nazism/Fascism took me to films such as Kamal Haasan’s Hey Ram which painted a vivid picture of how an Indian variant of fascism could wreak havoc on unsuspecting masses and poison even a non-political individual into hate-filled extremism and violence.It was a cinematic work of fiction titled American History X starring Edward Norton that introduced me into the period when some individuals in the United States were attracted to fascism and Hitler-inspired white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. It was the first film that taught me that America too had introduced a kind of affirmative action into its recruitment processes for state services and this knowledge came in good stead for me when I used to argue with my‘anti-reservationist’ friends in office who used to heap lies about how America grew into becoming one of the greatest powers of the world only on the basis of meritocracy.
Despite having so many insights into the phenomena of fascism through books and films mentioned above, it was only British historian Eric Hobsbawm’s best-seller Age of Extremes that gave me the real definition of ‘Fascism’. Hobsbawm’s definitions of fascism were not for a change wholly abstract or obscure (as it usually is) and his chapter on fascism placed the phenomena on a definitive historical context. He explains that at any moment in history there are always two forces that are in conflict with one another and any historic event that takes place at that moment is based on which of the forces takes the upper hand then. For example, Galileo’s postulates on the heliocentric model of the universe went against the grain of Church-inspired thinking and hence the hegemonic forces inspired by the religion then went after the prescient scientist-intellectual. It took a few more generations for the religious Geo-centric model to lose its relevance and it was only at that point of time in history that Galileo’s postulates that the Earth was moving around the Sun started gaining popular currency. In this story, the forces that compelled the society to stick to its foundations or ‘religious fundamentals’ are ‘conservative’ or ‘fundamentalist’ forces and those like Galileo who tried to untether the society from its outdated ideas are called the ‘progressive’ forces.
So Hobsbawm expounds that there are always progressive and regressive forces in a society that keep the society in a state of constant flux and the agents of fascism are all those that belong to the latter.In the film NatchathiramNagargiradhu too, this constant fight between progress and ‘reaction’ forms the core of the story with Rene and Arjun belonging to the opposite camps.One needs to remember that Hobsbawm’s definition was not in fact wholly his but that of Karl Marx who developed the term dialectics (two forces) from his ideological forefather Hegel in the middle of 1800s to explain and theorize sociological phenomena.
Even if my introduction to Marx came to me at a very early age through oral lectures from my father, I was a theoretical illiterate till the age of 24. I had successfully trudged across the pages of his Das Kapital Volume One by then and my understanding of capitalism grew not only from the massive volume but also through real-time experiences in my office life. My derision towards corporate capitalism took another dimension after I had finished John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hitman which was a searing account of how financial institutions such as the IMF pick and train ‘economic hitmen’ to persuade, coerce and coax political leaders belonging to the Third World countries to accept financial assistance from these banks through false and misleading economic projections. These hitmen, Perkins being one of them force the leaders of these smaller countries to sell the national assets to American corporations for throwaway prices, to award contracts for construction of dams, metro railways and bridges to American companies all of which being the necessary pre-conditions for these governmentsto obtain immediate financial support.
Perkins mentions a host of countries in Latin American, African and Asian continents where he had worked towards economically subjugating sovereign countries which soon ended up becoming even more financially and politically unstable, ultimately surrendering their economic independence to these financial institutions. I had read about a similar crisis long back that wrecked the country of Argentina in 2001 that was engineered by institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank.
Without really knowing which country the film belonged to, I had finished when I was 25 a film called The Secret in Their Eyes. I later found that the film was an Argentinian one and the actor who had captivated me with such a restrained performance was named Ricardo Darin. I decided to watch some more films of his, one of which was called the Wild Tales which released in 2014 and went on to win critical acclaim. It was an anthology and one of the stories which Darin starred in was a solid critique of how screwed the system of privatization was in a city of Argentina.
