Abstract
This paper will explore works by major twentieth-century French theorists, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Georges Dumézil. In Totem and Taboo and The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss contrasts caste with totemism by arguing that caste naturalizes the essence of culturally constructed differences between human beings, whereas totemism confers cultural-spiritual signification to inanimate natural object-representations of animals to organize human relations. The distinction is not based on polar opposites, but, instead, produces asymmetric effects. In his comparative mythological and linguistic studies, Dumézil argues that caste in ancient Hindu epics inverts the order of sovereignty and the priestly caste, whereby the latter's hereditary succession legitimates sovereignty, not the other way around; he compares and contrasts this dynamic with ancient Roman and Persian forms. The relation between sovereignty and sacral caste is an inversion of blood sacrifice in terms of perpetuity via cycles of reincarnation, the hallmark of the Hindu metaphysics of caste.
This paper will argue that Lévi-Strauss and Dumézil's ideas can be synthesized into a deeper metaphysical investigation of the hidden origins of caste: where caste is a self-justifying deviation of our human essence in the attempt to artificially divide human beings according to sovereign notions of purity that are, paradoxically, arbitrary and transcendental at the same time. We can then speculate on ways to overcome this polar deviation to achieve equality and dignity in caste-based societies through the elimination of caste and indigenous peoples’ oppressions. The highest goal would be the eradication of caste itself in democratic societies, which is to fulfill the legacy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar.
In order to fully develop insights that go beyond Lévi-Strauss and Dumézil, we will turn to Bataille’s works on the state of ‘immanence and animality’ in his posthumously published Theory of Religion, which predates our modern capitalist military-industrial complex. Furthermore, by reading Derrida on Bataille, we will develop our own thesis about caste as that which transcends both precolonial indigenous forms and postcolonial manifestations of rapidly evolving hierarchic formations that blur distinctions between the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial epochal timeframes. This is so, particularly, in the current global capitalist context, where neither the West nor East dominate. The interrelations between caste, nature, sovereignty, and historical time have to be thought through in a more primordial philosophical manner. The goal is to reimagine a relationship to nature in which caste is completely ‘annihilated’ to go back to Ambedkar’s lifelong quest.