The Biopolitics of Caste: Analysing the (Dis)honour Killings in South India

Introduction

This is an analytical article aimed at locating the caste problem in the Michel Foucault’s theoretical framework of biopolitics to analyse the persisting practice of endogamy even in the modern India. Although India celebrates 75 years of its independence, the right to choose one’s own life partner, which is guaranteed as part of ‘Right to Life’ under the Article 21 of the Indian constitution, is still far from reality. This is due to the fact that the social sanction for the union of two individuals for love or marriage is administered by the caste system. The crimes against the Dalits and women, in India, are on rise for choosing their choice of life partner. Though the killing of people for inter-caste love or marriage is justified under the guise of honour, such violence commands dishonour rather than honour (Kaushal, 2020; Menon, 2006; Patel, 2019). Henceforth, the killings of couple due to inter-caste love or marriage will be referred to as (dis)honour killings in this study.

According to D’Lima et al. (2020), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) reports 5,000 honour killings, while some of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) estimate 20,000 honour killings annually across the world. The World Health Organization (WHO, 2012) has pointed out the rising violence against women, especially killing the woman or girl to save the honour of the family in India. India ranks 140th in Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) in 2021 (World Economic Forum, 2021), slipping from its 112th rank of 2020 and 108th rank of 2018. The India’s declining rank in GGGI shows the alarming conditions of women in India. The violence emanates from the idea to have ‘control of “Beti-Roti” is the basis of caste system’ (Mishra, 2021). Thus, the gender-related violence is also intrinsic part of the caste violence that has increased to 15.55% between 2017 and 2019, as noted by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs (Dasgupta, 2021). In contemporary India, ‘every two hours, two Dalits are assaulted, everyday three Dalit women are raped and two Dalits are killed’ (Chatterjee, 2011, p. 37).

In the context of growing violence against women, Dalits, tribes and children, the social values such as caste pride, chastity and family’s honour are used to justify the violence by the perpetrators. The violence unleashed under the pretext of the honour of the family, or the caste entails the caste prejudices too. The idea of family’s honour is associated with the women’s sexual freedom, and family plays a vital role in selecting a life partner for women in India. The social norms are given immense importance in choosing the bride and bridegroom in Hindu society. Even the matrimonial advertisements carry the requirements, such as age, height, gotras, caste, religion and education. Of all these requirements, it is the caste which is given utmost importance, and it becomes the necessary and sufficient condition for matrimonial alliances between the two families. Popularly, this practice of seeking the bride or groom from the same community or caste or tribe is known as an ‘endogamy’. In other words, the endogamy is ‘the obligation to marry within an objectively defined group’ (Kaplan, 1973, p. 558). Today, this practice is not specific to India alone but evident among the Indian Hindu diaspora across the world.

Biopolitics of Caste

Explaining both theoretical and practical intricacies of caste system, B. R. Ambedkar has warned of its perpetuity that ‘it is a local problem, but one capable of much wider mischief, for as long as caste in India does exist, Hindus will hardly intermarry or have any social intercourse with outsiders; and if Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem’ (Ambedkar & Moon, 1979, p. 6). This caution indicates that the magnanimity of the caste problem is rooted in practicing ‘the custom of endogamy’ (Ambedkar & Moon, 1979) in the matrimonial relations. He further continues to explain that this endogamy ensures the ‘purity of the kinship’ among the different caste groups in the society. ‘The superimposition of endogamy on exogamy’ (Ambedkar & Moon, 1979) is not only observed in the pre-modern period but also continued to persist even in the modern times because of its metamorphosis nature of the caste. The functioning of caste system, as B. R. Ambedkar rightly pointed, based on ‘the idea of purity and pollution’ that is best expressed as an untouchability, is associated with the people belonging to Dalit communities or ati-Shudras. In maintaining the caste system, the body of an untouchable is perceived as the site of pollution in social and cultural realms of the life.

Even in the contemporary India after 75 years of independence, caste as a social institution continues to govern every aspect of Dalit life in its entirety ranging from cradle to graveyard. This is the irony of democracy/constitutional values in India to witness the ‘Michel Foucault’s Biopolitics’ in everyday life. For Foucault, the project of biopolitics was began by policing the sexuality and sex of the individuals in the Middle Ages (around seventeenth century). He identifies ‘the seventeenth century’, in his book, The History of Sexuality Volume-I, as the dawn for the age of repression despite the existence of bourgeois societies. He says mentioning of sex or sexuality became difficult and a punishable offence after seventeenth century onwards:

