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Re: Castes??? (Post - 3)
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To: soc-religion-hindu@uunet.uu.net
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Subject: Re: Castes??? (Post - 3)
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From: Prasad Gokhale <f0g1@unb.ca>
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Date: Fri, 22 Mar 1996 15:18:21 -0400
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In-Reply-To: <4it1ap$6rl@babbage.ece.uc.edu>
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Newsgroups: soc.religion.hindu
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Organization: University of New Brunswick
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References: <4it1ap$6rl@babbage.ece.uc.edu>
From: pslvax!htoday@UCSD.EDU (Hinduism Today Archive Server)
Index: Caste, Prof. Elst
Last month, two ardent Hindus battled out the controversial pros
and cons of caste. This month's assessment, from Europe,
focuses on history and how jati and varna have, for the most
part, helped rather than hurt Hinduism.
By Prof. Koenraad Elst
In an inter-faith debate, most Hindus can easily be put on the
defensive with a single word-caste. Any anti-Hindu polemist can
be counted on to allege that "the typically Hindu caste system
is the most cruel apartheid, imposed by the barbaric white Aryan
invaders on the gentle dark-skinned natives." Here's a more
balanced and historical account of this controversial
institution.
Merits of the Caste System
The caste system is often portrayed as the ultimate horror.
Inborn inequality is indeed unacceptable to us moderns, but this
does not preclude that the system has also had its merits.
Caste is perceived as an "exclusion-from," but first of all it
is a form of "belonging-to," a natural structure of solidarity.
For this reason, Christian and Muslim missionaries found it very
difficult to lure Hindus away from their communities. Sometimes
castes were collectively converted to Islam, and Pope Gregory XV
(1621-23) decreed that the missionaries could tolerate caste
distinction among Christian converts; but by and large, caste
remained an effective hurdle to the destruction of Hinduism
through conversion. That is why the missionaries started
attacking the institution of caste and in particular the brahmin
caste. This propaganda has bloomed into a full-fledged
anti-brahminism, the Indian equivalent of anti-Semitism.
Every caste had a large measure of autonomy, with its own
judiciary, duties and privileges, and often its own temples.
Inter-caste affairs were settled at the village council by
consensus; even the lowest caste had veto power. This autonomy
of intermediate levels of society is the antithesis of the
totalitarian society in which the individual stands helpless
before the all-powerful state. This decentralized structure of
civil society and of the Hindu religious commonwealth has been
crucial to the survival of Hinduism under Muslim rule. Whereas
Buddhism was swept away as soon as its monasteries were
destroyed, Hinduism retreated into its caste structure and
weathered the storm.
Caste also provided a framework for integrating immigrant
communities: Jews, Zoroastrians and Syrian Christians. They
were not only tolerated, but assisted in efforts to preserve
their distinctive traditions.
Typically Hindu?
It is routinely claimed that caste is a uniquely Hindu
institution. Yet, counter examples are not hard to come by. In
Europe and elsewhere, there was (or still is) a hierarchical
distinction between noblemen and commoners, with nobility only
marrying nobility. Many tribal societies punished the breach of
endogamy rules with death.
Coming to the Indian tribes, we find Christian missionaries
claiming that "tribals are not Hindus because they do not
observe caste." In reality, missionary literature itself is rife
with testimonies of caste practices among tribals. A
spectacular example is what the missions call "the Mistake:" the
attempt, in 1891, to make tribal converts in Chhotanagpur
inter-dine with converts from other tribes. It was a disaster
for the mission. Most tribals renounced Christianity because
they chose to preserve the taboo on inter-dining. As strongly
as the haughtiest brahmin, they refused to mix what God hath
separated.
Endogamy and exogamy are observed by tribal societies the world
over. The question is therefore not why Hindu society invented
this system, but how it could preserve these tribal identities
even after outgrowing the tribal stage of civilization. The
answer lies largely in the expanding Vedic culture's
intrinsically respectful and conservative spirit, which ensured
that each tribe could preserve its customs and traditions,
including its defining custom of tribal endogamy.
Description and History
The Portuguese colonizers applied the term caste, "lineage,
breed," to two different Hindu institutions: jati and varna.
The effective unit of the caste system is the jati, birth-unit,
an endogamous group into which you are born, and within which
you marry. In principle, you can only dine with fellow members,
but the pressures of modern life have eroded this rule. The
several thousands of jatis are subdivided in exogamous clans,
gotra. This double division dates back to tribal society.
By contrast, varna is the typical functional division of an
advanced society-the Indus/Saraswati civilization, 3rd
millennium, bce. The youngest part of the Rg-Veda describes
four classes: learned brahmins born from Brahma's mouth, martial
kshatriya-born from his arms; vaishya entrepreneurs born from
His hips and shudra workers born from His feet. Everyone is a
shudra by birth. Boys become dwija, twice-born, or member of
one of the three upper varnas upon receiving the sacred thread
in the upanayana ceremony.
The varna system expanded from the Saraswati-Yamuna area and got
firmly established in the whole of Aryavarta (Kashmir to
Vidarbha, Sindh to Bihar). It counted as a sign of superior
culture setting the arya, civilized, heartland apart from the
surrounding mleccha, barbaric, lands. In Bengal and the South,
the system was reduced to a distinction between brahmins and
shudras. Varna is a ritual category and does not fully
correspond to effective social or economic status. Thus, half
of the princely rulers in British India were shudras and a few
were brahmins, though it is the kshatriya function par
excellence. Many shudras are rich, many brahmins impoverished.
