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An Untouchable Community in South India
Structure and Consensus
By Michael Moffatt PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09377-2
CHAPTER 1
Models and Theories of Indian Untouchability
The present work is about Untouchables in the village of "Endavur," south India. It is intended as an ethnography, as a reasonably comprehensive description of the social and cultural context of "being an Untouchable" in a rural south Indian setting. But it is also intended as an argument, set in a structuralist mold. Briefly, the argument and the structuralism are as follows.
To be an Untouchable in a rural Indian caste system is to be very low in, and partially excluded from, an elaborately hierarchical social order. The consequences of this lowness and partial exclusion, however, are not those argued in much of the anthropological literature on Untouchability and caste. Untouchables do not necessarily possess distinctively different social and cultural forms as a result of their position in the system. They do not possess a separate subculture. They are not detached or alienated from the "rationalizations" of the system. Untouchables possess and act upon a thickly textured culture whose fundamental definitions and values are identical to those of more global Indian village culture. The "view from the bottom" is based on the same principles and evaluations as the "view from the middle" or the "view from the top." The cultural system of Indian Untouchables does not distinctively question or revalue the dominant social order. Rather, it continuously recreates among Untouchables a microcosm of the larger system.
More formally, the present argument is for fundamental cultural consensus from the top to the bottom of a local caste hierarchy — a consensus very much participated in by the Untouchables. "Consensus" here does not refer to simple and uniform agreement between actors of every rank in their spontaneous statements about caste and its cultural matrix, for no such consensus exists in south Indian villages. It refers, instead, to deeper and often unarticulated identities of cultural construction. The subject of these identities are such matters as the human and nonhuman units in the world, and the appropriate relations of these units one to another. The present argument for cultural consensus is not meant to rule out the possibility that power plays a role in the maintenance of this consensus. Nor is it meant to rule out the existence of certain types of cultural variation from caste to caste. But the argument is meant to suggest that these variations exist within, and must be interpreted within, a framework of shared definitions and values.
In what follows, cultural consensus will be demonstrated in a number of ways. First, cultural consensus or even identity will be illustrated descriptively, by setting side by side important collective representations of the Endavur Untouchables and of higher-caste actors. Second and more interestingly, cultural consensus will be demonstrated by a structural analysis involving the concepts of inclusion and exclusion, and complementarity and replication. Untouchables are defined in the present study as persons of a discrete set of low castes, excluded for reason of their extreme collective impurity from particular relations with higher beings (both human and divine). The same Untouchables are included, however, in other relations with these same higher beings. It is then shown that, in contexts in which Untouchables are included, they complement. They play the appropriate low roles necessary to the maintenance of the human and divine order. Complementarity is interpreted as an indicator of cultural consensus, but it is a weak indicator. For the Untouchables might be acting in accord with the definitions and norms of the total system because of the power of the higher castes, not because of strongly internalized agreement with the postulates of the system. The Untouchables might be "role playing."
There is a stronger indicator of cultural consensus in the present analysis, however. Structurally, it is here shown that where the Untouchables are excluded, they replicate. They recreate among themselves the entire set of institutions and of ranked relations from which they have been excluded by the higher castes by reason of their extreme lowness. Replication is a stronger indicator of cultural consensus than complementarity, since it operates within the Untouchable subset of castes, where the power of the higher castes does not directly operate.
In the following ethnographic analysis, this argument and its structural framework will become both more concrete and more complex. Ethnographically, the subject will be investigated in two broad domains: social relations (caste) and relations with the divine (religion). The description will proceed in opposite directions in the two domains. First, social relations will be unpacked, Chinese-box fashion, from large units (village and caste) to smaller units (grade, lineage, and family), to show the progressive unfolding of complementary and replicatory structures among the low castes of Endavur. Second, the same units will be reassembled, from small to large, in a description of the ritual relations between Untouchables and the deities of person, family, and territory. The structural vocabulary will become somewhat more involved as the analysis proceeds, and it will eventually include such terms as isomorphic transformation, code-switching, conflation, differentiation, many-to-one mappings and one-to-many mappings. But the general argument will remain the same throughout: for a pervasive cultural consensus between the Untouchables and the higher castes of Endavur.
