What is new about caste today is that, whether as idea or as experience, it is now articulated – in both senses of the word. Used as a verb, articulated means 'made distinct', 'set forth' or 'expressed'; used as an adjective, it describes something 'having segments united by joints', or 'consisting of elements joined in a flexible arrangement'. Thus, caste today is spoken, expressed, made explicit – it is no longer silenced or repressed as it was in the Nehru era. And caste today is very much a jointed, segmented or multi-layered reality – it is no longer something singular and homogenous. The problem is that these two aspects are in active tension with each other. The political language in which caste has been spoken is unable to acknowledge its segmented nature; indeed, it even seems as though caste assertion is only possible by insisting that it is singular and indivisible. This is not a problem unique to caste, it reappears in other contexts as well. To fashion new political languages that can voice concerns without evading fractured and contradictory realities – this is the crucial challenge of our time.
The loudness and omnipresence of caste in India's public arena today needs to be contrasted with the mute marginality that preceded it. What might be called the 'silent era' of caste stretches across the five decades that separate the Poona Pact of 1932 and the emergence of the 'caste atrocity' in the 1980s. Of course, the silence is only in the so-called 'national sphere', and in public discourse. At the regional level, caste was always prominently public; and outside public discourse, in everyday life everywhere, caste was an integral if constantly changing part of social existence.
The Poona Pact is the name given to the arrangement by which the Depressed Classes (as the 'untouchable' castes were then known), led by B R Ambedkar and others, were forced by M K Gandhi to forego a separate electorate and agree to be represented by the Indian National Congress. In return, they were promised special concessions, later included in the Indian Constitution and popularly referred to as 'reservations' – caste-specific quotas in the legislatures, in government jobs and in education. The shift from the flawed but fertile mechanism of separate electorates to the politically emasculating device of reservations manoeuvred the untouchables into the position of supplicants dependent on the largesse of the very society that had excluded them. Thus, well before Independence, Gandhi had almost singlehandedly 'settled' the caste question at the national level. This settlement involved two crucial moves – equating caste inequality and oppression with untouchability; and presenting reservations as a sort of 'full and final payment' of the material debt owed to the untouchables.
The Nehru era simply cemented the Gandhian settlement by insisting on a 'caste-blind' state. Apart from reservations – which it treated as a regrettable political-moral compulsion – the new state refused to see, hear or speak caste, in deference to the formal equality decreed by the Constitution. Both oppressors and oppressed were exhorted to join the virtuous conspiracy of silence about caste, or risk being denounced as 'casteist'. Whether it was due to naive idealism or an upper-caste conspiracy, the fact is that such even-handedness was not just ironic or unfair, but politically unviable.