It is not reasonable to think of caste system in the metaphor of a ladder with up and down ends. High and low are metaphors and embodied metaphors. They are linguistic traps which also conditions the mind to think in terms of high as good and low as evil. To apply this metaphor to the community of human beings is to give the members of horizontal society an ethical value of good and evil depending on the which end of the metaphor they are pegged.

In any language, high is generally referred to light and good, while low is referred to dark and evil. The way of using this metaphor has deeper psychological implications for those who are termed Highs and Lows relative to language. This metaphor creates a superiority complex among those who are termed as highs and inferiority complex among those who are termed as lows.

In fact, in case of India’s caste system, what is termed as higher is ethically evil, baser, gross, and incestuous. And what is termed as lower is the projection of higher (imago in Lacan’s psychoanalysis). The lower is the image of higher itself, and because the higher castes do not have the love for their humanness, the inhumanness is projected on others and termed as an attribute of lower. The psychological issue with India’s so-called lower castes is the mute acceptance of the evil projections of India’s self-styled higher castes. After seeing the immoral effect of their projections on lower castes, it is safe to conclude that India’s higher castes are immoral.

There is a major sexual complex among the higher castes which is keeping caste system alive. Caste system is sexual in its essence and working. We will come to this point later. Before that, we need a different metaphor to understand the caste system.

The metaphor of concentric circles will be an apt and clear metaphor. It will be rather very visual and emancipatory metaphor. There are basically two poles in the caste system and hence two different psychologies with two different psychoanalytical methods to destroy the mental disease. In between these two poles, there are many gradients and hence various variations in psychoanalytical methods.

The two poles of the caste systems are:

a) Casteist Castes (caught in the metaphor of Highness)

b) Peripheral Castes (caught in the projected lowness of those who consider themselves high)

The casteist castes are upper three Varnas of the Varna system, which also include Shudras, the fourth Varna, which is completely caught in the metaphor of highness, in which the highest is not only respectable to them but also guide and guru.

The peripheral castes are erstwhile untouchables and tribals.

The casteist castes have few attributes which can be shown mean, evil and necessarily incestuous from the ethical standpoint. They are trapped in the sexual complex. The morality of these castes is primitive, savage, and tribal in nature. These casteist castes live in constant fear and have the constant insatiable urge to have sex within their own circle of kinship which then leads to the complex issue of incest. This is the reason why the women from their caste circle suffered so much because of the sexual obsession of their own men. The Casteist caste fear that their daughters should not have sex with people from peripheral castes, but they should have sexual activities with only likes of them. That is the reason why the fathers from casteist caste kill their own daughters and brothers slay their own sisters if their women desire to follow their heart and most sublime feelings.

The underlying psychological state of casteist caste is incestuous. The fear of losing one’s daughter to the other is often expressed in violent terms by destroying the body of other, mutilating them, and chopping their bodies into pieces. This ritual of violence is done communally (Sonai Massacre 2013). There is no honour in this ritual of gory violence whose underlying mental state is incestuous. There is only dishonour.

Because of constant fear of others (which arises due to inferiority among the so-called higher castes), the casteist castes get co-ordinated and organised easily for then only they can have collective strengths to trample the individuals (often with higher moral virtues and values than collective moral strengths of casteist castes) of peripheral castes who remain unorganised as the dominant norms of the casteist castes enforces the control over their bodies and ultimately their minds by projections evil of casteist mind.

This is the case of Brahmans in India. Brahmans are the most organised casteist castes. They have assimilated the differences between various castes among them and essentially stand united in the face of the threat from any other castes or directions. There is a correlation between the degree of evil and claim of superiority. These caste groups are not governed by universal ethics, but by tribal and primitive sense of justice: an eye-for-eye justice. Hence the casteist castes besides being incestuous tend to be fatally violent and tend to commit organised crimes and conspiracies. Their power is derived from their organisation, and their organisation keeps the peripheral castes at bay.

The centre axis of the caste system is Brahmanism.

And this axis of evil is clearly evident in the nature and functioning of their supremacist organisation, RSS, which camouflages Brahmanism in the cloak of nationalism. It propagandises that a threat to one is the threat to another. The casteist castes closer to this axis of evil tends to work very closely with the central axel to keep the system moving through material and organisational support as they benefit with established norms of the Brahmanism. The norms of Brahmanism are powerfully imposed due to the power generated by the organisation and effective control of resources. The force of these Brahmanical norms is so strong that they render law and legal mechanism useless. (The practice of untouchability is abolished legally but it is still prevalent in many parts of India).

The problem with the peripheral castes is that they internalise what is imposed on them externally, the ethos that is imposed on them do not belong to them, but to them who project their weaknesses on them. The peripheral castes are forced to share the world of fear and hatred created by casteist castes through their language, religion, myths and metaphors. The peripheral caste finds it difficult to escape the gravitational pull of this organised axis of evil which is fuelled by lies and threats, the only effective weapons to make minorities powerful.

It is important for the peripheral castes to deny the world offered by the casteist castes and chose another world: an alternative to fossilised and debased world of casteist castes.

The study of the myths of casteist castes can shed a lot of light on the issue under consideration.

The prototype of Brahman is Parshuram. He decapitated his mother because his father suspected her of having sensual thoughts. The same murderer of his own mother is a mass killer of Shudras according to myths. Parshuram is in a way a symbol of violence and sexual complex. The myths of peripheral castes are positive stories of women and their power to heal suffering humanity.

The problem of caste is not the problem of peripheral castes, but that of those who consider themselves higher and spend their energies to maintain that state of tension between human beings. The casteist caste needs a method to liberate them from this pathological neurosis. The method of the liberation of peripheral classes and casteist castes is given by the greatest doctor, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, the method begins with the true understanding of nature of casteist caste and sickness arising due to it, and destruction of the prime cause of their sickness; the authority of the archaic texts.

(Inspired by Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Mask)

Author – Mangesh Dahiwale, Human Rights Activist

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