(Housekeeping first. Indosaurus is back and in form; “For Gandhiji” and “Liberal college bastions are taking body blows” and k jayas’s “30 seconds please“. Ordinarily I would open with viewer statistics; I’m dispensing with the ritual. The community is flourishing, and I would rather measure biodiversity than traffic.)
In DP’s telling India is down to three varnas: the Baniya, who owns the temple; the Brahmin, who guards it on salary and calls the arrangement dharma; and everyone else, rebranded anti-national upon objection. Stadium budgets flow to a state without medallists while the akharas that win them go hungry; the newsroom is Brahmin-bylined and Baniya-owned, the vegetarian canteen doing the work the salary won’t; ahimsa is reread as a doctrine of bloodless extraction.
Ahimsa Redefined
Take the milk, spare the cow; take the honey, spill nothing; empty an exchequer without cutting a throat and call it business. Nehru the Pandit, he reminds us, was unmade by Pandits while other men did the counting. And the merchant class, expelled from the fold in its Jain and Buddhist centuries, waited out the millennium and has made the priesthood its front office. “The Nagpur bowl is being refilled in Ahmedabad,” he closes.
The sporting structure he describes is not imaginary, India’s medallists come from Manipur to Kerala to Hyderabad, though Haryana’s share is so disproportionate. DP gives us a priesthood in service. But the priesthood that unmade the Pandit prime minister while other men did the counting was not obeying a master. I see a priesthood at war; with its own cousins.
The Sedimentary Elite
Every durable country is governed by a sediment. India’s old elite predates the Raj: strata deposited through the Sultanates and the Mughal centuries (the Rajputs kept rank by cavalry and accommodation), compacted under the Company, glazed by the ICS, lacquered by the licence Raj. Let’s call the true elite a basis point of its society, one in ten thousand, and give each member a network of a hundred: that is how a rounding error becomes a ruling class. The visible one per cent is essentially the network of the one-in-ten-thousand.
And that old Left-Liberal Nehruvian elite is post-caste in a very particular sense. It behaves like Bollywood: class first, everything else negotiable. It will happily admit the educated aspirant, Shudra, Muslim, anyone, who marries in and learns the table manners; long before it seats the pious, industrious twice-born up from the provinces, whom it privately files under country buffoon and hem them in with Reservations.
The Reservation Cleft
The snub is the point, and the snub is the recruiting sergeant. Reservations don’t block the children of the Old Elite, who anyway train in the West, but blocks their parvenu cousins. For the rural Uppers, the shakha supplies what the drawing room withholds: fraternity, status, vocabulary and eventually power. Hindutva is best read not as the lower orders storming the gates but as an upper-caste revolt of the provinces against a post-caste metropolis; a metropolis whose own bone structure is nonetheless upper-caste.
The Old Left-Liberal Elite looks on their rural Upper-Caste kin in a way a WASP may despise a Southerner but would never daresay to a minority for performing the exact same action.
Rahul Gandhi, a Brahmin whatever the exotic ancestry, personifies the drawing room; Modi, an OBC, commands a movement built and propelled by upper-caste cadre. The founders, cadre and intellectual infrastructure are provincial upper-caste, while the electoral coalition the movement later assembled reaches deep into OBC and Dalit India. Brahmins man both barricades. Hence the title of this piece.
The Elite Civil war
Nations inherit the pathologies of their founding elites, and the civil wars attending them. English liberty was less a gift from below than the residue of prolonged civil war within the ruling class; America is still litigating the quarrels of its founding stock. India’s peculiarity is the refusal to name its Left-Liberal elite at all. There is a half-serious case for titles: an aristocracy with letterhead can be balanced, taxed, mocked. It is the unnamed aristocracy that proves immortal.
(A Pakistan aside, since Kabir’s linked piece on provinces is still ringing in my ears. The provinces were not drawn for the parties, but they function as if they had been; redoubts where a movement beaten in Islamabad can govern, recruit and wait: the PPP in Sindh, the Sharifs in Punjab, PTI in KP. PTI are the proto-Pakistanis: the first cohort to buy the middle-class Pakistani identity whole – consolidation, not secession; the new Medina on layaway. Their war is generational: children formed by Pakistaniat against elders steeped in a shrine Islam that spent centuries absorbing local idiom alongside Hindu devotion.)
Which brings us to who actually needs religion. At the summit, tradition tends to ossify into heritage. No elite lives the orthodoxy: the Khans of Bombay are half-Hindu by blood or marriage, marinated in a Hindu environment whatever the surname. Tamil Nadu, Dravidianism’s own fortress, is so Hindu that the state emblem carries a temple gopuram even Periyar never troubled to contest; T.M. Krishna’s We, the People of India (a very good book and he is the Carnatic Singer of last night’s excellent performance) sits with that fact at length.