Darin is shown to be an expert in the field of controlled explosion who keeps paying fines to a private corporation for parking his car in a ‘no-parking’ zone for no fault of his.Apparently, it is implied that as long as the State was involved in penalizing parking offenders there were no such incidents of ‘extortion’ and Darin is extremely resentful of how the corporation keeps penalizing even innocent people. His rage soon grows into a point where he packs his car with explosives and parks it intentionally in a no-parking zone. The car is towed away by the authorities to the company’s office where he detonates the explosives leading to a blast with no casualties. I loved this episode in the film very much which illustrated with so much punchy vividness what I had read about free-market Argentina in non-fiction books and newspaper articles.
I am reminded about NatchathiramNagargiradhu once again about a conversation Rene has with Iniyan. Rene says that she disapproves of the theory that the disappearance of class divisions will one day lead to the disappearance of casteism as well.Here was the only point where I differed ideologically from the film/Rene’s argument. According to Marxism, India’s caste divisions are a way of reinforcing the traditional class hierarchy and the collapse of the latter will inevitably lead to the obliteration of the former. Marxism despite arguing against capitalism on almost all counts does not shy away from appreciating its positive aspects as well.
The Marxist theory of history(Origin of Family, Private Property and the State written by Friedrich Engels) says that human civilization ever since it entered the era of agriculture had unwittingly accepted a kind of social and economic hierarchy. The era of agriculture was the time when landlords started employing slaves to work in their farms which soon gave way to the era of feudalism where the farmer was allowed to retain a share of what he had produced after paying his landlord, a practice which was not there in the era of slavery. Slaves had no right to claim what they had produced and hence the coming of the era of feudalism was a progressive step in the story of human civilization.
Feudalism gave rise to multiple guilds or manufacturing communities that specialised in the production of specific goods. Families for the most part converted themselves into guilds each of which was engaged in a specific craft such as weaving, pottery, carpentry, etc. This phenomena of formation of guilds started giving the families something what is today called a traditional occupation which soon congealed into the concept of caste, a practice which became permanent and rigid over time. People began to be identified based on their births and hence occupations began to be assigned based on the same.
But the advent of British traders into India in the form of imperialism gave rise to a new form of society which India had hitherto not seen before- capitalism. One key difference between feudalism and capitalism is, in the former, guilds and manufacturing communities are all small self-contained units which don’t employ people in hundreds or thousands. The size of a guild is usually very small as a result of which there is absolutely no scope for commingling of people of different communities, births and other artificial identities in one common workplace. But the advent of industrial capitalism changed all that. Industrial machinery under the control of big capitalistswas able to produce goods more cheaply than they were being produced under guilds as a result of which people started consuming industrial goods more and more(You can see this happening in Ram’s ThangaMeengal where the hero loses his job in a small factory). People working under guilds soon started losing their jobs and the process of their pauperization turned them into industrial workers for mere subsistence wages. People belonging to different communities and traditional occupations began to merge in the large proletarian sea.
Post 1991, when India moved into full-blown industrial, neoliberal capitalism you could find every traditional occupation becoming gradually mechanised. For the first time in India, persons as different as a traditional potter or a weaver or a barber or a farmerstarted learning newer crafts that hitherto was forbidden to him. The presence of an international commodity market on a large scale for the first time in the world started changing the dynamics of commodity production as a result of which people from various traditional backgrounds started moving into professions or trades that served as the easiest way to progress socially and economically. Many of my colleagues in my workplace are all first time graduates whose parents and grandparents were all engaged in diverse professions imposed upon them by birth. For the first time in human history, capitalism began to employ thousands and thousands of people from different races, castes and religion under one roof- a phenomena previous forms of society such as feudalism did not offer scope for.
So, to put it succinctly, Marx says that the more you allow capitalism to invade your society and your market, there will be the inevitable dissolution of various ethnic and racial identities into one all-encompassing class- the working class. This is why you see lesser and lesser caste discrimination in the cities of India where people from different castes are engaged in professions traditionally unrelated to them while villages where some amount of feudalism is still prevalent, casteism is found to remain ineradicable.
