Dr. Jai Maharaj
2016-05-21 21:25:53 UTC
Caste
Verdict from Belgium
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
Hinduism Today Magazine, hinduismtoday.com
September 1994
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.
http://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=3336
More at:
Hinduism Today Magazine
http://www.hinduismtoday.com
Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
http://bit.do/jaimaharaj
o o o
o Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used
for the educational purposes of research and open
discussion. The contents of this post may not have been
authored by, and do not necessarily represent the opinion
of the poster. The contents are protected by copyright
law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
o Posted for information and discussion. Views
expressed by others are not necessarily those of the
poster who may or may not have read the article.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This article may contain copyrighted
material the use of which may or may not have been
specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This
material is being made available in efforts to advance
the understanding of environmental, political, human
rights, economic, democratic, scientific, social, and
cultural, etc., issues. It is believed that this
constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the
material on this site is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving
the included information for research, comment,
discussion and educational purposes by subscribing to
USENET newsgroups or visiting web sites. For more
information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this article
for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you
must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Since newsgroup posts are being removed by forgery by one
or more net terrorists, this post may be reposted several
times.
Verdict from Belgium
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
Hinduism Today Magazine, hinduismtoday.com
September 1994
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.
http://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=3336
More at:
Hinduism Today Magazine
http://www.hinduismtoday.com
Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
http://bit.do/jaimaharaj
o o o
o Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used
for the educational purposes of research and open
discussion. The contents of this post may not have been
authored by, and do not necessarily represent the opinion
of the poster. The contents are protected by copyright
law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
o Posted for information and discussion. Views
expressed by others are not necessarily those of the
poster who may or may not have read the article.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This article may contain copyrighted
material the use of which may or may not have been
specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This
material is being made available in efforts to advance
the understanding of environmental, political, human
rights, economic, democratic, scientific, social, and
cultural, etc., issues. It is believed that this
constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the
material on this site is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving
the included information for research, comment,
discussion and educational purposes by subscribing to
USENET newsgroups or visiting web sites. For more
information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this article
for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you
must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Since newsgroup posts are being removed by forgery by one
or more net terrorists, this post may be reposted several
times.