The Hindutva ideologues have developed a theory that Muslim rule is responsible for the rigidity of the caste system. One of them explains “When Islamic invasions started from the 9th century and slowly and steadily the Muslim invaders became the political masters of the Indian subcontinent, the caste system of the Hindu society became its defence mechanism and as a consequence it became more and more rigid.” This is a complete distortion as the process of the consolidation of the Jati structure in the country was completed in the main by the 10th century before the raids of Mahmud of Ghazni. The feudal class upheld the Jati system and even rulers who professed Buddhism were proud upholders of the Jati system. By 12th century in southern India and a century later in the north, the growth of trade and commodity production and the political and cultural changes created the material condition within the feudal society for protests against the caste system. It was in this period from the 12th Century to the 17th Century that the Bhakti movement emerged as the most significant opposition to the caste system and Brahmanical superiority. But due to the historical limitation at that time, the movement could not attack the base of the caste system – the feudal mode of production and the feudal relations of production therein. Hence it failed to break the caste system.
The British colonial rule brought a considerable change in the Brahmanical Hindu order and the inequitable caste system. The economic changes introduced by colonial rule in the 19th century in order to consolidate their rule and intensify the exploitation of India, had a severe impact on the relations of production in the rural areas and created new classes from among the various castes. But the British rule could not eradicate the caste system. Even Ambedkar admits “Whatever desirable change may have come in our condition during the British rule has just happened in the course of time. We cannot be sure whether the British government has made any special efforts for that. On the contrary, we are of the opinion that it is utterly futile to expect any emancipatory work for untouchables from the British rule.” In his very first dissertation-Administration and Finance of the East India Company, written for his M. A. degree in Columbia University, he had exposed how the East India Company exploited Indians during the long period, 1792 to 1858 and after its rule was abolished in 1858, how instead of removing the injustice, the British Crown increased it by loading the starving Indians with the huge debt, which was taken by the East India Company for its own consumption. The essential colonial mechanism for exploitation gets succinctly exposed in Ambedkar’s conclusion- “Apparently the immenseness of India’s contribution to England is as much astounding as the nothingness of England’s contribution to India.”
Some scholars project that there had been a positive impact on the Dalits due to British rule citing early Marx and claiming colonial reforms had hugely benefited the Dalits. We need to look and question whether in the colonial period, certain imperialist strategies, by way of their unintended consequences may have really benefited the Dalits. Marx writing about the British rule in India in 1953 mentioned “English interference having placed the spinner in Lanchashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economic basis, and thus produced the greatest, and, to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.” It is interesting to note that Marx later abandoned this opinion about India written in 1853.
At that time, he was influenced by Hegel, especially his Philosophy of History. In the Philosophy of History, Hegel termed the caste system “the most degrading spiritual serfdom” and dismissed India as a society that “has remained stationary and fixed”. Irfan Habib holds an opinion that Marx’s early optimistic belief that modern industry “resulting from the railway system” would dissolve the hereditary division of labour, upon which rest the Indian castes”, has been largely fulfilled, “though not to the extent perhaps, that Marx might have expected.” But Suniti Kumar Ghosh most rightly quoted Marx to show how Marx himself disregard his early views citing the work “Transformation of Surplus-Profit into Ground Rent” where Marx wrote “Domestic handicrafts and manufacturing labour as secondary occupations of agriculture, which forms the basis, are the prerequisite of that mode of production upon which natural economy rests in European antiquity and the Middle Ages as well as in present-day Indian community, in which the traditional organization has not yet been destroyed.” Marx’s shift towards more anti-colonial position is noted in his writings in 1857-58. In “The Revolt in the Indian Army,” published on July 15, 1857, Marx pointed to the new contradictions and antagonisms brought about by British rule- “In their colonial sepoy army, they unwittingly created for the first time a unified Indian national consciousness and organization… British rule…organized the first general center of resistance which the Indian people was ever possessed of”.
To search the “unintended boon” of the British rule, it would not be bad to quote the great teacher Marx once more from his ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’ where he mentioned about the destruction of the village economy and wrote “They destroyed it by breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the native industry, and by levelling all that
was great and elevated in the native society. The historic pages of their rule in India report hardly anything beyond that destruction.”
