Caste articulation

What is new about caste today is that, whether as idea or as experience, it is now articulated – in both senses of the word. Used as a verb, articulated means 'made distinct', 'set forth' or 'expressed'; used as an adjective, it describes something 'having segments united by joints', or 'consisting of elements joined in a flexible arrangement'. Thus, caste today is spoken, expressed, made explicit – it is no longer silenced or repressed as it was in the Nehru era. And caste today is very much a jointed, segmented or multi-layered reality – it is no longer something singular and homogenous. The problem is that these two aspects are in active tension with each other. The political language in which caste has been spoken is unable to acknowledge its segmented nature; indeed, it even seems as though caste assertion is only possible by insisting that it is singular and indivisible. This is not a problem unique to caste, it reappears in other contexts as well. To fashion new political languages that can voice concerns without evading fractured and contradictory realities – this is the crucial challenge of our time.

The loudness and omnipresence of caste in India's public arena today needs to be contrasted with the mute marginality that preceded it. What might be called the 'silent era' of caste stretches across the five decades that separate the Poona Pact of 1932 and the emergence of the 'caste atrocity' in the 1980s. Of course, the silence is only in the so-called 'national sphere', and in public discourse. At the regional level, caste was always prominently public; and outside public discourse, in everyday life everywhere, caste was an integral if constantly changing part of social existence.