Caste in a new light: Jati in British multiculturalism
Keywords:
cultural differences, anti-discrimination law, multiculturalism, caste, jati, Bristol school, Ghent school, casta, multiculturalismo, diferencias culturales, ley antidiscriminatoria, escuela de Bristol, escuela de GanteAbstract
Advocates of multiculturalism claim that it supports the rights of cultural minorities and the public recognition of cultural differences. However, this article shows that this cannot be true of Indian culture as it has become transported to Britain, where multiculturalism actually poses a threat to it. Using the resources of the research programme of the Ghent School on the comparative study of India and Europe, this article substantiates this claim by showing how the dominant conception of cultural differences as well as the classical conception of the Indian caste system, which takes over the Indian social structures of jati, are both imported by multiculturalist thought and practice. The concretizing of multiculturalism in the form of anti-discrimination law is not only anticipated by a destructive politics of identity, but the law itself can be used to foster the destruction of Indian culture on the pretext of targeting the discriminatory caste system.
Los defensores del multiculturalismo afirman que éste apoya los derechos de las minorías culturales y el reconocimiento público de las diferencias culturales. Sin embargo, este artículo demuestra que esto no puede ser cierto en el caso de la cultura india, ya que se ha trasladado a Gran Bretaña, donde el multiculturalismo supone en realidad una amenaza para ella. Utilizando los recursos del programa de investigación de la Escuela de Gante sobre el estudio comparativo de la India y Europa, este artículo corrobora dicha afirmación, mostrando cómo la concepción dominante de las diferencias culturales, así como la concepción clásica del sistema de castas indio, que recoge las estructuras sociales indias de jati, son ambas importadas por el pensamiento y la práctica multiculturalistas. La concreción del multiculturalismo británico en forma de ley antidiscriminatoria no sólo se anticipa a una política destructiva de la identidad, sino que la propia ley puede utilizarse para fomentar la destrucción de la cultura india con el pretexto de atacar el sistema discriminatorio de castas.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1333
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Prakash Shah
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
OSLS strictly respects intellectual property rights and it is our policy that the author retains copyright, and articles are made available under a Creative Commons licence. The Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution No-Derivatives licence is our default licence, further details available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 If this is not acceptable to you, please contact us.
The non-exclusive permission you grant to us includes the rights to disseminate the bibliographic details of the article, including the abstract supplied by you, and to authorise others, including bibliographic databases, indexing and contents alerting services, to copy and communicate these details.
For information on how to share and store your own article at each stage of production from submission to final publication, please read our Self-Archiving and Sharing policy.
The Copyright Notice showing the author and co-authors, and the Creative Commons license will be displayed on the article, and you must agree to this as part of the submission process. Please ensure that all co-authors are properly attributed and that they understand and accept these terms.