The colonial rulers commoditized land and land accessible to members of all castes in different levels. Marx observed that “the extinction of the communal ownership of land was only an act of English Vandalism which pushed the indigenous people not forward but backward”. Although he had earlier welcomed the land settlement acts for introducing private property in land, he later described the “exclusive proprietary rights claimed by the Talukdars and Zamindars” as “an incubus on the real cultivators of the soil and the general improvement of the country.” This understanding gets echoed in several periods of history when Dalit panthers in Maharasthra, revolutionary forces in Bihar or progressive leaders of Una movement claim land for the landless Dalits. The British also legally constituted classes notified as landlords (other than Vatandars or Inamdars), tenants and labourers.
Though Zamindars, Khotedars and Talukdars mostly come from the upper castes, the smaller landlords and rich peasants notified as tenants came from the Shudra castes. The Ati-Shudra, Adivasi, and nomadic tribes constituted the bulk of the landless, agricultural labour force. In the land settlement policies, the British ignored the inalienable rights of the actual cultivators, and in many areas the intermediaries, the non-cultivating sections who only had a share in the produce, traditionally, were made the sole proprietors of the land. The Shudra peasantry was divided into an upper section of rich peasants and a lower section of middle and poor peasants. With the intensified exploitation coupled with famines and other crises, indebted peasants of all the cultivating castes were pushed into the ranks of the landless, and also a section of artisans became landless labourers. A class of
rural poor, landless or poor peasants emerged from the ranks of most of the Backward and Dalit castes in the 19th century.
What really the British colonial rule brought was the Western institutional framework of governance with its army, police, the Uniform Criminal and Civil law and the colonial bureaucracy, and colonial education, prompted by its own colonial logic. It was during the British period that the modern proletariat was born, so also the comprador bourgeoisie was brought up by the imperialists. Within the peasantry too, a slow and gradual differentiation was taking place. From the peasant and artisan castes of the Shudras came the factory workers. The Dalits were recruited in large numbers in the Army, Railways, Road construction and in unskilled jobs in the factories. The Dalits and the Adivasis also worked in mines and plantations. All these together constituted the modern proletariat. Thus a working class linked to industrial production also emerged from the ranks of the Backward and Dalit castes. The Mahars began to take employment in textile mills, ammunition factories, ship repairing docks, railway workshops, engineering factories, construction works and so on. The 1921 Census records that only 13.5% of Mahar working force of nearly 3,00,000 were employed in their traditional occupation even though most Mahars maintained strong ties with their ancestral village. A small section among these castes also owned lands through jobs as small contractors, and traders. The occupational change and consequent upward mobility of the Mahars was especially noticeable in the Vidarbha region. Thousands of Mahars particularly from the Konkan region had got into the army and some of them rose to high non-commission ranks. With access to education, opportunities to find jobs in infrastructure and jute industries and the bureaucracy, a petty-bourgeois class developed within the Backward and Dalit castes. But they found their
avenues blocked by the monopoly of Brahmins over the government jobs. Due to their historic advantage, the Brahmins and others from higher castes took to Western education in a short period of time and soon came to occupy most of the posts in the administration and judiciary. Thus the introduction of Western education helped the Brahmin castes to monopolise the colonial bureaucracy. The Brahmins, Kayasthas, Anglo-Indians, Parsis, Muslim educated elite dominated the bureaucracy. The comprador business houses came from amongst the ‘Bania’ i.e., trading castes and communities like the Parsis, Jains and from the Kshatriya caste.
The new classes that arose in this period were thus born as multi-caste classes. The modern proletariat in particular was created with both the ‘Savarnas’ and ‘Dalits’ within its fold. However, the most significant change was that many castes ceased to exist as single-class entities as in the earlier period.
Class differentiation had resulted in the break-up of castes into various classes. Specifically, small but influential sections of the former Shudra castes were rising to take positions among the ruling classes. Small petty-bourgeois sections grew in most castes. Some sections of the uppermost castes even became proletariats. However, overall it was chiefly the sections from the higher castes that continued to own and control the means of production and continued to be the main section of the ruling classes. On the other hand, over 95% of the Dalits remained as agricultural labourers, poor peasants, and workers. The British colonialists too followed the policy of all earlier ruling classes of using the caste system for their exploitation and rule and though unintended, it created some objective conditions for the rise of movements against the caste system.
