Comment

India: Being Comfortable in Your Own Skin (Tone)

10
The Ghost of a Flea9/24/2011 2:21:04 pm PDT

Regarding caste:

Skin color is sometimes seen as an indicator of varna/jati/regionality—shorthanded as “caste” but way more complicated than the typical “four social classes” most people hear about…which are really, really ancient constructs that we’re not sure how they played out in actual history. As stated above, the general theory is that varnas entered the subcontinent with the Indo-Europeans, but the spatter-pattern of the concept suggests that it collides with a separate social classification system and the two synthesized.

The fast-and-dirty is that there’s the four varna (and two outlier categories, but that a tale for another day)—the “castes” everyone knows from Brahmanic texts and their World Civ class—but inside the varna are differentiated groups that are basically inherited statuses associated with one’s trade and societal niche…these are jatis, and they too are arranged into rough hierarchical structures. So there’s both a bloodline component and a status component related to ritual purity/pollution built into one’s daily tasks. However, jatis aren’t uniform across geography or time. Change your profession or location…or just get really good at local intrigue…and a jati can rise or fall.

The joke told by the gypsies my dad roamed with was:
Q: “How does a chandala (untouchable) become a Brahmin?”
A: “Walk two villages over.”

[One of the great shake-ups in Indian anthropology was fellows like McKim Marriot recording in real-time the re-categorization of a jati by cunning exploitation of the ritual and social criterion that set their relative status in a specific community, and big names like Srinivas and Ambedkar aggregating and theorizing—leading to the “sanskritization.” This has led to a re-evaluation of older monographs (mostly by Britons) that present caste as perfectly static.]

Regionality makes things even more complicated. Every region has their own pickling recipe and their own born-status hierarchy that makes a ladder out of the four varna. When two regional standards intermingle, there’s a lot of jockeying and rhetoric on who takes what position…but as more people move more distance those formal hierarchical distinctions are being flattened into something closer to regional stereotyping as an aspect of class. There are a couple of weird regional pissing contests that can be observed, like NI Brahmins poo-pooing SI Brahmins and SI Brahmins viewing NI ones as BrINOs.

Modern factors, like population dispersion, caste-based affirmative action (BC/OBC status is a good thing for a bunch of practical reasons), capitalist economics and consumption-driven identity have made this whole dynamic way, way more complicated, to the point that I can’t explain the picture meaningfully…more Boston Brahmins than Vedic ones.