So, all I wanted to tell Rene was only this – the arrival of capitalism marked the melting of various castes and ethnicities of the working people into one large pot called the proletariat or the working class. On the other hand, capitalism also has led to the creation of another class- the employer or the ‘proprietariat’. Just like how capitalism which succeededfeudalism as the new and a progressive form of societyunited people of various shades under one overarching category, Marx argues that the next form of society called socialism shall witness the culmination of the class war waged between the proprietariat and the proletariat (initiated under capitalism), leading to the victory of the latter and the emergence of anew working class state, a state where there is no artificial boundaries separating individuals. Hence according to Marxist theory, the annihilation of class divisions shall inevitably lead to the annihilation of caste as well.
If the reader still thinks that caste divisions and prejudices still exist in a corporate-capitalist-urban society such as ours, I am sure that we probably are the earliest generations who have been exposed to capitalism and with the progress of time, we will soon see the happy disappearance of caste. In a corporate workplace such as mine, I see no reason why I should discriminate against my colleague who might belong to a different caste such as mine. The same applies to even corporate hairstyle networks such as Naturals and Greentrends where I am reasonably sure that barbers and hairstylists employed there haven’t been hired based on their births.
anonym
November 14, 2022
Jeeva, a well written article, but the apologia for the caste system in the concluding paragraphs is at odds with the rest of the essay. Caste predates British colonialism and the advent of capitalism. 70+ years after independence and Ambedkar, the ‘upper castes’ are overrepresented in nearly every field, and vice versa. Rene (and through her Ranjith) is right – class divisions and caste divisions do not overlap. A rich person from an oppressed caste would still have to overcome discrimination and prejudices, and like I said, the oppressed castes continue to be underrepresented.
The caste problem in India can no more be put down to class divisions than the race problem in America. They are problems of historical (and continuing) injustices and have little to do with distribution of wealth.
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Honest Raj
November 14, 2022
The closing bit reminds me of the opening scene from Dharmadurai:
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Raghu Narayanan
November 15, 2022
G Waugh a.k.a Jeeva – quite a well written piece! Kudos! The initial part of your narration talks about how you are introduced into the world of reading and it moves on to how you consciously chose your areas of interest as you progressed into more serious reading. The second part of your narration goes on to the interesting aspect of overlap between class and caste divisions in society and how an economic model can correct some wrongs in the society. This is a very interesting perspective that you have brought out nicely.
Honestly, until now, I had not come across this perspective of capitalism as a leveler of the playing field. So its a new way of looking at it for me. Rather, I had always thought of the class division as yet another dimension of division in society apart from the caste and/or race dimensions. I had always thought that class differentiation (rich/middle/poor) created yet another layer of discrimination not only between castes, but also within castes. Surely, some castes have been traditionally affluent while some have been traditionally backward from the economic point of view. This is both one of the causes as well as the result of continuing oppression of one set of people by another based on their castes. However, with the rise in the general economic status of the people, the class differentiation surely does bring about a discrimination between people of the same caste (irrespective of whether that caste belongs to the traditionally ‘oppressed’ or ‘oppressor’ category) based on who is more wealthier (and so more powerful) than the other. So, it is indeed interesting to read that Capitalism can create some of sort of equality in the society in terms of caste discrimination. I do understand and agree that in a corporate environment, there is little scope for discrimination based on caste (or even otherwise). However, an organization is not really a ‘commune’, is it, where people live? So, even though there is little scope for discrimination of any kind in a supervised, controlled corporate environment, do people carry that mentality with them when they are at large in society, is something to be studied and researched.
But yes, India presently is a country in transition, and as you rightly pointed out there are multiple versions or degrees of discrimination – between the urban and rural folks. Even here, the many first timer graduate colleagues of yours that you had mentioned, will still have their roots in their villages (assuming) and so will still continue to clearly perceive differentiation based on caste, if not discrimination, at different levels. It might take a few generations before the villages (or roots) get neutralized in terms of caste identities, if it happens, because caste is actually an identity still, for many. And losing this identity will be hard. Even for the oppressed, losing the identity will mean losing the claim that they are oppressed, which is their biggest bargaining chip with the rest of the society. So it will take some giving up, until the status quo changes – which means the problem gets solved.
