Annihilation of Caste is not possible without a revolution. And revolution is not possible without the Annihilation of Caste
Anand Teltumbde
[Following is an edited and shortened transcript of the online speech delivered by the author on 17 April 2026 at the seminar on Brahmanisation at Jadavpur University]
It may sound as a clever formulation, but it is not. It succinctly captures the reality of what ailed India as a civilisation. It is a living, breathing description of the trap that Indian society finds itself in. It will explain why every movement for social justice in this country has either stalled, been co-opted, or been strangled before it could walk.
Caste is typically described as a system of social stratification. A hierarchy. A ladder with Brahmins at the top and Dalits at the bottom, with everyone else arranged in between. Ambedkar analogised it as a multi-storey tower without a staircase connecting the storeys. This metaphorical description is not wrong. But it is radically insufficient.
It depicts caste as a stagnant, fossilised, frigid system without life. This understanding still informs much of anti-caste activism which starts and ends with abusing Brahmins and selectively citing Ambedkar. No, caste has evolved and they are still evolving, Caste is not what they were in Buddha’s time. They are not what they became in Mauryan period or Gupta period or in medieval times or in colonial times. Castes are not even what they were spoken or written about or fought against by Ambedkar. Contemporary castes have since evolved. They are largely shaped by the Constitution and the post-colonial political economy. That is why they may be called “constitutional castes” They are the contemporary castes that people are faced with.
A simple way to understand caste is to see it as a structure that is homomorphous with Indian society itself. What does homomorphous mean? It means that caste does not merely exist within Indian society as one institution among many. It means that caste and Indian society share the same form. The same shape. The same skeleton. It means caste is not a feature of Indian society. It is the architecture of Indian society. It is not something that sits in Indian society. It is something that Indian society sits in.
For one thing the caste division of labour is not incidental to Indian economic organisation. The hereditary assignment of occupations–the fact that certain communities were confined to sweeping, to tanning leather, to carrying night soil, to washing clothes, to fishing, to farming–this was not a market outcome. This was not voluntary specialisation. This was a forced economic architecture in which birth determined one’s labour, labour determined income, income determined life chances, and life chances were deliberately kept asymmetric to reproduce the hierarchy across generations.
Then land ownership in India has always been, and continues to be, substantially a caste phenomenon. The agrarian structure of this country–who owns the land, who tills it, who is landless —still follows caste lines with remarkable consistency. Dalits are being denied land rights in villages across UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu–ant it is not isolated incidents of prejudice. In reality the economic structure of caste is reproducing itself.
And. Endogamy–marriage within the caste–is the biological mechanism by which caste reproduces itself across generations. This is what Ambedkar identified as the key to caste. Not untouchability. Not pollution. Not even hierarchy. Endogamy. Because as long as people marry within caste, caste reproduces. As long as caste reproduces, everything else that flows from it–the economic asymmetry, the social hierarchy, the cultural contempt–reproduces with it.
Now religion. The ritual order of Hinduism–as it has been historically practised, not as it is sometimes theoretically described–is a caste order. Who can enter the temple? Who performs the puja? Who reads the scripture? Who interprets the law? The entire ritual architecture of mainstream Hindu practice has been, for centuries, architecture of caste privilege.
As for politics it is vote bank. The caste arithmetic. The fact that in most Indian elections, caste is the single most powerful predictor of voting behaviour. The fact that political parties are essentially caste confederacies dressed in ideological clothing. The fact that even parties that claim to oppose caste organise themselves along caste lines to gain power. One cannot ignore the caste maths in India’s electoral politics. The case in point is the rise and fall of the Bahujan Samaj Party!
Caste is everywhere. It is in the economy, in the polity, in religion, in marriage, in the family, in the kitchen, in the body. It is not a system that operates within society. It is the operating system of society itself. And that is precisely why it is so devastatingly difficult to dislodge.
But structure alone does not explain the full tenacity of caste. If caste were merely a structural arrangement–if it were merely a matter of who owns what and who does what–then it could theoretically be dismantled through redistribution, through land reform, through economic restructuring. Difficult, yes. But conceivable.
What makes caste something qualitatively different–different from all other stratification systems that necessarily existed in all ancient societies but in course of times disappeared— what makes it perhaps the most formidable system of social control ever devised–is that over centuries of conditioning, it has embedded itself not just in social structure but in social psychology. It has colonised not just the body but the mind. Not just behaviour but belief. Not just practice but identity. Here comes the role of Brahminism that masquerades as Hindutva today!
