No fixed variables

Redemption

Author - Anuradha Dutt

Publisher - Evolutes Publications, Rs700

This book demystifies the politics of gender, religion, and caste which bedevil Indian society, says Dinesh Sharma

The starting point for this book that tracks significant periods in India’s history, meshed with individual stories, is the premise that the country’s ethos and people’s lives are too complex to be seen merely through the caste and communal prism. Hemming in a continuously evolving milieu as well as the existential graph within the narrow confines of colonial ethnography and identity politics has really served to derail India’s destiny. And it is time that outdated social constructs gave way to “new expectations and birthing”, to quote from the introduction. The title Redemption sounds intriguing at first, but as you read on, the aptness is revealed. The book demystifies the politics of gender, religion, beef-eating and caste which bedevil Indian society. The accounts are both in flashback and fast-forward. It also takes a critical look at Western utilitarianism and theory of evolution in the context of Hindu metaphysics, centering on the mystical realisation that a worm is a “God to be”. The phased narration keeps you in a lively suspense about the story. The central idea, says author Anuradha Dutt in the introduction, was suggested by the nation-wide unrest following the implementation of the Mandal Commission Report by former Prime Minister VP Singh on August 7, 1990. The caste cauldron, simmering underneath, exploded and continues to roil Indian society in multiple ways.

The story explores the uneasy interface between class and caste against the historical backdrop to infer that there are no fixed invariables, contrary to Manusmriti’s system of graded inequality. The book’s virtue is that Dutt has tried to avoid the didactic and focused on facts. She cites Pauranic and other annals to establish that the Indian caste system was based not on birth but created. Even tribals and those called Shudras, Antayaj or untouchables and mlechh or aliens were incorporated into the social fold as Brahmins and Kshatriyas. British and free India’s institutionalising of the savarna structure are to blame for its perpetuity. Most surnames as caste indicators are a recent invention, in imitation of Western family suffixes, or even Hindu and Muslim titles.

Binding the whole together is the story of a joint family, Chaudhurys, who relocate from Dhaka before the Partition of India to Calcutta, city of Goddess Kali. A palpable focus is provided by the decaying house in which they live. They ascribe their travails to an unnatural death over two centuries ago in Dhaka. In our time, Tara, a divorced daughter, moves to Delhi so as to rebuild her life. Beginning with a train journey, which follows a serpentine trail, Tara’s relentless pursuit of happiness takes her to Nigambodh Ghat, where seekers look for their own nirvan in the cremation ground. The mysteries of the subterranean realm are unveiled, as too of heterodox paths that subvert orthodox taboos. While she tries to put her life in order, political feuds over control of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya culminate in its demolition.

The foray into India’s history demonstrates how Avestan, Abrahamic and Scythian influences eroded the equitable nature of Indic ethos. Iniquitous savarna postulates are juxtaposed with older, egalitarian religious evolutes — the whole sublime edifice of metaphysics — that are avarna, outside the varna matrix: Shramanic, Vedantic, Jain, Buddhist, tantric, Shakt, yogic, Sankhya, Nyaya, devotional, ascetic. Avarna peoples are similarly delineated. The narrative infuses facts with elements of magical realism; and is notable for exhaustive research into the processes that shaped India: Unceasing migration of peoples from other realms, their Sanskritistion and assimilation, and emergence of the savarna order, helmed by priests, perhaps as a means to absorb them. Historical, anthropological and sociological data, as well as Sanskrit annals are cited to trace the process of absorption of outsiders, tribals and subalterns into elite tiers. Caste is shown to be a cultural imposition, originating in the Avestan or East Iranian pistras that influenced the restructuring of post-Vedic society in the wake of Persian incursions in the latter half of the pre-Christian millennium.

Historian AL Basham in his 1954 book, The Wonder That Was India, noted the comparability between pistras and chatur varna. To quote from the introduction of Redemption: “Colonial administrators had select scholars formalise the extant text of Manusmriti, an early Christian millennium law book, created over many centuries, and riddled with inconsistencies and interpolations, to be deployed for categorising the people they governed. It postulated a four-fold hierarchy or savarna tiers, hinging on universal human archetypes that were modelled on pistras — priests, rulers/warriors, husbandmen and artisans/menials, in that order — of ancient Persia. Book 3 of Denkard (Acts of Religion), a 9th century AD Persian compendium of hoary pre-Islamic Avestan beliefs, customs and quotes detailed social hierarchy in bodily terms: Priests were the head; kings/warriors the hands; cultivators the belly; and artisans/menials the feet. ‘Purush Sukta’, a very late interpolation in Rig Ved, and clearly based on Avestan ideas, replaced belly with thighs and farmers with merchants”.

Swami Vivekananda’s view that Indians are a mixed race and that caste identity is malleable are supported by the Bhagavata Purana allusion to “Kirat, Hun, Andhra, Pulind, Pulkas, Abhir, Sumbh, Yavan, members of the Khas races and even others” seeking deliverance by embracing the Vaishnav faith, and, no doubt, other credos; and historical references to creation of savarna tiers. This is contrary to the colonial view that one is born and not made Hindu, premised on birth into a caste. Vivekananda described caste as a “hereditary trade guild that would be eroded”. Incorporation of scientific and anthropological findings that trace antecedents and genetic make-up of diverse castes and communities dispel myths about ancestry, notably the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’s Aryan-Dravidian divide, and trash the Aryan invasion theory.

Redemption is, indeed, a tour de force that takes one effortlessly from the remote past to the present, while proffering the flavour of life in Bengali middle class homes, as well as aspirational free India. Eighteen pages of colour pictures serve to bring the narrative alive.