And in solving this problem – is where the politicians come counting their votes…
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Kay
November 16, 2022
Interesting read, Jeeva. I would like to read the books that you have mentioned. I have always thought of myself as a communist at heart but also comfortably ensconced in the capitalist setup and the luxuries it offers. I feel very conflicted about these two sides. Have you felt that? The philosophy of communism as I understand is abolition of class and wealth is distributed equally among everyone. But I’m also used to having a maid and a caretaker for the kids, my job that pays well and everything else that comes with it. It feels like an identity conflict.
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Madan
November 16, 2022
Very interesting and engaging as always. But still trying to wrap my head around the last para. I am just not so optimistic about capitalism dissolving caste and thus indirectly creating the conditions for class consolidation. I also don’t agree with the notion that capitalism truly only began in the 90s because if anything, licence raj created terrific conditions for a small group of oligarchs to consolidate wealth. Three decades on, we see similar consolidation anyway – after a period of churn – in the non IT sectors. For all that Nehru was a communist at heart and Indira enshrined the word socialist in the preamble, India was always what econ textbooks referred to as a mixed economy. They allowed for a throttled but highly sheltered capitalism to flourish, if anything. With the courts upholding EWS, it seems as if , if anything, we will deepen caste reservations and thus drift further away from abolishing caste but instead cement further multitudes of caste identities.
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Madan
November 16, 2022
The failure of the liberalization era – and Montek Singh Ahluwalia alluded to this in his 20 years of lib interview with CNBC TV18 last year – was if anything in not removing all the sarkari shackles and not moving fast enough with what they did remove. Thus, we are back to govt pumping in capex that the industry is reluctant to come in with and conditions of moderate growth with poor employment growth and thereby a renewed and unsustainable level of interest in govt jobs. We missed the bus, yet again. We could not achieve the transition to a market economy due to our hesitation. So we are still some sort of mixed economy. And just like up to 1991 we pretended to be socialist while we were anything but, now we pretend as if Modi is the Reagan of Asia when he has shown time and again that he is ardently statist. And he is statist because that’s what the electorate wants, after the 2010-11 fiasco soured faith in the capitalist-govt technocrat alliance’s ability to propel the economy.
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Jeeva Pitchaimani
November 16, 2022
Kay : I wanted to answer this question – can I stay within the capitalist system, enjoy its benefits and be seditious enough to dream about another form of economy – capitalism ?
In capitalism, nobody is doing a favour for us. Just like how a shopkeeper sells his commodity to a consumer like us and pockets the cost of it, we people are just selling our labour to the capitalist/employee and pocketing the cost of it. There is nothing holy here. The moment we stop being useful to our employer, we will soon be replaced by someone else. And there is a question of loyalty too, which is explained in Sivakarthikeyan’s Velaikaaran – we need to be loyal to the work we are doing and not to our employer – in other words, there should be no compromise in the quality of labour we are supposed to give and this loyalty has nothing to do with raising questions against him whenever he is trying to exploit. After all, capitalism is itself a system of exploitation- 90 percent of labourers are paid only the cost of their subsistence and the surplus value that the product he gives to his employer (market price of the commodity minus subsistence wage paid to the employee) is unfairly pocketed by the employer. Wealth all over the world is being ‘socially’ created but the benefits of the wealth are all enjoyed by an individual (the capitalist or the shareholders) and these people don’t even pay enough taxes.
If you are a slave(like as in Mammooty’s Vidheyan) and you are enjoying the benefits of being one such as a kind master who will help you whenever you need anything but will take your wife away as and when he feels like, is it being disloyal to him when you think about emancipating yourself and living with dignity ?
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Madan
November 16, 2022
One has to exist in a system anyway – and reap some benefits from it – before aspiring to reform it or displace it however applicable. Both Gandhi and Nehru studied in the UK. That didn’t bind them against revolting against the Empire.
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Jeeva Pitchaimani
November 16, 2022
Hi Madan/anonym
This essay I had planned was primarily to chart my course of political reading and not wholly to “deep-dive” into theoretical politics. The Marxism I have explained is on a very surface level and I tried my utmost not to go even this much into theory. I just had wanted to give a passing glance on the Marxist ideas that were not known much to public but the last part where I focus on caste-class idea is something that I couldn’t reduce much despite my best efforts. Had I worked on much more brevity, those parts would have turned very superficial. So I had allowed to let it be there.