The argument for a pervasive culture of caste among those whom the caste system appears to benefit least — the Untouchables — is in clear opposition to a set of disjunctive approaches to Indian Untouchability, approaches that argue that the essence of being an Untouchable is seeing the system in a different way. These disjunctive approaches in turn reflect quite different approaches to culture, to caste, and to comparative social inequality. "Consensus," in particular, is a fighting word in contemporary sociology, with a whole range of functionalist connotations often set in simplistic opposition to those of a more Marxian "conflict" perspective. Before we begin specific analysis of the present material, therefore, let us review in more detail these disjunctive approaches to Indian Untouchability and the theories of caste and social stratification to which they contribute — as well as the general and comparative framework to which the present approach to Untouchability is intended to contribute.
Early Images of Indian Untouchability
Perhaps the earliest and simplest Western image of Untouchability is embodied in the term "outcaste." In this view, to be an Untouchable is to be beyond the reach of Hindu culture and society, to be almost cultureless. Thus the Abbe Dubois, a remarkable French missionary with first-hand knowledge of village India between 1792 and 1823, contrasts the Untouchable "Pariahs" with those higher-caste Hindus on whom the system has had its beneficent moral effect: "We can picture what would become of the Hindus if they were not kept within the bounds of duty by the rules and penalties of caste, by looking at the position of the Pariahs, or outcastes of India, who, checked by no moral restraints, abandon themselves to their natural propensities." Dubois accomplished his protoethnographic goals in south India in the immediately pre-British period by acting as Brahminlike as possible, and his Brahminocentric view of the Pariahs includes a catalog of their "natural propensities" that includes drunkenness, shamelessness, brutality, truthlessness, uncleanliness, disgusting food practices, and an absolute lack of personal honor (Dubois 1959 [1815]: 29, 54-55). The word "pariah," which derives from the Tamil name for the caste to be described in the following pages (Paraiyan), has accordingly moved into the English language as a synonym for the socially ostracized and the morally depraved.
The early outcaste image, as it is articulated by Dubois, implies a major disjunction between the higher "caste Hindus" and the lowermost Untouchables, or outcastes. The very terms express the disjunction. The main body of the Hindu population "has caste," and is regulated by its social and cultural conventions, while the Paraiyans are outside the system and its restraints, and are thus in the grip of their distinctly reprehensible natures. The Paraiyans, Dubois continues, both deserve and accept their low and asocial state. "The idea that he was born to be in subjection to the other castes is so ingrained in his mind that it never occurs to the Pariah to think that his fate is anything but irrevocable. Nothing will ever persuade him that men are all made of the same clay" (50).
Implicit in this last statement of Dubois', however, is a contrary early image of Indian Untouchability, a simple consensus model. If Untouchables accept their status, they believe in the legitimacy of the system. If they further possess their own caste organization, they also act in accordance with the system. Dubois knew very well that Paraiyans and other low groups had caste organization, but he failed to draw out the implications of the fact. However, another Western observer of the same period did. Dr. Frances Buchanan, who surveyed newly acquired territories in Mysore for the British in 1799, describes the Untouchable Madiga as follows: "[The Madiga] are divided into small tribes of ten or twelve houses, and intermarry with the daughters of these houses only, in order to be certain of the purity of their race; of which they seem to be as fond, as those castes that are esteemed infinitely superior in rank" (Buchanan 1807: 640). Buchanan thus sees the Madiga as acting in the same way as higher castes, and in terms of the same values — concern with the "purity" of their group.
These two views of Untouchables and caste, the outcaste image and the simple consensus image, dominated Western thinking through the British period. Often they were held simultaneously and inconsistently by the same observer, but they could be brought together. Rev. Stephen Fuchs accomplishes this in a descriptive monograph on the Untouchable Balahis of Madhya Pradesh, by interpreting Balahi culture as consistent with the culture of the higher castes, but as entirely imitative: "[The Balahis'] social customs and conventions are not their own invention, but are copied after the pattern of other castes. Their moral laws and the regulations of public life are not based on high moral ideas, but mainly on fear of public opinion. ... The rites and ceremonies ... are each and all imitations of the rich ceremonial of their Hindu environment. Their religious ideas are no less confused ... than those of the other castes in the [region]." (Fuchs 1950: 434). Balahi culture may thus be in agreement with higher-caste culture, but this represents a weak, copied consensus. To be an Untouchable is not to be excluded from the culture of caste, but it is to possess this culture in a thinner and less convincing form.
