Caste, Community And Bloggers
Last night a friend of mine from
Singapore pointed me to the following post on a facebook page and I have been
mulling over it ever since.
The post refers to the schisms in
a group of bloggers from Chennai, based on their castes- or to be more specific
based on the sub sects of one particular caste - the brahmins of tamil nadu,
who according to my amateur knowledge as an outsider (as a Non-Brahmin) to the
community are composed of two sub castes- the iyers and iyengars based on
whether they are shaivities or vaishnavaites. And even if they have multiple
other subcastes (not known to me) - in effect they are one community which is
often referred to (online) as the TamBhram community and here they are
discriminating between the subcastes in of all places - a blogger meet.
Kind of strange to believe that
any community as educated and world aware as bloggers can so divide themselves
over castes and sub-castes and discourage people from mingling with them based
on such outdated concepts. Or it may be that there are hidebound elements
steeped in old world prejudices even now in the Internet age and connected
world. Even assuming the above, I don’t wish to talk any further about this
specific community or what goes on in their caste-specific (or subcaste-specific)
blogger meets ( I wasn’t there and so I will refrain from talking about what I didn’t
see firsthand). So let me take a broad based view and talk generally about caste
in this post-millennial modern India of ours.
I am sure that, like me, every kid
in India would have had "that" talk with their parents at one stage
or another of their teenage lives. No, no, I am not referring to the talk about
the birds and bees. Good Indian parents don’t talk to their offspring about such
things (only parents in American soap serials do). The talk I am referring to
is about exams and marks. As far as I remember (after all these years) the talk
involved something like being told that marks around the 90th percentile wouldn’t
suffice to get me into any useful course, as I had to compete in the OC or Open
Competition category and hence if I had any ambition at all of getting a good
education I had to slog my butt off and get a 99%percentile in my exams. I
confess that came as an unpleasant shock to my system. For here I was happily
complacent that if I got nine tenths of my answers right I might consider it a
good days work done and now comes this piece of shocking news that I am not
allowed to make even that single mistake and must perforce get everything right
if I didn’t want to end up begging for a living. Even then I knew with perfect
clarity that to get a high 99 percentile involved total and completed
dedication and sacrifice to the one goal of mugging up answers and vomiting
them in the exams and would result in the complete loss of all the things which
made normal life pleasant, like movies, books, music and hanging out with
friends. I was even tempted to chuck up this education system which required me
to get every question right and go off to my native village to do farming, plus
singing the “vivasayi, vivasayi" song like Puratchi Thalaivar MGR.
And then something dawned in me- a
curiosity to understand why. Why was i expected to get more marks than my
contemporaries? Why was I singled out? That question gnawed at me and so
to gain my own understanding I hit the
books (whatever available) at the school library and read avidly to get an
understanding of caste and its various prejudices. There it was I first chanced
upon E.V. Ramasawami Naicker or as he is now known- Periyar, who way back in
the 1930's had preached about a caste less society. I read about Mahatma Gandhi
who, to give him credit, realized very early in his career that caste was the
bane of India but who couldn't do much about it as he was a prudent man and had
bigger fights to fight and didn’t want to lose focus on his primary goal of
kicking out the British Empire. I also read about Bhim Rao Ambedkar, the man
who triumphed over every obstacle that fate and caste placed in his path to
prove that intelligence cannot be discouraged. I also read the Marxists- Karl
Marx and his views on a classless society which had overtones of a caste-less
society too. I even read Mr. King and about Malcolm X and their varying
approaches to fighting the racism which haunted American society in the 50's and
60's, for I could find parallels with the situation in India. My intellectual
curiosity drove me to read a lot of incidental stuff and accidental stuff on
caste and its various roles on society and after long and deep thinking and
debates with various friends, I finally came to an astounding conclusion which I
will share with you now.
My conclusion in a nutshell was -
All human beings are basically stupid. I mean, we only have to look in the
mirror to see that we all have one head and one body and two arms and legs.
Even the most prejudiced of our species would not deny that all human beings
are of one single species. And to divide us all based on artificial concepts
like caste and community is willfully closing eyes to the obvious. We don’t
need our genetic scientists to confirm our DNA codes match each other’s world
over - at some fundamental level in our collective conscious we all realize
that we are one single race, humanity or human beings or homo sapiens call it
what you will. Hence the sympathy we feel when we see starving children in a
Sudanese famine shown on TV. For us it doesn’t matter that they are from
another country or another continent even- starving children are just children
to our eye. Children of the human race. Our race. And our hearts go to them
almost unconsciously. That alone is proof that Manu was wrong. And that
division of human beings into castes and groups is crap.
We are sending space craft to
mars. We are cloning animals. We are manufacturing artificial organs. We have
even pared down the 6 degrees of connectivity into 4 or less with facebook,
twitter, watsapp etc. And yet to keep on
perpetuating old and idiotic fallacies like caste in the face of such modernity
is sheer stupidity. Even the Catholic Church (after centuries of denial)
finally accepted that Galileo was right and the earth is not the center of the
universe. When will we accept that we are all of the same community? And i
would have expected the educated to be leading the charge on this and not be
constrained by such artificial barriers- but the ground reality is so very different
and that’s what shocked me the most when I read about those bloggers grouping
themselves on caste basis. What’s to become the future of our country if
educated youth behave like this? Will we ever change? I hope so fervently.
I believe that the time is not far
when we Indians will also understand that caste and community is as much a
humbug as fairness creams guaranteeing fair complexions. I have hope. And like
Dr. King, I have a dream.
P.S. a Special thanks to my friend
Prashanth
from National University Singapore for sharing with me this stuff and which
made me mad enough to sit and write an entire post on it.
Its all got to do with the sixth sense, the sense of infinite thoughts.
ReplyDeleteAssuming everyone one days wakes up forgetting these existing caste system (like how they wipe out in MIB). Do you think people would live happily ever after? This caste based thing is only one of the millions of mental divisions people have one another.
There is the rich and the poor, the celebrity and the fan, for instance!
lets hope for a better future charan...think positive
DeleteWTH!!! Lets leave the caste to the politicians pls!!!
ReplyDeleteexactly my sentiments bhusha...same pinch
Delete