1) So coming to the point, human civilization is believed to have begun some 6000 years ago. Ever since then artificial divisions between human beings began to be grow and only become numerous. Only after the arrival of industrial capitalism in 1800s i.e 5800 years after civilization began, the process of intermixing of races, religions, castes have begun on an unprecedented scale and the trend of increasing divisions between people began to reverse. In the last two hundred years alone, there has been unforeseen decline in the number of ethnic divisions between people world over. We are still a very young capitalist world in my opinion and India is even more in the infantile phase. When the Britishers came in 1750s, they had developed a very skewed form of industrial capitalism here which tended to preserve the worst features of both feudalism and capitalism in India. In India, a proper form of capitalism began only in the Nehruvian era and can anyone of us deny that we have become only more liberal, more tolerant and more accommodating to people of other ethnic or casteist identities in the last 75 years or so? Before the arrival of capitalism when was the last time we saw children belonging to different castes and origins sitting together in the same place for hours together and dissolving themselves into a ‘community’ (despite the fact that dalits were denied that privilege too)? Isn’t modern education itself a distinguishing feature of liberal capitalism? 75 or even a hundred years is a very small period in the development of human civilization which is older than 6000 years and if you take a panoramic view of it, the first thing that will catch your attention is only how much we have gained and how much we have progressed even if there are gross mistakes and blunders in a lot of places. The speed with which we have reduced divisions between us in the last 100 years or so is almost ten times higher than that of what we had achieved prior to that. So what I am saying is a very broad picture of the Indian civilization story. I am not saying we should disregard the specifics and gloat in this success. But I just want to give some optimism in our search for a better society, a search which we must never abandon as long as we are allowed to live on this planet.
“Ulagam oru needhi perum!”
For more details about theory and more clarity – https://baradwajrangan.wordpress.com/2019/10/05/readers-write-in-101-the-russian-revolution-chapter-2-stalins-era-part-2/
Please refer the above link.
2) In my opinion, only an economic system determines the consciousness, values and other traits of a particular society. The concept of caste was integral to the economics of a feudal society without which the top bracket of the population could not keep surviving . So the divisions were allowed to remain and thrive. Similarly, since now we are fast moving into an era of corporate capitalism, the top bracket of the population needs workers in droves and millions to create wealth for itself. As long as we are divided among ourselves into castes and races and religion, such a commingling is near to impossible. So the top bracket will do everything in its power to integrate all of us without which this economic system will collapse. This is why capitalists in Nazi Germany after a point decided to stop supporting Hitler (it was too late then). So I am definitely sure that capitalism will put an end to casteism at least substantially if not wholly by the end of this century.
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Jeeva Pitchaimani
November 16, 2022
Thank you Raghu. I am glad I was able to attract a new reader to my essays.
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vijay
November 16, 2022
“The caste problem in India can no more be put down to class divisions than the race problem in America. They are problems of historical (and continuing) injustices and have little to do with distribution of wealth.”
Even in Google USA, a place as corporate as it can get in an alien country , there was a recent ‘caste’ issue over which they had a senior manager resign
https://www.opindia.com/2022/06/google-caste-washington-post-sundar-pichai-brahmin-thenmozhi-soundararajan/
We read hundreds of accounts of corporate employees being discriminated by team members/managers based on who they are in India not to mention the continuously reported suicides of Dalit students in IITs and other such establishments..
lets not mix up these differences..Marx may not have had a clue on India’s caste issues, its origins and how entrenched it is and how it works.. and this was pointed out by Ambedkar as well.. the fact that a 250-yr old USA , a capitalist poster boy, still have their affirmative action policies firmly in place(even if that is race and not caste, its still a decent comparison for analogy) and as recently as 2020 were still seeing angry minorities movements over discrimination gives a hint on how far India needs to go..and the current establishment in Delhi has’nt made things easier to say the least. Unless we become mukth of these zealots and their poisonous ideologies we may not move much further along..
