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Democracy and the Recasting

of Caste in India
a
Juned Shaikh
a
Department of History, University of Washington,
Seattle
Published online: 09 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Juned Shaikh (2010): Democracy and the Recasting of Caste in
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 India Review, vol. 9, no. 4, October–December, 2010, pp. 450–461
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Democracy and the Recasting of Caste

in India
JUNED SHAIKH
Democracy
India Reviewand Caste in India

Politics of Inclusion: Caste, Minorities and Affirmative Action. By

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Zoya Hassan. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. 316 Pages.
Hardcover, $40.00.

The Vernacularisation of Democracy: Politics, Caste, and Religion in

India. By Lucia Michelutti. New Delhi: Routledge, 2008. 256 Pages.
Hardcover, $100.00.

The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. By

Anupama Rao. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009.
416 Pages. Paperback, $24.95.

On May 7, 2010, the Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh,

declared in the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of Parliament, that the
government would decide shortly if caste would be one of the socio-
economic parameters used to classify India’s population in the Census
of 2011.1 Caste is a historically important feature of social stratifica-
tion in India, and it was deemed to be the foundational unit of society
by the Census Commissioner for the 1901 census, H. H. Risley. In his
influential work, The People of India, Risley argued that caste formed
the “cement that holds together the myriad units of Indian society”
and that if this cohesive force was removed, “order would vanish and
chaos would supervene.”2 Risley’s notion of caste reflects the influ-
ence of India’s high-caste literati on the formation of colonial knowl-
edge.3 Moreover, his view of caste also illustrates the influence of

Juned Shaikh is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of

Washington, Seattle.
 Democracy and Caste in India 451

theories of anthropometry and race; thus, for instance Risley held that
the distinction between high caste and low caste could be established
by the measurement of heads and noses, skin color, and the shape of
the jaw.4 The intellectual labor expended by Risley and his interlocu-
tors—other colonial administrators and their high caste informants—
contributed to the making of caste as an important feature of Indian
society and a vital unit of colonial governance.5
The political implications of the project of colonial knowledge and
governance resonate in India today, even though caste was abandoned
as a unit of classification after the 1931 census.6 The demand to include
caste in the 2011 census is seen as a sign of the continued political
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assertion of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), a group of castes

that comprised 32 per cent of India’s population according to the 1931
census7 and by various estimates could form 50–55 percent of the pop-
ulation or, if the claims of some OBC activists are to be believed, the
number could be as high as 70 percent. 8 The possibilities offered by
the socio-political mobilization of these castes and their influence in
government formation at the Center and in various states in North
India since the 1980s have been described by Christophe Jaffrelot as
the “silent revolution” and by Yogendra Yadav as the “second demo-
cratic upsurge.”9 The demand to include caste in the 2011 census, then,
is a condition of this upsurge.
One of the reasons caste has retained its status as an important
feature of Indian society, since H.H. Risley’s intervention in the
late-nineteenth century, is because it has been a crucial barometer for
designating the socio-economic backwardness of individuals and
groups. Moreover, since the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth cen-
turies, various caste groups have used the census reports to construct
solidarities at a regional level and demand caste mobility and remedies
for their backwardness. The books under review study the political
implications, the processes, and the limits of state policies of classifica-
tion and governance. Zoya Hasan, in Politics of Inclusion, examines
how the postcolonial Indian state has embraced the logic of back-
wardness of castes and lauds its commitment to redress the historical
disadvantages experienced by lower castes through affirmative action
policies. She would, however, want the Indian state to deepen its
obligation for social justice and include non-Hindu minorities, espe-
cially lower class Muslims, within the purview of its affirmative action
policies (p. 238). Lucia Michelutti’s Vernacularisation of Democracy
 452 India Review

