Two assumptions are necessary for the perpetuation of racism and casteism: namely, one must hold the beliefs that different races and castes exist, and that the properties that allegedly differentiate them can be used to rank them as superior or inferior in relation to each other (the same is true also for sexism, speciesism, ableism, etc.).
Recently, there has been a tendency in the study of caste to contrapose the theoretical positions of “caste as hierarchy” and “caste as difference” as two opposite but equally valid hypotheses, to be tested empirically. In this paper, we argue that substituting the notions of caste and race as categories of “oppression” with a neutral narrative of “difference” mystifies the violence inherent to the process of differentiation and exclusion from which both social constructs derive.
Scholars supporting the thesis of “caste as difference” claim that it is wrong to speak of caste as “hierarchy” and that castes should rather be defined simply as discrete identities, based on the observation that each caste group has a different origin tale and understanding of its dignity. However, this reasoning – by moving the debate on caste to the level of culture, stressing the role of ideology over that of economic and political power – tends to obscure the historical-material aspect of caste, or what makes it a problem rather than a simple feature of Indian society: namely, that it is a structure of disadvantage and oppression, whereby valuable resources have been distributed unequally among the population, to the benefit of those in power and at the detriment of those exploited and “downtrodden” by the system. Similarly, understanding racial divisions as merely representing different ethnic groups masks the conflicts and the power relations through which such racial categories were (and are) constructed as separate.
