In all literate discussions on Indian politics, it is assumed, quite rightly, that Brahmins have constituted the core group in the Congress-led alliance system which has ruled India since independence with the exception of the brief Janata interlude between 1977 and 1980. But seldom, if ever, are related issues raised in these discussions. This inevitably distorts the political discourse in the country, regardless of who engages in it.
The first major source of confusion and distortion is the widely accepted proposition that the Brahmins have played a key role in national politics and in the administration and much else besides, because they were the first to take to western education under the British raj in view of their long-established literary tradition and that in relative terms they have managed to maintain their lead. By itself, this view is, of course, accurate, but it misses the heart of the problem.
To begin with, I would say that the revolutionary significance of the consolidation of the process of state formation under the British needs to be recognised before we can hope to make sense of what has been happening in our country for over two centuries. Such was the balance of social and economic forces in the subcontinent before the arrival of the British, including during the Mughal period, that the state as an entity above society could just not entrench itself as it could and did in neighbouring China and Iran, for example.
Obviously, such a revolutionary change could not have taken place unless it was accompanied by equally dramatic changes in society. Such changes in fact took place beginning with the 18th century. Indeed, the supposedly eternal India of settled peasant communities arranged in a fairly rigid caste hierarchy is very much a product of developments in the 18th and the 19th century. The peasant won his battle against the nomad and agriculture against pastoralism finally only in the 19th century. The consolidation of the Brahmin ritualistic hold over the rest of Hindu society too was a result of this revolutionary power shift between the village and the forest.
No Reference
It is difficult to find in our political discourse even a passing reference to this or related issues such as the conversion of vast tribal populations to Hinduism (Brahminism) although it is a verifiable fact that Hinduism won over many more millions under the British dispensation in the 19th century than Islam and Christianity put together. But I have of necessity to pass over the consequences of this neglect for our intellectual and political life except to note that the problem of communalism also needs to be viewed in this perspective of the decline of fluidity in social arrangements and the growth of rigid classifications resulting from the victory of the settled peasantry over nomad groups and the virtual elimination of the great forests which had provided refuge in the past to warrior and tribal groups against the invaders and the rulers.
My concern in this piece is to draw attention to two other inter-related aspects of the rise of the Brahmins and their allies such as the writer caste of Kayasthas under the British dispensation. “Rise” is, of course, not the correct way of describing the development because these groups wielded considerable influence under the Mughals and the new courts that arose in north India during the disintegration of the Mughal empire. But I cannot think of a more appropriate expression because it was only in the British period that the sword ceased to be the principal instrument of securing and wielding power and the groups in question consolidated their hold on society.
Dominant Position
Leaving aside the top layer constituted by the British, the Brahmins and the neo-Brahmins (the khatris in Punjab, the Kayasthas in Delhi and UP and the vaidyas in Bengal, for example) acquired a dominant position in both the state apparatus the British established and the professions such as law and medicine which arose as a result of the spread of modem education.
As far as I am aware, the state and the professions have been clubbed together as if they constituted one single category manned by the same group of western-educated Indians, a sizeable number of them being Brahmins. In my view, however, they need to be treated as separate categories, the state being the more important of the two and attracting in its fold top echelons – “superior” (better educated and brighter) Brahmins and neo-Brahmins.
I can easily anticipate that this observation will cause a furore. I will be told that individuals like Pandit Motilal Nehru and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru could not possibly be described as “inferior” Brahmins. But however unpleasant, the fact remains that they were. Any serious student of Indian social history would know that the Brahmins of UP with Benaras as their centre did not regard the Kashmiri pandits highly as a group since the latter ate meat and fraternised with the Muslim elite, that the Nehrus were not among the leading Kashmiri pandit families in the 19th century, and that Motilal Nehru himself wanted his son to join the much-coveted ICS.
The Brahmins alone among the Hindus are at once a varna and a caste (jati). They are, therefore, a more coherent group than any other varna, the others being divided into numerous castes, each with a hierarchy of its own. But the Brahmins too are graded. If my memory serves me right, there were 24 yardsticks by which a Kanyakubja brahmin’s status used to be determined before the process of modernisation brought in new yardsticks. At present, I am concerned, however, with only one broad division among the western-educated brahmins during the British period – those who served the state and those who took to the professions, especially law, and through it to politics.
It would be wrong for me to suggest that the boundary between the state and politics was wholly impermeable It could not be because individuals with more or less similar backgrounds manned both sides of the fence. But the boundary was well drawn. Hardly anyone ever crossed from one side to the other, hardly anyone ever resigned from the government.
The Indian National Congress was organised, quite deliberately, on the model of the raj from Congress president (with his working committee as a parallel to the viceroy’s executive council) down to the district committee chief (the counterpart of the district collector). We had even our “king-emperor”, of course an uncrowned one, in the Mahatma. But the Congress was not a natural offshoot of the state. It constituted a different realm and not just because it wanted to take over the state from the British overlords. It constituted a different realm because it sought to bring back into the sphere of the state those very social forces whose subordination to the superior prowess of the British alone had made the formation of the state possible. Nationalism, despite its western-brahminical overlay, was the ideology not of the would-be inheritors of the Indian state but of the disinherited. Gandhi, not Nehru, embodied their range. His fury was directed as much at the state as it was directed at the British masters.
The barrier between the state and politics was too basic to disappear with the departure of the British. It did not. It could only be mediated by the dominant Brahmins, and so it was by Nehru. But mediation between such adversaries can at best avoid a headlong confrontation, it cannot help resolve the conflict. The conflict between the state and politics in India was contained reasonably well during Nehru’s ascendancy because the challenge to his own authority did not crystallise despite the majority of the electorate voting against his party in one general election after another.
Conflict Emerges
It came into the open under Indira Gandhi because she needed to use the state machinery to master the political forces which threatened to overwhelm her and with her the mediatory process and agency. The former felt compromised and never forgave her for it. There was a period of quiescence in 1985 and 1986 under Rajiv Gandhi when not only his adversaries in opposition but also his “supporters” in the Congress lay stunned under the hammer-blow of his landslide victory at the polls in December 1984.
The conflict revived in 1987 and rages in full fury. Rajiv Gandhi is not able to mediate because he is not able to dominate the political process and through it the state, as Nehru could do with ease and Indira Gandhi with difficulty. His own Brahmin battalions in the Congress are disaffected and demoralised. The Congress alliance system is in trouble not only because the Muslim and Harijan allies have become too demanding but also because the core (leadership) group has lost much of its confidence and élan. Its ideology as worked out by Nehru lies in tatters. Rajiv Gandhi faces the formidable task of rallying the old faithfuls under a new banner.
This is the fourth article in the series beginning with ‘The Congress Coalition’, July 20
The Times of India, 10 August 1988