This semester, I am teaching Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora, a novel published in Calcutta in the early 20th century. Published some years before Gandhi’s return to India from South Africa in 1914, and years before he would confront the issue of caste head-on, Tagore, the finest product of the Bengal Renaissance, responds to the issue of caste by pitting nationalism (in the form of orthodox Hinduism) against the reformism of Brahmo Samaj, the Society of God. Gora, the novel’s central character, considers belief in caste to be integral to nationalism, but the followers of Brahmo Samaj do not.

As I teach this novel, I see glimpses of it in the current resurgence of nationalism in both India and Nepal.  I often ask myself: Hasn’t India seen an emergence of orthodox Hinduism as upper caste superiority disguises itself as nationalism following the Brahmo liberalism of Nehruvian secularism? And isn’t republican Nepali nationalism a form of hill caste nationalism after the abolition of the Hindu monarchy? The only difference is that in the earlier version, Indian nationalism was pitted against the British colonialists, but now it is against the internal threat from the marginalised demanding their share of power. 

Bihar days

It also reminds me of the workings of caste ideology that I witnessed during my college years in Bihar. This caste ideology manifesting itself as strident nationalism appears against Muslims in India and against the marginalised in Nepal. While nationalism in India may be against Muslims on the surface, deep down it is a reassertion against the indigenous groups and Dalits. In Nepal, it appears against India but deep down, it is a regrouping of society against the Madhesis, Janajatis and Dalits. In both cases, this ideology is rooted in a sense of superiority and the desire for domination. 

For example, sanskar constituted a key concept among my so-called upper caste friends in Bihar. It is a word they used to distinguish themselves from the so-called lower castes. My upper caste friends called themselves sanskari, and were born with this innate virtue called sanskar. The more sanskari you were, the loftier your personality, the diviner your origin, the more light-skinned and sharper your features, the more intelligent your looks, and more obsessive your dietary habits. To me, it all appeared fuzzy.

I lacked many of these virtues. I loved onions and garlic, though I loved to eat fish and meat even without them. As for radishes and eggplants—white radish and white eggplant didn’t have even a fraction of the flavour of red radish and black eggplant. I was not tidy; my room was notorious for its messiness. And I argued for unconventional mores. Indians had killed thousands of human beings in the name of pigs and cows; so I argued why not eat garlic and chicken and what have you—yes, even pigs and cows, if one wished. A few years later, India would have a big communal killing in which two of my friends, one Muslim and one Hindu, would be murdered.

In the winter, as I didn’t sweat and it was too cold to wash—even in the holy waters of the nearby Ganges—I didn’t shower for days on end. Even in more temperate weather, I only showered when I needed, and not early in the morning but in the afternoon when it warmed up. I didn’t worship any gods or goddesses; instead, I blamed them for the Hindu world’s miseries. And my skin—the most important of all sanskars—had even my mother complaining. “What can I do?  It was God’s wish! He had fair clay only for me!” she would say and look up to the sky for mercy because I had dark skin. For all these reasons, I told my upper caste friends that I was not sanskari. My Brahman friend said it was true, the lack of certain virtues made me lack sanskar, but I was still sanskari because I was a Brahman. According to him, my last name was evidence enough.   

“Didn’t you hear what the gang leader called you—Black Babaji,” he reminded me. The leader of a gang of hoodlums had threatened me with my life, while addressing me with the sobriquet. The leader blamed me for planning and causing the revolution that had ended his hegemony and reign of terror in the hostel. Then my Brahman friend—without doubt one of my well-wishers—recited a couplet, favourite among the upper castes in those parts.     

“Black Brahman, pale Shudra

Beholding these, trembles Rudra.”

The meaning of this vernacular couplet is clear enough. Generally, a Brahman in India is supposed to be light-skinned and a Shudra (lower caste) darker. But there are many Brahmans who are dark-complexioned and many Shudras who are light-skinned. So how could the colour of one’s skin be applied as an infallible criterion and the irrefutable justification of the caste system be maintained? But for the Hindu society to function, the caste system must be maintained by any means. Hence this reverse logic. If a Brahman, by chance and quirk of subterranean matters, is dark-skinned, that’s all the better. Hindu society chooses to make such a Brahman superior to Rudra, the whimsical, dancing, pot-smoking, terrifying god Shiva.  Meanwhile, concession must be given to the light-skinned Shudras as well. They get upgraded to an elevated position—at least in informal beliefs; the deeply-entrenched social and familial customs would take care of the rest. In this way, both light skin colour and high caste are endowed with genetic superiority.

Virtues or looks?

I have since thought about the meaning of this strange word sanskar. Some of the dictionary meanings of this word are “purity, perfection, education, cultivation, embellishment, consecration, capacity, effect of the work, reproductive quality, such as vitality, elasticity, and mental impression, faculty of recollection, investiture with the sacred thread,” etc. 

The meaning of sanskar as used by the upper caste does include some of the meanings associated with rituals and habits. But the real meaning in current usage relates primarily to in-born genetic traits and skin colour, attributable to particular castes. One can say that my college friends used this word to represent a number of things: all assumed either present or absent—present among the high castes and absent among the lower castes. At the root of this usage, the concept of sanskari entailed racial superiority—in terms of colour and certain other biological features. When somebody said, “Look how sanskari he looks!” it obviously meant that the man looked brown, possessed a nose of a certain shape, had a certain elevation and width of forehead, etc. It was not very clear where the virtues ended and biological features took over. A mess of confusion existed.

A high caste by popular consensus had to be light-skinned. These light-skinned people were those whom the racist British colonialists referred to as “brown dogs”. If you were a “brown dog”, you considered yourself superior to the darker dogs, black being the lowest dog. Needless to say, the “white dogs” reigned supreme.

Even during my days in Bihar, the high caste boarders ranged from various shades of dark to pale. But the paler you were, the prouder you felt—even if you were foolish. The rhetoric of the lack of this magical sanskar condemned, without trial, all the so-called lower castes and validated all the so-called upper castes. In both India and Nepal, caste ideology has manifested itself in recent years as nationalism to find legitimacy and new ways of domination.