 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Social media has been abuzz with the term Brahmanical Patriarchy and it took a Twitter controversy to shift attention to it. To discuss what it really means today we have with us Uma Chakravati to shed light more on the aspects of what it really means and thank you so much ma'am for joining us and discussing this issue with us. Interestingly it took a Twitter controversy to talk about this term and everybody since then has been wondering what it really means. So what is your take on it? Well you know actually the Brahmanical Patriarchy has been in circulation and interestingly it's been in circulation amongst women's studies scholars and amongst Dalit students in particular. So it's circulated in certain categories but nobody paid too much attention to that because that's a constituency which doesn't make its mark necessarily in the media in a certain kind of way and to that extent there is a prehistory to the to the Twitter controversy. If you look at it it's a bunch of Dalit women in and we have to see that the controversy comes back to us from America not from here and it's a bunch of Dalit women who stand with that poster and handed to the Twitter the the CEO of Twitter saying smash Brahmanical Patriarchy and that has to come to us in these parts and it's raging here but nobody paid any attention to the fact that it was circulating among certain sections particularly so I think it's interesting that we even our controversies come to us from mediated by America. And only then have we actually paid attention to it. So Brahmanical Patriarchy is something that people are trying to get their head around of course that it's all around us but it took us this particular instance for us to discuss what it really means. So if you could break it down for our viewers as to what is really Brahmanical Patriarchy and where can we see its manifestations around us. Yeah well I'd go back to the you know why is it that the the this was a paper that was published in 1993. It was something that I'd been thinking about I'd been thinking about caste and gender together but I'd been particularly thinking about it since the 1990 the Mandala agitation. Those of you who have been around here would know that the Mandala agitation is the one that raised the caste question for the first in it was meant to be around the question of reservations in the civil services but OBC reservations but actually it the relationship in caste and gender in a sense was known or at least may not have been theorized and its source is a is a post many posters that young women from the elite Delhi colleges were carrying in front of them which said we don't want unemployed husbands to the to the ordinance. Now when I indicate that why is this that there's this bunch of young women who are carrying this poster and it's seen as something that is a you know a radical act on their part anti-state act on their part what is it saying and everybody and that they are protesting and they're protesting on behalf of their potential husbands and people laugh and say you know they think it's how crazy that is that the problem with it is only that they are protesting not for themselves but for their potential husbands but the most serious part over there is what I flagged not in the paper on Romanical Patriarchy but later in a piece of work that I did is that it who is it why is it the more ordinance only said who's going to who was going to get the jobs okay the OBC were going to open up where is the ordinance now these young women could have married these OBC characters just as much as anybody else who why would they actually protesting is because they saw it being taken away from their potential husbands and I would say that Vipi Singh has passed passed only the ordinance on the jobs who has indicated that there was an ordinance which said women should marry some some people should marry only some others that's an internalized ordinance that women carry around them so the link between caste and gender was very apparent in that slogan in that whatever and that to me was a fundamental issue in the way in which we needed to think about the conjointness of caste and gender in Indian society so that you reproduced caste and you produce gender gender inequality simultaneously through the same system and it is for that reason that finally I wrote my piece on Romanical Patriarchy because I am a scholar essentially of ancient Indian history the first formulation that I made was based on the textual traditions it has a textual tradition and in the structures for early India and because it takes us back it actually shows you the enduring power of a set of ideas which made endogamy the pivot of the reproduction of caste but also the reproduction of inequality among men and women and among women and women because that's the structure that came into being you know talking more in terms of how it manifests itself around us and how sometimes we ignore those kind of intersections so multiple systems around us are intersectional there's a nature of intersectional oppression that you've pointed out very correctly so if you could discuss more about those that we see around ourselves that we see in cases around us in terms of honor killings and yeah yeah well actually that's a good opening for issue if you look at it and then I went on after this 1993 article in 2003 or 4 I published a book which was called gendering caste through a feminist lens where the full discussion of this issue was explored and one of the things that is striking is however modern you are never mind whether you're in the United States of America or anywhere else when you marry you seek to marry from within your own endogamous group and the most visible sign of that is the advertising as advertisements if you look at the matrimonial ads they will actually privilege who you are so it will say Punjabi Khatri something something they may not say only you need to apply but the fact is that you marked your own identity so you're only expecting responses from the same community and sometimes you will get an ad which will say caste no bar it's rare it will it'll often come from the from the castes that are regarded as low in the hierarchy so in a sense the reproduction of caste is being sustained through the matrimonial system and it has no relationship to modernity you can be absolutely modern and you can still follow it so modernity or the ad world works very comfortably with the caste system in India and so it's as ubiquitous as that and I think that's so in a sense the endogamy