Caste capitalism is a way of understanding how caste-based violence and marginalization are concomitant with the reification of endogamy and a rule of dispossession.
The rise of authoritarianism around the world is producing myriad intersecting crises, the most overt at this point in time being crises of territorial expansion. We have all been watching the genocidal war on Gaza and the war against Ukraine unfolding in real-time in the wake of ethnonationalist majoritarianism. Authoritarianism in India and its reprieve in Bangladesh are eliciting concomitant questions about the terror of heightened forms of caste-based violence alongside the unevenly distributed catastrophes of extractive capitalism, environmental destruction, infrastructural neglect, communalism, and military occupation.
It is, among many other things, a moment of reckoning for the political theory of violence and autocracy on which we have relied since the end of the Second World War. This earlier era produced a liberal compact that is now clearly fraying, potentially sweeping the humanist academic disciplines aside with it. The crisis of intellectualism that is concomitant with ethnonationalist attacks on the academy are eliciting a need for new concepts and theories that can meet the moment. These include new ways of engaging questions of identity in a time when identity is being newly weaponized.
Caste Capitalism as A Method for Identitarian Times
The method of ‘caste capitalism’ comes out of this moment of analytic necessity. In my own work, this conceptual method is spurred by the need to analyze how discourses of sexuality and gender identity have become overtly interpellated within the consolidation of authoritarian power and how this consolidation traffics in heightened caste and class hierarchies.
Caste capitalism allows us to read the control of women’s sexuality as the mechanism through which caste becomes a site of material accumulation for Savarna and dominant caste groups and the dispossession of everyone else. This dispossession is, like caste itself, processual, maintained juridically and through extra-judicial violence. It is an ongoing phenomenon rather than a single, static event that takes place at a point in time.
In South Asia, the ways in which certain categories of transfeminine legibility, like hijras, have become the objects of juridical recognition in South Asia is a significant development for queer and transgender social movements and for anti-caste feminist theorists. It is also a development that raises questions about the centrality of controlling women’s sexuality to maintaining caste-based endogamy. How this endogamy will be maintained is a shifting question when the juridical terms of gender identity also seem to be shifting, however slightly.
Caste capitalism is a rubric that is being parsed by a number of scholars (Hota 2023, Shah 2024) who have both distinct and overlapping interests in theorizing caste and capitalism as part of an imbricated and coterminous process of violence and dispossession. It is a rubric that draws inspiration from Cedric Robinson’s historiographical critique of racial capitalism (Robinson 1983).
Caste capitalism is a means of understanding the political economy of caste-based violence in South Asia (Chhabria 2023), particularly with respect to the imbrications of property, land rights and titling, and rules pertaining to endogamous kinship and heritability. It is also a means of understanding the historical processualism of caste-based categories in relation to historical materialism. In my own work, caste capitalism is a way of understanding how caste-based violence and marginalization are concomitant with a rule of dispossession.
Here, caste capitalism is a specification of anti-capitalist critiques of class, land and capital in South Asia. Methodologically, it becomes a way of placing anti-caste critiques of endogamy and dispossession within a shared analytic frame and of reifying the ways in which scholarship on gender and caste and on caste-based violence can be read as anti-capitalist critique filtered through the violence of casteism.
Land Rights, Titling and the Rules of Endogamy
Caste capitalism is particularly relevant for thinking about land rights and dispossession because it builds on radical Dalit critiques that marks class hierarchy (Teltumbde 2022) and caste-based endogamy (Ambedkar 2018 [1936]) as normative features of caste society. Endogamy proceeds from the control of women’s sexuality (Chakravarti 2018 [2003]) and is critical to the normative social reproduction of ‘distinct’ jatis (sub-caste groups).
Caste capitalism allows us to read the control of women’s sexuality as the mechanism through which caste becomes a site of material accumulation for savarna and dominant caste groups and the dispossession of everyone else. This dispossession is, like caste itself, processual, maintained juridically and through extra-judicial violence. It is an ongoing phenomenon rather than a single, static event that takes place at a point in time.
It is evidenced in Bangladesh, for example, in the ongoing impact of the Enemy Property Act of 1965, which “enabled the widespread confiscation of properties of religious minorities in East Pakistan and Bangladesh.20 More often than not, it was families from Dalit communities who lost their titles and holdings under such government measures.” (Ghose and Ray 2018: 567)
In India, caste capitalism elicits a critique of the neoclassical economic argument that land titling is ‘the solution’ to ongoing urban housing crises and, ultimately, poverty. (de Soto 1989) Access to land titling and property squares with the expansion of biometric identification, known as the Aadhaar Card, in India, and the necessity of Aadhaar for accessing any form of formal property rights. Ironically, the Aadhaar regime has led to greater pressure on informal forms of property, leasing, housing, and income.
