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KINGS AND UNTOUCHABLES: A STUDY OF THE CASTE SYSTEM IN WESTERN INDIA By Rosa Maria Perez, Chronicle, Rs 525

According to Louis Dumont, the caste system in India was something peculiar and ubiquitous to the Indian social reality. In contrast, post-colonial theorists have argued that caste was a colonial construct, supported by the raj in order to exercise political control. Rosa Maria Perez, in this book, views both the orientalist and the post-colonial interpretations as erroneous. She argues that although the caste system has influenced social relations in India, it is not an unchangeable or sacrosanct construct. Neither is it irreducible to other social structures. In her field studies on the Vankars and other untouchables like the weavers of Valthera village in Gujarat, Perez analyses the problems of untouchability.

According to the 1981 census, the untouchables represent roughly one-seventh of the Indian population. They have been ascribed permanent pollution, as opposed to temporary and ritual impurity of the other castes. According to Perez, Gandhi’s attitude was religious and humanistic. He demanded that temples and other forms of social space be thrown open to untouchables along with the breaking down of the barriers of pollution. On the other hand, Ambedkar, says Perez, aimed at empowering these castes to fight social discrimination.

Perez presents various aspects of Vankar life — their homes, practices and rituals — in the second part of the book in great detail. The living space is composed of the interior (ghar), and the exterior, the courtyard (otalo), where persons not belonging to either the family or the caste are received. The otalo is dominated by men, while the ghar is eminently the woman’s world. For a Vankar, eating and socializing are bound by strict rules. Marriage is decisively endogamous but exogamy is permitted in the case of the gotra. The joint family co-exists with nuclear ones. Significantly, the treatment of women contributes towards the understanding of pollution. Women are temporarily separated during the menstrual cycle, and permanently segregated on attaining widowhood or for being sterile. They are also systematically excluded from participating in any political or religious activities.

The author also questions the hierarchical theory based on Vankar symbolic representations. Vankars are marked as untouchables by other groups. Interestingly, Perez notes that Vankars themselves are very strict in observing the rules of pollution and they even consider that they may be contaminated by other higher castes. This is a classic example of reversal of the purity-pollution paradigm. Perez also points out that Vankars often play a socially decisive role, traditionally played by Hindu kings: they are rainmakers and, therefore, closely associated with social and cosmic fertility. This role is ascribed to them by higher castes, who, when faced by a crisis, press them to restore the threatened order. This challenges Dumonts’ theory of caste as a model of exclusion, irrevocability and goes on to show the existing complementarity between castes on opposite sides of the system — on the one hand, the Rajputs, the economically dominant custodians of political power in normal circumstances; and on the other hand, the devaluated Vankars, who in a crisis assume the functions of guarantors and restorers of order.

Perez suggests that the existing sociological perspectives on the peculiarities of the caste system needs to change. She suggests that some of the cultural traits she highlights are also present among beggars, delinquents, slaves and gypsies in Europe. Though one may not fully appreciate Perez’s cross-cultural comparison, this book will be useful to anthropologists and sociologists.