they're acknowledging that endogamy is at the heart of the caste system and marriage is a highly controlled let's say element in our family system and our and our society is evident from this account that I've given you so at the end of the day we are reproducing the caste system it is not at all being diluted now often it will be said that the government is creating caste through the reservation but you're not acknowledging that caste is being also reproduced through the marriage system violations of this are very strongly punished and we know as women and especially if you blur the boundaries so if it's a uppercast boy and a lower caste girl that's also not good but it'll be tolerated but if it's an uppercast woman and a lower caste man then it's completely it's regarded as extremely what would you call it a violative of the social codes and it's punished with violence you enforce through violence and you know how terrible it can be sometimes you can kill the daughter itself and you know it's like or that is the structure that we're working in so I would not like to call it on a killing it's a wrong term we should call it custodial killing girls are in the custody of their families and the families execute the death penalty upon them informally and that's the structure that's so violations of the what you call the pratilomic relationship which actually go back to Manu I mean he's the one who bars Anuloma and Pratuloma is there are two categories Anuloma is containable Pratuloma is what has to be completely banned so that's that structure of reproducing caste is and caste inequality and gender inequality all simultaneously is being maintained even through modern times and through modern family systems so that brings me to another question in terms of how we trace this system back to Manu because a lot of activists who've come forth because of this movement have said that it is not against a community it is not against perhaps Brahmins it is talking about a system which has its roots in Manu I'm glad that some of the activists are writing back like that and let's also take it back let's let's take it back to Ambedkar I mean the person who really focused on endogamy as the basis of the caste system is Ambedkar and Ambedkar says very clearly he would stand against the Shastras for sure but he doesn't it's not the individual Brahmin or the individual Shatriya or the individual Banya that he would position himself against it's the relationship of these people within the caste structure and so Brahminism is simply the ideological let's say basis for caste and caste inequality so as he puts it very movingly in my opinion because as someone who's a constitutionalist he said because it stands against liberty equality and fraternity that's what you're positioning yourself with so the controversy is completely nonsensical I mean you can belong to any community but if you stand against that system of inequality which reproduces both caste and gender inequality so text strictly speaking everyone should be against should be against that system that mode of everyone should be against Brahminical patriarchy if you're a constitutionalist and if you stand against inequality you must actually be against Brahminical patriarchy because that's the source of that inequality and interestingly of course about a good thing has been the discussions that have come out of this whole controversy but again there has been a very strong reaction coming from political fronts coming from the BJP and the congress alike about how it is an attack on certain communities so how would you react to that that it's an attack it's completely nonsensical it's not an attack on community it's against it's an attack on a way of thinking and in a way of reproducing social relations it's against the manifestation of this it's against that structure it is not against individuals you can belong to any community you are any set of people and it is not to say that caste is not being let's say endogamy is not being practiced across the board so it's not only the Brahmins are practicing it or the dominant sections are endogamy is being practiced across the board and but it helps us it helps to reproduce caste inequality that is what we have to acknowledge and that is what we have to stand against and you can belong to anywhere if you're a democratic person you would stand against if you're a democratic person and you're a feminist and anyone can be a feminist you would stand against gender inequality and caste inequality so you would be against Brahmanical patriarchy it's as simple as that now coming to the question of smashing Brahmanical patriarchy how do we do that in our everyday lives if you were to give you know messages to young people because we're all very charged up currently thinking about how we can end this structure of oppression together so what is the key takeaway from this I think the key takeaway is to see not to ignore that this structure also reproduces the inequality of resources yeah so when we talk about and I want to take back take this back to critical moments in our history in which we should have ended the perpetuation of the caste system in terms of caste class and gender inequality you know so we have not actually made live resources communal or distributed distributed resources instead the palliative of I mean I'll stand for reservations as longer as they have nothing else but the fact is that the reservation is only a partial it is only a way of saying you have a right to live and I'll give you a job but the fact is that you should everyone should have access to resources so I think that the way to end it is that you have to work you have to struggle and I say this to all activists you have to struggle against caste class and gender inequality simultaneously and you should not postpone this struggle and say first we'll do gender then we'll do class and then we'll do class do you have to actually strike it all three simultaneously because it's the same structure it is the three joined together which have created this unequal structure and everyone should smash it everyone should smash it because it's an unequal structure and it's to my mind it's a visiation of the constitutional provisions and the constitutional spirit so I would say that's what you have to do so on that note that there are multiple oppressive systems and we can't fight them singularly and we have to fight oppressive systems together so we leave you with that message thank you for watching news click thank you so much ma'am for this discussion with us thank you thank you thank you