Caste in India - Part I

By looking at caste historically, this paper questions the assumption that caste is an organic part of the fabric of Hinduism. 

by Michael Cooke

…… there are many of us living this lie. We avoid talking about caste, hoping to somehow find a place in the world of upper – casteness that has been forbidden to us. We create upper – caste identities – stolen badges – that help us gain entry to a space that will reject us the moment it finds out who we really are. We nervously flash these IDs anytime we are grilled about our origins. …………. Those who fail to exhibit satisfactory signs of upper – casteness and those who refuse are punished for trespassing ……...

Discrimination, humiliation, oppression are all penalties for not being upper – caste, or simply being Dalit. Our Dalitness is imprinted onto us through the burned bodies of our children, suicides of our PhD scholars and college students, rapes of young girls and women, asphyxiation of our manual scavengers and ‘honour killings’ of lovers. These penalties are so routine that they aren’t even considered worthy of shock and outrage. Yashica Dutt 

Preamble

These poignant words open a disturbing memoir of what it is to live the life of a Dalit (a Mahrati word meaning broken).  Yashica Dutt is a Dalit who has had a tertiary education and entered the profession of journalism. Her life, the life of her family and clan, and the disturbing statistics she quotes attest to the uncomfortable fact that caste is alive and well in contemporary India. This essay will sketch the history of caste and why it still persists. Many a liberal Hindu insists that it does not exist, but when pressed concedes that it does, only to insist it is benign, and that the theological structures underpinning the system cannot be blamed. Others, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, insist it is disappearing.

Children from a Dalit community take part in education classes in the Maharjganj district of India.Andrew Aitchison / Corbis via Getty Images file

The historical persistence of caste finds an illustration in the Mahabharata, an epic poem which is one of the monuments of world literature. Here we find the people who were colonising the Indo-Gangetic plain in mythic guise - heroes, heroines, villains, gurus, nobles and commoners. 

The warrior Ekalavya of the Nishadha tribe (a tribe on the lowest rung of the caste system) is an archer who excels even the hero Arjuna, a Kshatriya prince who is also a pupil of the Brahmin guru Dronacharya (Drona). Drona asks Ekalavya where he had acquired his sublime skill. Ekalavya replies that being of a subordinate caste, he would never have been able to learn his craft from a Brahmin. He instead made a clay idol of Drona as his guru and taught himself archery. Arjuna is upset that somebody has bested him in a skill in which he feels he has no peers. His humiliation is magnified as his better in archery is from a lowly caste. Drona, to mollify the Prince, demands that Ekalavya cut off his thumb as gurudakshina (a fee paid to the master by his pupil). Ekalavya does so and allows the caste order to remain intact, so that the petulant Arjuna is again the greatest archer in the tale.

How one reads this depends on one’s caste. In a post written in 2022 (the internet has many posts in a similar vein) by Guru Sri Ravi Shankar (Gurudev), it is stated that if one looks at the story from the viewpoint of the ‘wise’, ‘actually Dronacharya uplifted Eklavya from just being a student to becoming an epitome of discipleship’. 

Gurudev claims that the sacrifice of Ekalavya makes him more famous in terms of devotion even than Arjuna, and says that ‘even if the Guru is wrong, if your devotion is there you can never go wrong. But the Guru is not wrong, it appears he was partial but he uplifted Ekalavya and preserved his dharma (duty) also. His duty was to maintain the law of the land. You cannot have anyone much better than the prince’. 

Gurudev is not alone in his uncritical acceptance of a caste hierarchy. What is absent from his homily is an appreciation of the actual human beings who are at the bottom of that hierarchy – the Dalits. Their demands for a living wage, better working conditions and the end of caste discrimination cannot be countenanced: they should accept their fate.    

