The Problem of Caste Violence and Death

Abstract

In his Slavery as Social Death, Orlando Patterson argues how slavery leads to the social death of a Black African American person. In the modern American history, segregation and Jim Crow laws perpetrated severe violence and deaths against people of colour (Black). Death by race is not a natural death as Orlando calls it Social Death. It is imperative to contextualize death by caste in a Hindu society. Hindu society is regulated by the structure of caste. B. R. Ambedkar argues that in the graded inequality of caste, Dalits are at the bottom of the ladder. The rights and duties are imposed on them on the basis of graded inequality, which goes against the natural rights of a human being.

Traditionally, caste is being studied in the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and recently, political science in analyzing elections and caste politics. However, each discipline of humanities and social sciences have not captured the totality of it. Nevertheless, a few concepts in studying caste are important including purity and pollution, domination, hierarchy, humiliation, exclusion, discrimination, violence, privilege and disprivilege, etc. My study of caste is inspired by studying such categories on caste but departs from it as well. I draw from Ambedkar’s writing on caste in order to argue caste as a system of death.

Ambedkar’s critical reading of Brahminical texts and traditions offers an interpretation to develop caste as a system of death. Ambedkar claimed that the Bhagavat Gita is a violent text, Manu Smriti perpetuates “penalty and punishment”, and Vedas and Ramayana establish the doctrine of graded inequality that is Chaturvarnya – a systemic way of life. In other words, reading Brahminical texts, one finds entrenchment of crime, cruelty, and violence in caste. I further study caste violence along the lines of death.