Counting Caste: Censuses, Politics and Castelessness in India

• In Event: 3181 - Section on Asia and Asian America Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 04. Government and Civil Society

Abstract

This paper addresses the important question of how ‘upper’ caste power is reproduced in contemporary India even in the face of organized challenges from below. I argue that this process turns on the construction of what sociologist Satish Deshpande has called “castelessness,” a subjectivity that emerged during state formation processes in the late colonial period in which the identity of ‘upper’ caste individuals is rendered largely invisible or casteless, while that of ‘lower’ castes and ex-untouchables is made hypervisible. A longstanding site for the cultivation of castelessness has been the post-colonial census, which has limited caste enumeration to certain non-elites for the purposes of affirmative action reservations. In the aftermath of an intensive campaign that culminated in the Lower House of Parliament, the political leadership of the Indian National Congress Party agreed to include a full caste count in the 2011 decennial census. This reversal of 60 years of post-colonial census policy temporarily realigned census policy on caste with its stated purpose: to provide data crucial for India’s centralized system of affirmative action. Yet, in the year that followed, key institutions of state and society pushed back to ensure that the enumeration of caste in the decennial census remained unchanged. This paper examines the institutional pushback centered in the executive bureaucracy. The struggle over census policy on caste reveals several institutional mechanisms of castelessness, and therefore how upper caste power is reconstituted.

Author

• Trina Vithayathil, Providence College