studies how the ideologies of equality and social justice are trans-
formed and internalized through the modality of democracy and
highlights how these notions of social justice and equality enter the
popular consciousness of a particular group, namely the Yadavs of
Mathura, through the idioms of religion and masculinity, and ideas of
personhood (p. 10). Michelutti emphasizes that notions of democracy
were reworked (or vernacularized) and highlights how caste was also
modified in the process. She demonstrates this by showing the trans-
formation of the Yadav caste into a quasi-ethnic community (p. 7).
Anupama Rao, in The Caste Question, poses the logic of redressing
socio-economic inequalities through the recognition of caste dispari-
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ties as the paradox of Indian modernity. This paradox, she says, entails
the desire to annihilate caste and the disparities associated with it in
the process of becoming modern while simultaneously strengthening
it in practice because caste in general, and the dalits in particular, are
central to the operation of Indian democracy. All three books reflect
on the mutual constitution of the practices of Indian democracy and
the phenomenon of caste as important features of life in India.
In Zoya Hasan’s study of state policies, constitutional frameworks,
and political processes that engage the question of social backward-
ness in postcolonial India, she highlights the assumptions undergird-
ing the varying strategies of the state to deal with different social
groups: the lower castes and minorities. She argues that the Indian
state addresses the question of social justice for the lower castes within
the “context of justice, equality and democracy” (p. 9) but does not
adopt a similar approach to deal with its religious minorities. Accord-
ing to Hasan, minorities are imagined as subjects of religious differ-
ence with cultural rights but not of socio-economic deprivation
(p. 233). This approach, she points out, has not addressed the question
of under-representation of Muslims in government, parliament, and
policy-making bodies (p. 14). Thus, she notes that even though the
Indian constitution safeguards rights of religious minorities, “large
sections of them have been feeling a sense of marginalization and
alienation from the nation-state” (p. 8). Hasan locates the variations in
the state’s approach toward marginalized caste and religious groups in
the institutional frameworks that were erected at the time of India’s
independence and against the backdrop of India’s partition (p 15). She
argues that the approach is in need of revision and that religious minor-
ities should also be made the subject of affirmative action (p. 15).
 Democracy and Caste in India 453

In making her case for extending the wages of backwardness to

India’s minorities, Hasan teases out the religious assumptions under-
girding the notion of social backwardness. In chapter 2, she points out
that social backwardness assumed a Hindu society (p. 32) and there-
fore ritual status in the caste system became the basis for solutions to
social deprivation. Caste “came to dominate the project of nationalism,
democracy, and citizenship, and much of public policy in modern
India” and this, in turn, strengthened the institution of caste (p. 38).
According to her, right-wing Hindus welcomed the exclusion of non-
Hindus from the institutional structures created to alleviate backward-
ness (p. 32). In chapter 3, she outlines how the ideology of Hindutva and
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the international and national conjuncture shaped by an anti-Muslim

rhetoric inhibited the government from providing substantive benefits
to Muslims. Thus, even institutions like the National Commission for
Minorities or the National Human Rights Commissions remained
ineffective (p. 73) and the recommendations of the Gopal Singh Com-
mittee Report (tabled in 1983) and the Sachar Committee Report
(tabled in 2006) were unheeded.
In chapter 4, Hasan further explores the assumptions undergirding
social backwardness by evaluating the politics of affirmative action for
castes that have been grouped under the umbrella category of Other
Backward Classes (OBCs) and by paying particular attention to
debates around the implementation of the Mandal Commission
Report in 1990 (she calls it “Mandal I”) and in 2006 (“Mandal II”).
According to Hasan the key question of the Mandal Reports was
whether “OBCs should be identified on the basis of caste or on the
basis of economic and occupational criteria” (p. 79). She acknowl-
edges that the politics of affirmative action for the OBCs has
“changed the polity” (p. 117) but notes with dismay that caste has
remained the exclusive criteria for reservations in jobs and higher edu-
cation (p 118). In chapter 5, Hasan highlights the under-representa-
tion of Muslims in legislatures and decision making bodies by
contrasting it with the “political fortunes of the OBCs” (p. 127). She
argues that decision makers from disadvantaged groups “can use the
legislative and policy arenas to bring about improvements” (p. 126).
Hasan lays more stress on political process—the inclination and bold-
ness of the political parties to field candidates from disadvantaged
communities—than on institutional remedies for substantive changes
in increasing representation. In chapters 6 and 7, Hasan suggests that
 454 India Review

