The controversy over Aaja Nachle has exposed deep fissures in Indian society. India’s society was historically marked by egregious forms of inequality and social division. While some of these have faded away, appalling forms of social segregation, stigmatisation and discrimination against dalits still persist, often in our most modern and progressive institutions. The hierarchies of Indian social practice have left an indelible mark on linguistic practice: an invocation of a caste, whether chamar or bania or brahmin, still evokes, not just a place in a hierarchy, but a whole set of moral attributes and capabilities. Referring to someone as a ‘bania’ is not just an invocation of their social standing, but also a pejorative reference to an obsession with money and general small mindedness; in Tamil Nadu, ‘brahmin’ has become a pejorative term, but it still evokes a set of character attributes: often wily and oppressive. In a culture where social place and attributes are so mixed up, detaching ‘caste’ from ‘profession,’ or using any caste words like mochi in a neutral sense that cannot be construed as offensive is a difficult task. You simply have to be generous about the intention of the speaker, and see if the context justifies cutting them slack. But in a society marked by division, the fear of impunity and no credible politics that effectively empowers rather than symbolically manipulates division, this mutual charity of interpretation will be hard to come by.

While the worry about the lyrics in question is understandable, the politics around it is not. The transformative promise of republican citizenship rests on this proposition: that there should be no identities in society that are necessarily imposed on an individual from the outside. One of the injustices inherent in caste was that you were condemned to a necessary identity: a yadav is a yadav, no matter what his qualities or accomplishments. One of the objections to the lyrics was that it implied that a mochi could not be a sonar, thus denying aspirations to mobility, or worse still, attributing lack of capability. Let us bracket the question of whether this is a correct interpretation. Assume that it is. But think of how we have reconfigured caste in modern India. Instead of asking: How do we overcome caste and how do we make it progressively less relevant for the rights and status individuals enjoy, we have, in the guise of transforming it, made it even more necessary and inescapable. The lyricist’s fault was probably less that he was guilty of unconscious caste prejudice. Maybe he was. But his fault was more in naively assuming that in India language, identity and profession can ever be detached from caste connotations. Previously caste was inescapable through a despicable ideology of social hierarchy; now caste is inescapable, because of the language of social justice.

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