The Hindu : Tolerance and exclusion

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Thursday, Mar 06, 2003

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Tolerance and exclusion

By Andre Beteille

Cultural diversity was always accompanied by a measure of social separation... Separation and exclusion were established features of the social structure well before the British or even the Muslims came to India.

INDIAN SOCIETY is marked by two contradictory features: the wide tolerance of diverse beliefs, faiths and way of life, and the stringent observance of social exclusion. This has been the case for a very long time although the balance between tolerance and exclusion has not always been the same.

Those who are inclined to present a positive view of the Indian social tradition stress the tolerance of diversity and argue that India's pluralist culture gives it a natural advantage in the pursuit of democracy. Of course they can see the tides of communal intolerance sweeping through the country, but these they regard as aberrations whose origins they attribute to external forces. It is in a way natural not to look too closely at the contradictions lodged in one's own society but instead to blame other for its maladies. Secular and left-oriented intellectuals tend to attribute most if not all the social and political maladies of contemporary India to the colonial regime and to some extent the ones which came after it on independence. Other nationalists go a little further and attribute them not just to British rule but even more to Muslim rule which preceded it. Left and right-wing intellectuals have this in common that they both assign the responsibility for the breakdown of order, harmony and unity to some external agency — the British imperialists in one case, and a combination of British imperialists and Muslim invaders in the other.On the opposite side are those who point to the myriad forms of social exclusion prevalent in India from ancient to modern times. This was the case with many civil servants and missionaries in colonial times who dwelt with relish on the Indian's preoccupation with exclusion and segregation in the past as well as the present.

No one can deny the profusion of languages, styles of life and religious beliefs and practices that have co-existed in India since time immemorial. The makers of modern India — Tagore, Gandhi and Nehru — took pride in the tolerance of diversity which they regarded as the defining feature of India's civilisation and the most valuable part of its cultural heritage.

The linguistic diversity of India is truly astonishing, languages belonging to the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian families have co-existed — and flourished — for hundreds of years. Sanskrit was introduced into the south many centuries ago, and it influenced the ritual idiom as well as the everyday language of the people; but it did not by any means extinguish the great Dravidian languages. The British introduced the English language into India, and its use has become more and not less widespread since independence; some of the best writers in the English language in the world today — Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh — are Indians or of Indian origin. Again, the spread of English through the length and breadth of the country has not led to the death or decay of any of the major Indian languages.

Most of the major religions of the world are to be found in India. Some of them, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, originated in the land while others, such as Christianity and Islam, which came from outside, have remained and grown in it for a thousand years and more. Islam did not bring Hinduism to an end, and Hinduism did not drive out Christianity. Each of the major religions is divided into a variety of sects and denominations. This great profusion of linguistic, religious and other customs and usages was associated with a multitude of castes and communities each of which was the bearer of a particular subculture or even sub-subculture which it transmitted from generation to generation.

The co-existence of the multitude of castes and communities with their diverse cultural practices was in the best of times maintained by a complicated balance of accommodation and exclusion. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that cultural diversity was always accompanied by a measure of social separation. Social separation was the general principle and social exclusion, as in the case of the untouchables and other marginalised or stigmatised groups, was only the extreme form taken by it. Separation and exclusion were established features of the social structure well before the British of even the Muslims came to India.

Separation and exclusion were maintained through the rules of commensality and connubium which regulated the exchange of food (roti) and of brides or daughters (beti). Only those belonging to the same community could freely exchange food and daughters; beyond that, there were restrictions of many different kinds. For all the damage that colonial rule may have done to the pride and self-respect of educated Indians, it did not invent either roti vyavahar or beti vyavahar.

Social separation and social exclusion were not unknown elsewhere, but the rules regulating food transactions were unusually elaborate, and those regulating marriage transactions unusually stringent in India. They did not preclude social interaction, even close and amicable interaction, between communities, but gave such interaction a distinctive character. Restrictions relating to food have become greatly attenuated as a result of modernisation to the point where many of them appear absurd even to those who remain very conscious of their caste or communal identity. Restrictions relating to marriage have also eased, but not nearly to the same extent and marriage within the caste or community is still the general practice.

Restrictions on food and marriage transactions were often, though not always, governed by considerations of superior and inferior rank and status. A group deemed superior might accept daughters from groups deemed inferior but would not give its own daughters in marriage to them: this is the principle of hypergamy or anuloma, discussed at some length in the classical literature. In the matter of food, it was the other way around. A group deemed superior might not accept food, or at least cooked food, or food cooked in water from one deemed inferior, but the later might accept any kind of food from the former. In these cases, division went along with hierarchy. Today, under the influence of democratic politics, the sense of hierarchy has become weakened, but the sense of division remains and may in some cases have even become strengthened. In India, as elsewhere, democratic politics has many unforeseen consequences.

As already indicated, separation sometimes took the extreme form of exclusion from the basic amenities of social life. There might be separation between two subcastes of Brahmins, for instance, the Smartha and Shri Vaishnava Brahmins of Tamil Nadu, in regard to both food and marriage transactions. Very different from that was the separation imposed on what were known as the exterior castes. Again, it has to be emphasised that the accommodation of diversity did not necessarily entail either equality or reciprocity. The system worked reasonably well and maintained a certain stability so long as each caste and community more or less knew and accepted its place in the general scheme of things. Democracy has destabilised the traditional hierarchy, and there is no way of putting it back in place again. It hardly helps to say that there was democracy of a certain kind in the past — village democracy or some other kind of democracy — and that we can try to go back to it. There simply is no going back to the past.

Centuries of separation and exclusion have led each caste and community to develop a strong sense of its collective identity and collective interest. The normal tendency of economic development is to blur the traditional boundaries between communities, but economic development in the 50 years has had that effect to only a limited extent. Democratic politics has, if anything, heightened the suspicion and mistrust between communities. Memories of exclusion, suffered for generations, are easily revived and they set caste against caste and community against community. The backward communities and the minorities feel that they are getting too little while the others feel that they are asking for too much. The accommodation of diversity is a very different thing in a democratic society from what it was in a hierarchical one.

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