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Blended Boundaries: Caste, Class and
Shifting Faces of Hinduness in a North Indian City
Kathinka Frøystad was in Kanpur with her informants when the Babri Masjid got demolished. The riots that followed resulted in a change of political alignments in UP. Mulayam Singh Yadav, who became the CM, subsequently gave unusual protection and support to the Muslim interests in UP. Then came Mayawati, who ensured that the Dalits got a fair share of the democratic cake. She did not hesitate to ride rough shod over established norms of common courtesy and rub upper-caste power holders the wrong way. All this was quite upsetting to the people with whom Frøystad lived in Kanpur during the course of her research. Their comments and responses during the period of such turmoil provided her with insights into the structuring of social distinctions in India. She noticed that the social boundaries the upper castes had created were fluid. Highly amenable to changing social and political contexts, her respondents had no trouble in being critical of the Muslims and the Dalits, while at the same time maintaining close relationships with them, helping them on various occasions and seeking their assistance on others. Frøystad has written two books in one. One is a simple report of what she saw. The other is her analysis of her observations in the light of what other academics have said on matters of caste, religion, social structure and politics. The second was somewhat flat in comparison and also more simplistic, even though it had considerable academic scaffolding to hold it up. Her report shows us the purity-pollution distinctions that divide upper-caste Indian society. Eat this, don’t eat that; sit here, don’t sit there; marry in this family, don’t marry in that family, etc. The social anthropologists of the 1950s and 1960s had given us a lot of information of this variety in their studies of the village India. Frøystad replicates much of that for urban Kanpur. The divisions from the earlier period continue to be central to Frøystad’s Kanpur in the 1990s. What is different in her study, though, is the observation that the Dalits and the Muslims are the essential "other" against whom the upper-caste Hindus define their identities. When a Muslim friend jokes that she has fed her Hindu friend non-vegetarian food by mistake, it results in a permanent schism in their relationship. Dinner invites to the Muslim households, Frøystad notices, result in some subterfuge, with the visiting female guests pretending to eat, while not actually doing so and the Muslim hosts pretending that the dinner went of well even when the women had only messed their food on the plate. Then there is the Muslim servant living in one of the quarters at the back of the house, who is prevented from using the common tap by the upper-caste Hindu servants for fear that he would pollute the water. Similar experiences with the Dalits, too, abound in Frøystad’s narrative. Had Frøystad looked at interactions of her informants with the Hindus from other states, she would have discovered similar responses. She is different from her intellectual predecessors in another important way. She notices that even when these distinctions exist, there also is a considerable day-to-day adjustment in living. The differences seldom result in a schism within the society. She describes the manner in which the people went out to help the Muslims during the riots that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid to prove this point. Similarly, once Mayawati began Dalit assertion in a new mode, Frøystad’s upper-caste informants quickly adjusted to the reality of the Dalit power without really giving up on their differences with the Dalits. Why this happens, Frøystad can’t answer. She shies from saying clearly that Indian society is highly segmented and finds it difficult to amalgamate outsiders. Tolerance never brings amalgamation with they who are different, which seems to be the mantra for social stability in India. |
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