One of the greatest innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of ‘population’ as an economic and political problem: ‘population as wealth, population as manpower or labour capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded’. Governments perceived that they were not simply dealing with the subjects, or even with ‘people’, but with a ‘population’, with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illness, patterns of diet and habitation. (Foucault, 1977, p. 25)

In managing and controlling the population, the sexuality of the population became the central problem for the caste-ridden society. Caste system, like Foucault’s eighteenth-century Catholic Church, aimed at regulating the sexual conduct of the individuals, especially the couples on the principles of the endogamy. This finds place in the (dis)honour killings of inter-caste marriage couples. The biopolitics of the caste system observed that

whether in pre-modernity or in modernity, whether through Dharma or through democracy, for better or for worse, caste shapes the very bios, the political life of the human collective in India, permeating institutions, driving practices and giving governmentality the specific form that it has in our part of the world. (Vajpeyi, 2020, p. 313)

Jyotirao Phule used the word ‘Dalit’, which means ‘things or persons who are cut, split, broken or torn asunder, scattered or crushed and destroyed’ (Chatterjee, 2011, p. 29), to describe untouchables or outcastes. This etymology of the word Dalit is a corollary of bare life in Agamben’s Homo Sacer. Singh (2019) compares Dalit/ati-Shudra with Agamben’s Homo Sacer to highlight the plight of Dalit men and women who are treated as sub-humans without any state protection in the Manu’s patriarchy. She further explains that:

Legally speaking Homo Sacer is one who can be killed without the killer being regarded as a murderer; a homo sacer is also one who cannot be offered as sacrifice at the religious altar. The homo sacer could thus also simply mean a person who has been expunged from society and from the state protection as the fallout of an offense, one who is deprived of all rights and participation in civil religion. (Singh, 2019, p. 34)

Although the modern Indian state gives the legal protection under the Constitution, the caste society still executes the third-century AD Manu’s law for violating the endogamy practice of marriages. This is associated with the (dis)honour of the family in the (upper) castes in India. This can be best expressed in the words of Narayan (2003):

In these rural societies, joru, zamin and beti (wife, land and daughter), are still considered to be the exclusive possessions of males that have to be protected from all forms of external aggression, whether it is the honour of the wife and daughter at stake, or the usurping of personal property. The protection of such private property is considered to be the dharma or duty of the males and is a part of their purusharth (masculinity). (Narayan, 2003, p. 7)

The underlying rationale behind such organized violence against Dalits is still based on the concept of untouchability and the principle of purity and pollution in the Hindu religion. The debate over ontological equality of human beings in the phenomenology of untouchability locates ‘the source of untouchability in the Brahminical self and this leads to…the politics of self-preservation in the Hobbesian sense therefore suggests an unwillingness to step out from Brahminhood’ (Guru & Sarukkai, 2021, pp. 203–206). This politics of self-preservation operates through practicing endogamy and disciplining the women’s sexuality in the union of inter-caste couples. Jal (2018) argues that endogamy in caste system is a form of exclusion of Dalits to maintain the graded inequality in the Hindu society. Thus, as a measure of preventing exogamy, the violence is directed towards the Dalit men for marrying the upper caste women.

(Dis)honour Killings in South India

The Karamchedu massacre of Dalits in 1985 in Andhra Pradesh had shaken the conscience of the entire nation. The political parties, civil society organizations and progressive individuals had vehemently condemned the heinous atrocities against the Dalits in the society. The subsequent legal protection by enacting ‘Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989’ for all the marginalized sections was welcomed and appreciated, but Tsunduru killing of Dalits in 1991 proved that the legal measures could not ensure the physical safety and dignity of the Scheduled Caste/Tribes (SC/STs) in the country. According to studies by Balagopal (1987) and Berg (2014), there was no explicit factor of ‘inter-caste marriage’ involved in those two incidents instead ‘violence of recognition’ (Rao, 2009). Largely, the phenomena of (dis)honour killings are mostly associated with Khap Panchayats against sexual/marital transgressions in northern India (Kaushal, 2020; Singhal, 2014; Singh, 2016) compared to South India, except in Tamil Nadu. It was observed that although ‘most of honour killings reportedly take place in Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Western Uttar Pradesh and other parts of Northern and Western India, other parts of India also witness such incidents’ (Dhull, 2017, p. 419).

However, this trend of (dis)honour killings continued to rise in the southern India after the formation of new state of Telangana in 2014, which witnessed mutilation of two young Dalit men: Manthani Madhukar for inter-caste love in 2017 and Pranay for inter-caste marriage in 2018. Thus, the Dalit (human) body is subjected to the death in sustaining the caste system in contemporary India. This could not be attributed to the repressive apparatus of the state such as police or military but due to the state’s complaisance with hegemony exerted by the caste system. Swamy (2018) argues that the so-called progressive ‘South India is also trying to catch up with North’ in the (dis)honour killings of inter-caste love/marriages. The agonizing story of inter-caste marriage couple, Deepthi Reddy and Vijay Kumar from Karnataka in 2018, also indicates the significance of caste divisions in the society.