sub-quotas for Muslim OBCs and dalits who have converted to

Christianity and Islam would help politicians and policy makers
rethink the discourse and practice of affirmative action and bring
more disadvantaged groups within the purview of social justice and
make the polity “more representative and pluralistic” (p. 191).
Hasan’s plea for an inclusive notion of social justice is based on
evidence of disadvantage and under-representation of minorities from
the Sachar Committee Report (2006), the Statistical Report of the
Election Commission of India, Government of India Reports, and
social scientific studies of other scholars. Her argument for affirmative
action for minorities is worked out through the modality of class.
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Only when policy makers and political parties look beyond caste and
acknowledge class as criteria for backwardness can minorities be
included in affirmative action programs, she argues. In Hasan’s analysis
class becomes the supplement to support claims based on already
existing group identities like caste and religious communities. More-
over, one of the assumptions of her argument is that policy makers
and elected representatives categorized as belonging to a particular
community will address the demands of the social group. Similarly,
she assumes that affirmative action policies would create a middle
class among minorities that would ultimately be advantageous to the
communities. Both assumptions are highly optimistic and problem-
atic, in large part because the conception of politics and “the political”
remains rather narrow: politics remains the preserve of political par-
ties, leaders, and policy makers.
While Hasan’s notion of what is political focuses on the strategies
and practices of institutions and policy makers and the centrality of
electoral politics and political parties, Lucia Michelutti moves beyond
this notion in the Vernacularisation of Democracy. For Michelutti, the
political extends beyond institutions and political parties and into the
everyday lives of the people where modern notions of democracy
become “part of conceptual worlds that are often far removed from
theories of liberal democracy” (p. 12). In her study of the notions of
democracy held by the Yadav caste of the city of Mathura in the north
Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Michelutti argues that the internaliza-
tion of democracy in Yadav consciousness has changed the form and
structure of the community (p. 13). Michelutti reveals how the vernac-
ularization of democracy has changed who members of the Yadav
community worship, altered marriage practices in the community,
 Democracy and Caste in India 455

and also changed the way Yadavs vote and how they “perceive politics
and political leaders” (p. 13). The recasting of the Yadav caste in the
process of the vernacularization of modernity has resulted in the
making of horizontal affinities in the Yadav/Ahir caste cluster. She
calls this process the ethnicization of caste (p. 8).
Michelutti’s political anthropology is based on extensive ethno-
graphic material, archival sources, official publications, caste litera-
ture, publications of political parties, and religious texts. Her
interdisciplinary approach helps put forth a compelling study of the
vernacularization of democracy and its entry into popular conscious-
ness among the Yadavs, a caste classified as OBC by the B.P. Mandal
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Commission Report. In chapter 1, she outlines the condition that

made the political mobilization of backward castes and the ascen-
dancy of the Yadavs possible in the 1990s and 2000s. According to
her, the deepening of democracy set in motion social processes that
led to the weakening of the hold of dominant castes. This created the
space for different patterns of authority and enabled a class of local
level politicians “who are often poorly educated, provincial, and come
from lower middle class, and more often also from lower/backward
caste communities” (p. 24). Michelutti argues that the Yadavs became
a politically ascendant group as a result of these changes (p. 19).
In chapter 2, Michelutti explores the entanglement of distinct
processes—religious topographies associated with Lord Krishna, the
mythical and historical recollection of the Yadav/Ahir kingdom, and
the interaction of males in public spaces in Mathura—that have con-
tributed to the formation of the Yadav community. According to
Michelutti, the central features of Yadav political performances in
these public spaces were the rhetoric of self-respect, the display of
masculinity, the absence of women, and the image of Lord Krishna as
the “socialist wrestler” (p. 66). In chapter 3, she combines data from
colonial ethnographers with her ethnography of Mathura Yadavs in
the late 1990s to argue that Ahir/Yadav scholars, social activists, reli-
gious reformers, politicians, and the colonial and postcolonial state
contributed to the formation of the Yadav community. Moreover,
she points out that democratic politics provided Yadavs the stage to
work out their identity in which myths, oral epics, folk kinship theo-
ries, and colonial and postcolonial projects of state classification
played an important role (p. 68). In chapter 4, she traces how kinship
structures were reworked in the process of the vernacularization of
 456 India Review

