Navami K Week 3

Reading – Gendering Caste Through a Feminist Lens – Uma Chakraborty

Chapter 1 

The author, in the first chapter, highlights the importance of “ideology” in understanding the caste system of the country. She believes that only through this method, this ideology perspective, one can understand the placement of power and the mechanism of the caste system. The idea that the caste system is a set of consensual values because this then means that those in power and in the higher ranks of the hierarchy are able to create their own rules and impose it on the rest of the members believing it to be ‘values’. This also makes it convenient for the upper castes to remove themselves from the hierarchy altogether because they are no longer affected by the system, they are the rule-makers. Ambedkar, on the other hand, described this system as a position of purity over pollution. The caste system in his eyes is a degrading system of inequality of contempt. 

The author believes this caste discrimination is worse than that of economic exploitation as it is more dehumanizing and where access to material resources are dependent on your social standing rather than on a necessity basis. The caste system comprises of a series of hereditary groups or jatis characterized by hierarchy or gradations according to ritual status. This discrimination depends on old religious texts that define this process as so. The relationship between castes is that of interdependency and mutual obligations and differences.  There  Is also inequality between castes in terms of productive resources, social status and access to knowledge. There is also a prescribed text for naming a person. Maybe this caste distinction was done for a division of labor, or maybe not. The repressive effect of the caste system is related to the ideological and religious notions associated with Brahmanical representations of society.  This also provides the basis for an argument that rituals and the caste system are interconnected and interdependent. There is a monopoly with respect to power that exists within the caste system.