Balasundaram Subramanian, Ph.D.
This essay seeks to highlight segregation as the keynote of traditional Indian life and caste as the key to the evolution of segregation. Caste in India could, over the centuries, unfold a truly pluralist polity, though each caste in itself was quite monolithic. The coexistence without coalescence of numerous castes could facilitate a polycentric social order in which power was diffused in the local communities. Politics and government found little salience in this centrifuged dispensation which was a kind of evolved anarchy that gave no scope for centralized autocracy or mega-government. The pluralist legacy of caste may finally account for the unique success of the Indian experiment with Western democracy which has had a none too commendable record in many other non-Western nations. True, caste in India would countenance no open or mobile society. But deeper than the compulsions of the social grad-grind and the disparities stemming from them marking the diurnal excrescences of caste in the theatre of life, are the hidden pulsations of a sublime philosophy politic etched indelibly in the ethos and encoded in the inner recesses of the psyche that inspires the weltanschauung of one and all, whatever one’s social station, towards asocial individuation, the impersonal individual programed to exit society in the end.
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