The hegemonic justification is that an individual must follow the dictates of his guru, an intellectual from the Brahmin caste, in all things: the guru knows best. A Judeo-Christian equivalent is the demand by Yahweh that Abraham kill his son Isaac as h also reminds us of how the oppressed can be complicit like Ekalavya in their bondage, being so caught up in the hegemony of the ruling elite. 

Origins

By looking at caste historically, this paper questions the assumption that caste is an organic part of the fabric of Hinduism. The apologists of caste claim that its pernicious effects were not intended by the framers of the cosmic order, regardless of the exploitation and degradation which are its historical consequences. Related to this is the idea that India was always Hindu and that the Arya (the progenitors of caste) were part of the organic tissue of Hindu India, which was later disrupted by invaders of the Islamic faith.

Discussing caste is complicated, as witnessed by the many unreliable accounts of its origins and history, but the effects of caste are everywhere in modern India. Many of the lowest in the hierarchy are involved in a deadly conflict with the state. Kashmir, a Muslim majority state, has seen tens of thousands dead, with many more incarcerated or made to disappear. There have been violent skirmishes and pogroms in the north of India against the Muslim population.  There have been violent clashes between the Dalits, who are demanding economic and social justice, and the higher castes. The Scheduled Tribes  and some Dalits, especially in the poorer states like Bihar, are involved in a deadly guerrilla war with the Indian state and its higher caste allies, who covet the Dalits and Scheduled Tribes ancestral lands for the timber and minerals they hold. 

Along with this and to paper over the oppression, a hegemonic narrative has been created, with an increasing number of organic ‘intellectuals’ who attack the more considered and nuanced work of other scholars.  This creates a cacophony of unreason in which caste is downplayed or irrelevant in the historical discourse. It is argued, contrary to the evidence, that India was not made up of waves of migrations and invasions, and that India’s complex and wondrous civilisation is a degraded one (the rot having set in with the Islamic invaders over a thousand years ago) which needs to be purged of its non-Hindu elements. 

There are fervent Hindus who argue that they are the ‘landlords’ and ‘guardians’ of the sacred land, whilst the others are mere tenants. The land was invaded by Muslims and Western colonialists, in particular the rapacious British, and with the British having gone the Muslims are now held responsible. Not only did Islam introduce alien practices, but it also (they contend) attempted to destroy Hindu culture. They argue that Hinduism is a very old civilization, maybe the oldest, stretching from at least 3000 BCE. It is now time for Hindus to regain their past glories. This, however, is untrue.

The first problem has to do with the Indus civilization. It is one of the four great ancient civilizations and lies in the northern part of the subcontinent. The impressive ruins at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro attest to its magnificence. The Indus civilization had a long gestation period and a long unexplained decline. Its mature period was from around 2500 BCE and it fell apart before 1500 BCE, when the Arya were beginning to make their presence known. The respected Indologist Professor Wendy Doniger confesses she had first subscribed to the organic link between the Arya and the Indus civilization. The appeal of this view comes in part, Doniger says, from the mistake of reading the past through the prism of the present and arguing that Hinduism is timeless, without outside influences, and that any disruptions and decline can be laid at the feet of foreigners (Islam). 

The first major obstacle to the continuity thesis is that there is no link between the material conditions characteristic of the Indus civilization and those civilisations which followed. The Arya were pastoralists and traders. The Indus Valley civilization, in contrast, was sedentary and agricultural and was based on a network of trade connections that stretched to Egypt. Crucially, the complex administrative and trading apparatus that was its backbone is absent in Arya settlements. They initially lacked the literacy to manage such a large urban culture. 

One of the most obvious features of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro is the bricks used to build them. The authors of the Rg-Veda did not know about bricks. It was only when they started colonising the Gangetic plain, around 600 BCE, that their rituals became more elaborate, and they then began to build large brick altars. The Indus Valley civilization made bricks in kilns rather than sun-drying them, a technique which reappeared only in the last centuries BCE – more than a thousand years later. 

