Concept of Caste and Practices of Jati: Exploring Roots of Incomparability

<strong>CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF DISCRIMINATION AND EXCLUSION (CSDE) SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES </strong> a Special Lecture on <strong>Concept of Caste and Practices of Jati: Exploring Roots of Incomparability</strong> <strong>Dr. Padmanabh Samarendra </strong> (Dr. K.R. Narayanan Centre for Dalit and Minorities Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia) <strong>November 6, 2015 </strong> Caste, as conceived in contemporary academic writings or within the policies of the state, is a new idea. The social form that is imagined through this term never characterized the Indian society. The idea of caste is premised on two assumptions: that it actually exists, and that it has a fixed and uniform boundary. These two assumptions together are applicable neither to varna nor jati, the indigenous forms of which caste is taken as an equivalent. The present notion of caste was produced during the second half of the nineteenth century in the course of and because of the census operations. The procedures of counting and classification in census required that the entity to be counted should actually exist and should be discrete and homogenous. The features of neither varna nor jati matched with these requirements. The colonial officials, in order to identify and classify castes, took recourse to anthropological tools. The western academic knowledge in the context of the statistical requirements of the census eventually produced the image of caste as an empirical and fixed system.