March Of Movements

Summary of this article

• Pre-colonial resistance to Brahminism—the ideological source of caste—often took quasi-religious forms.
  
• The Dravidian movement secularised the caste question and shattered Brahmin hegemony, but it did not annihilate caste.
  
• Reviving transformative politics demands creative synthesis of emancipatory legacies.
  

Caste in modern India operates simultaneously as a structure of inequality, a means of political mobilisation, and an idiom for ideological projects of social order—deeply entwined with the country’s power structure. Although it appears to draw from Hindu scriptures and pre-modern social organisation, its transformation into a political instrument is largely a product of colonial modernity and democratic politics.