Proponents of the continuity thesis assume that ancient boundaries are reflected in those imposed by the British - Lanka, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. These boundaries did not exist in ancient India, as borders in a modern sense were non-existent. People, ideas, goods, cultural and religious practices mingled over many millennia, giving rise to an unique, complex and ever-evolving civilization, till the British imperialists arrived. 

The Indus civilisation had strong links with regions represented by modern Iran, Syria, Turkey and the Turkic-speaking states, and Afghanistan, with the archaeology showing trading, artistic and religious links. The Vedic world was more constrained geographically. 

It has been claimed that an image discovered in Mohenjo-Daro represents Siva. Though the sublime hymns of the Rg-Veda are dedicated to numerous gods, Siva is not mentioned. If there was a continuity then the image claimed to be Siva in Mohenjo-Daro would have been known, and the deity’s presence and importance noted. 

The Rg-Veda is silent on the early migrations, and evidence must be sought from the linguistic and archaeological evidence, reinforced by the examination of ancient DNA. The DNA recovered from ancient bones allows the identification and dating of early human migrations into different geographical regions. This can be cross-checked with the linguistic evidence. Genetically the Aryas can be linked to the Yamnaya pastoralists who came from the steppes north of the Black Sea. They began their slow migration around 3,000 BCE, arriving in the subcontinent around 1500 BCE, after the decline of the Indus Valley civilization.  

Names, dates, deities, rulers, inscriptions and artefacts show a slow migration from the north down towards the subcontinent. These were nomadic people, which is reflected in the Rg-Veda’s emphasis on pastoralism. Horses and cattle were their main assets. What can be tentatively assumed is that they met non-Arya speakers in the subcontinent who were proto-Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman. Bilingualism and the evolution of new linguistic forms would have been a natural result. 

Professor Romila Thapar argues that what we see in the subcontinent is adaptation, requiring the historian to investigate the phenomena as a process of social history and not apply to it modern concepts of identity. A tentative thesis about the past requires that ‘the full armoury of complex, sometimes tentative evidence archaeological, linguistic and textual has to be brought into play relating to India and its neighbours’.  

Much of Hindu tradition, from the Mahabharata onwards, has come from non-Vedic sources. New ideas, new narratives, new practices arose from the non-Sanskrit world, found their way into Sanskrit texts, left it, and sometimes reappeared again. This is all part of the great Hindu tradition. Southern India’s contribution (i.e., Dravidian) is a shining example. Hinduism drew on multiple sources for its spiritual, linguistic and cultural nourishment.

We can tentatively conclude that the Harappan images that enrapture many contemporary Hindu nationalists probably lived on in folk memory and hundreds of years later took on new meaning. India is full of these cross-cultural influences. Hindus built new temples on the debris of Buddhist stupas and other Hindu temples. More controversially, Muslims built mosques on the same debris.  Doniger characterizes it as ‘new wine in old bottles.’ 

There are no copyrights there; all is in the public domain. This is not the hodgepodge that the Hindus and the early orientalists regarded as dirt, matter out of place, evidence of an inferior status but rather, the interaction of various different strains that is an inevitable factor in all cultures and traditions and a good thing. 

Caste developed and changed according to different historical epochs, differing social and economic relations and different modes of production. Its origins are hard to make out, but we get a hint from the ancient texts, written by Brahmins who were anxious to preserve their place in the hierarchy and to keep the favour of rulers. These texts, like the Mahavamsa in Lanka, show us how the elite of the day saw society. 

The Rg-Veda was composed during the early Vedic period (1500 BCE to 1000 BCE). It can be discerned from the texts that there were two groups, separated by varna (meaning order, color or class or a combination of the three, depending on the context). The fundamental assumption of the Rg-Veda is that people are not the same – there is a hierarchy of classes (i.e., castes), each with its separate duties and distinctive way of life. This, according to Professor Basham, is one of the distinguishing features of ancient Indian sociology. 

