The Banality of Caste
Arendt, Ambedkar & the terrifying normal that subsumes us
In the same way it’s unlikely to find mainstream, well-respected voices advocating openly for racial discrimination, it’s rare to find self-declared proponents of caste. Caste is an evil idea on its face, so few intelligent people are willing to stand by it publicly. Despite this, the caste system seems to retain total power over India and its people.
India’s National Crimes Records Bureau (NCRB) reports that atrocities against Dalits and Adivasis (India’s indigenous people) continue to grow in number every year. In 2000, NCRB reported 25,455 recorded crimes—finding that every day, three Dalit women were raped, two Dalits were murdered, and two Dalit homes were burned down. Today, the number of recorded crimes is a ghastly 57,582.
I’m always reluctant to detail these, but for the sake of awareness: just the most recent examples include the rape of Dalit minors and women, Dalits being forced to drink urine (and cow urine being used to “cleanse” water tanks used by Dalits), Dalits being beaten to death, Dalits forced to perform humiliating labor, and so on. Not captured in crime reports are the ubiquitous experiences of caste in everyday life, like workplace discrimination, religious abuse, untouchability, endogamy, and so on.
How can a system with such few avowed supporters still manipulate masses of people towards its evil ends—and for thousands of years, at that? There are many explanations, but I will suggest one not often applied to this topic: the banality of evil. A simmering mix of religious conditioning, social architecture, and moral failure have rendered caste an everyday practice for everyday people.
“Terrifyingly Normal”
When philosopher Hannah Arendt reported on the 1961 war crimes trials of Adolph Eichmann, a Nazi official responsible for helping implement the genocide of millions of Jews, she penned four words that altered the trajectory of global ethics: “the banality of evil.” Arendt observed that Eichmann was not psychopathic or sadistic, but “terrifyingly normal.” As she put it, “The deeds were monstrous, but the doer—at least the very effective one now on trial—was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.”
Arendt concluded that the doing of great evil did not always require malicious intent, but could emerge from somewhere outside the human heart—in this case, the bureaucratic machinery of a totalitarian government. Eichmann was not an exception; rather, any ordinary, even well-meaning person could serve as a blind instrument for immense harm. The past and present are littered with examples of everyday citizens and employees quietly, mindlessly perpetuating systems of unimaginable evil. Caste is one such problem.
Unlike other engagements with the problem of evil, Arendt addresses evil specific to an age of totalitarianism. A totalitarian state forbids individual freedom, subordinating its citizens and controlling every aspect of their lives. In Nazi Germany, this meant individual conscience was subject to political authority, enemies were dehumanized with propaganda and bigotry, independent thought and dissent was squashed, and the masses were manipulated with misinformation and pseudoscience. Such an environment is intentionally designed to coerce people to do evil, whether or not they intend to. The caste system is not the same as Nazi Germany, for obvious reasons, but it does exhibit many of these features.
Contaminated Water
Novelist David Foster Wallace famously imagined a fish’s response to a question about water: “What the hell is water?” Our environment, however perceptible and empirical, is often the thing we notice the least. We rarely observe how our habits, thoughts, and behaviors are subconsciously influenced by the environments we inhabit—like the order and number of choices we face, the technologies we use, our language, diet, culture, and so on. If the contaminant of caste lies upstream of such things, we are swimming in foul water—and we don’t recognize it.
Scholar Balmurli Natrajan calls caste both “brutal and banal.” In the anthology Caste is Life, he describes how caste is gently instantiated in non-dramatic features of life, including the procurement, preparation, and consumption of food, geographic demarcations between caste-segregated neighborhoods, and even colloquial distinctions between ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ objects or behaviors. Natrajan even takes aim at India’s hallmark greeting: “the namaste with folded palms, serves our caste system by not requiring people to touch as is normal in other parts of the world.”
By design, the practice of caste requires constant, everyday reminders. That’s why surnames, occupations, diets, entry, participation in religious traditions, etc., are all coded to indicate caste. These norms reinforce the caste order while requiring little thought, initiative, or deliberation. They represent a social architecture of routinized, ritualized norms that are not neutral but deliberate nudges towards a fundamentally evil practice. What makes these norms so pervasive, however, is that they first emerged as religious doctrines.
The Design of Moral Backwardness
Whenever evil is propagated in the language of morality or law, it possesses a unique staying power. In theocracies, religious dogma or the threat of punishment can trump individual discernment, moral progress, and free thought. India represents a society and culture conditioned by millennia of religious influence—namely, that of Brahmanism (proto-Hinduism).
In the Hindu text Manusmriti, the four castes—Brahmins, Vaishyas, Kshatriyas, and Shudras—are prescribed rules for almost every part of their waking life, including names, housing, education, marriage, sex, property rights, clothing, diet, and so on. Here is one such command concerning Dalits and Shudras (Note: Shudras are the lowest of the four-caste order—yet are still positioned above Dalits):
“Near worshipped trees and cremation-grounds, on hills and in groves, these shall dwell, duly marked [by caste], subsisting by their respective occupations. The dwelling of [Dalits] and Śvapacas shall be outside the village; they shall be made ‘Apapātra,’ [untouchable] and their wealth shall consist of dogs and donkeys. The dress of the Shudra shall be the garments of the dead; they should eat their food from broken dishes, black iron shall be their ornaments and they always should wander from place to place.” (Manusmriti 10.50-52)
These exact edicts have informed—to this day—where Dalits and Shudras live, what they do for work, what they wear, and even which dishes they are served food on.