Prasad (2012) gives the account of violence against a Dalit boy, Kanchikacherla Kotesu, under the pretext of theft in Andhra Pradesh in 1969, but this is an untold story of (dis)honour killing. Kotesu was burnt alive at the Raccha Banda (‘The village bench, where the elders hold council’) in the presence of all the villagers. No one can come to his rescue because Dalit lives did not matter. This shows how a Dalit life is condemned to death by the upper caste.

Telugu revolutionary poet, Kalekuri Prasad, wrote a poem, The Untouchable Love to the memory of Kanchikacherla Kotesu.

This poem shows the killing of a Dalit boy Kotesu for falling in love with the upper caste woman as a legitimate and justified for violating the endogamy principle in the caste system. This poem expresses the agony that even the woman who liked him in private but could not accept Dalit as her lover in public domain because of the social constraints in the society. Thus, punishing the body for the purity of soul, the caste system exercises biopower (Foucault, 1977) ‘engulfing every aspect of society, law, state and politics (adherence to economy too) through the multifarious power dynamics in the name of culture and nation’ (Sampath, 2015, p. 121). In analysing Bourdieu and Foucault’s power dynamics of caste system in India, ‘we see individual bodies as the site where social structures and individuals’ practices collide’ (Rafanell & Gorringe, 2010, p. 605). The caste system in India is a classic example of patriarchy that controls the bodies of women (and lower caste men) at every stage of their lives as daughters, wives and daughters-in-law (D’Lima et al., 2020, p. 23). The control over women’s sexuality is often manifested in the form of violence against women or girls in the society. Even this violence is directed against Dalit men and justified under the pretext of honour of the family.

The Udumalpet Shankar case, in Tamilnadu, has awaken the hibernating society in 2016. Shankar, a Dalit man, was killed for marrying an upper caste woman. Although the trial court has awarded the capital punishment, the Madras High court has commuted it to a lesser punishment, life imprisonment in 2020 (Imranmullah, 2020). This relief for the accused resembles the corollary of Oksala (2010) argument that in achieving the subjugation of the bodies and controlling the population, the techniques of biopower coordinate with the other functionaries such as healthcare, judiciary or penal apparatus and insurance systems in the state and society (p. 37). The state’s soft response to caste violence in punishing the guilty will normalize the killings of inter-caste love or marriage couple in the society. This amounts to the ‘Jupiterian’ history (Foucault, 2003), which indicates continuity of the historical practices from Middle to contemporary times. This historical practice of endogamy reinforces the biopower of the caste that exerted in the ancient and medieval times.

The culture industry also responded to the prevailing caste violence against the inter-caste love or marriages. Susairaj (2021) analysed the portrayal of (dis)honour killings in Tamil movie, Pariyerum Perumal, where the director conveys, through an old man character, the religious sanction of such killing as a sacrifice to the lineage god. The (dis)honour killing takes place, ‘when a family member falls in love with a person of a different caste, particularly of a lower caste, the family decides to kill him or her in order to maintain the honour and pride of the family among the group of the same caste’ (Susairaj, 2021, p. 235). This is not confined to the theatrical display alone but also a phantasmagoria of inter-caste marriages in social reality. The two major atrocities, killing of Manthani Madhukar, in 2017, in Peddapally district and assassination of Pranay, in 2018, in Nalgonda district of Telangana state, created political outrage after Khairlanji massacre of Maharashtra in 2006. In these two atrocities, one was killed for falling in love with an OBC girl while the other was murdered for marrying an upper caste woman. As per the media narratives, the brutality of killing these two Dalit men resonates the corollary of ‘body of the condemned’ (Foucault, 2012), where the torture of the prisoner’s body is exhibited to the spectators.

This violent response from the dominant communities for inter-caste love and marriage is a part of the biopolitics of caste system where the Dalit individual bodies are considered ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault, 1977). ‘A docile body constructed through the operation of disciplinary power is compelled to be “obedient in order to be managed” and is moulded into “a subject who is self-monitoring… useful, productive”’ (Heyes, 2011, p. 162 cited in Ghosh, 2021, p. 3). This modern (dis)honour killing aims at preservation of the endogamy that echoes Foucault’s ‘analytics of sexuality, in which the aim of governance was to administer and invigorate the life force of the populace, through proper management of their bodies and behavior, especially in relation to sex’ (Wade, 2017, p. 3). In examining the women sexuality and endogamy, Mitra (2021) highlights the gendered violence and caste discrimination exerted by the patriarchal control of female sexuality (p. 4). These (dis)honour killings, especially in the North India context, are directed towards women because ‘women embody the honour of males renders violence against women (including murder) justifiable’ (Gupte, 2013, p. 72).

