Apr 29, 2017 06:05 PM
https://aeon.co/essays/how-india-deludes...on-is-dead
EXCERPT: [...] The new European arrivals saw in Indian society’s obsession with lineal purity and demarcated living an echo of their own understanding of racial purity. [...] every Indian knows that there is another aspect to caste: jaat, or jati. Jati is the caste identity that every Indian is born with, the multifarious groupings of clans, tribes, communities and religions that comprise Indian society. [...] Caste is no static pyramid. It’s a dynamic social organisation, both hierarchy and segmentation. The revered Dalit scholar and leader B R Ambedkar likened the jati system to ‘a string of tennis balls hanging one above the other’, the string twining about, separating each caste from the other. This image helps us understand how, within a hierarchy, castes can shift in status; how different jatis can each believe themselves superior to the other; and how neatly separated, as planets in a system, each group is from even those occupying a similar status. It is this intellectual duplicitousness – the simultaneous knowing and unknowing – that allows many Indians to claim that...
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/how-india-deludes...on-is-dead
EXCERPT: [...] The new European arrivals saw in Indian society’s obsession with lineal purity and demarcated living an echo of their own understanding of racial purity. [...] every Indian knows that there is another aspect to caste: jaat, or jati. Jati is the caste identity that every Indian is born with, the multifarious groupings of clans, tribes, communities and religions that comprise Indian society. [...] Caste is no static pyramid. It’s a dynamic social organisation, both hierarchy and segmentation. The revered Dalit scholar and leader B R Ambedkar likened the jati system to ‘a string of tennis balls hanging one above the other’, the string twining about, separating each caste from the other. This image helps us understand how, within a hierarchy, castes can shift in status; how different jatis can each believe themselves superior to the other; and how neatly separated, as planets in a system, each group is from even those occupying a similar status. It is this intellectual duplicitousness – the simultaneous knowing and unknowing – that allows many Indians to claim that...
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/how-india-deludes...on-is-dead