The upper caste woman benefited largely from the social reforms, starting from the pre-independence era, or what Ambedkar called the ‘reform of the Hindu family’. These reforms were much about widow-remarriage, child marriage, girl education, etc., and according to Ambedkar, it did not aim at social reorganization or reconstruction, which would have meant annihilation of caste. The upper caste Hindu woman due to her obvious proximity to the upper caste man, reaped directly from the social reforms churning out in her family. The constitutional reforms on gender parity in post-independence India were doing similar wonders for the upper caste woman. As women in the propertied classes began to enjoy their right to inheritance, the ‘right’ meant little for the property-less classes of Dalit-Bahujan.
With the advent of economic reforms in the 1990s, the upper castes stood as principal benefactors owing to their social networks, share and proximity in the power structures of this country. The Dalit-Bahujan from the same period were growingly alienated and remained to serve their upper caste masters in the new Industrial complexes under old feudal relationships (3). The so-called post-liberalisation era merely strengthened the occupancy of the upper castes at the boardrooms and the bureaucracy, at the stock exchange and the newsrooms, at the IITs and IIMs, at the JNUs and DUs, as they have grown omnipotent and omnipresent in their stinking display of power and privilege.
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There have been debates revolving around the IPC codes of ‘public decency’ and its origins of Victorian morality (5). The attempt appears to be a clever ploy to shift the discourse and blame onto the colonial masters. It is the same ploy that is also used by the Hindus in blaming the ruthlessness of the caste system onto the colonial interventions, while reserving some usefulness for the caste system during the ‘glorious’, ancient past of their fatherland. Some ‘feminists’ have also invoked the ‘glorious past’ of Kamasutra and Rasa lila (6), also conveniently forgetting the inglorious past of burning women on the husband’s pyre, the system of forced widow-hood, girl-marriage, all the three carried out as repression of the Hindu woman’s sexuality, freedom and mobility.
As observed by Ambedkar in his seminal paper, ‘Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development’ at Columbia University, the violent forms of repression of female sexuality was to maintain the endogamic purity. The stance of the self-procalimed ‘progressive’ ‘feminists’, and the strong defence of Hinduism and their attack on any opponents questioning or problematizing caste is much in tune with the view that attacked Buddha for the downfall of women in India. The accusation was made by Eve’s weekly in 1950, which took an Ambekdar to refute and correct. It is the same view that also charged Ambedkar with preaching modesty to women in Kamathipura, where he appealed to the community women to disown prostitution. One has to understand the ease and élan with which the so called feminists discount the question of caste and the proponents of anti-caste thought. The suggestion of Victorian morality by neo-‘progressives’ negates the centrality of caste in the suppression of Indian woman and her sexuality. It is an irony that it was the Victorian morality in the larger sense that catalysed the Nadar castes to revolt against forced uncovering of their women’s breasts in public and in their rightful claim for social dignity and self-respect.
