Deep turned round to stare at me when Rahul Gandhi popped the question, “What’s your caste?” It’s not that my son didn’t know. But he was thrown because he didn’t think of himself in terms of caste… which is precisely what Mr Gandhi intended to highlight as emblematic of the emerging secular, non-sectarian India of his and Deep’s generation.

Their interaction makes me wonder if a caste census won’t set back the trend towards modernisation.
The past is another country. I remember paying a courtesy call many years before Deep was born at the Hindu newspaper’s office in what was then Madras, as instructed by my own editor, an Englishman who started his Indian career on the long-defunct Madras Mail. A barefoot Hindu editor with sandalwood marks on his forehead and wrapped in what Bengalis call a lungyi but is a dhoti in the south asked me how many Brahmins were members of West Bengal’s Legislative Assembly. Just back from England, I replied stoutly that caste didn’t matter in Bengal. “Not in the circles you move in!” he replied shortly, and pleaded an important meeting to end the conversation. Today’s Hindu is a different world.
But the man was right. I have had several brushes since then with caste lobbies. One tried to sue me but the magistrate threw out the petition. Another dragged me to the Press Council in the shabbiness to which the Faridkot House dining room has been reduced. The council ruled in my favour but subjected me to a homily on not hurting people’s sentiments. As B.P. Mandal said, “If Karl Marx were born in Calcutta, he would have realised that caste plays an equally important factor in denying people their rights”.
Bal Thackeray put it brilliantly: Indians don’t cast their vote, they vote their caste. Even Mahatma Gandhi baulked at a frontal attack on caste. He attacked untouchability instead, hoping that its removal would destroy the underpinnings of the caste system. What Gandhi doesn’t seem to have considered is the relevance of caste to identity and self-image. Perhaps we will get a glimpse of that in the proposed census to chart out the entire population’s economic, caste and religious affiliations. E.M.S. Namboodiripad tried something similar in 1968 but his purpose in assessing inequality was to mobilise lower caste voters.
Undoubtedly, the all-India exercise will also be exploited for political gain by not only the three Yadavs — Lalu Prasad, Sharad and Mulayam Singh — but also the BJP, Akali Dal, Shiv Sena and AIADMK. They have all been clamouring for a caste census.
Some good may yet come of it if the findings help the Centre to reject affirmative action as a blanket reward for everyone born in particular groups and evolve a rational policy to enable the genuinely disadvantaged to overcome social and educational drawbacks. But enumerators will have to tread warily through the minefield of “creamy layers” and “Brahminised” dalits.
The Harchand Singh Committee noted that when Punjab’s evacuee estates were being distributed among the underprivileged, “influential scheduled caste bureaucrats and public men” grabbed properties for a song to sell “at exorbitant prices to non-scheduled caste persons”. Certain Karnataka Brahmins pestered Mandal to be designated backward. He must have realised elsewhere — even if he didn’t record it — that conversion to Islam or Christianity needn’t mean escaping caste. Indeed, some Goan Catholics boast of their Brahmin origin.
There are many other complexities for, in some respects, India is a state of many nations rather than a nation of many states. It’s as confused as Indonesia whose Dutch rulers overlooked the high percentage of Chinese because they described themselves by dialect, as Hakka, Teochew or whatever. Caste names and practices aren’t uniform. Sub-castes and sects vary from region to region.
In fact, nomenclature was another reason for Deep’s discomfiture at Mr Gandhi’s question. I had to turn to H.H. Risley’s Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Volume I, to find confirmation of the mixed origin of our little-known Baidya (Vaidya in Sanskrit) caste. It’s “found only in Bengal Proper” and apparently ranks socially “next to Brahmins and above Kayasthas”. Since respondents were suspected of self-promotion when caste information was last gathered in 1931, I hasten to add that is Risley’s view, not mine. Today, if you mention Vaidya to someone from the cow belt, he will probably hear “Vaishya”!
Downgrading carries handsome educational, employment and other benefits, as borne out by the ever-lengthening list of eligible castes. Given this “vested interest in backwardness”, equating caste with socio-economic class is by no means as simple as the late Kanshi Ram’s pencil analogy. He held up a pencil when I went to see him in his Karol Bagh office, saying it represented the vertical caste hierarchy. His aim, he explained in his mild soft-spoken way, was to make it horizontal.
That’s what we were discussing in the context of Uttar Pradesh under the woman who claims to wear Kanshi Ram’s mantle (albeit, a fashionable designer version) when Mr Gandhi stumped Deep. We thought he was making the healthy point that since caste is no longer the major determinant in emerging India, it is regressive to keep harping on the so-called bahujan as if it’s a minority in dire need of care and protection.
No wonder the Centre hesitated to sanction a caste census. What many will see as affirmation and legitimisation of sectarian identities hammers yet another nail in the coffin of Macaulay’s famous or infamous dream of creating “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”. It sounds arrogantly Anglo-Saxon but meant no more than the rational, scientifically-oriented, English-speaking, superstition-free society Jawaharlal Nehru envisioned. As does his great-grandson. A caste census might mean goodbye to that.

POSTSCRIPT: An apocryphal story has it that P.C. Sen, West Bengal’s former Congress chief minister, told inquirers who were surprised at his turning up when Promode Dasgupta, the Marxist general secretary died, that he always attended events connected with fellow Baidyas. Caste before ideology!

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray is a senior journalist who contributes to several top international publications