The Manusmriti also dictates that people must only marry within their own castes; for Brahmins, marrying a Shudra would irreparably pollute their bloodline. In fact, India’s 2,000-year-old moratorium on genetic mixing can be traced to the publication of this very text. With an inter-caste marriage rate of just 5% in 2016, this obsession with caste endogamy continues today.
Caste draws strength by addressing concepts of purity and pollution, framed as touchable and untouchable. If all evil systems share a tendency to dehumanize, one can understand how people might easily commit gratuitous violence against a group of people divinely ordained as Untouchable—subhuman, impure to the touch, sight, or sound, disgusting.
Caste attacks these base instincts of judgment, like disgust, which inevitably trump reason. Evil doesn’t require one to think—just act. That’s why Arendt called evil “thought-defying.” In fact, the Manusmriti literally bars certain castes from thinking vis-à-vis learning and teaching. It gives the three upper castes the ability to study but only offers Brahmins the ability to teach, instruct, and rule. Conversely, Shudras and Dalits are considered unfit for learning, and anyone found guilty of advising them is threatened with hell.
Even if one questions such norms, caste employs widely held beliefs like dharma and karma to fortify its social imaginary. For comparison, these ideas are as fundamental and banal to India as first-order principles like individualism and liberty are to the West. Dharma, the cosmic law governing individual behavior and social order, dictates that one follow their caste-specific roles, duties, rituals, and vocations. By following one’s dharma, one earns good karma, which might advance them up the caste ladder in their next life (or conversely, lower). According to the Manusmriti, if a Shudra even issues a correction against a Brahmin concerning his dharma, he risks having hot oil dropped in his mouth or “a red hot iron pin tenches long” thrust in his mouth. He is, after all, “created by Brahma to serve the Brahmins,” and “can be slain at the pleasure of his master.”
Many of these religious edicts are not necessarily “non-dramatic” in the way that Natrajan details earlier. They represent a level of cruelty and sadism that would violate every universal law of conscience. Still, they are effective. In our twenty-first, morally progressive century, this sort of spiritually sanctioned savagery still appears in headlines, written first on Dalit bodies. In the way that a totalitarian Nazi regime usurped the conscience of ordinary Germans, centuries of Brahmanical religious conditioning and social architecture have overtaken our moral norms in subtle yet reliable ways.
A Failure to Think
In his magnum opus Annihilation of Caste, Dalit intellectual and architect of the Indian Constitution B.R. Ambedkar writes, “The effect of caste on the ethics of the Hindus is simply deplorable. Caste has killed the public spirit. Caste has destroyed the sense of public charity. Caste has made public opinion impossible.”
Caste represents moral rot at the heart of Indian society, tainting any and every thing that grows on it. When caste reproduces itself through generations of society, its people are not free. There is no free will nor goodwill, no free thought nor discerning conscience. The machine moves us along, and we are subsumed towards its ends. Social indifference, apathy, and silence among the upper castes normalize evil as much as the active presence of caste does. To Arendt, “Evil comes from a failure to think.”
It appears Arendt and Ambedkar had similar ideas about freedom, which begin with thinking. “Caste is a notion; it is a state of the mind,” Ambedkar writes. Free thinking can potentially shatter the banality of caste by compelling us to question inherited beliefs, reject the passive acceptance of tradition, and reimagine and implement alternatives. It involves a reclaiming of agency. Thinking isn’t merely an intellectual exercise but, as philosopher Immanuel Kant put it, an act of courage.
Minister Peter Marshall famously said, “A different world cannot be built by indifferent people.” If there is no moral agency, then the banality of evil triumphs. It is only when we can exercise our reason and consent amidst a social context that we act freely. That is why so much of the Dalit liberation movement prizes religious conversion—whether it induces a sudden material change or not, it is always a declaration of independence from an evil status quo.
In environments of evil, thinking is a duty. Arendt writes, “If the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ’demand’ its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be.”
All this said, there’s something that Arendt’s analysis doesn’t quite account for. In framing evil as banal, she writes that evil “possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension.” I reject the distinction. Caste is both banal and spiritual, both ordinary and demonic. As I explain in my next piece, Evil Has a Face, the animating spirit behind caste must be taken seriously if we are to have any enduring solution.
Really fascinating and informative, if difficult to reckon morally with, article to read from an outside perspective.
If you’ll forgive me the crude framing of the question, I wonder whether the reason that British colonisation of India was so all-encompassing and effective was due at least partly to the fact that, thanks to caste, the “dividing” in the imperial ‘divide and rule’ strategy had already basically been established in the Indian context? Perhaps there’s some works on this already you could point me to. Keep up the great writing!