Caste law persisted by regulating violations rather than forbidding them outright.
Evidence
The Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek says of the Manusmriti and the caste system that such a system can be sustained “only by a complex panoply of tricks, displacements and compromises whose basic formula is that of universality with exceptions: in principle yes, but…The Laws of Manu demonstrates a breath-taking ingenuity in accomplishing this task.” Žižek believes that the true regulating power of the law does not reside in its “direct prohibitions, in the division of our acts into permitted and prohibited, but in regulating the very violations of prohibitions: the law silently accepts that the basic prohibitions are violated (or even discreetly solicits us to violate them), and then, it tells us how to reconcile the violation with the law by way of violating the prohibition in a regulated way.” Cited in S. Anand (2010). — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 1169
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Connects to the chapter’s theme of caste’s ideological reproduction mechanisms; Ambedkar’s later point that Brahmins break caste daily yet preach against it.
- SEED: An essay angle: how systems of domination encode their own escape clauses as a survival strategy.