The crisis of the 'Other': Introspecting Bangaliyana (original) (raw)
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2013
By the beginning decades of the twentieth century, Brahmins had established an overwhelming dominance on the space of the modern world and its institutions. They 'Brahmin' with whom a polemical and oppositional engagement could be forged. Mysore Star was owned by a Lingayath leader, and accordingly served also to articulate the concerns of this caste order. The journal thus adequately represents the mutual-and often contending-self-identifications that go with the fact of being non-Brahmin and Lingayath. In doing so, it also reflects on the very limits of the non-Brahmin self (as indeed on particular facets of the latter's own recuperation of the Brahmin self) The Brahmin primarily responds to such categorisation in a complex manner. The word 'response', note, is being used here advisedly. The 'challenge' and the 'response' are not available in any mechanistic sense to either the Brahmin self or the non-Brahmin other. One needs to guard against imposing any notion of pragmatism or of deliberateness on either of these categories. The non-Brahmin recuperation of the Brahmin, to be sure, does not exhaust the Brahmin's own sense of what it is to be a Brahmin or at least to inhabit the space of a Brahmin. Consequently, the Brahmin's 'response' will necessarily be in excess of the non-Brahmin's retrieval of his self, both in its formulation and in its effects. This reminder, impinging on both our conceptual and methodological frameworks recounted in Ch. 2, is necessary in that it lends a sense of dynamism to the perceptual field we are going to encounter. Even as the Brahmin self subjects itself to many of the definitions that the non-Brahmin imposes, it also contests aspects of the othering that the process entails. But both in 'subjecting' its self to the other's categorisation as well as in resisting it, there is always an 'excess' that needs to be accounted for-primarily, in this instance, the Brahmin's very own processes of secularisation and modernisation. We will also detail such strategies of the modern Brahmin self particularly in the context of the non-Brahmin construction. Lingayaths, Vokkaligas and Muslims were the main participants in the non-Brahmin alliance that gets to be formed in Karnataka. Lingayaths and Vokkaligas were landed communities and were numerically dominant. 1 But, as we saw in the previous Manor (1977b) delineates the problems in assuming the Vokkaligas and Lingayaths as internally homogenised castes/communities; but for our specific purposes here we will not work with these complications. Our object, to reiterate, remains the specific contours of the Brahmin response to its othering.