Book review: Biswajit Das and Debendra Prasad Majhi (Eds). Caste,Communication and Power

The volume Caste, Communication and Power is a significant contribution that offers interesting entry points to critically engage with the questions and issues of caste and power from a communication perspective. It also broadens and situates the complexities of caste and offers renewed engagement with communication and power within the realm of social sciences in general and communication studies in particular. This edited book consists of 20 important contributions from various eminent scholars who represent diverse disciplinary backgrounds and orientations with a common interest and concern to engage with the questions of caste, communication and power. The contributions characterise multiplicity and offer myriad ways and means to understand caste and power in everyday life. The book offers vivid insights into unexplored terrain within the dynamics of caste and power in the everyday life of Indian society.

The speciality of this edited volume is in its rigour and depth to provide a critical understanding about the intersections of caste, communication and power rather than in romanticizing the already existing scholarship on caste and power. This book highlights and positions the importance of communication as an important ingredient in making sense of sociological engagements of caste and power. The editors argue in favour of a more sustained dialogue that will help us to think about and think through the questions of caste and power in the sense of the everyday and the ordinary. While showcasing a particular interest in media and communication, this volume attempts to make sense of the imaginary practices of caste and how people through cultural flows of texts embedded with meaning make sense of caste in their everyday lives. It also focuses explicitly on caste as a social category and explores the symbolic and ritual dimensions of caste that are communicative within and outside society. Comprehending the contemporary issues and debates around the questions of caste and power warrants a collective intervention that offers a critical and nuanced understanding of the inextricable association between caste, communication, and power. It is in this regard that this book is an important and timely contribution.

The edited volume is organised conceptually in five sections and these sections offer a wide-ranging overview of the intersection of caste, communication and power in Indian society. The contributions for this volume come from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and orientations which offer multiple theoretical entry points to engage with the questions of caste and power from various disciplinary vantage points. Section I ‘(Re)imagining Caste: Theories, Concept and Trajectories’ engages with the questions of history, theorisation and conceptualisation of caste in Indian society. The section starts off with Hira Singh’s essay, which appeals to bringing in a more Marxist engagement to mainstream sociology to make sense of the caste question and the related Dalit issues. The essay argues that caste is a social relation of production and property. The caste hierarchy in this view is a reflection of the hierarchy of economic, political, and cultural (read ideological) power, not in isolation, but in conjunction with each other. The next contribution by Archana Singh and Biswajit Das outline the scholarly anthropological tradition of communication by focusing D. N. Majumdar’s pioneering contribution on caste and communication. This work is based on a detailed ethnographic account of social structure and communication in an Indian Village in the late 1950s. The authors discuss in graphic detail D. N. Majumdar’s contributions and realise the need to go beyond keeping in view the developments in the field of Anthropology of Communication and conclude by saying that ethnography provides one way of engaging with communication, however Anthropology provides myriad possibilities to engage with communication. Following that Bhairabi Prasad Sahu writes about how the culture-specific caste systems evolved historically in India. His essay also focuses on the forms of articulation and communication of the caste order. He further explores the role of community activities, including rituals with a public character such as marriages, everyday interactions and exchanges as carriers and sustainers of caste and caste systems. The next contribution by Vijay Kumar offers insights into the etymological origin of caste and communication while doing a case study analysis of the Khatik in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century colonial Uttar Pradesh. He argues that our understanding about the etymology of caste has always been in flux while delving deeper into the caste and identity questions within the Khatik community in colonial Uttar Pradesh. The author also engages with the print culture and re-interpretation of caste while offering an analysis of caste and communication in India.

Contributions in Section II ‘Caste and Lifeworlds: Rituals, Folklore and Orality’, discuss caste as a source of power and hierarchy which provides detailed analysis of life-worlds of communities in reference to the caste and caste system in the Indian subcontinent. The first essay in this section by Subhadra Mitra Channa points out that most sociological analysis of caste have focused either on the textual aspects or political aspects, namely ‘casteism’. But she argues that there has been a language through which the various Jati groups have negotiated with each other, that is the symbolic language of rituals and ritual practices as well as the practices of everyday life. The essay also demonstrates that unlike what some scholars believe, the lower and marginal castes have historically evolved a language of protest and do not willingly submit to their subordinate position. She further argues that their language is a language of praxis expressed through religious beliefs, folklore, and some very unique caste-specific practices through which they have been continuously asserting their identity and self-respect and pride. The follow-up essay by Neerja Singh and Namit Vikram Singh deals with the instances of folk forms of protest between different communities, which helped shape social movements in Northern India. The chapter approaches this particular theme from a caste-based narrative in highlighting how lower castes within the social hierarchy had the scope and space to protest their grievances by utilizing folk forms of culture in Northern India. Moreover, the essay also reflects upon variants of social movements using different forms of folk cultural traditions which were caste-specific, against the forms of exploitation perpetrated by the socio-political and economic power structures of that time. Dev Nath Pathak in his essay communicating the contestation of caste discusses the subversion of caste surface in Maithili folklore through barbs, wit, and wisdom. He argues that there are complexities which summon a nuanced approach while dealing with the Maithili context. This chapter also tries to locate the broad folk-literary domain of caste-contestation and how folk worldview and modern literary attempts constitute a cultural stock of knowledge while shaping up the schemes of thinking, reasoning, and imagining. The final chapter by Asha Singh provides a sociological analysis of ‘naari-geet’ or women’s songs composed by Sadanand Verma and Raghunath Singh of Arjak Sangh. She argues that Arjak songs betray and dismantle the usual frameworks which inform ‘folklore’ and its conceptualization within folkloristic traditions in North India.