The limits of liberal regimes of juridical recognition for queer and transgender subjects in India are evidenced in the ways that Aadhaar maintains narrow confines for administrative legibility. This is because, whereas non-heteronormative life is now decriminalized, receiving the ultimate administrative legibility via an Aadhaar Card demands showing that one has normative householding arrangements by requiring documentation of one’s husband or male head of household. Those who wage life outside of administrative legibility do so outside of the purview of access to property but not outside of the ambit of dispossession.
This is why reflecting on the context of land titling, inheritance, enclosure and taxation — the interpellation of land into property — implicates a host of other forms of administrative dispossession. This stages a larger question of what the ‘lived imbrications’ of normative sexuality, gender and caste-based endogamy are with land and property rights.
These imbrications implicate new work on caste capitalism and Hindu nationalist delimitations of citizenship rights and economic autonomy for caste, gender and sexual minorities in India. The rubric of caste capitalism allows us to suggest that the contemporary exclusions within the administrative regime of Aadhaar can be read as a trace of colonial-era enclosure.
Producing the Heteronormative Rural
In The Great Agrarian Conquest, historian Neeladri Bhattacharya discusses how British colonial administrators were obsessed with eliminating newly defined ‘fallow wastelands’ in colonial India.
“Keen to convert all rural spaces into productive landscapes, colonial officials idealised an image of the peasants of central Punjab as a hardy lot busy cultivating their own farms. Settled agriculture was valorised as normative and desirable. When fixed to a piece of land, peasants became knowable and controllable; their lands could be surveyed, assessed, and taxed. Pastoralists were more difficult to control, govern, and extract revenue from. So they had to be settled, fixed to the land, bounded within delimited spaces, and turned into fiscal subjects of the state. Constituting rural spaces as villages was one way of creating such landscapes of settled agriculture.” (Bhattacharya 2019: 69, emphasis added)
Bhattacharya goes on to discuss “a refusal to see the legitimacy of other spaces, other habitations” (Bhattacharya 2019: 69). These ‘other habitations’ were erased, replaced with “Practices of inheritance, rules of adoption and gift, and notions of patriliny and primogeniture [that] were persistently reformulated and re-specified through litigation.” (Bhattacharya 2019: 14)
The term ‘other habitations’ is dense with meaning, including but not limited to nomads, all manner of so-called ‘fictive kin,’ and kinship arrangements that were not dependent on rules of blood, matriliny, or patriliny. ‘Other habitations’ also include a range of sartorial choices, affective relations and object choices that exceed caste-based endogamy and what we today call ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity.’ This is because describing the interpellation of uncultivated areas into productive tracts of heritable land also implicates the familial systems that allow for the heritability of both land and occupation.
These systems of heritability cannot exist without caste and binary gender, both of which had to be instituted and reified over time. Bhattacharya’s analysis of land use and enclosure has within it the trace of the institution of heteronormativity as something different from the ‘Other habitations’ that existed at this time as well and that have been marked in feminist critiques of sexuality and gender in South Asia (John and Nair 1998).
Caste capitalism is the rubric by which these seemingly disparate processes can be read together. It allows us to understand the processualism of caste-based endogamy in the present and in the past and to read this processualism through the histories of sexuality, gender identity, caste, and capital.
Intersectionality, Caste Capitalism and Dalit Feminist
It bears noting that, from a certain perspective, ‘caste capitalism’ may seem to retread ground that has already been well-defined by ‘intersectionality’ because it exists within the imbrications of gender, sexuality, and caste. Intersectionality is a term and framework that emerges from the American academic context and has served as a particularly useful and accessible way to talk about race and gender.
As it has traveled around the world (Nash and Pinto 2022), it has been taken up as a way to talk about caste and gender in South Asia within the same analytic frame. It has been particularly useful for representational politics. Indian Dalit feminists have repeatedly demonstrated how necessary intersectionality has been to making caste power visible in, for example, generalized pronouncements about “South Asian women” or in singular appellations like “the Indian women’s movement.” (Arya and Rathore 2019; Paik 2021).
At the same time, all analytic metaphors have both utilities and limitations. Caste capitalism works within an analytic universe that requires multiple methodological approaches. If intersectionality, freighted with the history of an origin story that begins in American juridicism (Kennedy 2017), is necessary for making minoritarian gender identity visible, caste capitalism becomes necessary for emphasizing the ways in which caste is imbricated within the history of material dispossession. It is designed to meet the moment of autocratic consolidation with a methodological intervention and with an even more pronounced sense of urgency than the crises that produced originary theories of autocracy on which we continue to rely.
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References:
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