I was recently forced to overhear a conversation between strangers, two Indian women, who met on the Bhopal-Delhi Shatabdi Express. They quickly zeroed in on each other's caste. One was a Kayastha (a privileged non-Brahmin) and the other, the younger woman, a Brahmin. Both were happy to discover that they had a Kayastha connection – the Brahmin woman revealed that she had married a Kayastha man. Then they dwelt briefly on the many subcastes and hierarchies within the Kayasthas – Mathur, Sinha, Saxena, Nigam and Shrivastav. The Brahmin woman, employed in the information-technology department of an insurance company, stated with distinct pride that, when all is said and done, Brahmins had 'sharper minds' and were born more 'intelligent'. To substantiate, she talked of how her Brahmin brother always outwitted her non-Brahmin husband in decision-making.
The Brahmin brother, it seems, could always convince his Kayastha brother-in-law of his point of view, whether on a financial matter or where to go on holiday. The quieter Kayastha woman did not protest any of this. Even when the diminutive Brahmin woman later concluded – with her own theory of caste eugenics – that her children had developed a 'better physique' owing to the Kayastha father, she underscored that she did not compromise on a vegetarian diet. Now, what would be the caste of the children of this Brahmin-Kayastha marriage, with its own power dynamics? Surely, given an option, it is unlikely they would register as 'no caste' in the forthcoming Census of India – the first to include a section on caste in nearly seven decades. Even in such mixed-caste offspring, the importance of caste in their minds would not be discounted.
That caste inflects almost every aspect of life in India, and large parts of Southasia, is a fact, as highlighted in Himal's April 2010 issue on its pervasiveness. In a society where caste is an overwhelming reality, it would seem that counting castes would have begun long ago. Surely it is not as though India will now become a caste society when caste is, finally, counted; but when every caste does get counted, there would be official recognition of what post-Independence India has been trying to ignore for decades, seeking to present a homogenised identity to the rest of the world. So far, since only the Scheduled Castes and Schedules Tribes have been getting counted, debates around caste have tended to focus on issues of reservation and atrocities against Dalits. For long, questions of ameliorating the disabilities forced upon people owing to the practice of caste or its utopian annihilation (which someone like B R Ambedkar dreamed of) have been jettisoned. Among the Brahminical castes, the question of caste has been reduced to a skewed debate around quotas – wherein the incursion of the Dalits and Backward Classes into hitherto-reserved public spaces is equated with the loss of 'merit' and therefore lamented. While maintaining the ideological bulwark, a majority of urban Brahmins also deny the very existence of caste, and behave as if they have 'exited' caste.
While conceding the need to count castes, what might be the political fallout of such an exercise – especially in terms of how it might affect the polarisation between Dalits and the 'Backward' and 'Other Backward' Classes (BCs and OBCs, as a bulk of the Shudra castes are designated by the Indian Constitution)? For the moment, let us set aside what could be characterised as the Brahminical objections to counting castes – represented by a medley of both liberal and neo-con voices that includes Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Barkha Dutt, Dipankar Gupta, Nandini Sundar and Gopalkrishna Gandhi, among others. That 'empirical' need for this ostensibly comes from the fact that in 2007 the Supreme Court of India stayed the order against the admission of OBCs to educational institutions citing lack of 'reliable data'. The demand for this, however, predates the reservations-related recommendations of the Mandal Commission, of 1980, or more recent debates around the issue.