The Mahabharata defines the varna qualities thus: "He in whom
you find truthfulness, generosity, absence of hatred, modesty,
goodness and self-restraint, is a brahmana. He who fulfills the
duties of a knight, studies the scriptures, concentrates on
acquisition and distribution of riches, is a kshatriya. He who
loves cattle-breeding, agriculture and money, is honest and
well-versed in scripture, is a vaishya. He who eats anything,
practises any profession, ignores purity rules, and takes no
interest in scriptures and rules of life, is a shudra." The
higher the varna, the more rules of self-discipline are to be
observed. Hence, a jati could collectively improve its status
by adopting more demanding rules of conduct, e.g.
vegetarianism.
A person's second name usually indicates his jati or gotra.
Further, one can use the following varna titles: Sharma
(shelter, or joy) indicates the brahmin, Varma (armour) the
kshatriya, Gupta (protected) the vaishya and Das (servant) the
shudra. In a single family, one person may call himself Gupta
(varna), another Agrawal (jati), yet another Garg (gotra). A
monk, upon renouncing the world, sheds his name along with his
caste identity.
Untouchability
Below the caste hierarchy are the untouchables, or harijan
(literally "God's people"), dalits ("oppressed"), paraiah (one
such caste in South India), or scheduled castes. They make up
about 16% of the Indian population, as many as the upper castes
combined.
Untouchability originates in the belief that evil spirits
surround dead and dying substances. People who work with
corpses, body excretions or animal skins had an aura of danger
and impurity, so they were kept away from mainstream society and
from sacred learning and ritual. This often took grotesque
forms: thus, an untouchable had to announce his polluting
proximity with a rattle, like a leper.
Untouchability is unknown in the Vedas, and therefore repudiated
by neo-Vedic reformers like Dayanand Saraswati, Narayan Guru,
Gandhiji and Savarkar. In 1967, Dr. Ambedkar, a dalit by birth
and fierce critic of social injustice in Hinduism and Islam, led
a mass conversion to Buddhism, partly on the (unhistorical)
assumption that Buddhism had been an anti-caste movement. The
1950 constitution outlawed untouchability and sanctioned
positive discrimination programs for the Scheduled Castes and
Tribes. Lately, the Vishva Hindu Parishad has managed to get
even the most traditionalist religious leaders on the
anti-untouchability platform, so that they invite harijans to
Vedic schools and train them as priests. In the villages,
however, pestering of dalits is still a regular phenomenon,
occasioned less by ritual purity issues than by land and labor
disputes. However, the dalits' increasing political clout is
accelerating the elimination of untouchability.
Caste Conversion
In the Mahabharata, Yuddhishthira affirms that varna is defined
by the qualities of head and heart, not by one's birth. Krishna
teaches that varna is defined by one's activity (karma) and
quality (guna). Till today, it is an unfinished debate to what
extent one's "quality" is determined by heredity or by
environmental influence. And so, while the hereditary view has
been predominant for long, the non-hereditary conception of
varna has always been around as well, as is clear from the
practice of varna conversion. The most famous example is the
17th-century freedom fighter Shivaji, a shudra who was accorded
kshatriya status to match his military achievements. The
geographical spread of Vedic tradition was achieved through
large-scale initiation of local elites into the varna order.
From 1875 onwards, the Arya Samaj has systematically
administered the "purification ritual" (shuddhi) to Muslim and
Christian converts and to low-caste Hindus, making the dwija.
Conversely, the present policy of positive discrimination has
made upper-caste people seek acceptance into the favored
Scheduled Castes.
Veer Savarkar, the ideologue of Hindu nationalism, advocated
intermarriage to unify the Hindu nation even at the biological
level. Most contemporary Hindus, though now generally opposed
to caste inequality, continue to marry within their respective
jati because they see no reason for their dissolution.
Racial Theory of Caste
Nineteenth-century Westerners projected the colonial situation
and the newest race theories on the caste system: the upper
castes were white invaders lording it over the black natives.
This outdated view is still repeated ad-nauseam by anti-Hindu
authors: now that "idolatry" has lost its force as a term of
abuse, "racism" is a welcome innovation to demonize Hinduism.
In reality, India is the region where all skin color types met
and mingled, and you will find many brahmins as black as Nelson
Mandela. Ancient "Aryan" heroes like Rama, Krishna, Draupadi,
Ravana (a brahmin) and a number of Vedic seers were explicitly
described as being dark-skinned.
But doesn't varna mean "skin color?" The effective meaning of
varna is "splendor, color," and hence "distinctive quality" or
"one segment in a spectrum." The four functional classes
constitute the "colors" in the spectrum of society. Symbolic
colors are allotted to the varna on the basis of the
cosmological scheme of "three qualities" (triguna): white is
sattva (truthful), the quality typifying the brahmin; red is
rajas (energetic), for the kshatriya; black is tamas (inert,
solid), for the shudra; yellow is allotted to the vaishya, who
is defined by a mixture of qualities.
Finally, caste society has been the most stable society in
history. Indian communists used to sneer that "India has never
even had a revolution." Actually, that is no mean achievement.
Address: Professor Koenraad Elst, PO box 103, 2000 Leuven 3,
Belgium.
Dr. Elst is a Belgian scholar who has extensively studied the
current socio-political situation in India. Keenly interested
in Asian philosophies and traditions from his early years, he
has studied yoga, aikido and other oriental disciplines.
Between 1988 and 1993 he spent much of his time in India doing
research at the prestigious Banaras Hindu University.
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