The genius of caste is that it persuaded its own victims of its legitimacy. It created, in the oppressed, what Ambedkar called the graded inequality–a system where each level of the hierarchy had just enough superiority over the level below to give them a stake in the system. The Shudra could look down upon the Atishudra. The lower OBC could look down upon the Dalit. The Dalit could find someone even more marginalised to distinguish himself from. And so the pyramid held, because everyone in it had something to lose by its demolition.
There has been incessant internecine struggle for superiority among castes within their vicinity that kept the overall structure unchallenged. That explains the longevity of the caste system.
And this conditioning does not spare the oppressor either. The upper-caste individual who has internalised caste–who genuinely believes, at some level, in the naturalness of the hierarchy, in the ritual logic of purity and pollution–is not simply a villain making a rational choice. They are also a product of centuries of conditioning. Their humanity has been deformed by caste just as surely as their victims’ humanity has been denied by caste. The deformation takes a different form, but it is deformation nonetheless.
The Paradox equates Annihilation of Caste with the Revolution. And revolution means radical transformation, as Marx conceived through the culmination of class struggle. The million-dollar question is what is this class struggle.
Constitutional reforms like abolition of unouchability, right to equality, positive discrimination in favour of the Dalits and OBCs created an illusion in people’s mind that they were revolutionary measures. Yes, in a historical process, they were important but they were certainly not revolutionary.
It is the recorded fact of the history that all the upper caste reformers, who came in contact with western civilisations, felt ashamed of the inhuman custom of untouchability and wanted to abolish it. But never by mistake they spoke against caste. Gandhi famously represented this trend. Naturally, when the opportunity came while writing the Constitution, they unanimously abolished untouchability. Only three members, ironically all from Bengal where ‘touch-me-notism’ form of untouchability was weakest in India, spoke against it. The first was Pramath Ranjan Thakur, the great grandson of Harichand Thakur, the founder of the Matua movement and the first barrister from the Dalit community. He said that he did not understand how untouchability could be abolished when the castes lived. Two more Bengalis, both Bhadralok, supported him. Barring them none uttered a word and relished in contributing to the self-congratulatory chorus.
Was caste abolition not possible? There was a tacit argument that perhaps silenced the SC members, which is that if the castes were abolished, their reservations would go away. Was it true? Reservations were instituted by the Government of India Act 1935 on the basis of an administrative category created by the colonial rulers, “Scheduled Caste”. It was not a Hindu Caste. Therefore, the Hindu caste system could have been very much abolished if they wanted to do so without affecting the extant reservations. No they did not want to let the caste go off. Caste and religion had proved their prowess in Britishers’ divide and rule strategy. The post-colonial rulers would not like to lose them. Castes were preserved with above intrigues and the religion was preserved with the skilful dodging of true secularism. Notwithstanding the impression that the Constitution has given people secularism, its text does not have this word beyond the Preamble, which also was an illegitimate insertion in 1976, during the Emergency.
Even reservations could have aided the project of annihilation of caste if the rulers had the honest intent. They only had to upend the rationale behind it from being a helping hand to uplift Dalits to be a countervailing force against the prejudice the society bears against them. It would have rightly pushed the onus on society to correct itself so as to do away with this exceptional policy at the earliest. The present provision implicitly stigmatised Dalits as a disable lot. But instead of doing such a thing they proliferated reservations to “Backward Castes” with an awkward criterion of “social and educational” backwardness. In a country like India, which even today ranks among the most backward societies, which community would not meet such a criterion? No wonder, there is no community that has not staked claim to reservation as socially and educationally backward community.
After the initial decade of Congress dominance—sustained by its aura from the freedom struggle—shifts in the political economy reshaped the polity and made electoral competition more intense. In this context, caste-based vote banks emerged as a central axis of electoral politics, effectively giving caste a renewed and instrumental life within modern statecraft.
Class, most people think is associated with economics. India’s communist parties deepened this notion. The classes are to be conceived in the context of extant conditions of the society and not the idealised ones in someone’s imagination. Even the Manifesto’s dictum that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” alluded that classes are to be constitutive of all other contradictions. Classes in any society should be constitutive of caste, gender, races, ethnicities, etc. and the contradictions associated with each one of it has to be resolved with conscious struggle, and which should be regarded as an integral part of the class struggle.
The task is formidable. But it is necessary. Because the alternative is unacceptable: to let society decay, to accept that the majority lives in conditions unworthy of human dignity, and to remain silent while a few continue to enforce and benefit from that injustice.
Frontier
Vol 58, No. 49, May 31 – Jun 6, 2026
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Book review: Sumit Guha’s new book on the history of caste
How the RSS, Golwalkar & Hindu Mahasabha glorified caste: Devanur Mahadevan
Domination and Chaos: India’s radical conservatism
After the truth-shower 