The Middle
Orthodoxy turns out to be a middle-class necessity: religion as portable code, standardised, legible, compatible with school, office and the nuclear family, lived exam to exam and paycheck to paycheck. The poor drift to the shrine and the syncretic edge because they have nothing to lose; the elite drift there because they have nothing to prove. The middle holds the line because the line is all it holds.
So yes: Nagpur’s bowl may well be filling in Ahmedabad. But look closer at the temple queue. The priesthood is not merely in service; it is in schism; metropolis against province, drawing room against shakha, cousin against cousin. Pattanaik sees a Brahmin who rented out his voice. I see two Brahmins fighting over what the voice should say. Civil wars are hardest to see when both sides wear the same thread.
Patnaik in my view tends to oversimplify a lot of things to the point that you lose sight of something( his drawing are very unique tho).
For starters,the two communities of Brahmins you mention, the elite suave brahmins and their country bumpkins are in reality one and the same, since this is not limited to brahmins but forward castes in general, let me use FC for referring to this class of people who have traditionally been dominant, who come for upper castes of all religions. While the more globalist ones among them ran the cities, the more rustic ones ran the villages with both using the necessary cultural methodologies to establish dominance in their respective areas.
It is clear that many rural FCs have joined the sangh in large numbers( barring member of religious minorities and those committed to the left or liberal thought), the urban FCs are not far behind. Ramesh Bhiduri who insulted his own colleges from the muslim community who happened to be muslim wins from south delhi for crying out loud, no bigger proof of the many suave, globalist and supposedly left liberal FCs have shifted over and still largely dominate the cities like their grandparents and parents did. This same pattern repeats in every Indian city, in the poshest of areas because for many of these people, power and privelege is an end in itself, very few of them are actually ideological.
One thing that getting bogged down in the ideological fights of the committed sections of the FCs hides is the declining relevance of this whole class of people as a whole. In rural politics the dominance of FC has effectivelty been ended by OBCs( though not being dominant does not mean one is not relevant). And in public education, and law Ambedkarites are gaining grounds on the FCs who have traditionally dominated these fields. Media is anyways dying so no need to consider that. And with increase in the number of SC/ST and OBC entering the professional courses like enginering and medicine, their dominance in the sciences will also be ending within this century.
The only exception to this reversal of dominance is the private sector where FCs, particularly traditional mercantile communities are still dominant, this is one of the reason why so many FC have a huge love for the private sector and immediately associate it with merit despite many organizations being both badly managed and even lagging behind govt counterparts in many cases. I wont bet on this dominance remaining though, and by lets say 2050 the way these look will also be changing quite a lot
In conclusion, the upper caste and class people of this country are much more united, largely are still dominant in the same areas their grandparents were by switching sides( so no the left liberal upper caste/class of the citys have just changed sides, not lost power) and this dominance is being chiseled away to relevance and as time goes one will decrease more and more as SC/OBCs and STs start taking a more center stage.
It is these people we should keep an eye on as to what they do.
//Reservations don’t block the children of the Old Elite, who anyway train in the West, but blocks their parvenu cousins. For the rural Uppers, the shakha supplies what the drawing room withholds: fraternity, status, vocabulary and eventually power. Hindutva is best read not as the lower orders storming the gates but as an upper-caste revolt of the provinces against a post-caste metropolis; a metropolis whose own bone structure is nonetheless upper-caste.//
One thing I want to repeatedly emphasize reservation is not a punishment or a conspiracy against upper castes of any categpory.
In the first case, the old elite and the rural uppers are kith and kin, who had different areas of influence and largely still do, because many of the old elite are also queuing up to the shaka. Both are also very anti reservation and would not have liked it to be there if they could help it.
The reason that this is there is that in absence of substantial social change, that would destroy the institutions and patterns of dominance that both the old elite and rural uppers benefit from, reservation is a small price to pay for keeping much of your socio-political dominance. Without reservation, the masses of India would be much less keen to engage with the state and the system at large. The whole furore over paper leaks in India is that it breaks one of the promises made to this section of society that if you work hard and get an education, you will be rewarded, so dont challenge the status quo too much, dont ask too many questions of your elites.
Both the old elites and rural uppers as you call them are united in what you also say is a post caste metropolis that they will have to sacrifice their privilege for.
I would like to flag an issue with Calvin’s commenting style in the threads. He posts too many of them at one go and almost all comments are longform. If he has so much to say he should write a post, which admin has offered him more than once i think, else he should extend some basic courtesies and keep his comments short and precise. If I have strayed out of my lane, admin can completely ignore/delete this comment
But you can skip over them; that would be over stepping on the Admin Team.
Yes I do skip them anyways if they are too long.
what happens to signal ratio in that case?
noise to signal is about abuse and courtesy.
The most popular man in the country is a Shudra.
