Browsing Through 51 Years of EPW | Caste and Castelessness: Towards a Biography of the 'General Category'

The quickest way to map the terrain I wish to cover is to recount a joke that has been circulating on the internet. Popularised five or six years ago when the 93rd amendment to the Constitution introduced reservations for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in elite educational institutions, the joke goes as follows: India decides to send a space exploration team to the moon. Feverish negotiations begin immediately on the composition of the team, and after much haggling it is decided to include nine OBCs, six members of the scheduled castes (SCs), three from the scheduled tribes (STs), and, if there is any place left, two astronauts. This joke unintentionally offers us a deep insight into the central predicament of caste today. The insight is contained in the fact that the “astronauts” are not identified by their caste but only by their qualifications (as astronauts), whereas the quota-walas are identified only by their caste and not by their qualifications. In short, the joke correctly assumes that “we” will know the caste of the astronauts without being told, but will agree that it is irrelevant in the face of their qualifications, while simultaneously agreeing that though the quota-walas too would presumably have qualifications, these are irrelevant in the face of their caste. To put it differently, upper caste identity is such that it can be completely overwritten by modern professional identities of choice, whereas lower caste identity is so indelibly engraved that it overwrites all other identities and renders them illegible, along with the choices that they may represent.