The resilient Brahmin
By Debashish Mukerji
It was called a watershed in post-independent India's history. Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh's decision in 1990 to implement the Mandal Commission recommendations was hailed and reviled with equal fervour. While the upper castes, especially Brahmins, saw it as the death knell of their aspirations, the backward castes and Dalits believed it was the gateway to a brave new world, free of Brahminical hegemony. Upper caste students demonstrated noisily, immolated themselves in protest, but in vain. Four years later, after an injunction against it was removed following a historic Supreme Court verdict, the Mandal recommendations entered the statute books.
But 12 years after the announcement-and eight since the judgment-both Brahmin fears and backward caste hopes appear to have been belied. Be it in national or north Indian politics, the bureaucracy or elsewhere, Brahmins are far from marginalised. Nine of the 12 years have seen Brahmin Prime Ministers at the helm (P.V. Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee); for five years there was also a Brahmin President (Shankar Dayal Sharma). The current Lok Sabha Speaker Manohar Joshi is a Brahmin, as are three chief ministers (of Uttaranchal, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal).
The Brahmin roll call among top civil servants is even more impressive: National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra, Cabinet Secretary Kamal Pande, Home Secretary N. Gopalaswamy, Finance Secretary S. Narayanan and Central Vigilance Commissioner P. Shanker are the leading lights among two dozen Brahmin secretaries at the Centre. The chiefs of the Army and the Air Force, Gen. S. Padmanabhan and Air Chief Marshal S. Krishnaswamy, are Brahmins. Brahmins proliferating in top corporate positions, or straddling the heights of the culture and entertainment worlds are too many to name. Why, four permanent fixtures in the Indian cricket team-Sourav Ganguly, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble-are Brahmins!
The Brahmin domination of Hindu society goes back a long, long way. The Purusasukta legend-claiming the Brahmin emerged from the head of Purusa, the primeval being, while the Kshatriya came out of Purusa's shoulders, the Vaishya from his thighs and the Shudra from his feet-first mentioned in the Rig Veda, aptly symbolises the unquestioned sway the Brahmin has held for millennia. But in the twentieth century there occurred a curious, sweeping, worldwide reversal of long-cherished values: suddenly elitism-like empire and patriarchy-became a dirty word.
Egalitarianism was the new ideal, and Brahmins, like traditional elites everywhere, found themselves under attack for having suppressed and oppressed the toiling masses. In the first half of the century the scheduled castes asserted themselves under Babasaheb Ambedkar; in south India, particularly Tamil Nadu, the backward castes rallied behind 'Periyar' E.V. Ramaswami Naicker. Half a century later, with the Mandal announcement, the backward upsurge reached north India.
Simultaneously, Kanshi Ram's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), slowly and painstakingly accreting support for years, suddenly grew wings in Uttar Pradesh, giving the scheduled castes-now renamed Dalits-a voice they had never before had. And as the anti-Mandal agitation failed, as the anti-upper caste, anti-Brahmin rhetoric of the BSP-and to a lesser degree, of the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)-grew shriller, it was believed by many that the Brahmin had had his day. "The upper castes did feel besieged," said Yogendra Yadav, political scientist and psephologist.
In south India, undoubtedly, lasting changes did occur, rendering Brahmins irrelevant in politics. In the bureaucracy, too, Brahmins have been reduced to a minority, but even that minority-as the list of top bureaucrats reveals-is not doing all that badly. Besides, south Indian Brahmins continue to thrive in the private sector, in the arts and related areas, in new fields of technology: the Indian contribution to software development, feted worldwide, is primarily the achievement of south Indian Brahmins.
In the north, Brahmins have held their own even more successfully. In the Hindi belt they still matter in politics, they still dominate the bureaucracy, they still possess sizeable land and economic resources. Indeed, it is their opponents' fire which has dimmed; the anti-Brahmin sloganeering of the nineties is no longer heard. Even Kanshi Ram and Mayawati now explicitly seek votes not just from the 'bahujan samaj' but from all sections of society, including the upper castes. Said sociologist Dhirubhai Sheth of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies: "Brahmins have shown an unexpected degree of resilience."
How did the Brahmin become so powerful in the first place? Recent research on caste questions if they were, in fact, all that important. The central thesis of Dipankar Gupta's Interrogating Caste, for instance, is that there was no single caste hierarchy, which was universally acknowledged and accepted by everyone in the caste system. "Every caste has always considered itself superior to every other caste," said Gupta, who teaches sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. "But the poorer castes, lacking wealth and power, never dared to openly say so!"
Gupta maintained that only those Brahmins who had plenty of wealth and land were dominant. "The Brahmins who were simply pujaris were not particularly revered," he said. The notion of unchallenged Brahmin superiority in ancient and medieval times, suggested Gupta, was a construct of the British. "When they took over the country they wanted to understand and codify the Indian caste system. They turned to the Brahmins, among the few literate groups then, for information. The Brahmins naturally gave them only their own point of view!"
The more conventional position, however, insists that all Brahmins-not only the rich, powerful ones-were accorded immense respect in bygone times. And that was because, trained in ritual, they were believed to possess occult powers. F.E. Pargiter writes in Ancient Indian Historical Tradition: "The original Brahmins were not so much priests as adept in matters supernatural, masters of magico-religious forces, wizards, medicine men." As much as he feared the Kshatriya's sword, the common man must have been terrified of the Brahmin's capacity to cast spells.
Whatever their position in the distant past, there is no doubt that Brahmins reached the zenith of their prestige under British rule. "The British needed a class of scribes to man their lower bureaucratic positions," said Gupta. "In those days the only literate castes were the Brahmins and Kayasthas, and these were the ones the British recruited. These salaried positions gave the Brahmins extraordinary power over Indian society."
