Can a caste-less society ever exist — and should it even be a policy goal? Prof. S.N. Balagangadhara says the answer is an unambiguous no.
In Part 5 of his series on the UGC controversy, Balagangadhara takes up the sociological and anthropological dimensions underlying recent Supreme Court warnings on UGC rules. He opens by dissecting the two dominant camps in India’s caste debate — those who see Jati as a degeneration of Varna, and those who see Varna itself as the problem — and exposes that both camps rest on claims requiring evidence neither side can produce. Drawing on textual and archaeological records, he demonstrates that Varna and Jati appear as co-existent phenomena in classical sources, making simple origin stories untenable.
His central argument is that Jati is simply the Indian name for the universal human reality of being born into a social group. No society has ever existed without such groups, and no policy — across 250 years of British and post-Independence governance — has succeeded in abolishing them. He then turns the lens on the “Brahmin conspiracy” thesis and shows it is logically self-defeating: a covert system operating over two millennia across a subcontinental geography without roads, communications, or central authority is no conspiracy at all. The episode closes with the bridge to India’s education system, where these same flawed assumptions are actively shaping policy.

About The Talk:
S. N. Balagangadhara is a professor emeritus of Ghent University in Belgium, and was director of the India Platform and the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap.