Speaking more generally, Gandhi’s defense of caste makes sense (to the extent that it makes sense at all) in the context of an ideal Indian village. For Gandhi such a village was an imagined historical realization of an ideal that was spiritual and at the same time and by the same token functional. But to make this claim I must also say that there is something about an ideal Gandhian village that makes it Indian; in other words, the Indian concept of caste, together with related ideas in which it is embedded, adds something to a village that would already be ideal as an implementation of western ideals like liberté, égalité, and fraternité.

Unlike any real caste system, the caste system of Gandhi’s ideal village accords everybody equal respect. Everybody has the same human dignity regardless of caste or calling. In this respect Gandhi echoes the 18th century European ideals most famously formalized by Immanuel Kant. For Kant every rational being has inherent dignity as an end-in-itself. But obviously Gandhi did not need to support caste in order to support an ideal of human dignity. He could have just endorsed Kant. On their face caste distinctions are violations of human dignity. Gandhi’s caste-without-rank appears to be more a concession to western ideals to make caste acceptable than a positive case for caste. The question remains what it is about Varnashram that makes it worth keeping –or seem to Gandhi to be worth keeping—after it has been amended to delete rank and insert equal respect for all. With reason Gandhi said that his concept of Varna “…has nothing in common with caste as we know it today,” (8) but the puzzle remains why he endorsed the purified concept of caste that he did endorse.

One way to look for a solution to the puzzle would be to hypothesize that Gandhi finds something in caste which makes it possible to implement the same human ideals the West in principle holds, but better than the West itself has implemented them. Gandhi is famous for having said that western civilization would be a good idea. He often pointed out that the West is notoriously unfaithful to its own moral norms, both its 18th century humanist norms and its Judeo-Christian norms. For example, freedom, the most prominent of the western norms, conceived as the autonomy of the individual, would be greater in Gandhi’s ideal villages than in the West. Perhaps there was even more freedom than in the West in the historically existing Indian villages prior to the British conquest and the dissolution of village life under the pressures of modern commerce and industry. The appropriate technologies of the ideal village would be controlled by individual workers who owned their own tools; or by small groups of workers; or by village panchayats which would make decisions at best by consensus and at worst by grassroots democracy –never by decree or by force. Instead of the modern world described by Anthony Giddens as one where people are disciplined mainly by fear of losing their jobs, there would be a world where most people are self-employed, or working in sisterly and brotherly small groups. They would own their own tools. (Large enterprises that necessarily transcend the village level would be exceptions, as will be discussed in several chapters subsequently.) People would be freer, because they could not be fired, because they were never hired.