The next section ‘Culture, Subversions and Representation’ deals with the questions of representation and specifically how visual, tele-visual, and cinematic representations provide a platform to deliberate, dialogue, and analyse various aspects around the problems and polemics of Indian films and other communicative media. In his essay, Prashant P. deals with the representation of caste in cinema, and investigates the politics of aesthetics. The chapter argues that the understanding of ‘political cinema’ must go beyond mere mimesis of socio-political issues and conditions in the form of realism. Instead, the chapter argues for a transformation of aesthetics—notions of beauty, entertainment, and style—by subverting popular cinema’s icons, mythology and tropes. Sushmita Pandit in her essay engages with the popular Hindi serials to explore the representational politics of caste. This chapter undertakes a critical examination of the caste question by studying the popular Hindi television serials. Referring to the Hindi serials, which frequently acquire the highest TRP, this chapter seeks to focus on the specific issue of how and why the caste question does not seem to find a fertile terrain in this specific television content. The next chapter by Benson Rajan and Shreya Venkatraman focuses on understanding how cinema has played a role in caste politics in India. They read three films to argue that films have always been in a constant struggle to eradicate as well as to maintain the boundaries between the dominant and the dominated. This chapter further tries to understand the representational politics involving the Dalit community with the help of costumes that the characters adorn in the films. Rohan Sengupta’s essay critically looks at developing an analytic of voice and its foregrounding intimacies with utterances of caste through an empirical study of Bengali sports commentary on radio in Calcutta (present day Kolkata), commencing systematically after independence, from the 1950’s onwards. This chapter conceptualizes mediations of caste and its complexities, as opposed to a static deployment of the domination-resistance, paradigm.

Section IV ‘Mediation, Negotiation and Re-appropriation’ highlights the dearth of knowledge in the field of communication studies regarding the idea of mediation and negotiation of caste. The contributions in this section offer key suggestions to address the contradictions and complexities of caste, communication and power. The first essay by M. Suresh and V. Ratnamala study how caste identities are constructed and negotiated through digital banners in Tamil Nadu. They argue that the digital banner designers and the digital banner consumers imagine and manufacture the caste of the film actors based on their films. Ritu Sharma’s work on Safai Karmachari examines how consciousness demands legitimacy for political patronage (reservation) and strongly communicates the path of regressive domination. This study explains the emergent crises as an offshoot of post-modern space of disadvantage reframing identity on the premise of closed communication and exclusion. The next essay by Jasmine analyses the linkages of food, caste and culture. The chapter concludes that food is a part of culture but an investigation into the food practices of various caste and regional groups provides strong evidence that food is not ‘merely cultural’. Debarati Dhar’s chapter interrogates the dominant assumptions about the relationship between media and society. She further argues that new media has the potential to be treated as a leveller and level playing field to bridge the digital divide among caste, ethnicity and gender.

The last section in this edited volume ‘Literary Culture and Communicating Caste’ deliberates on the importance of literary culture in unfolding the dynamics of caste and communication. Specifically, this section focuses on how different literary culture forms help depict and represent caste to the social world. The first essay in this section by J. Balasubramaniam discusses the role of print culture in communicating and re-imagining caste. Through a case study analysis of a nineteenth century Dalit journal Periyan, he focuses on understanding the communicative power of the journal in generating socio-political consciousness among the deprived Dalit communities. Shardool Thakur’s essay revisits Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable from the perspective of the lesser explored dimension of the caste dynamics seen in the novel. The chapter also explores counter-hegemonic forces that oppose it, both on the individual level and on a larger one. In another essay, Mayank Kumar investigates the complexities associated with ‘modern’ literary style and its negotiation with the social realities of the times with specific reference to novels of Babu Devki Nandan Khatri. The last essay by Akhshay Sawant examines the socio-political conditions under which the press evolved and propagated. It charts the process of making the ‘Maratha’ from a broader historical category that was more flexible in terms of its definition of caste boundaries to a consolidated upper-caste identity. It does so by examining events such as the Vedokta controversy and the separate electorate.