democracy and how a new ideology of descent was fashioned by the

Yadav caste-cluster (p. 102). The reworking of kinship has entailed
the restructuring of internal divisions within the Yadav caste: thus,
the ideology and practices of marriage and commensality changed
and in turn contributed to the remaking of the Ahir/Yadav caste-
cluster as Krishnavanshi Yadavs (p. 137). According to Michelutti,
the logic of electoral democracy, where horizontal solidarities facili-
tates political power, has enabled the imagination and actualization of
a new Yadav kinship.
In chapter 5, Michelutti explores how democratic politics refash-
ioned local religious spaces in Mathura and also reworked the rela-
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tions between ordinary people and their gods (p. 139). To illustrate
her point, Michelutti traces the shift over the past 60 years from local
lineage deities (kuldevatas) that needed to be appeased through animal
sacrifice to the cult of Krishna. Similarly, local female deities (kuldevis)
“have been tamed and transmuted into vegetarian vaishno devis” and
have been subsumed by the mythology of Krishna and his companion
Radha (p. 139). In this chapter, Michelutti borrows from Louis
Dumont’s thesis of the religious ideology of caste and argues that the
formation of the quasi-ethnic Yadav community has been enabled by
the religious ideology of Hinduism (p 159). Chapter 6 explores the
rhetoric of contemporary Yadav politics and the depiction of Krishna
as “muscular, democratic, and socialist” (p. 163). In her final substan-
tial chapter, Michelutti explores how Mathura Yadavs believe that
they have an innate ability for politics—to make political connections
and benefit from state resources (p. 187). Moreover, she also outlines
the intersection between Yadav caste associations and the Samajwadi
Party that is facilitated by the belief that political power will enable
them to enjoy economic benefits and gain social status (p. 186).
In Michelutti’s ambitious study, the importance of caste as a fea-
ture of social stratification seems overdetermined and the value of
class is undermined. For her, vernacularization of democracy does not
imply the decentering of a dominant class or language. By vernacular-
ization she does not mean the difference between Hindi (vernacular)
and English (elite) realms of politics. Neither does she imply a lag in
translation of the universal terms of democracy such as social justice,
constitution, and elections. As Michelutti points out, speeches at the
national Yadav caste association are often delivered in English and
terms like social justice are used interchangeably in English and in
 Democracy and Caste in India 457

Hindi translation. For her then, vernacularization entails that the “key
terms and symbols of democracy are embedded in the language of
caste, religion, regionalism, ethnicity, and so on” (p. 224). Michelutti’s
assumptions about vernacularization and democracy bear unpacking.
Her fundamental assumption is that democracy was bound to become
vernacularized as soon as it entered India because of the different
socio-cultural practices of “ordinary people” (p. 3). The assumption
betrays an ahistorical understanding of already existing socio-cultural
practices of the people. Similarly, for Michelutti, democracy is synon-
ymous with postcolonial India; she pays little heed to what Sumit
Sarkar has called the “historic inheritance” of Indian democracy: espe-
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cially the anti-colonial, national movements and debates of the

constituent assembly between 1946 and 1949 that were crucial to the
making of a democratic polity. What was it about the colonial period
that enabled the vernacularization of democracy? Was the colonial
census that made caste the foundational unit of Indian society the only
powerful legacy that led to its vernacularization? She does not pay
sufficient attention to debates or allude to different processes (like
regionalism or dyarchy) that could shed historical light on her argu-
ment about vernacularization. Moreover, Michelutti’s conception of
caste seems deterministic: like Risley and Dumont she seems to
believe that caste is the most important feature of Indian life and that
individuals who identify themselves with a caste will also vote for a
party that represents that caste. Moreover, her argument does not pay
heed to class differences within caste solidarities.
While Michelutti’s analysis of the reconfiguration of the Yadav
caste through practices of democracy reaffirms the centrality of caste
in postcolonial India, Anupama Rao’s The Caste Question, teases out
a paradox of Indian democracy. She highlights the dual impulse of the
postcolonial Indian state to recognize caste and to annihilate it
because of its commitment to universal models of progress (p. 278).
Rao states that the paradox of Indian democracy, where a commit-
ment to substantive equality of groups coexists with the recognition
of the politics of caste difference, has created the conditions in which
dalits have been subjected to new forms of political violence (p. 26).
Rao positions her work as an alternate history of dalit identity where
the category “dalit” sheds light on the assumptions implied by the
category “Indian democracy” and the juridical category of “caste
atrocity” (p. 26).
 458 India Review

