An Aversion to Progress: the cultural habitus of north Indian caste-histories

Abstract

I first came across Hindi author Indramani Pathak’s books in a small shop in in Mathura. The shop owner handed me Pathak’s Kshatryia-Rajput Vanshavali and Brahman Gotravali when I asked for local histories of the region. However, these books are not strictly histories according to academic protocols. Instead, they are more like caste-genealogies. They trace a nativist Hindu lineage from gods in Puranic mythical time, stake a Hindu civilizational claim over a sacred national geography of the subcontinent and barely refer to South Asia’s Muslim kings, except to describe a period of Hindu decline. All of this is narrativized through glaring factual inaccuracies, anachronisms and conveniently selective emphases and omissions in the use of evidence.

Through a careful reading of Pathak’s caste-genealogies, this paper will trace the larger contours and inner-logic of the complex caste-Hindu cultural habitus within which these texts circulate as histories. If thesetexts are not histories as we understand histories, then what are these texts? And if they are being circulated and consumed as histories, then what does history mean in this cultural milieu? What role is given to history in the lives of its subjects?

I suggest that these histories are texts aimed at providing a stable and meaningful identity for upper-caste Hindu young men frustrated by the unachievable prosperity once promised by globalization—men who are now brutalized by neo-liberal precarity. The books seek to resolve the contradictory pulls of being a high-born Hindu in a capitalist world that simultaneously undercuts the entitlement of the high-born by glorifying ideas of merit, rooted in exertion. I argue that these caste histories function as self-help books for young Hindu men to build pride. In doing this they act as a tool to help them navigate the world with greater ease by accumulating and consolidating their social capital.