However, the violence against the exogamy, inter-caste love or marriage is a coercive power to control the sexuality and reproduction rights of the Dalits in the society. Thus, the biopolitics of caste forges an intrinsic relationship between the honour and gender. The exogamy has a logic more than a biological mixture from reproduction that a socio-cultural notion of superiority and inferiority entrenched in the caste hierarchies. B. R. Ambedkar (1979) opines that the Hindu society has institutionalized the practice of sati and widowhood for surplus women and celibacy for surplus men in preserving the sanctity of endogamy in the caste system. Foucault terms this technique of controlling the individual’s body as a biopower. The operational aspects of biopower in the society are that:

The biopower operates in two domains: it seeks power over human body power over human population as a whole. Biopower aimed at politics that Foucault calls ‘anatomo-politics’. This anatomo-politics is centered on body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimisation of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces … its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls. (Liesen & Walsh, 2012, p. 6)

The ‘anatomy-politics’ is rooted in the political economy of the caste system. ‘Caste System is not merely division of labour. It is also a division of labourers … into water-tight compartments’ (Ambedkar & Moon, 1979, p. 47). Chalam (2020) also opines that Dalits and other marginalized groups involve in the production process and serve the Dvijas (the twice born). Thus, the political economy of the caste is maintained to the advantage of upper caste and the political parties do not pay attention in curbing violence against Dalits. Balagopal (2011) denounces the hypocrisy of the political parties in dealing with the violence against Dalits. The caste society attacks Dalits not only for inter-caste love or marriage but also for superstitious reasons. There are incidents of Dalits being forced to drink urine for witchcraft (locally known as Banamati) in Medak District of united Andhra Pradesh in 1999 (Balagopal, 2011, p. 125). He also observes that the modern state lacks the commitment in implementing the laws like SC/ST atrocity Act to protect Dalits from heinous crimes. This lackadaisical tendency by the state will strengthen the social institution of caste system. Subsequently, for Foucault, ‘social practices shape bodies into becoming specific social agents. What is more, an individual does not exist as a social being prior to being ‘categorised’ but rather because of it’ (Rafanell & Gorringe, 2010, p. 614). Analogically, in creating the docile and obedient individuals, caste as a social institution’s disciplining techniques aims at the human ‘body as object and target of power’ (Foucault, 2012, p. 136). This facilitates enforcement of the social power against Dalits and women in preserving the endogamy.

Endogamy Within Dalit Communities

B. R. Ambedkar (1979) proposes inter-caste marriages for the annihilation of caste. However, the irony of anti-caste struggles by Dalits in India is that they also adhere to the principle of ‘endogamy’ in their marital relationships. Dalit movements, in post-Ambedkar times, have failed to set exemplary practice of ‘exogamy’. The inter-caste marriage within Dalit communities is also centred around the pride and honour of the caste. Further, the question of sub-caste within the Dalit groups has not only led to breakdown of unity but also hampered the social relations, although it has voiced out the concerns of most neglected within the same fold. Even within the communities of Dalit fold, ‘the problem of Caste, then, ultimately resolves itself into one of repairing the disparity between the marriageable units of the two sexes within it’ (Ambedkar & Moon, 1979, p. 10). Telugu Dalit novelist, Varakumar Gundepangu (2016) exposes the hypocrisy of Dalit movement where Madigas attacked another sub-caste, Masti community boy for falling in love with Madiga girl (p. 89). The Dalit movement does not seem to have addressed the question of social transformation as envisaged by B. R. Ambedkar rather articulated the interests of political power. The intricacies of sub-caste within Dalit communities also emanate from the logic of ‘graded inequality’ (Ambedkar, 1979). Thus, the opposition from dominant (Dalit) castes to inter-caste marriages within Dalit communities also exhibited the casteist reaction that is generally unleashed by upper castes in Hindu social order. Patriarchy is not strange to Dalit communities, and the Dalit men also exert their control over Dalit women’s sexuality. It is observed that ‘masculine domination is the most horrible and worst form of torture towards women in India, and Dalit women are the worst victim of it’ (Yogisha & Kumar, 2020, p. 9).