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RK
November 16, 2022
I am born in a caste that should be classified as forward on any objective criteria but due to the quirk of politics is backward. Most of my relatives are upper middle class (income > 8 lacs p.a., my own definition) & maybe 20% belonging to middle class (income > 3 lacs p.a.). 90% of them own houses. There is no one I know who is below middle class and all of them live in & around Chennai.
Most of the younger generation work in IT with a small mix professionals & businessmen. I have never seen any of them indulge in visible forms of caste discrimination. Only < 5% of the marriages are inter-caste & even in that the other person always belonged to forward/ backward castes. The rest are all ‘arranged’ marriages with perfect caste alignment. The only progress in the last 25 years is that sub-caste has disappeared for matrimonial alliances but even that only due to the limited pool of brides.
This is the social reality that I witness in my extended family. Where is the utopia of capitalism being a melting pot of castes in this? At work, we temporarily leave our caste identity & wear them in all their resplendent glory when we are back home.
Just like Russia, India never had a proletariat, because a vast majority of people were engaged in agriculture, which is still feudalistic. And even now, modern knowledge workers can hardly be called proletariat. A garment factory worker can hardly be clubbed together with a software engineer. With India bypassing mass Industrialisation, we will never have a proletariat. We have directly gone from a semi-feudal society to a statist-oligarchic-crony Capitalism with no rule of law.
The only situation where caste divisions are ignored in matrimony in urban areas is when the other person is several classes above. So class definitely trumps caste, at least in urban areas.
@Jeeva: As a thinking person, do you really take Marx’s “prophetic” statements at face value even if they are made on the basis of the one of the most original theories of 19th century. I am really curious to know.
I always felt that ideologies are great frameworks to understand people & societies but to fit real people & societies into them, a lot of limbs have to be chopped.
PS: I asked the guy who cuts my hair at Greentrends to come to our house to tonsure my daughter’s hair. When he came to our house, he never came inside despite my repeated invitation, and sat in the outer portion of the house. Make of it what you will.
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karzzexped
November 17, 2022
Thanks Jeeva for this piece. I’m definitely going to give Confessions…. a try.
Speaking of Argentinian films and Darin, “Argentina 1985” (2022 film) is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, which is set in 1980s Argentina. Do give it a try!
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Jeeva Pitchaimani
November 17, 2022
Thanks karzzexped for this comment. I’m definitely going to give Argentina…. a try.
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hari
November 18, 2022
RK what do you mean by “At work, we temporarily leave our caste identity & wear them in all their resplendent glory when we are back home.”?
Jeeva, Nehru a capitalist? So far I thought he was anything but that.
Are you saying before India got independence we were not liberal and not welcoming of others? Hmmm, that is also news to me. Will need to check with my Watchmaker friend, who welcomed his ancestors to Indian shores.
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Madan
November 18, 2022
” Nehru a capitalist? So far I thought he was anything but that.” – Indeed, there was more capitalism in the pre-independence era and industrialists loved the Raj because rupee was strong and fully convertible. So they could take all their wealth to UK. The OG Mallya/Lalit Modis. Birlas, Tatas had all started and in fact were in existence for half a century or even more prior to independence.
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RK
November 21, 2022
@Hari: We do not differentiate, at least in TN, based on caste at workplaces. But in all things personal like marriage etc., caste is omnipresent, at least in my social milieu. I do think this is true for many upper middle class & middle class people.
And this perfectly reasonable as caste is not just about its obvious negativity. It is also inseparably present in many of our rituals & practices. To leave all the things associated with caste, will be in a sense abandoning one part of our very identity.
So, I do think only reformation & not annihilation of caste is possible. If annihilation of caste occurs, it will be in conjunction with all the other identities of a person. It is not possible to erase caste without affecting many of its social extensions. What is needed immediately, is annihilation of caste discrimination & caste pride.
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Madan
December 6, 2022
Finished reading a book that is a must read and at the same time one that makes the stomach churn. A Feast of Vultures by Josy Joseph. The fact that so much of what he has compiled comes across as unsurprising to us speaks volumes about the rot that has set in since eons and which we are, unwittingly or not, desensitized to. Reviewed it for goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5146949829
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