No, speaking in English won't rid India of caste
Here's a nitpicking rejoinder: Aaap kaun kasht hain? Aur kaun depart...(ment)?
To think that shifting from speaking Konkani to speaking only English at home is what it takes to form a new caste is not just hilarious, it is plain misguided, given the minefield that is caste in India. English becoming the main language in a privileged household today is like first Persian, and later Urdu becoming the language of the elite and cultured folks of the Mughal power centres like Lahore, Delhi and Lucknow.
Caste is not about a common language, it never was. It was and is about birth, lineage and stories of origin, and the resultant and accumulated inherited social capital of access, networks, privilege and opportunity in a highly hierarchical, discriminatory social system. The inter-caste, English-speaking households being touted as harbingers of a new caste are, alas, only more of the same. Savarnas marrying mostly other savarnas, with similar life stories and backgrounds, even if across religious and linguistic divides.
Transposing a well-known literary term like Indo-Anglian to name one’s anecdotal observations of a patchily defined sub-group of society is neither here nor there. I am not rankled at that point, even if it is slightly stretched.
Coming back then to the rest of the headline, and to the anecdata purporting to be proof for a grand new sociological-sounding finding about a certain "psycographic" and "demographic" being the newest and fastest growing caste. When the hardly sanguine term caste is used to make claims of something new, the social researcher in me begins to look at premise, implications, and revelations. I question my unease with the "like" responses to the article. Caste is a term we should be phasing out, and not popularising with oh-so-casual and misplaced usage.
It might be argued that the very way the term has been used, perhaps very loosely, very casually, even jokingly, by the writer, means its negation in his thoughts and world view. If it really means so little, why use it at all? And if people like us do not realise how seriously misanthropic the nature of caste identity has become in our lives, I really do worry for all of us.
I ask myself, is it advisable to use caste as a casual, loose catchphrase for a behaviourally defined but rather nebulous group, given the wider socio-political context, where caste is no "chill" word at all and can get you killed, excommunicated and rendered jobless — one that does not permit you to touch others, love others, or even share a meal with others?
Does its use in a less than factual way not mean a certain kind of entitled privilege-induced tone-deafness? Does it not signal a strangely circumscribed incestuous tunnel vision? I am not sure I know what to make of it fully, but the article comes across to me as self-absorbed navel gazing, and the premise (conscious or unconscious) underlying it — that caste is just another word for a somewhat homogeneous group is troublesome.
Caste cannot be created, it is what you are born into. That is the defining feature of the phenomenon. Sanskritisation has been one way for the lower castes to rise up the caste hierarchy by slowly acquiring signs and symbols of a higher caste, sometimes over many generations, something made possible with the accrual of greater power and control over resources and the social discourse.
In the more recent context, caste-based reservations have been the way of social, political and economic progress for many caste groups otherwise considered backward or more marginalised in the traditional structure. Then of course there is always the rare and risky business of marrying across and "above" your caste for women, thereby allowing children to acquire the caste of their fathers.
But these are really the exceptions that establish the rule of caste as a birthright or birthcurse. I know of an English speaking chauffeur from Calcutta, who married his employer’s daughter. His fluency in English didn’t ensure he would be easily accepted by his bride's family. I am sure that would still be the case with an English-speaking, not too poorly off "not-suitable caste" person today. I also know of a very posh English speaking man marrying his even posher English speaking daughter to a Hindi medium type same caste wealthy man because... money and position, you know, and of course caste approval.
And while caste is what you are born in, language skills and social polish can always be acquired.
Far from being inconsequential in the larger scheme of things, the politics and power of caste are on the rise, actually, empirically, in newer ways, in India, by newer means, but towards the same end, as always. Caste-based reservations in jobs and the electoral process are only increasing with greater political assertion among more and more caste groups. The fastest growing castes by numbers, meanwhile, as inferred from various indirect sources — including the government conducted SECC 2011 — at this time in India are the lower ranked caste groups, which are distinctly non Indo-Anglians (IAs) as described in the above article.
Fertility rates for highly-educated, economically well-off groups in all societies are typically lower than those of the traditionally underpriviledged groups.
The point then, is, that all through history, the elites have been small in numbers and disproportionately powerful in other ways. They have managed to hold on to and build on benefits accrued from ascribed caste or caste-like advantages over millennia. Their apparent increased control of power only means their power is growing even faster. It does not make them the fastest growing group/caste, though. Nor is the IAs cluster really something newest.
English is the language of the elites of this country for a number of historical reasons, there is nothing new about only English-speaking households, though their numbers are no doubt going up. Nehru spoke to his daughter in English, all those years ago. Some of my paternal uncles spoke in English with each other and with most other relatives, and yet continued to identify with the "caste" they were born into, while defying all its rituals and tenets.