Contemporary anthropological perspectives on the situation of Untouchables in caste represent both continuations of and reactions to these earlier Western views. Three sets of approaches can be distinguished in the literature since 1950. The first is a continuation of the "outcaste image": the cultural and social forms of Untouchables are determined by their being at some remove from a single high Brahminic culture. The second set, which are usually stated more explicitly, can be termed "models of diversity": Untouchables are the carriers of differentially valued alternate traditions, which have historically archaic or ethnically distinct roots, or which somehow express the distinct needs and experiences of those at the bottom. The third set of analytic frames is, like the first, a continuation of an older view, and can be termed "models of unity." Several of these models have been argued for the caste system in its higher reaches, but the model of unity has never been extensively argued in the contemporary anthropological literature on Untouchables. It is a form of this model that will be applied in the present work, one that states, most simply, that there is nothing distinctive about Untouchables culturally or socially, other than their placement at the bottom of a consensually defined hierarchical system. Let us look at the disjunctive models and the models of unity in more detail.
Outcast Images
A modern example of an outcaste image can be found in Kathleen Gough's analysis of the Untouchable Pallans of south India. Unlike Dubois, and like most modern ethnographers of Indian Untouchables, Gough is empathetically biased in favor of the low castes and against what she sees as the hierarchical, etiquette-bound high castes. If Dubois viewed the "nature" of the Paraiyans as uncivilized and degraded, Gough reverses the evaluation, and sets up tacit oppositions between the inhibiting "culture" of the Brahmins and the freer "nature" of the Untouchables. She discerns in the Pallans a looser, more psychologically healthy, approach to life. In their relation to sexuality and aggression, for example, the Pallans are said to be less restricted than the Brahmins: "The expression of aggression toward elders and peers [among the Pallans] is not strictly inhibited [as it is among the Brahmins], ... Similarly, the lower castes do not favor ascetic control of sexuality in marital relationships. ... The ascetic control of sexuality for its own sake does not increase a man's spiritual strength" (Gough 1956: 847).
The cultural dimension of Gough's approach is "certain moral values deriving from the Sanskrit religious tradition, of which [the Brahmins] are the main carriers" (1956: 826). Since the Pallans are among the lowest castes, farthest spatially and socially from the Brahmins, they are of all the castes in the village most free of the restraints of this Sanskritic culture. As with her psychology, most of Gough's cultural typifications of the low castes are framed in opposition to negatively loaded Brahminic traits: "The low castes place much less emphasis than do Brahmins on otherworldliness and on the fate of the soul after death. Engaged in the practical business of earning a living through manual labor, the low castes care more for health and prosperity in this life" (Gough 1956: 846).
Gough's positive restatement of the outcaste image is stated psychologically, but it is set within a broader materialist analysis. A closely related example of the modern outcaste image is found in the work of Joan Mencher and Gerald Berreman. This image is similarly materialistic, but it frames the cultural component differently. Here, Untouchables are seen to have demystified caste and its accompanying ideology. They view the caste system in an objective and culture-free way for what it really is — a system of oppression. Thus Joan Mencher feels that Paraiyans in south India have a more "explicitly materialistic" view of the system and their place in it than do those at the top, and that "those at the bottom of the hierarchy have less need to rationalize its inequities" (Mencher 1974: 476). The term "rationalize" expresses a particular view of culture held widely in the anthropological literature on Untouchability: that the culture of caste is a mask for what is in fact occurring in the sociomateriai world. It is a form of false consciousness. Since this consciousness serves only the interests of the high castes, the oppressors in the system, it is accordingly weak or absent among the low castes. What form of consciousness is present among the low castes is not, however discussed systematically in Mencher's work.
Gerald Berreman applies the same image in a comment on the consciouness of rural Untouchables in a Himalayan village in north India. In a short critique of Louis Dumont's structural theory of caste, Berreman claims that when he presented his version of the Dumontian model to rural Untouchables, "they laughed, and one of them said, 'you have been talking with Brahmins'" (1971: 16-23). Like Mencher, Berreman maintains that Untouchables in some way reject a high-caste model of the system, but he does not tell us what alternate model of the system is held and enacted among them. None, perhaps. In their realistic view of the system, Berreman seems to tell us, the lowest castes are uninterested in rationalizations and ideology. Untouchables act in accordance with the system because they are forced to so act, but they cannot be forced to believe.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from An Untouchable Community in South India by Michael Moffatt. Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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