Of the 31 CM’s in India, only 3 are Brahmin, just under 10%
I cannot remember the last time I saw a Brahmin in politics in my state, it is possible we have had a Brahmin CM, but not in my lifetime.
The largest business houses in India are still Parsee owned, with Tatas, Godrejs, Wadias, whatnot.
Basically the entire premise is that Adani and Ambani own everything and every govt secretary is Brahmin, except there are no stats to back it up, just perception from decades ago. Get the latest cadre numbers.
Counting caste is an appalling abominable disgusting business. I’m off to have a bath.
Brahmin is a euphemism in this case.
I don’t think Devdutt is talking euphemisms. And I don’t think it makes sense to use these words as such anyway. The views of caste are very different from each POV. A euphemism needs to have a common meaning, induce a similar feeling amongst readers.
We use Boston Brahmins. An apex elite..
Westerners and Chinese can look at this with detachment and consider Brahmins = elite.
Bollywood associates Banias with alternating ostentatiousness and miserliness. Brahmins with superstition and orthodoxy. These -ve stereotypes have been reinforced for decades now.
To an Indian context, there is a lot of baggage with these terms, the euphemism will not be universal.
The Varnas are too intermingled with Jatis, arguing about their original intent is a pointless exercise.
Calvin/XTM are doing a version of western press and ideological comrades do i.e. anything good from India is ascribed to South Asia and bad is associated to India and specifically to Hindus when appropriate. So brahmanism/hinduism has to bear all the burden of classism and elite predilections. ofc western tutelage (liberalism/missionaries) is always pitched as a panacea.
The 24 families of Pakistan have concentrated their wealth in much fewer hands yet attract much less scrutiny in comparison. This is to the point that even Pakistani contributors blame their Hindu heritage for the startling inequalities in their nation instead of their own policy decision. In comparison to their systems and economy India seems like a perfect liberal democracy. But I can understand the need for that propaganda.
If you look at the American Tributary states around China almost every single one of them surpasses China in terms of GDP per capita, Standard of Living, etc. However, the American Tributaries around India are all around the same ball part or explicitly worse than India in terms of their GDP per capita and other such metrics with the exception of Sri Lanka perhaps. Bangladesh which looked like a competitor initially is going through turmoil again due to its unstable government. Therefore, American propaganda has to take the form of only ideological coercion instead of economic and ideological coercion in the case of China.
what propaganda? I’m a bit surprised at how the Commentariat aren’t able to intellectually disentangle issues on equity without resorting to ad homimens and name calling
exactly where did I say this? please quote specific references?
Was I wrong to read this reply of yours to Indosaurus “We use Boston Brahmins. An apex elite..” as “steel-manning” or “charitable explanation” Calvin’s original attempt to ascribe all short-comings of Indic civilization to Brahmins?
Calvin has massive anti-GC / Brahmin blinkers on.
I was referring to my original post, rather than Calvin’s comment.
Yes Brahmin is a short hand for elite.
The point of the article is that the Left-Liberal elite, which has a genesis in a millennia of a making, and has predominantly, if not universally Upper Caste origins, is more guarded against Upper Caste rural bumpkins (who have the Socio-historical capital to threaten) rather than sub-altern masses.
This is a tale as old as time; Revolutions only happen the disaffected sub-elite is able to rally enough of the population.
Ariminius or even the French Revolution when the Nobility cast its lot agains the King. Or even in the Iranian Revolution when the Military turned against the Shah, which explains the IRGC.
Through the lense of an Upper Caste civil war the BJP’s rise as political hegemon is perfectly understandable.
You do the mistake, my friend, to presume I am ideologically, rather than intellectually, driven.
I think that’s an unfair characterization of XTM’s views.
DP is not a serious “intellectual “. He did make a valid observation on the class that governs India. The shrewd Gujjus run India. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Indosaurus is right in that jati and Varna are now all mixed up. I would go further to say that all jatis/ varnas / religious minorities comprise now of the elite class of India which XTM refers to as the Boston Brahmins (atleast that’s how I understood it).
Exact. Thank you Agni.
The “Boston Brahmin” class of India is the Nehruvian Left-Liberal elite.
pattanaik being a ‘ karana ‘,which is a kayasth caste ( scribes, clerks, hence literate, and also meat eaters), is continuing an age old battle with brahmins, the other literate caste. this quarrel has been happening over the centuries in the gangetic plains. so no need to worry too much.
in south india, kayasths are not present, and the role of clerks was done by brahmins.
Saraswat Brahmins and Bengali Brahmins are also non-vegetarian. Not to mention a big number of MH brahmins have also incorporated non-veg in their diet.
The real quarrel is between the two literate jatis, wherein kayasth’s claiming equivalence to Brahmins.
Doing priesthood duties and vegetarianism are on Brahmins’ side.
Being connected and worldly wise is on kayasth’s side.
yes..