Rao’s book is structured in two parts. Part I, consisting of three

chapters, highlights the historical context in which a politics of dalit
emancipation was articulated. Part II focuses on the paradoxical out-
comes of dalit emancipation. Chapter 1 centers on the making of the
intellectual formation that produced a critique of dalit stigmatization.
Rao highlights how the dalit critique of caste borrowed from the radi-
cal anti-Brahmin movement in western India in the late-nineteenth
and the early-twentieth centuries while also carving its own trajec-
tory. The critique of dalit stigmatization, she argues, was enabled by
print journalism that highlighted the disabilities experienced by the
“untouchables” (p. 40). This enabled the creation of a dalit public
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sphere in the first three decades of the twentieth century, but this was
a masculine public sphere (p. 68). In chapter 2, she focuses on the
paradoxical strengthening of caste as a feature of Hindu society when
dalits mobilized colonial courts to abolish Mahar vatans, a stigma-
tized form of property during the interwar years (p. 81). Rao argues
that caste custom and private property that undergirded two different
notions of exclusion got entangled and produced new forms of exclu-
sion and spatial segregation (p. 86). Rao posits that caste articulation
and the resultant segregation of castes were tactical strategies to coun-
teract dalit success in arguing that the denial of access to public prop-
erty (temples, water tanks, schools, streets) had material consequences
(p. 115). In chapter 3, Rao revisits B.R. Ambedkar’s role in articulat-
ing the politics of dalit emancipation and outlines the historical
context in which Ambedkar creatively interpreted democratic liberal-
ism to craft a minority status for dalits (p. 159). According to her, dalit
conversion to Buddhism was also a crucial factor in imagining dalits as
a minority, outside the fold of Hinduism (p. 34).
In chapter 4, Rao highlights the ironic outcome of Ambedkar’s
move to refashion the dalit self through conversion to Buddhism and
by becoming the subject of state guarantees of social justice. Accord-
ing to Rao, the making of dalits as a minority with exceptional legal
rights, who were defined by their “inherited subalternity,” exposed
dalits to more violence. This renewed anti-dalit violence was a symp-
tom and an effect of state intervention into dalit identity and has, in
turn, further reconstituted social relations and militant dalit selves
(p. 180). In chapter 5, Rao outlines the symbologies of violence
between 1960 and 1979, that is, from the formation of the state of
Maharashtra on linguistic grounds until the violent movement to
 Democracy and Caste in India 459

rename Marathwada University after B.R. Ambedkar. Lord Buddha

and Ambedkar became powerful icons in dalit symbolic practices and
represented dalit rejection of Hinduism and their claims to public
space (p. 184). According to Rao, symbolic politics became the most
important axis of the formation of dalit political subjects because
they were demographically small and therefore marginalized in the
electoral politics in the region (p. 187). Symbolic politics entailed the
politicization of everyday life and was central to postcolonial dalit
identity (p. 215). In chapter 6, she extends her argument about sym-
bolic politics by highlighting the role of sexual humiliation of women
in postcolonial Maharashtra as a form of caste violence (p. 221). In
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reconsidering the legal discourse around the Sirasgaon “caste atrocity”

of 1963, she highlights how gender, caste, and sexuality structure
certain forms of violence and humiliation (p. 232). In chapter 7, she
furthers her argument about the intricate connection between sym-
bolic politics and political violence by highlighting the murder of a
dalit police official, Ambadas Sawane, on the steps of a Hanuman
temple in the village of Pimpri Deshmukh in 1991. Sawane was appar-
ently murdered because he wanted to install a statue of Ambedkar
in the village, an act of symbolic reclamation of space, which eventu-
ally led to his violent execution by the power holders in the village
(p. 243).
Rao expertly brings out the role of dalits in expanding the domain
of politics by making visible the relationship between violence and
politics. She demonstrates convincingly the material effects of sym-
bolic politics and the complex construction of dalit subjectivity, and
she teases out the paradoxical role of the state, judicial intervention,
and civil rights law in making dalits more vulnerable (p. 275). Her
unpacking of the complex strands that lead to the formation of politi-
cal subjects and the timely reminder that celebratory histories of
emancipation need to be reconsidered are welcome additions to the
histories of caste in India. Methodologically, her deconstructive read-
ing of diverse sets of sources (e.g., archival sources, pamphlets, oral
interviews, legal documents, and Ambedkar’s writings, among other
sources), offers substantive insight into the craft of historical anthro-
pology and intellectual history. But, Rao is circumspect in suggesting
ways to navigate and move beyond the paradox of the dalit question.
If the politics of emancipation and the symbolic politics of dalits have
made them vulnerable to violence, how have dalits and actors interested
 460 India Review