In the Vedic texts we find two fundamental groups: the Arya, who were the noble ones, and a servile group called the Dasa (slave, servant). The Arya thought of society as consisting of four classes, as laid down by Manu, the first man. The first three groups were dvija (twice born), who were invested with the sacred thread on their initiation into Vedic rituals. It is a hierarchy of classes and occupations, each with a defined space in society.  

The fourfold caste system (caturvarnya) consisted of Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaisya and Shudras. The Brahmins were the theological elite, the Kshatriyas the rulers, the Vaisya the economic elite consisting of merchants and landowners. The fourth was the Shudras, whose duty was to service the needs of the three other castes. Each of these groups was assigned a varna – white for the Brahmins, red for the Kshatriyas, yellow for the Vaisya and black for the Shudras.  The Shudras were not allowed to partake in the religious rituals of the first three castes.  

We can tentatively infer that sometimes the Arya considered the moral behaviour and character of the Shudras as inferior. The signifiers of the hierarchy were religion, skin colour (indigenous and non-indigenous) and language. Who the Dasa were, what language or languages they spoke, the Rg-Veda is silent on. What can be discerned from the text is that the Arya were organised into large tribal clans, each containing several thousands of warriors and that these clans fought major battles with large groups of people they termed Dasa. They saw themselves as conquerors.  Their economic and political control of the Dasas and the ideological framework (i.e., caste) represented more than a benign religious injunction, as Sri Aurobindo piously hoped. It was also a means of controlling a population who were forbidden to share religious values and practices with the Arya. In ancient times given the centrality of gods and rituals to appease them, it was a heavy burden, economic, religious and cultural, for the Dasa. 

To be continued 

References;

1.   Dutt, Yashica (2019). Coming Out as Dalit. Aleph, p. xi.
2.   Shankar, Sri Ravi (2022). ‘The Story of Ekalavya and Dronachayra.’ Posted 30.01.22. Retrieved: http//wisdom.srisriavishankar. org. story of ekalavya and dronachayra.
3.   The killing of around 1500 Muslims after the destruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992 and the recent riots against Muslims in Delhi are tow amongst many.
4.    the official name given to any of the Indigenous peoples or tribal communities who are outside the caste system: these disadvantaged groups are now theoretically protected by the government and offered special concessions.
5.   See the hysteria generated by a sober, meticulous and rather dry academic study of Shivaji which forced the author James W. Laine to flee the country. See Raval, Sheela. ‘Maharashtra government bans James W. Laine’s biography of Shivaji.’ India Today, February 2, 2004. Retrieved: https://www.india
6.   Doniger, Wendy (2009). The Hindus: An Alternative History.  Penguin Books, p. 82.
7.   Op. cit., pp. 80-101.
8.   Mathur, Bhavyanish (2019) Examine shifts in interpretation of the term Aryan in studies on Early Indian History. Academic Edu. Retrieved: http:// www. Academia. edu
9.   Lorenzen, David N. (2002). ‘Religion, Skin Colour and Language: Arya and Non-Arya Identity in the Vedic Period.’ The essay is a revised version of papers presented at the Madison South Asia Conference, October 2002, and at the Ecole de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, March 2004. P. 7 Retrieved: https:// www.academia.edu.
10.   Thapar, Romila. ‘The Theory of Aryan Race and India: History and Politics.’ Social Scientist, Vol 24, No1/3. (January – March 1996) p. 26. Retrieved: http: www.jstor.org 
11.   Doniger, ibid., pp. 100-101.
12.   Basham, A.L. (1971). The Wonder that was India. Fontana Collins, pp. 138-150.
13.   Hussein, Asif (2013). Caste in Sri Lanka. Neptune Publishing, pp. 6-8.
14.   Lorenzen, op. cit., pp. 12-22.
15.   Sri Aurbindo on Caste and Democracy – January 1907. Retrieved: https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/quotes/sri-aurobindo-on-the-unhindu-spirit-of-caste-rigidity.