The Dalit sub-castes such as Adi-Andhras, Rellis, Malas, Madigas, Chindus, Dakkalis and Mastis neither inter-marry nor practice equality among themselves in both Telugu states: Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The dominant communities such as Malas and Madigas do practice untouchability against the other sub-castes such as Mala Dasari, Mastis and Chindus and avoid mingling with them because of the innate caste pride. Similarly, the Dalit communities like Parayas, Arunthathiyar, Ajila, Baira and Bakuda also do not engage in matrimonial relations in Tamil Nadu. It amounts to say that even the social practices of the sub-castes also operate in the circularity of the same power dynamics of caste. Thus, the ‘every society has its specific “political anatomy” (Foucault, 1979, p. 138) in which bodies are classified, sexed, classed, aged, raced and so on, by particular mechanisms of power that are local and historical’ (Gorringe & Rafanell, 2007, p. 101). In this hierarchy of power relations of the caste system, the Foucault’s disciplinarian power acts as a discriminatory in maintaining the ‘endogamy and sexuality’ of the individuals in Hinduism. The Dalit movements ranging from Dalitha Maha Sabha to Andhra Pradesh Ambedkar Yuvajana Sangham, and even issue-based organizations like MRPS (Madiga Reservation Porata Samiti) and Mala Mahanadu, could not succeed in bringing a substantial social change in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Moreover, the Foucault’s ‘governmentality’ was visible in shaping the conduct of these movements as per the requirements of the political parties, such as Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), communist parties, Telugu Desham Party (TDP) and Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS), which are led by upper caste leadership. Despite immense potential to aim at social transformation, the Dalit movement got entangled in the fight for reservations and protection of constitutional safeguards due to the political hegemony exerted by the mainstream political parties in India.

Prasad (2012) critically assess the nature of Dalit movements that failed to materialize B. R. Ambedkar’s vision of Samata Samaj. He expresses the agony that the failures in uniting various Dalit organizations as result of Dalit movement’s suicide by taking the poison (p. 196). Apart from sociopolitical unity, the Dalit movement is yet to overcome the logic of endogamy barrier in the crusade of annihilation of caste. Similar view was expressed by Balagopal (2011) in that the eponymous Aures of Dalit empowerment, Jyotirao Phule, B. R. Ambedkar and Periyar, preferred the social change over political power but the Dalit movement focused more on the power politics (p. i). This social change could be started by ‘annihilating the discrimination of the sub caste’ within Dalit folds. This is possible only if Dalit movement can rise above endogamic practices in their marital relations.

However, the practice of endogamy in marital relations aiming at the purity of the caste, in India, resembles the idea of persevering the sanctity/purity of the race elsewhere. This purity can be achieved by controlling the sexuality where ‘body and population meet’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 252). In explaining the biopolitics of marriage, Cadwallader and Riggs (2012) quote Foucault’s caesura or fragmentation of the population:

On the one hand was life, the ‘superrace’ (Society, p. 61), those whose lives and well-being must be prioritised and nurtured. On the other hand, were the ‘subrace’ (Society, p. 61), those associated with death, who, according to Foucault, could be subject to ‘not … simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on’. (Foucault, 2003, p. 256 cited in Cadwallader & Riggs, 2012, para 4)

The above passage indicates that biopolitics of marriage is similar to the biopolitics of the caste in practicing the endogamy where Foucault’s split single human race into super-race and sub-race. Thus, the life of an individual, especially Dalits and women, is reduced to family’s honour and stigma in exercising the biopower over the life in the society.

Conclusion

The biopolitics of caste begins with enforcing the practice of endogamy in the society and aspiring to control the sexuality of the individuals, especially Dalits. The caste as a social institution tries to govern the lives of Dalits in the sphere of education, clothing, profession, marriage, sexuality and death. This social control reflects sexuality through violent response to the inter-caste love or marriage not only between Dalits and non-Dalits but also between the sub-castes within Dalits. The incidents of (dis)honour killings in South India: Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, prove that the contemporary Indian society is still divided on the lines of caste. The societal approval of conjugal relations between the two opposite sex is based on the caste norms and values. In explaining the nexus between caste and sexuality, Foucault’s biopower that controls and regulates the population is reflected in the imposition of endogamy over exogamy in the maintaining the caste system as argued by B. R. Ambedkar. Dalit movement has directed towards capturing the political power but could not pay attention to the social transformation envisaged by Phule, Periyar and B. R. Ambedkar. In marching towards the annihilation of caste, it is required the Dalit movements to focus on the annihilation of the sub-caste discrimination in socio-cultural spheres of the life. It is inferred that B. R. Ambedkar’s vision of egalitarian society is also intertwined with the women’s freedom in the society. Thus, the biopolitics of the caste should be addressed through a social engineering by exogamy in the society.