This was in the 1960s and '70s. I have seen a lot of IAs of quite diverse sorts up close since my childhood. And while I admit these folks act like an in-group and marry their own type of IAs, who doesn’t? And while it may seem that IA is their core commonality, actually it goes way deeper than that. The reason that they even can be IAs is in fact their accident of birth, and the subsequent chances this bestowed them with. An upper caste Tamil Iyer marries an upper caste Assamese Brahmin and their home becomes English-speaking and remains as much an elite savarna household as any of the grandparents’ homes. New caste, this?
Successful elite do all they can to earn and maintain advantages within their groups and keep their superior position within a social order. If it means adopting a language other than the mother tongue, so be it. If it means expanding older boundaries of endogamy to have a better chance of matching with "equals", so be it.
Basically, adaptive changes like this keep the advantages with the elites, without changing the essential system. This English-speaking globalised upper castes westernised elites in India, being called IAs today, have been the same groups essentially, who hold power of all sorts, since over centuries, even when they did not speak only English at home. What has changed and is changing is only some traits within a certain sub-group of the top SEC, if we use a market research and advertising term.
It is going to be a great topic of investigation in sociology and political science to see how English education will impact the newer emerging OBCs and other groups who have not had traditional power in our society. Will English language and globalisation make some of them integrate into the elite IA "caste" through marriage or other kinds of assimilation? Or not? Will it lead to be some other remaking of who are the elites, to clashes and conflict, and what will be the place of English language skills in such a clash? I think the answers are hardly simple or predictable, and a long way off.
There is also all the the IA elite exclusion, marking of territory, establishing hierarchies and boundaries, in new and old forms. Ask any one of the IAs if they will count anyone who reads English books by Chetan Bhagat as one of them, as a bonafide member of this newest fastest growing caste of Indians. And while on this vexed matter of in-groups and exclusion and ascription, do also read the heart-wrenching tragic modern take on class and race and elite exclusion in Zia Haider Rehman’s uber brilliant novel, In the Light of What We Know.
Finally, about those so-called cultural markers and signal products of this newest fastest caste, the facetious point about new age gurus, for one, is so thoughtlessly made. Does no one remember the Bhakti movement? And as for the followers of these gurus being non-religious, perish the thought. Most followers of these gurus and practices are as religious as they come. Diversity of mathas and deras and gurus had always been a part of the nature of faith and its expression in various Indian traditions, since long.
Remember Annie Besant and the theosphists and the Brahmo Samaj. It is only presented and approached differently now with newer tools, and technology like social media and modern marketing. Elites always took care to equip their next generation to be able to manage and grow their legacy. The newer universities and career tracks for their kids are the same old strategies. All the talk of signal products the writer attributes to the "new caste" is also an old story.
Lifestyles change, fads change, needs change, and so do the brands and goods that are favoured by the trendsetter elites and their followers. New trends are always targeted and picked by elites, specially when they are costly and not easy to access for all. As for electoral power, votes are a number game and this tiny segment of the powerful never was and never will be the voteblock that can sway ballot boxes with sheer numerical strength.
Elections are a game of chess, played with the masses as pawns, made up of over 50 per cent non-savarnas, and even then the majority of office-bearers at all top levels of government and private industry and education and cultural bodies are the same old savarna elites from which come the IAs. There is something new afoot, undoubtedly, in the social structure of our population. I observe this around me across the land, across urban and rural India, in trains, buses and planes and homes and offices and markets and public spaces.
There is a definite emergence of a new kind of Indian who is confidently taking up space in the public imagination and the public arena. She is the kind of Indian who was physically and visually very much in the margins till a couple of decades earlier. Faintly seen, hardly heard, and really not given much attention to by us, the IAs.
That is the Indian I see aggregating visibly in larger and larger numbers. These are people who mostly will not make the cut for admission into the IA "caste" and are in fact quite conscious and close to their ascribed caste identity, and are not ashamed to flaunt their religion and are a long way off for various reasons from joining the new age international schools or liberal arts colleges or buying expensive branded or imported organic food or ahimsa silk.
They do, however, like Baba Ramdev and buy his range of products. They do flock to ashrams and yoga camps and look for farm fresh produce. They are part of the fastest demographic explosion in India and fuel the rapidest spell of its urbanisation. They are the new aspirers and the new consumers. This demographic is hard to miss if you look around beyond a limited close circle.
They are the old castes, upper, middle, lower and lowest, and they are growing new in the fastest of ways.