in the dalit question addressed this conundrum? Rao’s prescription

here is tepid: she suggests that the dalit question cannot be resolved
within existing forms of political restitution (p. 284), but she does not
offer any alternatives besides a broad suggestion that entails “new
imaginations of social justice and dignity” (p. 284). Have the radical
possibilities offered by extant notions of social justice been exhausted
as Rao seems to suggest? Moreover, she suggests that a creative alli-
ance between caste and class and between dalits and other stigmatized
minorities (Muslim and Christian) like the one attempted by Uttar
Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, provides
possibilities for the future. In western India, such solidarities,
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though ephemeral, were not uncommon. Rao’s symptomatic con-

struction of the paradox of the dalit question, does not offer a sub-
stantive discussion of the possibilities these moments offered and why
and how they remained ephemeral.
The three books under consideration, despite their different intel-
lectual and methodological approaches—Hasan is a political scientist
who focuses on public policy; Michelutti a political anthropologist
who is interested in grasping the political action of her respondents in
the context of the changing political structure of postcolonial India;
and Rao is a historical anthropologist who is also interested in close
reading of texts—share some common themes. The ideologies and
practices of Indian democracy and the importance of caste is one such
common theme. While Hasan views caste as an important barometer
of socio-economic backwardness that shapes state policies and
informs democratic politics, Michelutti sees caste as dynamic but also
as the central institution of India’s socio-political life. Rao sees caste as
a practice of embodied difference that is paradoxically important for
India’s engagement with universal modernity. Taken together, these
books reveal the complex patterns formed by imbrications of caste
with Indian democracy, at the level of the quotidian and the everyday
lives of people and in the realm of state policies and technologies of
governance.
Similarly, the books also reflect different understandings of the
relationship between caste and class. For Hasan, caste and class are
units of social analysis that supplement each other and thus divulge a
more accurate picture of social and economic backwardness. On the
other hand, class is occluded in Michelutti’s account because caste is a
determining factor in the activities and self-definition of the Yadavs of
 Democracy and Caste in India 461

Mathura. For Rao, caste and class have different temporalities and are
linked together differently in particular historical contexts. Thus, the
category of class is endowed with different valence by the three
authors.
Finally the books help us understand that caste was and is not an
unchanging institution but was consistently refashioned in the late
colonial and postcolonial period. Read together, these books offer a
fascinating account of the formation of political subjects in India and
the important role played by state policies and the processes of Indian
democracy in the making of these subjectivities. The books also pro-
vide the historical context within which to situate the demand for the
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inclusion of caste in the 2011 Indian census.

NOTES

1. Venkitesh Ramakrishnan, “The Caste Factor.” Frontline, Vol. 27, No. 11 (May 22–June
4 2010), http//:www.flonnet.com
2. Herbert Risley, The People of India (New Delhi: AES Publication, 1999), p. 278.
3. See Sumit Sarkar’s discussion of Risley in Beyond Nationalist Frames: Relocating Post-
modernism, Hindutva, History (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002), pp. 58–60. See also
Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India
(New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 49–52.
4. Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames p. 58. See also Veena Das, “Social Sciences and the
Publics,” in Veena Das, Ed., Handbook of Indian Sociology (New Delhi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2008), pp. 19–40.
5. Bernard Cohn has expertly pointed out the close connection between categories of colo-
nial knowledge and colonial rule. See Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist Among the
Historians and Other Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987).
6. According to Dirks the British discarded caste after the 1931 census because of the
numerous claims and counterclaims by various groups contesting their position in the
assigned hierarchy. Nicholas B Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of
Modern India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), p. 49.
7. Christophe Jaffrelot, “The Politics of OBCs,” Seminar, No. 549 (May, 2005).http://
www.india-seminar.com/2005/549/549 christophe jaffrelot.htm. Jaffrelot has traced the
genealogy of the term backward classes to Madras Presidency in the 1870s. According to
him, the British had clubbed together shudra and untouchable castes for the purpose of
positive discrimination policies. But by 1925, with the creation of the category
depressed classes for untouchables, backward classes implied castes other than the
depressed classes.
8. V. Ramakrishnan, “The Caste Factor,” Frontline Vol. 27, No. 11 (May 22–June 4 2010).
http//:www.flonnet.com
9. See Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in
North Indian Politics (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003). See also Yogendra Yadav,
“Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge: Trends of Bahujan Participation in
Electoral Politics in the 1990s” in Francine R Frankel, Zoya Hasan, Rajeev Bhargava and
Balveer Arora, Eds., Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 120–145.