The volume in its overall conceptual organisation along five cultural dimensions in the form of sections highlight the core aspects of the communicative experiences of caste and its intersections with communication and power. This collective scholastic intervention is novel and it offers some interesting theoretical entry points to further engage with the questions of caste and power from a communication perspective. This is an important addition to the communication studies scholarship in India. This volume will be immensely helpful to people interested in the intellectual inquiry of caste and communication research.

Interview with the Editor

Aniruddha Jena (AJ): As a sociologist turned communication scholar, how did your sociological orientation help you to think of caste and communication as two inextricable ideas?

Biswajit Das (BD): Caste and communication are inextricably interlinked in Indian society. In fact, Sociology as a discipline has contributed immensely to understanding communication in Indian society. The early contributions in Sociology and Social anthropology have addressed the institutions and social structure of communication. Any understanding of Communication in Indian society has to engage with these contributions.

AJ: Unfortunately, we don’t have much literature on caste and communication. What enthused you to think of this important volume on Caste, Communication and Power?

BD: My Doctoral thesis was on Communication and Power in an Indian Village. It engaged with the macro as well as micro dynamics of communication and power in an Indian village. There are enormous contributions on caste and power in Indian social science scholarship. The communication aspect was not much explored except the structure but not the agency. Hence, the need to explore caste. Studying caste provides enormous opportunities to understand the ‘intra’ and ‘inter’ dimensions of Communication and power in Indian society.

AJ: In the beginning, you seem to be unhappy with that fact that communication research in India has not engaged with caste and power adequately. What can be the main reasons for that lack of scholastic engagement and research?

BD: As I said earlier, studying communication was not a priority in Indian social sciences. Even though there was an engagement, it was under theorised. On the contrary, communication studies, a very recent engagement, primarily focused on journalism, a highly untheorized field in India. Even though many contributions have been made in recent years, these are ‘medium’ specific and rarely address the holistic perspective of understanding communication and Indian society.

AJ: Can you discuss a bit more about the importance of engaging with the questions of caste and power within social sciences in general and communication studies in particular?

BD: Caste, communication and power, as we argue in this volume, are inextricably interlinked. People’s construction of social reality is reflected through various symbolic forms such as the aural, written, tonal and visual expressions, signs and languages. All these forms help in making the foundation of caste, communication and power in Indian society. The conceptual and theoretical foundations of caste and power relations evolve and emerge from the observation of communicative resources that represent people’s construction of realities. Its implications are twofold: first, communication constitutes the organic, rather a founding, basis of caste and power relations; and second, the conceptual and theoretical discourses are deeply impacted by the manner in which analytical uses of the sources are used in concept formation and theorizing. The closer relationships between caste and power relations have their basis in this organic linkage. Consequently, communication may be treated as the ‘master social process’ in understanding caste and power relations. It is vital for cognition of realities. This interface of communication with caste and power relations reflects in its formulations the notions of ‘social structure’ and ‘culture’, and the analysis of their normative and ideological underpinnings.

AJ: What are ways in which you think this volume will encourage the researchers in the field of communication and media studies to further research on caste and power?

BD: The recent engagement with caste by policy planners, civil society and the body politic clearly shows that our obsession with caste is unending. While Social Science scholarship has contributed immensely, the theatre of caste has jumped to the mainstream. Further, media has made it omnipresent by its coverage be it inequality, exploitation and the rights of various caste based associations in the mainstream. Communication and media studies so far have not addressed the burning issues or engaged in a systematic enquiry. Hence, the opportunities to broaden their base to engage in future research on the intricacies of caste and communication.

AJ: What are the larger epistemological questions that you are engaging with in this volume?

BD: The communication process is essentially relational in nature, and its elements matter less than the relationships themselves; that all human behaviour (not only verbal or oral) has a communicative value, and the relationships that are mutually responsive can be perceived as a vast system with a logic of their own. Communication is an ongoing process with multiple modes of behavioural manifestation such as speech, gestures, facial expressions and physical space between individuals. It is based on ‘codes’, languages of time, space and possession of material goods, and others. The inability to comprehend ‘codes’ of a people’s culture may lead to misunderstandings in communication.

AJ: What was your experience of editing an important volume of this scale like? What would you suggest to young scholars and early-career researchers who want to write chapters and/or edit in the future?

BD: I think editing a volume on Caste, Communication And Power is extremely challenging. It requires an interdisciplinary orientation and engagement. I would advise the young researchers to develop the sensitivity and orientation for such engagement. Not only do they have to grasp the literature on the area of research alien to their discipline but also will need to set aside or bring their disciplinary baggage to those contributions, as appropriate, to develop a perspective of communication. I think the contributors for the present volume responded accordingly and had the patience to bear editorial comments and remarks.